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In Defence of Ken Loach

So, it’s come to that: Ken Loach is now the target of a character assassination campaign waged by those who will stop at nothing to shield the apartheid policies of Israel. Their message to people of good conscience is simple: Unless you too want to be tainted as an antisemite, keep quiet about the crimes against humanity and the assault on human rights in the land of Palestine. They are putting the rest of us on notice: If we can do this to Ken Loach, a man who has spent his life championing the victims of oppression, racism and discrimination, imagine what we shall do to you. If you dare support the Palestinians’ human rights, we will claim that you hate the Jews.

The art of assassinating the character of a leftist has become better honed in recent times. When the Financial Times called me a Marxist biker, I confessed to the charge gladly. Calling me a Stalinist, as some unsophisticated rightists do, also fails to ignite an existentialist crisis in my soul because I know full well that I would be a prime candidate for the gulag under any Stalinist regime. But call me a misogynist or an antisemite and the pain is immediate. Why? Because, cognisant of how imbued we all are in Western societies with patriarchy, antisemitism and other forms of racism, these accusations hit a nerve.

It is, thus, a delicious irony that those of us who have tried the hardest to rid our souls of misogyny, antisemitism and other forms of racism are hurt the most when accused of these prejudices. We are fully aware of how easily antisemitism can infect people who are not racist in other respects. We understand well its cunning and potency, for instance the fact that the Jews are the only people to have been despised both for being capitalists and for being leftie revolutionaries. This is why the strategic charge of antisemitism, whose purpose is to silence and ostracise dissidents, causes us internal turmoil. This is what lies behind the runaway success of such vilification campaigns against my friends Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Brian Eno, Roger Waters and now Ken Loach. 

‘Is your exclusive criticism of Israel not symptomatic of antisemitism?’, we are often asked. Setting aside the farcicality of the claim that we have been criticising Israel exclusively, criticism of Israel is not and can never be criticism of the Jews, exactly as criticism of the Greek state or of American imperialism is not criticism of the Greeks or of the Americans. The same applies to interrogating the wisdom of having created an ethnically specific state. When remarkable people like my heroes Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein questioned the Zionist project of a Jewish state in Palestine, it is offensive to claim that to debate Israel’s existence is to be antisemitic. The question is not whether Arendt and Einstein were right or wrong. The question is whether their questioning of the wisdom of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine is antisemitic or not. Clearly, while antisemites opposed the foundation of the state of Israel, it does not follow that only antisemites opposed the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

On a personal note, back in 2015, while serving as Greece’s finance minister, a Greek pro-troika newspaper thought they could diminish me with a cartoon depicting me as a Shylock-like figure. What these idiots did not realise was that they made me very proud! Trying to tarnish my image by likening me to a Jew was, and remains, a badge of honour. Speaking also on behalf of aforementioned friends vilified as antisemites, we feel deeply flattered whenever an antisemite bundles us together with a people who have bravely endured racism for so long. As long as a single Jew feels threatened by antisemitism, we shall pin the Star of David on our chest, eager and ready to be counted as Jews in solidarity – even though we may not be Jewish. At the very same time, we wear the Palestinian flag as a symbol of solidarity with a people living in an apartheid state built by reactionary Israelis, damaging my Jewish and Arab brothers and sisters and stoking the fires of racism which, ironically, always forge a steelier variety of antisemitism.

Returning to Ken Loach, thankfully no smear campaign against him can succeed. Not only because Ken’s work and life are proof of the accusation’s absurdity, but also because of the courageous Israelis who take awful risks by defending the right of Jews and non-Jews alike to criticise Israel. For instance, the group of academics who have methodically deconstructed the IHRA’s indefensible definition of antisemitism, which conflates it with legitimate criticisms of Israel that many progressive Israelis share. Or the wonderful people working with the Israeli human rights organisation B’TSELEM to resist the apartheid policies of successive Israeli governments. I am just as grateful to them as I am to my friend and mentor Ken Loach.

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War by Other Means

One principle that gives relative coherence to the political rationality of the Trump faction is this: politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. That was on full display in the rhetoric of previous weeks, with Rudy Giuliani calling for ‘trial by combat’, or Trump exhorting his followers to show ‘strength’ at the US Capitol. This combative approach is not reserved for moments of crisis; it rather permeates the political reasoning of Trumpism, and identifies it as a direct outgrowth of a long line of reactionary thought.

Here I want to investigate not so much the ‘warlike’ logic of Trump’s politics but the other half of the equation, which is its grounding condition: the assumption that traditional logics of political mediation are vacuous and serve merely as a ruse. Here one can discern a rational kernel in the deeply mystified shell of Trumpian thought.

First, let me step back and explain briefly what it means to assert that politics is a continuation of war. In his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault invoked this transformed relation between politics and war, ‘the inversion of Clausewitz’s formula’, to grasp the functioning of power (admittedly, in a very different political context than our own). When Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th century Prussian military theorist, famously claimed that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, he intended to emphasize that diplomacy between states (this is primarily what he meant by ‘politics’) does not cease with the outbreak of war but continues in other forms. Or, to put this in different terms, military confrontation does not mark the end of political mediation but its persistence in a different mode.

Foucault, then, adopts Clausewitz’s logic in reverse: whereas for Clausewitz war is still ‘filled’ with political mediation, for Foucault politics are reduced to confrontation, ‘emptied’ of mechanisms of mediation. Foucault is experimenting with this formula, in my view, as a key to interpret the emerging neoliberal strategies to undermine the structures and mechanisms of political mediation, such as trade unions, welfare structures, the reformist Keynesian state, and so forth. (Although he poses this inverted formula as part of a general analysis of power, it is reasonable to speculate that it serves also as an indirect analysis of the political developments of the 1970s, especially since this argument appears primarily in his courses, which were much more tied to current events than his books.) The neoliberal vision of a politics without political mediation certainly persists in the Trump world, but it has become more extreme in many respects.

This frame helps cast a different light on the events of January 6. It is instructive that apologists for the descent on the US Capitol claim it was no different to BLM protests of the previous summer. That assertion betrays blindness to many essential distinctions, one of which is that, in contrast to BLM actions, the Capitol siege was not a protest. The logic of protest assumes a context of political mediation: a situation in which social and governmental structures at various levels will potentially respond with reforms. The demand to ‘defund the police’, as it is generally understood, for example, only makes sense in a context characterized by potential political mediation. Yet for Trump and his supporters, since the logic of and potential for political mediation is absent, protest makes no sense. They expected no mediation in response to their actions, only a political result: to remain in power. There was, then, no passage from politics to war on January 6. Trumpist political praxis was already animated by war logic, which is to say, devoid of mediation.

The lack of credence in political mediation also illuminates the Trump faction’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of election results since, at a deep level, claims of political representation are conceptually allied to those of political mediation. There is, of course, an overtly opportunistic element to Trump’s acceptance of some and rejection of other election results, as there is too with the longstanding Republican strategy to exclude voters (especially Black voters and other people of color). But these opportunistic tactics rest on the view, deeply embedded in reactionary thought, that claims to political representation are deceitful. For instance, in the early 20th century Robert Michels, wary of the rising electoral power of European socialist parties, sought to unmask what he considered their false assertion of representational legitimacy: all parties – even those purporting to express the popular will – are in the final analysis dominated by elites, and political representation is an elaborate deception wielded by those elites to gain and maintain power.

The same logic, at a much lower level of sophistication, underpins Trump’s view of representation, and that of the Republican Party more generally. Neither suppressing voter turnout through devious legislative fabrications (as Republicans have long done) nor discarding legitimate ballots (as the Trump faction recently attempted) appears scandalous or hypocritical, because claims of representation – like those of political mediation more generally – are seen as inherently bogus. From this perspective, liberal hand-wringing about democratic safeguards is simply disingenuous, since those who champion representation are not really handing power to ‘the people’, but rather using the ruse of representation to legitimize their side’s social, media, and political elites. Every election, by definition, is rigged.

This brief characterization therefore suggests that, beneath the cloud of lies and buffoonery, a relatively coherent rationality animates Trumpism: since effective political mediation is lacking and claims to representation spurious, the thinking goes, politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. Last week, Mike Davis and Thomas Meaney debated the meaning of the Capitol Hill riot for the future of the Republican Party. If we accept my hypothesis about the rationality of the Trump faction then we should also consider its consequences for the left in the US and elsewhere. What constitutes an adequate response to such agonistic logic? One might reasonably reply that we should contest its premise, championing the existing structures of political mediation and representation as effective and progressive. Alternatively, one could advocate that we inhabit the same plane of combat as our adversaries, treating political contestation as war. My view is that neither of these is adequate. Structures of political mediation have indeed largely been withdrawn and structures of representation are relatively ineffective, but the solution is precisely to invent new mediations, including novel mechanisms of democratic participation and collective decision-making. This is, in fact, what some of the most powerful social movements today are already doing. Articulating that next step, however, must wait for another occasion.

Read on: Hardt and Negri revisit the theses of Empire, twenty years after its release.

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Ins and Outs

For several years now, a serious effort has been under way in Brussels to learn nothing from Brexit, and the way things are it may well be successful. What could have been learned? Nothing less than how to shake off the late-twentieth century technocratic, anti-democratic, elitist chimera of a centralized European neoliberal empire and turn the European Union instead into a group of friendly sovereign neighbour states, connected through a web of non-hierarchical, voluntary, egalitarian relationships of mutual cooperation.

The internal life of the European Union is unendingly complicated and uniquely opaque, but one principle applies throughout. To understand it you must grasp the domestic politics of three key member states, Germany, France and Italy, and their complex trilateral relations. There is no supranationalism here at all, or only as a veil behind which the real action, national and international, takes place. France sees Europe as an extended playing field for its global ambitions; Germany needs the European Union to secure production sites for its industries, markets for its products, and low-wage workers for its domestic service sectors, as well as to balance its relations with France and the United States; and Italy needs ‘Europe’, in particular Germany, for its survival as a capitalist nation-state and economy.

The British never really understood this. Even the famously formidable British diplomatic service found the Brussels underbrush utterly impenetrable. While Thatcher hated the EU – too foreign for her taste – Blair believed that by turning it into a neoliberal restructuring machine, together with Chirac and Schröder, he could become its Napoleon: the Great Continental Unifier, this time from without. Little did he know. France and Germany let him walk into the Iraq war alone, as adjutant of his American friend, George W, and subsequently into his demise. And Cameron learned in 2015 that even Great Britain, used to ruling the waves, was unable to extract from Merkozy the tiny concessions on immigration that he thought he needed to win the referendum of 2016 – called after all to cast British membership in stone. There was no consideration in Germany of the effect on the British vote of Merkel’s open borders in the summer of 2015, letting in one million refugees, mostly from Syria, driven from their homes by a civil war deliberately left hanging by Germany’s American friend, Barack Obama. For Merkel, this was an ideal opportunity to correct her image as ‘ice queen’ acquired in the spring of the same year when she had let it be known that ‘we cannot take in everybody’.

Mystification was mutual. On the Continent nobody believed that the Cameron government could lose its referendum gamble. The only Brits to which the ‘European’ educated classes ever talk are from the British educated class, and these were for widely different, often incompatible reasons in unqualified love with the EU. For the Euro-idealists on the liberal left the EU was a preview of a political future without the blemishes of a political past, a constitutively virtuous state if only because it was not yet a state at all, uniquely desirable for people who saw their own post-imperial country in need of a moral refounding from above. Others who knew how Brussels works must have laughed up their sleeves – in particular a political class which had long cherished the possibility of moving difficult subjects directly into the bowels of that inscrutable Brussels Leviathan to be dismembered beyond recognition. This included the post-Blair Labour Blairists. Having lost power, and facing a working class that they in good British tradition found not quite up to snuff, they were happy to import a residual social and regional policy from Brussels – knowing full well that Brussels was unable to deliver anything of importance, not least because British governments, including New Labour, had pulled the teeth of the ‘social dimension’ of the ‘internal market’ by subjecting it to the sacred imperatives of economic ‘competitiveness’. Nobody realized that this was bound to backfire the moment people began to wonder why their national government had left them unprotected in the social desert of global markets, having turned over responsibility for its citizens to a foreign power and a foreign court.

When Cameron lost, left to his own devices by Merkel and Co., the shock was profound, but then EU politics resumed as usual. France saw an opportunity to unearth its original concept of integrated Europe as an extension of the French state, with the special purpose of locking Germany into a French-dominated alliance. In case Britain changed its mind and the Remainers got their way after all, the return to the flock had to be humiliating enough to rule out any possibility of future British EU leadership. Negotiations on a divorce settlement were to be led on the EU side by the French diplomat Michel Barnier, one of the outstanding technocrats of the Brussels scene. From the beginning he played hardball, doing little to help the referendum revisionists on the British side. But neither was Britain to be let go easily. Here Germany chimed in, keen to uphold discipline among EU member states. Macron and Merkel insisted that the divorce settlement had to be expensive for Britain, preferably including an obligation to accept Internal Market rules and the jurisdiction of the EU court forever, even outside the EU. For Germany this was to show other member states that any attempt at renegotiating their relationship with Brussels would be futile, and that special treatment either inside or outside the Union was entirely out of the question.

It will fall to historians to uncover what really happened between France and Germany during the negotiations between the EU and Britain. There is no democratic, or presumably democratic, political system on earth that operates as much behind closed doors as the European Union. The German national interest in maintaining international discipline notwithstanding, the German export industry must have been equally interested in an amicable economic relationship with post-Brexit Britain, and it must have informed the German government of this in no uncertain terms. No trace of this was visible, however: neither in the negotiating strategy of Barnier nor the public pronouncements of Merkel. Very likely, this was because Germany at the time was under pressure from Macron to use the British departure as an opportunity for more and stricter centralization, especially in fiscal matters – an issue where Germany’s reluctance to agree to arrangements that might in future cost it dear had met with the tacit support of the British, even though the UK was not a member of the Eurozone.

As the deal-or-no-deal day approached and the usual ritual of negotiation until the last minute unfolded, it appears that Merkel finally threw her weight behind the demands of Germany’s export sector. The United Kingdom had now been sufficiently humiliated. During the final negotiating sessions Barnier, while still present, no longer spoke for the EU; his place was taken by one of von der Leyen’s closest aides. Toward the end France used the new ‘British’ coronavirus strain to block traffic from Britain to the Continent for two days, but this could not prevent the deal being closed. Johnson’s brinkmanship was rewarded with a treaty that he could reasonably claim restored British sovereignty. He paid for it with a lot of fish, mercifully obscured by the further unfolding of the pandemic.

What are the consequences of all this? France hired 1,300 additional customs officials to be deployed to interrupt economic relations between Britain and the Continent, including Germany, any time the French government feels that the deal’s ‘level playing field’ is no longer being maintained. France and Germany succeeded in scaring other countries, especially in the East, out of claiming the settlement with the UK as a precedent for their aspirations for more national autonomy. Pressures inside the EU for a more cooperative and less hierarchical alliance didn’t even emerge. And Merkel’s successors will have to navigate an even more complex relationship with France than in the past, having to resist Macron’s embraces without British succour and in the face of the uncertainties of the Biden administration in the US.

As to the United Kingdom, for the Lexiters Parliament rules again, unconstrained by ‘the Treaties’ and the European Court, and British citizens finally have only their own government to blame if something goes wrong: no responsibility without responsiveness. Moreover, the Remainers – the euro-revisionists – seem to have given up, at least for the time being, although they may continue to look for other protections against strictly majoritarian parliamentary government. There is also the possibility of Scotland breaking away from the UK, as the Scottish National Party might mop up pro-European sentiment with a promise to apply for the empty British seat at what will by then be King Emmanuel’s Round Table of 27 knights. This would amount to turning Scottish national sovereignty over to Brussels immediately after having recovered it from London, forgetful of the mixed historical experience of Scotland with French allies and rulers. As long as there is in Brussels a reasonable prospect for Scottish entry, forget about Brussels learning from Brexit. On the other hand, unlikely as such learning is in any case, one might just as well leave the matter to the good sense of the Scots.

Read on: Christopher Bickerton’s analysis of European futures.

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War Zones

With Biden in the White House, do you foresee any major US policy changes towards West Asia?

Let us look at what we are changing from before we look at what we are changing to. This is difficult to do because Trump’s policies, assuming them to be coherent strategies, were chaotic in both conception and implementation. Trump did not start any new wars in West Asia, though he did green-light the Turkish invasion of northern Syria in 2019. He withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, but relied on economic sanctions, not military action, to exert pressure on Iran. In the three countries where America was already engaged in military action – Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – surprisingly little has changed. Keep in mind that his foreign policy was heavily diluted by the more interventionist policies of the Pentagon and the US foreign-policy establishment in Washington. They successfully blocked or slowed down Trump’s attempted withdrawals from what he termed the ‘endless wars’ in West Asia. It is not clear, however, that they have a realistic alternative approach.

Biden will be subject to the same institutional pressures as Trump was and is unlikely to resist them. He may be less sympathetic to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu in Israel, but I doubt if the relationship between the US and either country will change very much. The next Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, approved the Iraq invasion of 2003, the regime change in Libya in 2011, and wanted a more aggressive policy in Syria under Obama. It does not sound as if he has learned much from the failure of past US actions in West Asia. This is not just a matter of personalities: the US establishment is genuinely divided about the merits and demerits of foreign intervention. It is also constrained by the fact that there is no public appetite in America for more foreign wars. For all his rhetorical bombast, Trump was careful not to get Americans killed in West Asia, and it would be damaging for Biden and the Democrats if they fail to do the same.

Will the Biden administration want to resuscitate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran?

Biden says he wants to resume negotiations, but there will be difficulties. One, security establishments in the West are against it. Two, Saudi Arabia and its allies are against it, and so, more significantly, is Israel. Three, the Iranians did not get the relief from sanctions they expected from the nuclear deal of 2015, so they have less incentive to re-engage.

A misunderstanding – perhaps an intentional one – on the side of Western states, Israelis and Saudis/Emiratis about the nature of the deal may prevent its resurrection. They claim that Iran used it as cover for political interference elsewhere in the region. But Iranian action, and its ability to project its influence abroad, is high in countries where there are powerful Shia communities such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan – and low elsewhere. Iran is never going to stop its intervention in these countries in which, in any case, the Iranians are on the winning side.

Gulf countries such as the UAE and Bahrain have recently established diplomatic relations with Israel. What effect will this have on Israel-Palestine relations?

This weakens the Palestinians, though they were very weak already. The UAE and Bahrain (the latter is significant only as a proxy of Saudi Arabia) did not do much for the Palestinians in any case. Yet, however weak the Palestinians become, they are not going to evaporate so, as before, Israel holds all the high cards but cannot win the game.

You’ve said that ‘great powers fight out their differences in West Asia’. Why is that?

West Asia has been unstable since the end of the Ottoman Empire. It has been an arena for international confrontation ever since. Reasons for this include, one, oil; two, Israel; three, states in West Asia look weak but societies are strong and very difficult to conquer – witness Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the even more self-destructive US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Invaders and occupiers in West Asia have great difficulty turning military superiority into political dominance.

What role did colonial rule play in the ethno-political conflicts of West Asia?

Foreign intervention usually exploits and exacerbates sectarian and ethnic divisions, though it seldom entirely creates them. Britain relied on the urban Sunnis to rule Iraq; the French looked to minorities such as Christians in Lebanon to rule there. More recently, foreign powers gave money, arms and political support to factions in Iraq to enhance their own influence but fuelling civil war. Opponents of Saddam Hussein genuinely believed that he had created religious divisions and these would disappear when he was overthrown. But, on the contrary, they got much deeper and more lethal. The same is true of Syria: the battle lines generally ran along sectarian and ethnic boundaries. Intervention in West Asia has traditionally ended badly for British and American leaders: three British Prime Ministers (David Lloyd George, Anthony Eden and Tony Blair) lost power or were badly damaged by the West Asian interventions they launched, as were three American presidents (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush).

You’ve said that the Iran–Iraq war was ‘the opening chapter’ of a series of conflicts in the region that have shaped the politics of the modern world. Why?

The Iran Revolution was a turning point, out of which came the Iran-Iraq war that in turn exacerbated Shia-Sunni hostility throughout the region. Saddam Hussein won a technical victory in the war but then overplayed his hand by invading Kuwait. Aside from Iraq, the sides confronting one another in West Asia are much the same now as they were 40 years ago. One big change is the recent emergence of Turkey as an important player, intervening militarily in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

What role do proxy groups play in West Asia?

One has to be careful to distinguish between different ‘proxy groups’. The phrase is often used as a form of abuse to denigrate movements with strong indigenous support as mere pawns – and sometimes this is true. The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, have been fighting for years and receive little material help from Iran, but are almost always described in the Western media as ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’, implying that they are simply Iranian proxies, which they are not. In Iraq, some of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Shia paramilitaries) are under orders from Iran, but others are independent. The Kurds in Syria rely on the US militarily and politically because they fear Turkey, but they are certainly not American puppets.

What has been the outcome of ‘the War on Terror’?

It was America’s post-9/11 wars, supposedly against ‘terrorists’, that created or increased chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. These wars turned out to be endless, so populations had no choice but to flee. In Europe, the refugee exodus from Syria peaked in 2015–16 and was probably a decisive factor in the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum. All the anti-immigrant parties in Europe were boosted. The intervention by Britain and France in Libya (backed by the US) in 2011 destroyed the Libyan state and opened the door to a flood of refugees from further south seeking to cross the Mediterranean. The Europeans in particular remain in a state of denial about the role of their own foreign policy in sparking these population movements.

You were one of the first to warn about the emergence of ISIS. What led to its rise?

ISIS was born out of the chaos in the region. Before 9/11, Al Qaeda was a small organisation. Al Qaeda in Iraq, created by the US invasion, was far more powerful. Defeated by 2009, it was able to resurrect itself as ISIS after the start of the civil war in Syria. I am surprised now that more people did not understand how strong ISIS had become by 2014, the year they captured Mosul in northern Iraq. They had already taken Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad earlier in the year, and the Iraqi Army had failed to get them out. This should have been a sign that ISIS was stronger and the Iraqi government weaker than had been imagined.  ISIS was a monstrous organisation, but militarily it was very effective in using a mixture of snipers, suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and booby traps. Its weakness militarily was that it had no answer to air power.

Do you expect to see ISIS’s resurgence?

There is a resurgence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, not on the scale of 2012–14, but still significant. I am not convinced that clones of ISIS in other countries are as significant as is sometimes made out to be. ISIS lost its last territory with the fall of the Baghouz pocket in eastern Syria in March 2019. ISIS leader and caliph, Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi, killed himself during a raid by American Special Forces on a house in northwest Syria in October the same year. Since then events have favoured ISIS: the US-led coalition against it has fragmented and the defeat of ISIS no longer has the priority it once had; Sunni Arabs, the community from which ISIS springs in Iraq and Syria, remain impoverished and disaffected; ISIS has plenty of experience in guerilla war, to which it has reverted, because holding fixed positions led to it suffering heavy losses from artillery and airstrikes. The Syrian and Iraqi governments, as well as the Kurds, all have weaknesses like corruption that ISIS can exploit.

That said ISIS no longer has the advantage of surprise, the momentum that comes from victories, or the tolerance – and probably the covert support – of foreign countries (notably Turkey) that it had in 2014–16. The Sunni Arabs suffered hideously because of the last ISIS offensive with the part destruction of Mosul and Raqqa, their two biggest cities. Many will not want to repeat the experience. Local security forces are more effective than they were five years ago.

Was ISIS an anti-imperial force? Not primarily, since their main enemies were Shia and other non-Sunni minorities. Objectively, ISIS energised and legitimised foreign intervention wherever it had strength.

You’ve recently argued that ‘oil states are declining’. If so, what are the implications for the region and international politics at large?

Biden or no Biden, the nature of power in West Asia is changing. Oil states are no longer what they were because the price of oil is down and is likely to stay that way. This is profoundly destabilising: between 2012 and 2020, the oil revenue of Arab oil producers fell by two-thirds, from $1 trillion to $300 billion, in a single year. In other words, the ability of the rulers of a state like Saudi Arabia to project power abroad and retain power at home has significantly diminished. A country like Iraq has just half the income it needs from oil – and it has no other exports – to pay state employees and to prevent the bankruptcy of the Iraqi state. People forget what a peculiar situation we have had in West Asia over the last half century, with countries that would have had marginal or limited importance in the world – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Libya and Iran – becoming international political players thanks to their oil wealth. They could afford to buy off domestic dissent by creating vast patronage machines that provided well-paid jobs. But there is no longer the money to do this. The end of the oil-state era is not yet entirely with us, but it is approaching fast.

Is the US now trying to extricate itself from the region?

Obama and Trump both said they wanted to reduce on-the-ground commitments in West Asia, but somehow the US is still there. In reality, the Americans would like to enjoy the advantages of imperial control or influence but without the perils it involves. They would prefer to operate by employing other means such as economic sanctions or local proxies. The Obama foreign policy was meant to see ‘a switch to Asia’ but this never really happened, and it was the West Asian crises that continued to dominate the agenda in the White House. In other words, the US would like to withdraw from West Asia, but only on its own terms.

Across West Asia, left movements have increasingly been replaced by Islamist forces. How would you explain this change?

I am not sure that this is quite as true as it used to be because Islamist rule in its different varieties has turned out to be as corrupt and violent as secular rule. Both have been discredited by their years in power. Secularism was always strongest among the elite in countries like Iraq, Turkey, Egypt. It never offered much to the poor. To a substantial degree the same thing that happened to the Left is now happening to Islamist forces. Elites with a supposedly socialist ideology were as kleptocratic as everybody else. The same was often true of nationalism because religious identity often remained stronger than national identity.

How would you analyse the changing inter-state dynamics in West Asia?

States have gone up and down. The crucial change in the relative strength of states was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, so regional powers that it had protected became vulnerable to regime change. Russia’s military intervention in Syria since 2015 has somewhat reversed this – but not entirely. Iran became much more of a regional power thanks to the elimination of its two hostile neighbours – the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq – by the US post-9/11. It is under strong pressure from US sanctions, but these were never likely to bring about its effective surrender. Iraq and Syria are too divided for state power to be rebuilt. Saudi Arabia’s more aggressive foreign policy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman produced few successes, aside from cultivating Trump and his entourage. Does the embrace of Israel by some of the Gulf rulers enhance their power or that of Israel? Probably less than they hope. Likewise, the Palestinians are weakened, but the ‘Palestinian Question’ has not gone away, will not do so, and will always return.

What of the ongoing civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Syria and Iraq?

The main sectarian and ethnic communities – Sunni, Shia, Kurd – will still be there in both countries, though there are winners and losers. The Sunni Arabs lost power in Iraq in 2003 and the Shia Arabs and Kurds have been dominant ever since. The Sunnis have failed to reverse this despite two rebellions, roughly 2003–07 and 2013–17 during which they suffered severe losses. The Kurds expanded their power (taking Kirkuk), but could not cling on to their gains. Nevertheless, they remain a powerful player.

In Syria, the Alawites (a variant of Shi’ism) hold power now as they did in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring. The majority Sunni Arabs, under jihadi leadership, have suffered a catastrophic defeat with more than five million of them refugees. The Kurds expanded their power thanks to their military alliance with the US, but they are under serious threat from Turkey that has invaded two Kurdish enclaves and expelled the inhabitants.

The Kurds’ problem is that they are a powerful minority in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, but all these states oppose them becoming an independent nation state. They did achieve quasi-independence in Iraq and Syria thanks to central governments in Damascus and Baghdad being weakened by ISIS and thanks to American backing. Without these two factors the Kurdish communities will be squeezed. They will remain a power in Iraq, but in Syria their position is more fragile.

How do you look back at your four decades of reporting from the region?

I am still amazed by the regularity with which Western powers, notably the US, launch military and political ventures in West Asia without knowing the real risks. They do not seem to learn from their grim experience. Reporting this was always dangerous and is getting more so.

A longer version of this interview appears in the Indian fortnightly Frontline on 15 January 2021. The questions – some of which have been shortened – were asked by Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M.  

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Republican Futures

No one writes about the American berserk with the perception and ethnographic fluency of Mike Davis. In his account of the rampage on Capitol Hill, a tonic rebuttal of the present hysteria, he sees an already long-exposed faultline of the Republican Party becoming irrevocable. To one side, post-Trump Republicans for whom the mines of Trumpism have been exhausted: they’ve already extracted their justices, their tax cuts, and their anti-immigration credentials. On top of all this, Trump has now offered them the perfect excuse to spit him out as quickly as they popped him like a pill four years ago. It’s been ‘a helluva journey’, as Lindsey Graham said from the Senate floor, like a man back on dry land. Meanwhile, erstwhile Trump loyalists like Kelly Loeffler appeared like truants mouthing remorse in the principal’s office. To the other side of the divide, Davis points to the ‘True Trumpists’, led by the two Ivy League slicksters, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who hung on to the rocket too long, and now find themselves in Republican outer space – captains of a de facto third party that is mostly concentrated in the House of Representatives and state legislatures.

For all of its obvious power, one nevertheless wonders if Davis’s read on the events is perhaps too categorical. If anything, it may underestimate the sheer cynicism of many of the Trumpist representatives and, more importantly, the traditional, tactical amnesia of the Republican Party, although Davis is hardly unaware of this. If Tucker Carlson’s open-air therapeutic ward is anything to go by, the content of Republican grievances has already shifted away from election fraud – a one-time travesty anchored in delusion – and onward to the dark plots and complicity of Silicon Valley – an on-going travesty anchored in reality. Hawley and Cruz and their shock troops in the House have spent the past four years trying to assemble a permanent front against Big Brother Tech. To this end, they will reframe their own intransigence as just a more piquant version of Republicans blocking Merrick Garland from occupying his Supreme Court seat, and they will recast the rampage of the Capitol as the Alamo of free-speech.

There is much ground to be won by whichever Party can position itself as the long-term opposition to Silicon Valley. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brandishing a copy of Logic magazine will be no match for a party that dedicates itself to that mission. Structurally, the Republicans have the advantage. As Dylan Riley made clear in NLR 126, both Democrats and Republicans have no interest in attacking the components in each other’s coalitions that they share – finance, insurance, real estate – but each has something to gain in attacking the other side’s exclusive components: Silicon Valley, in the case of the Democrats, and extractive industries in the case of the Republicans. As the battle lines clarify, the Republicans have only been aided by the social media monopolies themselves, who appear to be working out deals with the incoming Biden administration and Democratic Party charismatics. Even if Biden’s call to repeal Section 230, as Trump desperately tried to do last month, is the opening salvo of a gruelling offensive on the Valley, as seems very unlikely, it does not necessarily bode well for public speech to have to answer to the pleasure of an implacably centrist regime.

Surely Davis is correct that the Trumpist faction of the party will never rally around another Romney type, but Romney was already a Jurassic figure in his own time. And I will eat my laptop if Chuck Grassley ever becomes president. The extreme stab-in-the-backers may make up a sizable fringe – around 20 percent of the party – and Mike Pence may look over his shoulder for the rest of his days. But it seems that the unstable Republican coalition has a chance not only to hold, but to bind itself anew if it can use Valley-hatred to suture its wounds. Will Trumpist electoral terror against traditional Republicans be any fiercer than the kind mounted by its Tea Party incarnation? However sharply or dubiously the two camps of the American Right define themselves – True Trumpists and Back-to-Businessers – the future leadership of the Party may belong to the most enterprising half-breed.

Read on: Mike Davis’s account of Republican realignments after the Capitol Hill riot.

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Riot on the Hill

Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)

But something unexpectedly profound happened: a deus ex machina that lifted the curse of Trump from the careers of conservative war hawks and right-wing young lions, whose ambitions until yesterday had been fettered by the presidential cult. Today was the signal for a long-awaited prison break. The word ‘surreal’ has been thrown around a lot, but it accurately characterizes last night’s bipartisan orgy, with half of the Senate election-denialists channeling Biden’s call for a ‘return to decency’ and vomiting up vast amounts of noxious piety.

Let me be clear: the Republican Party has just undergone an irreparable split. By the White House’s Fuhrerprinzip standards, Pence, Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Jim Lankford even Kelly Loeffler are now traitors beyond the pale. This ironically enables them to become viable presidential contenders in a still far-right but post-Trump party. Since the election and behind the scenes, big business and many mega-Republican donors have been burning their bridges to the White House, most sensationally in the case of that uber-Republican institution, the National Association of Manufacturers, which yesterday called for Pence to use the 25th Amendment to depose Trump. Of course, they were happy enough in the first three years of the regime with the colossal tax cuts, comprehensive rollbacks of environmental and labor regulation, and a meth-fed stock-market. But the last year has brought the unavoidable recognition that the White House was incapable of managing major national crises or ensuring basic economic and political stability.

The goal is a realignment of power within the Party with more traditional capitalist interest groups like NAM and the Business Roundtable as well as with the Koch family, long uncomfortable with Trump. There should be no illusion that ‘moderate Republicans’ have suddenly been raised from the grave; the emerging project will preserve the core alliance between Christian evangelicals and economic conservatives and presumably defend most of the Trump-era legislation. Institutionally, Senate Republicans, with a strong roster of young talents, will rule the post-Trump camp and, via vicious darwinian competition – above all, the battle to replace McConnell – bring about a generational succession, probably before the Democrats’ octogenarian oligarchy has left the scene. (The major internal battle on the post-Trump side in the next few years will probably center on foreign policy and the new cold war with China.)

That’s one side of the split. The other is more dramatic: the True Trumpists have become a de facto third party, bunkered down heavily in the House of Representatives. As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps will probably become impossible, although individual defections may occur. Mar-a-Lago will become base camp for the Trump death cult which will continue to mobilize his hardcore followers to terrorize Republican primaries and ensure the preservation of a large die-hard contingent in the House as well as in red-state legislatures. (Republicans in the Senate, accessing huge corporation donations, are far less vulnerable to such challenges.)

Tomorrow liberal pundits may reassure us that the Republicans have committed suicide, that the age of Trump is over, and that Democrats are on the verge of reclaiming hegemony. Similar declarations, of course, were made during vicious Republican primaries in 2015. They seemed very convincing at the time. But an open civil war amongst Republicans may only provide short-term advantages to Democrats, whose own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden’s refusal to share power with progressives. Freed from Trump’s electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize. In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee – a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence – renders political crystal balls useless.

Read on: Mike Davis’s New Year’s blast to the American left. 

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The Trial of Julian Assange

The trial is over. Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States. If anyone who has been observing the trial says that they aren’t surprised, they’re fibbing.

Nobody who sat through the proceedings (as I did at an earlier stage) could have failed to detect the bias and, on occasion, outright hostility that Baraitser displayed towards the defence lawyers. The bulk of her judgement is in that vein. The defence put forward numerous arguments for why Assange should not be extradited to the US – above all, that the US was bringing political, not criminal, charges against Assange, prohibited by the UK–US extradition treaty – and she ruled against nearly all of them.

She ruled there were no grounds for thinking that Assange’s constitutional rights wouldn’t be upheld in the US or that he would not be subject to arbitrary punishment after extradition. She denied at length, in the final paragraphs of her verdict, that this was a politically motivated prosecution aimed at silencing a journalist – essentially providing a face-saver for the UK government.

Instead, she ruled against extradition on the grounds that it would be ‘oppressive by reason of mental harm’ – that under US pre-trial conditions, held in isolation in a maximum-security prison, Assange would not be prevented from committing suicide.

It seems that the spectre of ‘supermax’ – the brutal reality of the American carceral system – was placed in the dock and found guilty. Pure hypocrisy. Is London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, where Assange was held in isolation after being forcibly arrested in the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019, a humanitarian zone by comparison? In late 2019, doctors who inspected Assange wrote an open letter to the British government, stating that he ‘could die in prison without urgent medical attention’ due to the conditions in which he was kept. Nils Melzer, the UN Rapporteur on Torture, noted that ‘Assange showed all the signs typical for victims of psychological torture’, having been ‘in solitary confinement for all intents and purposes for more than a year now’. But Baraitser gave short shrift to this testimony.

Her ruling is only the first step. We do not know whether Assange will be granted bail pending the US appeal, or whether the judge will be vindictive. At his bail hearing tomorrow, the court will be more concerned about the risk of flight than the risk of assassination. And though Baraitser expressed her grave concern for his psychological wellbeing, she is unlikely to safeguard it by issuing an order of protection.

Questions also remain about the real reasons for this clemency. Did the incoming Biden administration let it be known they would rather avoid a US prosecution, in which the New York Times would be bound to defend Assange’s rights under the First Amendment, since it had also published Wikileaks materials? Did the British government want to link this to its own stalled extradition case against Anne Sacoolas, the US diplomat’s wife who fatally ran over a British teenager in August 2019? More details may yet emerge. But as they say in sport, a win is a win. The refusal to extradite should be celebrated, whatever its motives.  

As most people know, the case against Assange – an initiative of Eric Holder, the US Attorney General under Obama – is little more than an attempt to suppress freedom of expression. In a world where visual propaganda is central to war making, counter-images present a problem for the warmongers. When Al Jazeera broadcast footage of American troops targeting civilians during the War on Terror, a US army general – accompanied by a jeep full of armed soldiers – entered the news channel’s compound in Qatar to demand an explanation. The director of the station, a soft-spoken Palestinian, explained that they were simply reporting the news. A year later he was dismissed from his post.

Wikileaks likewise obtained footage of a 2007 US helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. The pilots were heard cheering, ‘Light ’em all up!’ and cracking jokes after firing on two young children: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.’ The ghoulish cynicism shocked many after the tape went viral. The crime it depicted wasn’t novel, nor was it comparable in scale to previous American atrocities (massacre of POWs in Korea, chemical warfare in Vietnam, carpet bombing in Cambodia and so on). Yet the Pentagon fulminated that the Wikileaks video would encourage terrorist reprisals. The problem was evidently not with committing war crimes, but with capturing them on film. Thus, Chelsea Manning, who leaked the material, and Assange, who published it, must be made to feel the consequences. 

Wikileaks cast light on the real reasons for the military interventions of the 2000s, which had nothing to do with freedom, democracy or human rights – except as codewords for capital accumulation. Using the internet to bypass legacy media, Assange published more than two million diplomatic cables and State Department records that exposed the machinery of American Empire. The reaction of the US state has often tipped into absurdity; a dog snapping mindlessly at everything ends up biting his own tail. Assange pointed out that ‘by March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so far as to create an automatic filter to block any emails, including inbound emails to the Pentagon, containing the word Wikileaks.’ As a result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing the case against Chelsea Manning found they were not receiving important emails from either the judge or the defence.

Revenge was the lesser motive. The primary aim was to deter other whistleblowers. Yet this was shortsighted and foolish. Those who expose war crimes, corruption or corporate malfeasance are usually courageous but ‘ordinary’ people, often quite conservative, working in establishment institutions: think of onetime CIA employee Edward Snowden or former marine Daniel Ellsberg. Would such a person – whose entire worldview has been shaken by some horror in their conscience – succumb so easily to a deterrent? The attempt to make an example out of Manning and Assange is at odds with the mentality of the whistleblower, whose sense of injustice drives them to accept the life-changing consequences of leaking.

Ellsberg, the State Department official who handed over secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, eventually became a liberal sweetheart, especially amongst Democrats, as he had exposed Nixon’s lies and misdemeanors during the war in Vietnam. I doubt whether Julian Assange will ever reach that exalted status on either side of the Atlantic. He has been slandered by media outlets across the political spectrum. Liberal newspapers have lined up to claim that he is ‘not a journalist’ but an ‘activist’ – or, as the Boston Herald had it, a ‘spy’. His trial never got the coverage it deserved in the NYT, Washington Post or the Guardian. The latter, despite publishing the Wikileaks material back in 2011, now appears to have given up on serious investigative journalism altogether. By contrast, El País and the Suddeutsche Zeitung were more objective.

Given what Assange has suffered, a few weeks of freedom in lockdown Britain will be a gift from heaven. No more cramped space and lack of sunlight; a chance to hug his partner and children, to use a computer, or pick up a random book. ‘I am unbroken, albeit literally surrounded by murderers’, he wrote to a friend from Belmarsh. ‘But the days when I could read and speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals and the people are over…’

Perhaps not.

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The German Söderweg

Like the biologist’s dye that stains bodily tissue and illuminates its cellular structure, the laboratory-grade opportunism of Markus Söder is a useful resource for understanding German politics. As the Minister President of Bavaria and leader of the Christian Social Union, Söder currently polls as the leading contender to replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor next year, despite not having declared his candidacy. The calculus is not strained: the CDU’s own three pretenders – Norbert Röttgen, Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz – could all cancel each other out. For all of northern Germany’s imputed reluctance to being ruled by a Bavarian, the closest election in postwar German history was between Söder’s political mentor, the Deutschmark fetishist CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, and Gerhard Schröder, who only narrowly won after he cannily channeled popular discontent about the US plan to invade Iraq. Most decisively, Söder is a Nürnberger from the relatively industrialized region of Franconia, not some primitive mountain yodeler of Berlin caricature.

From his earliest days, the German press identified Söder as a formidable political animal. After a minor deviation in childhood, when the five-year-old Söder brought home a ‘Vote for Willy’ sticker and his father enjoined him to pray for his sins, Söder slickly ascended the ranks of the Christian Social Union: president of the youth wing of the CSU at 28; CSU association leader for Nürnberg-West at 30; CSU media commissioner at 33; CSU general secretary at 36; CSU chairman for Nürnberg-Fürth-Schwabach at 41; Minister President of Bavaria at 52; and, as of last year, party chairman of the CSU at 53, with a standard CSU-majority of 87.4 percent of the party vote behind him. In what is essentially a Catholic political aristocracy – the CSU now has a room of its own in the Bavarian Historical Museum in Regensburg that follows the suites devoted to the reigns of Ludwig I and Ludwig II – Söder is perhaps only unusual in being a Protestant. Long known as the CSU’s attack dog – a reputation only aided by his beefy figure and faintly menacing, and quite possibly self-administered, haircut – Söder has been known to pick gratuitous fights with opponents. His ability to switch positions nimbly with plausible conviction, and his sheer enjoyment of political battle, has consistently earned him comparisons to Schröder. In their biography of the ‘Shadow Chancellor’, Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer note that Söder, who had a poster of Franz Josef Strauß, the Barry Goldwater of German politics, above his teenage bed, was also impressed by the pageantry of George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, which he witnessed at close range as a CSU emissary to the 2004 Republican Convention in New York (Curiously, Armin Laschet introduced this fairly critical biography of Söder at an online event in Berlin the other day, partly, it seems, as a gambit to narrow the race for the Chancellorship down to the two of them.)

How did this immaculate CSU stalwart become, over the past year and a half, an ardent progressive, posing as Merkelite Landesvater? It is one of the puzzles of contemporary German politics. The answer has roots deeper than simply the fact that Söder, with his eye on Merkel’s job, now has some appreciation for how she does it. To begin with, it’s worth recalling how drastically both he and the current Interior Minister (and preceding Minister President and CSU chair) Horst Seehofer misread the consequences of Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the German border open to asylum-seekers. In their interpretation of events, the political crisis over refugees was the uncorking of a bottle that would release all of the conservative spirits that Merkel had suppressed. As Merkel seemed to reveal her true colors – that of a delusional humanitarian – Söder and Seehofer finally thought they had her cornered. 2015–18 was the period in which they tried to finish her off by riding the wind of the right-wing backlash toward her and her policies (Needless to say, there was no principle in any of this: in his days as the Health Minister under Kohl, it was Seehofer who was regularly criticized within his own party for being ‘communist’ when it came to the destitute). Seeing no threat from the AfD, Seehofer and Söder decided to relax the CSU’s Strauß doctrine (‘Never allow a democratically legitimized party right of the CSU’) and appeared to think that the fledgling party’s promotion of more forthright Euroscepticism could be helpful. Then comes the CSU’s Austrian romance. Let us revisit those happy days:

  • Mid-December 2017: The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP, and his coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache of the hard-right FPÖ, presented their coalition agenda withdrawing protections for refugees at the Kahlenberg, site of a decisive 1683 battle against the Turks.
  • Early January 2018: Alexander Dobrindt, head of the CSU’s parliamentary group, published his call for a ‘Middle Class Conservative Turn’ in Die Welt (Springer’s ‘prestige’ paper). Portions of it read like a less erudite version of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.
  • Early January 2018: Viktor Orbán was the guest of honor at the CSU-Klausur, and gave an interview to Bild-Zeitung (that had been leading a pro-Kurz campaign for weeks by then): ‘We are not talking of immigrants or refugees, we are talking about an invasion’.

And so the CSU with Söder in the driver’s seat appeared prepared to go down the Austrian road: EU-critical, Putin-curious, agrarian-traditional, culture-war-trigger-happy, maximally Islamophobic neoliberal.

Then came the stunning upset. The CSU was humiliated in the 2018 October regional election. Söder lost 10 percent of the vote, much of which seemed to have been recouped by the Greens, who offer an ever more urban and online electorate the sought-after credentials of anti-racism and cosmopolitanism. With 16 seats lost in the parliament, Söder’s majority vanished. He had to build a humiliating, if not unprecedented coalition with the Free Voters of Bavaria, a hodge-podge ‘non-ideological’ party of the centre. It was now clear that the turn to the right had been a mistake. How did Söder respond? By conducting one of the most dramatic U-Turns in recent German history. Overnight he became a lover of bees and trees – calling for new regulations for their protection. He declared combustion engines would be banned by 2030. His progressivism even overshot what his party was prepared to stomach. At the CSU conference last year, Söder’s proposal for a quota of 40 percent women at all levels of the CSU was rejected by the party delegates. The CSU still has the best discipline of any party in the land, but there are audible grumblings from lower quarters. The CSU Landtag chair Thomas Kreuzer has been lately appending pointed reminders about ‘the farmers’ to Söder loyalty oaths.

What all of this reveals is not simply that Söder is now, belatedly, reforming the CSU in the same way that Merkel did the CDU. It shows that, with his eye on the Chancellorship, Söder knows that he has no choice but to forge a working alliance between main sections of export-oriented industry and the progressive middle classes. He grasps the objective pressure Merkel is under to balance the hegemonic alliance of big multinational corporations (as opposed to smaller, more conservative family businesses), moderate conservatives and urban liberals. Urbanization and export-orientation are two of the dominant forces shaping German social life: and they are moving the country in a progressive and liberalizing direction. (The AfD, caught in factional infighting, and experiencing diminishing returns on its novelty, has meanwhile become a party of last resort for disenchanted members of the state security apparatus and the Bundeswehr). Söder knows that he must divert some of the Green vote or at least make the prospect of ruling with them more plausible. The Austrian example was always an unworkable fantasy in Germany, even in Bavaria, where there are fewer traditional Catholics, the population is urbanizing, and there is a strong ‘progressive’ neoliberal ideology that emanates from BMW (Munich), Siemens (Munich), Adidas (Herzogenaurach), Audi (Ingolstadt), etc. Companies like this do not exist on the same scale in Austria; the country is 20 percent less urban than Germany; and Austrians never underwent any comparable ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as they still prefer to think they were not responsible for crimes committed by Nazi-Germany. Despite Kurz’s relative popularity among the professional classes of Vienna, and his wing of ÖVP’s closer position to the Federation of Austrian Industries (Industriellenvereinigung), which represents big capital groups, Austrian conservatives can still cobble together a majority without the sort of urban progressives on whom Merkel has increasingly come to rely.

What are Söder’s chances for Chancellorship? It is still too early to say. He has acquired enemies all over the country, but also ardent supporters in unlikely places. As he approaches the seat of power in Berlin, he will come under much more scrutiny. It is practically a German political rite of passage at this point to plagiarize your doctoral dissertation, but if anything it’s a sign of Söder’s intelligence that he did not resort to the copy-paste method of his peers, but rather appears to have commissioned the thing wholesale, unless one is persuaded by the image of one of the busiest political operatives in the land pouring over hundreds of documents written in Kurrentschrift in a state archive to produce the 263-page thesis, ‘From old German legal traditions to a modern community edict: The development of municipal legislation in the Kingdom of Bavaria between 1802 and 1818’. That said, Söder has had a very good pandemic, which suited both his and the CSU’s authoritarian instincts. He locked Bavaria down faster, harder, and more coherently than any other state minister, and his resolute media performances played well in the liberal press. As he considers the dimensions of Merkel’s shoes, Söder is seeing like the German state: no longer the optics of the Mittelstand businessman or the farmer in the beer tent, but something more total and omniscient: Der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist.

Read on: Joachim Jachnow on the degeneration of the German Greens; Christine Buchholz’s wide-ranging survey of the political landscape under Merkel.

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Regional Interests

Russian combatants in northern Mali faced a bloody confrontation earlier this summer. On 27 July, a Malian army patrol accompanied by Wagner Group auxiliaries was ambushed by Tuareg rebels near Tinzaouaten on the Algerian border. The Malian military acknowledged significant losses without providing specifics. Videos circulating on social media show destroyed vehicles and dozens of bodies strewn across the desert. Russian media reported around twenty Wagner deaths, while rebel sources claimed up to eighty mercenaries were killed. A sandstorm is said to have stalled the column, leaving it vulnerable to the attack. The spokesman for the rebel coalition accused government forces of retaliatory drone strikes, causing around ten civilian deaths in the area.

Following the attack, Ukraine’s director of military intelligence claimed that his agents had fought alongside the Tuareg rebels. This was corroborated by images showing black and white fighters holding the flags of Azawad and Ukraine side by side. It would not be the first instance of Ukrainian engagement in Africa. In November 2023, reports emerged of a hundred Ukrainian special forces taking part in operations against Wagner-backed militias in Sudan. In Mali, Ukrainian agents are said to be training Tuareg rebels to use the Mavic 3 Pro, dubbed the ‘AK-47 of the 21st century’ – a lightweight drone used for close reconnaissance and equipped with a drop grenade.

The ambush marks the first major defeat in Africa for the Wagner Group, which was formally placed under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defence after the failed coup of June 2023. First deployed in Crimea in 2014, the private military company has been active in Africa since 2017, with operatives reported in some eight countries, from Libya to Mozambique. Wagner functions as a series of semi-independent franchises, which employ Russian cadres alongside local fighters and veterans from neighbouring conflicts (primarily Libyans and Syrians). Of the 5,000 men it has in Africa, 1,500 are in Mali. This is half the number of soldiers who were stationed there as part of Operation Barkhane – France’s counterinsurgency mission in the Sahel – whose responsibilities Wagner has gradually assumed since Colonel Assimi Goïta took power in May 2021.

The government in Bamako is using Wagner to fight the separatists of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), an alliance of Tuareg militias active in the country’s north-west. The CMA is demanding the creation of an autonomous state, Azawad (‘Land of Transhumance’), an 800,000 km² expanse of rock and sand surrounding the cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. It commands a force of around 3,000 men, reportedly equipped with weapons and ammunition abandoned by Malian regular troops. Recent fighting appeared to favour the government forces. A Wagner-coordinated air campaign enabled them to recapture Kidal in November, more than ten years after a deal brokered by France and Algeria had handed it to the rebels. With the conclusion of Operation Barkhane, reclaiming the city became a priority for the junta as a symbol of restored Malian sovereignty.

Wagner purports to offer sub-Saharan states a comprehensive alternative to the French. Its mercenaries equip and train the armed forces and presidential guards, traditionally a key lever of power for Paris in ‘friendly’ regimes. But the group also provides non-military services, with a network of companies that compete with French economic interests: offering access to credit lines, management of mining and forestry activities, and even local vodka and beer production, to the detriment of French beverage company Castel. In classic neo-colonial fashion, Wagner offers its services in exchange for concessions. In Mali, it secured a revision of the mining code, granting more control to local political authorities at the expense of established foreign companies. Details of its fee structure remain opaque. Le Monde reported that €135 million of Mali’s 2022 defence budget was attributed to Wagner (well below the €600 million annual cost of Barkhane).

The Sahel – like the Horn, where the Gulf-led proxy war in Yemen is spilling over – is at the centre of what some are calling the ‘new scramble for Africa’. The recent wave of regime changes, some carried out by democratic means, others by force, has reshuffled the geopolitical deck. The withdrawal of French forces coincided with the rise of a new strategic bloc, formalised by the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States in September 2023. This confederation, comprising Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, was intended as a counterweight to ECOWAS and the G5 Sahel, both seen as pawns of the French. The demand for reliable military cadres in a region where national armies often drive political instability has created a favourable environment for private operators. Wagner’s arrival has thus allowed Moscow to gain a foothold in a region it had largely abandoned since the end of the Cold War (it has recently rebranded its operations there under the name Africa Corps).

If the Saharan-Sahelian belt is hotly contested, it is not least because of its resources. Local populations are on the frontline of mining conflicts, particularly in Niger, one of the world’s leading uranium producers. France has exploited several mines there since the 1960s, under the quasi-monopoly of Cogema – later Areva, now Orano – a linchpin of the country’s energy sovereignty, established during the oil shocks of the 1970s and still 50% state-owned. In 2023, Niger supplied about 15% of France’s uranium. Pending the development of so-called ‘fast neutron’ reactors, which are less fuel-intensive, Niger’s imports remain critical. Securing uranium sites in the ‘three borders’ area was allegedly one of the motivations behind Barkhane’s predecessor, Operation Serval – following a series of kidnappings at Areva’s mining complex in Arlit.

French involvement with the Tuareg long predates the discovery of uranium. The French conquest of the Sahara, begun under the Second Empire, expanded under the Third Republic when, to ratify the territorial partition agreed at the Berlin Conference, the signatory states had to effectively occupy the territories they had claimed. This need for control combined with a fascination with the way of life of the desert peoples. The exotic and archaic allure of these nomads captivated French high society: could these fair-skinned, light-eyed peoples be the descendants of Frankish crusaders, wondered deluded newspapers of the time. This fantasy was further fuelled by the idea that the supposedly moderate Islam practised by the Tuareg might be a veneer concealing an ancient Christianity.

The colonial administration regarded the Tuareg (a term of Arabic origin not used by the people it describes) as a constellation of chiefdoms, which it divided into four geographical confederations. It exploited internal conflicts: the strategy of ‘tribalization’, developed in the ‘Bureaux Arabes’ of colonial Algeria, fostered the proliferation of fronts, sub-fronts and decision-making centres, and continued into the post-independence era. This involved the appointment of leaders sympathetic to French interests, such as the charismatic Mano Dayak, allegedly installed by French intelligence in 1993 to fracture the separatist front in Niger. Infiltrating rebel movements provided security for local governments while allowing France to meddle in their internal politics. This has sometimes meant removing defiant factions. Hundreds of Tuareg repatriated from Algeria, where they had fled drought and repression, disappeared in Niger during the 1990s – largely uncommented upon by the French media.

The rise of national sentiment among the Tuareg owed much to the anti-Tuareg campaigns waged by the new regimes after independence. The romantic image of noble desert warriors that dominated colonial narratives was replaced by a view among the political elites of a plundering, slave-owning people. This narrative is particularly strong in Niger and Mali, where the CIA estimates that three-quarters of the three million Tuareg live. Cycles of severe drought and famine in the 1970s and 1980s drove nomadic youth into vagrancy. Fleeing northward, they were herded into camps in Algeria and Libya, where this mosaic of groups was seen as a homogeneous mass by the Arab authorities. Many ultimately joined Gaddafi’s Green Legion, serving as cannon fodder on the battlefields of Lebanon and Iraq, or in Libya’s war against Chad and its French ally in the Aouzou Strip. Some returned south to take part in the Tuareg uprisings of the 1990s and 2000s, their migrations facilitated by the arrival of ‘Japanese camels’ – diesel-powered Toyota Land Cruisers brought to the desert by humanitarian workers.

During this period, Gaddafi played the kind of disruptive role in the Sahel that Wagner does today. He challenged French economic interests by making Libya a hub for raw material trade independent of major Western companies – particularly in uranium, which he supplied to both Pakistan and India. Shortly before his regime collapsed under NATO bombs in 2011, the latest generation of Ishumars – a corruption of the French word chômeur (unemployed) – moved south with their weapons, allegedly encouraged by French intelligence. In Mali, the 2012 coup coincided with the resumption of hostilities between Bamako and the Azawad movement. The disorganised Malian army withdrew from the northern cities, retreating across the Niger River. But Tuareg control over Gao and Kidal was short-lived, as better-equipped jihadist groups – suspected of receiving covert support from Algeria – quickly gained ground. It was at this juncture that Paris sent in its troops.

Rather than cultivating relations with Tuareg communities, Algerian security services have focused on Islamist movements. Like Gaddafi, Algiers sought to challenge French hegemony in the Sahara. Salafists were a means of asserting itself as a new regional anchor. During the Algerian civil war, persistent rumours suggested links between Algerian intelligence and the Islamist groups Algiers claimed to be combating. When the Algerian army finally reclaimed territory from these groups in the late 1990s, some Islamists moved south. They mixed with local Berber tribes – of which the Tuareg were just one component – adopting their way of life in a classic Maoist ‘fish in water’ strategy. The Sahel provided fertile ground for racketeering and trafficking, originally in cigarettes and fuel, now also in arms and cocaine, with seizures of the latter in the region rising from 13 kg per year between 2015 and 2020 to 1,466 kg in 2022.

The first generation of Islamist leaders in the Sahel was predominantly Algerian. Among them was the enigmatic Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan who became a prominent figure in the Mzab valley during Algeria’s Black Decade. Francois Hollande’s high-profile campaign to eliminate jihadist leaders in the Sahel, including Belmokhtar – killed in a 2016 airstrike in southern Libya – paved the way for a new generation. Iyad Ag Ghali, a local noble and former leader of the Tuareg rebellion, broke away from the movement in 2012 to found the Salafist group Ansar Dine. He later took command of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), an Al-Qaeda affiliate that, from 2017, unified the region’s katibas. GSIM has since expanded its operations beyond Mali, becoming increasingly active in other Sahelian border states, notably Burkina Faso, where the group claimed responsibility for an attack in the country’s north-central region last week that left over 300 civilians dead.

Despite tensions between the Tuaregs and the jihadists, these groups occasionally collaborate against their common enemy, the Malian government. Several sources reported that GSIM fighters were involved in the 27 July attack alongside the CMA. This information heightened enmity between Algiers and Bamako, the latter accusing the former of harbouring the attackers. But this non-aggression pact is far from a full-fledged alliance. According to Tuareg sources quoted by Le Monde, the GSIM was largely absent from the battle of Kidal last November. The CMA accuses the Islamists of letting them exhaust themselves against government forces in order to impose their own political programme and that of their supposed backers.

In the new conjuncture, France now finds itself isolated, a consequence of its long-standing habit of going it alone in sub-Saharan Africa. While the EU funded some infrastructure to support Barkhane, Paris bore the brunt of the operation alone. The Bundeswehr deployed up to a thousand soldiers in Mali but refrained from combat despite French requests. The approach has enabled Germany to maintain a presence in the Sahel after France’s official withdrawal. Resentment towards French influence in the region is also on the rise, aided by Russian propaganda. Wagner has been blamed for organising embassy protests and running online disinformation campaigns – here accusing a French company of orchestrating fuel shortages, there fabricating a mass grave at a former Barkhane base to cover up a massacre committed by its own mercenaries. In the CAR, authorities screened Tourist (2021) in Bangui’s main stadium – a crude propaganda piece that portrays Russian-speaking instructors leading Central African loyalist troops against a rebel faction propped up by a shadowy French figure. (The parallel with Hollywood is striking: much to the dismay of Macron’s Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the sci-fi blockbuster Wakanda Forever (2022) depicted soldiers in Barkhane-like uniforms looting Wakanda’s resources).

The United States has long tolerated the former coloniser’s hold on the Sahel. It supported Operation Barkhane, providing half of the supplies and offered intelligence and satellite capabilities, allowing Washington to keep a close eye. Recent developments may look like a setback for this strategy, as security deteriorates and Russian influence grows. Yet the US has also long sought to position itself in Africa as a Western partner distinct from France. The Eizenstadt project – named after a Clinton-era undersecretary of commerce – intended to establish a free-trade zone in the Maghreb to rival the Euro-Mediterranean market project championed by Paris. After 9/11, as Jeremy Keenan has shown, the Sahel and its ‘failed states’ were identified by the US security establishment as a key front in its global ‘War on Terror’. Beginning in 2002, Washington launched the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a series of military cooperation agreements with Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania, which involved deploying American trainers to build up local security forces. This initiative appears to have borne fruit, as Washington managed to avoid direct confrontation with the recent coup leaders in Niger and Mali, most of whom had undergone training programmes led by US Special Forces.

The signing of the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership in 2005, followed by the launch of AFRICOM in 2008, extended training missions to all countries bordering the Sahara. Algeria reportedly allowed Washington to establish a secret base in Tamanrasset, on the edge of the desert, in exchange for a substantial increase in US direct investment. Washington has also maintained a presence in Niger through drone bases in Niamey and Agadez. AFRICOM had been conducting surveillance flights there, tracking the movements of combatants to support Barkhane’s intelligence operations. US forces recently withdrew from the country after failing to reach an agreement with the ruling junta, effectively legitimising the coup. Despite its symbolic significance, this withdrawal is unlikely to have much operational impact, as surveillance activities were already being transferred to bases around the Gulf of Guinea.

AFRICOM’s relatively small footprint in the Pentagon’s budget should be seen in the context of a much higher proportion of contractors compared to other US military theatres. Current trends suggest that this reliance is set to increase. In January, the chairman of the Africa subcommittee urged competition with Wagner before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In particular, he stressed the need to expand the US toolkit for addressing security crises in Africa beyond traditional UN peacekeeping operations. Private military contractors are already eyeing the lucrative ‘regime security’ market. Since last year, DC-based firm Bancroft Global Development has been negotiating with the Central African government to replace Wagner in securing mining sites. ‘Private contractors have played, and continue to play, an important role in providing logistical support, training, equipment, and other capacity building’, an official from the State Department’s Africa Bureau said at the same hearing.

By sidelining Paris in the Sahel, Wagner appears poised to accomplish for security what Chinese construction and mining companies tentatively began on the economic front in the late 1990s. Through its example, states are rediscovering the classic model of the private militia – a model active in the Global South since at least the sovereign debt crises of the 1980s, as Joshua Craze has recently highlighted in his writing on Sudan. This approach is more flexible, cheaper, and less compromising of sovereignty for the host country. It is one that France itself has employed on several occasions, starting with its ‘Affreux’ in the former Belgian Congo. The recent events in Tinzaouaten suggest, however, that private military companies and militias are no panacea, and that after the failures of French stabilisation missions, they too will likely struggle to realise their interests in the region.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.

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Darker Turn

There were few surprises in the German state of Thuringia’s regional elections last Sunday. Polling had long suggested that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which already scored 23.4% five years ago, was well-positioned to take first place, and that Die Linke, the party of Thuringia’s still highly popular Minister-President Bodo Ramelow and once the leading force in Thuringian politics, would not be able to replicate its previous success. Ultimately, the results proved to be just a bit worse than expected. The AfD performed slightly above expectations, taking 32.8% of the vote and thereby gaining a so-called blocking minority in the state parliament, which would allow it to hinder constitutional amendments. Die Linke, whose polling numbers had been declining slowly but surely since former parliamentary speaker Sahra Wagenknecht split off to for her eponymous Alliance (BSW) last October, came in fourth with 13.1%, less than half of its electorate from 2019, most of which seems to have decamped to Wagenknecht’s new formation, whose 15.6% put it in third place, between the CDU and Die Linke.

The outcome, as mainstream commentators announced with breathless unanimity on Sunday night, represents a political ‘caesura’: for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich, a far-right party has won a state-wide election, indicating a profound level of alienation vis-à-vis the political establishment among a wide swathe of the electorate. On the parliamentary level, last week’s results will necessitate never-before-seen governing constellations, such as a potential alliance between the CDU and Ramelow’s humbled Linke, or perhaps even Wagenknecht’s BSW. This kind of triangulation, long the norm in many of Germany’s European neighbours, would prove a first for the Federal Republic, and is further evidence that even in the EU’s economic core, political business-as-usual is no longer tenable.

The surge for the AfD in Thuringia is particularly remarkable for the fact that its leader, Björn Höcke, is not your run-off-the-mill Muslim-baiting populist à la Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen, but, at least in the eyes of many observers, a dyed-in-the-wool fascist with a penchant for race science and Nazi-esque rhetoric. Yet that does not seem to have worried many voters, who flocked to the party across demographic groups. Although the AfD’s vote skewed male, winning 38% of men compared to 27% of women, in other respects the party seems to be breaking new electoral ground for the far right, significantly over-performing among young people and workers. Indeed, had it not been for Thuringia’s seemingly left-leaning pensioners, the AfD might have topped 40%.

It’s important to note that Thuringia is not particularly representative of the German electorate. With only 2 million residents, it contains a mere 2.5% of the country’s inhabitants, and its population is older than that of Germany as a whole. Although unemployment levels more or less align with the national average, structural inequalities – real or imagined – and feelings of having been colonized and infantilized by the West in the years after reunification, as documented in the work of sociologist Steffen Mau, have created a socio-political terrain that is evidently conducive to xenophobic ressentiments.

Of course, it would be reductive to blame the AfD’s growing mass appeal on the scars of reunification alone. After all, for decades, the losers of the transition were Die Linke’s core constituency, and many continue to vote for Wagenknecht’s new party in large numbers. Crucial to the far-right surge is the shift in the political atmosphere since the so-called ‘summer of migration’ in 2015, when over a million refugees, largely from war-torn Syria, arrived in Germany. Although initially received with open arms, their presence, alongside public sector austerity and infrastructure that – although it could be considered robust by American or British standards – is increasingly atrophied, has allowed social problems to be recast as a zero-sum competition between newcomers and natives. The AfD has effectively paired xenophobic calls for ‘remigration’ with easterners’ inherited distrust of elites in general and western elites in particular. The tone of its campaign – angry, provocative, but not without a hint of millennial post-irony – also gives it an oppositional flair that is particularly appealing to young voters, whom it reaches via social media platforms in numbers the mainstream parties can only dream of.

Having consolidated its strongholds in the East, and still polling at a comfortable 18% Germany-wide, it seems that the AfD is here to stay. The party narrowly missed first place in Saxony, which also went to the polls last Sunday, and is likely to do the same in the state elections in Brandenburg two weeks from now. Particularly noteworthy, however, was exit poll data on Sunday that shows voters increasingly turning to the AfD not as a protest vote, but because they regard the party as most capable of representing their interests on issues like (reducing) migration, fighting crime, and – crucially – keeping Germany out of the war in Ukraine, an issue that Die Linke, for whom opposition to NATO was long a key programme plank, has effectively ceded to the far right (Ramelow now repeatedly expresses his support for weapons shipments).

For now, the rest of the parties seem intent on maintaining the political ‘firewall’ around the AfD that has been in place since its founding in 2013. But beyond that (increasingly unsustainable) strategy, its opponents have made little headway in stopping its ascent. For months now, the parties of centre-right and centre-left, along with trade unions, churches, NGOs and the rest of civil society, have been organizing mass demonstrations across the country against the AfD’s growing influence. Sparked by revelations about a closed-door meeting between party functionaries and far-right activists to discuss mass deportation scenarios, the demonstrations, which social movements scholar Dieter Rucht described as the largest concentrated protest wave in the history of the Federal Republic, initially seemed to deal a blow to the AfD’s polling numbers, which have yet to return to their late-2023 highs. Yet the mobilizations had already been losing momentum for a number of months, long before failing to stop the AfD’s electoral triumph on Sunday. So far, the shock does not seem to have lent them a new lease on life.

Meanwhile, the BSW has made major concessions to the right on questions of migration and asylum entitlements under the pretext of winning back voters from the AfD and presenting a credible alternative to both the open racism of the far right and the left’s admittedly utopian promise of open borders, which few seem to want and even fewer seem to believe is possible. If this political pivot was intended to halt the growth of a grave threat, it increasingly feels like a darker turn, with Wagenknecht’s rhetoric escalating in recent weeks to denunciations of ‘uncontrolled violence’ committed by foreigners, and descriptions of Germany’s asylum seeker population as a ‘ticking time bomb’.

This kind of talk unsurprisingly makes many on the left bristle, but has it at least succeeded in taking some wind out of the AfD’s sails? Thus far, the answer seems to be no. The numbers of AfD voters defecting to the BSW camp are still vanishingly small. Non-voters, another group Wagenknecht hopes to mobilize, have proven somewhat more receptive, but its primary base continues to be former Linke supporters, while the overall vote for ostensibly ‘left-wing’ parties has continued to decline. BSW therefore finds itself in the awkward position of negotiating with the CDU, of all parties, over forming coalitions in Thuringia and Saxony, where the AfD’s strength and the collapse of the centre-left makes almost every other constellation impossible. This surely does not bode well for a project whose electoral fortunes have rested primarily on proclaiming its full-throated opposition to the entire political establishment. Nevertheless, the BSW was the other big winner of Sunday’s elections. Even if it has so far failed to eat into the AfD’s base, it looks set to become a significant force in the next federal parliament, due to be elected in autumn 2025. But given the volatility of the political landscape and the party’s own idiosyncrasies, what kind of force it will be remains an open question.

Read on: Joshua Rahtz and Oliver Nachtwey debate the BSW.

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Something Monstrous

In their recent exchange on Sidecar, Richard Seymour and Anton Jäger discussed how the left should understand the racist riots that erupted across the UK this summer. For Seymour, the spate of attacks on immigrants were not driven by the material deprivation of Britain’s ‘white working class’. They were, rather, symptoms of an insidious neo-nationalism that is increasingly obsessed with borders, boundaries and fortifications – seen as necessary safeguards against the erosion of traditional gender and ethnic divisions. Jäger agrees that it would be wrong to interpret the riots as ‘wrongly sublimated left-wing energy’ or read into them some emancipatory content. But he criticizes Seymour for elevating ‘mass psychology’ over ‘political economy’, arguing that the misery wrought by Britain’s uneven growth model – a low-wage service sector dependent upon migrant labour – is the ultimate cause of its social crisis.

Both writers adeptly capture the combustible atmosphere of contemporary Britain. Yet their debate risks lapsing into a zero-sum contest. Just as economic analysis can elide complex individual impulses, psychological analysis can erase their social context. What is needed instead is a concrete psychosocial assessment: one that adequately captures how the vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.

When images of the riots began to circulate, they looked all too familiar to those engaged in anti-racist activism. Many had seen them coming. On 23 May, a small group of protestors gathered outside the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley after it agreed to host an Israeli state-funded film festival. They were immediately surrounded by hundreds of far-right counter-protesters, who hurled glass bottles and chanted racial abuse. ‘They are going to kill us’, a friend texted me from the demonstration, before a handful of police officers escorted her and her comrades to the nearest underground station. That night, the extremists went home emboldened. The following weekend the pro-Palestine encampment at University College London was attacked. It was hardly surprising that as the Gaza genocide – backed and funded by Western governments – was broadcast by every major media outlet, some Britons should seek to emulate this anti-Muslim violence on a smaller scale. Echoing the bloodlust of the IDF, online platforms thrummed with calls to burn down mosques.

Meanwhile, the political establishment had turbocharged its racism in the runup to the general election. Rishi Sunak tirelessly reiterated his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘control our borders’ by imprisoning asylum seekers and banishing them to Rwanda. Keir Starmer tried to outdo him by demanding the accelerated deportation of Bangladeshis. One of Yvette Cooper’s first moves as Home Secretary was to draw a direct link between immigration and rising crime, launching a new Border Security Command and ramping up ‘illegal working raids’. When the rioters took to the streets, they were not merely repeating the slogans of these politicians. They were taking matters into their own hands, enacting the violent policies they had been promised. If creating a ‘robust deterrent’ means marking out migrants for persecution and death, it is only a small step to set fire to hotels where they are housed. Both Labour and the Tories described the riots as ‘thuggery’ and ‘mindless violence’, but neither was willing to discuss the establishment racism that galvanized them. Liberal democracies generally prefer to obscure such murderous impulses, dressing them up as ‘law-enforcement’ or cloaking them in national mythology.

Though Seymour and Jäger are right to argue that the riots lack a moral or emancipatory core, they nonetheless promote an avowed moral claim that warrants our attention. In both establishment and street discourse, what we see is the juxtaposition of the criminal outsider with some innocent or virtuous insider that requires protection. Sunak claimed that the ‘stop the boats’ policy was about saving lives at sea by breaking the model of people smugglers and punishing imaginary ‘queue jumpers’. Those that gathered outside mosques held signs that read ‘save our children’. It reflects the phantasy of ridding society of its rotten elements. When leaders fail to fulfil this desire, street violence is an alternative.

According to Klein, persecution and punishment are an infant’s psychic defence against ‘depressive’ realizations: the acknowledgement that a perceived aggressor is a complex and ambiguous whole, which in turn enables acceptance of the child’s own complexity and ambiguity. Infants experience their primary caregiver as split into two figures, one good (present and responsive) and one bad (absent and rejecting). Their rage at the latter distorts their sense of reality, which becomes populated by threatening figures who must be attacked and destroyed. Ideally, this condition is eventually supplanted by a more ambivalent outlook, in which the external object is seen as neither wholly one nor the other. But when the child fails to make that transition, it remains trapped in a cycle of fear and aggression.

In Britain, this process of ‘splitting’ serves to excise from national consciousness the role of colonial and neo-colonial violence in producing the ‘illegal migrant’. While Seymour writes that a ‘utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion’ has now given way to a far-right fixation on borders, it would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.

The 1981 British Nationality Act defined the concept of British citizenship via ‘patriality’, or blood ties. This legislation sought to erase Britain’s imperial history from memory and reestablish the country as a hermetically sealed white nation state. William Whitelaw, the then Conservative Home Secretary, remarked that ‘it is time to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule’. Today, those directly or indirectly affected by colonization are branded unlawful intruders with no claim to what was stolen from them. The racist violence of the 2020s is a means of repressing its historical antecedent. Splitting enables self-absolution and claims to moral righteousness in the face of this blood-stained lineage. And racialized people are emptied of their humanity. Palestinians are blown to pieces abroad; at home racist lynch mobs roam the streets. As James Baldwin wrote, ‘You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves’.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.

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To Be Continued

Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more than a century of cinema. But its ubiquity, at least among Western festival organisers and cinephiles, goes back forty years, to the emergence of the directors who were identified as the Fifth Generation though were, more significantly for descriptive purposes, the first to appear since the end of the Cultural Revolution and, with it, the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy. The graduating class of 1982 announced itself almost immediately, with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s September, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight, and – above all – Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, about a soldier’s relationship with a teenage girl set on Loess Plateau in Shanxi Province and shot by Zhang Yimou, who emerged as a director with the Mo Yan adaptation Red Sorghum (1988), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin. During the next five years, Zhang received a Silver Lion at Venice for Raise the Red Lantern, then a Golden Lion for The Story of Qiu Ju, while Chen shared the Palme d’Or – with Campion’s The Piano – for Farewell, My Concubine.

These films, a rejection of the socialist-realist habits that had dominated earlier practice, were dramatic and pictorial, not dialogue-driven, and usually historical and rural in setting, literary in source. What came next, reflecting differences of social attitude as well as aesthetic inclination, was altogether harder-bitten, more self-conscious and self-consciously abrasive, carnal, lo-fi, ad hoc. Films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lover, and Guan Hu’s Dirty, set in the capital in the modern day or recent past, and typically concerned with members of the post-Tiananmen generation working as artists, musicians, or petty criminals, began to appear less than a decade after the first films of the Fifth Generation, and coincided with the height of its international renown. (Chen and Zhang even won BAFTAs.)

The relationship was initially one of gratitude. Wang has pointed to the ‘huge impact’ of Yellow Earth, which came out just before he entered the Beijing Film Academy; Jia Zhangke, who emerged slightly later but soon became the Sixth Generation’s leading figure, said that it was seeing Chen’s film as a 21-year-old art student, at the social club of the Department of Roads and Highway in Taiyun, in the Shaanxi Province, that inspired him to apply. (He was initially rejected twice.) He was a product of ‘yellow earth’ country, and he felt that the film, though set in the 1930s, was consistent at least in spirit with realistic portraiture of contemporary social problems, the approach he would adopt in his hour-long short Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), a sort of migrant-worker Waiting for Godot, and his early features Pickpocket (1997) and Unknown Pleasures (2000). In order to tell the story of modern China – and to preserve what was being eroded at such speed – the Sixth Generation drew on the early work of their predecessors and on kindred aesthetic movements like neorealism and the French New Wave, but perhaps especially on the example of the Guangdong-born, Taiwan-raised director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, work first introduced to the BFA students by the British Asian cinema scholar Tony Rayns. (Hou later donated a set of prints to the school.) 

Hou’s trajectory goes some way to complicating the Mainland narrative of successive and seesawing philosophies. If his work displayed overlap with Fifth and Sixth Generation habits, it failed to do so chronologically. Though his early period films, notably A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and A City of Sadness (1989), could be seen as similar in theme and scope to what Chen and Zhang were making at the same time, Hou was all along engaged with stories about young people in the present day, the Sixth Generation reflex. For Jia, a largely unheralded Hou film like The Boys from Fengkui, made as early as 1983, could serve as a great liberator, his other Yellow Earth, when he saw it at the BFA, even though, looking back at Hou’s work – he announced his retirement last year – the more ragged and looser-gaited tale of ‘urban youth’, Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), stands out as his honorary contribution to Sixth Generation aesthetics. (Wang included A City of Sadness on his list of the ten greatest films, with the citation: ‘The light of Chinese cinema, directly facing the unbearable history’; Jia, on leaving BFA, sought out Hou’s producer Shôzô Ichiyama as a collaborator, and later wrote the introduction to Boiling the Sea, the 2014 book of interviews Hou did with the American scholar Michael Berry.)

It was as the Sixth Generation began to gain prominence, and by a similar route – though without the BAFTAs – that their predecessors turned their attention to preserving and burnishing what Chen himself called ‘legend’, essentially highlights of Chinese history, initially the medieval martial-arts tradition known as wuxia. Wang lamented that the Fifth Generation no longer presented ‘real human beings and true feelings’. In this context, in which fantasy and artifice of various kinds began to dominate, a redoubled devotion to realism and to representing dangxia xing ­(here and now), emerged as the dissident manoeuvre. Jia dismissed Chen’s later films as ‘childish fairy tales’, pointedly noting that he no longer suffered issues with the censor. In 2003, he lamented that Chen and Zhang had reneged on ‘the values they used to represent… I’m quite disappointed to see that Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Ju have been consigned to the dustbin so quickly.’ And in late 2006, Jia moved the release date of his latest film, Still Life, to coincide with Zhang’s latest wuxia epic Curse of the Golden Flower – at nearly $50m, the biggest-budgeted Chinese film, a record previously held by Chen’s The Promise, which had in turn superseded Zhang’s Hero – to emphasise, as he put it, how few cared for the inhabitants of the region affected by the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam in an age that worships gold. (Jia had by this point abandoned realism as a mode – Still Life, for example, contains elements of fantasy – but retained his interest in what might be considered realist subject matter.)

There are a handful of potential factors behind the reluctance to anoint a successor gang to Jia and co., a new class. Younger directors have not arrived en masse, with a succession of similar or similarly notable debuts. The Beijing Film Academy has lost its prestige, and role as mass incubator of new talent. And the Sixth Generation – or the prominence of its original members – has had a long tail. This is partly a product of cultural lethargy. Jia, more than a quarter century after Pickpocket, remains in international eyes the boy wonder of Chinese cinema. Guan Hu made his Cannes debut this year, with Black Dog, which won Un Certain Regard prize. (It comes out in the UK next week.) On the other hand, since the commercialisation of the Chinese film industry in the early years of the century, driven partly by the need to compete with imported products, it has ceased to be a director’s cinema even to the degree that it was. The film that Guan Hu made before Black Dog, The Five Hundred, a war film shot on IMAX cameras, was the second-highest grossing film at the global box office in 2020. (Hu has been unusual in his consistent willingness to cooperate with the film bureau, even paying to receive official sanction for Dirty.)

But while there has been no talk of a Seventh Generation, the culture of descent – of Chinese cinema as a site of baton-passing – has remained strong. Among directors born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many have shown their work at the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, which Jia founded in 2017, or allied themselves with a Sixth Generation figure. The late Hu Bo worked with Wang on An Elephant Sitting Still. Na Jiazuo made Streetwise in 2021 with the help of Guan Hu. Jia executive-produced Yuan Yuan’s Tomorrow Will Be Fine. Though certain members of the Sixth Generation have started to trade in fairy tales – or at least commercial frivolity – of their own kind, industrial conditions are not strong enough to support a movement born from the resulting disillusionment or contempt.

For now, the closest to an heir to this story of inheritance and rebellion, a frontrunner for the status of Jia’s dauphin, appears to be the thirty-three-year-old Wei Shujun, whose four films to date – a short and a trio of features – have all appeared at Cannes. Wei, who was born in Beijing, is eager to offer the pleasures of what might be broadly considered the Fifth and Sixth Generation approaches without subscribing wholesale to either. He has revealed that he fell out with his tutor on his directing Master’s, a BFA contemporary of Chen and Zhang, because he was constantly being urged to ‘adhere more to standards’ or ‘conform more to common practices’. He has also asserted – without naming names – that too many new directors ‘are just repeating the language of the Sixth Generation’.

If Wei’s work eludes the narrow debate about what constitutes the best – most responsible or rewarding – way to depict Chinese society, it draws on many of the sensibilities and techniques at stake. He is that by now familiar but not yet tiresome figure, the millennial magpie, and his new film, Only the River Flows, winner of Best Film at Pingyao and a hit on its release in China last year (it’s currently showing in the UK), is a mystery and a critique of the mystery form, by turns elegant, gritty, ethereal, sensual, playful, grounded in logistics and practicalities but also beholden – too beholden, it turns out – to the elusive and intangible. It begins in December 1995, and takes place in a small town. A murder has been committed in a nearby river-side community. The police chief (Tianlai Hou) has given his squad a vast new headquarters in a disused cinema and urges the lead detective, the Yunnan-born Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) to wrap things up ‘quickly’. It emerges that the first victim, known locally as Granny No. 4, adopted a ‘madman’ (Kang Chunlei) who is currently hard to track down, and therefore seems the likely culprit.

Like many films of the Fifth Generation, the film is a loose adaptation, in this case of a novella by Yua Hu, the author of the saga To Live, which Zhang filmed – with mixed results – in 1994. And there’s a lushness, a pleasure in colour and composition, that recalls Zhang and Chen in their pomp. Surfaces – leather jackets, cars, the river – shimmer and glow. Wei, working with the cinematographer Chengma, shot – in sequence order – on 16mm in the Zhejiang and Jiangxi Provinces, though the film stock had to be scanned and printed in Taiwan. (Even when Wang was making The Days thirty years earlier, he was forced to travel the one-hundred-and-fifty kilometres to Baoding where the only manufacturer was based.)

The period setting renders the film to some degree a social portrait. Wei decided to set the story in the mid-1990s – the source was published in 1988 – for roughly the same reasons that the Sixth Generation felt the urge to chronicle it first time around. Jia has ascribed his near-exclusive engagement with the new China not only to his disillusionment with Chen and Zhang but to his feeling of surprise, when returning to the Shaanxi Province, at the sudden availability of motorcycles and televisions and washing machines. Only the River Flows portrays a slightly earlier moment – or the same process at an earlier stage – serving up a landscape of boxy desktops, indoor smoking, cassette tapes, biros. During a recent conversation, Wei told me that he wanted – and perhaps, for practical reasons, needed – to evoke a period just before technology brought changes to forensic science, and ways of living and working. He explained that he was eager to get the tangible details right – the locations, textures, music – but also ‘the whole atmosphere. At that time people tended to congregate more. Nowadays we are islands. Each of us is an island. That was the main difference I wanted to recreate.’

Although the one-child policy looms and the presence of a disused cinema cannot help but allude to the state of the Chinese film industry – audience attendance was at an all-time low – Wei only flirts with the sort of historical analysis so pervasive at the time the story takes place. For the most part, the noir-ish plot and landscape are exploited for broader allegorical resonances. The epigraph is from Camus. The soundtrack borrows music by Howard Shore from Cronenberg’s unsettling adaptation of J G Ballard’s Crash. Wei seems to be drawing from less realist, more oneiric, predecessors – the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, whose ghost story Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place in a cinema on the night of its closing, possibly Bong Jon-Hoo (Memories of Murder) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure).

In our conversation, Wei told me that he is also greatly indebted to Hou, a director resistant, he said, to established narrative formulas. Wei’s debut, Striding into the Wind (2020), about a sound recordist working on a student film project in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, recalls Goodbye South, Goodbye as it tracks its slightly feckless characters driving around, pursuing schemes that turn into scrapes. (Wei, before turning to directing, majored in sound recording at the Communication University in Beijing.) Like Good Men, Good Women, his superb follow-up, Ripples of Life (2022), follows the making of a film, is divided into three parts, largely concerns the lead actress, and ends, as A City of Sadness almost does, with the taking of a group photograph. Wei’s tendencies in the new film recall Hou’s own record as a director of off-kilter thrillers – not just Goodbye South, Goodbye but also Millennium Mambo – and his emphasis in Good Men, Good Women and The Puppetmaster on how stories get told and what may be lost in the telling.

Only the River Flows is aggressively thematic, insistently self-reflexive. The film opens with a sequence in which a boy carrying a toy gun chases his friends around an upper floor of a derelict building until he reaches a door which opens onto nothing. It has no relation to the story, and the boy is never seen again. (Ma Zhe is nearby on the ground, just about visible in a crane shot.) The river, the site of the killings, has a more symbolic function than in, say, a Sixth Generation thriller like Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, where it separates Shanghai from suburban Hong-Ku. (All his titles deploy spatial metaphors.) Only the River Flows doesn’t concern the making of a film, but as well as using a cinema as a central location, it is occupied by what is revealed or obscured by images and sounds, and contains details and lines of dialogue that allude to where people are within a story. There’s an emphasis on trajectories, on processes unfolding over time – in the pregnancy of Ma Zhe’s wife, and in the jigsaw puzzle at which she has been hard at work.

The final section of Ripples of Life, entitled ‘A Pluto moment’, takes the form of a thirty-five-minute debate between the director and the screenwriter (played by Wei’s co-writer Shunlei Kang). It turns on a clash of fundamental priorities, very roughly akin to the Sixth Generation’s polemic against the Fifth Generation. What vision of reality should their film promote? Their script concerns the awakening of a small-town girl’s consciousness. The writer views it as Chekhovian, but the director believes that even a portrayal of unrequited love ‘needs a bit of action’. The writer worries about being ‘cheesy’. The director reckons that the writer is just being ‘lazy’, and complains about the script’s seventy-two instances of silence. One of the writer’s potential solutions is, as he puts it, to take out ‘all of my concepts’. 

A similar back-and-forth takes place – albeit in serial form – in the new film, with the unfolding case instead of a work-in-progress. The turning point arrives halfway through, following the arrest of the ‘madman’. ‘Why haven’t you wrapped up your report yet?’ Ma Zhe’s superior (Hou Tinlai) asks him. When he replies that he still needs to ‘sort things out’, he’s informed that the whole thing is ‘crystal clear’. As if to cap this assertion, the senior officer proposes a group photo with Ma Zhe and his colleague. But just as it is being taken, a box full of ping-pong balls is knocked to the floor. In a later instalment of this procedural-philosophical debate, it becomes clear that Ma Zhe’s position extends to a resistance to the explanatory force of the visual and audible field. He is keen to show fidelity to what lies beneath ‘evidences’, to reject ‘deductive reasoning’ as a route to understanding.

Wei doesn’t quite succeed in finding a structure and scenario for this mode of questing. The grounds for Ma Zhe’s discomfort are never plainly established. Wei’s work to date has been notably concerned with choosing one of two clearly defined alternatives – the allegiance to China or South Korea in On the Border, structure or flow in Ripples of Life. (His next film, Mostly Funny, which features Jia in a small role, portrays two brothers with divergent approaches to caring for their elderly mother.) The problem with establishing binary choices is that even taking the more nuanced route imposes a sense of resolution. Ripples of Life avoided this danger by ending the debate between the writer and the director in mid-flow, with the sudden revelation of the death of Diego Maradona, raising the question of whether an event of that nature belongs to the category of action or life-as-it-really-is. 

Only the River Flows plumps more solidly for openness and chaos, the rejection of sense, or legibility. The story ends with a number of clinching gestures – a salute, a ceremony, a handshake – before a coda, set one year later, introduces a dissentient note. The classic instance of this sort of juxtaposition, between case-closed and a murkier, possibly infinite reality, comes at the end of Psycho when Hitchcock cuts from the psychiatrist’s pat account of deviant mother-love to a close-up of Norman’s near-grin and the contention, on voiceover, that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. The effect achieved here is not dissimilar, at least in the clarity of its intended meaning, and also has recourse to the reliably eerie power – in a hitherto fourth-wall-respecting context – of a gaze-cum-glare directed at the camera’s lens.

Wei has given himself the additional task – familiar to Hitchcock on other occasions – of needing to resolve by narrative means a central dilemma in aesthetics and epistemology. He is hardly the first director to overrate the conceptual possibilities of the mystery form, to mistake a refusal to deliver on expectations – almost to shirk his basic obligations under genre-cinema trading laws – for an act of tribute to the wonders of phenomenal reality. This implicit position is the corner into which Antonioni painted himself in Blow-Up, and was pretty much the starting-point for Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (though you might say that a starting-point is the best place to have it). If Only the River Flows is not ruined by its faith in the non-ending ending, it’s because by that point Wei has already set a contrary formal example, based in his virtuoso’s greed, the positive embrace of possibilities, a statement of intent that, in its implicit recognition of higher stakes and longer-term struggles, recalls the silly but none the less rousing toast raised by the director near the start of Ripples of Life: ‘It’s a long road ahead. We are in it together. To Chinese cinema!’

Read on: Zhang Xudong, ‘Poetics of Vanishing’, NLR 63.

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Counter-Music

Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 and died in Rome in 1996, leaping from the kitchen window of her apartment. She has long been recognised as one of the most formidable post-war Italian poets. In an early critical appreciation, Fausto Curi described her work as ‘ravenous, violent and dreamlike’. Pasolini admiringly compared her language to ‘the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumours, atomic blasts’. In a review from the 1970s, Andrea Zanzotto – also grasping for an image to describe her linguistic intensity – pictured her words as ‘clawed little monsters of light’.

Rosselli’s work is exciting and alien, a little frightening. For readers in English, her reputation has been secured by a number of excellent translations over the past twenty years. The most important of these are Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti’s War Variations (2003/2016), which presents her first published book, Variazioni Bellichi (1964), and Jennifer Scappettone’s Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (2012), an editorial triumph, bringing together extracts from interviews and correspondence, a selection of photographs and a comprehensive introductory essay. Thanks to these books, Rosselli found a ready audience among the leftist experimental poets of the 2010s, commanding respect and a certain awe. She was not the kind of poet whose work we knew by heart, but she was a poet we agreed on, a litmus test of difficulty and a watchword of invention.

The recently reissued Sleep is perhaps her most unusual book. Written in English, it consists of 126 short poems, mostly untitled. It was composed in what Barry Schwabsky calls, in his useful introduction, ‘three campaigns’, spanning 1953-55, 1960-61 and 1965-66. This means that it both is and isn’t early work, and it shadows and overlaps Rosselli’s first two books in Italian. It isn’t clear if the material was produced in an initial burst and subsequently revised, edited and shaped, or if Rosselli’s process was one of intermittent accumulation of fresh work. Each poem feels unfinished but perfect, or like a damaged fresco we can’t quite imagine was ever complete in the first place.

Though extracts from Sleep appeared in Locomotrix – and the sequence has been available with facing-page Italian translations since 1992 – Rosselli’s English poetry has not been widely known to anglophone readers. Rosselli spent a good deal of her childhood and adolescence in Britain and the United States. In 1937, her father – the antifascist activist Carlo Rosselli, who had recently returned to France after fighting in the Spanish Civil War – was murdered on Mussolini’s orders, along with her uncle Nello. When France fell to the Nazis, Rosselli and her brothers fled with their mother – the English suffragist Marion Cave Rosselli – first to London, then to New York and then back to London in 1946. Weakened by the hardship of years spent in exile, Marion died in 1949. Rosselli, still a teenager, moved to Rome, where she found work as a translator.

The poems in Sleep are, unsurprisingly, marked by these experiences. The beginning of the sequence simultaneously registers Carlo and Nello’s violent deaths and Rosselli’s own sense of displacement:

What woke those tender heavy fat hands

said the executioner as the hatchet fell

down upon their bodily stripped souls

fermenting in the dust. You are a stranger here

and have no place among us.

Rosselli’s accusatory register is much too volatile, too mobile, for speechifying or rousing oratory. She draws on parable and lullaby, writing from a position of vulnerability and exposure. A sense of mortal danger is fundamental to the work. There are police summons and brawls, the threat of a massacre at court and at least a dozen references to hell. ‘Tenderness itself is dangerous’, she writes at one point. But the poems are rarely harsh: they emerge from deep gloom, wisps of fog, before suddenly, catlike, darting away.

Amelia’s older brother John once wrote that Carlo and Nello came to be treated ‘as saints, or more prosaically as street names’ in post-war Italy. Sleep could be read as an ambivalent, at times even withering, analysis of martyrdom. Despite Rosselli’s secular Jewish background and Marion’s Quakerism, much of this is explicitly Christological:

Then you got reality: at the age of thirty-three

dying on the cross, at cross-country, murdering

your parents’ parents, saving that which was true

to your cumbersome nature. Then you got a sort

of freedom, by playing truant to all good causes,

then you fetched the seamstress, and she put things

straight.

Elsewhere there are crowns of thorns and time on the rack, and if I squint at a passage where someone tied to a chair shoots out arrows, I’m sure I can see a mirror-image Saint Sebastian.

In the 1950s Rosselli’s own politics began to depart from the ‘good cause’ of her parents, who were avowedly non-Marxist (and more importantly, non-Leninist) liberal socialists. In a letter to John in 1952 – a year before commencing Sleep – Rosselli discussed her growing frustrations with ‘democratic, gradual revolution’, given the fate of the post-war Labour government and the ‘floundering’ Italian socialists. In 1958 she would join the Communist Party (PCI).

Readers looking for didactic anthology pieces will be disappointed. Rosselli’s poems are assuredly not fit for placards; phrases can’t easily be plucked from their surrounding context, where it isn’t always clear who is speaking. She is guarded, suspicious and seems to have little interest in telling anyone what to do or how to feel. Nonetheless, some of the most moving moments in Sleep come in half-strangled declarations of political commitment, with glancing references to her ‘red roots’ and ‘revolutionary heart’. Emerging from historical and personal catastrophe ‘impertinent with grief’, Rosselli did not turn away from the practical tasks of socialist and communist organizing. But nor did she renounce her restlessness and uncertainty, the sometimes impractical feelings provoked by loss.

Rosselli’s decision to write in English – the language of her mother, but not her mother tongue – carries a certain pathos. Doing so while living in Italy implies a degree of withdrawal from public language, as if Rosselli writes towards an inward domain of familial intimacy. But if the configuration of that domain has been disturbed by the death of her parents, then writing in English is also a signal of estrangement, a turning inside-out, searching the language for what’s gone missing. These are porous and sometimes brittle poems, where the barriers between public and private, self and other, memory and expectation seem corroded. Because Rosselli did not, after all, become an English poet – her career really begins as an affiliate of the neoavangardia ‘Gruppo 63’ – it’s tempting to see Sleep as an act of exorcism or a settling of accounts. For her part, in an interview in the 1990s, Rosselli described English as ‘a very neutral language, barely emotional even in the vowels’.

The poems in Sleep are rarely funny exactly, but there’s a kind of gleeful pastiche as she tries on the metaphysical poets for size, adopts Shakespearian poses, demonstrates her flair and audacity. English was also the language of her schooling, and at one point she reduces Donne to a kind of haiku: ‘Ye who do Batter me with Wordes / be Still: my Soul does rise in Silence / up the Sordid Moon’. But nobody could mistake these poems for simple exercises. Another vignette, hushed and beautiful, runs:

o the trees are wild with winter tension

and the leaves rush upon the big mat

gallop-horsed

(and the leaves tumble like wild birds on the heath)

Here the act of shaking out a doormat is briefly imagined as the cracking of reins, spurring us on towards winter. The dead leaves have some life in them yet, held in fragile parenthesis. It reminds me of modernist imitations of classical Chinese poetry: Ezra Pound’s ‘L’iu Che’, where ‘a wet leaf clings to a threshold’, full of clarity and sadness.

Rosselli’s form in Sleep, while taut, is generally unobtrusive. Ten or so poems are only two lines long. A couple are even shorter. Her line breaks are often surprising, like a jutting-out paving slab or the jolt of a missed step. Her rhymes can be sardonic and cajoling, as in the final stanza of the final poem in the main body of the text (before the appendix of poems omitted by Rosselli from the Italian edition):

The stop: the glare the blare the hare

the hinges and the ruts all were there

singing or crying or fornicating or swinging

to a merry tune: your nostalgia, your

unhampered care: my business and your

solace.

Rosselli trained as a musicologist and attended the Darmstadt summer courses for New Music. In the letter to her brother where she declares her nascent communism, she discusses her attempts to develop a new notation system for transcribing the folk music of Lucania, in Southern Italy. She was not interested in merry tunes or nostalgia. The poems seem to demand to be sung, the words elongated and the pitches drawn out.

In an obituary for her friend Maximilian Voloshin, Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote of ‘putting out your ear like a shield’. It’s an appealing image, because it might be a defensive manoeuvre, like the brace we adopt for bad news, or a strategic parry, the way we listen while we plan our next move. Rosselli writes like a poet under constant threat of attack:

be kind be kind be kind I hear this phrase

screaming in my ear each day, be sweet

be sweet be sweet be sweet this is all

I can say (or seem to say).

Elsewhere she describes ‘singing rot / into the crashed ears’, which uncannily suggests ‘crashed cars’ without quite adding up to a pun. Rosselli’s poetry is a form of counter-music, a score for liberation, where struggle might involve something other than sweetness and kindness. The bitterness of this knowledge – ‘that shaft of marmalade lightning / that hiss in the prayer’ ­– demands that poetry resist and warp the language of business-as-usual.

In the final third of Sleep, Rosselli begins to square up to her theme, ‘staring in the face that / grey hound: death’. It’s as if we’ve had to earn each poem’s trust, and in return they can grow longer, more complicated and confrontational. What follows is a climactic series of violent, questioning lyrics, whose address seems both rhetorical – for the attention of the reader – and punishingly self-directed. The movement begins: ‘Who am I talking to? Who asks me / anything? What rebel use have you / for my jargon?’ and ends some twenty pages later with the mock-Jacobean ‘Would you have me fry in my soup? Or / be the everlasting damsel in her skirts?’ It is delirious and unnerving, almost operatic.

In one of the most intriguing and affecting moments she writes: ‘And are you crazy really? and are you your / friend’s friend?’. The lines brought to mind Muriel Rukeyser’s late 1930s elegy ‘Rotten Lake’: ‘are you your best friend’s / best friend?’ These are insecurities that anyone might identify with, but which take particular shape in periods of political defeat and disaster. It’s not impossible that Rosselli read Rukeyser; later she would translate Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Certainly they belong with one another as urgent poets of the mid-century left.

It seems to me that the difficult power of Sleep makes it hard to share: you want to be left alone with it, rather than to push it eagerly into the hands of friends, whether best ones or otherwise. If Shakespeare had his problem plays, these are problem poems, sitting uneasily in Rosselli’s own oeuvre and hard to assimilate to our nationally constrained notions of what constitutes English poetry. Maybe Sleep could provide a different starting point for thinking about the fate of late modernism in post-war Britain. We could construct a lineage of exiles, of migrant languages, a seam of experiment and survival.

The book is pocket-size; you can take it with you on the move and ‘hold it into the round world’s / marvellous substance’. Yet the ghostliness of Sleep can’t quite be shaken off, even with repeated readings. These are Rosselli’s first poems, and it’s not impossible to imagine a different ending, where she returned to English in her old age, completing the circuit. But such apparent consolation would be the work of some other poet, the result of another kind of life. What we’re left with is singular: a ferocious, perfect interim.

Read on: Rossana Rossanda, ‘The Comrade from Milan’, NLR 49.

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Fraud Foretold?

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is no stranger to accusations of fraud. He has faced them for his entire presidency, starting with his April 2013 triumph in the contest to succeed Hugo Chávez. It therefore came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition refused to recognize his latest claim to victory in the presidential election on 28 July. Since then, Maduro and his supporters have sprung into action to denounce what they see as a coup attempt that threatens Venezuelan democracy. They have been backed by many leftists around the world, who echo their narrative of a revolutionary government confronting an imperialist and fascist threat. Such claims have a firm basis in recent Venezuelan history. Over the past quarter century, the opposition has repeatedly refused to concede its electoral losses (the 2004 recall referendum, the 2013 presidential election) and made violent attempts to topple democratically elected leaders (the 2002 coup, the 2014 and 2017 guarimbas). Washington has imposed brutal sanctions aimed at bringing down the government and supported Juan Guaidó’s corrupt and illegitimate ‘interim presidency’ of 2019-23, during which he attempted to incite a military coup and called for a US invasion.

Yet if false charges of fraud have become familiar, this should not blind leftists to the simple facts that make Maduro’s claim to victory ‘difficult to believe’, as Chilean president Gabriel Boric put it. First, and most importantly, in the three weeks since the election, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has yet to publish any electoral results. The CNE has issued two televised bulletins, in which results were announced orally. The first bulletin came just after midnight on 29 July, approximately six hours after polls closed. The CNE announced that with 80% of the ballots counted, Maduro had won the election with 51.2% of the vote, while the leading opposition candidate Edmundo González received 44.2%. On 2 August, the CNE issued a second bulletin, announcing that it had confirmed Maduro’s victory based on 97% of ballots counted, with Maduro on 51.95% and González on 43.18%.

The CNE’s failure to publish detailed results, indeed any results at all, is in marked contrast to the past twenty years, in which results were published days and sometimes hours after polls closed. In the December 2015 parliamentary elections, which I observed, it took just over 48 hours to produce a clear breakdown. This year, the CNE says it suffered a massive hacking attack that prevented it from doing so, but it has not presented any evidence to back this up. The alleged hacking does not appear to have stopped the CNE from turning over tally sheets to Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, which Maduro requested on July 31 as part of an official review of the results. Even those sympathetic to Maduro have wondered why the CNE has not found a way to publish this information publicly.

The opposition’s record on democracy is far from spotless. Its leader, María Corina Machado, has long been the head of an intransigent far-right faction which adamantly rejected elections. Machado was a signatory of the infamous Carmona Decree: the document that was intended to consummate the 2002 coup against Chávez. She spent years advocating violent regime change while cozying up to authoritarians like Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei. Throughout this period, she and her allies were supported by the US and other Western governments. Now that it has become politically expedient, however, Machado has had a Damascene conversion to electoralism. The popular sectors remain wary of her and of the opposition in general.

Yet in recent weeks the opposition has published its electoral tallies on a website that purports to show the results from 80% of voting centers. It claims González won with two-thirds of the vote while Maduro received only a third. To assess the validity of these figures it would be useful to compare them to those of the CNE, were the latter available. Another option would be for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to release the tallies that its electoral observers collected from every polling station nationwide. It did this following the 2013 election to counter the opposition’s false claim that Maduro’s victory was fraudulent. Yet, to date, the party has refused to release any results. Outside observers have not been able to confirm the opposition’s findings, but scholars who conducted statistical analyses of the data claim that they do not appear to show signs of tampering. They also found the CNE’s results to be dubious, noting, for example, that rounding the tallies to the first decimal, as the CNE did in its first bulletin, would have been ‘arithmetically impossible’. The first bulletin also claimed that the gap between Maduro and González was 704,000, with 2,300,000 votes yet to be counted, yet at the same time it asserted that the trend toward Maduro was irreversible: an obvious inconsistency.  

A further piece of evidence that counts against Maduro is the explosion of protests across popular-sector barrios on 29 July, the day after the election. These were clearly spontaneous, as Machado had not called on supporters to take to the streets until the following day. Video evidence suggests that thousands, and likely tens of thousands, participated. This chimes with opposition tallies that ostensibly show massive rejection of Maduro in such areas. Equivalent protests have not occurred during any other recent instances of opposition mobilization, which have been dominated by the middle and upper classes.

A report by the Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social, titled Represión a los pobres en Venezuela, counts 192 protests in the Caracas region (specifically in the Capital District and state of Miranda, which includes much of greater Caracas), out of 915 total protests nationwide on 29 and 30 July. Of these 192 protests, the report finds that 80% occurred in barrios and popular zones, and that 75% of government repression against the protests took place in these same areas. This appears to support Yoletty Bracho’s assertion that the mobilizations ‘are not remotely guided by the Venezuelan right or by US imperialism.’

Maduro’s actions have been denounced by two international bodies that the state itself invited to observe the election. The Carter Center asserts that ‘Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.’ It indicts the administration and CNE on numerous fronts, including the failure to release disaggregated results; obstacles that prevented the vast majority of potential voters abroad (thought to number over four million) from voting; the disqualification of leading opposition candidates, who were ‘subject to arbitrary decisions of the CNE, without respecting basic legal principles’; unequal conditions for different candidates, with Maduro receiving significant positive media compared to González; and harassment of opposition campaign and staff.

On 13 August, a UN panel of experts, who observed the election at the invitation of the CNE, issued a sixteen-point preliminary report. Some of its findings are positive or neutral, such as the 59.97% participation rate, the peaceful environment on election day, the effective logistical coordination and the initially smooth electronic transmission of results. Yet, like the Carter Center, the UN report calls out the CNE for its failure to publish results – which, it says, ‘has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections’ – and concludes that those tallied by the opposition were trustworthy. It condemns government repression of protests from 29 July to 2 August, which it claims led to 20 deaths and 1,000 arrests. (The government itself has proudly declared that it has arrested more than 2,000 people for engaging in ‘terrorism’ following the vote.)

A careful consideration of the evidence, then, suggests that the election results are not just difficult but impossible to believe. Boric is not the only Latin American leader to have expressed major doubts. This has also come from three countries that have been close allies to Maduro’s Venezuela: Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. This bloc issued joint statements on 1 and 8 August asking the CNE to release the electoral returns and calling for restraint in the face of dissent. In recent days, Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro have gone further, with both leaders calling for new elections, with enhanced safeguards to ensure accountability and fairness. Petro has floated the idea of a transitional government bringing together officials from the Maduro administration and the opposition. On 16 August, Lula ratcheted up the pressure by publicly stating that Venezuela has ‘a very unpleasant regime’ with an ‘authoritarian slant’. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken a softer stance, typical of his hands-off approach to foreign policy, yet even he has refused to recognize the incumbent.

The fact that Lula and Petro have become increasingly strident in their public statements may be welcome news for the opposition, but it does not bode well for a quick settlement to Venezuela’s political crisis. If Lula and Petro were engaged in serious negotiations with Maduro over an exit strategy, the public would be unlikely to hear much if anything until an agreement had been reached. At present, it is hard to imagine that Maduro and his supporters in the Venezuelan state will accept any overtures to step down. They are unlikely to agree to an amnesty deal in exchange for leaving office, aware that such agreements are all but impossible to enforce when political conditions change. And they appear to enjoy the full support of the Venezuelan armed forces, as well as China and Russia. The regime appears well-positioned to ride out the crisis for as long as it lasts and then get back to the business of governing Venezuela.

Maduro’s recent actions belie his claims to be continuing the revolutionary legacy of Chávez. The current president has implemented increasingly neoliberal, and even rightwing, policies in an attempt to jumpstart Venezuela’s economy after years of sanctions: eliminating tariffs on many imports, lifting price and currency exchange controls, and a embracing de facto dollarization. His regime has also engaged in massive repression, which has targeted not only the center and right, but also the left. As with the protests of 29 and 30 July, it is the poor – particularly poor men of colour – who have borne the brunt. This is one of the reasons that the Communist Party of Venezuela has stood against Maduro and now fervently rejects his claim of victory.

Publicly, the US has taken a surprisingly cautious approach, pledging to follow the lead of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. The State Department issued a statement in the days after the election calling for transparency and the full release of the voting results. White House officials have been inconsistent: sometimes recognizing González as the rightful winner, sometimes refusing to take a clear stance. Biden at one point echoed calls for new elections before reversing this position. The current package of US and EU sanctions have already severely constrained Venezuela’s ability to raise funds or do business internationally. In October 2023, the Biden administration partially lifted Trump-era sanctions on the oil, gas, and gold industries as part of the Barbados accord negotiations, where the government and opposition agreed on a framework for the upcoming elections. Yet Biden subsequently reimposed oil sanctions in April this year after Machado was barred from running. These will continue for the foreseeable future, but to date there has been no serious talk of reimposing more debilitating measures.

The current US policy towards Maduro has two main causes. The first is the failure of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy launched by Trump and continued in the early days of the Biden administration, characterized by crippling economic warfare coupled with full US support for Guaidó’s attempted coup. These actions failed to dislodge Maduro. Instead, they prompted the Venezuelan military and ruling class to close ranks to defend him, while causing massive outmigration which affected the US and many Latin American countries (none more than Colombia, hence Petro’s leadership on the Venezuela crisis). This brings us to the second determinant. With elections looming, and Republican hysteria about the so-called ‘border crisis’ at fever pitch, Washington is in no mood to see hundreds of thousands more Venezuelans coming to the US in the next few months.

What comes next? Proposals for new elections or power-sharing have fallen on deaf ears, rejected by both the government and opposition. ‘We go to a second election’, Machado remarked sardonically, ‘and if [Maduro] doesn’t like the results, do we go to a third, fourth, fifth until Maduro gets results he likes?’ The prospect of the US lifting sanctions appears remote, and it may even introduce new ones, especially if Trump wins in November. This suggests that the modest economic recovery Venezuela has experienced in the last few years will be stalled or reversed. In conjunction with continuing government repression, there will likely be continued outmigration on a significant scale. Venezuela is unlikely to return to any semblance of ‘normalcy’ in the near future.

This debacle plays into the hands of the regional and global right, which cites it as proof that social-democratic policies are untenable in the twenty-first century. Want to raise the minimum wage, reduce poverty and inequality, or stimulate popular participation in the democratic process? Don’t even think about it, lest you end up like Venezuela. If the left is to counter this narrative, and defend the real gains of Chavismo during the 2000s and 2010s, it must give up on consoling fantasies and take a clear-eyed look at the country’s degeneration. That means resisting apologism for Maduro. Socialists, of any stripe, should not provide cover for a government that fixes elections and then clings to power by brutally punishing its poorest citizens when they protest.

Read on: Julia Buxton, ‘Venezuela After Chavez’, NLR 99.

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Prospects

How is the Starmer regime likely to govern? The election period yielded more questions than answers. As a succession of blunders by Sunak’s campaign – the PM’s early exit from a D-Day memorial assembly in Dunkirk, the revelation that several of his close confidants had placed suspiciously accurate bets on the date of the election before its public announcement – filled the rolling news chyrons, the opposition played dumb. Labour’s strategy was to do nothing and let the government fall, breaking its silence only occasionally with monosyllabic yelps of ‘growth’ and ‘change’. The Labour manifesto was light on detail – 136 pages of large-point font outlining amorphous commitments to focus-group-tested quangos in the energy and transport sectors – but heavy on photos of Starmer, Reeves and Lammy, their furrowed brows and rictus grins framed by turbines and terraced houses. Throughout May and June, the Labour leader appeared on the nightly news, tight-lipped, clutching unsipped mugs of tea as pensioners relayed the impossible costs of heating their homes; in interviews he claimed to have no favourite novel, to have suffered no childhood fears and never to dream.

If Starmer was reluctant to announce new policies, he was eager to rule them out: taxes on wealth, corporations, VAT or income; spending commitments that might contravene his ‘iron fiscal rules’. Now, after a month in office, neo-Labourism continues to assert itself through a series of negative propositions. ‘If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it’, Rachel Reeves told Parliament in a dour reversal of Keynes’s dictum, as she claimed to have discovered a £22bn ‘black hole’ left by her predecessor. That means no significant funding boost for the nation’s vitiated health service, no automatic winter fuel subsidies for retirees, no repeal of draconian restrictions on child benefits, a halt to infrastructure spending and further cuts to departmental budgets. It also means an end to some of the Tories’ most expensive culture-war gimmicks – among them the deployment of the Bibby Stockholm, an offshore barge to house 500 male asylum seekers, and the pledge to deport others to Rwanda – although Labour may yet substitute these with its own. 

To forecast the likely trajectory of Starmerism, it is necessary to grasp the UK’s domestic tensions and global position – for these are the parameters within which the new government will have to operate. A victory by default is not necessarily pyrrhic. But given Labour’s deliberate lack of political vision, the party’s fortunes are uniquely dependent upon external events. Already, it has been forced to confront a series of far-right riots which spread from the deindustrialized north-west to impoverished coastal and semi-urban peripheries in late July. The signs of decline – economic, societal, geopolitical – are clear. If the election was marked by a shrugging acceptance of this, as the neutral background on which British politics plays out, then the next half-decade may thrust it to the fore.

‘Change’, the byword of Starmer’s campaign, has hardly been in short supply since the start of Tory rule in 2010. Britain has not only experienced the rapid dissipation of its internal civic structures thanks to austerity, but also a series of external economic and political shocks. Hollowed from within and buffeted from without, the country rattles as it falls. After leaving the EU, it proved incapable either of enacting nativist protectionist measures or of becoming a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ super-city-state (canard though the ambition may always have been). Instead, it has improvised its own inversion to Pyramus’s denouement: staggering across the world stage mortally injured while proclaiming its good health, inflicting further damage on itself as it tries to hide the wounds. In power, the Tory Party could no more ‘take back control’ than it could control its own frontbench. As a proxy for national self-determination, it pledged to safeguard England’s southern border from the perils of French supermarket dinghies bearing Syrian, Afghan and Eritrean teenagers. But even its immigration targets proved elusive, allowing Farage’s Reform UK to outflank it on the right.

While other parts of the world have begun to shift from ‘frictionless’ trade towards industrial policy and defence investment, the Ukanian economy has remained reliant on the mobile capital that flows through the City of London: a significant liability, as demonstrated by Truss’s ‘fiscal event’ and the subsequent bond market crash in autumn 2022. West London’s townhouses, along with rate-subsidised ghost developments elsewhere in the country, continue to act as brick-and-mortar piggybanks for international investors. Meanwhile, stagnant wages and high inflation have fuelled the decline of working-class living standards (with ‘cheapflation’ driving up everyday costs at an accelerated rate). The number of impoverished individuals is roughly the same as it was in 2010, but the severity and entrenchment of household poverty is much greater, with more children suffering from deprivation. NHS waiting lists have doubled from 2010 levels, and with them the need for life-saving interventions, as benign conditions are left to metastasize. Cases of type-two diabetes have risen to five million, an affliction indicative of a populace that struggles to feed itself healthily and relies on foodbanks in record numbers.

Economic ‘growth’ is presented as a panacea for the fractured kingdom. Yet the only hope for this is ambitious, targeted investment of the kind which is not forthcoming from Labour. The party is straitjacketed by its self-imposed fiscal rules: the current budget must ensure that day-to-day costs are met by revenues, and debt must be falling as a share of the economy by the fifth year of the forecast.  Even the FT and IFS have scoffed at Reeves’s plan to dynamize British industry within this framework. Her formation as a Bank of England economist, which played an essential part in casting her as the most ‘qualified’ candidate for the role, now prevents her from taking any of the measures that might begin to fulfil her pledge to ‘restart’ the economy. Yet in contrasting such hallmarks of ‘discipline’ with the previous government’s ‘reckless’ approach, Labour has clearly made a political calculation. It reckons that a return to the austerian discourse of the Cameron–Osborne era is useful to lower expectations amid a set of structural economic problems which the government is unwilling to confront. If national rejuvenation is out of reach, middle-managerial competence is the best for which we can hope.

Much has been made (mostly by the government) of the government’s proposed changes to planning reforms, easing restrictions on new building sites to create more homes. But Britain does not suffer from a lack of houses, it suffers from an excess of landlords – even as buy-to-let mortgage holders have been selling up in response to rising rates that render small-time real estate investments unprofitable, increasing costs in an already over-inflated market that sees many tenants spend nearly 50% of their income on rent. The only real solutions, which Labour refuses to contemplate, are new social housing and rent controls. In their absence, attempts to stimulate a construction boom through deregulation will have little effect. At best, they might yield new opportunities to indebt oneself for flimsy newbuilds on so-called ‘grey belt’ sites: aptly named zonal designations for areas in which no one wants to live.

Behind this is a tale of diversification among the fractions of Britain’s capitalist class. While the City’s multinational finance firms are insulated from the most immediate shocks of interest rate rises, large and mid-size domestic retail and real estate firms have felt the brunt of monetary climate change. Starmer’s fiscal rules are intended to please the former, while his hazy promises of ‘growth’ and ‘stability’ are pitched at the latter. Rallying behind him early on were CEOs of companies such as Iceland, nationwide market-leaders in discount frozen foods, fed up with a Tory Party that presided over steep price rises for shipping, storing, selling and refrigerating consumer goods. Meanwhile, smaller businesses and the self-employed have a new electoral option in Reform, who took chunks out of Conservative majorities in its former heartlands across the commuter-belt south-east. The party is enmeshed in a web of petty commercial property holdings, guest houses, bust TV production companies, bed bug removal firms and, in one instance, a ‘social enterprise’ established to promote ‘White Rights’.

Historically, many have hoped to ‘solve’ the perennial problem of British decline by breaking up the polity itself. But today this prospect looks more distant than ever. It was neutralized by the electoral rout of the SNP last month: the culmination of a slow unravelling in which sapped enthusiasm for independence coincided with a series of damaging corruption scandals among the party leadership, with cause and effect impossible to parse. In Northern Ireland, the power-sharing impasse has ended and Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has become the first Republican to lead the assembly. But her appeals for a united Ireland remain rhetorical. The end of British occupation could only be brought about through a referendum triggered by Dáil Éireann and authorized by the British executive – something neither is likely to permit for the foreseeable future.

Labour has promised a change from Conservative government-in-absentia. But even if it is more proactive in managing the state, there is nothing to suggest that this will check the process of decline – which may, in turn, force the government to make some unappealing zero-sum decisions: fill in the potholes or stop the prisons overflowing, free up medical appointments or clear the asylum backlog. In foreign affairs, Labour remains committed to a series of hawkish propositions that are increasingly beyond its political-economic means. Arms will continue flow to Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ to reclaim every inch of territory from Russia. The UK will try to reclaim its role as America’s head-prefect in the New Cold War with China. A closer relationship with the EU will be sought, though the prospects for a more favourable post-Brexit trade deal remain uncertain. Continued support for Israel is essential to safeguard the ‘special relationship’, yet this has already begun to damage Labour at the polls, as young and Muslim voters seek a non-genocidal alternative.  

Fealty to a standard notion of ‘electability’ – in which the least possible change is promised, for fear of disturbing the markets – has until now locked Labour and the Conservatives into a battle for the votes of a population that increasingly doesn’t. As Peter Mair foresaw, the parties have outlived what once passed for capitalist democracy; electoral choice now amounts to deciding between two cartels dominated by a clutch of ‘special advisors’ and their increasingly scandal-prone proxies on the frontbench. In 1997, when Labour won its last low-turnout ‘landslide’, the newly elected parliamentarians had a bright future, with better-remunerated positions in policy and finance lined up after they left office (note David Miliband’s smooth transition from baying for Iraqi blood to CEO of the ‘International Rescue Committee’). In 2024, by contrast, the Labour candidates seemed to have secured nomination only after exhausting all other opportunities for professional advancement.

Herein lies an important feature of Starmer’s neo-Labourism: an assertion of working-class identity without any commitment to working-class politics. The Starmerite formula demands having once been proximate to wage-labour, then using ‘public service’ as a means of social mobility. Of the new MPs that make up ‘Generation K’, more than two-thirds emphasized in their election literature some early personal or familial link to the constituency in which they were standing. But by drawing this connection, they also emphasized having left. Unlike former generations of working-class Labour politicians, the return of these middle-class small-town émigrés is packaged as a messianic managerialism. Prodigal pragmatists sent back to oversee decline. At least no one speaks of a classless society anymore.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Good Riddance to New Labour’, NLR 62.

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Into the Void

Stuck in American exile in 1941, Karl Korsch surveyed the success of the Blitzkrieg on Greece and tried, heroically, to offer a socialist interpretation. The German offensive, he wrote in a letter to Bertolt Brecht, expressed ‘frustrated left-wing energy’ and a displaced desire for workers’ control. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt summarized Korsch’s position as follows:

. . . in their civilian life, the majority of the tank crews of the German divisions were car mechanics or engineers (that is, industrial workers with practical experience). Many of them came from the German provinces that had experienced bloody massacres at the hands of the authorities in the Peasant Wars (1524-1526). According to Korsch, they had good reason to avoid direct contact with their superiors. Almost all of them could also vividly remember the positional warfare of 1916, again a result of the actions of their superiors, in whom they had little faith thereafter . . . According to Korsch, it thereby became possible for the troops to invent for themselves the Blitzkrieg spontaneously, out of historical motives at hand.

It is tempting – and consoling – to view the recent riots in Britain through this lens. In regions that were once hotbeds of Luddite agitation and labourite self-organization, the old demand for workers’ control now seems to have been perverted into xenophobic violence, a longing to overthrow the bourgeois regime replaced by an attempt to smash its weakest subjects. One wants to believe, with Korsch, that behind the mask of reaction there is still some potentially emancipatory profile.

In his recent Sidecar article, Richard Seymour ably circumvents this economism. He insists that the unrest should not be understood in terms of wrongly sublimated left-wing libido, but as an expression of late-capitalist rot. Not an insurgency to be redirected, but an impulse to be quashed. The essentials of his diagnosis are inarguable: that the class composition of the rioters was not homogenously proletarian, that they were not responding to events representing any real ‘immigrant threat’, that their actions were incited by both the political class and digital ‘lumpencommentariat’, and that the concatenation owes more to feverish misinformation than to the authentic grievances of the dispossessed.

Seymour is also correct to note the contemporary character of the riots – flash mobs of a newly networked far right, rather than a return to Freikorps militancy. Hitler and Mussolini promised to forge colonial empires of the kind their French and British competitors had acquired long ago. Their ambition was to break down borders, not to reinforce them. Today’s far right, by contrast, seeks to shield the Old World from the rest of the globe, conceding that the continent will no longer be a protagonist in the twenty-first century, and that the best it can hope for is protection from the postcolonial hordes.

Seymour’s account is easier to fault for what it does not say than for what it does. Granted, the riots are no twisted expression of ‘material interests’. But this should not lead us into a form of superstructuralism that represses the economic roots of the current crisis. The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northen Europe. If a Korschian outlook can lapse into lazy apologism, there is also a species of anti-economism which risks obscuring the social terrain and thereby relinquishing the prospect of changing it. To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy.

In focussing on the ‘perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity’, for instance, Seymour neglects how economic factors underpin the peculiarly schizoid status of immigration in British public life. Powellism, as Tom Nairn once noted, was an elite reaction to an industrial strategy that relied on workers from the former empire. (The ‘rivers of blood’ speech was mainly a response to the Wilson government’s attempt to halt discrimination in public-service provision.) This supply of labour remained essential in the wake of deindustrialization, as demographic expansion became necessary to sustain the rising service sector. Despite all its rhetorical bombast, the Conservative Party has done nothing to change this fragile growth model. It did not reduce immigration figures over the last decade, nor articulate even the mildest English equivalent of Bidenist ‘reshoring’.

Popular dissatisfaction has meanwhile been rising since at least the late 2000s, with a creeping sense at the lower end of the labour market that although immigration does not cause low wages, it remains an indispensable part of the low-wage regime to which the policy elite is committed. What we have witnessed in recent weeks is the explosion of that discontent in the ‘hyperpolitical’ form that dominates the 2020s: agitation without durable organization, short-lived spontaneism without institutional fortress-building. That the UK’s majoritarian electoral system cannot process the rise of these far-right forces might be another subterranean driver of the street violence: if they cannot achieve stable parliamentary representation, as elsewhere in Europe, then extra-parliamentary activity becomes fatally attractive.

Today’s neo-Powellism is an attempt to rhetorically manage and contain this contradiction at the heart of British financialization: an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth rates, unable to deliver meaningful productivity, with a population that increasingly wants the state to mount some kind of systemic intervention. Added to that economic backdrop are other, more twenty-first-century factors: the falling price of cocaine, which is no longer merely consumed in law firms and nightclubs but also at sports matches and in pubs; the suppression of British football hooliganism, which has siloed more young men into the milieu of the far right – a world that mainly exists online, but in which nocturnal terror squads provide at least a fleeting sense of social collectivity.

There is also the international dimension. Is it surprising that a nation which styles itself as an attack dog for a declining imperial hegemon, and unconditionally supports genocide in the Middle East, would see such belligerence ricochet on the domestic front? The UK, having normalized the ongoing attempt to exterminate a surplus population in Israel and solve the Palästinenserfrage once and for all, has given a strong impetus to those wishing to enact anti-Muslim violence here at home.

Unlike the dominant varieties of antisemitism, anti-Islamic sentiment does not usually engage in projections of global omnipotence. Instead, it casts the Muslim as a dangerously ambiguous figure. In the zero-sum world of late capitalism, their ability to retain a minimum of communal cohesion is seen to have better equipped them for labour market competition. Rather than a fear of the other, anti-Muslim feeling is a fear of the same: someone in a position of equal dependence on the market, yet who is thought to be more effective in shielding themselves against its onslaught. Simultaneously, the Muslim is also seen as a subaltern agent of the abstraction which finance has inflicted on world of post-war stability: someone who is out of place, who is causing ‘borders and boundaries to erode’, as Seymour puts it.

In 1913, Lenin controversially claimed that behind the Black Hundreds – the reactionary monarchist force which gave the world the notion of ‘pogromism’ – one could detect an ‘ignorant peasant democracy, democracy of the crudest type but also extremely deep-seated’. In his view, Russian landowners had tried to ‘appeal to the most deep-rooted prejudices of the most backward peasant’ and ‘play on his ignorance’. Yet ‘such a game cannot be played without risk’, he qualified, and ‘now and again the voice of the real peasant life, peasant democracy, breaks through all the Black-Hundred mustiness and cliché’.

There is no repressed emancipatory core to the riots, no ‘energy’ which can be recuperated. In this sense, the kind of desperate hope that Korsch read into the Blitzkrieg must be abjured. But beneath British pogromism still lies a universe of misery which it is the left’s historic task to negate. Successful strategies for doing so are in short supply. A-to-B marches, of the type which now take place in London every month, can be a useful way to assert a political line. They remain a minimum requirement of socialist politics. But they are inadequate to occupy the void that is now being colonized by the neo-Powellite right. In Seymour’s depiction, this world often falls by the wayside. The left must make sure it stays in focus.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.     

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Dreaming of Downfall

What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.

In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.

Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.

The occasion for this carnival of racist inebriation was a terrifying mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July. The alleged attacker, for reasons not yet discernible, descended upon a Taylor Swift dance class, attacking eleven children and two adults. Three of the children were killed. Because the suspect was under eighteen, his identity was initially protected. It took only a few hours for the stabbings to become a rallying point for the far right, thanks initially to coalescing waves of online agitation. The suspect, according to rightist disinfotainment accounts, was a migrant on an ‘MI6 watch list’ who had arrived on a ‘small boat’: ‘Ali al-Shakati’. ‘Uncontrolled mass migration’ was to blame for the stabbings.

This fantasy, which came just days after a large rally in support of Tommy Robinson in Trafalgar Square, was signal-boosted by the usual reactionary grifters, Robinson and Andrew Tate among them. The rumour was further infused with vitality thanks to a swarm of reactionary social industry accounts based in the US. A Telegram account, set up either by fascists or the fash-curious, gained 14,000 members and played a direct role in incitement. Like sparks flying from a furnace, the agitation spread from social media into meatspace. On 30 July, a loose collection of racist vigilantes and neo-Nazis gathered on St Luke’s Road in Southport and attacked the mosque with bricks and bottles. Although residents participated in the clean-up and repairs the next day, the furies were only beginning. From the end of July, the cycle of riots swept the UK for over a week. They slowly petered out when, following the announcement of dozens of intended far-right protests across the UK on the evening of 7 August, tens of thousands of anti-racists turned out in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton, Hastings, Southend, Northampton, Southampton, Blackpool, Derby, Swindon and Sheffield. Most of the racist gatherings failed to materialize, and those that did were outnumbered.

Throughout, the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the marauders had been defended by a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, including Matthew Goodwin, Carole Malone, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. More insidious were the routine obfuscations of major broadcasters, such as the BBC insipidly referring to these Poujadist enragés as ‘protesters’, while the hosts on ITV’s Good Morning Britain scoffed and guffawed when the left-wing Muslim MP Zarah Sultana described the riots as racist. In Bolton, where local Muslims organized in their self-defence against a movement that had shown murderous intent, the BBC called the far-right rally a ‘pro-British march’, while ITV described how ‘anti-immigration protesters’ were met by ‘300 masked people shouting Allahu Akhbar’.

Still, on the morning after the anti-racist turnout on 7 August, all right-minded opinion-formers exhaled in relief. ‘Well done decency, well done the police’, sighed former BBC journalist Jon Sopel. Even the Daily Mail, a constant source of front-page panic about migration, saluted the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down the Thugs’. The Express, ever a redoubt of Robinsonades, cheered: ‘United Britain Stands Firm Against Thugs’. There was, of course, no genuine unity. Those who flooded the streets to stop the riots had recently been slandered as ‘hate marchers’ by politicians and pundits alike when they rallied in support of Palestine. And while the majority of Britons disapproved of ‘unrest’, a surprisingly large number of people, 34%, supported the ‘protests’. Almost 60% expressed ‘sympathy’ with the ‘protesters’. Unsurprisingly, among those who backed the ‘unrest’, supporters of Reform UK, the third largest party by vote share, were disproportionately represented. Still, what a comfort not to have to think.

There followed the inevitable search for foreign subversion. The BBC, the Mail and the Telegraph were joined by Paul Mason and the usual social-media liberals in blaming Russia. There’s scant evidence for this, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has pointed out. But the implication appears to be that nothing in Britain’s recent history, or in the behaviour of its dominant institutions, could possibly have led to the conflagration. The same mass media that has relentlessly drilled the public with moral panic about migration now denounces social media ‘disinformation’, stressing the importance of ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’ in public life.

It is true that rumour played a critical role in congealing ad hoc alliances of engorged racists. As in the Knowsley riots in February 2023, inflammatory allegations spread on the social industry formed the inciting incident. But it’s telling that when courts revealed the identity of the suspect on 1 August, proving that he was neither a migrant nor on any ‘watch list’, the rioters didn’t break their stride: the worst attacks happened in the following days. People believed the rumours because it was expedient for them to do so, because it confirmed their prejudices and gave them the opportunity to act out long-brewing revenge fantasies.

This is how it has always worked. Rumours of a coming massacre of whites by black people sparked the pogrom in East St Louis, Illinois, in 1919. In Orléans in 1969, salacious stories about Jewish merchants drugging and selling women led to riots attacking Jewish shops. In 2002 in Gujarat, it was unsubstantiated claims that Muslims firebombed a train with Hindu pilgrims on board that became a pretext for gruesome ecstasies of Islamophobic murder and rape. And in the summer of 2020, the idea that ‘Antifa’ had started the Oregon wildfires to murder white, conservative Christians fuelled armed vigilantism. We can’t ‘fact-check’ the rumours into oblivion because, as Terry Ann Knopf documents in her history of rumours and race riots in the United States, the ‘facts’ are usually irrelevant. In moments of emergency, real or perceived, official sources are distrusted, while unofficial ‘witnesses’ are briefly sanctified to the extent that they fuel the fantasies bred by racial hierarchies and fears of revolt.

Recent moral panics, whether about race, nationality or gender, whether they are obsessed with asylum seekers in ‘five-star hotels’ or ‘bathroom predators’ or a supposed ‘man’ competing as a female boxer, share a sense of borders and boundaries eroding, of people being where they have no business being. Men becoming women, the rich becoming poor. The whites, as David Starkey once worried, becoming black. The majority becoming the minority. This is a surprisingly mobile fantasm, making it easy to switch rationalizations. When the identity of the Southport suspect was revealed, for instance, the subject was swiftly changed. It became about the fact that he was ‘the son of Rwandan migrants’, as Matthew Goodwin put it in a Substack post. Despite knowing nothing about the motive for the crime, it was suddenly a problem of ‘integration’ or as some of the online poetasters put it, ‘British values’.

This is an intriguing pivot: the actions of a white mass murderer (for example, incel killer Jake Davison) would not lend themselves to such pained interrogations. The fact that what is at stake is ‘ethnic’ belonging was clarified by Goodwin, when he was quizzed by Ash Sarkar on the BBC’s ‘Moral Maze’. Many people are English, he said, without being ‘ethnically’ so. Writing on Substack, he channelled the ‘fears’ of the ‘British and the English’ who, he informed us, are worried about ‘majority decline and demographic change’. Even cast in terms of ‘ethnicity’, not ‘race’, it is difficult not to see this as a soft version of what Chetan Bhatt described as the metaphysical obsession of today’s white far-right: the fear of white extinction. It is Britannia dreaming of its downfall.

This is a loose theodicy, which claims that whatever pain people are enduring in a country with stagnant living standards, crumbling infrastructure and an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian state, it must be the product of ‘broken borders’. Lacking the utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion, today’s far right has become obsessed with bordering. It has retreated to a defensive nation-statism, as the container for a series of traditional demarcations along gender and ethnic lines, obedience to which is invariably described as ‘integration’.

This parasitizes on official discourse. In the last few years, we have heard from senior politicians that ‘Islamists’ run the country, that peaceful Gaza protesters are a ‘thuggish mob’, that a parliamentary debate on a Gaza ceasefire had to be blocked to prevent the terrorist murder of MPs, that ‘Hamas’ was to blame for Labour’s poor showing in the West Midlands, that asylum seekers should be tagged, that too many migrants work in the NHS, that asylum seekers are expensive and dangerous, that Rishi Sunak is ‘the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration’, and that both Tories and Labour would ‘stop the small boats’ delivering refugees to British shores. And much as there has been a bipartisan consensus on leaning into the racist culture wars, both major parties are now affiliated with some variant of the transphobic panic. 

Much as liberalism fails by blaming it all on ‘Brexit’ or Russia while ignoring the convection cells of the storm that have been gathering in plain sight, so the left often has its own comforting narrative in which plebeian racist violence is a distorted expression of ‘material interests’. This usually translates as a call to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ rather than ‘identity politics’: as though we could route around the perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity by offering jobs and wages. No doubt we need more bread and butter, but that is strictly orthogonal to what is taking place. Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always. The ‘legitimate concerns’ of these rioters pertain to the idea of lost ethnic status. Where the ‘white working class’ is misleadingly invoked, ‘white’ is the operative term: the idea is that workers, far from being exploited, have been denied the appropriate moral recognition as white members of the nation by ‘elites’ too overzealous about extending recognition to minorities. It is about recouping the lost ‘wages of whiteness’.

Meanwhile those drawn to this ethnonationalist politics steadfastly refuse to be particularly poor or marginalized. They may have experienced relative class decline or inhabit declining regions, but they are as likely to be middle-class as workers. Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organize the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation and decline. The terror of white extinction, to that extent, is the fear that without rigid boundaries and borders those who have hitherto been protected will plunge into the toiling mass of humanity. The hypertrophic excitement of the pogromists, and their manifest enthralment at the idea of annihilation, gives them something to do about it. It is their alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression, in a dying civilization.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Riot on the Hill’, Sidecar.

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Overwriting Palestine

The most intense bombardment of a concentrated urban space in recent memory, the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict worldwide, and the greatest number of United Nations staff slain in any period: Israel has set out to methodically obliterate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, with the Lancet estimating that its war may have already left more than 186,000 dead. As part of this ten-month rampage, Israel has targeted schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It has assassinated professors and massacred teachers, faculty and staff, along with their entire families. It has also caused irreparable harm to tens of thousands of students, in what UN officials have described as a ‘scholasticide’.

In the United States, the country most responsible for overseeing and abetting these horrors, university and college presidents have, at best, responded with stony silence. Many of them had rushed to denounce the violence perpetrated on October 7th, swept up in the panic over what Biden called the ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’ and the lurid fabrications about beheaded babies. Since then, they have expressed concern for the alleged safety of their Jewish students and introduced mandatory ‘antisemitism awareness’ training (along with an occasional nod to Islamophobia, but with scarcely a word about the anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism rampant on campuses).

It is extraordinary that to date not a single US university has officially condemned the genocide in Gaza – or, at the very least, the systematic Israeli destruction of universities there. On the contrary, they have insisted that they will maintain institutional ties with their Israeli counterparts, including those that are implicated in the war on Palestinian society and life, as well as their investments in the corporations gorging on the profits generated by Palestinian death. The fact that Palestinians, Christians and Muslim Arabs, as well as Jewish anti-Zionists, are now well-represented in many Western universities – mostly as students, and to a lesser extent as faculty and staff – means they have an intimate view of their own erasure.

For much of its history, the American academy was unapologetically Eurocentric, existing in what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘white world’. This is no longer explicitly the case. Higher education is ostensibly more racially inclusive; curricula are ‘decolonized’. Yet unlike every other case of Western settler-colonization – from the enslavement of Black Africans to the genocide of Native Americans to the conquest of Algeria and South Africa – the oppression of Palestinians has outlasted the mainstreaming of concepts such as ‘human rights’ and ‘racial equality’. Apologists for apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South would not be tolerated in any major Western university today; yet Israel is openly embraced despite it being a state founded and sustained through the mass, and ongoing, dispossession of the native Palestinians, and despite being described by leading human rights organizations as an apartheid regime even before the Gaza genocide. Israel is also unique in having a large network of academic centres, visiting professor programmes and cultural and faith centres on American campuses, which are committed to defending and promoting an anachronistic and openly anti-Palestinian colonial ideology that seeks to fuse modern Jewish identity to an exclusivist ethno-nationalist state. 

In recent years, some universities have removed monuments to slaveholders or renamed buildings to acknowledge their complicity in colonialism. Yet these same institutions, along with bodies like the American Historical Association (AHA), have refused to engage directly with the issue of Palestine. In May 2024, the AHA issued a statement criticizing police violence against campus protesters but managed to avoid using the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’ even once. It seems that the only victims who can be mourned are those safely buried in the past. The ‘Palestine exception’ thus reflects the disjuncture between support for Israel and its ideology of colonial Zionism, on the one hand, and attempts to make amends for racist and colonial history, on the other. In this ideological landscape, Palestine is denied the status of a moral and political question, and Palestinians that of a people with significant history. Admitting the moral and political imperatives of Palestinian history and humanity contradicts the West’s highly selective self-image.

There are, of course, material and political costs to siding with the Palestinians. Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors routinely smear Palestinian students and professors as ‘antisemitic’, while pressuring administrators to clamp down on anyone advocating for Palestinian rights, which is said to amount to ‘hate speech’. The Israel lobby has supported Congressional investigations into Palestinian activism on campuses. The pro-Israel Brandeis Center wages constant lawfare against universities and public-school districts to ensure they toe the line. One billionaire hedge fund manager has led a crusade against pro-Palestine student protesters, calling for some of them to be locked out of the job market. Most American politicians have stood with Israel since the onset of the genocide. They have not merely demanded that university presidents follow suit, but pressured them to do so through congressional hearings evocative of the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s. Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said that the Palestine solidarity protesters should be no more tolerated than KKK racists would be on campuses.

Yet the heart of the Palestine exception is not simply the crude denial of Palestinian history and humanity. More significant is the constant overwriting of this history by a different one: that of modern European antisemitism, with which the Western academy is deeply familiar (Jewish scholars were, of course, once barred from many of the same Ivy League institutions that now crack down on Palestine solidarity encampments). With this act of substitution, the ongoing reality of Palestinian slaughter is erased from ethical consideration. Palestinians and allied students, including Jewish anti-Zionists, protesting apartheid and genocide are presented as anachronistic ‘antisemites’ by a liberal (and, interestingly enough, by the increasingly ‘conservative’ and right-wing) West which has supposedly outgrown its historic Judeophobia. By the same token, supporters of the state that carries out genocide, or those who identify with its ideology, are cast as victims in need of institutional and police protection.

Beneath this distorted discourse is the West’s selective commitment to philosemitism: its professed love of Judaism and the Jewish people, which it views as necessary to atone for its record of racism and prejudice against them. Philosemitism has, in turn, been conflated with philozionism: support for Israel’s ethno-nationalist state ideology. As a result, contemporary Palestinian subjugation has been obscured by a narrative that presents historical Jewish victimhood as more consequential, and the state of Israel as a safeguard against it. By this means, ‘fighting antisemitism’ often implies erasing Palestine, not talking about Palestinians, not acknowledging that there can be no ethical consideration of contemporary Zionism without centring the Palestinian experience of subjugation at the hands of the self-proclaimed Jewish state of Israel. This is a disastrous outcome for anyone invested in the genuine and conjoined struggle against anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian racism.

The development of this outlook can, of course, be traced back to the Nazi Holocaust that decimated European Jewry. In its aftermath, the establishment of an Israeli state was presented in the West as a means to expiate the sin of Western antisemitism. In the debates leading up to the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948, the Palestinians were described by Western diplomats as impediments to this redemptive project. Palestinian life was not valued on its own terms, but simply in relation to a Western-identified ‘Jewish problem’. As Du Bois noted in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn and Aimé Cesaire argued in his 1955 Discourse on Colonialism, the victorious Allies had portrayed Hitler as a singularly German creation, rather than recognizing him as part of a pantheon of Western leaders who had long embraced virulent racism and carried out systematic genocides against non-Western peoples. Playing to this narrative, the newly established state of Israel launched a propaganda campaign which endures today, in which it presents itself as the victim of Arab ‘terrorism’ and a bulwark against a return to antisemitic barbarism.

The persistence of these tropes means that Palestine is rarely placed in its centuries-old Ottoman and Arab context or seen as an integral part of a multireligious Mashriqi region. In the Zionist imaginary, the only possible remedy to the historic plight of the Jews in Europe was to establish a uniquely modern, European-style Jewish state in Palestine. This state, so the story goes, has since its inception been besieged by hordes of Arabs who are afflicted by the kind of antisemitic hatred that European Christians are supposed to have abandoned. In The Jews of Islam (1984), orientalist Bernard Lewis writes that Arab opposition to Israel has little to do with colonialism or dispossession; he claims that its origins lie in a new ‘Arab antisemitism’ which was imported from Europe and brought an end to peaceful Judeo-Muslim coexistence. Palestinians have no place in this story, except as inheritors of Western anti-Jewish prejudice. ‘The Arab’, as Edward Said remarked in Orientalism (1978), ‘is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew’.

It is no wonder that the Western academic hierarchy, bound to these profoundly misleading narratives, and to the political, financial, and cultural investments that sustain them, has been silent in the face of Gaza’s immolation. To change course is no easy thing. The Western world’s last settler-colonial regime, committed to an ideology born in nineteenth-century Europe, remains remarkably adept at diffusing a story that erases Palestinian humanity, including in the realm of higher education. Most students, however, no longer buy this Eurocentric erasure – nor does most of the global population.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.