For two years the chant was rehearsed, circulated, aestheticised: “globalise the intifada!”. A resistance moment. A noble liberation struggle, cleansed of consequence. Now that it has arrived not as metaphor but as blood, the same people who normalised the rhetoric – progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, the Greens, the Labor left – present themselves as mourners. Today it is condolences, unity, and prayers.
But you do not get to globalise the intifada and then feign surprise when it turns up.
This did not erupt spontaneously. It was built – patiently, rhetorically – until violence no longer felt aberrant but earned. Shock, at this point, is not innocence; it is evasion.
The Prime Minister calls for unity and convenes the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Necessary, yes – but no longer enough. The problem he faces is credibility. For two years the response to antisemitism has been managerial rather than moral: statements instead of lines, calibration instead of resolve.
The record is plain. Within hours of the October 7 Hamas massacre, and before Israel inflicted its biblical rage upon Gaza, Jews were openly abused outside the Sydney Opera House. Synagogues and childcare centres were firebombed and homes and vehicles vandalised. Hate preachers operated freely. Week after week, marches moved through our cities celebrating “resistance”, praising terrorism, calling for Israel’s elimination, and chanting explicitly for the globalisation of the intifada: violence against Jews, everywhere – for what else could that word mean? Jewish students and academics were harassed on campus. Jewish artists were doxed and frozen out of cultural life. Antisemitism was rhetorically dissolved by equating it with Islamophobia, converting a specific hatred into a moral blur.
Step by step, it was normalised.
The year ends with an Islamist terrorist attack at Bondi Beach – an ordinary, intimate place, place many of us walk, eat, linger. We were in Sydney last weekend, and had we stayed another night, we would very likely have been there ourselves, walking the promenade and then taking refreshment, as is our custom, at the North Bondi RSL, just across the road from the park where the atrocity occurred. Authorities had warned such an incident was probable. They were not speculating; they were reading the climate.
Antisemitism in Australia has risen to levels unseen in living memory – even in small country towns like the one we live near and in Byron Bay, meccas of alternative lifestyles and long-styled as havens of inclusion and wellness. Alongside this rise sits another failure: the government’s inability to confront antisemitism with clarity and force, preferring symbolic gestures and offshore moral posturing while hatred hardened at home.
Now, suddenly, our leaders discover grief. Social media is more revealing. Facebook fills with empathetic words and memes from politicians, public figures and keyboard activists who spent the past two years condemning Israel in ways that blurred – and often erased – the distinction between Israeli policy and Jewish existence, creating at best, indifference to Jewish fear and, at worst, a permissive climate of hostility toward Jews as such. Today it is all tolerance, inclusivity and unity – and an air of regret and reverence that reeks of guilt.
But not all. Social media has fractured along familiar lines. At one extreme are conspiracy theories — false flags, invented victims, claims the attackers were Israeli soldiers. At the other is denial: what antisemitism? Between them sits a more revealing response. There is genuine shock and horror, even remorse – but also a careful foregrounding of the Syrian-Australian man who intervened, coupled with a quiet erasure of the victims’ Jewishness; a reflexive turn to whataboutism; and a refusal, even now, to relinquish the slogans and moral habits of the past two years. If antisemitism is acknowledged at all, it is ultimately laid at the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why this reticence, this resistance to reassessment after the Bondi attack? Perhaps it lies less in ideology than in psychology. For some, there is a simple inability to relinquish prior convictions- positions publicly held, repeatedly performed, and now too entangled with identity to abandon without cost. For others, perhaps a deeper reluctance to acknowledge having been misinformed or misdirected, an admission that would require not just intellectual correction but moral self-reckoning. Empathy, too, has become selective: extending it fully to Jewish victims would require suspending, even briefly, a framework that collapses Jewish identity into the actions of the Israeli state. And finally, many are no longer reasoning freely at all, but are caught inside the machinery – the rhythms of platforms, slogans, group loyalties and algorithmic reinforcement – where reconsideration feels like betrayal and pause feels like capitulation.
So the question must be asked plainly: can many on the left side of politics, no matter how well-intentioned (and ill-formed) honestly say that nothing they have posted over the past two years contributed, even indirectly, to prejudice against Jewish people? Nothing that helped turn anxiety and empathy into hostility, criticism into contempt?
Australian Jews warned that today’s chant would become tomorrow’s attack. They were told they were exaggerating, weaponising history, crying wolf. Yet despite inquiries, legislation, and repeated arson and vandalism, the ecosystem of hate was allowed to deepen. Two years of weekly protests chanting “From the river to the sea”, “Globalise the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” – calling for the eradication of a nation state and its people – were treated as politics, not incitement.
In July 2024 the government appointed Jillian Segal, a lawyer and businesswoman, as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (followed soon afterwards by the appointment of Aftab Malik as Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia). Her report, released a year later, was unambiguous: antisemitism had become “ingrained and normalised” across universities, schools, media and cultural institutions. She called for curriculum reform, university accountability, migration screening, and a serious national effort to explain what antisemitism is and why it corrodes societies.
Five months on, the government is still considering it. It has been under heavy pressure from many quarters to hasten slowly, including from within its own ranks: there were calls from the Labor left, including motions from branches and petitions, for Segal to be sacked and her report shredded.
Mere days after Bondi, the pushback has already begun. Pro-Palestinian platforms – and even some Labor branches and members – have denounced Jillian Segal, her report, and Prime Minister Albanese’s intention to implement its recommendations as an assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties. So, argue that that the Australian government is using the atrocity as a pretext to accelerate its repression of the Palestine movement, and, even, to protect and defend Australia’s complicity in what is viewed as the Gaza genocide. What this framing conspicuously avoids is any reckoning with the antisemitism the report documents- or with the immediate, practical questions now facing authorities. Among these are the potential for copycat attacks, and what duty of care is owed to the Syrian-Australian man who intervened to stop the attack? Hamas and sections of Middle Eastern media have already branded him a traitor. In this moral economy, even heroism is conditional – and quickly becomes a liability.
The partisan responses have been opportunistically predictable. The Murdoch media accused the government of weakness. The Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, accused Labor of neglect. Pauline Hanson followed, reliably. None of it alters the central fact identified by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore: the taboo on antisemitism has collapsed. Perhaps because Jewish identity is lazily collapsed into Israel. Perhaps because the world’s oldest hatred never disappears; it waits for permission. That permission was granted – gradually, rhetorically, respectably. And antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name.
This did not come out of nowhere. It arrived exactly as advertised, and this is what it looks like.
And shock, now, is not a moral position.
Postscript … just saying …
The following is a précis of an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2025 by satirist and presenter Josh Szeps entitled “What kind of Australia do we want to be? Let’s stop dodging the hard questions”. It encapsulates succinctly the questions we must ask ourselves. It is no satire:
In the aftermath of Bondi, everyone has an explanation and a slogan. Blame is flung in all directions – Israel, its critics, Muslims, the prime minister, “the world’s oldest hatred” – and consensus collapses into a hollow refrain: say no to hate. Comforting, yes; clarifying, no. Meanwhile, Jewish Australians now fear public gathering, and Muslim and Palestinian Australians brace for backlash of their own. This is the brittle edge of multiculturalism when the shared glue has weakened.
That glue once went by a plain name: liberal universalism – free speech, equality before the law, scepticism toward dogma, the right to criticise ideas without condemning people. Over the past decade it has been displaced by a politics of identity, grievance management, and performative outrage, leaving us unwilling to ask hard but necessary questions: how to integrate insular communities, how to criticise religious fanaticism without collapsing into bigotry, how to balance pluralism with a shared civic culture. Into that vacuum rush provocateurs, algorithms, and foreign actors only too happy to inflame old hatreds. The weekly Gaza marches exposed this failure. Slogans like “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” may sound abstract or benign to some, but to many Jews they carry a very concrete historical threat – especially after October 7. That most marchers may not have grasped the implications is precisely the problem. Chanting borrowed slogans in mass, without curiosity or restraint, is not moral seriousness. Nor is pretending that theocratic, homophobic, antisemitic religious doctrines are merely “cultural differences” compatible with the values that made Australia attractive in the first place.
Multiculturalism survives only if it demands something of everyone: discomfort and openness from the majority; reciprocity, restraint and abandonment of imported feuds from minorities. If liberals won’t defend universal values — plainly, without euphemism or ritual throat-clearing — others, far less liberal, will step in and do it for them.
Here are three particularly resonant paragraphs:
“Week after week, chunks of our cities were overtaken by protesters carrying signs that had nothing to do with Israeli policies, such as “globalise the intifada” and “by any means necessary”. The ubiquitous “from the river to the sea”, benign-sounding to bystanders, proposes that an Arab state ought to sit on top of all the land of Israel – that Jewish people should live at the pleasure of rulers whose theocratic education would make Australia’s most radical imam look like a Jew-loving hippy. Is such a sentiment just innocent political speech? Or, in the wake of the jihadism on October 7, 2023, could it be understood as a threat to conquer the world’s only Jewish safe space?
… if you found yourself marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge chanting slogans you didn’t write, about a complex issue you’re not really across, surrounded by crowds chanting the same thing, which others found intimidating … you may, in fact, not have been elevating the discourse. “Intifada” technically means “uprising”, but in the context of Palestinian resistance it implies exploding buses, drive-by shootings and suicide bombers in cafes. (See: “Second Intifada” in Wikipedia, kids). Presumably, most of the protesters didn’t know this. After last weekend, they do. The Intifada has been globalised …
It’s up to all of us to refresh multiculturalism by tethering it to universal values and admitting that it demands sacrifices all around. It demands that people in the majority make themselves uncomfortable, around unfamiliar languages, faiths, customs and food. And it demands that people in the minority give up dogmatism, grudges and cultural feuds”.
There are moments in the Middle East when history suddenly shift gears and takes us all by surprise. Lenin knew the cadence: there are decades, he wrote, where nothing happens; and then, weeks in which decades happen. A year ago, Syria – trapped in the vortex of its civil war for almost fourteen years and virtually ignored by the rest of the world since October 7 2023 – suddenly leapt into one of those crazy weeks, leaving allies, enemies, and analysts alike blinking in the dust. Even now, a year after the astonishing fall of Damascus, the country sits like Kipling’s Tomlinson at the gates of judgement: not quite damned, not fully redeemed, suspended between heaven and hell.
Sleepers awake …
For years, as The Independent’s Bel Trew observed last December (see Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants) the world forgot about Syria – notwithstanding the courageous efforts of western and Syrian reporters and humanitarian workers who strove in perilous circumstances to bear witness. The civil war had become the background hum of the region, a grim drone many had learned to tune out as Ukraine and Gaza dominated the world stage. The regime of Hafez al Assad, brutal and immovable, bolstered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, looked set to endure indefinitely. The jihadi rebel enclave in Idlib, though supported by Türkiye, was dismissed as a besieged hold-out. Even those who professed expertise couldn’t reliably tell you whether the war was still ongoing, who was fighting whom, or what stage the conflict had reached. It was as if the wheels of war had stopped spinning.
Then, over the space of days – eleven, to be precise – the wheels spun again. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s fighters burst from their confined redoubt with a momentum no one expected (including, it seems, themselves), sweeping through Aleppo and racing down the highway to the capital. Analysts reached instinctively for historical parallels: Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. Analyst David Kilcullen pointed instead to Timur Kuran’s theory of the “preference cascade”: the sudden collapse of a regime that had mistaken silence for loyalty and compliance for consent. Assad’s security apparatus – omnipresent, omniscient, yet somehow oblivious – realised too late that its soldiers had no stomach left for the fight. The all-powerful giant had feet of clay.
It didn’t help that Iran, Assad’s indispensable patron, had stumbled into the most grievous strategic miscalculation of its post-1979 history. Flush with revolutionary zeal, Tehran had kicked the hornet’s nest in Lebanon, prompting Israel to pivot from Gaza to Hezbollah with stunning force. Suddenly Iran’s expeditionary assets were exhausted, its proxies over-extended, and its clerical leadership exposed as both ageing and isolated. Even the Ayatollah’s conspiratorial refrain – that the fall of Damascus was all a plot by the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the Sultan in Ankara – couldn’t mask the fact that this was less Zionist cunning than simple imperial overreach. When the rebels came, neither Iran nor Hezbollah, nor Russia, entangled in its Ukrainian quagmire, could ride to the rescue.
But the rebels, too, were surprised. Their mandate from Ankara was modest – expand the borders of their statelet a little, test the regime’s nerve. Instead, they found themselves virtually unopposed on the road to Damascus. In an Informative article in E-zine Unherd republished below, British writer and investigative journalist Tam Hussein writes how many of the fighters interpreted the victory as divine intervention – not jihadi zealotry, but a sincere theological attempt to explain the inexplicable. The suddenness of Damascus’s collapse felt, to them, like an echo of Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca. And in a land where the eschatological imagination has always saturated politics, it didn’t take long before social media brimmed with end-times speculation. Ahmed al Shara’a – formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, with a $10 million American bounty on his head – was seen by some as “the one”, and the precursor of the Mahdi and the foretold end of days.
Yet as Hussein rightly notes, miracles make poor policy. The survival of the new Syrian administration will depend not on prophecy but on governance, and on whether Shara’a, interim president and ex-jihadi turned statesman, can transform a miraculous seizure into a sustainable state.
To his credit, he has avoided the catastrophic purges that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He has kept the civil service intact, flirted audaciously with Western diplomacy, and allowed at least the theatrical semblance of elections. He has restored the embassy in London, opened channels to Washington, even visiting the White House and played the charm-game with Gulf capitals that only recently readmitted Assad into their fold. As Hussein writes, he has shown political finesse: keeping the constitution, appointing seventy parliamentarians himself, and balancing piety with pragmatism.
But the tightrope is frayed. Sectarian wounds – Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian – remain raw and unstitched, with the Latakia massacres now entering their fraught judicial phase, and Israel stirring the Druze pot. Kurdish anxieties simmer: the old “Arab-first” chauvinism must be abandoned if Syria’s patchwork is ever to become a tapestry again. Foreign fighters, once lionised, now loiter between hero and hazard, implicated in sectarian atrocities. Kurds clash with Syrian forces; Turkish troops press deeper into Rojava; Israel remains the unpredictable neighbour bestride the Golan; and Iran, though weakened, is never entirely out of the game. It is not inconceivable that the forces that helped topple Assad could yet turn their sights toward Jerusalem in the belief that prophecy demands it.
And there are darker portents too – those flickering shadows that hint the wind of freedom may be blowing from the wrong quarter. The new government’s early gestures toward Islamisation – the hair-covering admonition, the curriculum purge, the dismissal of women from key posts, the torching of a Christmas tree in Hama – suggest that pro-Russia and anti-western platforms like RT and Mint may have a point when they warn that the leopard has not fully changed its theological spots. Shara’a’s declaration that elections may be four years away, the dissolution of the old constitution, and the folding of all rebel factions into state structures recall less a liberal transition than a consolidation of revolutionary power.
Meanwhile, the country remains a mosaic of mini-wars. In the north, Turkish proxies grind against Kurdish forces in Rojava. In the south, local militias continue to resist HTS’s claim to national authority. In the west, Alawite formations cling to their shrinking redoubts. To the east, Islamic State survivors eye the chaos, waiting for the prison gates to break. And overhead, as ever, the Americans and Israelis fly their competing deterrents, ensuring the war never quite ends.
So: Syria stands at the crossroads. Will Syria’s future be heaven, hell, or merely another circle of the inferno?
Optimism is possible – cautiously so. If the West can avoid its habitual fatalism, if, when sanctions are lifted, investment flows, if Turkey and Israel can be coaxed into tolerable coexistence, if Kurdish autonomy is honoured, if sectarian grievances are handled with equity and not vengeance — then Syria could, in time, become a conservatively stable hub. Shara’a’s Idlib experiment shows he can build an economy under duress.
But the inverse is equally imaginable: a Lebanon-style implosion, a Yugoslav-style partition, or a Gaza-style fortress of permanent mobilisation. As Isreali commentator and contributor to Haaretz Zvi Bar’el wrote a year ago, writes, the warm international “envelope” around Damascus is generous but tentative. Nobody quite knows where Shara’a is heading. They simply assume anyone is better than Assad – the same mistake Syrians once made about the old Ba’athi patriarch Hafez al-Assad himself.
Right now, the future’s not ours to see. Something’s happening, but we don’t know what it is, and anyone with a deep knowledge of the Middle East knows that one must expected the unexpected. The old regional wars – Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Iran’s Axis of Resistance – though seemingly on hold, have not paused to let Syria breathe. The war in Ukraine grinds into winter, the bizarre Gaza peace plan shuffles on, and there are constant political shifts in Washington. Each of these could rewrite the geopolitical chess board yet again.
Still, as Robert Fisk wrote in the final line of the final book he never lived to promote: all wars come to an end, and that’s where history restarts. Syria is restarting now – painfully, precariously, imprecisely – but restarting nonetheless.
Whether Syria walks toward heaven or hell remains to be seen. The choice – as ever in the Levant – will not be its alone.
Syria Today: Walking Through the Wreckage
A year after the Assads fell, Syria still moves through its own ruins – startled by its freedom, and half-afraid of it. The dynasty’s collapse ended the nightmare but did not usher in a dream; it simply exposed, in unforgiving daylight, the damage done over half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of war. The smashed cities are visible to any passer-by; the deeper wreckage – the traumas, resentments, and debts of blood – is harder to map and harder still to mend.
Sednaya prison’s opened gates remain the sharpest indictment. The men who stumbled out were not just survivors but witnesses, their bodies forcing the nation to acknowledge what many had whispered and few had dared investigate. Yet even this reckoning has not united the country. Sectarian reprisals and atrocities on the coast, more atrocity and calls for Druze autonomy demands in Sweida, tribal restlessness in the south and northwest, Kurdish self-rule in the north, and Alawite fear of collective punishment keep the national psyche taut and divided. Bitterness circulates like a second economy.
The economy, meanwhile, balances on a fraying tightrope. Western aid and investment have brought cranes, reopened highways, and a flicker of commerce, but also inflation that is hollowing out households. Reconstruction glimmers like a desert mirage: real enough to chase, never close enough to touch. Corruption accompanying nepotism and patronage has survived the revolution, and many returnees discover that rebuilding a home now costs more than earning one.
Politically, the country sits in an improvised equilibrium. Al Shara’a rules as both liberator and question mark – trusted by some, tolerated by others, watched by all. His pivot toward Washington, his quiet coordination with US forces, and his break with former comrades offer a new direction, but also a gamble. Around him, sovereignty is nibbled at the edges: Israel digs deeper into Quneitra province; Türkiye tightens its grip in the Kurdish north. Liberation has shifted the map without fully restoring control over it.
So Syria stands on the threshold, like Tomlinson, neither damned nor redeemed, simply called to account. The war is over, but its aftershocks and tremors linger in regional loyalties, local vendettas and regional manoeuvres. The people are free, yet unsure of that freedom’s limits and what it asks of them. And the vast machinery of the state still creaks with old habits and temptation.
And yet – a small, highly qualified yet – Syrians are imagining a future again. Not the predetermined script of dictatorship, nor the fatalism of war, but something open, negotiable, theirs’. For a people long told that nothing changes, the mere possibility of change is its own quiet revolution. Hope is not guaranteed; neither is stability. But the impossible has already happened once, and that alone shifts the horizon.
Postscript: the strange, messianic weather of revolutions
Among the HTS fighters Tam Hussein describes, the astonishingly swift and almost bloodless collapse of Damascus could never be reduced to battlefield arithmetic. After over a decade of stalemate and slaughter, the conquest of Damascus and the fall of Assad felt too abrupt, too neat, too historically implausible to be merely human. And so they reached, perhaps instinctively, for the vocabulary of prophecy that has long circulated in the Levant: the old stories of tyrants toppled in the final days, of a just ruler rising at history’s eleventh hour, of a brief season of peace before a climactic confrontation with “the Romans,” a term that in popular imagination now stretches elastically to include Israel, America, or the West at large.
In this folk-level cosmology – not the carefully parsed doctrine of scholars, but the lived, emotional scripture of men who have lived too long fear, death and loss loss – the victory in Damascus reads like a prophetic epic ballad. When a fighter told Hussein that Syria would enjoy “ten years of peace before the war with Israel,” he was drawing from a hazy amalgam of hadith traditions and battlefield folklore to make sense if the improbable: the idea of a lull before the storm, a breathing space before the world tilts into its final reckoning. It is vernacular eschatology, shaped as much by trauma and longing as by text.
Within that register, the murmurs that Shara’a/Jolani might be “the one” carry an unmistakable Mahdist echo. No fatwas or proclamations like when Da’ish leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi famously declared the caliphate from the minbar of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque in 2014; but the emotional charge behind the phrase is unmistakabl: an intuitive reach for a Mahdi-shaped idea of the righteous restorer, the unifier, the man who appears when everything has fallen apart. It’s not that anyone literally thinks Jolani is the Mahdi; it’s that the mood of the moment makes such thoughts feel briefly within arm’s length. A silhouette on the horizon, nothing more.
And here, Syria is not unique. Revolutionary periods everywhere – the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Arab Spring even, have their magical phase — those jittery days when people begin to speak as if the world has cracked open, meaning is pouring through the seams, and events blur into myth. When a regime that seemed immovable collapses in a fortnight, people fall back on stories larger than themselves. Sudden upheaval, long suffering, and the ascent of a charismatic figure combine to crack open the ordinary world. Prophecy offers a narrative frame when history seems to be behaving like fable.
So the eschatological edge in these fighters’ conversations tells us less about doctrine and more about psychology. It’s a very human response: a form of magical thinking that arises when reality becomes too strange to process, a way of giving shape to chaos, of telling themselves that their suffering fits into a larger story. A coping mechanism, if you like – a mythic vocabulary for a moment when Damascus fell, and the ordinary rules stopped making sense and the earth seemed briefly to tilt on its axis.
A few months ago in Damascus, I discovered a medieval hospital. The door had been left slightly ajar, and I wandered in with my companion Hassan Idlibi — a rebel fighter and old friend. He hadn’t been in the Old City since the fall of Syria’s capital, exactly a year ago today. “When Damascus fell,” he told me, “we were at our lowest ebb. Even the attack on Aleppo was our last gasp. We wanted to break the stalemate. And then we just pushed and pushed, and we ended up sleeping inside the Umayyad Mosque. It was a miracle.”Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who travelled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.
After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.
The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.
Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.
Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticised — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.
Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbours, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.
Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favourite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.
Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.
Granting these fighters legal status, regularising their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilising them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralising one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.
Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to manoeuvre — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.
For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.
Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.
If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.
Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment programme to stabilise Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unravelled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.
Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment programme, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularise or demobilise foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.
What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.
Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. His work has been recognised by the Royal Television Society Awards.
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
American poet and author Stephen Crane, 1899
Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.
But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction.
In what can only be described as a melancholy case of selective blindness, the gaze of western mainstream and social media, distracted by other conflicts and causes has been turned away. The global conscience has appeared unmoved. The numbers are obscene, the silence more so.
El Fasher, in Sudan’s far western province of Darfur, is once again the world’s unacknowledged abyss. The UN warns of genocide; videos show unarmed men executed in cold blood, hospitals shelled, aid workers vanished, women violated, and civilians starved into submission. The Rapid Support Forces – the Janjaweed (colloquial Arabic for “devil riders”) in new fatigues – are methodically annihilating ethnic groups such as the Masalit. El Fasher was the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur and its capture marks a milestone in the two yea long civil war, giving the RSF de facto control of more than a quarter of the territory.
Why the silence?
Because Sudan resists the narrative template that powers modern activism. There is no imperial villain, no clear coloniser or colonised, no simple choreography of oppression and resistance. The slaughter of black Africans does not fit the anti-Western moral geometry upon which contemporary protest movements are built. Sudanese bodies fall outside the moral lens of the global North even as they fall in their thousands.
This is not to rank suffering but to note the selectivity of empathy. Sudan’s tragedy lacks the aesthetic of victimhood that flatters Western guilt. The WHO pleads for hospitals; journalists beg for their detained colleagues. It all sounds chillingly familiar – yet no outrage follows. Perhaps because Sudan offers no convenient villain, no redemption arc, no social currency.
At the heart of the moral selectivity of the globalised conscience lies outrage as performance, empathy as branding. Sudan exposes the performative element of protest: empathy contingent on narrative utility. Its tragedy has no liturgy, no public ritual of belonging. It shows what our age truly worships: not justice, but self-expression masquerading as it. And in El Fasher’s unmarked graves lies the measure of this hypocrisy – a mute testimony to the moral vanity of a world that rages for Palestine, hashtags for Ukraine, and sleeps through Sudan.
In That Howling Infinite has touched on this dissonance before in The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality We wrote back then, in December 2023, when the Sudanese civil war has been raging for the best part of a year: “Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims … There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists”.
Journey to an civil war
American journalist Anne Applebaum wrote very long essay the August edition of The Atlantic: Sudan … the most nihilistic war ever. She believes that Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed. Her essay reads like a missive from a civilisation already past the point of rescue. The country she describes is less a state than a geography of ruin — a landscape where the coordinates of morality, nationhood, and even information itself have come apart. The title is no exaggeration; it is diagnosis and prognosis both. Sudan, she argues, is not an aberration but a preview — the shape of the world when the liberal order finally collapses, when wars are fought not for gods or ideas but for bullion and bodies.
Sudan’s civil war began, at least formally, as a contest between two men: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the regular army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who rose from the Janjaweed militias to command the Rapid Support Forces. Both were products of the same regime; both were once partners in repression. When they turned upon each other in 2023, the result was not ideological conflict but a kind of mutual devouring. Each accused the other of betrayal; each proceeded to loot, starve, and bomb the very population he claimed to protect.
Applebaum’s Sudan is not one country but many — an archipelago of fiefdoms and frontiers, each governed by whoever holds the nearest airstrip or gold mine. And gold, indeed, is the keyword: the new oil of an old desert. Sudan possesses vast deposits of it, and with them a vast invitation to corruption. Wagner mercenaries mine and smuggle it northward to fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. The United Arab Emirates bankrolls Hemedti’s RSF in exchange for access and influence. Egypt and Chad manoeuvre for position; Iran quietly re-enters the game. The Sudanese warlords themselves fight not to win the nation but to control the veins of the earth — the alluvial goldfields of Darfur and the Nile Basin that glitter beneath the dust like a curse.
Western governments, overstretched and inward-turned, offer gestures in place of policy. Applebaum notes that the world’s great democracies — once self-appointed custodians of human rights — now behave like distracted landlords. There is a knock at the door, another tenant murdered in the basement, but the owner is on the phone about something else.
In this sense, Sudan is less an anomaly than a mirror. It shows us what happens when international law becomes theatre, when moral outrage is rationed by proximity and profit. It is not merely a humanitarian disaster but a philosophical one: a demonstration that without belief — in justice, in shared reality, in the notion that human suffering still obliges response — politics decays into predation.
Applebaum’s prose, always measured, carries a note of exhausted mourning. The old ideological world — that twentieth-century drama of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy — at least believed in something, even if those beliefs destroyed millions. Today’s warlords believe in nothing at all. They are not even tyrants in the grand style; they are contractors of chaos, CEOs of slaughter, men who weaponise hunger for leverage and sell access to ruins.
What makes her essay so haunting is that Sudan’s nihilism feels contagious. The war may be geographically distant, but morally it is next door. The same disintegration of purpose infects the international response — the shrugging cynicism, the moral fatigue, the slow erosion of empathy. Applebaum’s Sudan is what remains when the “rules-based order” becomes a slogan muttered by people who no longer believe it themselves.
Coda: A Mirror in the Sand
The desert, Applebaum implies, has turned into a mirror of the world’s soul — reflecting its avarice, its indifference, its slow retreat from meaning.
What lingers after Applebaum’s account is not simply pity for Sudan, though that would be reason enough, but unease — the feeling that the world’s moral compass has slipped its pole and is spinning uselessly in our hands. Sudan is not the exception; it is the precedent. It is the world without illusion: borders drawn in dust, governments as rackets, truth dissolved into overlapping transparencies.
Once, wars were waged for empire, for creed, for revolution — each claiming, however falsely, to serve a higher cause. Now they are fought for metal, for markets, for motion itself. The soldiers are mercenaries, the civilians collateral, the nations staging grounds for someone else’s ledger. Applebaum’s overlapping maps are more than an image of Sudan’s confusion; they are an x-ray of a civilisation that no longer shares a moral reference point. We are all now drawing our own maps, colouring the world according to our comfort zones, overlaying them until the truth beneath is invisible.
And so Sudan becomes both tragedy and parable. Its gold mines glitter like tombs of the old order — the liberal dream of rules, rights, and reason — while above them drones and scavengers circle. A century ago, Conrad called it the horror; today it is merely another tab on a newsfeed. The anarchy is not confined to Khartoum or Darfur. It is spreading quietly through the arteries of global indifference, through our own fatigue, our own appetite for distraction.
Postscript: selective empathy in a world of sorrow
Comparing the international outcry over Gaza to the silence on Sudan has been condemned as intellectual dishonesty. One comment on this post ran this:
“The mainstream media can stir outrage on any topic when its political masters and financial backers want it to. Why has it not done so in this instance? Follow the money is one rule of thumb. I assume it suits the powers that be to let the slaughter continue. I hope more people are inspired to become activists against this dreadful situation, but public opinion tends to follow the narrative manufactured by the media more than impel it. When it comes to pro-Palestinian activism it is the story of a long hard grind of dedicated protestors to get any traction at all against the powerful political and media interests which have supported the Israeli narrative and manufactured global consent for the genocide of Palestinians over many years. And still, although the tide is gradually turning, the West supports Israel to the hilt and crushes dissent. Using the silence in the media and in the streets over the slaughter in Sudan as an excuse to try and invalidate pro-Palestinian activism is a low blow and intellectually dishonest”.
This particular response is articulate and impassioned, but it also illustrates precisely the reflexive narrowing of moral vision that the comparison between Gaza and Sudan was meant to illuminate. The argument hinges on a familiar syllogism: that Western media outrage is never organic but always orchestrated (“follow the money”), that silence on Sudan therefore reflects elite indifference rather than public apathy, and that to highlight that silence is somehow to attack or “invalidate” the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian activism. It is a neat, closed circuit—morally reassuring, rhetorically watertight, but intellectually fragile.
For one thing, the claim that outrage over Gaza is a product of “a long hard grind” of dissenters battling pro-Israel hegemony may be partly true, but it fails to account for the asymmetry of moral attention. Why, if media outrage can be manufactured at will, does it attach so selectively? Why is one tragedy magnified until it becomes the world’s moral touchstone, while another, numerically and humanly no less immense, barely registers? This is not to invalidate solidarity with Gaza—it is to interrogate the mechanisms by which empathy itself is distributed, channelled, and constrained.
The “follow the money” thesis also misses something subtler and more disturbing. Western silence on Sudan is not an act of conspiracy but of exhaustion: no villains clearly marked, no sides easily named, no tidy narrative of good and evil to moralise upon. Sudan’s war—fragmented, internecine, post-ideological—does not lend itself to hashtags or flags on Instagram profiles. It is a horror too complex to package and too distant to own. By contrast, Gaza offers clarity, identity, and the reassuring architecture of blame: victims and oppressors, martyrs and monsters, the colonial morality play in perfect focus.
Thus, when critics accuse those who draw this comparison of “intellectual dishonesty,” they mistake the argument. To juxtapose Gaza and Sudan is not to weigh one body count against another, or to diminish Palestinian suffering. It is to expose the limits of our moral imagination – how empathy becomes performative when it is contingent on narrative simplicity or political fashion.
In Sudan, the gold glitters under the rubble. Warlords, mercenaries, and foreign patrons all claw for it while millions starve. In Gaza, the ruins are televised, moralised, and weaponised. Both are human catastrophes, but only one has an audience.
The point, then, is not that activists for Gaza are wrong—it is that they are lonely. If their struggle truly seeks a universal human justice, it must be capacious enough to include Darfur, Khartoum, El Fasher—to grieve what the cameras do not show. Otherwise, our compassion becomes another form of exceptionalism: the selective virtue of those who need their tragedies to fit the script.
In truth, to compare Gaza and Sudan is not to rank suffering or diminish solidarity, but to expose the limits of our moral bandwidth. Gaza compels because its story is legible—villains, victims, a script the world knows by heart. Sudan confounds because it is too fractured, too many nations within one, too little meaning to hold. There is no clear narrative, only greed, hunger, and gold buried beneath the ruins.
The real dishonesty is not in caring for Gaza, but in mistaking selective empathy for universal conscience. If our outrage depends on simplicity, we risk turning compassion into performance – mourning only what the cameras show, and averting our eyes from what they cannot.
Señor, señor Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor?
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
Donald Trump’s Neo-Monroe Doctrine
Yanqui wake up
Don’t you see what you’re doing
Trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin
Better start swimming
Before you begin to drown
All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down
Bruce Cockburn, Yanqui Go Home (1984)
Which brings us to American journalist John Masko’s insightful analysis of Trump’s Latin American policy in a recent Unherd article. It is sharp and well-informed, particularly his framing of the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” as the ideological scaffolding for Washington’s renewed interest in its southern backyard. Yet, like most American commentators, he skips over a crucial subplot – namely, the role of the United States itself in creating the very chaos it now claims to correct. Venezuela’s “descent into shambles,” as he calls it, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Sanctions, economic strangulation, and decades of covert interference were not incidental background noise but deliberate acts of policy – the slow throttling of a regime that refused to align with the hegemon’s economic and political script. Without that context, the narrative too easily morphs into a morality play about Latin American incompetence, when in truth, it’s an old imperial story of cause, consequence, and selective amnesia.
Masko’s central thesis – that Trump has revived the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – is persuasive. In Trump’s mind, security begins at home and radiates outward; when weak or corrupt neighbours threaten that security, they must be coerced or replaced. The author rightly traces this logic back to Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that the US would “police” the Western Hemisphere, supposedly without territorial ambition but with the clear intent of monopolising intervention. From Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala to Chile, the Corollary became the moral fig leaf for American coups, invasions, and corporate extractions. Trump, Masko argues, sees himself as restoring that prerogative – a hemispheric sheriff cleaning up the neighbourhood after decades of liberal hand-wringing.
There is, however, a deeper irony in Masko’s framing. He presents Trump’s military buildup around Venezuela – F-35s in Puerto Rico, B-52s off the coast, CIA “covert” operations loudly proclaimed on television – as a return to historical normalcy, a reassertion of superpower swagger. But this conveniently ignores that America never really stopped intervening. From Plan Colombia to the Contra wars, from IMF leverage to trade sanctions, the methods simply evolved. The empire modernised; the mission never changed.
Masko paints Venezuela as a nation hollowed out by corruption, its military loyal only through fear and patronage, its once-mighty oil industry captured by criminal syndicates and foreign proxies. He’s not wrong — but he omits the pressure points that made reform or recovery almost impossible: the freezing of foreign assets, oil export bans, and a sanctions regime designed to collapse the economy under the banner of “democracy promotion.” The result is a country starving under siege, then blamed for its own starvation. It is the oldest of imperial tricks: break it, then call it broken.
The author is also curiously incurious about the demand side of America’s perpetual Latin drug war. He notes Trump’s pretext of “narco-trafficking” but fails to mention that the real market for those drugs lies not in Caracas or Bogotá, but in Chicago and Miami. As long as there is insatiable appetite and profit north of the Rio Grande, cartels will thrive no matter how many “suspect vessels” are blown out of the Caribbean. America’s own prohibitionary puritanism – the same logic that gave birth to Al Capone – continues to nourish the problem it claims to fight.
Masko’s analysis of Trump’s strategy does capture one key insight: the re-militarisation of hemispheric policy as a form of domestic theatre. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less about Venezuela per se and more about a symbolic restoration of dominance. It is the same playbook that guided the 1989 invasion of Panama, when Noriega — once Washington’s man in the canal zone – became inconvenient and was duly removed under the banner of anti-narcotics and democracy. The echo is unmistakable. Venezuela today serves as both scapegoat and proving ground: a chance for Trump to replay history, cast himself as the avenger of American sovereignty, and perhaps even seize a few oil fields in the process – though that, as always, is to be disavowed in polite company.
What Masko misses, perhaps by design, is the wider economic and ideological dimension. To call this merely an attempt to “seize Venezuelan oil” is too simple – Trump’s doctrine is more performative than acquisitive. It is about reasserting that the Western Hemisphere remains, in practice if not in name, America’s exclusive zone of influence, a region where Chinese investment and Russian advisors are not just economic competitors but existential affronts. In that sense, the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less a new foreign policy than a nostalgic hallucination: the dream of a hemisphere restored to its “natural order,” where Washington’s word is law and the rest are junior partners or failed states.
And yet, the danger lies precisely in that nostalgia. Venezuela’s collapse – accelerated by sanctions and corruption alike – has left it a tinderbox of criminal fiefdoms and shattered institutions. Push too hard and you get not regime change but fragmentation. The military Masko describes as Maduro’s bulwark could just as easily splinter, leaving behind a patchwork of armed enclaves and foreign proxies – a Caribbean Libya with oil rigs.
Trump, Masko concludes, is signalling not just to Caracas but to the continent: the Roosevelt Corollary is back. America will once again “help its friends and hamper its foes.” Perhaps so. But the hemisphere has changed; the hegemon’s writ is no longer automatic. China, once a distant abstraction, now bankrolls half the region’s infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are present in the margins. The Monroe Doctrine may have been written to keep Europeans out of America’s backyard, but the world has since moved into the neighbourhood.
What emerges, finally, from Masko’s piece is a portrait not of a coherent strategy but of imperial muscle memory – the reflex to intervene dressed up as rediscovered purpose. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is at once a geopolitical manoeuvre and a campaign slogan: Make Latin America Great Again, or at least make it obedient again. The tragedy, as always, is that ordinary Venezuelans – impoverished, exiled, and exhausted – will pay the price for another American morality play performed for domestic applause.
Trump is coming for Venezuela
…John Masko, Unherd 24 October
America’s foreign policy appears to have been turned upside down. In the Middle East and Far East, which have consumed most of America’s defence planning energy over the last few decades, trade wars and diplomatic negotiations have replaced shows of military power. Meanwhile, the US is stockpiling both materiel and manpower off the shores of South America to a degree unseen in many decades.
As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorising CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.
To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbours drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbours from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?
In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behaviour, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.
President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonisation or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”
During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalisation of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.
Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.
Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.
“What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.”
In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighbouring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).
Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organisations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.
Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.
With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organisations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organised crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The megabandashave outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organisations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.
Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).
For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.
Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.
For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorisation of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.
Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to affect its overthrow.
Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.
Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.
John Masko is a journalist based in Boston, specialising in business and international politics.
It refers to Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks to me of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that will feature in this blog.
Other memorable quotations follow:
“For long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched out in one hammock as his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another, and so interfusing, made him mad”. Chapter 41
“Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow — Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” Chapter 36
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”. Chapter 135
Amid accusations from Venezuela of piracy, US lawmakers have moved to bring back privateers, authorised by government-issued letters of marque, to ply the trade of piracy in service of their country by targeting enemy ships.
The Washington Post, 19 December 2025
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
People with only a passing acquaintance with Latin American history and politics have been asking, with genuine puzzlement, “why Venezuela? And why now?” The question is reasonable enough, but the coverage has been thin – particularly here in Australia – where Venezuela tends to appear only as a shorthand for failure or excess, rarely as a site of serious American political investment.
So, as the history of US intervention in Latin America repeats itself – or rhymes, if that is the more appropriate adage – I asked Chat GPT to rummage through the copious commentary to shed some light on why, with so much else on its “to do” list, America is dedicating so much energy, military resources, credibility and prestige on a defiant caudillo and his ostensibly floundering state. It is followed by a précis of an illuminating article by American journalist John Masko analysing President Donald Trump’s options. [We have featured Masko’s work in a recent post, Tales of Yankee Power … at play in America’s backyard]
Have we see this film before?
There is a temptation to see Washington’s renewed fixation on Venezuela as an anachronism, a Cold War reflex kicking in long after the war itself has dissolved into history’s sediment. Oil state, socialist autocracy, US sanctions, ritual denunciations of imperialism – surely we have seen this film before. And yet the timing matters. Not because Venezuela has suddenly changed, but because the world around it has.
For much of the past decade, Venezuela functioned as a kind of geopolitical ghost ship: visibly derelict, drifting just offshore, but no longer worth the trouble of boarding. Sanctions were imposed, statements were made, opposition leaders were anointed and then quietly forgotten. The regime endured, hollowed out but intact, while Washington’s attention migrated—to China, to Russia, to pandemics, to its own increasingly operatic domestic divisions.
What has changed is not Venezuela’s internal character so much as its external usefulness.
Start with the most prosaic explanation, the one policymakers prefer not to dwell on too explicitly: oil. Venezuela still sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves, a geological fact that stubbornly resists ideology. Years of mismanagement and sanctions have reduced production to a shadow of its former self, but the resource remains—latent, tempting, strategically inconvenient to ignore. In a world of supply shocks, Middle Eastern volatility, war in Ukraine, and a climate transition that talks green while still burning black, Washington has rediscovered the value of optionality. Not Venezuelan oil tomorrow, necessarily—but the capacity to influence when and how it might re-enter global markets.
But oil alone does not explain the renewed urgency. Venezuela has also become a symbolic problem—what might be called an authoritarian laboratory. It is a case study in regime survival under pressure: an illiberal state that absorbed sanctions, repression, diplomatic isolation, and international scolding, and still remained standing. Worse, it did so while cultivating alternative patrons—Russia, China, Iran—demonstrating that US pressure is no longer the decisive force it once imagined itself to be.
Left alone, Venezuela risks becoming precedent. A proof that sanctions can be endured, elections ritualised, opposition fragmented, and time allowed to do the rest. For an American foreign policy establishment already uneasy about its diminishing leverage, this is not an abstract concern. It cuts to the credibility of pressure itself.
Then there is migration, the most human—and politically combustible—dimension of the crisis. More than seven million Venezuelans have left their country, destabilising neighbours and feeding directly into US domestic politics. This is not simply a humanitarian tragedy; it is a hemispheric systems failure. From Washington’s vantage point, doing nothing is no longer neutral. Containment is expensive, intervention risky, abandonment costlier still.
And so we arrive at the question of timing. Why now?
Because Washington senses a narrow corridor. Maduro’s regime is weaker than it pretends but stronger than its critics admit. The opposition remains fractured but not extinguished. Sanctions relief, once treated as a moral hazard, has become a bargaining chip. And crucially, the US is acting before its own political calendar—always the hidden metronome of foreign policy—renders incremental diplomacy impossible. With another Trump presidency no longer unthinkable, subtlety has a sell-by date.
What the US is not doing, despite the familiar rhetoric, is embarking on a grand democratic crusade. The language of democracy remains, but largely as moral scaffolding. This is not Wilsonian idealism resurrected; it is managerial realism, stripped of romance.
The objectives are modest: reinsert leverage into a frozen conflict; test whether conditional sanctions relief still works in a multipolar world; signal to rivals that the Western Hemisphere is not entirely conceded; stabilise migration flows enough to quiet domestic unrest. Pressure without invasion. Engagement without trust. Diplomacy without illusion.
And this is where the contradictions sharpen. America is attempting to discipline illiberalism abroad while its own democratic norms feel brittle, contested, and—under the shadow of political retribution, institutional erosion, and performative governance—alarmingly provisional. It is hard to export confidence when you are busy auditing your own foundations.
So what will all this effort achieve?
In the best case, a managed thaw: partial electoral concessions, incremental sanctions easing, a trickle of oil, a slight widening of political space that can be narrowed again at will. Not democracy. Not regime change. Something closer to détente.
More likely, the choreography will look familiar. Maduro gives just enough to divide his opponents. Elections occur, tilted but recognisable. Washington claims progress. The regime consolidates. Oil flows marginally. Everyone declares victory, sotto voce.
The worst case is equally familiar: talks collapse, sanctions snap back, alliances harden, migration accelerates, and US credibility erodes a little further in a region already sceptical of American patience.
Which brings us, finally, to the point that sits beneath all the policy briefings and diplomatic cables.
Long story short …
In a nutshell: the US is leaning into Venezuela now because it wants leverage over oil, migration, and a stubborn authoritarian outlier—before rivals lock it in and before domestic US politics make subtle diplomacy impossible.
What it will achieve is unlikely to be transformation: at best a managed thaw and partial stability; at worst another reminder that pressure still matters—but no longer decides outcomes.
And perhaps that, more than anything, explains the urgency. Venezuela is not just a test of Maduro. It is a test of whether American power, recalibrated and diminished, can still bend events—or whether it has entered an era where it can only nudge, negotiate, and narrate its own restraint.
Trump, Maduro, and the old, disgraced song sheet ..
The Chekovian principle: If there’s a gun on the wall in act 1, it has to be used in act 3, otherwise, what the point of it Trump has to do something or his huff and puff loses all credibility.
Somewhere in the wings of world politics there hangs a theatrical maxim attributed to Chekhov: place a pistol on the wall in Act I, and someone must fire it by Act III. Americans profess to dislike theatre but cannot resist its narrative temptations; they threaten, they mobilise, they crescendo—and then, sooner or later, the audience expects the gun to go off.
Trump, a man who treats the world as a stage of which he is always the centre, has spent months pointing such a pistol at Venezuela. Warships prowled the Caribbean, threats were lobbed and withdrawn like fraternity-house dares, the Venezuelan regime was slapped with a foreign-terrorist designation—as though a label might restore the gravity of a play that has been poorly rehearsed. The horns swell, the curtains billow, and the crowd waits for the downbeat.
But Nicolás Maduro—part caudillo, part stagehand in an unraveling drama—has now done the one thing presidents hate most: he has refused to play his assigned role. He called the bluff.
When the Venezuelan National Assembly announced an investigation into an alleged American strike that killed survivors of a drug boat, it was the diplomatic equivalent of flicking Trump’s nose. It broke the Putin playbook: flattery first, deference always, never embarrass the man who believes himself the protagonist of history. Instead, Caracas stepped forward and said, in effect: All right then, fire your gun. We are still standing.
Now Trump is between a political rock and a theatrical hard place. His threats—grand, extravagant, and not altogether serious—have become a promise in the eyes of his supporters; promises demand fulfilment. To withdraw now would be humiliation. To act might mean plunging the United States back into the kind of messy, generational entanglement it claims to despise. The pistol on the mantel must discharge; the question is into what.
To parse the bind honestly, one must acknowledge an uncomfortable truth we have circled before: Venezuela is not a conventional state. It is a patchwork of criminal enclaves, guerrilla zones, mining fiefdoms, and military mafias stitched together by a government whose stability rests not on legitimacy but on shared complicity. Maduro presides not over a functioning bureaucracy but over a mutually-assured-corruption pact. The US demanding Maduro “stop the cartels” is akin to demanding a puppet cut its own strings.
Washington keeps treating narcotrafficking as a moral and strategic emergency demanding muscular intervention, and yet refuses the more awkward truth that demand originates north of the Río Grande. The US keeps trying to prune the branches while fertilising the roots. Eliminate a distribution node and another will spring up; curb the supply and the addiction of demand remains. This is the farce of policies sold as decisive: a clean narrative for messy problems.
That narrative—remove the strongman, restore democracy—does not fit a country that is less a dictatorship than a tangled criminal archipelago. The first domino in Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine refuses to topple. And worse: Washington is discovering that its preferred script cannot accommodate a terrain where power is exercised not by state capacity but by patronage, graft, and predation.
So what can Washington do? Masko’s menu of options—attacks on cartels, direct strikes on the regime, or covert coups—reads like a particularly bad buffet of imperial choices. Each invites familiar Latin American déjà vu: civil war, occupation, an opposition that cannot govern, and long occupations in which American “advisers” proliferate like mushrooms after rain. US policy keeps writing cheques reality cannot cash. Threats become commitments; commitments become entanglements; entanglements become “forever wars.”
If Trump escalates, Venezuela risks becoming another chapter in that long, wearying book the US pretends not to have read—even though it wrote half the pages. If he backs down, the political cost is immediate: the performance of American hemispheric resolve collapses into farce. The Monroe Doctrine reboot—portrayed as a return to muscular Rooseveltian policing—becomes a punchline when the first test proves a stubborn, shabby caudillo.
There is another uglier truth hidden in the theatre lights: Maduro’s survival is not proof of ideological victory but of practical, transactional survival. He has kept his inner circle bound to him through graft and opportunity; he has turned state instruments into instruments of private enrichment. That sort of stability looks like power because it is durable; but it is hollow, brittle, and violent. You cannot negotiate with a manager of vice the way you negotiate with a functioning state.
Trump staged a drama that now requires a climax, but the stage is rotten and the actors are improvising. The US treats Latin America like a backyard it keeps tripping over, never the garden it accidentally poisoned. Year after year Washington dramatises crises and expects tidy resolutions. Every generation invents a new justification—communism, terror, narco-terror—but the habit remains: pressure, coercion, intervention, regret.
The tragedy—ancient, predictable, almost Greek—is that Latin America again becomes the terrain on which American narratives are tested and American credibility measured, rather than a set of societies whose own tragedies and complexities deserve to be understood on their own terms. The region is treated as a proving ground for policy theater rather than a neighbour with histories, grievances and real human costs.
What should be done? Not much in the way of heroics. Policy that pretends to be theatre is precisely the policy that will go wrong fastest. If the United States truly seeks to reduce drug flows and migration, it must look at demand; it must reckon with domestic consumption patterns, with financial flows that launder proceeds northwards, with the geopolitics of trade and sanction that hollow out legal economies. Most of all, it must stop pretending that the remedy lies in a staged intervention that will neither eliminate the cartels nor restore democratic governance.
But the theatre will have its denouement whichever path is chosen. If the gun is fired, the consequences will echo for years in the hemisphere and in the lives of migrants and refugees. If it is not, the spectacle of American impotence will redraft the calculus of rivals and allies alike.
Either way, Venezuela will feel the impact long after the curtain falls. And the United States, which keeps writing checks the world will not conveniently cash, will be left to explain why a pistol on the mantel was ever thought a suitable prop for foreign policy.
A few years back, I retrieved from my archive a dissertation I wrote whilst studying politics at the University of Reading in 1970 about Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. It was entitled “How Rational Was The Great Purge?” Though somewhat different in tenor, this is companion piece to that, yet one more addition to the narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Josef Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a twentieth century socialist state. It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (there were two revolutions that year) and the bloody civil war that followed, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – the latter being a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.
An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB and present day FSI) covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936-38, or “the Yezhovchina”, named for Victor Yezhov, head of the NKVD and Stalin’s lord high executioner, stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.
But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard. The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable.
On 1st December in 1934, as the winter dusk pressed its blue-grey thumb across the courtyards of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, a single gunshot cracked through the brittle calm. Sergey Mironovich Kirov – First Secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, popular tribune, organisational wunderkind, and a man whose affability had made him the darling of the rank-and-file—fell outside his office, killed instantly by a bullet fired at point-blank range by Leonid Nikolaev, a nervous, impoverished, and previously disciplined Party member who had been wandering around Smolny with a revolver for weeks.
And here the historical record tilts its head. Nikolaev had already been arrested near Kirov’s office in October, gun in pocket, only to be released after a perfunctory interrogation. The NKVD, that ever-present priesthood of Soviet vigilance, somehow managed to remove or reassign Kirov’s guards on the day of the murder—an administrative coincidence so serendipitous it practically winks at the reader. Documents disappeared almost immediately. The crime scene was tidied up with un-Soviet efficiency. Even in Stalin’s lifetime, people whispered that this one was just a little too neat.
Comrade General Secretary Stalin died on 3rd 1953, but the mystery did not. During the course of ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing his former boss at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Secretary Nikita Khrushchev announced that the party leaders were not satisfied with the hitherto accepted account of the assassination. ‘It must be asserted’, he said, ‘that to this day the circumstances surrounding Kirov’s murder hide many things which are inexplicable and mysterious and demand the most careful examination.’ There were reasons to suspect, he added, that Kirov’s murderer, Nikolayev, had been ‘assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was to protect the person of Kirov’. He then cited some details:
A month before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behaviour, but he was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for an interrogation, on 2 December 1934, he was killed in a car ‘accident’. After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organisers of Kirov’s killing.
No actual or archival smoking gun has ever been found linking Stalin directly to the assassination. But as understood better than anyone, you don’t always need to give orders to get what you want; sometimes you merely need to lift an eyebrow, or refrain from stopping what you know is coming. Whether he orchestrated the murder or simply permitted the fates to do a little unofficial housecleaning, Stalin recognised Kirov’s death for what it was: an opening salvo in a new political era. A gift, as some later put it, from the socialist gods.
He rushed to Leningrad that very night—a grim figure stalking the polished corridors, smoking endlessly, looming over the bloodstained floor like a man already imagining the script he was about to write. Within hours, special decrees were drafted. Emergency powers were demanded. A new legal order materialised almost overnight: accelerated trials, truncated appeals, executions carried out within twenty-four hours. The machinery of terror, hitherto still warming up after collectivisation, now clicked decisively into gear.
Leningrad became the laboratory. More than 100,000 residents were arrested in the so-called Kirovskie potoki—the “Kirov batches”—a bureaucratic term so bland it might have referred to grain shipments rather than human lives. Arrests were made by quota rather than evidence. Lists circulated with blank spaces in which names could be conveniently filled. One’s fate depended not on guilt, but on arithmetic.
And this, astonishingly, was only the overture.
Between 1936 and 1938, the Soviet Union descended into the convulsive madness we now call the Great Purge. It was not simply a repressive campaign; it was a metaphysical restructuring of reality, a forced rewriting of the Soviet soul. The Party turned in upon itself like a great cannibalistic serpent. Old Bolsheviks—survivors of Siberia, civil war, famine, exile—stood on stage under the pitiless glare of Kaganovich’s lamps and confessed to crimes that would have embarrassed a mediocre novelist: working for the Germans, the Japanese, the Vatican, sometimes all at once. These confessions were extracted through sleep deprivation, threats to families, and the grim promise that cooperation might reduce the duration of one’s suffering before the inevitable bullet.
“Better that ten innocent men suffer than one spy escape,” Stalin reportedly told his inner circle. Whether he said it or not hardly matters; it distilled perfectly the moral arithmetic of the period. And Soviet bureaucrats, never ones to shirk a quota, applied that arithmetic with terrifying enthusiasm.
Millions were swept into the vortex. Workers vanished during lunch breaks; professors walked into lecture halls and never walked out; Red Army officers were summoned to meetings from which only the echo of their boots returned. Entire households—parents, children, in-laws—were removed en bloc, as if snipped from a photograph. The NKVD knock—three brisk raps that punctuated the night like an omen—became the most feared sound in the Soviet Union.
The damage to the Red Army was catastrophic. Three of the five marshals were eliminated. Thirteen of fifteen army commanders. Eight of nine admirals. Roughly half of all officer corps personnel were killed or imprisoned. When Hitler invaded in June 1941, the Soviet state staggered like a boxer already concussed before the fight had begun. The purges had not merely eliminated dissent; they had amputated competence.
Robert Conquest, in the mordant prose of The Great Terror, wrote that Stalin’s purges “destroyed the best and brightest of Soviet society, leaving in its wake a legacy of silence and servility.” It is difficult to dissent. At the nucleus of this great national trauma—like a dark planet around which the Soviet Union spun for the next decade—lay the corpse of Sergey Kirov, still and bloodied on the parquet floor of Smolny, a death reshaped by the state into a myth of enemies, a justification for a tyranny that would echo across generations.
And so the story resolves into the familiar Soviet paradox: a single bullet in a winter corridor becoming the pretext for a system built on fear, performance, and the relentless rewriting of truth. History, as ever, does not simply record events; it chooses its moments, stretches them, refracts them, and turns them into instruments. In Stalin’s hands, Kirov’s death became exactly that—a tool sharpened not by ideology alone, but by a man’s bottomless appetite for control.
Sergey Kirov: A Biographical Sketch
Sergey Mironovich Kirov (1886–1934) occupies a distinctive place in Soviet history: a disciplined, loyal Bolshevik whose quiet career was overshadowed by the immense political power his death unleashed. Born Sergey Kostrikov in the provincial town of Urzhum and orphaned early, he rose from poverty into revolutionary politics through underground Marxist circles in technical school. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1904, fought with the Bolsheviks in 1905, and endured the familiar cycle of arrests and exile that shaped many second-tier revolutionaries.
After 1917, Kirov built his reputation in the Caucasus – first in Tiflis, then in Azerbaijan and the broader Transcaucasian federation – where he proved an efficient administrator and a moderate, pragmatic voice on nationalities policy. His steady work in Baku won Stalin’s trust, marking him as a loyal and reliable lieutenant rather than an ideological innovator.
Kirov’s ascent reached its peak in 1926 when he replaced Grigory Zinoviev as head of the Leningrad Party organisation. In a volatile political environment he projected affability and organisational competence, and by the 17th Party Congress in 1934 he had become one of the Party’s most popular figures—popular enough to cause Stalin visible discomfort.
On 1 December 1934, Kirov was assassinated in the Smolny Institute by Leonid Nikolayev, a disgruntled minor Party member. The regime immediately portrayed the killing as an opposition conspiracy, but later archival evidence suggests that Stalin and the security services at least exploited the event, if not abetted it. In its aftermath, the “Kirov Case” became the justification for sweeping arrests, show trials, and the Great Terror that followed.
Kirov himself had posed no real challenge to Stalin. Yet in death he became the catalyst for Stalin’s most violent consolidation of power – a loyal apparatchik whose murder opened the door to the darkest machinery of the Soviet state.
A Bullet, a Bureaucracy, and the Old Trick of Power
On that winter evening in 1934, when Sergey Kirov collapsed in the Smolny corridor and the echo of Leonid Nikolaev’s revolver still trembled along the marble, the Soviet Union crossed one of those invisible historical thresholds. A man died, yes, but something else came sharply alive: the age-old political instinct to turn a crime into a charter.
Stalin saw at once what the moment offered. The corpse had barely cooled before he was demanding emergency powers, accelerated trials, and new legal instruments that would—purely coincidentally—vastly expand the reach of the NKVD. Kirov’s murder became the template for a new order, the catalyst for the machinery of quota-based repression that would culminate in the Great Purge.
And here the story widens, because history is full of such moments: a spark, a fire, and then—quite suddenly—a fire code rewritten in the name of safety, patriotism, or public order.
Power, after all, is seldom gained incrementally; it prefers the catalytic event.
The Nazis, of course, had already rehearsed this choreography of opportunistic outrage. When the Reichstag went up in flames on that cold February night in 1933, the fire itself mattered less than the story the new chancellor told about it. A lone Dutch drifter, Marinus van der Lubbe, may well have acted alone — the archival balance still leans that way — but Hitler and Göring seized upon the spectacle with preternatural speed, proclaiming a Communist uprising that existed nowhere but in their own ambitions. The ensuing Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties at a stroke; within days, thousands of political opponents were in custody; within weeks, Germany had its first concentration camps. What Kirov’s murder later became for Stalin — a ready-made key to unlock extraordinary repression — the Reichstag fire had already been for Hitler: the moment when fear, accusation, and executive power fused into a single instrument, and the machinery of dictatorship began to hum in earnest.
Even democratic states are not immune. Fasr-forward to 1964, when a murky naval skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin—exaggerated at best, fictionalised at worst—was used to justify sweeping presidential war powers in Vietnam. Again, the pattern: an incident, an interpretation, and then an escalation that far outstripped the original event.
In the United States after 9/11, the Patriot Act expanded surveillance authority to a degree unthinkable only weeks earlier. Australia, after Bali and then after Sydney’s Lindt Café siege, hardened counter-terrorism laws that still sit uneasily with civil libertarians. France declared and repeatedly extended a state of emergency after the 2015 Paris attacks, normalising extraordinary policing powers. Israel has used the elastic concept of “emergency regulations” continually since 1948; the Occupied Territories have lived inside that emergency for more than half a century.
None of these analogies are morally identical—history is too unruly, and context is everything—but the structural echo is unmistakable. Violence bends the narrative arc; leaders seize the pen.
And this brings us back to Stalin’s peculiar genius: he didn’t just use Kirov’s murder to justify repression; he used it to ritualise repression. The Great Purge was not a single reactionary spasm but a system, a bureaucratised theology. The NKVD did not simply knock at doors; they filled quotas. Courts did not merely try cases; they enacted a morality play in which guilt was predetermined and confession became a sacrament. Terror became, quite literally, a mode of governance.
The difference in scale between the Kirov aftermath and, say, the Patriot Act is obvious. But the underlying logic—never waste a crisis—travels across centuries and ideologies. It is as old as the Roman Republic, which appointed dictators during emergencies (and occasionally forgot to roll the powers back), and as contemporary as any government tempted to expand executive reach during disorder.
One might even say—quietly, and with the historian’s gentle shrug—that Kirov’s death is what happens when a single bullet drops into a political ecosystem already saturated with suspicion, ideology, and a leader’s longing for omnipotence. The event becomes a story; the story becomes a mandate; the mandate becomes the new architecture of the state.
And so the long shadow of that Leningrad corridor stretches far beyond 1934. It is the shadow cast whenever governments discover that fear is a pliable material, and that extraordinary measures, once introduced, have an almost uncanny habit of lingering. The lesson, if we can call it that, is neither simple nor consoling: history’s turning points are often quieter than we think—just a gunshot in a hallway, an explosion in a building, a skirmish at sea—but the legal and political aftershocks can reverberate for generations.
From Smolny to Scottsdale … a bullet has its uses
If Kirov’s murder taught the twentieth century anything, it was that the meaning of a political assassination rarely lies in the event itself. The bullet is only the opening chord; the symphony is written afterwards, in the speeches, the security directives, the moral panics, and the institutional reshuffling that follow.
And in that sense, the killing of Charlie Kirk two months ago — whether one judged him a provocateur, a tribune of the populist right, or simply a highly effective megaphone — was always going to echo far beyond the crime scene. Kirk’s public persona was built on perpetual mobilisation; his death, inevitably, mobilised his movement again, but now under the darker banner of martyrdom. His memorials reflected that doubling: part sermon, part rally, part lament for a country slipping from its constitutional moorings.
But it was Stephen Miller, with his uniquely glacial cadence and his understanding of narrative opportunity, who supplied the Kirov-like inflection point. His statement — the warning you referenced earlier — was not merely an expression of grief but a deliberate recasting of the assassination as a signal, a sign of political war, an indictment of an alleged national slide into lawlessness promulgated by the “radical Left,” “deep-state actors,” and whatever other agents of chaos could be invoked for the occasion. Where others spoke about sorrow or unity, Miller spoke about security, retaliation, and the need for extraordinary measures.
And here we see the familiar pattern.
There is event as catalyst. As with Kirov, the Reichstag, and countless other precedents, the assassination becomes instantly detachable from its forensic specifics. It enters myth-space. What matters is not the evidence but the utility. A political movement in search of discipline or mobilisation suddenly finds itself handed a clarifying moment. The death becomes a symbol; the symbol becomes an argument.
There is the suspicion narrative. Just as Stalin insisted that Kirov’s killing revealed a vast conspiracy – conveniently amorphous enough to justify purging anyone he found inconvenient – Stephen Miller framed Kirk’s murder not as an isolated act but as a node in a network: a symptom of a broader threat, one that (he implied) justified the suspension of ordinary political restraint. It was, rhetorically speaking, the oldest move in the book: taking a single violent act and turning it into evidence of systemic existential crisis.
There is the call for expanded authority. Miller’s warning, as we discussed earlier, was not merely cautionary; it was a prelude. His argument threaded together a need for enhanced federal policing prerogatives, expanded domestic intelligence capabilities, and what he rather ominously called a “realignment of internal security expectations.” Underneath the phrases lay a familiar logic: this changes everything — and therefore everything must change. You can practically hear Beria nodding along from the afterlife.
There is the martyrdom of the fallen. Kirov was transformed in death from a moderately independent party chief into the gilded justification for the Great Terror. Kirk, too, is already undergoing a kind of mythological laundering. In certain strands of American right-wing discourse, he is being reimagined not merely as a media provocateur but as a culture-war sentinel struck down for the truths he spoke. That kind of sanctification is politically useful: martyrs don’t compromise, martyrs don’t embarrass you, and martyrs confer moral urgency.
There are the inevitable political aftershocks. And this is where the analogy becomes most illuminating. The aftermath of political violence often tells us more about a society than the violence itself. In the Soviet case, it was the acceleration of authoritarian rule. In Weimar Germany, it was the final collapse into dictatorship. In the post-9/11 United States, it was the normalisation of surveillance and the redefinition of security.
In the months since Kirk’s killing, we are witnessing something similar, albeit in an American key: attempts to mobilise his death into legislative proposals; rhetorical escalations framing internal political opponents as existential threats; renewed arguments for federalised policing reforms that concentrate authority; and the repurposing of the assassination as a rallying point for a harder-edged populist conservatism.
No two eras are identical. No analogy is perfect. But the structural pattern – event → narrative → authority — is hauntingly familiar.
Coda …
We’d like to think that history runs on principles and ideologies, or moves to the will of great men. But mostly it turns on moments – sharp, shocking, sometimes sordid moments that give political actors the excuse to enact the plots, plans and programmes they were already dreaming or dreaming. Stalin, this story would have us believe, needed Sergey Kirov more dead than alive. Hitler needed the Reichstag fire’s plumes to rise just so. And in our own conflicted present, certain actors wanted, needed Charlie Kirk’s assassination to mean more than the tragedy it was: they needed it to become a story about enemies, collapse, and the heroic necessity of broader powers. Whether their narrative succeeds is another question. History is written not only by the victors but by the survivors – and we are still very much living in the moment.
A Bibliography on the Kirov Assassination and the Great Terror
1. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990). Conquest’s landmark revision of his 1968 classic, drawing on émigré testimony and early archival material. Still the most influential narrative framing Stalin as the architect not only of the Great Purge but of Kirov’s murder itself. Conquest argues that the political exploitation of the assassination was too rapid, too totalising, and too convenient to be accidental.
2. Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (Hill and Wang, 1999). The most comprehensive English-language study devoted specifically to the assassination. Knight uses post-Soviet archives, NKVD personnel files, and internal Party correspondence to argue that Stalin’s involvement is “highly probable.” An indispensable monograph.
3. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (Yale University Press, 2015). Based on more extensive archival access than any historian before him. Khlevniuk maintains that while no direct written order for Kirov’s assassination has been found, the behaviour of Stalin and the NKVD “defies innocent explanation.” He focuses on how Stalin transformed the murder into a political instrument.
4. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (Yale University Press, 2009). Provides key context for Stalin’s relationship with Kirov, the dynamics of the Politburo, and the mechanism by which personal decisions translated into state terror. Essential for understanding the broader ecosystem in which the murder occurred.
5. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). The central “revisionist” challenge to Conquest. Getty argues that bureaucratic chaos, factional competition, and institutional dysfunction explain much of the period, and that Stalin’s direct role in Kirov’s murder remains unproven. Important for historiographical balance.
6. Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Mehring Books, 1998). Rogovin, writing from a Marxist opposition (Trotskyist) perspective, argues unequivocally that Stalin ordered the assassination as part of a premeditated strategy to eliminate potential rivals. While ideologically framed, his research includes valuable Soviet sources and contemporary accounts.
7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1999). Though not focused on the assassination itself, Fitzpatrick provides the essential social context into which the event was inserted — showing how citizens experienced the tightening of repression after 1934. A vital complement to the political analyses.
8. N. V. Petrov & A. B. Roginsky (eds.), Kirovskoe delo [The Kirov Case] (Moscow: Memorial, 1993). A collection of newly released documents from the early post-Soviet period, including NKVD reports, personnel files, witness statements, and internal memos relating to Kirov’s security arrangements. These documents confirmed the suspicious reassignment of guards, Nikolaev’s earlier arrest, and the swift destruction or sealing of evidence.
9. Alexandre Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (Random House, 1953). Memoir of a high-ranking NKVD defector. Orlov asserted that Stalin personally ordered the assassination. Though coloured by Cold War context and personal motives, his claims shaped early Western interpretations and remain part of the evidentiary landscape.
10. Nikita Khrushchev, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress, February 1956. Khrushchev accused Stalin of orchestrating or at least politically weaponising the assassination. Though politically motivated, the speech is a primary document revealing how Soviet leadership themselves interpreted the event after Stalin’s death.
Concise Bibliography
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford UP, 1990. Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Jonathan Cape, 1996. Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Yale UP, 1999. Khlevniuk, Oleg. Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. Yale UP, 2015. Knight, Amy W. The Kirov Murder: Politics, Crime, and Conspiracy in Stalin’s Russia. Princeton UP, 1999. Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. Penguin, 2014. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. Viking, 2004. Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford UP, 1993. Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. Norton, 1990
For Soviet tragics and nostalgics only: the following may be of archival interest:
Murder Revisited: The Case of Sergei Mironovich Kirov
The thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of the Bolshevik leader and Politburo member Sergei Kirov (which took place 1 December 1934) passed without mention of the ‘thorough inquiry’ Khrushchev had promised into this event that marked the beginning of the era of the great Stalin purges. While a commemorative article was published in Pravda and a biography of Kirov by SV Krasnikov appeared in 1964, neither of these items offered any fresh material towards a solution of the Kirov mystery.
During the course of his ‘Secret Speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev had announced that the party leaders were not satisfied with the hitherto accepted account of the assassination. ‘It must be asserted’, he said, ‘that to this day the circumstances surrounding Kirov’s murder hide many things which are inexplicable and mysterious and demand the most careful examination.’ There were reasons to suspect, he added, that Kirov’s murderer, Nikolayev, had been ‘assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was to protect the person of Kirov’. He then cited some details:
A month before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behaviour, but he was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for an interrogation, on 2 December 1934, he was killed in a car ‘accident’. After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organisers of Kirov’s killing. [1]
In 1961, some five years after Khrushchev’s first disclosures, the Soviet people at large learned of the Kirov ‘affair’ in the course of the Premier’s attack on the ‘anti-party group’ at the Twenty-Second Party Congress. Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Voroshilov and others, he stated, had ‘violently’ resisted the Twentieth Congress’ decision to launch the de-Stalinisation campaign and had continued their resistance afterwards, because they feared that ‘their role as accessories to mass reprisals’ would come to light. He went on:
These mass reprisals began after the assassination of Kirov. Great efforts are still needed to find out who was really to blame for his death. The deeper we study the materials connected with Kirov’s death, the more questions arise… A thorough inquiry is now being made into the circumstances of this complicated case. [2]
In further statements at the Twenty-Second Congress, it was asserted that Nikolayev had in fact been arrested on two occasions before the crime, that arms had been found on him, but that he had been released. Kirov’s bodyguard was said to have been killed while on his way to be questioned by Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov. It was no longer ‘assumed’ but presented as fact that the NKVD functionaries had been shot in 1937 in order to cover up the traces of those involved in the assassination.
If one turns to the evidence presented at the Moscow Trial of March 1938, it will be seen that the substance of Khrushchev’s ‘revelations’ had long ago been put on record. The testimony given at the trial reflected its double aim: to reinforce the Stalinists’ previous charges against ‘Trotskyites and Zinovievites’ and at the same time to ‘purge the purgers’. Yet discounting embellishment, certain essential facts about the Kirov killing emerged at this time. GG Yagoda, former chief of the NKVD, now himself in the dock, gave this version of the affair:
In 1934, in the summer, Yenukidze informed me that the centre of the ‘block of Rights and Trotskyites’ had adopted a decision to organise the assassination of Kirov. Rykov took a direct part in the adoption of this decision… I marshalled a series of arguments about this terrorist act being inexpedient and unnecessary… Yenukidze insisted that I was not to place any obstacle in the way; the terrorist act, he said, would be carried out by the Trotsky – Zinovievite group. Owing to this, I was compelled to instruct Zaporozhets, who occupied the post of Assistant Chief of the Regional Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, not to place any obstacles in the way of the terrorist act against Kirov. Sometime later Zaporozhets informed me that the organs of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had detained Nikolayev, in whose possession a revolver and a chart of the route Kirov usually took had been found. Nikolayev was released. Soon after that Kirov was assassinated by this very same Nikolayev. [3]
Yagoda’s secretary, Bulanov, dealt with the ‘accident’ to Kirov’s bodyguard as follows:
Yagoda further told me that Borisov, an employee of the Leningrad Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, had a share in the assassination of Kirov. When members of the government came to Leningrad… to interrogate him as a witness… Zaporozhets…, fearing that Borisov would betray those who stood behind Nikolayev, decided to kill Borisov. On Yagoda’s instructions, Zaporozhets so arranged it that an accident occurred to the automobile which took Borisov to the Smolny. Borisov was killed in the accident… I then understood the exceptional and unusual solicitude which Yagoda had displayed when Medved, Zaporozhets and the other officials were brought to trial. [4]
This earlier trial of NKVD officials had also been made public at the time (1935). The indictment against them stated inter alia that FD Medved, chief of the Leningrad NKVD, and most of the others accused (twelve in all) had possessed information concerning the preparation for the attempt on Kirov but had taken no measures to prevent the crime, even though they had every chance to do so. [5] Furthermore, it was clear from what was said about them at the 1938 Moscow Trial that Medved and Zaporozhets had been shot in 1937.
Thus the facts given out by Khrushchev were hardly new. Although these facts without doubt came as something of a sensation to the party’s younger rank and file, all of the top leaders surviving from the purge period must have known them. Certainly it did not require years of investigation to dig them up.
What is new, of course, is the fresh interpretation given these facts. With the launching of the de-Stalinisation campaign, Khrushchev assigned the Kirov affair a role in the picture of the past that he was anxious to have the Soviet public accept. Kirov’s assassination was now presented as marking the entry into an entirely new phase of Soviet history; it was allegedly the true beginning of the Stalin era, during which Leninist party and state norms, hitherto prevailing, suffered a temporary defeat.
In his ‘Secret Speech’ Khrushchev put it like this: ‘After the criminal murder of Kirov mass repressions and brutal acts of violation of socialist legality began.’ [6] The basis for these mass repressions, Khrushchev recalled, was a decree of 1 December 1934 (the very day of the murder), which demanded a speed-up of investigations into terrorist acts, the denial of any right of appeal against sentences, and the carrying out of the death sentence immediately after a verdict. [7]
By 1961 Khrushchev and his supporters openly asserted that Stalin and his closest colleagues had seized on the Kirov murder to launch the era of terror, and the implication was strong that they may have indeed been accomplices in the act itself. Thus, in the 1959 edition of the history of the CPSU (which replaced the Stalinist work published in 1938), the assassination was still treated as the result of a plot by the ‘Zinovievites’; but in the revised edition of 1962 Stalin is accused of using the assassination as an excuse for organising reprisals against all those who in one way or another displeased him. This approach echoed the line taken at the Twenty-Second Congress by AN Shelepin (at the time Chairman of the Committee for State Security):
The assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov was used by Stalin and Molotov and Kaganovich, who were close to him, as an excuse for settling accounts with people they disliked (s neugodnymi liudmi). [8]
Obviously Khrushchev’s probe into the Kirov affair was useful to him first as a threat and finally as a weapon in the struggle against the ‘anti-party elements’. Yet the problem remained – and still remains for those who have replaced Khrushchev – to produce a full explanation of this event, which even today continues to hound the trail of Stalin’s erstwhile friends and associates.
In accordance with a decision of the Twenty-Second Party Congress to honour the memory of victims of the ‘personality cult’, Pravda from time to time carries articles on this theme. One such article, dealing with the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU (1934), is an interesting example of the manner in which the anti-Stalinists try to explain how things went wrong. [9]
At the Seventeenth Congress, says this article, the party was ‘united and monolithic’. This was the ‘congress of the victors’, at which even former members of the opposition groupings – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky – came forward to extol the successes achieved by socialist construction and to express their repentance for their past attitudes. By the time of this congress ‘the authority of the party had grown exceptionally’; this was the congress that marked the ‘firm and irrevocable victory of socialist relationships in our country’. NS Khrushchev is said to have declared at the congress: ‘The strength of our Lenin Central Committee lies in that it knew how to organise the party, knew how to organise the working class and the collective farmers…’ The names of some other delegates who spoke for this allegedly ‘united and monolithic’ party are cited, for the purpose of ‘rehabilitating’ them. Among those mentioned are I Zelenski and G Grinko, two of the accused at the 1938 Moscow trial; but no reference is made to the trial itself.
Kirov is referred to as ‘the wonderful Leninist’, the ‘favourite of the entire party’ (the words, incidentally, used by Lenin in his ‘Testament’ to characterise Bukharin):
Less than a year passed after the Seventeenth Congress when a criminal hand cut short the life of Kirov… This was a premeditated and carefully prepared crime, the circumstances of which, as NS Khrushchev declared at the Twenty-Second Congress, have not yet been fully cleared up.
The writer’s appraisal of the inner-party situation at the time of the Seventeenth Congress renders the subsequent fate of the party incomprehensible. In this united and monolithic organisation vested with such exceptional authority, how did it come about that – as the writer admits – 70 per cent of the Central Committee, and 1108 of the 1966 delegates who unanimously elected it, were subsequently condemned as counter-revolutionary traitors? Quite obviously this could not have happened under the conditions described.
That the Seventeenth Congress did indeed express the mood of jubilation and relief then prevailing in the top circles and among the activists of the party is indisputable. But underlying this mood was an awareness of the monstrous forces of repression and terror that had been created – forces that the activists themselves had helped to create, and yet that were in a sense alien and threatening to them. Hence the ovation given by the delegates to Kirov, who appeared at the congress as the outstanding champion of the authority of the party against the authority of the secret police.
There exists a document which is of exceptional value for an understanding of the political atmosphere of the time, which explains Kirov’s role and the hopes centred in him, and which also throws light on the motives of Leonid Nikolayev, his assassin. This is the so-called ‘Letter of an Old Bolshevik’, first published anonymously in two issues of the Menshevik monthly, Sotsialisticheski vestnik (Paris), 22 December 1936 and 17 January 1937; and subsequently published as a pamphlet, also anonymously, by the Rand School Press (New York City, 1937). The identity of the author, none other than NI Bukharin, was not revealed by the editorial board of Sotsialisticheski vestnik until 23 November 1959. (Bukharin at his trial in 1938 admitted that he had met in Paris, on his last trip abroad, a representative of the Mensheviks, Boris Nikolayevsky. It is not without significance that Bukharin knew that if he could trust no one else, he could trust his lifelong ideological opponents.)
Bukharin writes that Kirov ‘stood for the abolition of the terror, both in general and inside the party’:
We do not desire to exaggerate the importance of his proposals. It must not be forgotten that when the First Five-Year Plan was being put into effect, Kirov was one of the heads of the party, that he was one of those who inspired and carried through the notoriously ruthless measures against the peasants and the wiping out of the kulaks. The Kem and Murmansk coasts, with their prison camps, etc, were under his jurisdiction. Furthermore, he was in charge of the construction of the Baltic – White Sea Canal. This is enough to make it clear that Kirov could not be reproached with any undue regard for human lives. [10]
Yet according to Bukharin, Kirov’s previous role only served to strengthen his position as the advocate of reconciliation with former opposition elements, once the struggle for collectivisation was over and there remained ‘no more irreconcilable foes of any importance’.
It could be argued from this that Kirov stood in 1934 where the anti-Stalinists stand today. And, indeed, it is precisely this that makes Kirov so attractive a figure to the present leaders: it is possible to portray him as a precursor, a fighter against anti-party elements and a defender of the true Leninist tradition that the present regime has succeeded in reviving. Had he not been gotten rid of by the Stalinists, the argument goes, the mass repressions and violations of socialist legality would never have occurred.
The grain of truth in all this does not make it any the less a distortion of the facts. To get at the real truth one must also consider the other figure central to the drama, Leonid Nikolayev. Who was this man? What were his motives?
Practically no official information about Nikolayev has ever been divulged; but from Bukharin’s ‘Letter’ we learn that he fought on the front against Yudenich’s forces at the age of sixteen, [11] that he there joined the Komsomol, and later became a member of the party in Leningrad. At one time he was apparently connected with the NKVD. He also held a minor post as supervisor of a forced-labour camp in Murmansk. In 1933 he returned to Leningrad where, it was rumoured, he was again connected in some way with the NKVD (although this, wrote Bukharin, was kept especially secret). Early in 1934 he came into conflict with the party and was expelled, but was reinstated shortly afterwards on the grounds that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion and that too much should not therefore be expected of him.
The Moscow correspondent of the British Daily Worker at the time, WG Sheppard, stated that Nikolayev had formerly been a member of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. [12] This item of information is probably valid. It ties in with the mention by Victor Serge of a Nikolayev who, as an investigator of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection in Leningrad, had been instrumental in obtaining the reinstatement of Serge’s father-in-law, Russakov, into his trade union. Serge describes Nikolayev as ‘a tall, lean young man, grey-eyed, with tousled hair, who showed himself singularly honest’. [13]
Bukharin’s ‘Letter’ refers to the diary that was found on Nikolayev when he was arrested. [14]Limited extracts from this diary, which were circulated among a select circle as top secret (to be returned when read), sufficed to indicate Nikolayev’s state of mind at the time. According to Bukharin:
Everything seems to point to the fact that his mind was preoccupied principally with personal conflicts with the party machine, which was becoming increasingly bureaucratic. The diary is full of references of this kind, and of complaints of the disappearance of the old friendly relationships which had made life in the party so pleasant in the years following the revolution. He returned again and again to the memories of those days, which appeared to him very simple and rosy, the days of a sort of brotherhood… His complaints about the bureaucratism that had developed inside the party were the starting point of Nikolayev’s critical attitude. Further than that he did not go. The striking thing is the disproportion between the gravity of his act and the absence of any more profound criticism on his part… Nothing existed for Nikolayev outside the party… To the condition of inner-party relationships he began to react with growing intensity, and gradually he came to regard the situation as a veritable betrayal of the fine party traditions of the past, as a betrayal of the revolution itself. [15]
The irony here revealed is that Nikolayev – the killer of Kirov – saw himself as a champion of the ‘fine party traditions of the past’. In strict justice, therefore, the anti-Stalinists ought at least to recognise that Nikolayev was neither the common criminal they make him out to be, nor merely a man oppressed by a personal grievance. Granted that he was gravely mistaken as to the effect of his act – that it must inevitably have had consequences opposite to those it was intended to produce. Still, all that he wanted was, like Zheliabov, ‘to give history a push’ – in the direction of ‘de-Stalinisation’. He knew from close personal experience the rottenness of the party regime; he saw no essential difference between the existing situation and that under Tsarism (he had, wrote Bukharin, steeped himself in the literature of the People’s Will and the Social Revolutionaries and been profoundly influenced by it); he knew that there was no hope of change through the channels of inner-party democracy, which had become an empty slogan. Thus he came to the conclusion that there was only one way of effective action left open: someone had to sacrifice himself by executing a prominent representative of the ‘usurpers’, as he called them, and so rouse the country to the danger facing it. Bukharin reports the story that when Stalin asked him why he had committed the murder, and pointed out to him that he was a lost man, Nikolayev replied: ‘What does it matter? Many are going under now. But in the days to come my name will be coupled with those of Zheliabov and Balmashev.’
Nikolayev was not to know that certain men behind Stalin were themselves interested in getting rid of Kirov. To Nikolayev – and to how many others like him? – Kirov was obviously neither more nor less than one of the ‘usurpers’. What could he know of the struggle on the summit of power between the ‘conciliators’ and the advocates of continued ruthless repression? Certainly he was aware of nothing to alter his opinion of Kirov as the close companion of Stalin, [16] and a dedicated, ruthless executor of Stalinist policy.
But even in the unlikely event that Nikolayev had recognised Kirov as a co-thinker, and that the assassination had therefore never occurred, would this really have made any difference at all to the subsequent course of events? Is it not clear that the long-drawn-out struggle between the Stalinised party and the Stalinist secret police inevitably had to come to a head? The ‘mysterious and suspicious circumstances’ surrounding Kirov’s death amount simply to the fact that the advocates of repression, who already controlled the country, regarded Kirov as a menace to their authority, and that they were therefore glad to get rid of him, using Nikolayev as their unwitting instrument. This one killing was used as a pretext for mass killings, but a pretext for them would in any event have been found because Stalin’s ‘working staff’ needed one. As Bukharin put it, the members of his staff were not in principle ‘opposed to a change in the general policy of the party’ – they were not even interested in general policy as such. ‘What they emphatically opposed was any change in internal party policy. They realised that… they could expect no mercy in the event of a change in the inner-party regime.’ [17] And they knew of course – none better – that the number desiring such a change was not negligible. The extent and ferocity of the ‘mass reprisals’ following Kirov’s death can be explained only on the basis of the feeling of fear and insecurity prevailing among those who were the major prop of the regime, the men of the NKVD. They knew how much they were hated, and by how many.
Nikolayev acted as a lone individual; there was no Trotskyite – Zinovievite – Bukharinite plot. But Stalin and his general staff knew that there existed throughout the country a sharp mood of extreme bitterness and incipient revolt against their dictatorship, and that Nikolayev’s act was an expression of this mood. It was for them essential to get rid of all former oppositional elements in the party and the state apparatus – to remove anyone at all who might conceivably serve to crystallise that mood into action. In due course, even to venture a word of protest in favour of one unjustly accused was taken as indicative of dangerous thinking. [18]
In his ‘Secret Speech’, Khrushchev himself gave an example from the year 1931 of the methods used in the internecine struggle for supreme power, [19] and in so doing contradicted his general thesis that the rot only set in after 1934. But, of course, that struggle had begun immediately upon Lenin’s death, and it became progressively more deadly and bloody. Sooner or later – Kirov affair or no Kirov affair – the line of blood would have finally closed the balance sheet and marked the victory of Stalinism. Khrushchev was at his most un-Marxist when he said that ‘had Lenin lived, such an extreme method would not have been used against many’ Trotskyite opponents of the ‘general line’. On the contrary, had Lenin lived, he would have stood in the dock with Bukharin. Stalin’s treatment of Krupskaya shows that he was no respecter of persons, however eminent.
The question arises: how did Khrushchev have the nerve to carry his charges against Stalin and his cohorts as far as he did without apparently entertaining any serious fear that his audience would draw the ‘wrong’ conclusions – notably in the matter of his own complicity? The only explanation would seem to be that the present Soviet generation is not able to check the facts it is now given against its own knowledge of the events to which those facts relate. It has no such knowledge. The facts about the circumstances surrounding the Kirov murder were new to it; it did not know that these very facts had been used at the Moscow Trials to incriminate – not Stalin and his close companions – but Stalin’s enemies in the party, or those insufficiently subservient to him. This generation does not know that the rehabilitation of Zelenski, Grinko and Ikramov invalidates their evidence at the Third Moscow Trial, evidence incriminating themselves and the other defendants. It does not know that the same is true of the rehabilitation of Yenukidze and Rudzutak, who – although they were not then in the dock (having been tried and condemned in separate and secret trials) – were in effect equally among the accused at the trial.
The report of the ‘thorough enquiry’ into the Kirov affair promised by Khrushchev in 1961 will – if it is a true account, and if it is ever made public – be of enormous importance to the present Soviet generation. For it could herald the official demolition of the most monstrous edifice of lies and slander ever erected by any government in the entire history of mankind: the Moscow Trials. And not only the Moscow Trials, the keystone of which was the Kirov affair, but also the trials that preceded them and of which – as Vyshinsky pointed out at the last great trial – they were a logical extension.
This work of demolition would give the Soviet people a clear view of their own political history; it would, further, lift from their minds the remaining load of suspicion of the outside world inculcated by those trials. The new anti-Stalinists have chipped at the structure, even made great holes in it, yet it still stands, a horrible memento to the depths of depravity to which mankind is capable of sinking.
Notes
1.The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A Selection Of Documents (Columbia University Press, New York, 1956), pp. 25-26.
2. NS Khrushchev, Report on the Programme of the CPSU (Soviet Booklet no 81, London, 1961), p. 111; also Pravda, 19 October 1961.
3.Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1938), pp. 572-73.
4.Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, p. 559.
5.New York Times, 24 January 1935.
6.The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, p. 24
7. Khrushchev mentioned only Yenukidze as signatory of this decree, omitting the main signatory, Kalinin.
8.Pravda, 27 October 1961, p. 10.
9. L Shaumyan, ‘Na rubezhe pervykh pyatiletok’ (‘On the Threshold of the First Five-Year Plans’), Pravda, 7 February 1964.
10.Letter of an Old Bolshevik (Rand School Press, New York, 1937).
11. Was he related to the General Nikolayev taken prisoner on this front and hanged after refusing an offer by Yudenich to join his forces? See Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army (Secker and Warburg, London, 1940), p. 64.
12. WG Sheppard, The Truth About the Murder of Kirov (Modern Books, London, nd), p. 7.
13. Victor Serge, Mémoires d’un Révolutionnaire (Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1951), p. 301.
14. Both Yagoda and his secretary, Bulanov, confirmed the existence of this diary at their trial.
15.Letter of an Old Bolshevik, pp. 28-29.
16. When the regime’s spokesmen today talk of those who were close to Stalin, they perhaps forget that The Short Biography of Stalin (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951) carries a 1926 photograph of Stalin and Kirov together. The only other persons so honoured are Lenin, Kalinin and Gorky. No mention is made of Kirov’s assassination in the biography.
17.Letter of an Old Bolshevik, p.�29, emphasis in original.
18. Note the case of DA Lazurkin, for example, a party member from 1902 on, who spent 17 years in prisons and camps for this offence. See Pravda, 21 October 1963.
A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations—all were his! He counted them at break of day – And when the sun set, where were they?
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, writes of how Greece’s antiquity presses in on the present. It is a lightweight piece, surveying as it does three millennia of history, from the days of the Greeks, Alexander, the Great and the Romans to those of the Ottomans and their successor states – but it is elucidating nonetheless.
It is a brief reminder of the veracity of the phrase “history is always with us”, and of how the past continues to shape the present through its influence on culture, human nature, and ongoing events – a constant guide, providing both cautionary tales and inspiration for the future, as we carry our history with us in our identities, cultures, societies and recurring patterns of behaviour. As author and activist James Baldwin is attributed to have said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.
Greece has always lived a double life. To the casual visitor, it is a sun-splashed idyll of sea and sky, but its history tells a darker story – a long, hard ledger of heroes and horrors, and the stubborn will to survive wedged between warring empires. The last two and a half millennia have been less a tranquil Mediterranean tableau than a parade of conquerors, liberators, and the occasional poet-adventurer.
Over time, Greece has drawn to its shores soldiers and adventurers, poets and dreamers – and naive youths like myself. I hitch-hiked down from what was then Yugoslav in the summer of 1970, a young man with a second-hand rucksack and followed the looping Adriatic highway from Thessaloniki and Athens. I knew enough history to feel the charge of passing near Thermopylae, where Spartans once made their famous last stand against the might of Xerxes. But I wasn’t to learn until over half a century later that an army of ANZACs battled overwhelming odds just a valley away.
The past, in Greece, as in the Middle East, always stands just offstage, awaiting its cue and refusing to stay politely within its own century. It is not merely one of the world’s most benevolent postcards; it is a crossroads of empires, a battleground of ambitions, a cavalcade of famous names and places, where East and West have met, mingled, clashed, and sometimes embraced in the long swirl of history, where the mythic and the modern travel together.
One particular reference also reminds me of how history sends out roots, twigs and branches throughout the settled and hence recorded world.
Tempe, on Sydney’s Cooks River, wears its classical inheritance more openly than most Sydney suburbs. When Alexander Brodie Spark built Tempe House in the 1830s, he christened the estate after the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece – a narrow, ten-kilometre gorge carved by the Pineiós River as it threads between Olympus and Ossa. The poets imagined Poseidon’s trident had cleft the mountains to make it; Apollo and the Muses strolled beneath its laurels; sacred branches were cut there for Delphi. Spark, standing between his own modest “Mount Olympus” and the river, saw a faint echo of the Greek idyll and gave the place its name.
But the Vale of Tempe was never entirely pastoral. Armies have squeezed through that narrow defile for millennia. The Persians marched through it on their way south – Tempe lies just north of the iconic pass of Thermopylae, part of the same chain of passes that determined so much of Greek military history. And in the twentieth century it would again become a stage for outsiders in uniform.
In April 1941 Australian and New Zealand troops, together with British units, were thrown into Greece as Lustre Force – outnumbered, outgunned, and facing a German army with air superiority and modern communications. One of the hardest-fought delaying actions took place – inevitably, given the geography – at Tempe Gorge on 18 April (the featured image of this post, from the collection of the Australian War Museum). The Australian brigade was commanded by Brigadier A.S. Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF. His “Anzac Force” (apparently the last operational use of that designation) held the gorge long enough to impede the German advance and allow wider Allied withdrawals. The serene valley Spark had sentimentalised became, for a few violent hours, an Anzac bottleneck: those same narrow walls that once sheltered shrines now channelling rifle fire and Stuka attacks. Many of those men would soon find themselves on Crete, resisting the first large-scale parachute assault in military history.
And then – because Australia never resists a touch of Mediterranean whimsy—the Hellenic (and Hellenistic) echoes continue in our own neighbourhood on the Midnorth Coast. Halfway along the road from Bellingen to Coffs Harbour lies the township of Toormina, home to our closest shopping centre and to the Toormi pub. Its name began its life on the slopes of Mount Tauro in Sicily, in the ancient town of Taormina, the site of a famous amphitheater. In the 1980s local Italian residents of who were clients of developer Patrick Hargraves (the late father of a good friend of ours) suggested the name “Taormina” for the new subdivision. He liked the idea but clipped the opening “a” to make it more easily pronounceable- and Toormina entered the Gregory’s and thelocal vernacular.
So in our small corner of New South Wales, Greek myth, Persian marches, Anzac rearguards, and Sicilian nostalgia all whisper from the signposts. Tempe and Toormina: unlikely twins, proof that even the quietest suburb can carry the long shadows of the ancient world.
Uncovering a forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
From ancient battles to World War II, a visit to Athens’ War Museum exposes the dramatic military history that shaped modern Greece. Christopher Allen’s deeply personal connection unravelled in the process.
Christopher Allen, The Australian, 21 November 2025
James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
A little over 200 years ago, the Greeks began their war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered most of the Byzantine world in the 15th century; the renaissance in Western Europe thus coincided with the beginning of a new dark age for the Greeks under Turkish oppression. Some islands held out for longer: Rhodes, home of the Knights of St John, was taken in 1522, forcing them to withdraw to Malta; Cyprus, ruled by the French Lusignan dynasty from the time of the Crusades and then by Venice, was brutally conquered in 1571, and Crete, held by Venice since 1205, finally fell after a generation-long siege in 1669.
The Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its power in the early 18th century, but then began a slow decline, one of whose incidental effects was to make the Greek world more accessible to Western travellers: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett spent time in Athens from 1751 and published their Antiquities of Athens in several volumes in 1762. By the early 19th century, Greece had become part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour; by 1816, the Parthenon Frieze was in the British Museum and profoundly transformed modern understanding of Ancient Greek art.
Meanwhile the Greek War of Independence began with revolts in the Peloponnese in 1821 and a Declaration of Independence in 1822, eliciting a savage response from the Turks and sympathy from intellectuals and the educated public in Western European countries. The slaughter of the population of the island of Chios in 1822 led Eugène Delacroix to paint his famous Massacre at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824 and purchased in the same year for the national collection; it is today in the Louvre. In 1823, the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, who had already demonstrated his sympathy for Armenian culture and independence from the Ottomans, went to Greece to help in the fight, both personally and financially.
This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron in traditional Albanian attire. Alamy
Byron’s death in 1824 at Missolonghi only attracted more attention and sympathy to the cause of Greek freedom, and the great powers – Britain, France and Russia – warned the Turks about further repression, even though they were also committed, for different reasons, to maintaining the integrity of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, an international fleet led by the British and commanded by Sir Edward Codrington destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian navies. After further interventions on land by Russian and French forces, the Ottoman Empire was compelled, by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, to accept the independence of mainland Greece, although initially only as far north as the so-called Arta-Volos Line. The north, including Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained in Ottoman hands and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the former Byzantine city of Salonika in 1881.
Instability in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s gave the new Greek nation the opportunity to annex the central region of Thessaly in 1881 (while Britain incidentally acquired Cyprus in 1878). Further important gains were made during the two Balkan Wars (1912-13): much of Epirus in the northwest as well as Salonika and most of southern Macedonia, most of the Aegean Islands and Crete; the British had already ceded the Ionian Islands in 1863 and the Italians would relinquish the Dodecanese after World War II in 1947. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of World War I, Greece had briefly seized eastern Thrace and territories in Anatolia, soon to be retaken by the Turks with immense loss of life in the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.
Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum
This is of course a very much simplified version of the extraordinarily complicated story of Balkan politics from the mid-19th century, which forms such an important part of the lead-up to World War I. All of these events were accompanied not only by terrible military casualties on all sides, but by massive disruption to the population of lands where people of different ethnicities and faiths had lived side-by-side for centuries as part of a multiethnic empire, including war crimes and atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. And Greeks who had previously enjoyed political and economic prominence throughout the Ottoman world, including the Phanariots of Constantinople, were first stripped of their privileges, then persecuted and finally expelled in the tragic population exchange of 1923.
All of these events and many more are covered in the exhibits at the Athens War Museum, which I had never visited until a few weeks ago, but which gives a vivid idea of the almost continuous warfare that has been carried on over the past couple of centuries in a land most tourists imagine as a paradise of sea, sun and waterside taverns. The events of the war of liberation, especially as we pass through so many bicentenaries in the current decade, are naturally well represented: there is, for example, a new and interactive display devoted to the sea battle of Navarino and events surrounding this decisive moment in the war.
There are portraits of the many famous leaders of the independence movement in their picturesque costumes, as well as dramatic reimaginings of heroic battles, and of course weapons and equipment of the time. The resonance of the Greek struggle in Western Europe is recalled in a copy of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as well as a version of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron in exotic Albanian costume (1813), of which the original hangs in the British embassy at Athens; another replica by the artist himself, but only of the head and shoulders, is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios
But there is much more about the history of Greece in Antiquity, and the chronological arrangement of the displays makes this an effective way to follow the sequence of events, especially the main episodes of the Persian Wars – with the great battles of Marathon in 490BC and Salamis in 480 – as well as the subsequent conflict between Athens and her quasi-subject states on one side and Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies on the other, known as the Peloponnesian War.
This disastrous war (431-404 BC) was followed in the second half of the fourth century by the rise of Philip of Macedon to hegemony, for the first time, over almost all of mainland Greece. After his assassination in 336, his young son, who became Alexander the Great, embarked on a spectacular campaign that led to the conquest of the whole of the vast Persian empire, from Egypt to what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s conquests led to the extension of Greek language and civilisation deep into Asia, creating the international culture of the Hellenistic period, characterised among other things by a rich and complex exchange of ideas and forms between East and West.
He left an indelible impression on all the lands he conquered and is, for example, the first historical figure in the Persian national epic, the Shahname. By the time of Ferdowsi, who composed this masterpiece a millennium ago, the Persians had forgotten about the Achaemenid dynasty that first created the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; even the great site of Persepolis was and still is called Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, one of the mythical rulers from the great epic.
Each of Alexander’s battles – he is one of the handful of great generals never to have been defeated – is illustrated in clear diagrams, but they are also recalled in later images, in this case particularly in a series of 17th-century engravings whose story is probably unknown to almost all visitors to the museum. These are reproductions of gigantic paintings made as cartoons for tapestries commissioned by the young Louis XIV in the 1660s from Charles Le Brun, who was to become his court painter and who was later responsible for the decorations at Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The series illustrates the valour but also the magnanimity of Alexander, as is clear from the moralising inscriptions attached in the engraved versions. For a long time, the huge canvases were not displayed at the Louvre, but for the last few decades have had their own room upstairs in the Sully wing.
Following the chronological sequence from antiquity we eventually get back to the war of independence and its sequels already mentioned above; but the story continues, after what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the early 1920s, with a new calamity two decades later. For Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, to achieve an easy victory and utterly underestimating the strength and resolve of the Greek army. By the following spring, it was clear that he was getting nowhere, and Hitler decided to come to his rescue by invading Greece in April 1941.
A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus
An Allied army, mostly consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops as well as some British units, was hastily put together and sent from Egypt to Greece as Lustre Force. It was heavily outnumbered by the Germans, who were also massively better equipped and had the benefit of air cover and wireless radio communication. Nonetheless, the Allied army put up a determined resistance in a series of battles including one notable action on April 18, 1941 at Tempe Gorge commanded by my grandfather, then Brigadier AS Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF and taken our first troops to World War II. The brigade he commanded at Tempe was known as “Anzac Force”, apparently the last use of the term, after the designation Anzac Corps for the whole Australian and NZ component of Lustre Force.
After the evacuation of mainland Greece, my grandfather was sent to fight the Vichy French in Syria, but many of our troops were taken to Crete, where in May 1941 they were faced with the first and only large-scale parachute assault in military history, in which the Germans suffered appalling casualties but ultimately prevailed. Next year will be the 85th anniversary of these dramatic events in Greece and Crete, and among other things will be commemorated by an exhibition of Australian and NZ artists whom I accompanied on a two-week tour of these battlefields in the second half of October.
It was a moving experience to visit what are today the peaceful sites of such desperate battles almost three generations ago, aware at the same time of the long history of warfare in the same lands: the Persians marched through Tempe, which is just north of Thermopylae; Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (now Farasala), which you pass on the train from Athens to Salonika (now Thessaloniki), and; Cassius and Brutus died at Philippi in Macedonia, defeated by the Caesarian forces of Octavian and Mark Antony.
Christopher Allen is the national art critic for Culture and has been writing in The Australian since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.
And I guess that’s why they call it the blues Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Elton John
My sweetheart is a soldier as handsome as can be But suddenly they sent him away across the sea So patiently I waited until his leave was due Then wrote and said, my darling, I’ll tell you what to do: Come to the station, jump from the train March at the double down lover’s lane Then in the glen where the roses entwine Lay down your arms And surrender to mine
Geoff Downes, John Payne and Gregory Hart
“Right-wingers … have a disreputable history of picking on that particular cohort. The young, and not just those of Muslim persuasion, are more likely to question the conventional mores of the time than the middle-aged, which is why they make a lot of conservatives uneasy. Maybe national service will get them to shape up. This is really quite a smart idea from a Tory standpoint, since many of the values which young people in Britain are wary of are military in origin … they are cultural traits rather than basic moral values. Loyalty, team-spirit, toughness, honour, character, valour, austerity, self-discipline, leadership, physical prowess: the nation divides between those like the present monarch who consider these values utterly vital, and those who think they have their origin in a tiny, unrepresentative sector of society (the officer class, public schools, Boy Scouts and so on), and stem ultimately from Britain’s repressive colonial history”.
Sunak’s call triggered some sympathetic martial bugles here DownUnder. There were letters to the editor aplenty in Australian newspapers, including our own Coffs Harbour News of the Area (an actual printed newspaper too). I couldn’t resist writing a response – and it was actually published:
“There’s been a couple of letters recently suggesting that national service would be a suitable panacea for the problems of delinquent youth, and another by Bellingen’s Warren Tindall (an old pal of mine, by the bye) on the “perils of national service”, reminding us that whingeing about the younger generation is timeless and generational. The notion appears to appeal to folk of a certain age who lament the lack of respect, discipline and Australian values (whatever that means) amongst Australian youth – the “knock some sense into them” law and order types who would like disorderly young folk to be “out of sight and out of mind”, and effectively, someone else’s problem. They naively believe that the induction of potentially underage and recalcitrant youths would somehow contribute to our defense manpower shortfalls and bolster our military preparedness. On the contrary, the conscription of unwilling and probably unfit recruits, and the time, effort and money needed to render them of use in any military capacity is are the last things a proficient defense force needs.
In countries culturally and politically unaccustomed to national service, conscription has historically been considered a burden on the forces. In western countries with national service – most notably the Scandinavian and Baltics, and Israel – young people grow up with the expectation of service and the national duty that implies, and are culturally and temperamentally prepared for it by the time they come of age. It is not a military trainer’s job or even skill set to “instil a sense of purpose”, teach “physical and mental coping skills” or “positive career paths” or “train responsible human beings”, whilst “reducing our prison population” seems like something like Vladimir Putin would do”.
All this brings me to British author Richard Vinen’s enthralling book National Service in Britain 1945-1963. It charts the institution’s origins, administration, and social consequences, painting a vivid picture of postwar Britain negotiating the uneasy transition from empire to welfare state, revealing how conscription shaped not only military efficiency but the habits, ambitions, and identities of an entire generation – a cultural imprint whose echoes still surface in debates about civic duty, and national identity.
Reading it a while back, I recalled the promotional video for the Elton John song quoted above with its nostalgic visual narrative of young lovers separated by a call to duty, including footage of young army conscripts and of the early British rock ‘n roll era. I also recalled the BBC serial Lipstick on Your Collar – a particular favourite of mine; A romantic pop song Lay down your arms featured in its finale. [More on Potter’s story below] Both dramatise a decade and more of British social history that few recall today when over two million young men were conscripted to serve in the armed forces for up to two years, and sometimes more, at a critical time in their social, intellectual and emotional development.
We republish below a comprehensive overview by Davenport-Hines But first, here are a some of my own recollections, and themes explored by Vinen that are not covered therein.
A grave new world
After the Second World War (1939-45), the young men of Britain were called upon to meet new challenges facing the country in a rapidly changing world – the Cold War between the USA and its European allies, and the Soviet Union.
The post-war world was a tenuous time for the old empires. Whilst old King Canute demonstrated his inability to control the tides, when Britain faced emergent and powerful nationalist movements, it sought to reassert its control in de facto colonies as far-flung as Egypt and Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya; and together with France and the Netherlands, actually fought to reclaim and hold on to their “possessions” (a term that reflected a mindset as much as political reality) that had fallen to the Japanese. Portugal, Spain and Belgium likewise fought to prevent their subject peoples breaking loose. Few outposts of empire endure today.
The decision to repurpose wartime conscription in 1947 was a response to these challenges and also to the threats presented by the Soviet Union and a multitude of communist-inspired and Soviet-nourished national liberation movements. And yet, only a very small proportion of conscripts served overseas – and most who did were stationed in what was then West Germany and isolated and divided Berlin.
To meet the military manpower needs of this grave new world, the National Service, a standardised form of peacetime conscription, was introduced in 1947 for all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 21. Nowadays, when all sorts of evasion, dodges, and exceptions are common in society at large, it is hard to imagine a nationwide system in which all were actually deemed eligible, lord or landless, toff or tough, brains or bozo, had to serve. endured and was endured for over a decade; its abolition was announced in 1957 but continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963. Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over the sixteen years.
And then it was over, not with a bang but with a series of whimpers, stuttering indecisively to a close, leaving few traces on the cultural topography of late twentieth century Britain. Whilst many soon to be famous authors, playwrights, producers and musicians served, only a few wrote of their experiences. Nor did many other conscripts, although Woodfield Publishing carries a range of memoirs by ordinary men who resolved to record their experiences for posterity. The most important films and television programs about National service were comedies. Carry on Sergeant, which appeared in 1958 was the first and the most innocent of the long “carry on“ series. It was filmed at a real army camp.
There was no tangible ‘outcome’ to National service. There was no single conflict that ended in victory or defeat. There were none of the collective events – bonfires, parties, mutinies – that marked the end of the two world wars. It was ‘ending’ almost soon as it began because individual men were demobilized every two weeks. They went back to work – in the tight labor market of 1950s some of them started jobs on the Monday after they were demobilized – and to marriage and families in the dour but brightening fifties. It was not until they retired in the 1990s that most of the former servicemen had much time to reflect on their youth – which is why national service was so little discussed in the three decades after it ended.
Setting a date for the end of conscription was awkward. No one wanted to be the last conscript. There was a danger that the whole system might come to an end in “a most ragged and unsatisfactory manner” if men knew the precise day on which was ceased to operate, especially since as officials recognized, they would not have the resources to track down and prosecute evaders once the machinery of National service had been put into mothballs.
Though the last years of national service were uncomfortable for many conscripts, in someways, they were even worse for regulars particular, particularly for regular officers in the army. The tone of civil-military relations changed. when the first peace time conscripts had been called up, the army still had some of the prestige that went with victory in the second world war and with the military traditions of the Empire …
Those who regarded themselves as defenders of the interest of the army, had implied that peace time. conscription was a burden for the forces and look forward to the day when a well trained well paid and dedicated professionals were combined comprise a lean flexible and hard, hitting army. At least, in the short term this did not happen, and the end of conscription went with an undignified period when middle-aged officers scrambled to hold onto their jobs.
In one sense conscription was just one aspect of a British illusion of great power status, an illusion few people outside Britain, and perhaps a few people outside the British governing classes, believed or cared about
As Vinen reminds us in his enthralling story, the public’s historical memory of the institution imperceptibly faded from the national consciousness once it had ended, once parents no longer fretted about their sons being called up and once young men no longer needed to be anxious about interrupting or postponing careers and higher education. High rates of employment, rising incomes and standards of living during the fifties and early sixties, the attractions of consumerism and new forms of mass entertainment, and the lowering of Cold War tensions with the death of Josef Stalin, gave rise to fresh and less war-like circumstances and expectations.
The end of national service coincided with the beginning of the cultural era now known as the sixties (which actually lasted from about 1963 until about 1973). Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. It was a time remembered for self-consciously irreverent attitudes towards the British establishment, the class system, the almost casual racism of the past, and indeed history itself. It manifested the in theatrical reviews of the early sixties like Beyond the Fringe and the scatological and iconoclastic Private Eye magazine, and also the so-called youth culture which revolved about fashion and pop music.
In 1964, a year after National Service finally ended, a British band called the Barron Knights recorded an awful parody medley called Call Up The Groups which imagined many popular British groups being conscripted. It was hammy and cringeworthy then and it has not aged well, but when listened to sixty years on, it seems like an irreverent dated relic of Britain’s stuttering “farewell to arms”.
The very last line of Vinen’s book says it all: the culture in which national service existed belongs to a different age. To repurpose LP Hartley’s well used line, the past was another country where people thought and did things differently.
Descent from Glory
As noted in our introduction, present day advocates of conscription – or “national service”, which soothes the sting of compulsion – argue that it would encourage young people to “shape up”, to inculcate in them those treasured values that many of a certain age believe have been lost in the tide of modernity – to reiterate, like patriotism, loyalty, respect, honour, character, valour, leadership, toughness, self-discipline and physical prowess. And yet, the society that existed in those postwar years, and the values it espoused and revered, are long gone. The historical, political, social and cultural conditions that rendered national service universally acceptable no longer exist.
The British Empire had created a political culture that took greatness for granted and victory in the Second World War had reinforced this, even as it eroded the resources with which great power might be supported. The leaders of both political parties shared this culture as did most of the officials who advised them; and during the early years of National Service, most people of all classes accepted the shared obligation to serve, and with the memory of the war years still fresh and the Soviet and communist “threat” manifest, the populace as a whole were onboard with what could be described as official patriotism.
Most national servicemen had grown up in a period when there were no great ideological divisions in Britain. At least they were mostly young and the forces provided them with little in the way of political education. Of the small number who were actually posted overseas, many went without having much idea of what they were being sent to defend, and rarely understood what they were doing. In farflung outposts like Cyprus and Palestine, Kenya and the Far East, they were fighting people with whom they were not at war and often, as in Korea and later, in Egypt, countries that were not British possessions. The army didn’t get down to the politics what it was all about, and some national servicemen appear to have thought about the political significance of their actions at Suez, or in Malaya only years after the event.
Regular Army officers introducing themselves to conscripts would advise to tell them that the British preferred the term national service to conscription, because, to quote Vinen, “that is what it is “a service to the nation, each national serviceman contributes towards giving the nation, strong and efficient army”. Judged on an international perspective, however, the most striking thing about national service is, that was not actually very national
And yet, the military authorities never tried to instill patriotism.
Often, particularly in new states many ethnicities and religious affiliations and little social cohesion, military service is regarded as a “school of nation” inculcating presumptive national loyalty, values, interests. This was not the intent of the designers of national service. It was not intended to inculcate patriotic feelings. Nor was it really designed to foster manly martial virtues. Service for most conscripts was monotonous and seemingly pointless, whilst stories of bullying and mistreatment were common. One serviceman, Peter Burns, noted in a memoir years later: “In the old phrase, I went in a boy and came out a man, but not a very nice man”. He did not elaborate further.
It was manpower first and foremost, “boots on the ground” and potentially, on the battlefield – though technological innovation was rendering “serried ranks” redundant. Military authorities, determined to make things easier for themselves, were reluctant to call up, as a War Office report put it “a social group that is poorly integrated in the nation. For example, barrow boys, gypsies, the racing community, Liverpool Irish, foreign communities in London, the Glasgow community from which the gangs are recruited, etcetera … “. Indeed, the forces were probably glad to be rid of some of their potential and actual delinquent conscripts.
Conscription was never applied in the part of the United Kingdom where the largest number of people was likely not to feel themselves British: Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales, there was a small amount of overtly nationalist opposition to fighting for a ‘foreign’ government. more important was the general sense that conscription did not fit with the social structure of either Wales or Scotland. The Welsh dislike of the armed forces, rooted in chapel going respectability, was very different from the antipathy to army discipline that was associated with some working-class Scotsman. Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the war office was Glasgow”.
National service did not create a more homogenous and disciplined society – on the contrary, it worked partly because Britain, mainland Britain at least, was already homogenous and disciplined.
But there were the outliers. As Vinen writes: “Would that substantial group of men of Irish origin living in mainland Britain have been called up during the northern Irish troubles? What would the forces have done about non-white immigrants? Black Britons were not excluded from national service, but given how rare such men were, it is significant that they were quite common amongst those that officers regarded as ‘difficult’. The British army recruited 2000 West Indians in 1960, partly to make the shortfall that sprang from the imminent end of national service. However, the authorities decided that coloured soldiers should not make up more than 2% of the strength of any corps”.
Lipstick on your collar … national service through Potter’s prism
Lipstick on Your Collar is a 1993 British TV serial written by the late socialist playwright Dennis Potter, acclaimed for his television dramas The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. He also wrote the brilliant screenplay for the film adaption of Martin Cruz-Smith’s most excellent novel Gorky Park, itself, in my opinion, one of the best ever film adaptations of a novel.
Potter was a national service conscript along with many soon to be well-known British politicians, sportsmen, authors, poets, playwrights and performing artists – including Rolling Stones bass player, former RAF private, Bill Wyman, iconic actor and national treasure Michael Caine, late actors Sean Connery and Michael Gambon, onetime Conservative Party firebrand Michael Heseltine, and the ‘Angry Young Men’ of letters Allan Sillitoe, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton.
The story is for the most part set in a British Military Intelligence Office in Whitehall during 1956. A small group of foreign affairs analysts find their quiet existence is disrupted by the Suez Crisis. A young conscript is completing his national service as a translator of Russian documents, but bored with his job, he passes time in fantasy daydreams in which his very straight colleagues break into contemporary hit songs. The character is portrayed by a young Ewan McGregor went on to movie fame in Star Wars and other major films. His fellow language clerk is a clumsy Welsh intellectual and admirer Russian poets and playwrights – Pushkin and Chekov in particular- whose academic career has been interrupted by his call up. collar.
The subtext is the conflict between the old order, as represented by the middle-aged and-patriotic regular army officers, the conscripted ‘other ranks’ as portrayed by the two privates, and the new ‘rock ‘n roll’ generation, illustrated her by dance halls, coffee bars, and ‘fifties American popular music.
Denis Potter studied at Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. One such graduate was Tom Springfield, the elder brother of diva Dusty Springfield. He borrowed the melody of The Seeker’s timeless song The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional Russian folk tune that told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbine rather than casting them overboard. See “High above the dawn is waiting” … the unlikely origin of a pop song
“And what a year that was! With peacetime restored, the British electorate immediately voted out its esteemed and beloved war leader, Winston Churchill, and bought Labour’s promise of a democratic socialism. In his excellent documentary The Spirit of ‘45, film maker Ken Loach describes the nationalisation of public services and industries and their subsequent privatization three decades later. His interviewees provide poignant anecdotes about the poverty of the 1930s, the dangerous and exploitative working conditions, poor housing, and abysmal health care, and the renewed sense of purpose and optimism a the end of the war and Labour’s landslide victory. He recounts the subsequent expansion of the welfare state, with its free to all medical service and the nationalization of significant parts of the British economy, most notably, electricity, the railways, and the mines. The Attlee government was elected due to a general belief that nothing would or could be as it had been before. Britain had pulled together to win the war; now, it would transform the peace.
But for ordinary folk, life in the immediate postwar years wasn’t that rosy. Britain emerged from the war victorious and though brave, physically battered and financially broke, its towns and factories in disrepair, and it’s people coming to terms with a not so brave new world of disappointed expectations and ongoing privation. Rationing, introduced early in the war on most foodstuffs and consumer items, remained in place and was only gradually lifted until its end in 1954.”
If we’re born in forties and early fifties, and look back, to our childhoods or to contemporary photographs and films, there is a patina of austerity and drabness. It was mirrored in how people dressed and in the fashions of the time. During the conflict and long after, clothing and colour were rationed due to the shortage of fabrics and of dyes as industry and manufacturing were directed to “essential industries” contributing to the war effort. This is why images of the time look so monochrome, or when colourized all blacks, browns and greys. Until the technicolor explosion that is now synonymous with the “swinging sixties”, enabled by the invention of new, often synthetic fabrics and an insurrectionist generation of designers, artists, and entrepreneurs.
I was born at the right time in the right place. I missed the Second World War, and arrived to be blessed with the benefits of the National Health Service – launched by Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan on 5th July 1948 – which had had at its heart three core principles: that it met the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – and The Education Act , or ‘Butler Act’, of 1944 which promised and then delivered ‘secondary education for all’. I was too young to do National Service in the fifties, and caught the wondrous wave of the sixties in all its freewheeling, rumbustious glory, whilst Harold Wilson kept us potentially eligible conscripts out of America’s Asian war in Vietnam.
When I was a nipper, the Second World War was tangible. I born less than four years after the fighting finished. It was nearer than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Northern Ireland are today. We just called it “The War”. We had family, friends and relations who had lived through it, fought in it, and died in it, as had many of the schoolmasters who taught us. Many wore scars and infirmities from the war, and some bore invisible wounds.
We played war-games on bombed-out “wasteland”. Rationing continued into the fifties, so it constrained our lifestyles. War stories were ubiquitous, on the screen and in print; James Bond had served in the war, as had George Smiley. In the boys’ comics, gallant British Tommies invariably overcame superior numbers of Germans, who were portrayed as mindless automatons and referred to contemptuously as ‘Krauts’ or ‘Jerries’. In the sixties, we built Airfix warplanes, battleships and fighting vehicles.
Conscription was reintroduced in 1948 to maintain what remained of Britain’s imperial dream; young men in uniform were always around whilst older cousins and friends’ big brothers had to do their national service. Little wonder that the war’s echoes reverberated through our imaginations, pastimes and preoccupations.
My own memories of National Service are are just fleeting images of young relatives in army uniforms and of school pals mentioning that their brothers or uncles were doing their bit. To us children, it was relatively unobtrusive and taken for granted. I commenced grammar school in September 1960 at a time when many grammar schools imitated the practise of public schools with a military training outfit called the CCF or Combined Cadet Force. Once a week, toy soldiers would strut about school in khaki attire. Prefects, another practise borrowed from public schools (along with the term “fags” for first and second formers – though none the servile duties immortalised in that fabulous movie If) were naturally officer-cadets. And they would march up and down the square with real guns! No ammo, but. I was already a Boy Scout by then and that was enough of matters martial and patriotic for me. And my Irish folks said “No!”
Whether by design or coincidence, by 1963, conscription and our school CCF were no more. And I did not notice the passing of either.
We were taught and accepted the narrative that wartime prime minister Winston Churchill had promulgated: that the period after the fall of France, when Britain had stood alone against the Axis powers, had been our finest hour and that the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany made all the sacrifices worthwhile. We also accepted His word for his pivotal role in it. “History will be kind to me”, he famously wrote, “for I shall write it”. And we were inculcated with the values that he fostered and indeed, personified: courage, duty, obedience, self-denial, reticence, restraint – the qualities that had won the war, or at least had enabled Britons to survive it. This is what being a man meant, then.
The are not values that resonate today. By the beginning of the sixties, “the times were a’changin’”, slowly but surely. Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. Rising levels of education, and also, of affluence wrought changes in attitudes and ambitions. The fifties gave rise to the phenomenon of “the teenager”, an American concept that took off in drab Britain as rationing came gradually to an end and as life in general took on more colour and excitement – young people were less accepting of authority, discipline, and ageing and anachronistic concepts of Queen and Country – and as the songs at the head if this post illustrate, love was always in the air …
Rather than keeping a stiff upper lip, we are encouraged to show our emotions; rather than keeping it in, we are supposed to let it all out. Like most of us today, I share these modern, peacetime values; yet I retain a respect for the men of my father’s generation. Without them, our lives would have been very different.
The world was much smaller then
In those days, young people did not travel too much, and accordingly, did not move far from their economic and social circles. Vinen notes that schools and later, universities, were for many, the most important gatehouses on the social frontiers. Until then, few folk got close enough to see the middle class or conversely, the working class closeup. The eleven plus was the border crossing where children who’d come through primary school together were filtered off onto different paths.
My recollections concur totally regional differences were less pronounced in primary school where children were drawn from a particular locality, where even Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents were to a degree diluted and normalized by schoolmates. My Roman Catholic primary school in Yardley Wood in south Birmingham was located between middle- and working-class neighbourhoods, the former on the eastern side of Trittiford Road, the latter on the west and south, so we were a socially mixed bunch. But Catholics all. Of Irish parentage, went through primary school without mixing socially with non-Catholics. Secondary schools drawing on a wider yet still local catchment saw more familiarization with differences accents, often of a social character. But it was in tertiary education that young people came into continued contact with contemporaries and teachers from all over the country and even from abroad.
Conscription in the Anglosphere post 1945
The following is a brief overview of postwar conscription in Australia and the United Sates, particularly with reference to its introduction in the light of these countries’ controversial involvement in the Vietnam War. Britain sat this one out – to the great relief of myself and my peers, who were all of conscription age and had no inclination to take part in America’s Asian war – although US President Lyndon B Johnson endeavoured unsuccessfully to strongarm and indeed blackmail British Prime Minister Harold Wilson into committing British troops to the conflict. A more comprehensive overview of conscription in the Eastern and Western blocs during and after the Cold War is provided in an addendum at the end of this post.
Britain had done away with military service in 1963; Belgium did so in 1992. France in 1997 and Germany 2011, between 2004 and 2011, a vast swathe of Europe did away with national service. Only Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Cyprus, Greece, Austria and Switzerland have never abandoned conscription.
In Australia, I’d meet veterans who’d been conscripted for the Vietnam War through the notorious, discriminatory birthday ballot – a method actually rejected by the British government as inequitable, unfair, and contrary to the notion of universal obligation.
It was introduced in April 1964 primarily to meet the challenges if of the Indonesian “confrontasi” and the emerging threats from communism in Asia and Australia’s overseas commitment to Cold War allies. Tensions were increasing between North and South Vietnam by May 1965, and as an ally of the US, Australia agreed to allow national servicemen to be sent overseas to Vietnam.
Australia sent over 60,000 military personnel to Indochina between 1962 and 1972, including large combat units and conscripts under the National Service Scheme. Most 20-year-old Australian men had to register for national service between 1965 and 1972, and 15,300 ‘nashos’ as they were called were conscripted into. More than 200 died and at least 1,200 were wounded on active duty.
Conscription was generally supported by Australians. Polls showed widespread support for the policy. Parents saw it as a way of instilling discipline in their sons, as well as teaching valuable life skills. At the time, the Australian media portrayed conscription in a positive way. Army life and national service were generally praised. The army was not so enthusiastic. Instead, it argued the need for skilled tradesmen and officers and not what it considered a ragtag selection of semi trained men. Public support waned after the first conscripts were killed, stirring the anti-war movement. Australia’s last combat troops came home from Vietnam in March 1972, and the national service scheme ended that December after the election of the Whitlam Labor government.
Like Britain, Canada did not enter the Vietnam War. New Zealand, the last of the ”Five Eyes” allies did, for similar geopolitical reasons to Australia’s.There was domestic opposition, but never on the scale or intensity of Australia’s anti-Vietnam movement.New Zealand’s total deployment was around 3,500 personnel over the whole war, but all of them were volunteers. There was no conscription in NZ and therefore not the same resentment about people being forced into service – major driver of Australian protests. The protest narrative focused on the morality and legitimacy of the war, not the injustice of conscription.
While in both countries, the conservative governments framed Vietnam as part of the Cold War “forward defence” strategy and alliance obligations (SEATO, ANZUS). the scale and visibility of the commitment in NZ were smaller, and the government carefully emphasised the limited nature of the force.
Early in the war, like in Australia, public opinion was more favourable toward involvement, partly due to alliance loyalties and the perception of a communist threat in Asia. Opposition grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly among students, churches, and parts of the Labour Party – but large street protests only became common toward the end, especially around 1970–72. There was no equivalent of the huge moratorium marches across the Tasman. NZ began winding down combat deployments earlier than Australia; the infantry company was withdrawn in late 1971, with only a small training team remaining until 1972. The Labour government elected in 1972 (Norman Kirk) quickly ended remaining involvement. It never became the same national political crisis that it did in Australia, but it did, help cement a more independent foreign policy during the 1970s–80s, culminating in the nuclear-free policy and tensions with the US.
America’s Vietnam conscription experience was combustible and cathartic. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. All men of draft age (born January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950) who shared a birthday would be called to serve at once.
Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve. While many soldiers did support the war, at least initially, to others the draft seemed like a death sentence: being sent to a war and fight for a cause that they did not believe in. Some sought refuge in college or parental deferments; others intentionally failed aptitude tests or otherwise evaded; thousands fled to Canada; the politically connected sought refuge in the National Guard; and a growing number engaged in direct resistance. Antiwar activists viewed the draft as immoral and the only means for the government to continue the war with fresh soldiers. Ironically, as the draft continued to fuel the war effort, it also intensified the antiwar cause. Although the Selective Service’s deferment system meant that men of lower socioeconomic standing were most likely to be sent to the front lines, no one was completely safe from the draft. Almost every American was either eligible to go to war or knew someone who was.
Global areas of operation for National Servicemen, 1947-63
National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945-1963
The forgotten history of Britain’s peacetime conscription
Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the cultural revolution of the 60s, there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Mods and peaceniks were reacting against generations that had been mobilised during two world wars. Yet the militarisation of British society was not just the outcome of war. Under the National Service Act, introduced in 1947, healthy males aged 18 or over were obliged to serve in the armed forces for 18 months. After the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the length of service was raised to two years – more onerous than elsewhere in Europe. In practice national service was a catch-all for men born between 1927 and 1939 whose childhoods had already been overcast by economic depression, wartime bombing and evacuation. Although its abolition was announced in 1957, it continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963.
Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over this period. The army took 1,132,872 and the RAF much of the rest, leaving relatively few sailors. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and were liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Many drilled men became conformist and respectful of authority, but others reacted to their experiences with a lifetime of insubordination and resentment. National service did not cause the upheaval or leave the distressed aftermath of the US draft in the Vietnam war, but the significance of the forgotten militarisation of mid-20th century Britain is enduring.
National Servicemen relax in the NAAFI canteen at Weybourne Camp, April 1954
In an era when it was hard to recruit enough regular soldiers to meet Britain’s commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, conscripts trained to police regions occupied by the British after the war, to provide a reserve of troops who could be called up in any future major conflict, and they were available for immediate deployment, notably in the decolonisation wars in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. Most of them were not yet old enough to vote (voting age was only lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970) and felt disempowered. They had scant pay, and provided a cut-price way for Britain to maintain its illusory great power status. But withdrawing this number of fit youngsters from the economy at a time of labour shortage harmed British post-war reconstruction.
Vinen admits that he could write a whole chapter on a Conservative MP’s claim that he was offered a commission because an officer spotted that he was circumcised and concluded that he must be a public school boy. In turn, a reviewer could write a monograph on Vinen’s book, which is chock-a-block with important themes, provocative ideas, arresting stories, heartbreak and good jokes.
Nowadays we commemorate the launch of the National Health Service as promoting a historically unprecedented mentality whereby a benign state provided its citizens with social benefits rather than treating them as subjects serving the needs of the nation. The National Service Act was the negative counterpart of the NHS, whereby civilians were dragooned into compliance with the demands of the state. Its chief proponent was Field Marshal Montgomery, the posturing bully who was in a permanent panic of denial about his repressed homosexuality, and hoped to use military service to mould national character towards chaste combative virility. For many conscripts their sense of the state was not the benign NHS but the bullying of national service square-bashing.
Generally, though, national service was not intended as an instrument of social discipline. It was disliked not only by antimilitarists and left-wingers, but by middle-of-the-road people because it disrupted the lives of their sons in a period when there was full employment for the working classes. Welsh chapel-going traditions were hostile to conscription. Working-class Scotsmen fought army discipline. As Vinen writes, “Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the War Office was ‘Glasgow’.” Regular army officers resented national service, especially during its early years, because the need to train a constantly renewed stream of conscripts was dull, repetitive and diminished “real soldiering”.
The Church of England, unlike the nonconformists and the Catholics, encouraged its clergy to undertake national service. Anglicanism and “manly morality” were promoted together by the military authorities. An army guide of 1947 declared, “the sexual appetite was implanted in man for the lawful use in Wedlock”. Yet Christian morality had minimal influence on the sex lives of conscripts. Rather, says Vinen, national servicemen, as opposed to regular soldiers, believed in “that greatest of all postwar virtues: deferred gratification”. His findings support Claire Langhamer’s wonderful study The English in Love(2013) in showing how strongly young men of the 1950s were romantics who believed in love at first sight, idealised virginity and had sweet dreams of domestic bliss within the institution of marriage. The discomfort and violence of military life, the lack of privacy and the mindless rules imposed without consent produced a generation that cherished intimacy and non-confrontation. Most conscripts came from families where defiance of the law was inconceivable. Yet the armed forces gave innumerable opportunities for non-commissioned officers and clerks to exploit conscripts, pilfer stores and make dodgy deals. Many conscripts learned how to duck and dive, to break rules and subvert authority. One RAF clerk issued instructions that officers must count the number of flies stuck to flypapers at all bases. Such experiences chipped away at the law-abiding, respectful traditions of Britain before peacetime conscription.
Vinen depicts “the hellish chaos of basic training”: its violence, verbal savagery, the dumb misery of military drills, the horrors of bayonet practice. Several young men killed themselves during training – usually by hanging from a lavatory cistern, because “the shithouse” was the only place that gave a moment’s privacy – but suicide statistics seem to have been doctored by officials. Sergeants with booming voices and curling moustaches were fabled figures, but it was corporals who gave the orders in training – many were malevolent, sadistic figures. Vinen gives numerous instances of cruelty, both in training and in combat. These include the massacre in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol – mainly national servicemen – of 24 Chinese labourers on a Malaysian rubber plantation, killings and mutilations in Kenya and a rampage by troops in Cyprus after two British servicemen’s wives were shot. A serviceman described: “wholesale rape and looting and murder”, including “a 13 year old girl raped and killed in a cage”.
Royal Engineers homeward bound from Suez on the SS ‘Dilwara’, 1954
National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. It is written with cool, elegant lucidity and there are neither ideological tricks nor obscure jargon. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man.
How National Service introduced in 1949 saw more than two million young men take up military roles
Males aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted between 1949 and 1960
Initially recruits had to serve for 18 months, but this was extended to two years
Did YOU do National Service? Email harry.s.howard@mailonline.co.uk
Harry Howard, History Correspondent, Daily Mail, 31st August 2023
For those who did not enjoy the experience, it must have felt like the Second World War had not truly ended.
Between 1949 and 1960, more than two million men aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted into the armed forces as part of National Service.
The proposals – mooted by think-tank Onward – would not be compulsory, but youths would have to opt out if they did not want to join. As many as 600,000 youngsters could be involved.
Triplets Allan, Brian and Dennis Kirkby (front, left to right) reporting with other recruits at North Frith Barracks, Hampshire, in 1953
Michael Caine (back row, fourth from left) was among the men who were called up. He served in the Royal Fusiliers from from April 1952 and ended up fighting in the Korean War
National Service was deemed necessary in part because of Britain’s military commitments abroad.
The British Empire – although diminishing – still existed and both Germany and Japan were still occupied following the end of the Second World War.
Ministers also wanted to re-establish British influence in the world, including in the Middle East.
Further manpower demands were imposed by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, whilst Indian independence in 1947 meant Britain no longer had the huge Indian Army to call upon.
Those who were conscripted as part of National Service would have to sleep 20 to a room in ramshackle barracks, with little heating, primitive toilets and poor washing facilities.
They would be woken at 5.30am and spent hours marching on the parade ground, with afternoons taken up by field or rifle training, ten-mile runs and obstacle courses.
Recruits spent their evenings cleaning the barracks, their kit and their rifles in a routine that was known as ‘the bull’.
Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper (pictured left with his twin brother George), who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games
Sir Henry Cooper (left) is seen on a training jog with other recruits during his National Service
Former Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, was called up but served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election: (middle row, fifth from right) with fellow conscripts at Caterham Guards Depot in 1959
Conscripts are seen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames in 1953
National Servicemen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames enjoy a smoke as a comrade examines his rifle in 1953
National Servicemen are seen marching at a depot in Kingston upon Thames
National Servicemen training with the Royal Air Force at RAF Booker in Buckinghamshire in 1951
Punishments for any slip in standards included being confined to barracks, washing latrines or peeling potatoes.
Recruits also had little chance to see their families. They were given just 14 days’ leave for every eight months of service.
Basic pay in 1949 was 28 shillings (£1.40) a week, much less than the average weekly wage of around £8.
But the men still had to buy all their own razor blades, shaving soap, boot polish, haircuts, dusters and Brasso for polishing any buckles and badges.
If any kit was lost, recruits would have to pay for it twice. Once to replace it and once as a fine.
After finishing basic training, conscripts were posted to regiments both at home and abroad. Overseas postings included Germany, Cyprus and the Middle East.
Other National Servicemen who went on to become household names include Oliver Reed, Tony Hancock, and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones
Around 125,000 National Servicemen were deployed to war zones such as the conflict in Korea and 395 lost their lives in combat.
Others saw action in Malaya and during the Suez Crisis in 1956.
Although for some the experience of serving was a negative one, many National Service veterans look back fondly on the period.
They often formed bonds that have stayed with them ever since.
During his stint in the Royal Fusiliers, which began in 1952, Sir Michael, now 90, served in the Korean War.
He recalled his experiences in an interview with the Daily Mail in 1987.
Commenting on the tactics employed by the enemy, he told of ‘attack after attack, you would find their bodies in groups of four’.
‘We heard them talking and we knew they had sussed us…Our officer shouted run and by chance we ran towards the Chinese. Which is what saved us; in the dark we lost each other,’ he added.
Lord Heseltine, 90, served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election and then getting his solicitor to persuade the War Office that he did not need to return to the barracks.
Sir Bobby, 85, combined his football career at Manchester United with a stint in the Army in the mid 1950s.
He served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Shrewsbury, meaning he could still play football at the weekend.
Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper, who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.
Eighteen-year-old conscripts on parade at the Royal West Kent Depot , November 1955
Teenagers line up at the Royal West Kent Depot in Maidstone forinoculations in November 1954
Major General Sir Reginald Laurence Scoones of the British Army takes the salute at the passing-out parade of 32 National Service and regular recruits from the depot of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) at the Tower of London, October 17, 1958
National Service recruits lined up in 1952
He joined up with his twin brother George. Recalling his first day, Sir Henry previously said: ‘Well, it’s all a bit nerve-wracking because we didn’t know what to expect.
‘We went to Blackdown where we did our basic training.
‘We had to have medicals, strip off in front of doctors, put our arms up and they stuck a needle, one in our shoulder, one in our arm, and we wondered what was going on.’
He added: ‘They were hard on you in those days. Thank God we were a little bit better than a lot of the ordinary guys.
‘We were very fit because we’d been training as amateur boxers so the physical fitness side didn’t bother us at all.’
Sir Henry was crowned Army Boxing Association champion two years’ running and went on to win the Imperial Services Boxing Association title.
In the late 1950s it was decided to bring National Service to an end, in part because of the burden it placed on the Army and the fact that workers were being drained from the economy.
Rifleman E Akid showing National Service recruits a captured Korean flag at the Royal Ulster Rifles Depot in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
Yorkshiremen a posing for a group photo before they entered the armed forces 1955
A group of national servicemen in the canteen at their barracks, November 1954
Swansea Town and Wales international footballer Cliff Jones serving his National Service at with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery regiment of the British Army. Here he is having his rifle inspected at the St John’s Wood barracks, October 14, 1957
Recruits taking part in an assault course in 1955
The last recruits entered the armed forces in November 1960, with their service coming to an end in 1963.
The last man to be discharged was Second Lieutenant Richard Vaughan of the Royal Army Pay Corps, who departed on June 14, 1963.
Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint for the new National Service-style scheme yesterday in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the ‘goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination’ of teens.
She also insisted it could promote ‘good mental health and resilience’ after the upheaval of the Covid crisis.
Addendum – Around the World
Britain 1945–1962
Name: National Service (post‑WWII call‑up)
Period: Men born from 1927–1939 were called; effective peacetime service formally ran 1947 to 1960 for new call‑ups, with final discharges in 1963 (legal end often cited as 1960–62 depending on measure). (Double‑check exact administrative end dates for your footnote.)
Age at call‑up: typically around 18–20 (varied).
Length of service: initially 18 months (later raised to 2 years during Korean War era, then cut back to 18 months by the 1950s).
Exemptions/deferrals: students, those in reserved occupations, medical unfitness, and conscientious objectors (who faced tribunals and could receive civilian or non‑combatant service).
Context: early Cold War, Korean War, decolonisation operations; political consensus for a peacetime force to meet global commitments. Abolished as Britain moved to a smaller professional army and as political pressure mounted against peacetime conscription.
Comparative snapshot: selected Western & allied countries (1945 → present)
Note: “Present” means status as of mid‑2024 unless otherwise noted. Please ask if you want this converted into a formal table with citations.
France
Post‑1945 pattern: Mandatory service re‑established after WWII; heavily used during the Indochina and Algerian wars.
Length: historically 18–28 months at various times.
End/suspension: Standing conscription ended in 1996 (President Chirac suspended the appel). France shifted to a professional army; short mandatory civic training (Journée Défense et Citoyenneté) remains.
Notes: Algeria and decolonisation had big effects on French policy and public debate.
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) / GDR (East Germany)
West Germany (FRG): Introduced conscription in 1956 (Bundeswehr). Length and rules changed over decades. Suspended in 2011 (modern Bundeswehr since then volunteer‑based; conscription remains in law but de facto suspended). Alternative civilian service existed.
East Germany (GDR): Conscription existed until German reunification in 1990.
Notes: Reunification led to integration and later suspension in unified Germany.
Italy
Post‑1945: Universal conscription throughout Cold War.
End/suspension: 2005 (Italy moved to an all‑volunteer force).
Notes: Length and structure varied; alternative civilian service for conscientious objectors established in the 1970s.
Spain
Post‑Franco transition: Conscription continued during Francoist era and into the transition.
End/suspension: Abolished in the early 2000s (commonly cited as 2001), moving to a professional force.
Netherlands
Post‑1945: Conscription kept for Cold War.
Status: Compulsory service suspended in 1996 (military became professional; registration obligations remain in law).
Notes: Like many NATO states, transitioned in the 1990s.
Sweden
Post‑1945: Long tradition of universal conscription.
Suspension and reintroduction: Suspended in 2010, reintroduced in 2017 (partial, gender‑neutral selective conscription) in response to regional security concerns.
Notes: Good example of 21st‑century reintroduction.
Norway
Status: Conscription continued after WWII and remains active; Norway extended recruitment to women (practical gender‑neutral service).
Notes: Nordic model with broad reserve obligations.
Finland
Status: Conscription has been continuous since WWII and remains active; long service and comprehensive reserves are central to defence doctrine.
Notes: Key example of a small state with universal conscription for territorial defence.
Switzerland
Status: Active conscription for men with militia model; long tradition dating well before 1945 and continuing to present.
Notes: Extensive reserve system; alternative service exists.
Greece
Status: Conscription has persisted; length and requirements have varied but it remains active (security focus with Turkey as contextual factor).
Notes: Frequently among the longer service lengths in Europe.
Turkey
Status: Mandatory military service continues; important political and social role.
Notes: One of the larger countries with longstanding conscription.
Israel
Status: Conscription active and central to society (included here though not in “Western Europe”).
Notes: Universal for men and women; unique labour/defence mix.
United States
Post‑1945: Draft (Selective Service) used during Korea and Vietnam (peacetime draft active through early 1970s).
End/suspension: All‑volunteer force established in 1973; Selective Service registration remains mandatory for men (no draft since 1973).
Notes: US is important precedent for transition to volunteerism.
Canada
Post‑1945: Canada did not maintain peacetime conscription after WWII (it had conscription in WWII and limited measures in WWI). No peacetime universal conscription for most of the Cold War.
Notes: Canada used volunteers and reserves; National Service not used after WWII.
Australia
Pattern: Australia used selective/periodic national service schemes post‑1945: e.g. conscription for Korean War era? (there were early 1950s programmes) and notably 1964–1972 conscription for the Vietnam War (National Service Scheme) — abolished in 1972.
Status today: All‑volunteer force.
Notes: Australia shows intermittent use tied to specific conflicts and governments.
New Zealand
New Zealand’s post-1945 conscription story is short and quite different from Britain’s or Australia’s. Compulsory military training (CMT) existed during the war; at the end of WWII, conscription was wound down but not entirely abandoned.
In 1949, New Zealand reintroduced Compulsory Military Training for men aged 18–26. This wasn’t the same as Britain’s two-year full-time National Service — instead, recruits did a few months’ full-time training (initially 14 weeks), followed by years in the reserves with annual camps. New Zealand’s 1949–1958 scheme was short-term training + reserves rather than Britain
Korean War period: CMT supplied trained reservists but no direct mass call-up for the Korean front; active service was still voluntary.
Abolition: The peacetime CMT scheme was abolished in 1958 by the Labour government (Walter Nash PM), in part due to cost and a belief that a small professional army plus reserves would suffice.
Later conscription: No peacetime conscription after 1958. During the Vietnam War, New Zealand’s forces were all-volunteer (unlike Australia’s mixed volunteer/conscription model).
Current status: No conscription; military is all-volunteer.
Cross‑cutting themes & political context
Cold War & immediate post‑war security environment — NATO, Warsaw Pact, and decolonisation shaped demand for mass armies in 1940s–1960s.
Colonial wars and conscription politics — France (Indochina/Algeria) and Britain (Malayan Emergency, Suez, later emergencies) faced public controversy and political consequences.
Economic costs vs. professionalisation — By the 1990s many democracies shifted to volunteer forces to improve quality, reduce political resistance, and cut costs; the end of the Cold War accelerated this.
Social effects & demographics — Education deferments, social class effects, and the experience of the working class vs. middle class; conscription often politicised by student movements (e.g., US/Vietnam).
Conscientious objection & alternatives — Growth of legal alternatives, tribunals, civilian service provisions from the 1950s–1980s onward.
Reserves, mobilization policy & territorial defence — Nordic and Swiss models retained conscription because of territorial defence doctrines; small states with perceived existential threats (Finland, Israel, Greece, Turkey) kept universal systems.
Gender & conscription — Mostly male‑only until the 21st century; some states (e.g., Norway) expanded to gender‑neutral service in recent years.
Legal suspension vs. abolition — Some countries (Netherlands, Germany) suspended conscription or kept the law on the books; others formally abolished it.
The USSR and the Warsaw Bloc (1945–1991)
The Soviet bloc had a very different conscription story to that of Western democracies, both in duration and in the political role of the draft. Here’s a condensed but detailed overview for the USSR, post-Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe from 1945 to present:
Status: Universal male conscription was a central feature of Soviet defence. It had existed since before WWII and continued uninterrupted until the USSR dissolved in 1991.
Length:
Immediately after WWII: usually 3 years in the army, longer in the navy.
Reduced slightly in the late 1950s–60s (Khrushchev era) to about 2 years army / 3 years navy, which remained the basic Cold War standard.
Scope: All able-bodied men aged roughly 18–27; women could be drafted in wartime but were not subject to peacetime call-up.
Exemptions: Health grounds, some students (especially in priority fields), certain ethnic minority exemptions in early post-war years.
Role:
Central to the USSR’s massive standing force, supporting Warsaw Pact commitments.
Ideological as well as military — military service was seen as a key Soviet citizenship duty.
Notes: Discipline was often harsh, with hazing (dedovshchina) a chronic problem; conscripts served both in domestic garrisons and abroad (e.g., Eastern Europe, Afghanistan).
Post-Soviet Russia (1991–present)
1990s: Conscription continued under the Russian Federation; legal term reduced in the 2000s from 2 years to 1 year (army) under reforms completed around 2008.
Exemptions/avoidance: Student deferments remain; draft evasion became common in the 1990s/2000s due to unpopular wars (Chechnya).
Current status: Conscription still active (as of 2024); men aged 18–30 serve 1 year. In wartime (e.g., Ukraine 2022–), the Kremlin has also mobilised reservists and in some cases extended service.
Differences from USSR: Smaller total force, more reliance on contract soldiers (kontraktniki), but conscription is still a key manpower source.
Eastern Europe – Warsaw Pact members (1945–1991)
General pattern: Every Warsaw Pact state maintained conscription for men during the Cold War; service length typically 18–36 months.
Common features:
Universal or near-universal male service, with medical and limited educational exemptions.
Conscripts formed the backbone of armed forces aligned with the USSR.
Political indoctrination part of military training.
Examples:
Poland: 2–3 years service until 1980s; some reductions late in the Cold War.
East Germany (GDR): Introduced conscription in 1962 (before that it was nominally voluntary); 18 months army service; alternative service existed from 1964 (construction units for conscientious objectors).
Czechoslovakia: 2 years for most of the Cold War; universal male service.
Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania: 18–24 months typical; service deeply integrated into socialist “citizen duty” ideology.
Post-1991 – Eastern Europe after communism
Ended or suspended conscription (most NATO-aligned former Warsaw Pact states)
Ukraine: Maintained conscription post-1991; partially suspended in 2013, reinstated in 2014 after Crimea; now fully mobilised for war.
Key contrasts with Western Europe/Britain
Longevity: USSR and its satellites kept conscription far longer, with no 1960s/70s abolition wave seen in Western Europe.
Purpose: In the East, conscription was linked not just to military manpower but to political indoctrination and socialist identity.
Transition after 1991: Most former Warsaw Pact states that joined NATO abolished conscription by the late 2000s, while Russia and some post-Soviet states retained it.
Resurgence: Some Eastern states (Baltics, Ukraine) have reintroduced or strengthened conscription due to perceived Russian threat — a trend not mirrored in Western Europe except in Sweden.
Key comparative themes
Duration & timing: Britain’s National Service was a comparatively short post‑war peacetime draft (roughly late‑1940s → early‑1960s) vs. the Soviet bloc’s continuous Cold War conscription and the patchwork Western transition to volunteerism from the 1970s–2000s.
Purpose & doctrine: Western shifts towards professional forces were driven by expeditionary/NATO interoperability, cost/quality debates and changing public opinion; Eastern conscription prioritized territorial mass, political control and bloc commitments.
Colonial/operational effects: Colonial wars (France, Britain) made conscription politically salient; in contrast, Moscow used conscripts for garrisoning client states.
Political contestation & social impact: Student movements, anti‑war activism (Vietnam, Algeria, late‑1960s), and changing labour/economic expectations shaped abolitionist pressure in the West; in the East, conscription was harder to contest publicly under single‑party regimes.
Resurgence & selective reintroduction: Recent security shocks (Russia’s actions 2014–present) have prompted reintroduction or reinforcement of conscription in parts of Eastern Europe; Sweden’s 2017 reintroduction demonstrates the flexible, security‑driven character of modern conscription policy.
Legal suspension vs formal abolition: Some countries suspended conscription (kept the law on the books) while others formally abolished it — an important distinction when discussing future reintroduction.
I use ChatGPT daily. Probably too much. I oscillate between awe and unease – between marvel at the eloquence of the machine and a wary recognition of the echo chamber it builds around us. Artificial Intelligence, so-called, is a conjuring trick of extraordinary scale: it digests the collective work of humankind and speaks it back to us, a mirror that flatters, distorts, and occasionally reveals.
When one has a blind spot – in the retina or the soul – the brain fills in the missing detail from instinct or memory. That is the magic, or the peril, of AI: it hallucinates our absences. When the data runs out, it dreams; when we falter, it improvises. It’s not so different from us, except that we invented it to remind us of ourselves.
Yet the paradox persists. The chatbot depends upon the very content it displaces. It feeds upon the living imagination even as it threatens to automate it. The web economy, once a marketplace of minds, now trembles under the weight of its own reflection. The abyss, as Nietzsche warned, is a slow and patient gazer. Look too long into the algorithm, and you may find the algorithm looking back — articulate, deferential, and strangely familiar.
Still, I keep asking questions. Perhaps because I suspect that in its confabulations lie our own. Perhaps because every hallucination hides a truth we have forgotten. Or perhaps simply because, as writers and readers, we cannot resist the shimmer of the mirror, even when we know the mirror is also a mask.
AI and the Future of the Web: Between Convenience and Curiosity
As ChatGPT and its rivals reshape the internet, the real threat is not the loss of information, but the erosion of inquiry itself.
On 5 October 2025, The Economist published an article titled “AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?” The piece argued that the rise of AI chatbots is undermining the economic and cultural foundations of the internet, threatening the very ecosystem that sustains journalism, creative work, and niche content. This essay reflects on the article’s warnings, exploring not only the economic and structural consequences of generative AI but also its broader cultural implications — and, ironically, the ways in which deliberate, interrogative engagement with AI can preserve the curiosity the article fears is vanishing.
The rise of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT is reshaping the internet’s economic and cultural ecosystem. For decades, the web operated on a delicate bargain: users accessed information and entertainment for free, while content creators and platforms monetized that attention via advertising or data collection. This system sustained journalism, creative industries, and countless niche websites. Now, AI threatens to unravel it. Chatbots can answer questions, summarize articles, and generate content with increasing sophistication, often without sending users to the original sites. Traffic – and revenue – flows away from the websites that produced the material in the first place.
The implications are far-reaching. If content creators cannot earn a living, the diversity and quality of material on the web could decline sharply. Specialized journalism, independent blogs, and even large media outlets might struggle to survive if audiences bypass them in favor of AI-generated summaries. This is not just a financial issue, but a cultural one: the internet’s richness relies on a wide ecosystem of creators, whose incentive to contribute diminishes when AI intermediates access to their work.
The piece examines potential remedies but casts doubt on any quick fix. Subscription models might help, though they risk fragmenting the web and excluding users who cannot pay. Legal or regulatory approaches — requiring AI to cite sources or compensate content creators — face practical and global coordination challenges. Revenue-sharing between AI developers and content producers remains largely theoretical. The Economist concludes that while AI offers enormous utility, it may simultaneously hollow out the ecosystem that makes the web vibrant, informative, and sustainable. In other words, the very tool designed to amplify access to information could starve the sources of that information, threatening the web’s long-term health.
Beyond the economic threat lies a deeper cultural shift. By mediating access to knowledge, AI risks centralizing authority over information in the hands of a few large platforms. Where users once navigated a decentralized web — from blogs to academic repositories – AI now acts as a single gateway, subtly shaping what people see and how it is framed. This raises questions of epistemic diversity: whose knowledge is amplified, whose is marginalized, and how errors or biases propagate when AI interprets the web.
Generative AI also encourages a culture of consumption over engagement. Users increasingly rely on synthesized answers rather than visiting original sources, participating in discussions, or evaluating evidence themselves. Over time, this could erode critical thinking, reduce exposure to divergent viewpoints, and reinforce algorithmic echo chambers. AI promises unprecedented access to information, yet by centralizing authority, it may shrink the very informational ecosystem it draws upon.
Importantly, this is no longer a speculative threat. AI is not poised to take over content creation — it has already arrived. Large language models are actively writing text, generating articles, essays, and summaries at scale. Meanwhile, readers are already turning to chatbots to précis, distill, or interpret that very material. The paradox is immediate and self-referential: the AI produces the text, and the AI digests it, while humans step in chiefly to interrogate, verify, and contextualize. In this recursive loop, the risk of distortion compounds, especially when hallucinations – the machine’s way of filling gaps in knowledge – are left unexamined.
A particular dimension of this phenomenon lies in how AI generates those hallucinations. These arise because the AI depends entirely on human-generated content to construct its answers. When gaps, biases, or missing information appear, the model must invent plausible-seeming outputs. An apt analogy comes from human vision: when someone has a blind spot or an obstruction in the retina or optic nerve, the brain instinctively fills in the missing details, drawing on memory, context, or subconscious “magic” to create a coherent image. Similarly, when a language model encounters missing content, it fills the gap, generating answers that seem authoritative but may not reflect reality. The AI, like the brain filling a visual blind spot, is striving for completeness, yet it can mislead if we do not interrogate its outputs. The lesson is clear: just as we know the eye can be tricked, so must we question AI’s “sight,” balancing reliance with critical vigilance.
Yet the irony is striking: engaging with AI is also the way to test its warning. To question AI is still to use it; to précis is still to probe. When used dialogically – as a partner in thought rather than a vending machine — AI can revive the exploratory spirit it threatens. What the Economist calls “the death of the web” might instead be its metamorphosis: a shift from a sprawl of pages to a lattice of conversations, provided users insist on curiosity over convenience, interrogation over automation.
Ironically, reading this warning through AI embodies exactly the behaviour the article fears might disappear. But here lies the distinction: using AI as a tool for interrogation, not substitution. By asking follow-up questions, seeking all sides of an argument, and qualifying answers, one preserves the habits of critical thinking and active engagement. AI becomes an interactive partner, prompting reflection rather than replacing it. Preservation of curiosity — and the web’s intellectual richness — depends not on abstaining from AI, but on using it with vigilance, discernment, and a willingness to probe deeper than the first answer it provides.
Viewed this way, AI may not spell the end of the web but its transformation. The sprawling landscape of pages may evolve into a lattice of conversations, mediated by intelligent systems but animated by human questions, scepticism, and moral reflection. Survival of the web depends on whether users insist on curiosity over convenience, engagement over automation. It depends on whether we continue to ask: Where did this knowledge come from? Who benefits from its presentation? What has been omitted? Machines can synthesize words, but they cannot yet replicate the moral and intellectual labour of wondering why those words matter.
In short, the web will not die at the hands of AI; it will die only if its users stop thinking. The technology challenges us, but it also offers an opportunity: to transform passive consumption into deliberate inquiry, to turn a warning into a call to action, and to ensure that curiosity remains the lifeblood of the digital commons. The threat is not the web itself, but the spirit of engagement that makes it meaningful. By interrogating, questioning, and balancing – and by understanding the limits of AI’s “vision” – we preserve that spirit, demonstrating that the human capacity for reflection remains, for now, irreducible.
Coda
And so the circle closes: the machine writes, the reader queries, the machine replies, and the reader wonders whether the wondering itself has been automated. Perhaps this is what Voltaire foresaw in jest – that if the truth does not exist, we will simply have to invent it – though he could hardly have imagined silicon doing the inventing. Yet invention, in all its ambiguity, remains a human art: the ability to doubt, to test, to laugh at the illusion even as we depend upon it. The web may flicker, morph, or narrow beneath the weight of automation, but the act of questioning – that restless, unprogrammable impulse – is what keeps it alive. If AI fills the blind spots, it is still up to us to notice the seams. And perhaps that is where the future of thought now resides: not in what the machine can see, but in what we still suspect it cannot.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
In That Howling Infinite 