Category Archives: War

Things worth fighting for? Justice, not for kings

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Summary: speech to the Cambridge Union, 22 October 2026

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.

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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.

The Birthday Boys, by Samuel Thompson

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Summary: the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives

Sam Thompson’s first novel, Nights in Armour, a fine account of the lives of peelers during the Troubles, had something of the seminal 1980s cop show Hill Street Blues about it. The Birthday Boys brings to mind a rather different television series, thirtysomething … though the Birthday Boys of the title are now closer to sixty than thirty.

Marine Boy, Fred, Carp and Dougie were friends at school in Belfast and have kept in touch over the decades, making a point of meeting for birthdays. Their lives have meanwhile diverged, sometimes wildly. Through them Thompson explores everything from marriage and bringing up teenagers to homophobia to war. The opening chapter’s visceral account of combat on Las Malvinas during the 1982 Falklands War put me in mind of some of Norman Mailer’s descriptions of battle in The Naked and the Dead.

Inevitably, lives spanning nearly sixty years accumulate their share of tragedy. But even at its bleakest, The Birthday Boys holds to a hopeful idea: that apparently ordinary people can rise to moments of heroism, and even the most despairing life can be redeemed.

Judgement at Tokyo, by Gary J. Bass

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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.

Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

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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.

21st Century Candidates for Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

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Summary: an evolving list

Ambrose Bierce, 1842 -1914

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 entitled migrant.

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.

The careless application of high explosives: reflections in the shadow of the unlawful US-Israel assault on Iran

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Summary: The myth that violence solves problems persists despite history often proving the opposite.

At the end of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George shoots his friend Lennie. Lennie, a well-meaning but simple-minded man, does not understand his own strength or the fragility of others. So, he has accidentally killed a young woman, and George knows that if the mob reaches him first Lennie will be tortured before he dies. 

Steinbeck understood something that popular culture often forgets: violence rarely solves anything cleanly. Yet in cinema it frequently does. From Westerns to modern action films, societies’ problems are tidily resolved by lethal force.

Wyatt Earp invariably sorts out his society’s ills by use of his six-guns. James Bond’s liquidation of supervillains always makes the world a better place. 

The satisfactory resolution of daunting problems through the use of violence is so commonplace a trope in cinema that it is perhaps now as deeply embedded a cultural idea in the West as that of Santa, and the Easter Bunny. However, unlike these last two myths, some adults seem to continue to believe it. 

Put another way, in spite of the vast historical evidence to the contrary, they believe that the most complex of geo-political problems can be solved, as Eddie Izzard’s character says in the movie Valkyrie, “with the careful application of high explosives.”

Anyone who has any experience of actual war will attest that the matter is much less clear-cut. Violence tends to be the bluntest instrument in problem solving, often ineffective and opening as many new problems as it was meant to resolve. 

As Shakespeare warned, in war the dogs are let slip. The ensuing carnage leads to the ties that bind society being sundered, civilians being slaughtered in even the most “surgical” of military strikes, and the infrastructure of daily life being decimated. 

There may be diverse reasons that people celebrate the unlawful 2026 US-Israeli assaults on Iran and studiously ignore the piles of children’s corpses that have resulted. What those celebrating have in common is a lack of empathy with the innocent falling under the weight of metal, and a lack of imagination about what will transpire. In particular, they fail to conceive of the legacy of bitterness that will result. 

Violence rarely ends a conflict. More often it plants the seeds of the next one. As James Baldwin noted, “The perpetrator always forgets; the victim never does.” Societies that know little history never learn this truth. That has long been true of much of England. It is also true now of the United States. 

Anyone who watched the Tucker Carlson interview with US Senator Ted Cruz will have been struck that US foreign policy is being made now by the spectacularly ignorant. Cruz did not even know the population of a country he thought the US should invade. 

Such people are malicious contemporary equivalents of Steinbeck’s Lenny – simple-mindedly disdainful of complexity, absent of empathy, and contemptuous of those who are fragile before their military strength. 

The world is currently in the hands of such dangerous buffoons, people who treat violence as a solution and assume they will never face consequences for the murderous destruction they unleash. 

Even Steinbeck would be at a loss to find a neat narrative resolution to deliver us from their evil. 

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

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Summary: Theatre in a theatre of brutal war.

Glorious Exploits is something of a literary first cousin to Michael Hughes’ superb Country, a retelling of the Iliad transposed to the mountains of South Armagh during the Troubles. 

Like Hughes, Lennon tells his story of the ancient world in an Irish vernacular – Dublish, in this instance – and the result is a comparable dark magic that brings to unsettling life a barbarous moment from humanity’s bleak history. 

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Athenian invasion of Sicily two literature loving Syracuse potters, Lampo, the narrator, and his childhood pal, Gelon, take to visiting the prisoners, exchanging food for snatches of Euripides. After a while Gelon has the idea of staging a full production of Euripides’ masterpieces Medea, and his new play, The Trojan Women, with the doomed Athenian prisoners in the quarry where they are quartered. 

Though his motives are never fully explained, one gets the sense that Gelon hopes to provoke an empathy for the prisoners similar to that Euripides encourages his audiences to feel for his tragic protagonists. This, perhaps, might save both some prisoners and a threatened portion of Syracuse’s soul as it hovers on the edge of a monumental war crime.  

The story is based on a true episode in the ghastly Peloponnesian War, and Lennon’s imaginative exploration of it in turn seeks to provoke in the reader an empathy for the long-dead, and help understanding that war’s pities are a constant in human history.  

Glorious Exploits is a wonderful book. 

The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism, by Eric Lee

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Summary: an account of how an abortive insurrection in Georgia irrevocably split the Left

There is an anecdote in Cyril Cusack’s short book, The Humour is on Me, about a TV cameraman filming pro-British, loyalist, rioting in Belfast during the 1970s. The unfortunate journalist was set upon by a woman armed with an umbrella, offended by the fact that he was “filming things that were not actually happening.”

Similar attitudes have surfaced in other wars and conflicts before and since, including the Bolshevik onslaught on Georgia, the subject of Eric Lee’s The August Uprising. This fine book recounts the doomed 1924 revolt against Soviet rule and the moral choices it exposed, which ultimately divided the socialist movement itself.

Lee shows how those habits of denial, later seen on the streets of Belfast, flourished among Stalin’s defenders. He records some particularly shameful examples of propaganda from apologists for whom partisan loyalty mattered more than facts, decency, or human life.

Lee’s book follows the chronology of Georgian history, roughly from the outset of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, through the overthrow of the government of Georgia in 1921 to the bloody crushing of Georgian independence efforts in 1924. In describing the machinations of the Bolsheviks, Lee shows that the brute force used by Stalin and his associates in suppressing Georgian independence prefigured later atrocities, including Stalin’s murderous assault on the Russian people, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.

What makes Lee’s account compelling is not simply its chronicling of another crushed national movement, but its portrayal of a deeper struggle, between democratic socialism and the totalitarian impulses that would consume it.

While the facts on the ground created by battles, torture chambers and execution grounds may have been decisive in establishing the nature of many Eastern European societies, the ideas that diverse leaders used to justify such violence were also of vital importance to many. 

Trotsky, writing an introduction to one such work, noted it was composed “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war.” One suspects that, as commander of the Red Army, he might have had more urgent matters than writing a work of political philosophy. But perhaps reassuring himself of his righteousness helped him sleep at night.

Stalin, of course, needed no such soporifics, and his own writing may have amounted to little more than execution lists. Yet, even as the corpses mounted he still had enough useful idiots, including on one occasion a delegation from the British TUC, to obey and reassert the Party’s final, most essential command, as Orwell put it, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” 

Such fantasy-island politics can endure only so long in the face of atrocity. Eventually there must be a reckoning. In Lee’s telling, the suppression of Georgia and its social democratic movement became an object lesson for the entire European Left, showing that there could be no meaningful alliance between democratic socialists and the “red fascists”, as the German communist Otto Ruhle branded the Bolsheviks. 

That lesson has lost none of its relevance. The temptation to mistake ideology for truth, and moral certainty for moral rightness, remains as potent as ever

Sudan stories III: war by remote control

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Summary: Elphaba on some disturbing new trends in the Sudanese conflict

We are constantly learning how this obsene tit-for-tat war goes between groups who care nothing for the folks in the middle. Towns fall to one side and then are re-taken, new weaponry allows for new tactics in an unclear strategy. 

So it is that drones this week hit Singa taking out the power supply and with it the water. I imagine a person many miles away with a computer programme and some coordinates playing an online game with lives. Of course on the ground there has been a rounding up of people suspected of guiding the missiles to their targets.

There is a deep weariness as people say: “Ah so we’re back to that again” and for how long?My family member, Ax, says they came in the middle of the night Wednesday and it took several attempts to hit their target.  The noise sent people scurrying outside. Some left Singa again, crossing the river as they were revisited by the trauma and fear of last year. He kept the family indoors more worried about the risk of falling debris than immediate re-occupation. But that grim possibility is never fully out of mind.

The scaling up of threats from RSF (they hit the airport that the government was boasting they would re-open soon, they claimed to have taken Fasher, they threatened cities beyond Sudan that support the Govt) and counter attacks from the government (they killed the leadership of communities in Kordofan as they met last week) seems to be in preparation for talks in the US – talks that although reported are hotly denied in Sudan. Even talking about them is risky.

Meanwhile Ax and I mused on the differences between towns in England and Sudan: a mini tale of two cities. Where in dying town-centres in UK the shops all seem to be nail-bars, second-hand clothes shops and takeaways, in Singa  every shop is a pharmacy, mini-clinic or something medical related.

We are hoping this latest wont lead to something more serious.  

Sudan Stories II: Not Exactly a Getaway Car

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Summary: second in a series of guest blogs from “Elphaba” on the ongoing war in Sudan

There was some great excitement in Singa this week as it was announced that many vehicles had been found and owners could bring proof of ownership and reclaim theirs. Ours was a battered, old, much-loved and very unreliable crate. She appeared to have some kind of sentience: working on a whim for some and not others. Opening and closing the windows was an act of will power (no winders that worked). But she had given great service carrying sheep, produce, people and everything in between for several years before she was taken at gun point last summer

A family member, Ax, went to see if she was there. He said the site was depressing. It was full of lines of metal shells, most with no wheels, broken windows and some with little or no innards. 

At the back of his mind in going to look for the vehicle, apart from the fact that it is “something to do” when daily routines are still restricted, was a potential to get her back “in case we need to run”. But then you are an easier target in car than on foot. Behind this is the reality that although our family are for the most part fine, there is a thin ice feeling.

On the 4th October a friend in El Obeid rang and we were delighted to hear all was well. The next day he rang to say that they had been bombarded with drones. Omderman has also been hit. Nothing is resolved. And South Sudan is still unravelling.

One of the fall-outs of the war coupled with climate change (I think) has been a steep increase in Dengue fever. We also hear disputed reports of cholera outbreaks. Now at the tail-end of the rains is the malaria season 

In the end we could not locate our vehicle. We laughed that she was never exactly a get away car, except in the sense that we seemed to get away with paying very little road tax over the years. In this seemingly endless war, the citizens who have lost most of what we think of as essentials are expected to pay significant amounts to reclaim their cars at a time that inflation in the costs of everyday needs, and the continuing devaluation of currency, bites.