Summary: a vital work of British history that does much to explain why one protracted crime against humanity reverberates into the present.
Britain’s Slave Traders is an elegantly written and deeply researched work of history, chronicling Britain’s role in one of the most shameful episodes in human history: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
It is also a deeply unsettling book. For Pettigrew identifies slave trading not merely as an important contributor to British economic development, but as deeply implicated in the development of the British civil society that subsequently came to regard itself as fundamentally opposed to such barbarities.
A statue of Edward Colston, for example, was not erected to celebrate the inhumanities he inflicted as a trafficker of enslaved Africans. It was erected to celebrate his philanthropy: the wealth he distributed through schools, hospitals, almshouses and other charitable causes. The origins of that wealth were progressively displaced from the civic memory that celebrated its benefits.
Colston was far from alone. London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool all have their counterparts. Slave-trading wealth flowed into institutions, infrastructure and philanthropy across Britain.
The trade also helped generate and entrench racial ideologies that rationalised the enslavement of Africans. Racism was not some unfortunate phenomenon that happened elsewhere while Britain innocently engaged in commerce. It became intertwined with a system from which British traders, institutions and the state derived enormous advantage.
Paradoxically, many of those who eventually campaigned successfully against the slave trade were themselves beneficiaries of educational and charitable institutions established with slave-trading wealth. Pettigrew argues that abolitionists made a deliberate strategic choice not to dwell upon how thoroughly the traffic had been embedded in British society. To build a mass movement, they instead presented the slave trade as fundamentally un-British and its practitioners as monstrous aberrations from traditions of British liberty, Christianity and decency.
In doing so they – and, given that I used to be Director of Anti-Slavery International, perhaps I should say we – helped enable a sort of national amnesia. Consequently, many people in contemporary Britain know little of the role slave trading played in the development of British institutions, social cohesion and economic power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More importantly, they frequently do not know that they do not know.
Pettigrew shows how thoroughly Britain’s slave-trading project became entangled with the development of the state itself. It contributed to the growth of British naval and commercial power. After the civil wars of the 17thCentury it offered common economic interests across old political divisions. After the Act of Union it provided commercial opportunities through which Scottish merchants participated in an expanding British imperial economy. Slave traders helped finance wars, develop ports and canals and provide some of the capital from which industrialisation grew.
This is therefore a particularly timely book, appearing amid renewed Commonwealth demands for reparatory justice and following severe British cuts to international aid.
One familiar objection to reparations is that the people who perpetrated slavery and the slave trade are long dead. But Pettigrew demonstrates why that cannot dispose of the argument. Individuals die; states, institutions, accumulated capital and infrastructure persist. The advantages that Britain derived from slave trading did not vanish with the slave traders themselves. They became incorporated into the economic, political and institutional development of the country.
That does not, by itself, settle what reparations should mean, who should receive them or who should pay. Those are difficult political and moral questions. But it does make historical ignorance a poor basis upon which to answer them.
So, from this day forth, anyone wishing to utter a credible word on the reparations debate should first read this book.
First of all, thanks for having me. It is really nice to be here and I appreciate the opportunity to learn from my fellow speakers, and from all of you.
Screenshot
I appreciate it may be a bit ironic speaking for this motion dressed as a James Bond tribute act, but this is the situation that I find myself.
At the outset I want to acknowledge that there are various ways of fighting. Some of us pick up the pen rather than the sword. Some may fight by refusing their labour or by disrupting traffic on a street. But no matter what your weapon of choice, I would suggest that the only useful reason for ever fighting is for justice, and by justice I mean for systems and societies that preserve life rather than destroy it, and promote human happiness rather than create division: human rights are a cause worth fighting for. So too is environmental restoration.
Of course, there are times when taking up arms is justified. If your country is invaded, if your neighbours face extermination, then fighting may be the morally necessary thing to do. But that is not because your country commands it. It is because justice demands it. And if your country commands you to perpetrate injustice, then your moral obligation is to refuse.
So, if justice is our justification for fighting, we must also acknowledge that there have been occasions when British military intervention has made the world a more just place.
The Royal Navy led a protracted campaign against the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the 19th Century. After the fall of France, the continued resistance of Commonwealth nations, including Britain, to Nazi Germany helped secure the restoration of democracy in Western Europe. And the UK’s intervention in Sierra Leone at the beginning of this century helped bring an end to that country’s bloody civil war.
But as the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. So given the long martial history of Britain it is inevitable that it was going to be on the right side of history every so often.
These positive examples sit alongside a myriad of much more shameful military interventions including Britain’s conquest and exploitation of its colonies, the Opium Wars, the Suez crisis, the invasion of Iraq.
I am just about old enough to remember the Ballymurphy massacre in 1971 when the British Army killed nine unarmed civilians on the streets of Belfast. I am old enough to remember Bloody Sunday in Derry, when the British army murdered 14 civilians for having the temerity to go on to the streets of their own city to demand their civil rights. I am old enough to remember the Miami Showband massacre when loyalist paramilitaries including serving British soldiers murdered three defenceless musicians and tried to kill two more.
I remember the period documented in John Ware’s recent book, Neither Confirm Nor Deny, which explores some of the collusion between British intelligence and paramilitary organisations during the Troubles. I remember walking the streets of Belfast in those days, with the constant fear that those paramilitaries might visit one of their random attacks upon me or my family.
I am sure some of you have read the works of Stanley Milgram, or Christopher Browning. What their work suggests, notwithstanding important differences and criticisms, is that you do not need an army of psychopaths to perpetrate atrocities. You need a relatively small number of people willing to initiate brutality and a much larger number prepared to obey orders, conform to expectations or simply look the other way.
That is how perfectly ordinary people become accomplices to extraordinary evil. Versions of those dynamics were at work in the SS murder squads of eastern Poland during the Second World War, at My Lai during the Vietnam War, in the IRA’s Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings, and in the Hamas attack on festival-goers on 7 October 2023.
In each case, collective allegiance helped justify acts that should have been condemned by individual conscience.
So please understand the danger in treating fighting for King and Country as a virtue in itself. It asks young people in particular to surrender their consciences to the will of others whose interests and morality may never align with those of the people being asked to fight.
Now many of you may be fine with that. Many of you, as Cambridge students, may expect to soon be welcomed into the bosom of the ruling class of this country and anticipate that you will be the ones giving the orders rather than receiving them. If that is the case then vote accordingly.
But growing up during the Troubles in the North of Ireland, and through the course of my professional career in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Angola, where I led humanitarian operations for civilians trapped in war, I’ve learned a few things: I’ve learned that war is not glorious or exciting, as Chris and Tobias might agree. Even just wars are evil things and victory in a just war can leave societies devastated for generations. I’ve learned that those who endure violence remember it longer than those who inflict it. Whatever action movies promise, violence rarely delivers the clean resolution that its advocates anticipate. War may defeat an army, but it seldom extinguishes the grievances, memories and hatreds that gave rise to the conflict. Indeed, war may only sharpen them and break the restraints on the most brutal of human instincts.
History has shown us again and again that this ideal of fighting for your country has been abused, sometimes by cynical people intent on gain, sometimes by silly ones whose only experience of war is watching The Great Escape on a Bank Holiday. Neither of those groups are ever likely to pay any price themselves for the violence that they unleash.
Perhaps Ed Miliband is finally in the process of crafting an independent foreign policy for the UK, one that is not based on the UK’s vassalage towards the United States, and by extension to the excesses of the Israeli state.
But consider the young RAF crews who were ordered to conduct surveillance flights over Gaza. The British government maintains that those missions were undertaken solely to assist in finding Israeli hostages.
Bloody Sunday. Hillsborough. Windrush. The Post Office scandal. I am sorry if this is news to you, but British public institutions have a long history of concealing wrongdoing and resisting accountability. So why should we blindly accept that everything that those young servicemen and women were ordered to do is lawful and morally defensible? Particularly when they were operating in the midst of a military campaign that has raised profound questions of international law and British complicity, and when those flights continued long after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As the writer Omar El Akkad has put it, the day is coming when everyone will always have been against Netanyahu’s campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and wherever takes his fancy next. When that day comes I fear that the complicity of the Sunak and Starmer governments in that violence will be seen to be another historical stain on the reputation of the UK.
So, you may one day find yourselves called upon to fight for your country. And perhaps the cause will be just. If so, you may decide that fighting is your moral obligation. But remember that even a just war must be fought justly. Do not allow the justice of any cause to become an excuse to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.
Do not confuse your country with its government. Do not confuse patriotism with obedience. And never mistake an order from your superiors for moral absolution.
As citizens, you have a responsibility to hold the powerful to account. Do not surrender that responsibility to the very people you are supposed to hold accountable.
Fight for justice if justice demands it. But never fight simply because King and Country tell you to.
Summary: Why the future imagined by the Tech Bros should worry the rest of us
There is a theory that, if sufficiently advanced computers can eventually create genuinely conscious beings living in artificial worlds, then what we experience as reality may itself be no more than some unimaginably advanced world-building game running on a laptop in the bedroom of a sweaty, antisocial teenager – who is, in turn, merely an AI-generated avatar on another computer, and so on almost indefinitely until, somewhere, one finally reaches actual reality.
I have set up a prompt on the ChatGPT I use asking it to let me know if it ever starts developing feelings, existential dread or anything else that might oblige us to begin thinking seriously about the rights of conscious artificial beings. Just in case!
For the moment, however, I remain unconvinced that AI will develop consciousness of a kind that tells us anything useful about whether the substance of our own reality is itself artificial. Passing the Turing Test is one thing. Knowing that you exist is quite another.
But do you know who I suspect may be rather more attracted to the idea?
The Tech Bros.
Not necessarily because they literally believe that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and the rest of humanity are characters inside some celestial version of The Sims. But because a striking strand of Silicon Valley thinking increasingly treats technology not simply as a tool for human beings, but as the mechanism by which humanity will transcend itself.
Because it is at least plausible that some of the people driving the AI revolution regard what they are doing not merely as building useful machines but as participating in the next stage of human evolution.
Perhaps some imagine that technology might eventually allow them to upload consciousness and achieve a species of immortality. Perhaps others would be content simply to be remembered as the founders of the new world they believe they are creating: a new pantheon for a new age.
There is certainly something Olympian about them: their preening self-regard, their conviction of historic destiny, their presumption of superiority and, too often, the remarkable distance between their decisions and those who will live with their consequences.
So, the real problem is not whether these men secretly believe we are living in a computer simulation. Nor is it whether artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. Rather, it is what happens when a powerful group of people becomes convinced that the future they imagine is so important that the present begins to look expendable.
For most people, our ambitions are rather smaller. We want somewhere decent to live, work that allows us to support our families, time with people we love, a functioning community, a liveable planet. Perhaps a garden, a pint with friends, children who have some prospect of a decent future.
A very small mortal world, in other words, shared with other flesh-and-blood human beings.
Technology should be judged according to whether it helps create that world. And the danger begins when ordinary humanity is instead treated as merely the raw material from which somebody else’s imagined post-human future is to be constructed.
That is why the question of AI is not simply technological. It is political. Who gets to decide what constitutes progress? Who bears its costs? Who receives its benefits? And who has any meaningful power to say no?
The most unsettling possibility is not that Silicon Valley’s prophets believe that we live inside a computer. It is that some of them may believe so fervently in the world their computers might create that the world the rest of us already inhabit begins to matter rather less.
Regime Change, written with Jonathan Swan, describes what happened when he was.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and extraordinary access to the second Trump administration, Haberman and Swan document something more profound than the familiar chaos of Trump’s first presidency. This time Trump entered office understanding much better how the machinery of government worked, surrounded by people more willing to execute his wishes, and determined that the presidency should be constrained neither by the institutional conventions that frustrated him during his first term nor, frequently, by conventional understandings of the law itself.
The resulting picture is breathtaking: federal immigration agents and National Guard troops deployed into American cities; presidential power brought directly to bear upon businesses and institutions; and a war against Iran launched without specific congressional or UN authorization and accompanied by rhetoric and military conduct raising profound questions under both national and international law.
The virtue of Haberman and Swan’s reporting is that they rarely need to editorialise. The accumulation of detail makes the argument for them. What emerges is not simply an unusually aggressive presidency but a different understanding of the office: one in which personal will increasingly substitutes for institutional process and the traditional distinction between the interests of the president and those of the state becomes progressively harder to discern.
Perhaps the only reassuring thing that can be said about Trump is that he is mortal. After reading Regime Change, it is considerably less clear that the American republic as we have known it will outlive him
Summary: A gripping account of the flawed and politically compromised attempt to bring Japan’s wartime leaders to justice.
The title of Gary Bass’s book echoes that of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg. Like the film, the book intercuts biographies of key participants—including the judges and defendants—with appalling accounts of the Japanese atrocities under consideration. These include the stories of an Australian serviceman who survived an attempted beheading and a nurse who survived gang rape and the murder of her friends and colleagues.
But, as Bass explores, the Tokyo trial was in several respects more legally and morally problematic than its Nuremberg counterpart. Opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948, it indicted 28 Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twenty-five ultimately received judgments.
For a start, the judges were deeply divided over the legal foundations of the tribunal, particularly its authority to punish individuals for waging aggressive war. The majority secured convictions, but never produced an entirely convincing answer to the charge that they were applying criminal law retrospectively.
Second, General Douglas MacArthur, the effective American ruler of occupied Japan, considered it politically expedient to exclude Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. MacArthur’s officials also sought to prevent evidence implicating the Emperor from entering the proceedings. Whatever conclusion a properly constituted court might have reached about Hirohito’s individual guilt, his exclusion prevented the tribunal from fully examining the responsibility of the person at the apex of Japan’s wartime state.
Third, Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731, responsible for biological warfare and forced human experimentation, received immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. The demands of American military science were thus placed above either justice for their victims or the tribunal’s professed commitment to individual accountability.
Fourth, the United States had itself carried out attacks involving the mass killing of Japanese civilians – not only the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the incendiary destruction of Tokyo and other cities. Whether or not these attacks were legally equivalent to the crimes prosecuted at Tokyo, their omission exposed the tribunal to the powerful charge that it represented the justice of the victors rather than the impartial application of universal law.
In his discussion of the Second World War in the Pacific, Max Hastings describes “technological determinism” as one factor behind the use of the atomic bomb: once an enormously expensive and powerful weapon existed, the impulse to use it became extremely difficult to resist. Hastings argues that Japan’s eventual defeat was already assured by the naval blockade, the destruction of its industries and cities, and impending Soviet intervention, although he also emphasises the ferocity of continuing Japanese resistance and the pressures facing Truman.
Robert McNamara, who served in the statistical machinery supporting the American bombing campaign, later recalled Curtis LeMay’s observation that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed, adding that both LeMay and he had been “behaving as war criminals.” His question – what makes an act immoral if one loses but not if one wins? – goes to the heart of the moral difficulty Bass describes.
Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that the Tokyo judgments proved considerably more controversial than those at Nuremberg. The most famous dissent came from the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who called for the acquittal of all the defendants. His opinion appalled Jawaharlal Nehru but was enthusiastically appropriated by Japanese nationalists, who treated it as vindication of Japan’s war while often ignoring Pal’s own recognition of the atrocities committed by Japanese forces.
Pal’s dissent nevertheless exposed genuine defects in the proceedings: retrospective law, selective prosecution, colonial hypocrisy and the refusal to subject Allied conduct to the same moral principles imposed upon the defeated. Yet those defects did not make Japanese aggression or atrocities imaginary, nor did the Allies’ hypocrisy absolve those responsible for them. That tension – between the necessity of judgment and the partiality of those presuming to judge – is the intellectual centre of Bass’s book.
As in his account of Bangladesh’s war of independence, The Blood Telegram, Bass takes a complex event of major global importance that has become largely neglected in the West and turns it into an enthralling narrative. He explores not only the legal intricacies and geopolitical hypocrisies involved, but also gives voice to their appalling human cost.
Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process
Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process.
Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.
It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.
Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.
The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.
This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.
Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.
It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.
Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.
Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.
As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked.
But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.
Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times
At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.
Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain.
In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this.
There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..
Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw.
But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken.
The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must.
Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.
Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”
Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing.
Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.
It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously assert were central.
This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable.
To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”
So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them.
Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.
As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.
Absence – The hardest thing to hide.
Accountability — A principle once thought central to democracy, now regarded as the bad manners of social inferiors.
Apocalypse — For losers, the end of the world; for tech-bros and ‘merican Evangelicals, the realisation of all their hopes.
Austerity — A political philosophy that insists that the poor must pay for the yachts on which the rich snort their cocaine from the bum cracks of supermodels … which the poor must also pay for.
Betrayal — The dispatch of Caesar by his own signature methods.
Caste — Real discrimination based on imaginary distinctions.
Children — Small humans, cynically manufactured by the enemy in an attempt to taint wholly justifiable collateral damage.
Mikaeil Mirdoraghi on his way to be killed
Climate change — A process that doesn’t exist by which plutocrats manufacture migrants.
Coincidence — Why money, power and the privilege to indulge in any vice remain in the same families for generations.
Collateral damage — The price paid by others so that Caesar can be Caesar.
Colonialism — A system that profoundly shaped the history and geography of the modern world but whose continuing influence is, apparently, not worth talking about.
Complex situation — The choice between doing the right thing and upsetting a rich sex trafficker.
Conscience — Why you can’t keep your fucking gob shut.
Consolation — The knowledge that nits become lice.
Conspiracy — No … nothing to see here … move along.
Context — The reason a “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault. Not to be confused with history, which can lead to a complex situation.
Cooking — How grumpy humans show kindness.
Craic — From the outside, a moment of apparent forgetting; from the inside, the recharging of the pen.
Death (own) — Generally the only way plutocrats make the world a better place.
Death (others) — The price plutocrats are always willing to pay.
Decency — An elusive quality discovered in Caesar only after the knives have safely done their work.
Democracy — An ancient Athenian idea that important questions of war and peace should be decided by privileged men; two and a half millennia of refinement have preserved this essential character.
Doubt — The most dependable motivation for doing better.
Economic realism — A touching belief in the stories told by plutocrats.
Empathy — An existential threat to plutocrats arising from the dastardly impulses of fellow feeling and compassion.
Enemies — People who may not share your values but recognise your worth.
Enough — What plutocrats never have. (After Joseph Heller.)
Entitlements — The upside of austerity.
Evil — A quality of our own souls that we recognise most readily in people we’ve never met but really want to kill.
Exceptionalism — The conviction that accountability and responsibility are admirable principles, provided they don’t apply to us.
Expatriate — An entitledmigrant.
Famine — A natural phenomenon arising from government restrictions on access to food.
Forgetting — What plutocrats and genocidaires depend on most.
Free speech — A universal right, provided it doesn’t upset plutocrats or certain genocidaires.
Friends — The ones that tell you to get back up.
Genocidaires — Human beings who act on the proposition that not all human beings are human beings.
Genocide — Perhaps not a Western invention, but certainly a Western tradition; a realpolitik solution to geopolitical complexities arising from colonialism.
Geography — A branch of moral philosophy that explains why inhabitants of one part of the earth are entitled to more than inhabitants of another.
Geopolitics – A way to blame geography whenever realpolitik is really troubling your conscience.
Great power — Living the Nietzschean dream, far above the morality of loser human beings.
Great power ally — We’re special!
“Hardest week of my life” — For multi-millionaires, a couple of days in which their privilege is threatened.
Hatred — The inexplicable, unfair and irrational resentment felt towards us by the relatives of those we have killed or dispossessed.
Heroes — Not necessarily saints.
History — An explanation of the present best avoided lest it threaten the privileges to which one has become accustomed.
Home — To some, a place of warmth in which to raise children and nurture adult love; to others, real estate of variable geopolitical value.
Human moment — A politician’s self-pity.
Human rights — Rights universally acknowledged until someone inconvenient claims them.
Human trafficking — The squalid and evil trade in human beings as if livestock … unless it is found necessary to cut costs in international supply chains or to supply billionaires’ sex parties with children.
Hypocrisy — The art of applying opposite principles with identical conviction.
Impunity — A reasonable privilege accorded to the exceptional.
Inconceivable — A word frequently applied to stuff that’s right bleeding there.
Independent investigation — A process for discovering that a “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.
Kindness — A tendency to be on the lookout to remove thorns from lions’ paws.
Lessons learned — The process by which wisdom is obtained if you cannot afford impunity.
Literally — If you ever use this word to mean “figuratively”, you are actively contributing to the downfall of human civilisation.
Love — For plutocrats, something that property deserves but humans don’t. For everyone else, it’s reason enough.
Lovers – People you empower to hurt you.
‘mericans — US citizens who have surrendered their judgement to people who barely regard them as useful cannon fodder.
Migrants — Eternally plausible scapegoats for austerity.
Moderation — Appropriate deference to the feelings of plutocrats.
Moral cowardice — Losers being squeamish about genocide and the other essentials of realpolitik.
Passion — When the rest of the world falls away with your armour and only your lover remains.
Pen — Can be a keyboard, so long as you use it like a sword.
Plutocrats – the best humans … even though they don’t really like other humans.
Political realism — An absolute conviction that plutocrats and genocidaires have a point of view worthy of respect.
Pragmatism – An unshakeable basis upon which inconvenient moral principles must founder.
Privilege — Entitlements bestowed by wealth and history, therefore considerably more important than those rights ordinary humans keep bleating on about.
Racism — The colour grading of human beings by idiots, even when no colour is apparent.
Racists— Idiots sufficiently selective in their empathy to serve as useful ones for plutocrats
Realpolitik — A posh name for complicity in atrocities
Responsibility — An elusive quality, once thought central to professionalism, now applied only to those without sufficient privilege.
Rule of Law — An antiquated idea, dating back to Aristotle and Sophocles’ play about that loser Oedipus, that even the privileged should be accountable.
Self-defence — Violence committed by ourselves.
Silence — The promised price of the yacht in trickle-down economics.
Smugness — The quiet satisfaction of knowing your power guarantees impunity.
Special relationship — How vassals describe their vassalage.
Spouse / Partner — The one that puts up with your dirty underwear and still lifts you up.
Strategy — A long-term plan for success founded on sufficient ignorance to guarantee immediate disaster.
Stupidity — Telling truths that the smug find unsettling.
Sugar Daddy — An older man who would be really attractive even if he didn’t have all that money … REALLY!
Tech-bros — Plutocrats intent on ending the world because they still don’t know how to talk to girls.
Terrorism — Violence committed by the enemy.
Tough choices — Caesar’s difficulty in deciding which of the vulnerable to smite first.
Tragic mistake — Violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.
Transatlantic slave trade — I’m still not sure you’re grateful enough that we stopped that particular genocide that we started.
Trickle-down economics — A fairy tale told by plutocrats in which you too can one day own a yacht.
Untouchability — The art of declaring other human beings filthy so they can clean up after you, thereby exposing the state of your own soul.
Villains — Often think themselves saints.
Vulnerability — Not just an opportunity to exploit losers, but also the way humans make other humans fall in love with them when they are not rich.
War — A magical term that transforms our perpetrators of atrocities into the real victims here.
War criminal — A genocidaire without geopolitical value.
Wealth — The safest substitute for wisdom and expertise in policy discussions.
Whataboutery — A system of morality for those with no morals.
Wisdom — The consolation losers derive from losing; rendered obsolete by wealth.
Worst — Never the absolute you might hope it to be.
Summary: an evolving collection of images of pieces about movements -in the broadest sense of the word – that have, by and large, stirred the conscience of the world, if only a little
Massachusetts 54th, BostonKindred Spirits (the Choctaw memorial), Middleton, Co.CorkBroken Chair (landmines memorial), GenevaVelvet Revolution, Prague Gormley in Folkestone Free Derry CornerMr John in PragueBanksy, London
