For months, I have avoided writing about the country where I live, Britain. There has been far too much to write about the country where I was born, America, and the country where I have no vote but whose actions are most likely to endanger me as a Jew, Israel.

By comparison what has been going on in the country where I have lived for more than 40 years, has seemed unimportant. It is trapped in a time-loop where the same few events keep repeating. It’s like a long running West End show — new cast, maybe new costumes, but same old script.

Here’s a list of the stories that have been playing out recently that have struck the “seen it all before” synapse in my overloaded cerebrum.

1. Anti-immigrant riots in Belfast

2. Anti-immigrant riots in Southampton

3. Open Challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer from within the Parliamentary Labour Party

4. Chagos Islands sovereignty (WTF?!?!?!?!?!?)

Let me deal with these in order.

Belfast riots: It’s mid-June, of course there are riots in Belfast. It’s the rhythm of the place. The phrase, “We’re coming into marching season” is tattooed in my neocortex from the half-decade, 1993-1998, when Northern Ireland was my main NPR beat. That’s roughly from the Shankill Road fish shop bombing to the Omagh bombing. The latter took place a few months after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified by the genuinely “good people of Ulster”.

Marching season is the time of Protestant Orange Order parades. A symbol of either “heritage” or “intimidation and supremacy” depending on which community you came from. The high point is the Twelfth of July, the anniversary of Protestant King William III’s victory over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne, when massive marches take place to the accompaniment of enormous drums and screeching fifes. Twelfth of July marches are a big deal and are shown on Northern Irish TV. I’d say they are like Thanksgiving parades in the US but that would undersell the triumphalist menace that some in the crowds march with.

I have some experience to draw on here. July 12th, 1993 I marched in formation with the Shankill Road Orange Lodge the full 7-plus miles of their parade, with stops for “refreshment”.

The Shankill is the “loyalist” heartland, Protestant ultras, “loyal” to the British crown. I was new to the beat and understood my American listeners instinctively supported the North’s Catholic population if not Sinn Fein/IRA. So I marched with the Shankill lodge to immerse myself in their culture and to develop contacts among loyalist paramilitaries.

These no-work class Protestant men, among the discarded of post-industrial Britain, still erupt in violence around this time of year, not always, but many is the early summer when some grievance or other is fanned locally into flames of violence. This year it’s anti-immigrant violence, in the past it has been local political grievances.

Nearly three decades have gone by since the Good Friday Agreement. That’s a couple of generations in Northern Ireland. It is likely the younger guys I marched with, those in their mid-20s and early 30s are grandfathers now. And still Loyalist rioting. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s excellent Ireland correspondent, noted the knife attack that triggered the violence took place in a nationalist (Catholic) neighbourhood yet the rioting took place on the Loyalist Shankill:

The knife attack that triggered the disturbances occurred in a nationalist area yet the mayhem played out against a backdrop of union jacks and loyalist murals.

You could watch rioters hurl missiles and target foreigners on Shankill Road, then cross a few blocks to Falls Road, bedecked with Irish tricolours and republican murals, and experience serenity.

History, demographics and psychology can explain some of the diverging community reactions, but there is also a familiar factor at play under the surface – paramilitaries.

The security services and some academics say there are more loyalist paramilitaries today than in 1998 when the Good Friday agreement drew a line under the Troubles. One estimate from 2020 put the number as high as 12,500, albeit with many members inactive.

The Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, which are proscribed as terrorist groups in the UK, have endured despite engaging in a state-sponsored process of “transitioning” that is supposed to phase out their existence.

Anti-immigrant riots in Southampton: Last year they were in Essex. The Essex riots were based on fear that a local no-star hotel was going to house illegal migrants who’ve arrived by small boats. This year’s riots came out of a tragedy: a white youth, Henry Nowak, an 18-year old university student in that post-industrial port was knifed by 22-year old Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh. When police arrived at the scene Digwa, falsely claimed Nowak had attacked him. The police handcuffed Nowak as he bled to death on the ground.

The incident happened on 3 December last year. Five days later, the police arrested Digwa. He was found guilty of murder on May 28 and jailed for life June 1st. Justice was not delayed, justice was not denied. Nothing, including the police error that led to Novak’s death was covered up.

The riots started the next day. Why?

Stephen Yaxley Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, race-baiter, convicted felon, went down to Southampton to stir things up. Robinson is now a darling of the Elon Musk/Steve Bannon axis of racism and Musk’s twitter algorithm bigged up the idea that Nowak was a victim of DEI policing. The cops believed the dark-skinned person who had actually wielded the knife and hand-cuffed the white boy who bled to death. Police error, family tragedy now became fodder for the press,

Britain’s right-wing press (and it is more than 90% right wing in this country) compete directly with social media these days for eyeballs and ad revenue so a shrill crescendo was reached and violence was in the streets.

To me it was reminiscent of riots a quarter of a century ago in Portsmouth, just east of Southampton on Britain’s South Coast. That violence had to do with a paedophile scare whipped up by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World following a real life tragedy: 8-year old Sarah Payne had been abducted and murdered the previous month. The suspect was known to police prior to the murder.

The right-wing press went into high-gear. The paedo scare spread. Where else are they hiding!!!!!. So there were riots in Portsmouth, nowhere near where the tragedy occurred. In Wales, a mob wrecked a paediatrician’s office — because it didn’t know the difference between Paediatrician and Paedophile. The murderer was caught, convicted, sentenced to life. He is still in prison.

The dynamic today is roughly the same: A tragic murder, an arrest, justice. The system worked. But with the added network effect of social media and traditional media you have: riots.

There is nothing for me to add except that once again Britain’s right-wing papers, particularly the tabloids, have shown themselves to be a stain on humanity and that if I live here another 40+ years I will never understand why most British people read them.

Open Challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer from within the Parliamentary Labour Party: Oh Jesus, not this again. Since the Brexit vote in June 2016 (happy 10th anniversary) There have been six prime ministers including Keir Starmer. Five Conservative Party leaders have held the office and only one was removed via a general election. The party threw them out. It’s become a habit.

But the Starmer situation triggers PTSD from the NPR days. After the Tories defenestrated Margaret Thatcher in 1990 (knifing their leaders is their entire political programme now that they’ve destroyed the unions and the Soviet Union is gone). John Major became Prime Minister and even though he managed to win an election in 1992 — against expectation — they came for him too. He was weak on Europe, or something like that.

Then it was one thing after another. The right-wing press predicted his imminent demise. It was the main political story here. I did more goddam short pieces on tight deadlines knowing it was all bullshit then I care to remember. Then one day in June 1995, I got on a plane in London to fly to NPR HQ for a meeting and when I rolled into the office heard that Major had called for a leadership election: a back me or sack me challenge to the “bastards” in his cabinet who were undermining him. Straight into a studio to do a 2-way on it, jet-lag be damned.

Major won the leadership contest, it was never really in doubt. Upside for me was NPR shows stopped asking for a piece every time they saw the AP summary of the day’s tabloid headlines.

The Starmer situation is slightly different. Major was an experienced and terribly underrated politician. The current PM came late to politics and is an awful politician, good careerist but terrible at the actual game of politics.

A deja vu moment this past week. Starmer’s Defence Secretary John Healey resigned over an argument about funding for his department. I remember exactly 40 years ago when Thatcher’s Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine also quit over a procurement issue stirring speculation about her leadership. The following year she won her third election in a row.

Like I said at the beginning the cast changes the play is the same.

One unspoken aspect of the dynamic driving the current dump Keir movement is Britain’s political press. A new generation cover Westminster. I know some of them. They are incredibly bright kids (actually kids is relative term they are mid-30s/mid-40s). They have committed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour to covering the politics of a country eight decades past WW2 victory, three decades past “Cool Britannia” cultural relevance, and now a decade since mattering in Europe since Brexit has cut the country off from the Continent. (London is not Britain and Britain is not London)

Of course these super sharp people want a leadership contest: they are bored!!!

There is plenty else for them to write about politically. The decay of Transport, the NHS, most other public services. But very few of this generation can write about these issues in a way that brings in the clicks. Policy — oh yes, they can discourse on policy — but I don’t want to read that and most Britons don’t. People want to read about how why most weekends you can’t get from one end of London to another on the underground, or one end of the country to another on the trains because of endless track repairs. They want the people responsible named and shamed for the delays and strikes.

But those pieces are few and far between.

Nearly a decade ago I interviewed Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who were having a public moment for writing a book about declining life expectancy in the American working class. “Deaths of Despair” they called the phenomenon.

We discussed politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Deaton, a Nobel Prize laureate, from Scotland, asked rhetorically, “How many Labour Party politicians today have coal dust under their fingernails?” He reminded me seven members of Clement Atlee’s cabinet — the government that created the NHS and the rest of the Welfare state — had been miners. The implication: how could 21st century MPs of the party of the working man/woman begin to understand what working lives today are like?

The same question can be asked metaphorically of today’s journalists in Britain: “How many have coal dust under their fingernails?” How many come from anything other than a solidly upper middle-class background, with Oxbridge or other Russell Group Universities featuring prominently on their academic cv’s?

These young colleagues must know in their hearts that they are engaged in trivial pursuits. Starmer may or may not be gone by autumn, but for the world and for Britain, what happens to him is neither here nor there. In the autumn there are events that will effect the entire planet: the Midterms in the US, and the general election in Israel.

British politics? Tant pis.

Finally:

Chagos Islands sovereignty: Do I have to go into detail? this story has been going on since before I was born and relates to the fact that Diego Garcia naval base is located there. Trump has dipped his oar in — which is a cue for the right wing press to dump on Starmer and relive the glory days when Britain mattered and wars could be fought over distant islands in the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean. Nobody cares.

All of this puts me in mind of this guy:

Bonus content. The Deaton and Case conversation:

“The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.”

King Lear, Act V scene iii

is not young — and neither am I — but we both know the truth of the last lines of King Lear. You probably do as well.

In Robin’s case it has a deeper resonance. His parents were German Jews who managed to get out just in time. Not all the members of his family were so lucky. Now he has written the story of their escape, their activity in the war, their losses. And much more: how music shapes a life; how living long is really the best revenge.

In this FRDH, First Rough Draft of History podcast, we talk about his family going back centuries (on one side) and being an assimilated Jew today in Britain and in Germany in the 1930s, and the psychological armor the practice of journalism affords us when considering the worst events in history. It is the kind of conversation you might expect with someone who spent a quarter of a century as one of BBC Radio’s main news presenters, famed for his judicious questioning and empathetic listening.

One of the morbid symptoms of American society’s unraveling in recent decades has been the turning away from science exemplified by the anti-vax movement.

It’s not like vaccination is a new thing. Edward Jenner figured out inoculating people with cowpox could stop them getting the much deadlier smallpox more than two centuries ago. Yet somehow today, in an era of dramatically decreased infant mortality from infectious diseases because of vaccination, a vocal minority — particularly in America — is turning away from them.

I have long-since thrown up my hands and shuffled the phenomenon into the mental drawer marked the whole world’s gone crazy.

But there is more to it than that, as this serious new book points out

Dr. Kira Ganga Kieffer is a professor at Fairfield University and her book traces out a half century long story of changes in attitudes to not just vaccines but what it means to be a mother — the two are inextricably linked — and how even secular people find religious meaning in the anti-vax view.

I am doubtful but in this FRDH podcast, Professor Kieffer takes me through her thesis and explains how legitimate scepticism about one particular vaccine 50 years ago ends up with Bobby Kennedy Jr. as Trump’s Secretary of Health.

Listen and see what you think.

There were two rallies of note last week in London.

Last Saturday, saw a second Unite the Kingdom rally organized by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson. The ultra-nativist Robinson is beloved of the Anglosphere’s new fascists like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. About 60,000 people attended the rally.

Then last Tuesday, Arsenal won the English Premiere League. 150,000 people gathered in the streets around the club’s Emirates Stadium in north London and partied throughout the night. The difference in the gatherings was stark.

The attitude of those at Tommy Robinson’s get together hadn’t changed since Elon Musk addressed the first Unite the Kingdom rally last September via satellite link:

“I want Britain to remain Britain, said Musk. “I think there’s something beautiful about being British. And what I see happening is a destruction of Britain.”

Everyone there understood the racial code Musk was speaking and if they didn’t get it at the start they sure understood when he claimed that immigration was a left wing policy to

“Allow people who are not from Britain to vote in Britain … It’s really a voter importation thing.”

He warned the crowd, most of whom came from outside London,

“If you want to know what’s going to happen to your town or village, just visit London and you’ll see that it’s filled with crime. It often doesn’t feel like Britain at all. And it’s only a matter of time before that is what happens to your town or village. It starts in London, but it will spread to every town and village in the country and no one will have any peace.”

20 people were arrested at Robinson’s demo last Saturday. None after Arsenal were crowned champions. [Although 8 Arsenal fans in Uganda were arrested for overexuberant celebrations.]

In fact, the ensuing 48 hours after the celebrations were a perfect refutation of Musk’s ignorant and nakedly racist remarks. To be fair to the world’s richest man — so long as he can fool people into keeping Tesla/SpaceX stock price up — he was simply parroting things you can hear any week in the Anglosphere’s ultra-right media. In that world of paranoid propaganda, white people are being overwhelmed in their heartlands: America and Europe, by people whose skin is many shades darker than theirs.

But the reality of Britain’s capital city is far from their fevered dreams.

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In the 40 years I’ve lived in London, the city has gone from a 20% non-white population to being a nearly 50-50 white/non-white city. The tensions that accompany this kind of rapid ethnic/racial demographic change have been comparatively minimal here. There have been race riots but they have not been intra-communal. Almost all the riots have been related to policing and, inevitably, tied to downturns in the economic cycle.

But the street level racial tensions that I knew in New York and pre-gentrified Capitol Hill in Washington DC in the decade before I left America for good have not been a feature of life in my neighbourhood, Stoke Newington, part of the borough of Hackney, one of the most ethnically diverse urban areas anywhere in the world.

Stoke Newington is a mile from Arsenal’s Stadium — full disclosure I have been an Arsenal supporter for more than half a century — this may or may not have influenced my decision to make my life in this area of the city.

The good feeling in Stokey, Highbury, Islington — the contiguous neighbourhoods near the club carried on for days. They were like no celebration I have ever encountered in my life as a sports fan. Arsenal, the Gunners, have won titles before, although it had been 22 years since they last won the league, so happiness was a bit overdue, but the feeling of joy was different. Cars weren’t overturned and set on fire, looting and fistfights in the name of celebration did not occur. After a long night of cheering there’s just been a mellow joy that has lasted throughout the week.

What was interesting was how the joy spread around London. Not everywhere but in the places where newcomers, mostly of colour, live. In short the people Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon would love to round up and send home, the people they say are making London a no-go area for whites.

This is an essay about racism’s persistence, even when it is at the margins and how sport can reflect what is good and bad in society.

When I first arrived in Britain in late 1985 I was shocked by how much racism surrounded sport. The country was forty years behind America in terms of integration of Black players in its most popular sport — football — and the other traditional English sports: cricket and rugby.

The racism was casual among managers and sportswriters and endemic among sports fans. Football fans’ banter is merciless and the stadiums back in those days put the fans practically on the pitch. Opposing teams’ Black players were taunted with grotesquely racist insults. It was not uncommon for bananas to be thrown at them.

These were the bad old days when there was a blending of the white supremacist National Front and football hooliganism. Wrapped in the English flag, these fans wreaked havoc when their teams played abroad. At one point English football teams were banned from playing in European tournaments because of the violence.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon took his pseudonym Tommy Robinson from a notorious football hooligan in his hometown of Luton and has written openly about his own life in football violence.

Three things happened in the 1990s that changed the situation:

First, The Premier league was formed from the old English First Division. The League scored major TV contracts. With money flowing in, stadiums were improved and foreign players were attracted to England to earn big money. The nationalist underpinning of much fandom “We invented the game. Don’t need no foreigners with their fancy footwork to show us how to play,” eroded rapidly.

Second, Frenchman Arsene Wenger was hired by Arsenal in 1996. He was the English game’s great innovator bringing professionalism to training habits, player nutrition, and tactics. He also opened up a pipeline of recruitment to Africa. Early in his career at the French club Monaco Wenger had established contacts with African players by signing George Weah of Liberia. Weah stayed in Europe became Footballer of the Year and eventually became President of Liberia.

Wenger continued to build on his African relationships when he took over Arsenal. At the time there were no African players among the top five teams in the Premier League. He signed Nigeria’s star forward Nwankwo Kanu. This opened the door for not just widespread African representation in the Premier League but from the African diaspora in Europe. Kanu had been playing in Europe for five years when Wenger recruited him.

Kanu’s signing also had a huge impact in Africa. In 2000 I spent a month in the Niger River Delta making a radio documentary about Medecins Sans Frontieres. Kanu’s picture in his Arsenal kit was in bars and restaurants and his shirts were worn even at the literal end of the road in Yenegoah, where you have to get into a motor boat or dugout canoe to go deeper into the region.

[Arsenal as Africa’s team may explain those arrests in Uganda I mentioned earlier]

English attitudes to blacks in professional sports still had a lot of catching up to do and Wenger’s Arsenal was the accelerant. In 2002, the manager fielded a team with nine Black starters. This was comparable to Boston Celtics’ coach Red Auerbach starting five African-Americans in a game back in 1964, the first time that happened in a major league sport in the US.

Third, while Arsenal was opening the door to West African players, there was a surge of economic migration from that region to London throughout the 1990s, with those identifying as African in origin doubling from approximately 165,000 to 390,000 during the decade.

It goes without saying that no matter what part of the city they lived in many of these new arrivals automatically chose Arsenal as the team they would support.

A new generation has been born since this surge of migration and the most gifted footballers among them have somehow ended up playing for Arsenal.

And its not just football where children of the Nigerian wave are achieving in sport. The England Rugby captain Maro Itoje is also a child of Nigerian immigrants. It must drive the Unite the Kingdom mob crazy to see so many British people of colour playing such an important role in the nation’s sporting life.

Look beyond sport: the leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch is the daughter of Nigerian parents; international film stars John Boyega, David Oyelowo, Chiwetel Ejiofor, all from Nigerian immigrant families. Broaden it out to the rest of West Africa and you add Idris Elba and Michaela Coel.

And my local band, the phenomenal Ezra Collective who come from all over the city but are Arsenal for life

When Yaxley-Lennon and his transatlantic fan club freak out about what London has become, their panic is based on a lie. The city — meaning the people who live in it - has proven remarkably adaptable to a historic shift in what it means to be a Londoner.

Arsenal, going back to Wenger’s time in charge, represents what is best in London but it is not London’s team. Football supporting passion is just this side of insane and the capital has a lot of teams. Chelsea, Spurs, West Ham, Fulham, Brentford supporters would never acknowledge the Gunners as “London’s team”. And no true Arsenal supporter would ever acknowledge those teams should they win the title as the capital’s team.

But that’s not the point. In 1986, the first World Cup I was in England for, there were exactly two Black players in the team of 22. England’s World Cup squad for the upcoming tournament was named this week and more than half are Black. Three of Arsenal’s Nigerian posse pictured above are among them: Saka, Madueke and Eze.

”The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people and every blessing of society, depend so much upon an upright and skilful administration of justice ... The judges therefore should be men of learning, experienced in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness and attention; their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests; they should not be dependent upon anybody of men.”

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe, July 1776

I was in Washington DC last week doing some final interviews at the Library of Congress for a couple of programs on Thomas Jefferson I’m making for BBC radio as part of its season marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America’s Birthday.

The Library of Congress is just across the street from the Supreme Court, and even though the weather was more like London in April than DC in mid-May I stopped for a minute, sheltering from the rain under an elm tree in full spring leaf to grab a few pictures. I was struck by the limpness of the American flag in the breezeless, humid air.

For two years in the early 1980s I lived directly behind this building. Capitol Hill hadn’t really been gentrified then. It was unfashionable. In those days before mass tourism, at the weekend, when the business of government is on hiatus, I had the Supreme Court building to myself. On days with better weather than last week I would walk over and plonk myself down on the steps, let the sun warm my skin, stare over the road at the Capitol building itself.

These are intentionally imperial buildings, built to echo Rome. America as an “Empire of Liberty” was Jefferson’s hope and as the Capitol was rebuilt after it was torched by the British during the war of 1812 (the original Library of Congress went up in flames, Jefferson sold his vast personal library to the government so it could be re-established) the architecture was designed to say, We are an Empire.

Sitting on the steps in the sunshine, a decade after I had been tear-gassed near the White House, following the Kent State massacre, I would think about where the country was in 1970 and where it was in 1981, and the remarkable fact that the Court, led by a series of Republican appointed Chief Justices, had become the guarantor of liberal progress.

America had just turned 200 when I lived on the Hill. The country still felt young and capable of growth and progressive change. How badly it has aged in the last fifty years.

The fallout from the SCOTUS Gang of Six’s continued dismemberment of the Voting Rights Act in April’s Louisiana v Callais decision was roiling my contacts in DC.

The joy over the Virginia redistricting vote which created a new legislative map that would probably have added four safe Democratic Congressional seats to the state’s delegation turned to ashes as first the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the referendum result and then SCOTUS refused to intervene. Virginia voters’ choice was nullified.

In the redistricting wars initiated by Trump in Texas last year as he tries to fix the midterm elections in his favor it is clear, with the Callais intervention and the Virginia non-intervention, that the Gang of Six are more than putting their thumb on the scale. They have revealed themselves to be the opposite of what Jefferson wrote to his former law teacher and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, George Wythe, quoted at the start of this week’s newsletter. They are not:

“People of learning, experienced in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness and attention.”

And their minds ARE distracted with jarring interests; and they ARE dependent upon a body of men, not just Trump but the Federalist Society and various right-wing billionaire funded think-tanks.

These decisions have solidified a view among DC’s anti-regime observers that Trump’s people are busy planning a variety of ways to interfere with the mid-term vote, secure in the knowledge that any legal challenge to their activities will be thrown out by the Gang of Six.

So I heard:

Rules on postmarking mail-in ballots will be changed so that a postmark is affixed on the day the ballot is delivered not the day it is posted. If a mail bag is not delivered to a count until the day after polling day. The ballots would therefore be postmarked with that date and so will be considered late — and invalidated.

ID will be checked slowly in some locations creating long delays to cast a vote. This naturally depresses turnout because many can’t stand in line for several hours.

ICE will be deployed to depress the Hispanic vote. With their warrantless powers, ICE has been known to drag people away because of their appearance and then release them with a “Sorry, my bad,” shrug. This could (note conditional tense) cut the number of voters in some constituencies.

There is also talk of deploying National Guard troops to certain areas — trios of Guardsmen are still patrolling DC, an incongruous presence in a Capitol most definitely not seething with insurrectionist violence. Troops near polling places are illegal under 18 US Criminal Code Section 592

Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

When I pointed out to the contact who was listing these possible ways to mess with the midterm vote that there aren’t enough ICE agents or National Guardsman to suppress a couple of hundred million voters, he said it was only necessary to have this military presence at a small number of polling places in tightly contested Congressional seats to alter the outcome.

Then I suggested that it would take a lot of organization to get this sort of activity in place and Trump is not, shall we say, a details oriented guy. He said that teams in the administration are already at work organizing these shenanigans.

Given the Supreme Court’s recent record, it is pretty clear the Regime will be confident that whatever it organizes to keep a hold of both houses of Congress will be backed up by the Gang of Six.

This will have an effect on the outcome of the election. Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report, the gold standard of American political analysis, wrote in The New York Times last Friday

“I think of this election as a battle between two very powerful forces in politics: One is the political environment (things like inflation, the war in Iran, etc.), and the other is partisanship (the fact that voters are now more cemented into their party identities than ever and less willing to give the other party their vote). The political environment helps Democrats; the structural partisanship helps Republicans.

What the court decisions did helped Republicans’ structural advantage even more. By taking safe Democratic districts and making them favorable to the G.O.P. — either safe or likely Republican — Republicans have helped to shrink the already small playing field even more.

…

Before the court rulings, our Political Report rated 217 House districts as solidly Democratic or leaning toward Democrats and 16 seats that were tossups. In these tossup districts, each side had a 50-50 chance to win.

And now, after the various SCOTUS decisions?

We rate 207 districts as solidly Democratic or leaning toward Democrats and 18 as tossups. To win a majority, Democrats need to win at least 11 of the 50-50 contests (and hold all those leaning their way) in order to get a majority.

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Most of Washington seems to be behind barriers these days. The picture on the left is taken from the exact spot where I got tear-gassed in May 1970. The picture on the right shows the Washington monument obscured by cranes working on the Billion-Dollar Ballroom. Trump did that old real estate developer trick of knocking something down before he had the money to build its replacement. And then did another developer’s trick, which was raise the price of the proposed new building.

The initial estimate for the ballroom was $200 million funded by private donors. Now the number bandied about is over a billion with a hefty contribution coming from the taxpayer. Almost all Trump’s vanity projects — including repairing the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial — are over-budget. Dramatically. The assumption throughout the Beltway is that a substantial part of those overruns come in the form of pay or play kickbacks to Trump.

Colossal corruption has become normalized in this second iteration of Trump. Whatever final shape the ballroom and the rumored triumphal arch take it will reflect this era.

The Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress was built in the 1890s. You can read the social history of a society in its buildings. Pretty clearly America was in a better place back then. The reading room remains an inspiration:

Things always seem gloomier in Washington for partisans of whichever side is out of power — For most of this century that has been the Democrats of the New Deal tradition. The tendency to see things as apocalyptically awful is hard for my fellow New Deal Dems in DC to shake.

Fascism is bedding down in unimaginable ways but I am not sure things are quite as bad as my Beltway brethren see it. Despite the occasional lawsuit thrown at legacy media by the regime, We the People are still free to mock and deplore Trump and his thugs. Any troll through social media you will see things like this.

There are 100s of thousands of posts like this in social media every day. No one is being thrown in prison for them.

Compare that post to this poem about Stalin and the author of the poem’s fate:

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Trans: W.S.Merwin & Clarence Brown

The author of those lines of verse, Osip Mandelstam, was arrested, tortured, spared execution and then sent into internal exile by Stalin, but his card had been marked and a few years later he died somewhere on the way to imprisonment in the Gulag.

Really, FRDH is worth paying for. I mean, where else can you get bonus content like this: a long conversation with Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson about the world turned upside down since Oct 7th, 2023.

Nick was the BBC’s man in America from the Clinton administration through the first Trump Presidency with a brief hiatus reporting from Australia and he has returned Down Under to live.

Nick continues a tradition of BBC correspondents going back to Alistair Cooke and Charles Wheeler who know the US in their bones and write with eyes open to its flaws and deep love for the place in their hearts. This is exemplified by the titles of Nick’s books: “When America Stopped Being Great”, and most recently “The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself”

He can be found on Substack at History Never Ended.

Our conversation is wide ranging, beginning with how the Iran “special operation” is effecting Australia’s economy before broadening out into … well, just give a listen and find out.

This past week the Supreme Court amputated with a dull bonesaw and no anesthetic another limb of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In my many decades on earth, the Voting Rights Act is the greatest achievement of American civic life. As a suburban teen-ager in that volatile yet hopeful time, the Sixties, it seemed to justify keeping faith with American ideals.

As an ex-patriate covering conflicts and conflict resolution, confronted regularly by people who were cynical about the US promotion of “democracy”, it was the example I used to refute criticisms of my native land. Yes, America had a racist history, but the structures existed in the Constitution that allowed it to reform itself. The Voting Rights Act is proof.

That is no longer the case. The SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v Callais has shredded the example I used to argue for America’s remarkable ability to correct its flaws.

Briefly: the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. The 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution — the Reconstruction Amendments passed just after the Civil War — were effectively ignored in the South. A hundred years later, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Southerner, rode the historical zeitgeist: a Civil Rights movement at high tide and national guilt over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to get the Voting Rights Act passed.

The Act seemed carved in stone. Over the decades occasional court challenges failed. Then in 2013, the Supreme Court, led by current Chief Justice John Roberts, in the case of Shelby County v Holder struck down sections 4 (b) and 5 of the Act. These contained one of the law’s key provisions: States with a history of voting discrimination (i.e. Southern states) had to have “pre-clearance” from the Federal government before changing voting rules. Roberts wrote that discriminating against Southern states "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day" was not legal.

This past week in the Callais decision the Gang of Six Republican justices took away Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision giving states the right to draw electoral districts to guarantee minority representation in Congress. Louisiana’s population is one third Black. African Americans vote as a bloc for the Democratic party. There was already one majority black Congressional district in Louisiana. After the 2020 census a new district was created that was also majority Black. Its boundaries were being challenged. If the map had remained it would have guaranteed that that one-third of the Louisiana congressional delegation was Black.

The six justices appointed by Republican presidents declared this was unconstitutional racial preference/prejudice. Justice Samuel Alito who wrote the opinion said,

“Section 2 was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it.”

As the news broke I was researching a five-part series of talks for BBC Radio 4 as part of its America 250 season called Mr. Jefferson’s Library. It looks at the books in Thomas Jefferson’s enormous library that shaped his thinking when he sat down to write the Declaration of Independence.

This week I was immersing myself in Enlightenment writing on natural rights and positive legal rights. The two are often at odds as the SCOTUS decision underlines.

When I wrote my book Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, reading through the same materials I learned a basic truth:

Legislating away prejudice is never simple. Prejudice is learned behavior, but it is acquired early and once inside a person it has an almost spiritual quality that goes soul deep.

Emancipation begins in the French Revolution. At the time Jews across Europe were living in segregation — ghettoization — not citizens of any of the countries in which they found themselves. Following the revolutionary events of July 1789, a constitution writing assembly was convened in Paris to write founding documents for the new French Republic (Jefferson was the US Ambassador when the Bastille was attacked).

In writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and then a Constitution, the case of the Jews in France was a subject of debate. Were they citizens or something else? Ultimately, they were granted citizenship — emancipated — and in the same session of the Constituante assembly, similar rights were granted to people of African descent who found themselves in France.

(It may pain Black Nationalists in the modern US as well as the Trump supporting Likudniks in AIPAC, but the fate of the two diasporas — Jewish and African — have always been intertwined in modern history.)

During the debates over Jews’ citizenship status, the Mayor of Paris, Jerome Petion de Villeneuve, had the money quote:

“Rights are not laws. Rights are for all time and come before laws.”

The rhetoric of the debates which ultimately granted Jews French citizenship was magnificent but like most rhetoric was easily blown aside by historical reality. One of the themes in the book was that once natural rights become codified into law, which is a political process, mundane, they lose their universality. They are also frequently subject to temporal changes in society.

Napoleon spread the Emancipation of Jews wherever he conquered. After his defeat at Waterloo most places took Jewish civil rights away. In the German speaking world depending on the politics of the day Jews had rights and then they didn’t. A person might study law, expecting to practice or teach it, and by the time he finished his studies find he was banned from doing either. This was a pattern repeated over and over in the German-speaking world.

IN April 1933, when Hitler made permanent the state of emergency under which he had been appointed Chancellor, Jewish civil rights were suspended again. Older members of the community, having lived through earlier suspensions of civil rights were sanguine. So was the rest of the world. Then it was too late.

Read Emancipation

Time will fix everything. That was the view of the slave-owning Founders. Jefferson wrote about slavery as an abomination but relied on the passage of time to bring the South’s “peculiar institution” to an end. His fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, explicitly wrote the thought in a letter to John Alsop, an abolitionist Quaker in 1773:

“I shall honor the Quakers for their noble efforts to abolish Slavery. It is equally calculated to promote moral and political good.

Would any one believe that I am master of slaves by my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct …

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be afforded to abolish this lamentable evil.”

Time is neutral. It can bring about the conditions that end slavery and later a guarantee to the descendants of slaves gaining their constitutional right to vote. But time also erodes the conditions in which men create laws.

The SCOTUS Gang of Six justify their section by section amputation of the Voting Rights Act saying enough time has passed and the situation in America has changed sufficiently that race is no longer a problem for fair elections in the South. Alito quoted the 2013 decision in Shelby last week

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, … As this Court has recognized, “things have changed dramatically” in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”

The thing is that times are dramatically changing back again. Avowed White Supremacists are today paid senior advisers to President Trump. A White Christian Nationalist with tattoos all over his body to demonstrate his “beliefs” is Secretary of Defense.

Immediately after the SCOTUS decision was published, Louisiana Governor, MAGA Republican Jeff Landry, declared a “state of emergency” to halt mail-in voting in primary elections for the upcoming mid-terms so that the congressional district maps can be redrawn. It is widely expected that the new districts will dilute the black vote and Louisiana might well end up with no Black representatives in Congress.

Lost in this is the fact that the absolute, fundamental right in a democracy is the right to vote. I was re-reading John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government when the SCOTUS decision was announced. Locke was absolutely clear that a people’s right to choose who governs them is the bedrock natural right of any social compact.

You can argue about whether every other legislative remedy for persistent racial discrimination that came out of the Civil Rights Era is still useful but not voting rights. They are natural rights and should be, as Petion de Villeneuve, said:

“for all time and come before laws.”

Voting rights have never — NEVER — been a sustained feature in American life. Add up “The bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” plus 90 years of Jim Crow and only someone terminally naive or perhaps soul-infected with prejudice can think that 60 years of legislative correction on the right to vote can begin to undo the damage.

Civil rights are given. Time passes, society’s change. Civil rights are taken away. But natural rights are inherent, self-evident, inalienable.

Time is everything in this discussion. It is the framework, occasional friend and frequent enemy of progress. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this elegantly in a speech at City Temple in London in 1964 en route to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

“There are those individuals who argue that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice in the United States, in South Africa or anywhere else; you’ve got to wait on time. And I know they’ve said to us so often in the States and to our allies in the white community, ‘Just be nice and be patient and continue to pray, and in 100 or 200 years the problem will work itself out.’ We have heard and we have lived with the myth of time. The only answer that I can give to that myth is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I must honestly say to you that I’m convinced that the forces of ill will have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And we may have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around saying, “Wait on time.”

And somewhere along the way it is necessary to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability … Time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation.

And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

This week, SCOTUS did wrong. And I am not sure I have the time left on this earth to see the United States come right again and secure in perpetuity voting rights for all.

But the time is ripe to push America on its way back to the course of justice based on fundamental natural law on which the nation was imperfectly founded. I will take the words of John Locke as guidance. If they were good enough for Jefferson, Adams and the other Founders, they are good enough for me :

“Where there is no longer the administration of justice for the securing of men’s rights, nor any remaining power within the community to direct the force, or provide for the necessities of the public, there certainly is no government left.”

When the government is thus dissolved because the administration of justice for men’s rights has failed:

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What is the driving force of history? Strip away economics, politics, all the big picture stuff. Human beings are the driving force of history. Individual lives, people like you and me, our quotidian acts, not those of the “great men.”

And the critical moment in each life is the individual’s realization that he or she will only live once and either accepts the world as it is and makes their way as best they can in it — or fights to change it.

When enough people decide to fight for change, things begin to destabilize, you have a revolution or something near to it. That was what America was like 250 years ago.

And it almost seemed like a similar moment was approaching nearly sixty years ago, when Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch” opened in a society splitting apart at the seams.

The year was 1969, fear of violence hung in America’s atmosphere like the smell of gunpowder hovers over a 4th of July firework display.

There were hints of violence everywhere when more than 400 critics viewed The Wild Bunch on a junket in the Bahamas. In those far off days film studios, in this case Warner brothers, used to fly the critics all expenses paid to a salubrious place and show them their upcoming releases. You can call it bribery if you like, I couldn’t possibly comment. In any case, the assembled critics decided the film’s violence was the talking point.

At a press conference the day after the screening, the film’s star William Holden defended Peckinpah’s movie against the charge,

“Just turn on your TV set any night. The viewer sees the Vietnam War, cities burning, campus riots. He sees plenty of violence.”

Holden’s defense didn’t stop the conversation. It enflamed it. Judith Crist, nationally syndicated film critic and television personality wrote, audiences should bring along a “barf bag” to the film. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby concluded his positive but not endorsing review

“When I came out of it I didn’t feel like shooting, knifing or otherwise maiming any of Broadway’s often hostile pedestrians.”

It was a publicist’s dream — since there is no such thing as bad publicity. People who wouldn’t cross the street to see a Western joined the queue to see for themselves what the critics and moralists were talking about.

Maybe one of them was standing behind me, on a June evening outside the Randolph Theatre, a big old picture palace, on Chestnut St in Center City Philadelphia. I went there the weekend the film opened. I wanted to see The Wild Bunch in its original form. Back then, studios often started hacking away at movies after they debuted. Sometimes in response to public outrage, more often so that theatre owners could squeeze another showing in during the course of the day.

On first viewing the visual depiction of the gunfights was pretty overwhelming.

The violence is everything: pornographic, cathartic, ridiculous — there is a moment at the beginning of the final epic shoot out when Ernest Borgnine looks at William Holden and starts to laugh, and I remember vividly a moment several minutes into the orgy of bullets and slo-mo death when the audience started to laugh as well.

But the violence is a side show:

The Wild Bunch is a meditation on history. It is about men who live long enough to have a second chance to consider whether they will accept the world as it is or fight against it. The passage of time adds a level of complexity. When you live long enough you won’t fear if your answer to being asked the question a second time leads to violence. Death holds no terror.

This was a profound lesson although I didn’t realize that at the end of June 1969. I was too young and the times were moving too fast. Every day, people like me were being challenged to figure out whether to accept the world as it is or fight to change it. It is a real dilemma when you are still in your teens and have no idea yet of who you are and are being twisted around by every strong social/cultural/political breeze blowing.

Peckinpah wasn’t the only artist teaching this insight. The poet Langston Hughes was getting at it in his poem Harlem which opens with the question:

What happens to a dream deferred?

and closes with an italicized rhetorical answer

Or does it explode?

But for my sensibility it was Peckinpah who best explored that question.

Several years later, sitting in an apartment in New York, failing at being an actor, and having reluctantly accepted the world as it is, I was killing time in the late afternoon. Dialling around on television I came across the last 10 minutes of a western. Didn’t know what its name was, had never seen it before. The final image was so overwhelming I burst into tears.

Two older cowboys, played by Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, seem to be resolving a personal argument while on the way to fight some bad guys. There is a shoot-out. The bad guys are all killed. Joel McCrea is mortally wounded. Doubled-over on his knees, a mountain peak in the middle distance looming over the scene. McCrea asks Scott to leave. “I’ll go it alone.” Scott says, “I’ll see you later.

Then McCrea is alone, the camera, placed on the ground is tilted up and frames him and the mountain. He turns his face slowly to look at it for a few seconds, a last glimpse of the world’s beauty, then turns back and slumps out of the frame dead,

The name of the picture came up on the end credits, Ride the High Country. Peckinpah. Eventually I saw the film in a cinema. I cried at that last shot again. I’ve seen the film all the way through perhaps a dozen times, and seen it just as I saw it the first time, partially, coming across it by chance on television dozens more. I always stop what I’m doing and wait for that final shot and the cathartic tears.

The lesson is reinforced:

We live once, and if we are lucky we live long enough to give a better answer to the question about accepting the world or changing it — even if the world is an entirely different place, even at the cost of our lives.

You can make too much of an artist’s biography in understanding their work but in Sam Peckinpah’s case knowing about his life is necessary.

Peckinpah’s people had been living along the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains for several generations by the time the filmmaker was born in 1925 in Fresno. They were the law — literally. His maternal grandfather was a judge, father an attorney — and prominent enough that a peak in the Sierra Nevadas was known locally as Mt Peckinpah. Fresno was the modern commercial center of California’s main agricultural region the San Joaquin Valley but Peckinpah’s family had ranching properties back up in the Sierras. As a boy, the director often skipped school to hang out there and join the ranch hands in their cowboying tasks. He was a participant and an observer of a world in transition.

His truancy worried his father so much he was sent to military academy to learn some discipline. During World War 2 he joined the Marines but by the time he finished basic training the war was over and he was deployed to China, assigned to aid in detention and repatriation of Japanese soldiers.

His deployment continued as the conflict between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists ignited. The US did not want its troops drawn into the fighting. Peckinpah watched political prisoners tortured and beheaded, and could do nothing. He got close to fire fights and saw what happened to bodies when they encountered military ordnance. He learned that good guys — groups supported by the US — were often bad guys. And when he asked his commanding officer about stopping the atrocities he was told the mission was to observe, not intervene. And so he made mental notes of all the terrors he saw.

He also drank prodigious quantities of alcohol.

When he mustered out of the Marines he went home, took a degree in history at Fresno State University, married an aspiring actress, got hooked on the theatre, and followed her to Los Angeles where he slowly began working his way towards the film industry by directing plays.

Each of these biographical points fed into his film career: The remnants of the old ranching West, the indiscipline, the Marines and their motto : Semper Fidelis. Always Faithful.

So Peckinpah observed history and the violence that always accompanies historical change. From the theatre he learned how to draw out performances from actors. As for his visual sense? Well, that was just his personal genius.

By the late 1950s television had completely disrupted Hollywood. The studios were making bigger and more spectacular films in the hopes of getting people to go back to the cinemas rather than sitting around staring at the little box in the living room after dinner. But at the same time the studios began to produce programs for the TV.

There were dozens of TV westerns in production and Peckinpah quickly built a reputation for re-writing western scripts, putting authentic cowboy talk in the mouths of characters. He invented one of the most popular shows, The Rifleman. And created and kept control of another, The Westerner, where he began to invent his own world, an American West, in transition to the modern, populated by men who have outlived their times.

By the early 60s he had graduated to feature films. Ride the High Country, released in 1962, was his second. Filmed initially near the places he knew as a boy in the Sierras. Two aging lawmen, old friends, Steve Judd played by Joel McCrea, and Gil Westrum, played by Randolph Scott, meet up by chance at a town fair. They have fallen on hard times as the old West has become civilized. They get a chance to earn a buck guarding a shipment of gold from a mining camp up in the High Country. Gil decides to steal the gold, and obliquely sounds Steve out about joining in.

“Partner, you know what’s on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they’re not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. Is that all you want, Steve?”

“All I want is to enter my house justified.”

Once again an exploration of the philosophical dilemma, change with the times or stay faithful to the life you have lived. The pair march resolutely into a firefight to give their answer.

The film made Peckinpah’s reputation, troubles with authority nearly destroyed it, and then, in 1968, the director went down to Mexico to make The Wild Bunch. The question is the same but the historical detail echoes Peckinpah’s experience in China. A group of outlaws who have lived too long find themselves in the middle of a multi-sided civil war in Mexico. They get a second chance to decide whether to accept the world as it is — or make it better, even at the cost of their lives. They die trying to make it better, a group of Samsons bringing the whole temple down on their heads.

In the ensuing four years, Peckinpah made five films, some set in the Old West, some in modern times, all but one deal with the basic question of outliving your era, and accepting the world or changing it.

I saw them all and slowly but surely understood what Peckinpah was getting at. By the mid-70s the question about accepting the world or changing it, had been answered by people my age. There would be no revolution. In our 20s we were already nostalgic for what might have been. The heroes we might have become. I thought often of a poem I had to memorize at school. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy. Last verse goes:

“Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.”

Peckinpah was Miniver Cheevy. And his drinking was the end of him. In this he wasn’t born too late, he was born too soon. Interventions and rehab didn’t become common until the late 1980s — and certainly he needed both— but by then he had drunk himself to death just shy of his 60th birthday.

The years go by and Peckinpah becomes a prisoner of critics. His films are discussed in terms of the violence, the machismo, the misogyny, the code of honour among men. All of those elements are present but critics miss the fact that he is a philosopher of history whose medium is film.

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Today, as in 1969 and 1776: a critical mass of people are making personal decisions not to accept the world as it is.

When Trump first came into sight a decade ago as a serious contender for the White House I was struck by the images coming from his rallies.

I saw men and women my age: potbellied, white haired, MAGA hatted. I thought of what Sam meant in The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country. If you live long enough, you will get a chance to re-assess and have another chance to accept the world as it is, or try to change it.

This past autumn by chance I was in America on the day of a No King’s demonstration. I was struck — as many commentators have been — by the fact that most of the people who turned out were also my age.

Perhaps most Americans now in life’s middle passage have decided to accept the world as it is and make their way as best they can in it.

Since Trump and Netanyahu launched their war against Iran this dialogue from A Man for All Seasons has been going through my head

ALICE MORE: Arrest that man

SIR THOMAS MORE: Why? What has he done?

ALICE: He’s bad!

MORE: There’s no law against that

WILLIAM ROPER: There is — God’s law.

MORE: Then God can arrest him.

ALICE: While you talk, he’s gone!

MORE: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

The Islamic Republic of Iran is bad, the regime is led by murderous men. But there is no law against that other than perhaps a divine one. They are not unique. There are evil rulers everywhere.

However there are laws about going to war, and the Trump MAGA regime has ignored them. In this they are following a well-worn path. The US ignores law because it follows a custom: the Custom of Empire. It does what it wants because it can.

The United States throughout most of my life has followed the Custom of Empire. Trump is just more brazen about it

Out of many here are two examples of what I mean: in 1953 the US staged a coup against the freely elected government of Iran led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah — because it could.

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, overthrew the Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein — because it could.

But even imperial force sometimes isn’t enough to deliver what the US wants and that is the case this time in Iran.

In Iraq, a conflict I covered as an unembedded reporter, Bush’s war of choice succeeded for two primary reasons. The terrain was flat and a large force could easily move through it and the regime was so corrupt that the army wouldn’t fight for it. Soldiers literally took off their uniforms put on dishdasha and walked home. I saw the uniforms on the side of the road to Baghdad.

The Iraq war began on March 20th, the initial invasion was slowed by extreme spring sand storms for nearly a week. But once the fighting began in earnest it wasn’t quite two weeks before Baghdad was seized, Saddam’s statue torn down, the dictator went on the run.

In the current conflict in Iran those conditions do not exist. The mountainous terrain is unfavorable to any invader even the imperial United States and its only ally in this venture, Israel; and while there is plenty of corruption at the top of the Ayatollah’s government it’s key armed elements — the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Basiji domestic security force, and the regular army — all remain committed to the regime.

In a recent FRDH podcast, former British ambassador to Iran Rob Macaire estimated about 10% of the Iranian population are strongly in favor of their government. My guess is its a little more but I defer to Macaire. In any case that is at many millions of well-armed and trained people prepared to fight and die for their country.

This is not some stunning new insight. Prior to this war the only US military engagement in Iran was President Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue the 52 people held hostage in the US Embassy in 1979.

After that catastrophe Ronald Reagan did not pursue a war with Iran after Islamic Jihad, allegedly one of Iran’s proxies, had bombed the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut killing 241 marines.

A casus belli if the law needed one. But President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet was split on how to proceed. There was not absolute proof of Iranian involvement at the time — although it seems more than likely that the attack was masterminded from Tehran.

Containment and preservation became America’s policy to the Iranian government. Why preservation? To maintain a balance of power in the Middle East. That’s another custom of empire. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel at US behest — and for its own interests — sold weapons to Iran. The origins of the Iran-Contra affair are found in these transactions.

It also paid dividends in the period after 9/11. I was in Iran then. The government, led by Mohammed Khatami, a reformer, gave considerable help to the US in its war to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mutual benefit.

A few months later in his State of the Union the second president Bush declared Iran part of the Axis of Evil, a phrase coined for him by David Frum. Today Frum is a well-compensated star of the Atlantic and more circumspect about whether Iran is still part of the Axis of Evil but his words in Bush’s mouth still carry weight in Tehran.

Bush’s speech marked the end of post-war realpolitik in guiding America’s foreign affairs. Realpolitik’s origins lie in the famous X cable from George Kennan to President Harry Truman. Most of the people who embraced that policy had lived through or fought in the second world war. They are all dead now. In the third decade of the 21st century, under Trump, whose lack of a military record is well-known, this is no longer the US approach to maintaining its imperial hegemony.

The current illegal but customary imperial war with Iran proves the point. It is obviously an error. But many advising Trump, both inside the Armageddon-loving Christian nationalist grouping in his cabinet, and in Israel where Netanyahu has boasted of trying to get an American president to overthrow the Iranian regime for 40 years don’t care. They want the US to do this because it can. That is the new definition of realpolitik.

The Israeli public is happy about the situation. It has been conditioned by experience — Iran has maintained Hezbollah on its northern border with Lebanon for decades — and also by decades of propaganda that has rendered even the most thoughtful Israelis incapable of thinking the problem of Iran through.

The 1980s arming by Israel of the Iranian regime has been memory-holed along with several successful attempts to frustrate Iran’s attempts to build a nuclear weapon. Containment was a policy that was working for Israel as surely as containment worked for the US during 45 years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Containment is frustrating but it works. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood (perhaps yours, too) there were plenty of people who thought there would be war. Khrushchev’s public statements were considered threats

We will bury you!

We must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism.

These statements lingered in many Americans’ consciousness in the same way that Frum’s “Axis of Evil” lingers in some Iranians memories.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was as close as the two empires came to war. A nuclear exchange between the US and USSR was too horrible for either side to contemplate. Self-preservation is the key to understanding how imperial regimes work. In the 20th century it was the MAD doctrine, “Mutually Assured Destruction,” that maintained the balance of power.

What the current conflict demonstrates is that you don’t need a nuclear weapon to force a stand-off with an imperial power you just need hundreds of cheap Shahed drones and if that power and its one and only ally choose to fight you on your mountainous terrain overlooking one of the world’s most strategically important waterways, the Straits of Hormuz, you can do more than force a stand-off.

ON February 27th, the day before Operation Epic Fury began, Iran was contained and today it is elevated. As Thomas More warns in A Man For All Seasons, the US and Israel are having trouble standing in the winds that are blowing now.

It is not a custom of empire but a feature of all of them that eventually they are ruled by an idiot. The US should never go to war with a Commander-in-Chief as brain-addled as Donald Trump and his squad of Fox News hosts elevated to positions of leadership. From ’s newsletter dated April 17, 2026

When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

As I write this on Sunday, April 19th, the Straits which Iran declared open are now closed again because Trump apparently didn’t end the US blockade of the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf.

But enough with war for the moment. It will be here for a while. There was some good news this week. One leader of my “Axis of Evil”, Viktor Òrban, Hungary’s leader and Putin and Western democratic fascist’s favorite authoritarian was soundly defeated at the polls and thrown out of office. My friend, the great and very modest poet George Szirtes, who left Hungary as an 8-year old boy during the 1956 uprising, was back in Budapest for the great event and wrote this reflective poem about wandering the city of his birth at the beginning of what is hopefully new era. He kindly gave me permission to share it with you:

Pesach has just passed. Global Jewry gathered around Seder tables to re-tell the 3500 year old story of our liberation:

“We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord brought us out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

We remembered the wandering in the desert, being fed with manna, receiving the Torah and say after each remembered moment, “Dayenu! it would have been enough!”

But there is a bit of the story that gets left out: 50 days after the Red Sea has been parted, the Israelites are encamped at the foot of Sinai, Moses is on the mountaintop to receive the Ten Commandments. While Moses is speaking with ha-Shem, the people demand of Aaron, his brother. an idol to worship. And so we have the Golden Calf.

Since Oct. 7th and once again since February 28th, my Judaism has been hijacked by the Golden Calf worshippers.

AND I WANT MY JUDAISM BACK!!

My Judaism has disappeared in a spasm of ignorance and futile rage. I’m not just talking about the hate-filled idiots. We are the Chosen but that doesn’t mean we have any fewer venal, mendacious, stupid people than other ethnic groups. I am talking about people of learning and standing: professors in the Ivy League and Oxbridge taking to twitter, where rational discourse goes to be ritually mutilated, to cheerlead for the war in Iran, to continue justifying — long past the need for vengeance — the utter destruction of Gaza and now an invasion — or “special military operation “ if you prefer — in southern Lebanon and the sowing of yet another century of hatred and war.

Do these leaders of the global Jewish diaspora communities not see who their allies are in this relentless quest for blood and vengeance? Can they not feel the new hatred they are breeding — not on the campuses where they teach, nor on pro-Palestinian marches that disrupt their weekend shopping trips downtown — but in the spaces where those adjacent to the Trump regime command audiences in the tens of millions? Maybe they don’t have as much direct experience of anti-Semitism as some of us — especially those who have lived outside the community and are occasionally privy to the thoughts of non-Jews.

Have these people who can quote you talmud tractates and entire passages of tanakh (Hebrew Bible) forgotten the story of how the Kingdom of Israel, the Northern Kingdom of the Ten Tribes, was utterly eradicated from the face of the earth because its leaders chose the wrong empire to ally with.

I ask, What happened to your vaunted Yiddishe kopfs? Have you completely forgotten what Judaism is?

I WANT MY JUDAISM BACK. YOU KNOW, THE ONE WHERE INTELLIGENCE, LEARNING, QUESTIONING, THINKING AND THE MOST BASIC CODE OF MORALITY: “THAT WHICH IS HATEFUL TO YOU DO NOT DO UNTO YOUR FELLOW” GUIDES US.

I am not observant. But I learned the rituals of Judaism easily enough in Hebrew school. You can shed religious faith as you get older, many people do. You can’t shed your Jewishness.

My Judaism was founded in family and food. This is not an exclusively Jewish thing. Children form their identities from home and the nourishment they get there. My identity as a Jew was set very early.

Every Friday night, my grandparents came down from the Bronx to our apartment on east 90th Street for Shabbos dinner. The joy of waiting for my grandfather to emerge from the Subway exit at 86th and Lexington Avenue, then accompanying him and my father to Braun’s liquor store to get some schnapps to toast the end of the work week. Listening to them speak yiddish so the kinder wouldn’t understand.

Pesach seders in the Bronx. More food. Aunts and uncles, cousins. Noise. Food. Stomach aches. The story, such a wonderful story. And the inciting action of the whole thing: the youngest person at the table asks the leader of the service the Four Questions. The answers form the service. For years I was the youngest, the center of attention for those few minutes

The Jesuits say give me a boy until the age of seven and I will show you the man. These experiences and a thousand others meant my Judaism was indivisible from who I was by the age of four or five when I first started asking the seder questions.

When I was eight we moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia and another element became embedded into my Judaism. Anti-Semitism. Being called a dirty Jew and a kike for the first time was confusing more than hurtful.

My parents seemed to understand, even expected that this would happen eventually. Lessons — maybe prepared, maybe just autonomic, maybe genetically encoded after 3500 years of hatred culminating in the Holocaust — fell from their lips. You can’t escape this. You are a Jew. Being hated is part of it. But you have nothing to be ashamed of.

If boys call you names, call them names back. If they want to fight, walk away. That wasn’t always so easy, so there was occasional fear and fighting.

The most valuable lesson my father taught was that it would all pass. We would find our own way and the Italian kids who were tormenting us would be going their way and we really wouldn’t have much to do with each other.

And so it proved. In school, streaming by academic ability was the main engine for separation. Most of us Jewish kids were together in the advanced classes, still in the minority but a more sizeable one. We still know each other 60 years later.

Community is an essential part of my Judaism and it has been torn apart and:

I WANT MY JUDAISM BACK!!!!

What did I learn in Hebrew school about Jewish history? Suffering and sages. Jewish achievement to make a world that persecuted us a better and more just place. Chosen-ness in the 20th Century meant standing with the oppressed.

Above all things, learning was what defined Jewishness, life-long learning. Risk your life to keep learning. Young Rabbi Hillel nearly freezing to death outside a yeshiva window listening to a Torah lesson in a school he did not have money to attend was the role model. So desperate to learn.

The foundations of my Judaism: Family, Food, Anti-Semitism, Learning and one other thing:

Israel.

Collecting money when I was five or six to plant a tree in Eretz Yisroel; reading Leon Uris’s Exodus two or three times before the age of 13. One scene above all from that potboiler remains in my memory: Barak ben Canaan shouting over and over at his wife Sarah as he goes off to fight some anti-Semites who have abused his son Ari, “My Son will not be a ghetto Jew!” Listening on transistor radios for the news on the hour during the Six-Day War in June 1967.

My first trip to Israel was at Pesach in 1971. I met a woman down in the desert. We got trapped at Ein Gedi (then just some small buildings, not the developed resort it is today) Heavy spring rains had washed out the roads. We were together for a week — except for the day when she returned to Tel Aviv and I stayed in the desert and climbed Masada alone as the sun rose. I joke that she was part of a secret program for young sabra women to seduce American Jewish boys and get them to make aliyah. And I did think about it briefly. But even then, I realized that I didn’t want to live there. We were all Jews but the national difference between being an American Jew and an Israeli Jew was too big and I didn’t feel an urge to overcome it.

I sometimes wonder: we were pretty careless about contraception. Well, we were 20 and that’s not something you think of at that age when having urgent, intense sex in the desert, on the beach, in Tel Aviv doorways. It is unlikely but not out of the realms of possibility that she got pregnant and that I have a 55-year old son (in this fiction it is a male child) and probably a grandchild in Israel. When I indulge this fantasy I ask, what would their wars have been? First intifada for my son, post-October 7th Gaza for my grandchild.

These thoughts are just one example of how linked Israel and my Judaism are in a positive sense.

I WANT THAT JUDAISM BACK!

Ok. I’m romantic about that Judaism. Maybe it’s a generational thing. I belong to the generation of latency. The modern Jewish sage Sigmund Freud’s classic formulation was trauma>latency>neurosis.

The Holocaust was the trauma. Those of us born shortly thereafter grew up in the long latency period. The enormity of that crime was incomprehensible as its details were slowly revealed. The anti-Semitism my parents had grown up with and taught me to deal with was not the raw hatred that led to the murder of six million.

The survivors themselves preferred not to talk about it for the most part in those first decades after the war. My generation includes the children of survivors, all marked by their parents trauma and in many cases their silence. The wounds were there, but not for us to really fathom as kids.

In this period of latency the world at large was consumed by guilt over allowing the Holocaust to happen. Jews were acknowledged as human beings. In America, Jewish wit could put on dress clothing. Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Woody, Nichols and May, the entire staff of Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows — Hebes and they weren’t ashamed of it (although names were changed). But not just comedy: Bellow, Roth, Heller, Mailer, Grace Paley. Broadway, the Brill Building.

American culture was Jewish American culture in the first decades of my life.

The neurotic phase began after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as close as Israel has ever come to being eradicated (If I had made aliyah and started a family with Gila, the Sabra girl, that would have been my war). In its aftermath the Likud party was formed by Menahem Begin and since 1977 has pretty much governed Israel ever since, except for two very brief periods when the Labor party, the country’s founding party, led the government. In one of those periods Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords.

In the American Jewish community a “My Israel right or wrong” attitude took root. The voices of wannabe Bar Kochba’s ready to fight all enemies real and imagined started to dominate. What did we learn in Hebrew school about Bar Kochba? That he was a great and brave leader who took on the might of Rome. We didn’t dwell too much on the fact that his revolt was crushed, and that it ended a sixty-year period of fruitless confrontations with the Empire that included the destruction of the Second Temple and the creation of the Diaspora of which, 2000 years later, I am a part.

The Holocaust was weaponized in service of this Israel to justify questionable military actions like invading Lebanon in 1982. And the word was flung at Prime Minister Menahem Begin by President Ronald Reagan as that invasion almost immediately went awry. From Reagan’s diaries:

“Right now Israel has lost a lot of world sympathy.”

He said one particularly devastating bombing and artillery attack on western Beirut in August 1982 had led King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to call the White House “begging me to do something.”

“I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did -- I was angry -- I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”

A decade later, amazingly, came the Oslo Accords and 18 months after that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. In my personal life, in my life as a Jew, these were the years of building a career in journalism. The only Jewish story NPR asked me to cover was the commemoration to mark the 50th anniversary of the “liberation” of Auschwitz.

Thus this counterweight to my Judaism — paranoid, anti-intellectual — didn’t become apparent to me until 2001 when I made an hour-long radio program for WBUR, the Boston public radio station where I worked, looking at Jerusalem. The final status of the city — could it be a shared capitol for Israel and a still just about conceivable at that time Palestinian state? — had been left to the very end of negotiations. The second intifada was just getting under way. When I finally put the piece together I was not pleased with the finished product.

The one thing I had learned in reporting the documentary is that both sides in the conflict lie. They lie to each other and they lie to themselves about what they mean by peace and what they will do to achieve their personal definition of peace.

It was the first time I heard the expression “From the River to the Sea”. It was not spoken by a Palestinian but by a student at the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in the Old City. The student assured me that all the Arabs would be forced out of the ancient land of Israel so that from the Jordan to the Sea only Jews would live in the land.

But I soft pedalled the conclusion that everybody is lying and went entirely Talmudic, asking a series of questions of myself and the world without giving a definitive answer to the Jerusalem question. My studio producer George Hicks mixed sounds I had recorded of the Old City at prayer: church bells, muezzin calls, general religious hubbub under this Talmudic disquisition. It culminated with the sound of artillery fire from Jerusalem’s Gilo neighbourhood over into the West Bank.

Anyway, a few weeks later I was doing a fundraiser for the station with some BBC colleagues and we were picketed by a Jewish media monitoring group accusing us of bias. Others accused me personally of self-hate and implied I was a traitor to Israel. I am secure enough in my Jewish identity to have shrugged this off.

But ultimately the pressure from Jewish groups did have an effect. When the radio station had a financial crisis a few years later, I was laid off. My firing had nothing to do with saving money, it was a cover for the culmination of a long pressure campaign by the self-appointed judges of who is a bad Jew.

With spare time and a decent financial pay-off I outlined a book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews From the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance. (Barak ben Canaan shouting, My son is not a ghetto Jew obviously had a deep influence on me). The book was extremely well reviewed but didn’t sell very well among my co-religionists. By now deep in the neurotic phase of their group response to the trauma of the Holocaust, they preferred to read Tough Jews, a book about Jewish mobsters: Louis Lepke, Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Shultz, Meyer Lansky. Men who took no shit.

Emancipation was about how the end of ghettoization and looking for a new place in a world that was itself evolving into modern nation-states with modern concepts of citizenship, had led to the thought systems of Marx, Freud, much of modern music, literature, philosophy and the invention of sociology. It was a paean to secular Jewish learning because

Learning is one of the pillars of my Judaism.

But for too many people living in today’s Diaspora the pillar is:

“We don’t take no shit!”

These Diaspora dwellers oscillate neurotically between feeling safe because Israel exists and possesses the Samson Option, and fearing the freight cars are being assembled to transport us to Poland when they see a 20 year old college kid wearing a keffiyeh.

To go back to the beginning:

In the Diaspora too many have forgotten recent history. Like the Israelites delivered from Pharaoh at the foot of Sinai who in five weeks had forgotten how the Lord had parted the Red Sea for them they are worshipping an idol of war and conquest with Bibi as High Priest.

In my Judaism we remember everything, not just selectively. How else can you peer into the future — always fraught for us with the potential for reversal of freedoms and worse, reversal of tolerance — if you suppress inconvenient facts?

So in my Judaism, we don’t say Oslo was a disaster as Likudniks and their AIPAC and other diaspora equivalents said the minute the Agreement was signed. In my Judaism we say Oslo was murdered in its cradle by Yigal Amir who shot Rabin through the heart in 1995 and we remember he was a Jew, not an Arab.

We remember that on October 6th, 2023, the biggest demonstration yet against Netanyahu’s plans to neuter the judiciary — the only check on his autocratic power in the Israeli constitution — was being organized, and that on October 7th all that organization was mobillized to defend Israel and provide aid and comfort to survivors of the Hamas pogrom.

And when thinking about the need to avenge October 7th, we remember the excellent reporting of Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times about how Netanyahu helped propped Hamas up as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority even after his government knew that Hamas was planning for a big attack in southern Israel.

The Golden Calf worshippers forget all those facts — intentionally or because of neurosis. They indulge a Manicheanism completely at odds with the Talmudic tradition that says there are many sides to any question, particularly those questions that relate to what it means to be Jewish in this increasingly dangerous world.

In my Judaism and those who think like me, we are able to see that the half-life of guilt the world felt for the Holocaust has passed, it’s disappearance hastened by the current Israeli government. In their Judaism, they still expect the whole world to forgive the Israeli government all its violence because of guilt over the Holocaust.

They blindly follow Bibi to war with Iran, an enemy to Israel for sure but one in a box of its own making, its nuclear threat contained. They forget stuxnet virus, the many assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, the killing of the IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020. They are quiet while the West Bank is violently annexed and Israel seizes south Lebanon up to the Litani river.

They use social media and other private channels to try and enforce community adherence to their world view. This kind of behaviour to force a narrow, conforming set of rules on all Jews in Israel and the Diaspora may have been necessary in the days of the ghetto, when community cohesion was necessary to face outside threats. But we don’t live in that world anymore.

Bibi and the men who have propped him up in office the last few years — Ben Gvir and Smotrich — have a vision of turning Israel into a ghetto. The ghetto as nation-state is their high concept for the future of Judaism. Too many in the Diaspora whether out of fear or sheer thoughtlessness give their silent consent to the creation of this perversion of Zionism and Judaism.

In my Judaism we have left the ghetto behind but not our Jewishness, we understand that history is a dynamic, evolving process. One of the most important ideas I learned when writing Emancipation was historian Salo Baron’s critique of the Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History. “They” aren’t always coming to get us and “we” can be confident of our identity as we live and interact in a world where we are always a tiny minority.

My Judaism has the prophetic voice at its core calling the community back from one of its frequent excursions into errors of group think. Because we do make these errors frequently and honoring that prophetic voice I say again:

I am borrowing this week’s commercial message from Berkeley Professor of Economics J. Bradford Delong:

I would add: when considering whose Substack you will pay for, aim for writers like myself who have no other source of income, as opposed to those who have 7 figure incomes from staff jobs and book advances.

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ADDENDUM, 18 April:

A few days after I posted this piece — which inevitably led to some disapproval from some of my Israel right or wrong co-religionists — Engelsberg Ideas published this. I want my Judaism back and clearly if it doesn’t return to what it was it will have a profound effect on the most important relationship Israel has: the one with the US public.

A public opinion poll from Pew Research Center was published last week, and it sent shock waves through much of the US foreign policy establishment who follow the Middle East. It showed that 60 per cent of US adults have an unfavourable view of Israel. In both political parties, more than half of those under the age of 50 rate Israel negatively. Simply put, the results are stunning. In sum, while this trend has been noticeable over the last several years, there is additional cratering of support for Israel across the political aisle.

Sara Wheeler is one of the outstanding travel writers of her generation and she has written her authorized biography. In this FRDH Easter Bank Holiday special we talk about Morris’s remarkable life, the end of Empire, transitioning from male to female, pronouns, and what Wheeler’s technique for writing biography has in common with Inspector Wallander’s technique for solving murders.

We live in an age of mono-lingual Babel. Words and phrases with established meaning can, in a single maniacal day in social media, be given 17 new definitions all of which can be argued over until you have another set of definitions repeated ad infinitum. General incomprehension and confusion follow.

The claim that America is a “Christian Nation” is an example. The claim means one thing to the neofascist, pulpit strutters who are periodically summoned to the Oval Office to lay hands on Donald Trump. And at first glance you could look at the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and say, well, America was founded by White Christian Men.

But their claim is demonstrably false. There were men of traditional Christian piety among the Founders, most notably Patrick Henry, but that piety did not define the Revolution or its symbols.

Start with the flag.

This is the Francis Hopkinson flag, designed in the first winter of the Revolutionary War. Hopkinson, a New Jersey man, was a Founding Father, signatory of the Declaration. (Sorry Philly friends and classmates, the Betsy Ross story seems to be a fiction). 13 stripes, red for valor and white for purity, thirteen stars representing the colonies. But what is missing from the design, if America is an explicitly Christian country?

Flag symbolism doesn’t mean as much today but look at the flags of Britain and France in 1776 to find an answer to the question:

Britain’s Union Flag and the French Fleur de Lys are freighted with Christian meaning.

The Union Flag is the Cross of St. George (patron saint of England) superimposed on the St. Andrew Cross (patron saint of Scotland) and St. Patrick Cross (Ireland). The Fleur de Lys, the Lily of the Field, represents the Virgin Mary and the Trinity.

If the US were founded as a Christian country there would have been Christian symbols on the flag. The Confederate Flag returned to the tradition putting the St. Andrew’s Cross on its Battle Flag

There is some dispute about how religious the intention was. In my occasional forays down South I’ve been told it reflects the fact the region was overwhelmingly settled by Scots-Irish immigrants and honors that heritage. Still it’s a Christian cross and the South remains the most religious part of the country so I’m inclined to think there a was a bit of religious thinking in the design.

But the US was founded on the idea that there would be no established church and that the right to become a nation was not derived from an established church’s definition of God.

Read the Declaration, admire the felicities of Jefferson’s style, its near religious cadences stating belief in the rightness of the dangerous course being embarked on and you will not find the key Christian terms:

Saviour

Jesus Christ, our Lord

Or any other terms from religious hymns and prayers. Why? Because it is not an exclusionary document. It is a framework for ideas synthesized from the previous century’s intellectual trends.

When Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the following year’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom he was expressing conclusions reached from his deep reading of the latest political and philosophic writing. A new, modern polity should be defined primarily by two related things:

No King, No Established Church.

A hundred years before the American Revolution the wars of religion were still smoldering in Europe. The pure hatred of Christian sect against Christian sect was being replaced by pure hatred by people of one nation against another but rulers were able to maintain control by blowing on the embers of the religious wars to bring out mobs and recruits for armies.

In 1670 the Dutch Republic — in its Golden Age of wealth, science and culture — bucked that trend but was slowly being strangled by its main trade rivals Britain and France. A book appeared that year called Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the Theological-Political Treatise. The author was anonymous but most in intellectual circles around the continent knew it was the Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza.

The sub-head of the Tractatus was: “Wherein it is shown that the Republic can grant freedom of philosophizing without harming its peace or piety, and cannot deny it without destroying its peace and piety.”

Spinoza’s Tractatus was published in support of the Dutch Republic led by Johan De Witt. De Witt was an advocate for a republican form of government and tolerance for the Catholic minority in the Netherlands. A pact between Britain and France to crush this threat to monarchical rule — and the two countries’ trade — put De Witt under pressure. The Dutch Calvinist clergy seeking a return to a divine monarchy supported the House of Orange and made De Witt’s ouster a religious issue. (note for pedants and academics among my readers: you try and summarize in a single sentence this episode. I dare you to do better).

De Witt and his brother Cornelius were lynched by a mob in the Hague. King William III of Orange re-established more monarchical rule. He would shortly also be invited to take the throne of England and become involved in resurgent wars of religion in Ireland (don’t ask me to go into it here).

When the mob ransacked De Witt’s office following his grotesque murder (disemboweled, his liver roasted and eaten by the more cannibalistic members of the mob) Spinoza’s book was found among his papers and became an ex-post facto justification for killing him: De Witt consorted with atheists (Spinoza wasn’t). Reports from the time described the book as being written by the “Renegade Jew from Hell.”

The intellectual world of the time was small as I mentioned and by chance, John Locke, then a young physician and close adviser to Lord Shaftesbury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, owned one of the first copies in England.

Locke’s own political development built out on the idea that “freedom of philosophizing” would not harm “the peace and piety of the state” and began to think his way to the idea that the consent of the governed is what gave legitimacy to government, not some divine “Christian” ordinance.

Perhaps, but the King was still absolute and if you or your patron fell from his favor you were in trouble. Locke spent five years in exile in Amsterdam. He became close with people who had known Spinoza and were in the process of organizing his work for publication — the Tractatus was the only book of his published during his lifetime. Locke would downplay the Spinoza connection, according to the great historian of that time, Jonathan Israel. But it is hard not to see the influence of the Dutch Jew on Locke’s Letter on Toleration, written while he was in Amsterdam, along with the bulk of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Yet it was religion that got Locke back to Britain. The Protestant William of Orange was offered the English throne after he married James the Second’s Protestant daughter Mary. This was after James, who was actually a Catholic but had had to keep shtum about it early in life to protect his position, had remarried the Catholic Mary of Modena who gave him a Catholic son and heir.

Do you begin to understand why Jefferson and the Founders preferred to leave religion and monarchs out of their new order for the ages?

Toleration. All faiths are accepted in our compact. Religion is a private business between the individual and his deity. We demand our independence for legal reasons but also because it is our “natural right” to choose how we are governed, a right derived from “nature’s God” who created the laws governing the universe: NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, NOT Our Father which art in Heaven. Simple and direct: “nature’s God”.

100 years is not a long time for an idea to be planted and grow into a movement that changes the course of history. From those first essays of Spinoza and Locke and their associates across Europe came a century of astonishing works of science, theology, political and legal theories. The Enlightenment. Another word degraded by today’s social media erected Tower of Babel.

Jefferson, educated at William and Mary College founded by, yes, that Dutchman and his wife, read them all. His library was the largest in British America before the Revolution and he made copious notes on many of these works.

You can see the synthesis in the Virginia Statute:

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

Jefferson’s reasoning came not just from his reading but also from his knowledge of the convoluted history that had seen Locke forced to flee England and a Dutchman crowned Britain’s King in order to preserve Protestant Christianity as the state religion. He applies the lesson to ordinary citizens.

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy of the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

He restates the Enlightenment creed heralded in Spinoza’s subtitle to the Tractatus: “the Republic can grant freedom of philosophizing without harming its peace or piety”

Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

And as this was a draft statute it calls for legislative approval:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

The draft statute would a decade later, with independence won and a Constitution written become the basis for the Establishment Cause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …

America was not at its Founding, and certainly is not today, a “Christian” nation. because Jefferson — and Franklin and Adams and Madison — were deeply sceptical of those who claimed to speak with special knowledge of Christ’s intentions. In 1823, Jefferson wrote to Adams:

But the perverters of Christian teachings have had a renaissance the last 50 years and the idea that America is a “Christian” nation is promoted relentless by those surrounding this uniquely corrupt President. They need to be dealt with seriously.

And if you haven’t had enough of me this week, give a listen to this program I made for the BBC. There’s a lot of interesting music and a really great anecdote about the time Spinoza went out on a kind of No Kings protest march in support of Johan De Witt.

By all accounts Nowruz and Eid al-Fitr were celebrated even as bombs fell on Iran. The parties this year served a medical purpose. In a brilliant dispatch from Tehran, the Financial Times Najmeh Bozorgmehr described life in the Iranian capitol. It begins:

The sweetest things arrive at the most brutal moments. In Tehran, under bombardment, the craving comes almost instantly — after the blast, after the tremor, when someone reaches for something sugary. Jam appears. A piece of pastry is broken in half and shared. It sounds surreal to speak of desserts in a city under sustained air strikes. But the body insists.

People in Kyiv, Kherson, and Odesa would agree. So would people who lived through bombardments in Belgrade and Sarajevo and all the assaults on Beirut going back to the early 1980s. For civilians, the physical and emotional shock that accompanies tons of ordnance being dropped on them— 77 separate bombing raids on Tehran in three full weeks of war according to BBC monitoring — is best dealt with, if no bones are broken, with a jolt of sugar.

Bozorgmehr also wrote eloquently of an irony that the bombers cannot begin to imagine.

It is not unheard of for the region to be at war on Nowruz. The Iraq war started on the holiday in 2003. That conflict was a chastening experience for those who advocated for it and covered it with a certain amount of hope that a brutal dictator would be removed from the neck of his people.

The temptation to use that disaster as a framework for thinking about the current US-Israel war with Iran is strong but should be resisted, points out Rob Macaire in this brief essay for Engelsberg Ideas. Macaire, who served as British Ambassador to Iran, from 2018-2021 does offer this one useful comparison to the earlier conflict.

As the air campaign continues, a historical parallel insistently raises its head: a country with its military decimated in a decisive war, but its leadership still clinging on to power; crippled by years of sanctions; its nuclear programme recently comprehensively dismantled; an international pariah that is periodically bombed by dominant Western forces, but continues to terrorise its own people. This was Iraq all through the 1990s, but sounds eerily like where we might end up with Iran.

Former Ambassador Macaire is a very calm explicator of the situation at the moment and a reasonable assessor of what might happen in and around the Strait of Hormuz, which is likely to determine how and when the war ends. Since, after three weeks, it is clear that US-Israel bombing alone cannot achieve any of the shifting war aims articulated by Trump-Netanyahu. We discussed this in an FRDH Podcast last week

Since the war began three weeks ago, the reasons articulated by the US and Israeli leadership have varied and now have diverged. At first it seemed an agreed strategy: decapitate the Iranian regime’s leadership. This was accomplished fairly quickly. The next objective was re-destroy — following last year’s “obliteration” — Iran’s nuclear program. For the Israelis this has morphed into their well-established strategic goal of “mowing the lawn”: periodically assaulting an enemy to degrade their weapons capacity and reduce future threat. The phrase “mowing the lawn” is used mostly to describe Israel’s periodic assaults on Gaza.

Now Israel is happy to use its and the United States’ advanced targeting systems to find and destroy Iran’s missile launchers. These are the overgrown weeds that threaten Israel most. There is still a lot of work to do it would seem. Last night Iran successfully launched missiles at Dimona in southern Israel. 160 people were injured, some seriously. Dimona is where Israel’s nuclear program is headquartered.

As for Trump’s intention — do you think he even knows what he wants? My best guess is that he wants to declare victory and let others clean up the mess. Unfortunately for him, the Iranian regime is still in place and more than capable of wreaking regional havoc.

This was evident from the beginning of the war. Anyone with a knowledge of US and Israeli attempts knew that decapitation strikes do not bring positive change. I have this knowledge, you probably have this knowledge, Tom Friedman certainly has this knowledge and he has the platform on the New York Times Op-Ed page to remind the president and the rest of the world of the salient facts.

I have watched the Israelis kill three generations of Hamas leaders. The first generation consisted of the movement’s founders, who were eliminated in the 1990s and early 2000s. These included the chief bomb maker Yahya Ayyash (“the Engineer”), who was killed in 1996; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, who was assassinated in 2004; and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Yassin’s immediate successor, who was killed about a month after him.

A new tier of leaders then emerged, focusing on turning Hamas from a militant group into a governing organization with a sophisticated rocket arsenal.

All its leaders were eventually, assassinated.

…

Then, following the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel launched a systematic campaign to eliminate the next generation of Hamas leaders.

…

Now answer this question: Who has control over the areas of Gaza today where the vast majority of Palestinians live — outside the zone controlled by Israel?

Answer: Hamas, generation four.

In sum, Israel has killed the entire Hamas leadership right next door in Gaza — three times over — but it has not been able to eliminate Hamas’s control there once and for all. Think about how hard that would be to do with the leadership in Iran, from the air, roughly a thousand miles away.

Friedman concludes by echoing a point I made in last week’s FRDH newsletter:

The power of the strong and the power of the weak are more equal than you think.

This is as true in Russia’s war on Ukraine, as it is in the US-Israel war on Iran. The smaller, seemingly weaker party is more equal than Putin or Trump thought and continue to think.

And so long as there is chocolate, or honey, or sweet jam to spoon into their mouths the people being bombarded and their governments — beloved in Ukraine, despised in Iran — will survive.

Read The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat

March is when America goes to war in the Middle East. Author Kim Ghattas reminded me of this a few weeks ago. She was off by a day but I knew what she meant.

March 2003 was the last time I was in Iran. It was the only way left to get into Iraq to cover the approaching American invasion.

I got fingerprinted at Mehrabad airport. I assume my fingerprints are still on file because Iran was then, and is now, an incredibly meticulous police state.

Was America defeated in Iraq? Did it win in Afghanistan? The concepts of victory and defeat have become as vague as the evolving ideas of war summarized in the term “asymmetric”.

But if the combatants are of different size, using different tactics and fighting for separate objectives — all aspects of the definition of asymmetric war — one side can say “We’ve won” while the other side carries on the war. Continued acts of insurgency against the side that has already declared victory, constitute a form of victory as well.

And how do you define defeat?

Confusing, no?

In Iraq it took a little less than a month to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime. The war began on the 20th of March, 2003. Bad weather in the south of the country meant it didn’t begin in earnest for another week. It took about two weeks after that to capture Baghdad. In the north of the country, in Iraqi Kurdistan where I was based, it went on a few days longer.

So, Victory to the US, right?

Two weeks later I was in Boston putting together my radio documentary about the war when, on May 1st, President George W. Bush gave one of history’s greatest rhetorical hostages to fortune:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Erm, no. By October, Time magazine was dishing out a not too gentle correction.

A year after the overthrow of Saddam I was back in Iraq to do a follow-up documentary and research a book about my friend and translator Ahmad Shawkat who had been murdered shortly after that Time Magazine cover was published. He was a dissident who had survived Saddam only to die in the “freedom” Bush brought to his country. The simmering fear and anger in the country broke into war as I was leaving.

Factions were fighting each other and all were fighting the US in Fallujah and Sadr City. What the outcome of this war would be was uncertain.

A short while later someone shared a video with me. It showed several American personnel carriers going down a main road in Baghdad. An IED goes off and one of the vehicles goes up in flames. You hear a voice on the video shout Allahu Akhbar.

That’s when I knew the war was lost. Videos like this were common and circulating all over Iraq. It took no great feat of imagination to understand the network effect of how these videos were seen among the Iraqi militias — shi’a, sunni, Ba’athist remnants, local mafias. Every successful attack on an American target was a brick in a metaphorical victory arch steadily being constructed in the fighters’ minds.

There was no possibility for the US to retrieve the situation. No matter how many surges of military force would be dialled up in the following decade.

But was the US defeated?

This is not an academic question. When a nation goes to war, the psychological make-up of the entire society is disrupted. When the war ends, if the society is to return to some state of balance, it is necessary to have a clear idea of the war’s outcome.

The ambivalence surrounding the Iraq War’s outcome is a major component in the rise of MAGA.

And it is not unique to Iraq. In all the wars of my lifetime going back to Vietnam how was victory defined, was defeat ever accepted?

Vietnam is the origin of the modern idea of:

“Declare victory and get out.”

The phrase is credited to Vermont Senator George D. Aiken, a Republican. In 1966 he went on a fact-finding tour with a bi-partisan group of Senators to South Vietnam. In the two years since he had taken office President Lyndon Baines Johnson had massively increased the number of combat troops in Vietnam: from around 23,000 in 1964 to 385,000 in 1966.

The war had become asymmetric: the US was fighting a conflict of massed firepower, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies were fighting a guerrilla insurgency and prepared to endure a great deal of punishment — casualties and destruction of their cities — and would continue the fight. Aiken could see the war was not going well but also understood the political realities of admitting defeat and walking away. So on October 19th, 1966 he said to his fellow Senators:

"The United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam War is over. That we have 'won' in the sense that our armed forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam."

Aiken went on to suggest that such a statement be accompanied by de-escalation measures. Somehow Aiken’s speech was boiled down via paraphrase to “declare victory and get out.”

In any case, Johnson paid no heed and even banned Aiken from the White House for a time.

The Vietnam war dragged on to an ambivalent close. And, as Iraq would four decades later, poisoned American society’s cohesion long after it ended.

Now Trump has begun a war with Iran. You have to describe the fact in that personalized way. The traditional phrasing should be “has taken the country to war” but Trump did not consult Congress nor build-up public support — manufacture the consent — of the American people before launching the attack.

And because of this Trump and his Florsheim wearing minions have no idea why they went to war or what would constitute victory … or defeat.

Najmeh Bozorgmehr, the Tehran correspondent of the Financial Times, filed this story a few days ago. Killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the war, and days of bombardment around the country with the inevitable tragedy of hitting a civilian target, in this case a school in Minab in the Southern part of the country in which 168 people died, more than 100 of them children, has not led Iranians to overthrow the regime:

Trump is learning forcibly the essence of asymmetric warfare. People won’t surrender their homeland just because a massive army is at the border. It’s a lesson as old as time. A lesson underlined in the film Gladiator, which doubtless Trump and his gleeful Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have seen many times:

Throughout the region bordering Iran, Americans are now under threat. This warning was issued yesterday by the State Department:

And the desperate nature of the situation Trump has created is escalating beyond his control. This morning the FT has this headline:

Good luck with that request.

Read The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat

The war is now in its second week. The fog surrounding this particular conflict is made of the black smoke from refinery fires throughout the Persian Gulf and breeze block dust from Beirut to Tehran.

The pundit’s inclination is to look for a pattern that might lead to a reason for the US and Israel initiating the conflict beyond the gleeful destruction of Iranian cities.

"This was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down. Which is exactly how it should be". Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, March 4, 2026

But looking for patterns in a war chosen by Donald Trump, egged on by Bibi Netanyahu, really is a fool’s errand. As the US built up its naval and air forces in the Middle East, it seemed likely to me that the upcoming action would just be a repeat of last spring’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. To justify the expense of moving two aircraft carrier strike groups into the Middle East, there would be a few sorties to re-”obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program as the first obliteration turned out not to really have done the job; there would also be an attempt to take the Iranian leader, Ali Khamenei off the board. Since you can’t simply kidnap him as in the case of Venezuelan strong-man Nicolás Maduro, that would mean death from the skies.

I confidently suggested this to the Beirut-based journalist and author Kim Ghattas when I booked her for the FRDH podcast just before the war started.

I was wrong. Kim was right. She expected a full-scale attack by the US and Israel. Here is our conversation again if you missed it when it first went out last Wednesday:

My pattern recognition is not what it used to be, I guess. The information environment has changed since my last reporting trip to the Middle East, shortly before October 7th. Social media has replaced legacy news media as the place for breaking news. I’ve been able to put together a group of sources in the region who have been pretty reliable over the last 16 or 17 years.

But now algorithmic shenanigans by the owners of platforms have turned social media into another element in the fog of war. Partisanship and algorithm-induced wishful thinking have made my sources less reliable and so my search for a pattern beginning with the question why? in order to discern what happens next, how the war will wind down, is made difficult.

The problem is not helped because of the destabilizing character of Trump. His erratic nature is predictable but the actions that emanate from it are wholly uncertain.

Legacy media outlets still frame reporting of his actions via the office he holds and expectations of how a president acts based on the way his predecessors more or less acted. That’s a mistake. Trump is mentally ill, clearly, but not crazy and probably not suffering from dementia. He knows what he is doing because he has been doing it for a very long time.

He is a con man from the world of New York real estate trying to get a second round of investors to buy into a project that may or may not ever get built, because the first round of investment somehow has disappeared into his pockets without the building going up.

Trump is the guy who when sued by his first investors decides to bury them in paper, in the expectation that the expense of having their lawyers go through all of it makes them drop their lawsuit. (This is what he has done with the Epstein files: you want’em. Here they are, redacted. tens of millions of pages. You want them unredacted? Go to court again)

He is just fundamentally a liar to a degree that has never been seen in American politics.

There have been dishonest men in the Presidency before. A certain economical approach to truth is necessary in the practice of politics, sometimes literal quids have to be quietly exchanged for pro quos but there needs to be rules, parameters, a sense that words of commitment will be honored, otherwise the enterprise falls apart:

“The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”

Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774

Jefferson is another reason, I have failed so far to discern a pattern in the US-Israel War on Iran. I’ve been immersed in the world and words of the man because BBC Radio is planning a big season to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and I am making a couple of programs for it.

The past week has been spent alternating between reading and re-reading A Summary View of the Rights of British America and talking to friends and colleagues like Kim in Beirut and others in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The connection between a capricious ruler like Trump presiding over a rubber stamp Congress and George the Third ruling with a rubber stamp Parliament appeals to the need to find patterns, historical analogies that make the present understandable.

Jefferson’s text is a clear forerunner to the arguments and style of the Declaration of Independence. Reading it now, as Trump cuts Congress out of the war making decision, offers a potential analogy.

Jefferson describes the King as not just the monarch but the:

“chief magistrate of the British empire,”

and

“He is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government, erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendance.”

Jefferson objects to the effects of centralization of power in one man and a small coterie in the legislature.

“… the united complaints of his majesty's subjects in America … are excited by many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations, attempted to be made by the legislature of one part of the empire, upon those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.”

Some of the encroachments and usurpations really do have contemporary analogs

“His majesty has from time to time sent among us large bodies of armed forces, not made up of the people here, nor raised by the authority of our laws:”

“those whom he sends here are liable to our laws made for the suppression and punishment of riots, routs, and unlawful assemblies; or are hostile bodies, invading us in defiance of law.”

The inability of Minnesota to investigate the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti demonstrate that Trump, like King George really does feel above the law.

“Can his majesty thus put down all law under his feet? Can he erect a power superior to that which erected himself? He has done it indeed by force; but let him remember that force cannot give right.”

Jefferson understands how the “chief magistrate” can become so egomaniacal — by listening to courtiers who tell him what he wants to hear:

“Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art.”

To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.

There are quite wonderful passages in Jefferson’s essay that anticipate current angry debates on issues like migration as a universal right

“ … a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.”

He demand’s the gross abuse of natural rights represented by Slavery, and objects to its abolition being made secondary to the commercial rights of those who import human beings from Africa to British America :

“The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.”

The name Tresilian turns up in the essay. Robert Tresilian was Chief Justice of the King’s Bench during the Reign of Richard the Second. He advised the King that his power was effectively unlimited.

“History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.”

In the 6-3 majority opinion in Trump v United States, the six “conservative” members of the court succumbed to this “spirit of tyranny.” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.

In his second term Roberts’ decision has led Trump to make war regularly without reference to Congress, among whose “separated powers” includes the right to declare war (in part because Congress holds the power of the purse and war is damned expensive, the current one on Iran has cost several billion dollars already.

Does Roberts remember what happened to Robert Tresilian? A group of noblemen opposed to Richard’s increasingly autocratic rule turned on Tresilian (well, at that point they weren’t prepared to depose the King, they would a decade later). Richard abandoned him — loyalty was transactional with the King as it is with Trump. Tresilian was tried for treason in absentia and convicted. The judge claimed sanctuary in Westminster. The noblemen dragged him out of the sanctuary house into the court, then he was taken to Tyburn and executed.

This digression into Jefferson’s words and world has been a life saver this week but it still leaves me looking for a pattern to the current war so that I can see how it is likely to end. I’m still asking why it started now, and the question why and the character of Trump make me think of the words of Primo Levi from his memoir of his imprisonment at Auschwitz If This Is a Man.

The war which began on February 28th with the US-Israel decapitation strike on Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian leadership has inevitably spread into Lebanon.

For this FRDH, First Rough Draft of History, special edition I contacted author and journalist Kim Ghattas in Beirut. Ghattas, a native of the city, is a contributing editor of the Financial Times and the author of Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East.

Our conversation goes deep into the long history of enmity among the US, Iran and Israel whose battles have too often been fought in Lebanon. But I began the conversation by asking Kim for the latest news on the 4th of March 2026 in Lebanon.

Read Black Wave

This week I could have written about Iran, Trump, Israel, the collapse of American society in MAGA MkII, or any of the usual subjects for the FRDH newsletter but I’m taking a break. There are literally thousands of Substacks that cover those topics and following yesterday’s US/Israel decapitation attack on Iran’s leadership I am ceding the field to the competition. If you want a hot take on what will happen next that will be overtaken by events in 48 hours go to one of them. The subject will still be relevant next week (and the week after and the week after) and I will address it then.

But this week I want to make a confession to my loyal readers, something that has tortured my soul for years:

I have never read Middlemarch.

I’ve tried, Lord knows I’ve tried to read the book, but I just can’t get through it. It’s a mystery as to why and it troubles me enormously. I consider myself a fairly literate person and hope you do as well but a failure to complete reading Eliot’s masterpiece, throughout my lifetime considered the greatest English novel of not just the 19th century but of all time, fills me with shame.

It is also a source of mockery within my house. My one and only child, who shortly sits her finals at Cambridge in English Literature has long poked fun at this massive lacuna in my reading CV. As she began her final year I pledged that I would finish the book in time for her graduation but since Christmas I’ve been stuck on page 80 and there’s at least another 750 pages to go!

The reason for this confession now, as bombs fall on Iran and Iran retaliates around the region, is a friend took me to see Alexi Kaye Campbell’s “Bird Grove” at Hampstead Theatre last Thursday. The play is about young Mary Ann Evans, before she took the pen name George Eliot, and her relationship with her widowed father, for whom she cared until his death. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, appears in a dreamlike sequence in the second act and this renewed my sense of inadequacy and need to confess.

The play was just ok but the central performance by Elizabeth Dulau was lovely and and humanized the formidable figure that Eliot has become in the English imagination. It is easy to forget that the novelist was young once and girlish with a wide-ranging intellect that had no prospect of being able to shine forth given the social strictures of her class and (drum roll) the patriarchy.

This youthful quality is caught in a portrait of the author by Swiss artist Francois d’Albert Durade painted in 1850 in Geneva when the author was 31, shortly after her father’s death released her into the world.

Self-analysis of my failure to read her masterpiece only deepens the mystery of why not?

It’s not like I haven’t read Eliot novels. Silas Marner was assigned in Mrs. Murphy’s English class in high school. I read Daniel Deronda on a long holiday in the Cévennes decades ago. But I’m not sure how much of either book stuck. High school reading is more like a skim, you’re just taking in the novel at speed in order to do well on the test or writing assignment given on it. In Daniel Deronda the hook was the title character being Jewish and the discussions about Jews as a nation. Critics note that it was the first book in English literature to depict a Jewish character as something other than a caricature — as opposed to someone like Fagin in Oliver Twist. And that’s pretty much all I remember of it.

I’ve read Eliot’s copious non-fiction work as well. When I was researching Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews From the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, I came across an essay she had written on German wit focused on the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, a major figure in my book. The 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was another important person in the story and I discovered she had made the first English translation from the original Latin of Spinoza’s masterwork, Ethics.

Further analysis of my Middlemarch problem indicates that translation, something Eliot practiced beyond Spinoza and long before writing novels, may have something to do with it.

When I moved to London in late 1985 the locals would ask, “Why? Why would you want to move here from New York?” It was the high noon of Thatcherism and the people I tended to meet were people like me, Guardian readers and writers. I got why they would question how anyone would voluntarily to choose to live in Thatcher’s Britain. My response usually was, “If I had been a more diligent student of French in school I’d have ex-patriated myself to Paris.”

Part of the truth underneath that joke was I prefer 19th century French novels to English novels. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, published around the same time as Middlemarch, is the book from that golden age of the novel that has meant the most to me in my life. I read it in the acting days in New York, back in the mid-70s, when I drove a taxi on the night shift to make rent. An enormous amount of reading I didn’t do as an undergraduate got done back then.

The world of Sentimental Education — Paris after the failed 1848 revolution — had so many echoes with the New York I lived in after the failed revolution of 1968: the social games of the 19th century Paris art world and 20th century Soho galleries, idealists becoming crass materialists chasing money, a young man falling hopelessly in love with an older married woman (in my case she was divorced but it was just as hopeless). Their final heartbreaking scene ends with her cutting a lock of her now white-hair, then hailing a horse-drawn cab to take her out of the now middle-aged man’s life forever.

One morning, staring at the ceiling I saw a way to adapt the whole book into a film set in mid-70s New York including a part for me — as the cab driver — and immediately set to work on it. I gave up after an hour.

But it’s not just 19th century French novels I prefer, it’s the Russians as well. Thinking about the Middlemarch problem it occurred to me that whether Flaubert/Balzac/Hugo, or Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/Gogol, I have read these books in translation and fairly recent ones at that.

And they are constantly re-translated as English evolves. The translation of Sentimental Education I read circa 1975 was by Robert Baldrick and had only been published a decade earlier. The dialogue in that final scene between the two platonic lovers felt normal, like words I might speak, which is why they moved me. Since then there have been at least four more translations of the book, the most recent in 2023. A reasonable guess would be that the dialogue in each new edition is adapted more and more to current idioms.

For me as a reader, the high Victorian English dialogue that Eliot writes is anachronistic. It doesn’t have the same suppleness as twentieth and now twenty-first century translations of the French and Russian canon. It would be sacrilegious to translate Middlemarch into contemporary English but this means for native speakers the novel is frozen in its time stylistically.

(Much of Shakespeare is also written in anachronistic English but the difference between the two writers is Shakespeare is meant to be spoken. You can read him aloud and catch his meaning. Plus when performing the plays nowadays he is usually cut down — not the same as translating his work but an effective way of making him accessible to a contemporary audience.)

Language should not be a barrier to understanding and enjoying literature but in one’s own native tongue it often is.

I wondered if Middlemarch in French translation worked and asked Professor Google, who turned up a paper by S Henri-Lepage summarized:

“The translational confrontation between Middlemarch and its French version allows us to assess the position of digressions in the novel on both sides of the Channel, as well as the figure of translation in France at the end of the 19th century.”

It notes that many of Eliot’s observational digressions on Dorothea’s society simply aren’t included in French translations. So I’m guessing that Middlemarch poses the same problem for its readers in French as it does for me.

The translation point is one that is important though:

"Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light,"

is a line in from “The Translators to the Reader”, the preface of the King James Bible published in 1611. I used it as an epigram for my first book, recently republished as The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat, the story of my translator during the Iraq War.

Translation’s importance is gaining recognition on the literary prize circuit. This past week the nominees for the International Man Booker Prize were announced. That prize grew out of a merger with an earlier award, The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The honor was unique in that it recognized — with cash money — the contribution of the translator who rendered each novel into English. The last winner of the award in its Independent incarnation was German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.

No piece of literary fiction I’ve read in the last 15 years has meant as much to me as Erpenbeck’s story of the possible lives of a Jewish woman born in the easternmost edge of the Habsburg Empire might have lived through the bloody twentieth century.

For her 20th birthday, I gave my daughter a copy of Erpenbeck’s book with a suitably soppy inscription expressing my pride in her for being a lover of books. She hasn’t read End of Days yet because she is otherwise engaged. She’ll get to it. Probably finish the book before I finish Middlemarch.

Which brings me back to my philistine confession: beyond being bogged down by reading untranslatable, anachronistic language, my struggle with Middlemarch may partially be found in its subtitle: A Study of Provincial Life. There is a difference between a story and a study. The former primarily engages the heart and imagination, the latter the analytical mind. Silas Marner to whom great wrongs are done, sinks into misery, and finally finds redemption through the love of a child, was a story that engaged my heart, not a study of miserliness in the 19th century English Midlands.

80 pages into Middlemarch the people really are studies, and all they seem to be talking about is our Miss Brooke and whether she can find a suitable life partner and then gossiping when she picks the wrong one. I sort of got the point around page 36.

Also, a study of the Midlands society in which Mary Ann Evans grew up is not enough to take me away from the world in which we live right now.

As America slides towards fascism, the books I am compelled to read the last few years are set in Germany from the Weimar Twenties through the Cold War. I spent 18 months reading and re-reading all 14 of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels. Now I’m getting to grips with Alan Furst’s 15 volume Night Soldiers series. These books are genre, not literary fiction, but at their best, which is frequently in the Furst books, they reach the level of literature in the way the novels of John Le Carré do.

While working on this little essay my bedtime reading has been Furst’s Dark Star and just last night this monologue between two Soviet Jews in 1938 Paris came up. One is a journalist doing errands for the NKVD, the other a General in the GRU, who is organizing a new secret network. Stalin’s purges of the old Bolshevik guard are at their height. The journalist asks:

“What actually is the nature of your business?

“That’s a good question, I’ll try to answer it. The truth is I’m in several businesses. Like you, like all of us, I was in the paradise business. We got rid of the czar and his pogroms to make a place where Jews, where everyone, could live like human beings and not like slaves and beasts — that’s one definition of paradise and not a bad one. This paradise, we soon saw, needed a few willing souls to serve as guardians. Isn’t that always the way with paradise? so I offered my humble services. Thus my second business, one could say, became the GRU, the military intelligence business. In this choice I was guided by the example of Trotsky, who became a soldier when he had to and did pretty well at it. And yet, even so, paradise slipped away. And now we have a new pogrom, run, like so many in history by a shrewd peasant who understands hatred, who knows its true value and how to use it.”

The third business, to which the General is trying to recruit the journalist is this:

“A chance to save a few Jewish lives, never a commodity with much value, but then Jews have always found their way to such enterprises — we deal in cheap stuff: old rags, scrap metal, bones and gristle, whatever like themselves, people really don’t want.”

A final confession: I know how Middlemarch ends. Sometimes I skip ahead and read the final paragraph of a book. That really marks me as a philistine, I know. The journey into and through the novel is what counts not the end point. But for a classic like Moby Dick where the entire culture is one enormous spoiler why not around page 180 skip to the very end?

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

It isn’t a cheat, and I would never do it with a Furst or Le Carré novel, where plot twists are kept up often til the last paragraph. Reading the final paragraph from a third of the way through a major work of literature is like pausing to rest on a ridge on the way up Everest to glimpse the summit, which is about to fall out of sight as you traverse to gain elevation and won’t be seen again til you reach the Hillary Step 60 metres below the peak.

Anyway, I now know that Eliot’s study of provincial life will eventually evolve into a story that leaves it complex points and counterpoints and resolves into the most beautiful, major chord.

… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The question is whether I will ever complete the journey through Middlemarch to experience those words in their full glory.

Read Emancipation

Read The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat

For Jews, the October 7th Hamas pogrom in southern Israel was the most shocking event since the Holocaust and the aftermath has been almost as bad, for it reminded the global Jewish community of two terrible truths:

Anti-Semitism is always present, and the half life of guilt humanity felt for the Holocaust was over and done.

So why was Bibi Netanyahu’s son Yair willing to pose with a notorious anti-Semite like Tucker Carlson in 2020?

Give Yair the benefit of the doubt, Jew-hatred is endemic and it can be tough to pick temporary allies among those who hate you.

As a Jew, I have written and spoken about living with anti-Semitism for decades. This work has appeared most often on the BBC. Yes, the BBC, much-maligned by the modern Jewish community for its alleged anti-Semitism, has been the place where I have frequently reached the largest audience to talk about being Jewish, as in this essay from a decade ago.

The first time I was called a “Jew” with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word “Jew” had simply been one of the words and phrases - like “Mike”, “son” and “114 East 90th Street” - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.

Whoever called me a “Jew” didn’t accompany the word with a shove or a punch, but the way the word was bitten off and barked contained enough implicit violence to make it clear that being Jewish was bad and someone wanted to hurt me because of it. I simply didn’t know how to respond. Before too long I learned I was a “mockey” and a “kike” as well as a “Jew”. And with the help of the adults in my world I learned the boys calling me a Jew could be called a name back. They were “Wops” and “Dagos” and “Micks”.

In the essay quote above I go on to talk about a more insidious form of anti-Semitism I encountered growing up, a polite social form that was more dangerous because, unlike the working class Catholic kids with whom I occasionally had fist fights in elementary school, the upper middle-class WASP kids I went to high school with came from backgrounds where hatred was spoken in oblique references to Jewish paranoia and exclusionary social practices.

All my memories of anti-Semitism from when I was eight to the present came swarming up after October 7th.

In an early edition of the FRDH newsletter, a month after the Hamas atrocity, I wrote this:

From the moment the first reports of the massacres in southern Israel began to filter into my social media feeds, what would follow was predictable: the Israeli government would retaliate disproportionately and the inciting outrage would be forgotten. Then there would be an upsurge in anti-Semitism that one would have to grit one’s teeth and endure until things calmed down and global attention moved on. But as the scale of the Hamas atrocity became clear my sanguine assessment became a more worried one: the scale of violence was so enormous that everything that followed would be paradigm shattering, including the Jew-hatred. And so it has proven.

What has worried me most from the beginning is how much attention the majority in my community have given to the anti-Zionism>anti-Semitism of undergraduates and how little has been given to the anti-Semitism of those close to real political power.

Cosplaying, keffiyeh wearing students at elite universities chanting, “From the River to the Sea” don’t frighten me.

First, because I was an undergraduate during the Vietnam War and went on marches, was tear-gassed on two continents, and realized early that all our efforts would not end the war. Similarly, no sit-in on an Ivy League quad would ever effect US policy towards Israel (at least we left campus and encircled Nixon’s White House to demonstrate our anger).

Second, the chant From the River to the Sea didn’t feel threatening. I first heard the expression in April 2001 in the yeshiva of the Ateret Cohanim, a Jewish-American funded settler group. I was making a radio documentary about Jerusalem and a young man, I believe originally from South Africa, assured me that “from the river to the sea” there would shortly be no Arabs in Israel.

But too many of my co-religionists responded to these expressions of adolescent impotence as if storm troopers or Hamas irregulars were being recruited in Harvard Yard, forgetting that people who chanted “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win” had no intention of becoming a fifth column for North Vietnam.

But even today all it takes is a march through central London by the impotent to bring forth the atavistic Jewish fear, probably now encoded genetically, that every public expression of anti-Zionist anger means the Cossacks are racing up the road sabres drawn to murder us.

And while people are distracted by demonstrations the anti-Semitism to fear has been growing — in America at least — adjacent to the MAGA regime headed by Donald Trump.

Throughout his time in office and while conducting his Avignon presidency between 2021-2025 at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has consorted with outright anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes. But more recently he has brought Tucker Carlson into his orbit. Carlson is exactly the kind of anti-Semite I know so well from my adolescence. And his growing popularity led the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs to conduct a poll about his influence on young MAGAts. This week a summary of the poll’s findings by Irwin Mansdorf appeared in a Times of Israel blog under this headline

Mansdorf’s poll echoes one from 90 days ago by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, among that poll’s findings:

25% of GOP voters under 50 expressed antisemitic beliefs, compared to just 4% of Republicans over 50.

The poll’s most alarming finding involved Holocaust denial. An extraordinary 37% of all respondents believed the Holocaust was exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.

It is no longer possible to dismiss Carlson as a clown. He has a constituency and a platform on Twitter gifted him by Elon Musk (it is also not possible to be dismissive of Twitter, as crazy as the site often seems, because for better and mostly worse the platform really does set the news agenda). There he conducts the most wide-reaching and effective campaign against Zionism, one that makes the chants of “Globalize the Intifada” by the campus crew look like what they are: war cries of the useless idiots. Carlson has long since crossed the line where anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism.

Over the last 24 hours his interview with Trump’s ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has dominated my feed. Huckabee, of course, is a Christian Zionist who believes sincerely in End Times eschatology: the in-gathering of Jews to the Promised Land leading to the final battle of Armageddon which will bring the second Coming of Christ.

Here are three brief extracts. I urge you to watch them all the way through,

In addition to anything else this conversation underscores a reason why the conflict in Israel/Palestine has continued for 80 years. Both sides need smarter allies.

Carlson’s line of questioning is framed around an idea I first heard in Cairo just after 9/11 from an Arab novelist: “the Jews should just go back to Poland.” When shouted by a 22-year old at Harvard it is annoying and laughable, when calmly posed by someone with 22 million followers on Twitter it is dangerously anti-Semitic.

Yet, groups like AIPAC seem willing to continue to blindly support Trump, despite the fact that Tucker has been a visitor to the White House regularly this year. And far too many American Jews are still looking at immigrant communities from Muslim countries as the source of Jew-hatred in their society. As I said at the start of this essay, anti-Semitism is endemic and if you want to fight it you need to pick your targets. I know which anti-Semitism is the one we need to fight against.

The Carlson brand of anti-Semitism is likely to grow if the US seriously attacks Iran in the coming weeks.

One of the foundational concepts the young MAGAts (and those further right) who follow the preppy Jew-hater have memorized is that America fights Israel’s wars for her. Iraq was the paradigm and now Iran is in the frame. It is certain that Barak Ravid’s Axios article where the info in the tweet above is from will be read by Tucker’s acolytes as an Israeli using unnamed “sources” trying to manufacture consent for yet another war America will fight for the Jews.

My guess is it won’t come to that.

Despite the military build up in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean it is unlikely that a full-scale war will break out. There may be some sorties from the carrier to bomb desert targets related to Iran’s nuclear program as happened in June 2025.

One reason is this: China is the main buyer of Iranian oil and any disruption to that supply would create serious problems for the People’s Republic. Trump is scheduled to visit the PRC at the end of March.

But another reason is Tucker is firmly in his ear now and Trump’s feral, survivor intelligence will understand the political cost to his MAGA movement if he goes into Iran full bore.

In American presidential campaigns the question that candidates ask voters is, “Are you better off today, than you were four years ago?”

In Trump MkII, the question becomes, “Are you safer today than you were four years ago?”

My personal answer is, No. Not just because the single greatest crisis in the world — America’s continued descent into an anti-democratic morass continues unabated — but its a knock on effect in managing international affairs via diplomacy rather than the uncertainties of war.

The latter point was underlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. Among those listening were the foreign secretaries of most EU nations.

The headline out of the event was European leaders were re-assured following last year’s belligerent address at the same forum by Vice-President J. D. Vance

But there was less re-assurance on offer than many in attendance might have thought. Think of the Rubio/Vance speeches as a good cop/bad cop routine or, more apt considering the setting, an interrogation of a political prisoner in the basement of Munich’s Wittelsbacher Palais circa 1933-1944.

A year ago, Vice-President J.D. Vance delivered savage blows about the head and groin to the assembled prisoners, I mean Foreign Secretaries, who were then returned to their cells to recover their wits, mull what had happened and their sudden fall from favor. This weekend they were dragged back upstairs to find the calmer, more rational-seeming Rubio leading the interrogation.

But the message was the same: the MAGA way or the Highway. Rubio made clear this means accepting the MAGA version of history, after the Cold War’s end:

We embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies, to systematically undercut ours, shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being de-industrialized …

(ed. note: The term Rust Belt came into common use in the early 1980s in America when the Cold War was still in full-swing and seemed set to go on in perpetuity. De-industrialization was the inevitable consequence of the Oil Shock of 1973 and the Great Inflation which followed, combined with improved automation tools in factories making human workers redundant.)

We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.

(Ed. note: Sovereignty over foreign and defense policy, the key government areas related to sovereignty, have never been outsourced. The US has always been free to make whatever wars it wanted. So have any of the former great powers that had empires: Britain, France, Russia. All of these countries have availed themselves of this freedom)

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.

(Ed. note: … nah, I don’t want to get side-tracked by climate change this week)

Rubio then shifted into a call to embrace the MAGA way to renewal:

For the United States and Europe, we belong together.

America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

There was a lot of MAGA rhetoric about Christian civilization and Rubio traced his family roots in Europe back 250 years (avoiding any mention of how his family came to be in Cuba until 1956: Yanqui sí!, Latino mí? Non!)

But as in all good interrogations Rubio comes to the moment where he offers up the hope of salvation to the prisoner (s):

President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.

(Screenwriter’s direction: The interrogator walks around the chair where Winston Smith is sitting, we see him place a gentle but firm hand on Winston’s shoulder, the prisoner’s bruised face and body slump in relief as he realizes he will not be given the 9mm solution.)

What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear. Fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology.

…

Yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits.

The response as summarized on Twitter (larger circulation than The Washington Post)

The assembled officials and their think tank brains rose to applaud, already forgetting that Rubio skipped a meeting on Ukraine while in Munich which rendered it useless. He then headed to Budapest for one to one meetings with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban and then on to Bratislava for talks with Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico — the two European leaders who are full MAGA despite their countries being in the EU and receiving more in funding from Brussels than they pay in.

In a speech delivered the day before Rubio’s, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took up the theme that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney first broached at Davos a few weeks ago.

The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed. But I’m afraid we have to put it in even harsher terms. This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.

America’s European allies must look to their own resources to navigate this new era

Our military, political, economic and technological potential is enormous. But we are still far from exploiting it to the extent necessary.

The most important thing now is that we need to flip the switch in our minds. We have understood that in the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer simply a given. It is under threat.

It was possible to interpret Merz seeing the threat being as much from the US as any other country.

Among the journalists attending the conference was the Financial Times’ Ed Luce. Earlier in the week he had written a column about MAGA loathing London.

The myth of London as a third-world sinkhole is now central to Maga politics. Restoring Britain’s allegedly vanishing character is also an official goal of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Luce, who is the foreign journalist who best understands the US, goes on

London serves as the most visible symbol of a Europe that Trump’s national security strategy claims is facing “civilisational erasure”.

He notes that one part of Trump and minions’ animosity comes from the fact that the city where I live is the poster child for a successful multi-cultural society. It is an immigrant city.

The MAGA propaganda machine in the US led by Steve Bannon pumps out bilge depicting London as a violent crime-ridden hellscape despite facts like the murder rate being significantly lower than in any major American city. Whether measured per capita or in absolute numbers. Last year there were 97 homicides in the city, compared to more than 300 in New York or 127 in Washington DC.

Luce also points out that part of the MAGA assault on London comes from commercial concerns: the UK along with its erstwhile partners in Europe are trying to regulate the clearly harmful aspects of social media and the web. It doesn’t matter that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has maintained the National Health Service’s £330 million contract with Palantir, the data-mining company run by J.D. Vance’s benefactor, Peter Thiel.

This dovetailing of white Christian supremacy and commercial power under Trump has destabilized a system that was creaking and in need of shaking up as Chancellor Merz said, but to go back to the question at the beginning of this newsletter, are we more secure now?

The assault on international institutions trumpeted by Rubio and everyone else in the regime — institutions like the United Nations — is actually not new in the US. It has been a dark undercurrent since the world’s diplomatic, economic and legal architecture was created out of the catastrophe of the Second World War. In America, almost from the beginning, there was push-back against the UN in the far-corners of what was called “conservatism” but was really proto-MAGA.

Billboards like this sprang up all over the country in the 1950s. The Bolsheviks went on a long march to finally seize power in Russia, but MAGA — the descendants of the original Birchers and Richard Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style — went on an even longer if less bloody one — almost 70 years.

They were laughed at, mocked, ignored and now, allied with the new fortunes made in tech, they are in charge. But power has not brought them wisdom in international affairs. Their world view is horribly simplistic which is why wrecking is all they have to offer. That is no way to conduct foreign policy.

On Wednesday I thought this week’s newsletter would be about Iran. Lord knows social media is full of people calling for regime change and it is difficult not to have some sympathy with them.

Trump has broached the “A” word, “Armada”, to describe the deployment of two carrier strike groups to the Middle East. Last week, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who has been urging him to attack the Iran and overthrow the regime. As often happens with Trump, he suddenly realized that there was a downside to attempting regime change in the Islamic Republic and seemed to back away from imminent action.

Anyway, I will have time to get back to Iran and the difficulties of removing the Ayatollahs — militarily and politically — as it will be at least two weeks before the Armada is in place.

This was made for the BBC in early 2016 and aired just before the Presidential primaries began. Are you better off now than you were 10 years ago?

1976 was a remarkable year in American cinema. The list of Academy Award nominations for Best Picture for that year give you a sense of just how rich it was:

All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, Taxi Driver. Three of those four films are canonical.

The winner, Rocky, is not in the cinema esthetic canon but has its own importance. First, on a small investment it made a lot of money and in Hollywood that is a big deal. Second, it can be seen in retrospect as a harbinger of the overrunning of American culture by populism, a force that would evolve in a political direction. Ultimately, populism with a tinge of show business would bring director Sylvester Stallone’s good friend Donald Trump to the White House.

Taxi Driver is unique among that group. Its classic status goes beyond the brilliance of its young creative talent — director Martin Scorsese, screenwriter Paul Schrader, star Robert DeNiro — or that it was actually written in Los Angeles and was meant to be an exploration of male alienation in modern society.

The film is a historical documenting of New York in 1975, the year it was filmed. The city was going through a bankruptcy crisis. The de facto financial and cultural capital of the West was collapsing economically, nearly 20% of its jobs had disappeared since the start of the decade. New York was losing population and devolving into anarchy, large parts of it consumed by fires and crime.

The film was controversial when it came out for its stylized depiction of violence and a plotline revolving around an underage prostitute played by 12-year old Jodie Foster (Foster was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar for her permance). But the violence and the street life were an accurate reflection of the city in which the film’s protagonist Travis Bickle drove the nightshift. I can testify to its veracity because I drove the nightshift then as well and lived on the street where Scorsese filmed it.

To mark this half-century anniversary, I made a BBC radio documentary about the film and the city. I interviewed Martin Scorsese, now 83 and still working, about making Taxi Driver and the city he and I knew then and how it evolved into the city of today.

To say thank you, I’m making the full 35-minute interview available to paid subscribers.

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