“There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character.”
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012)
The shadows of war and humanitarian crises in Gaza and Ukraine fell over the last week while I enjoyed a short beach holiday. Thank you for your forbearance since my holiday has delayed and shortened this edition of the newsletter. However, there are uncertain glimpses of peace amidst these catastrophes. Perhaps, the sleepwalkers will wake before escalating current conflicts into another disastrous world war.
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.
Just some quick reminders. Tune into my podcast (Spotify, Apple or other platforms).
Watch my YouTube channel, including my playlist on the Nobels, reviews of quality history books and commentary on world affairs.
And check out all my content at www.theburningarchive.com.
My next newsletter will be published on 11 November (eerie coincidence?) from which date I will be reurning to the weekly schedule.
World Crisis Glimpses
Great Power Rivalry
The UN General Assembly resolution of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza marks a decisive moment in the redistribution of global diplomatic power.
The UN General Assembly voted 121 to 14 (with 44 abstentions) in favour of a resolution for an immediate truce in the Israel-Gaza crisis. The full Resolution includes numerous preparatory statements of principle, and fourteen active clauses of resolution to prevent any deepening of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. In the primary and decisive clause, the United Nations “Calls for an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.”
The UAE ambassador, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, who represents one of the new BRICS member states made a powerful statement. She said:
“The drums of war are beating. Taking these warnings seriously begins with stopping this war in Gaza. We do not serve Israel’s security by enabling it to go on. We cannot reverse the heinous 7 October attacks by Hamas by condoning this war in which civilians are paying the price.”
By contrast the US Ambassador of the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, displayed the manners of a sore loser, and said,
“it is outrageous that this resolution fails to name the perpetrators of the October 7th terrorist attacks: Hamas. Hamas. It is outrageous…These are omissions of evil.”
The USA looks isolated, sullen and inept in its diplomacy. It now needs to learn how to accept defeat with grace and more humility, and even to learn something from it.
Political Order
If the USA and other Western elites do accept a lower, but realistic status in the world, it will have consequences for domestic political order within those states. Running an empire creates many positions of high status and many sinecures in government, media and academies. The retrenchment of empire will require some structural adjustment among the political and intellectual elite. However, it has not happened yet; as we can see in the responses of the various contenders, including Trump and RF Kennedy Jr, to the Israel-Gaza Crisis.
Social Fragmentation
But we have seen the breakdown of the consensus of the last five years that there can be only one acceptable political opinion. “Bipartisan consensus” is often demanded on foreign policy and defence matters, but it is rarely based on a common community view, especially in multi-ethnic, multicultural states. In recent years, there has been a widespread assumption in domestic and foreign policy matters that there is one right thing to think on most, if not all, issues of public debate; and anyone who expresses a a different view is at risk of cancellation. Especially in the last five years of Trump and anti-Trump, COVID, the NATO-Russia-Ukraine War and other social-moral debates, political discussion has sweltered in an oppressive climate of single-mindedness. People who doubted the public health line on COVID were anathematised; people who doubted that NATO was purely a ‘defensive alliance’ or Ukraine a ‘liberal democracy’ were cast out as stooges of Putin.
But there a signs of a weakening of the fever of cancel culture and our very modern Newspeak. The tone of our recent political debate was famously captured in Orwell’s 1984. There Oceania fought Eurasia, who it declared evil. Big Brotehr interprted reality to all its citizens. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Like Orwell’s sate, our state and media declare on the occasion of every international conflict that war is peace, and ignorance is strength. They designate the enemy to be hated, not only because they opposed some interests, but they represent evil itself, as exemplified in Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s rhetoric on Hamas. At the outset of the Isreal-Gaza Crisis, the media and state actors attempted the same perfomance of “Standing With X,” complete with flags inserted in biods and projected onto public buildings. But the long established social basis for support for Palestine within so many ‘Western societies’ created obstacles to this kind of communitarian belief. Our society did not stand as one in the conduct of the next foreign war against some of our own identities. The pendulum may have swung, and we may all need to learn the virtues of talking with people of different outlooks and varied values.
Cultural Renewal
The horror of yet another war led by America, therefore, may end up doing more for a culture of tolerance and true diversity of opinion than all the harangues from Jordan Petersen, or the earnestly ineffective Westminster declaration. Culture may be the way of the pilgrim and the refugee from these times of wailing empires, broken politics and fragmented societies. Culture can restore the practice of detachment, and all the cultures of the multipolar world can offer many paths out of the impasse that the West has created. Rather than listening to the jaded jeremiads of more Western liberal intellectuals, I find myself finding my own Narrow Road to the Deep North in Basho’s practice of haiba, the mixed form essay including both prose and poetry.
World History View
Will the Sleepwalkers Wake?
“There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character.”
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012)
I have been very worried for some time now that the leaders of the international rules-based order are sleepwalking to war, in a way similar to European and American elites before World War One, as described in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012).
This concern has increased in the last few weeks with the reports that the USA positioned aircraft carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea in a posture of “self-defence” and in preparation for American ‘shock and awe’ salvos against Iran.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Burning Archive to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.