“We are on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East…”
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General 16 October 2023
The Israel-Gaza Crisis, as the United Nations describes the situation, has shocked the world, and confronted us with the difficulties of living in a time of war. How can we respond to these shocking events mindfully, given the torrents of emotion coursing around the world? How can we use history not to nurse grievance, but to nurture empathy, and so to restore peace?
Fragments of the Burning Archive is my live journal of historical writing on how we are to live, now, in this time of crisis, war, peace, ruin and fragile hope.
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This week again I am making my premium content (the world history view) available to all subscribers. Before the world history view on the Israel-Gaza Crisis, let us take some glimpses at four quadrants of the world crisis: great power rivalry, social fragmentation, political decay and cultural renewal.
World Crisis Glimpses
I will be commenting on the Israel-Gaza crisis in this newsletter. I stress I have no side in this conflict, and condemn all forms of atrocity and breaches of human rights. I do not need to choose a side, nor to fight a war. I urge empathy for all. I see insight through compassion for all actors and victims, opponents and allies, and even uninvolved bystanders. Peace can only be accomplished through talking with strangers and enemies.
Great Power Rivalry
In little more than a week, there have been thousands of deaths in the Israel-Gaza crisis, and dramatic changes in the power and prestige of the two great states of the Western world, the USA and the European Union. At the outset of the events, some commentators thought that these powers would use the events to rally the Western world behind America and Israel. The Russian playbook was taken out. People stood with Israel as they had with Ukraine. The Israeli flag was projected onto the monuments of the Western world. The Western media spoke with one hive mind, again.
But, as Paul Valèry said, History is the science of what never happens twice. The horrors of initial atrocities were shrouded by the terrors of thousands of bombs dropped on the civilians of Gaza. Allegations of terrorism on one side were countered by claims of ethnic cleansing on the other. Righteous demonstrations of support for Israel’s right to defend itself were swamped by rightful protests that no human actor can claim an unlimited right for vengeance.
Divisions within Western politics and society emerged, including the EU and the USA. Notably the Muslim world unified, motivated by a credible threat to one of its most holy sites. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all BRICS+ states to be, acted as one. The Arab States coordinated pleas to the UN Secretary-General. Indonesia, Australia’s nearest neighbour and the world’s largest Islamic country, played an active role in diplomacy including with Russia and China. Those two superpowers mediated and proposed a peace conference for an enduring settlement with a state of Israel and of Palestine, as resolved by the UN in the early 1970s. The week ended with the disastrous diplomatic failures of Biden and Blinken, with Biden’s summit cancelled. Mumbled incoherent words about freedom and grief were watched mournfully by a Secretary of State chained to a dying empire.
https://twitter.com/Angelo4justice3/status/1714775261873627160
Rats started to jump from the sinking diplomatic starship, USS Exceptionalism. The Financial Times (of London) reported one senior G7 diplomat as saying
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Political Order
Many people including the elites did not expect events to turn out this way. It seems since 2020, or even before, political leaders have grown accustomed to a public culture and political order in which there is only one acceptable view.
When the word went out on the events in Israel and Gaza, it seemed they expected a similar unified response. It was again an “unprovoked” attack. It was again unified controlled media shouting the one acceptable view at the public. Anything else would be censored and banned as misinformation. It was again time to denounce anyone who dared to question what lay beneath these murky moral waters. These quibblers had lost their moral compass. They were terrorist sympathisers. They were haters.
But in this case the long tradition of divided loyalties and moral qualms on the Israel-Palestine issue broke the four year pattern of politics without argument. Too many people fell on the other side of the argument. There was too much evidence of error on both sides. The problem required serious negotiation, not spectacular waving of flags.
Moreover, a problem of political order in the imperial centre emerged. Great empires offer power and prestige for the elites they recruit from the provinces; but in exchange those elites draw the metropolis into endless, fruitless provincial wars. The post-Soviet and Ukrainian diaspora in the USA, Canada and Western Europe helped drag NATO into its long war against Russia, on the false pretext of a war of national liberation for democratic Ukraine. Similarly, dual loyalties are at play amongst Israeli and American elites, and in the American homeland all sorts of catastrophic fantasies are entertained on the questionable assumption that the wealthy, metropolitan elites will not have to bear the consequences. This was demonstrated most spectacularly this week with the conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, entertaining the “Samson” option of nuclear war in West Asia, from the comfort of his American radio studio. Provincial elites in over-extended empires keep the endless wars burning.
Social Fragmentation
The attempt to replicate the communal hatred against Russia of 2022 did not work, and would not work in the fragmented societies we have become. In the West, Islam cannot be cancelled in the way that Russia Today was taken off air in 2022.
There have been some spectacular protests around the world about events in both Israel and Gaza over the last week. For example, despite a Presidential ban on pro-Palestine protests in France, a large crowd appeared:
https://twitter.com/sahouraxo/status/1715065436587343982
A group of American Jews stormed the Capitol building in Washington to protest in support of a ceasefire and Palestinian rights. Will they now be jailed like the participants of the January 6 2020 allegedly insurrectionary riot?
There have been a few cases of hate speech and over-excited emotion, but, as far as I know, few cases of violence or committed venom. We need to learn to live again with open protests against the regime and the current thing. We should be able to be a society of islands, and not a swarm of followers all with the same icon in our bio.
Cultural Renewal
Curiously during this week - of all weeks - a group of journalists and public intellectuals (a scientific term for writers who take themselves too seriously) launched a Westminster declaration to combat cancel culture, censorship, and silencing of dissent. You can read this declaration here.
Among the authors or grandees who gave their name to this declaration are Matt Taibbi, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Julian Assange, Richard Dawkins, Jeffrey Sachs, Glenn Greenwald, Jordan B. Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Matt Ridley. It is a motley crew with a mixed record of practising what they preach when it is difficult, and no track record of producing consensus declarations. For this reason, the prose of the declaration does not sing:
We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.
Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity - through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.
The commitments they declare support for are similarly weak.
We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.
And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people's democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.
The focus on the “Censorship Industrial Complex” reads more like a log of claims by commercial writers, than a deep concern with all people who struggle to live in truth. For example, none of the concerns about restrictions on speech and thought of public servants that I wrote about in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat are even entertained. I think it is regrettably Anglophone, in the week that Xi Jinping announced more developments in the Global Civilizations Initiative, that free thought should be declared under the name of the Palace of Westminster. Am I being unkind?
World History View
Empathy and endurance in a time of war
we are on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General 16 October 2023
The Israel-Gaza Crisis has pushed the world to the edge of the abyss, as António Guterres, UN Secretary-General. We are confronted with the difficulties of living in a time of war. How can we respond to these shocking events mindfully, given the torrents of emotion coursing around the world? How can we use history not to nurse grievance, but to nurture empathy, and so to restore peace?
I talk about these issues this week on my podcast. I share thoughts from Simon Schama, the distinguished British-Jewish historian and author of a history of the Jewish peoples. I also explore the importance of empathy to respond to these events. Some might say a lack of “strategic empathy” brought these wars into being. A little bit more empathy might help cool tempers and restore dialogue and diplomacy.
I also read from two poems that reflect on the grief, horror and laments inspired by war. I read the final lament or keening of the Geatish woman in Beowulf.
Then another dirge rose, woven uninvited
by a Geatish woman, louder than the rest.
She tore her hair and screamed her horror
at the hell that was to come; more of the same.
Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes
marching across her country, claiming her body.
The sky sipped the smoke and smiled.
Beowulf, transl Maria Dahvana Headley
And I read the great Wislawa Szymborska, whose The End and the Beginning starts:
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Many die in war, and many feel they have no good choices but to endure and to survive. These wars will bring many losers, and ultimately all wars are lost. History is written by the losers, not only the victors.
“After a lost war one should only write comedies” Novalis
It seems likely that one of the losers of the wars to come will be the West. Disappointment will come to all those American politicians who call to bomb Iran and ‘finish them’, the anonymous evil that cannot be named. The time for comedies, however, has not yet come to the West; but it will come.
Until then the world must shelter in the shadows of this looming catastrophe. The shadows have been growing darker since February 2022 when the Special Military Operation began in February 2022. But the shadows did not begin nor end there. I have stared into this abyss perhaps too intently ever since then. I wrote about it in The West’s grand Illusions in Ukraine
Overconfidence about success in war provokes war, makes for long wars, and springs from the grand illusions of national elites. Truth will disperse the illusion. It may take weeks. It may take months or years. But, at some stage, there will be a reckoning.
That reckoning is coming, but has not come yet. However, events of the last week have drawn it closer, even as they imperil the world. Still none of us can stare into the abyss of war for too long. As Nietzsche wrote in Good and Evil,
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
I had intended this week to write a longer piece, even a chapter for my next book on the world crisis about war and what we have learned about war through this world crisis since 2020. But in the end I had to turn away from the abyss for my own good, and dear reader perhaps you should do so too
I did however discuss some of my fears and assessments in this interview with Hrvoje Moric on TNT radio.
And I also continued to read a very fine book that has changed my understanding of the mythic, ancestral War of the Ancients in the West, World War Two. Richard Overy Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-45 (2021) is a brilliant reinterpretation of World War Two that I will write more about. On another podcast, Overy observed that military historians and imperial historians have tended to follow separate tracks, and that his reframing of the war in this book was influenced by John Darwin After Tamerlane (which I recommend to all readers). His account of the tides and swirls of empires over the last 500 years has deeply influenced me. Empires, especially in the American language, is a term of abuse, but it may be seen as a more descriptive term. It has taken many forms, and the rivalry between great states has often caused and been a consequence of war.
So it is today. The world crisis has certainly laid bare the American elite’s addiction to war. But the great error of so many observers and Western elites is to make false comparisons with the great mythic war of World War Two. It has shaped our minds. It has shaped our armies. It has shaped our culture, and stories of war. But today’s wars are not the same.
Today’s wars are not a repetition of democracies fighting the axis powers. It is not a second or third cold war. It is however a war intricately linked to the new form of empire that formed after 1945, and dreamt of itself as the universal republic after 1991. That Universal Republic, the USA, assumed it had walked through a singular door in 1991 and achieved the status of immortal empire in the virtual reality world that it created. But in fact the other great states of the world were never that subordinate, and once the mirage of progressive liberalism and American exceptionalism broke - whether in 2001 or 2008 or 2016 or the disastrous years since 2020 - the other powers of the world would always come into their own.
But since February 2022 we entered a new period of conflict, in which these great states and many middle powers challenge, and prepare for the world that succeeds Anglo-American hegemony. The over-extended empire is being exposed on its many flanks. It will ultimately need to withdraw and allow space for the other powers of the world to find a new settlement and a new order.
If the last imperial war ended in 1945 and created the world of nation states, this is a global war of independence that will require a refashioning of the order of the united nations. Those nations will be gathered together under international law, but not united under one culture, one leader, one universal empire.
Or at least that is the hope we may cling to. I do not know how long these wars may last. Let us take Overy’s dates for WW2 as a guide, 14 years from Japan’s incursions into China to America committing a nuclear crime on Hiroshima. If we round that up to fifteen years, then we just need to settle when the Global Wars of Independence begin. Did they begin with the USA incursion into Ukraine in 2014? In which case we may expect the rest of this decade to be an experience of war. If they begin in 2022, we will spend most of the next two decades in war, and I will be 75 before we may see a world of a symphony of civilizations again.
But beyond the big issues about which we can do so little, war is experienced by individuals, including by citizens. We have all been conscripted into this culture war.
We all need to find ways to endure the coming years of war, including those who may need to defend those they do not love, and those who eventually will need to clean up afterwards
But we must avoid the cataclysm. History, if practised mindfully, can be a resource to do so, and to contemplate the moral, cultural, personal and political challenges we face if these coming years of war are to yield to a symphony of civilizations rather than devastating wars of crusade and revenge.
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Incompetent leaders, abetted by rabid warmongers that infest all Western governments, were responsible for the two World Wars.
Of the three governments that matter today, only one has incompetent leadership.
Putin is the best leader since Stalin and Xi the best since Mao*.
Each has more smarts, guns and money than Sleepy Joe.
It's just bluster. It's over.
* Says Harvard's John King Fairbank, “The simple facts of Mao’s career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28, with a dozen others, to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao’s scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao’s achievement is almost beyond our comprehension".