One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us. Hamas has been called “barbaric”, but that is hardly a sufficient description of its primitive savagery. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi because their words sounded like babble to their ears: “bar bar bar.” Barbarians ranged from the slavish inhabitants of large, sophisticated, highly stratified societies (Persians, Egyptians) to fiercely spirited, independent tribes (the forest-dwelling Northerners that the Romans called Germani). None of these peoples based their identity on the struggle against a hated Other whose total elimination, to be achieved at any cost, was their sole reason for existence. None embraced the complete destruction of body and spirit — including their own as well — that the Nazis called Vernichtung: “negation”. None, in other words, were pure enemies of civilisation.

But jihadis are. Civilisation is the sum of cultural and social conditions that make for flourishing lives and communities. Jihadism is a death cult. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris reminds us of the Taliban jihadists who, in 2014, murdered 132 Muslim children at a school in Peshawar and burned a teacher alive in front of her students. A supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said of the dead children: “We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise…. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them.”

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These words are themselves apocalyptic. From the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism, there is no human being who does not deserve to die. Muslims will go to Paradise; non-Muslims will burn in Hell. Death is a blessing for true believers, divine justice for apostates and infidels. Choosing a martyr’s moral and physical self-destruction thus legitimises the deaths of everyone one can possibly kill. Murder-suicide on this grand scale is the ultimate form of religious totalitarianism, the complete control of the lives of others.

This mentality explains a lot, including the abject misery of the Gazans — a people who, pressed beneath the heavy machinery of organised death-worship, are twisted with moral scoliosis. Is it any wonder that Hamas has stolen tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for military purposes? Or that it hides weapons and hostages in hospitals using sick and injured Gazans and new-born babies as human shields? Or that it blocked evacuation routes and confiscated the car keys of civilians who wanted to cross the Wadi Gaza, as the IDF urged them to do, in order to flee Israeli military action in the northern part of the territory?

Hamas’s strategy is to maximise civilian deaths in order to stimulate worldwide opprobrium of Israel, and, if possible, open up more military fronts of Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria. As Harris says, Hamas is “eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews”.

But if Hamas, Isis, and other jihadis are not barbarians, what are they? This question takes us back to remotest antiquity, when very ancient peoples struggled to master the dark depths of the human psyche, and to establish the handful of “Thou shalt nots” on which all civilisation is based.

Weirdly, the most primitive tribal impulses are today expressed by means of the latest digital technology. There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

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In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families. The Hamas murderer claims the status of a hero, but his deeds belie his words. His perspective has no Greek analogue. It is pre-Homeric.

It is also pre-Abrahamic. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of Sarah, up Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Isaac embodies the entirety of Abraham’s hopes, as it is with Isaac’s descendants that God has established his eternal covenant. Abraham dutifully binds Isaac and draws his knife so that he may cut his throat, drain his blood, and burn his corpse. An angel stays his hand at the last moment, and he learns that the Almighty does not want human sacrifice.

Herein lies the basic problem: Islamists never got the message. That’s why they regard murder-suicide as a sacrament. When the Hamas jihadi’s brother tells him to come back, he replies “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion.” In other words, she gave birth to him so that he might advance the cause of indiscriminate death.

Why does Islam remain fertile ground for such insanity? The Bible suggests that fraternal conflict is at the root of the problem. When Abraham’s wife Sarah could not conceive, she instructed him to impregnate their Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarah harassed her and she fled. An angel told her that her child “will be a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Hagar then returned to Abraham and Sarah, but after Isaac was born, Sarah drove her and Ishmael out of their camp.

The angel’s prophecy makes sense in hindsight. An outcast twice over, Ishmael must bear considerable ill-will toward Isaac — the son favoured not only by his father and stepmother, but by God. This is important, because Muslims regard Ishmael to be the ancestor of Arab tribes, and of Muhammad in particular. Islamic tradition furthermore holds that the Jews falsified the Hebrew Scriptures, and many Muslims believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac, who was Abraham’s favoured son. These facts, too, suggest fraternal resentment.

The story of fraternal enmity and rancour is one of the earliest in the Bible, and a recurring theme in Genesis (think of Esau and Jacob, or Joseph and his brothers). It first appears immediately after the exile from Eden. Cain is incensed that God favours Abel’s sacrificial offering. Turning a deaf ear to God, who urges him not to sin, he murders his younger brother. Exiled by God, he becomes “a restless wanderer on the earth” who is nevertheless protected by the Lord’s own mark. That means he and his descendants will be with us forever. If we are to come to grips with the revenant monster that announced itself, yet again, on October 7, we must acknowledge this fundamental fact.

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No one has thought more deeply about what Cain’s story means than the anonymous author of Beowulf, an epic poem that explores the open wound of the outcast brother. Heorot, the great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shielding Danes, is a place of light, warmth and decorous ritual: generous mead-pouring and gift-giving. A microcosm of civilised existence, Heorot “stands at the horizon, on its high ground”, a Nordic city on the hill “meant to be a wonder of the world forever”. But the monster Grendel prowls the low, cold bogs outside until, berserk with anger, he splinters Heorot’s doors and wreaks bloody horror.

What ails Grendel? A “corpse-maker mongering death” in his repeated night-raids, he descends from “Cain’s clan”. For this wild branch of the sons of Adam, split off from the main human trunk by primal sin, the house of civilisation is an unbearable reproach. In Beowulf, resentment and envy are fevers of the mind that inflame and disfigure the body, twisting it into a sullen slouch. Outlawed by God, cast out by men, barred from hall and feast to gorge on envy and resentment, Cain’s clan — “ogres and elves and evil phantoms / and the giants too who strove with God”— are grotesque figurations of poisonous passions, the fermentation of the bitter fruit of exile.

Beowulf soberly acknowledges the disconcerting fact that we who dwell in the house of civilisation can neither make peace with, nor be rid of, the descendants of Cain. The eponymous hero slays Grendel and his mother and rules his people, the Geats, for 50 good years. But Beowulf finally succumbs to the poisonous bite of a flame-belching dragon, accidentally awakened after many centuries, that emerges from its subterranean lair to waste Geatish farms, homesteads, forts, and earthworks with great sprays of “molten venom”. The hero’s death spells doom for the Geats. At the poem’s end, a grieving woman unleashes “a wild litany / of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement”. Order and decency, peace and security, are only as solid as the ground they stand on.

The woman’s nightmare is a dark prophecy for our age, which has few heroes but plenty of monsters. Some parade daily on the streets of major Western cities, surrounded by mobs of ignorant, confused people. We face the same challenges Beowulf confronts, but with none of the poem’s clarity or resolve. Many of us can no longer tell good from evil, or hate from love. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilised world, remain standing?

The state has always had two faces, one civilised and the other coercive, and you generally need a balance between the two. As Edmund Burke argues, it’s affection which binds us to authority; but if we don’t feel daunted by it as well, we will cease to respect it. Burke saw this dilemma in gendered terms: how can sovereign power avoid indulging us like a doting mother without frightening us out of our wits like a heavy father? During the Terror in France, this balance between softness and severity was thrown to the winds, as the law rampaged like a madman.

Is it an act of terrorism to detonate a bomb in a crowded pub because you have a grudge against the landlord? Perhaps. But most people would see terrorists as having political motivations, not personal ones. Letting off a bomb in a pub as a protest against the decadence of Western culture is a better example. Shooting people in a shopping centre just for the hell of it doesn’t really count as terrorism because to be a terrorist you need a cause — perhaps one which you feel is being overlooked, and which you must therefore bring to public attention in the most dramatic possible way. Terrorism is politics at its most lethally theatrical.

Terrorists commit unspeakable acts of inhumanity. If they don’t lose any sleep over this, however, it is because they aren’t out to win sympathy. Unlike a regular army, they don’t have a legitimate military aim and then apologise when it goes grotesquely wrong and kills 50 schoolchildren. The intention is to spread horror and outrage as a strategy in itself.

Like guerrilla armies, terrorist groups emerge, strike, melt away and reappear somewhere else, which gives the impression that they are everywhere and indestructible, and thus compensates for the fact that they may be fewer in number than their enemy. An invisible adversary can be as formidable as one whose tanks stretch to the horizon. Not wearing uniform enhances this sense of ubiquity, since anyone you see on the street may be a military commander disguised as a window cleaner.

The IRA behaved roughly like this during the Northern Irish Troubles. They weren’t able to defeat the British army in the sense of winning a series of pitched battles with the Paras, but neither did they need to. They just had to slaughter enough people for the British government to suspect that this stalemate was likely to last forever and decide to pull out its troops. After a while, so the IRA calculated, the British people would become so disgusted and fatigued with the whole operation that it would withdraw its support. This was much more likely than the Irish Republican community withdrawing its support from the IRA, however much they may have complained about them behind their backs.

Terrorism, however, is by no means confined to terrorists. I don’t remember the word being used of the USA’s “shock and awe” assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but that’s what it was. Terrorism in the sense of committing atrocities has been the stock-in-trade of regular armies since the dawn of history. It isn’t confined to non-state actors, or (as The Oxford English Dictionary puts it) “unauthorised” forces. Many national armies engage in terrorist activities from time to time, raping civilians or shooting prisoners of war, rather as most terrorist groups don’t just murder and torture but also blow up bridges and ammunition dumps. The line between the regular and the irregular isn’t always clear.

Those who are revolted by the moral obscenity of terrorism sometimes see its perpetrators as mad. They must be mad, because otherwise one would have to consider the possibility that they have a reason for what they do, and to attribute a reason to their actions would seem to grant them a certain humanity. If you act for a purpose, however malign, you must be some kind of rational being. If you’re out of your mind, however, you can be excluded from the civilised world of ends and intentions, but only at the cost of being absolved from blame, since the mad can’t be held responsible for what they do. You can’t be crazy and evil at the same time. During the Irish Troubles, the British tabloid press sometimes portrayed the IRA as monsters or animals, but Downing Street was well aware that they acted with reasonable aims in mind — not necessarily reasonable in the sense of acceptable, but reasonable in the sense of capable of being argued over. They didn’t just want to drown the British in a sea of blood; they wanted a united Ireland. People who want a united Ireland may be fantasists or sentimentalists, but they aren’t lunatics.

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There’s a confusion here between excusing and explaining. Some people feel that examining the reasons why terrorists do what they do comes perilously close to justifying it. But you can explain why Hitler came to power, or why Boris Johnson exudes an air of entitlement, without justifying it, just as you can understand why someone acts to avenge the fact that their people have been shackled and humiliated for decades without endorsing the action they take. In fact, if you don’t see their actions as comprehensible from their own viewpoint, you are unlikely to defeat them. To deny that they are acting for what seems to them a good reason means you can make nothing at all of what they do. It is just a piece of nonsense or absurdity. So we are back to the madness hypothesis, in which case we sail dangerously close to letting the terrorists off the moral hook. One should beware of gazing at some piece of carnage and murmuring that this is pure insanity.

There are, in fact, historical connections between terrorism, absurdity and madness. In his novel The Secret Agent, which concerns a group of sinister foreign anarchists in London, Joseph Conrad invites us to envisage an act of terror so momentous that it would beggar all meaning. Common or garden anarchists may attack this or that bit of the world, but the perfect anarchist is the one who is out to destroy nothing less than reality itself. To do this, you need to pull off some piece of savagery which will shake the mind to its roots and shatter belief in the very possibility of sense-making. The ruling social order can take an onslaught on particular institutions; what it can’t abide is the subversion of meaning itself through some monstrous act of absurdity. In continental Europe at about this time, avant-garde artistic movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism were experimenting with much the same project. As civilisation staggered towards that collapse of meaning known as the First World War, art, evil, anarchy and nihilism began to make strange bedfellows. It all seemed a long way from E.M. Forster.

The target of terrorism is usually the state, but many states were themselves born in the blood and fire of invasion, dispossession, forcible occupation or extermination. If they are to become legitimate, they need to live down this original sin and not inquire too deeply into their own murky beginnings. For this, the sheer passage of time is usually enough. “Time alone,” declares the philosopher David Hume, “gives solidity to [the rulers’] right; and operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable.”

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Legitimacy, in a word, is longevity. The longer in the tooth you are as a nation, the more your tainted origins fade from collective memory and the more respectable you become. Political power is founded partly on oblivion. For Edmund Burke, there was a violence at the foundation of the state which mustn’t be brought to light, and which the merciful passing of time would gradually obscure. It follows that political states that were founded more or less within living memory, and whose origins involve displacement and occupation, have a particular problem of legitimacy. Like Macbeth, they are haunted by the illicit way they achieved their sovereignty, as the taste of victory turns to ashes in their mouths. Like Macbeth, too, they come to recognise that power is nothing without security, and that security continually eludes them.

For much of the 20th century, rich and powerful nations fought poorer and weaker ones in a series of anti-colonial wars. Taken as a whole, the struggles of these poorer nations transformed the face of the earth. The lesson of this history is that the desire for independence and self-determination runs as deep in nations as it does in adolescents. It is one of the ideas of our time. Nothing is easier in the modern world than killing people; but defeating an idea is a much harder business, and if you destroy it in one form it is likely to crop up again in another.

Many historical and societal factors set the stage for the Holocaust. But none of these, individually or collectively, can explain the kind of violence to which the Nazis subjected their Jewish victims.

Jewish children and babies were, for a time, thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz. It has been calculated that, in this manner, the SS saved approximately two-fifths of a cent per child on Zyklon-B, the insecticide they used in the gas chambers. Were the children burned alive to save money? It would be obscene to suppose that economy explains such a horrific method of murder. The same holds for sealing people in a boxcar for as much as a week without telling them to bring water and food, neither of which the Nazis provided. Or sewing twins together back-to-back, as Dr Mengele once did at Auschwitz. (Gangrene immediately set in and they died in three days.)

In fact, nothing could explain such abominations. Primo Levi’s distinction between “useful” and “useless” violence makes this clear. Useful violence has an aim outside itself. A thief kills a witness to a crime in order to avoid capture. The victim would otherwise have been unmolested, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such violence is evil, but useful in that it serves a purpose outside of itself. The thief might say: “I never wanted to hurt anybody, but then she came out of the back.” Perhaps he really is just unusually callous and stupid; he didn’t go looking for evil, but he found it. This explanation makes some sense, but does not excuse: the thief is going to prison for homicide, and rightly so.

Useless violence, however, is the deliberate production of pain and suffering as an end in itself. There is nothing apart from the violence to which one could point and say “that’s why they did these things”. The sole aim of useless violence is to torture, to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. It is not evil, but Evil.

Evil (with a capital E) defies explanation, which is why it is often called “senseless”. Evil is done for its own sake, and in this it mirrors, like a photographic negative, the senseless kindness of Good. In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman writes of a Soviet woman who, prepared to strangle a wounded German soldier who had participated in deadly reprisals against her village, instead gave him water. “No one could understand [her action]; nor could she explain it herself.” That spontaneous and inexplicable act of kindness — kindness for its own sake — was Good.

Theologians have long understood Evil as an absence or privation: complete separation from God. But while mere absence is inert, Evil is as potent and contagious as certain deadly viruses. It can fill entire social classes and ethnic or religious groups with bloodlust, and drive them to frenzies of violence. Organised and routinised by the State, Evil can even give rise to an entire industry of death. The power that produced the labour, transit, concentration, and death camps of Nazi Germany was evidently substantial and virulent.

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Still, the theologians have discerned something important about the negative capacity of Evil. Evil has a way of disabling moral receptivity and short-circuiting intelligence. Examples abound in Claude Lanzmann’s brave film Shoah, a 9.5-hour documentary that records the testimony of perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of the Holocaust.

Consider Frans Suchomel, SS Unterscharführer at Treblinka, a death camp where 800,000 Jews were murdered. Suchomel embodies pure superficiality: a human outside with no inside. He is secretly filmed by a van outside his apartment building. The technology Lanzmann employs generates a grainy image in which faulty video transmission or reception obscures Suchomel’s eyes with a black line, as if to emphasise his moral blindness. He sings a song that the doomed “worker Jews” of Treblinka were forced to sing as they dealt with a noxious liquid pool of decomposing corpses. The song’s message is that the human lot, the lot of Germans and Jews alike, is determined by forces that we can neither fully understand nor control. When he finishes, he says to Lanzmann with obvious pride: “Satisfied? No Jew knows that today!”

Consider also Mrs Michelsohn, the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher at Chelmno, where 400,000 Jews were murdered in mobile gas vans. (These vans were outfitted with a pipe that fed exhaust fumes into the sealed interior of the vans, which were driven until the Jews packed within were asphyxiated.) Michelsohn cannot recall how many Jews died in Chelmno; she remembers only that the number began with a four. At one point she confuses Poles and Jews. Asked by Lanzmann what the difference is between the two, she says: “The Poles weren’t exterminated and the Jews were. That’s the difference. An external difference.” But she “can’t assess” the “inner difference,” for “I don’t know enough about psychology and anthropology”.

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By Jacob Howland

Today, the world is still full of wilfully blind Suchomels and obtuse Michelsohns, callous perpetrators and complicit witnesses who see no Evil and hide behind a veneer of intellectual abstraction. Lanzmann’s words about the making of Shoah ring true: “The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past.”

When they invaded Israel on October 7, Hamas terrorists beat, robbed, raped, kidnapped, and executed Jewish men, women and children. They also burned families alive, shot babies in the head, and decapitated them. Such horrific crimes hadn’t been perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Yet politicians and university presidents who were previously quick to comment on issues of social justice have little or nothing to say about mass slaughter in Israel, while more than a few students and professors have applauded Hamas’s atrocities and assaulted Jewish students.

Hamas, whose hateful ideology was directly influenced by Nazism, has claimed that the brutal murder of Jewish children and babies in Israel was perpetrated by enraged civilians from Gaza. In fact, documents recovered from Hamas terrorists killed in southern Israel show “detailed plans to target children and young people”. Hamas’s supporters cite “facts” that are supposed to justify the terrorists’ vile deeds, including the seizure of Palestinian land in the 1948 War of Independence, when the Jews of the new nation of Israel fought the armies of five invading Arab nations. But there can be no justification of Hamas’s atrocities, not even in principle. They are so vile as to fall beyond the realm of explanation, let alone excuse. History teaches us at least this much.

In other words, Hamas’s vicious deeds were Evil. They exemplified useless violence, for they were designed to make their victims — Israelis, and insofar as possible, all Jews — suffer in the cruellest possible way. This must be understood, because the organs of supposedly judicious opinion are already explaining that Israel’s military response to Hamas must not be “disproportionate”. We’ve seen this movie ad nauseam: it plays on an endless loop. Israelis are murdered in terrorist attacks, and then they are denounced for taking concrete steps to protect themselves.

There is something absurd about the demand that Israel exercise proportionality in the face of Evil. As Douglas Murray has observed, that would mean that “Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped… kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed.… [They should] go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed.”

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The revulsion this suggestion elicits in decent human beings underscores the literal impossibility of reckoning with Evil. If Good is transcendent, Evil is negatively transcendent, exceeding measurement as it exceeds explanation. To try to measure or explain either Good or Evil is like trying to capture mathematical infinity in a finite sequence of numerals. It simply can’t be done.

We must not forget this when we hear “reasonable” people at the UN, The New York Times or the US State Department urge Israel not to go too far in its attempt to eradicate Hamas, or when they condemn the country — as is inevitable — for having done so. Such judgments pose as clarity, but are in fact moral and intellectual obfuscation. They can only encourage antisemites everywhere, and give Hezbollah and other agents of Iran’s theological tyranny a pretext for opening up more fronts in their effort to effect a Final Solution: to finish, once and for all, the work of the Holocaust.

Indeed, Hamas and its Islamist allies are counting on exactly this. They have set a trap for Israel, baited by their Evil. They want the IDF to grind Gaza to a pulp. They hope that publicising images of suffering in Gaza (including fake ones, if past performance is any indication) will stimulate world outcry and justify a wider war — one that Israel may not be able to win. This violence might seem to be “useful”, but if so, it is useful only in the cause of Evil.

If we are to speak of Evil at all — and now is no time for decent people to be silent — we cannot rely on ordinary frameworks of evaluation. The only language that can hope to do justice to Evil is theological. Perhaps all that can be said of Hamas and the worldwide gang of Islamists is that their crimes and plans are Satanic: absolutely and completely demonic.

Why is granny hiding in a bomb shelter? Why do they want to murder people like us? I want to protect them from all of this and just let them play with their Pokémon cards. But children have an instinctive knowledge that something is not right. And their questions keep on piling up. For today, my love is reserved for creating a loving bubble around my family. Making tea, piano practice, keeping the house tidy, sharing cuddles. I don’t even like them leaving the house at the moment.

I tried to say a few words about what is happening in Israel at church on Sunday. I thought I would be ok to just ask people for their prayers. I speak in front of my parishioners all the time. But I underestimated the distress I was suppressing. I had, foolishly, spent too long scrolling through social media in search of information. And so I have seen things that cannot be unseen. The fear in the eyes of those who have been taken, the wild hatred of those parading the semi-naked bodies of murdered young people, their twisted limbs. When I stood up to speak, the words wouldn’t come. The simple mechanics of speech abandoned me. Only dumb tears.

And for today at least, I have no time for those who want to “both sides” the situation. This was a massacre, hideously reminiscent of the Shoah. They beheaded children. I do not want to hear those whose first sentence expresses condolences, and whose second sentence begins with a “But”. Nor do I want to hear your little pet theories about the politics of the Middle East, not when the world outside feels such a threatening place for my family. As Amos Oz explained in his excellent book, How to Cure a Fanatic, Arabs and Jews typically understand each other far better than we Europeans understand either of them. Cost-free wisdom from Western liberals is so often pathetically ill-informed and bathing in self-righteousness. Look at those riding their cars up and down the Edgware Road, beeping their horns in delight, Palestinians flags flying from their windows. And those B-list academics who preach decolonisation and celebrate the slaughter of innocents as some sort of noble justifiable resistance. Little wonder London’s Jewish Free School has just made the wearing of their school blazer optional for students on the way to and from school. Those who have created a culture where all this is deemed acceptable have lost any sort of contact with moral reality.

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I’m not sure I have even got properly angry yet, though this will inevitably follow. Not just anger, but blazing fury. Then I will have to reckon with those impossible words: “Love your enemy.” Then I will need most to remind myself of the humanity of those who want to do my children harm. Yes, that they have children too. And that their children are now under the most enormous threat.

It was 19 years ago last week, that I first visited Gaza. We went to a primary school in Khan Yunis, right at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. Before lessons, the children had to throw balls at the wall to expend all their frustration. Without that, they were unable to concentrate on their lessons. As the children were showing me where their houses used to be, houses which had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers, a machine gun from the border emptied its load in our direction. Bullets kicked up dust all around us. Children of seven and eight — the same age as my boy — ran behind a wall like they’d done it before.

I remember we played football and ate ice cream. And I tried to recall some of their faces and I will need to think of them when my own anger wells up within me. They would be in their late 20s now, of course. It was a disturbing thought, inviting a depressing conjecture: perhaps some of them were now in Hamas; perhaps some broke through the border on Saturday, going house to house, murdering Israelis. Or perhaps some of them never made it to adulthood.

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The situation is, of course, now going to get so much worse. And so, not only do I find “love your enemies” hard to conjure, but I find hope even harder. I’m not much of a Christian, I know. Surely a ground war is coming, with soldiers venturing into the most dangerous of places to try and rescue terrified captives who are now tied up in cellars, subject to the Isis-like cruelty of their captors. There will be those who will inevitably cast this response as revenge. But retrieving prisoners from the depths of such a desperate evil is the only thing that the Israeli army can possibly do. Those who try to draw some sort of moral equivalence between a rescue mission and the deliberate and gleeful murder of the innocent have totally lost their moral bearings. They have become the useful idiots of rapists and murderers. So for now, the only words of hope I have to stand alongside are those from the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikvah. “Our hope is not yet lost. It is 2,000 years old. To be a people free in our land.”

I pray that captives will be found and released — prayers being the only thing available to some of us. What good will they do, asks the sceptic? Even that question misunderstands how prayer works. Prayer is my category for the most important of things that I cannot and do not know how to solve. Like tears, it is a bubbling up of something impossible to silence. It’s not a way of getting something done in the world; I’m not escalating stuff to the almighty. And anyway, He and I are going to have words when this is over. I have more than a few questions — and in the silence of my prayers, they won’t be gently put. But neither can I get through all of this without Him.

To feel relief, though, is surely misguided. Nurse Letby might be behind bars, but those who ignored, shielded or enabled her remain unpunished. Regardless of their motives or excuses: the public record has shown that senior executives at the Countess of Chester Hospital obfuscated attempts to stop Letby.

This is not to say they aided and abetted her. But as any lawyer will tell you, ignorance is no defence in law. On the wards, as anywhere else, those who want the benefits, privileges and status that come with the highest level of leadership must shoulder responsibility for what happens on their watch.

Following Letby’s conviction, the Northern Care Alliance NHS Trust in Greater Manchester suspended Alison Kelly, former director of nursing and quality at the Countess of Chester. The hospital’s former CEO, Tony Chambers, also faces mounting claims that he had dismissed warnings about Letby before walking away with a £1.5 million pension.

Under Kelly and Chamber’s leadership, the neonatal unit’s head consultant, Dr Stephen Brearey, who first raised concerns in June 2015 about the link between Letby and an increase in baby collapses, was ignored. Likewise, Dr Ravi Jayaram, a consultant paediatrician at the hospital, and others, were forced by hospital bosses to apologise to Letby after was “upset” by their criticisms of her.

We don’t know what Kelly and Chambers were thinking as they watched a significant rise in the number of babies suffering serious and unexpected collapses in the hospital’s neonatal unit from 2015 and 2016 — a rise that was well above the expected local average. We do know that they failed to act decisively. We also know that they both objected  to concerns raised by Breary, Jayaram and other clinicians. These “whistleblowers” were told there was “no evidence” against the nurse “other than a coincidence”.

In my experience, such negligence can be partly the result of the professional differences — and hostilities — between those from a nursing or midwifery background and doctors and senior consultants. When doctors raise concerns about nurses, the nurses’ ranks tighten. When the roles are reversed, however, doctors are far less likely to put professional favouritism first.

And this conflict particularly afflicts maternity wards. As I warned in UnHerd last year, the Care Quality Commission found that two out of five maternity units in England were providing “substandard care to mothers and babies” — a disturbing review preceded by another damning inquiry, Dr Bill Kirkup’s three-year investigation into mass failings at East Kent Hospital Trust’s maternity care. Between 2009 and 2020, he concluded, 45 babies who died under the trust’s aegis might have survived had they received “nationally recognised standards of care”.

Taken individually, these scandals and exposés are little more than horror stories, the sort of voyeuristic fodder rinsed out by newspapers before moving onto the next tragedy. Taken together, though, they are symptoms of a greater problem: our maternity service’s dysfunctional relationship between management, staffing and patients across the board. And there is something unique about this dysfunction: while the Bristol heart scandal during the Nineties revealed how a combination of ineptitude, arrogance and an old boys’ culture had contributed to dozens of babies suffering brain damage and death following cardiac operations by surgeons, today we are seeing cases, such as Letby’s, in which the “heroes” are senior consultants who come up against bloated, self-serving and intransigent management.

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Over the past days, weeks, months and years, my colleagues and I have repeatedly called for senior managers in the NHS to be more accountable. The Letby case clearly illustrates — along with the East Kent, Bristol, and Mid-Staffs scandals, the latter in which anywhere between 400 and 1,200 patients died as a result of poor care between 2005 and 2009 — there is zero jeopardy for the legions of NHS senior managers when things go wrong, and lives are needlessly lost. As Dr Breary has pointed out, a “structure akin to the General Medical Council or the Nursing and Midwifery Council” solely for NHS managers is needed to “monitor the integrity, competence, and conduct of senior NHS executives”.

But I would go further. Within its health sectors, the NHS has too many managers floating between various levels of management. This murky bureaucracy has created a culture in which weaker and weaker talent fails upwards, driving out many consultants at board level who simply can’t cope with the cumbersome ineptitude of senior management committees. Once they have ascended to management positions, people who were mediocre on the wards vent their petty grievances and exert their lack of talent by putting consultants in their place. It’s an open secret that NHS management has become a gravy train, an opportunity to put your feet up and “protect your workload”. If anything, this cynicism, laziness and inertia is as deadly as the rare cases of pure evil.

No doubt there will be those with questionable “leadership skills” who view my and colleagues’ calls for an audit of management capability — and culpability — as a witch hunt. But we’re willing to take that risk. There’s clearly something rotten at the heart of the NHS.

Reports of such atrocities always strike a chord across Western Europe and North America. They played a key part in mobilising popular sentiment against Germany in 1914. They were crucial in persuading the United States to intervene in the Balkans in the Nineties. Every time, they have encouraged us to conceptualise war as a moral struggle between good and evil.

The invasion of Ukraine has been no different. It has become common for commentators in the West to compare Putin’s Russia to the ultimate evil actor of modern history, Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is portrayed as Captain America.

Even Joe Biden appeared to endorse this Manichean contrast during his recent trip to Warsaw, describing the conflict as a struggle between the light and the dark: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness.” The Pope also used similar language on his trip to Malta last weekend, declaring that “from the east of Europe, from the land of the sunrise, the dark shadows of war have now spread”.

I don’t disagree. When an invading army uses rape as a weapon of war and mercilessly bombs civilians in a theatre, what better word than evil can we use? Likewise, even if he is only human, Zelenskyy’s leadership has undoubtedly been heroic. Yet there is a problem with framing the war in Ukraine — and every struggle that came before it — as a battle between light and darkness. It may be a powerful rhetorical device, but it clouds our understanding of who is fighting and, ultimately, can prolong and intensify a conflict.

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Consider the fact that, even as the West frames the war in Ukraine as a struggle of good against evil, the Kremlin is doing exactly the same. Putin has repeatedly portrayed the invasion as a “special operation” to “denazify” the region. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, even blessed the invasion as “God’s truth”, a necessary measure to bring together the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

While this rationale for invading Ukraine is patently false, it would be foolish to whitewash the far-Right elements in Ukraine’s politics and military. Yes, President Zelenskyy himself is Jewish, and a clear majority of Ukrainians favour a Western, democratic orientation for their country. But there is no use denying the existence of far-Right groups in the Ukrainian opposition, such as the Svoboda party, which has unabashedly anti-Semitic leaders. Likewise, the Azov Battalion, which has been heavily involved in the fighting to defend Mariupol, was founded by a far-Right nationalist. Though now a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, it has not managed to evict its neo-Nazi and white supremacist members — as American soldiers involved in training Ukrainians before the war discovered to their consternation.

I unequivocally support Ukraine in its struggle for freedom from the Russian knout. But these are hard truths that the West needs to face, not least because ignoring them plays into Putin’s hands — a dishonest discussion is exactly what he wants.

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For proof, we need only look at his careful attempts in recent years to portray himself as a defender of the Christian faith. Often wearing a cross around his neck, he frequently visits monasteries and swims in the freezing Lake Seliger to mark Epiphany. He also relishes taking swipes at the excesses of Western “woke” progressivism. His campaign has been so effective that, unbelievably, some on the American Christian Right support his invasion of Ukraine, proclaiming him the last bastion of the true faith and upholder of traditional values.

But Putin’s Russia is not the Christian idyll they fondly imagine. While the West often views Russia as a European nation-state that just happens to be very big, it is actually a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. There are, for instance, approximately 25 million Muslims in Russia, making up 18 per cent of the country’s population. The complexities continue, as Russian Muslims are themselves not homogeneous, ranging from Sufis in Chechnya to Tatars in Crimea.

Why does this matter? Because it illustrates that, when it comes to war, sweeping generalisation is the tool of the despot. Despite his posturing as an Orthodox emperor in the Tsarist tradition, Putin is directing a colonial army with many Muslim soldiers against Christians in Ukraine. Lists of captives and casualties from Russia reveal that Muslims are significant participants in the fight. As The Washington Post reported, “about one third of [Russian] casualties are soldiers with non-Slavic, mostly Muslim names”. There is, after all, a reason why Chechen strongman and Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov labelled the fight against Ukraine a jihad.

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Yet Putin’s fabrications suddenly become irrelevant, no longer worthy of discussion, when the invasion of Ukraine is reduced to a Manichean conflict between good and evil — even when these fabrications are used to justify something as enormous as the war itself. As satisfying as it may feel to frame the conflict in this way, the West will never defeat Putin’s alternative reality by creating its own. He is not the devil: he is a despotic leader who draws his authority from an imperial fantasy. Exposing this fantasy — no hard task — is far more likely to topple him in the long term than painting him as Hitler.

Of course, there is good and evil in this war. But this is also a war between a fledgling nation-state and a receding empire. It’s messy, complex and scarred by history. Vladimir Putin wants you to think otherwise — but let’s not play his game.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

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Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

Suggested reading

The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

Suggested reading

Young Russians love Stalin

By Daniel Kalder

Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.

Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.

As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.

I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.

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Norway confronts its Breivik demons

By Asne Seierstad

As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.

When I first read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a book about how ordinary Germans, from all walks of life, willingly participated in the open-air slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in occupied Poland between 1941 and 1942, I was impressed by its overall Arendtian argument; it seemed profound and radical. According to Browning, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed not because they were fanatics motivated by the ideology of murderous anti-Semitism, but because they were psychologically weak.

As Browning puts it: “To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot…” A broader argument soon materialises: that there is a line of good and evil that runs through every human being; that we are all, when the circumstances permit it, capable of terrible acts of inhumanity.

I have now come to think of this account of human evil as banal and partial. And I have come to dislike the glibness with which the account is expressed by its defenders, as though they are imparting some deep and unsettling truth about the human condition that is lost on the plebs with all their talk of evil and mythical monsters.

Well, we are not all capable of inhumanity, and while some people fearfully succumb to the weight of group dynamics and kill, others can’t wait to get started with the business of slaughter and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to enter a berserk state. And still others not only refuse to follow orders, but bravely intervene to stop their fellows from killing civilians.

The problem with the Arendtian thesis about ordinary killers, and the broader consensus that has hardened around it, is that it can’t explain ideologically fervent men who revel in the idea of murdering and humiliating scores of their perceived enemies. Men like Breivik.

Granted, Breivik was a pudgy-faced, piggy-eyed loser with blond sweaty hair — all now shaven off. As Seierstad recounts in her book, Breivik’s life was an elaborate catalogue of miserable failures. The problem was his tremendous narcissism and resentful anger, which sabotaged him at every turn.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

As a teenager, he reinvented himself as a graffiti artist called “Morg”, claiming to be the top “tagger” in Oslo. But he was shit and annoying and was soon excluded from the “tagger” community. In another reinvention, he tried his hand at selling fake university diplomas on the internet, until he nearly got caught. He then joined the anti-immigration Progress party, intent on becoming a politician. That, too, went nowhere. Women, in particular, seemed to find him radioactive: he ordered a Belarusian mail-order bride who left as swiftly as she came. He would brag to his friends that he was a brothel man; this self-righteous and disgust-prone creep was probably terrified of women.

But for all these squalid and all-too human details, Breivik was a singular individual with a troglodytic interior world that made him stand out. Around 2006, he moved back in with his mother and retreated from the world, living almost entirely in his imagination. He became obsessed with the idea that white European culture was under existential threat from marauding hordes of Muslim migrants, abetted by white cultural Marxists and multiculturalists. And he began nurturing the fantasy that he would lead a secret order of knights to stop this cultural “genocide”.

Yes, Breivik was a chump and a radical loser, but he was no ordinary killer following orders, still less some colourless bureaucrat orchestrating mass-murder from behind the scenes, as was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the apotheosis of Arendt’s banal evil. Far from being banal, Breivik’s motives were related to his sense of worthlessness and lack of virility. Only by violently crushing all those who had made him feel weak and pathetic could he restore his sense of manly “honour”. In short, Breivik was an enthusiastic killer who wanted to kill.

One of the dark ironies exhibited in Breivik’s parole hearing was his appropriation of liberal explanatory motifs to excuse his monstrous behaviour. “I was brainwashed,” Breivik told the court on the first day of the proceedings. He had been radicalised online, he elaborated, embracing the language of victimhood that he so despises in others and that so many progressives employ to rationalise or explain away the crimes of “the oppressed”.

Breivik once had a grudging admiration for al Qaeda, and the courage with which its foot-soldiers embraced death in defence of their beliefs. There was no culture of violent martyrdom among neo-Nazis, and he bitterly lamented that. Now, it seems, Breivik has taken a leaf out of the jihadi apologia playbook, claiming that he was radicalised by dangerous material on the internet. While he hasn’t gone the full Shamima Begum, who has explicitly renounced Isis and its ideology, his displacement of responsibility onto the internet closely resembles hers and many others like her.

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The trivialisation of trauma

By Simon Cottee

It is hard to know if Breivik’s claim that he was radicalised online is sincere. Given that he continues to hold firm to his to neo-Nazi beliefs, it seems doubtful. In fact, I am inclined to believe that it was some private joke aimed at other neo-Nazis to mock liberals who use the self-same explanatory trope to excuse the radicalisation of jihadists.

I also don’t blame Breivik for flagrantly ridiculing his liberal oppressors, as he sees them. In Breivik’s eyes, they are his enemies, and he is a political prisoner. Perhaps the Norwegian authorities should in turn take him seriously and recognise him as such, which would mean refusing him any public stage on which to propagandise his vile beliefs.

Even in liberal Norway tolerance should have it limits — as should the virtue that professes that even the most fanatical and dangerous of murderers should be given a chance to present a case for their release.

What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

They agree, however, that with this one, there’s a newer, calmer, more optimistic Houellebecq: finally, “Houellebecq makes room for love”. With this clumsy ode to the least philosophical Matrix, is Houellebecq perhaps telling us that though it might not look like it, this novel — this sentimental, mushy-penned final novel — is his true masterpiece?

He seems to believe so. As he told Le Monde, “contrary to what a famous formula claims, I think that it is with good feelings that we make good literature”. The murderous misogynists of his earlier books are gone, replaced with a pretty reasonable technocrat who’s nice to his wife (Paul “Raison” — clever!). Indeed, most of the characters are pretty nice. That’s by design: as Houellebecq continued, “the ultimate achievement would be if there were no bad guys at all!”

How can this be the Houellebecq we know and love, the Houellebecq who complained that female readers found it “difficult to accept pure negativity”?

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq has never been known as the greatest of stylists or the fairest of psychologists. When I studied him for an aborted PhD, there were, of course, the requisite titters: he was sexist, he was racist, and what’s more, he was populaire. It’s clear that Houellebecq is an important writer — the most interesting, the most provocative, the most of our time, for better or worse.

Fan as I am, though, his “badness” occasionally frustrated me: could it escape Houellebecq’s attention, I wondered as I read, say, La Possibilité d’une île (2005), that it’s a little unconvincing for a perfectly harmonious couple to calmly and spontaneously dissolve at the very first appearance of ageing on the wife’s previously perfect body?

I don’t know. But now, annihilated by Houellebecq’s 735-page attempt at a less Manichaeian narrative, I mourn the venom. I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.

In the acknowledgments of Anéantir, Houellebecq announces that this will be his last novel. As the title predicts, of course, this is a novel about annihilation. Radical ecologists are attacking Europe, targeting immigrants and artificial reproduction, the only bulwark against the population collapse of the West. Paul’s father is dying. Paul, ultimately, dies. And Houellebecq writes his last book.

On such an occasion, with this strange and sentimental swan song, should we recall what made Houellebecq so wonderful? In a recent defence of Anéantir published in The Spectator, Houellebecq is compared with Balzac, in both his “comparable ambition” and his “tireless work”. This is, of course, familiar to any reader of Houellebecq; not only has he ceaselessly praised Balzac for two decades, but his novels have been peppered with allusions to him.

But Balzac’s ambition wasn’t primarily the psychological complexity of individual characters: his devouring ambition, the one that kept him writing for 15-hour days, on 50 cups of coffee, was to write the complete Comédie humaine of France, the one that would depict in narrative, like a map in lines, French reality from the Restoration to the July Monarchy. These 91 novels, furiously written by a man who had tried to be a respectable, bourgeois lawyer, and ended up wearing Middle Eastern robes and writing through chronic illness, are a capsule of a time of dizzying social and economic change. They are not about people; they are about people in a society. Many of his novels, indeed, were designated “studies”.

So, too, in Houellebecq: like his hero, he gives his characters, at his best, birthplaces, birthdates, and parents. Like his hero, he has an encyclopaedic bent, a desire to explain, a will to knowledge. Like his hero, he wants to understand what on Earth is going on. The laziest critics of Houellebecq dismiss him as a novelist of the patriarchal white male, who doesn’t “recognise that it is societal structures such as poverty, racism, colonialism and inequality that are the source of men’s suffering”. But this is precisely where Houellebecq succeeds: he does recognise that society is making us miserable.

That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.

Suggested reading

How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.

Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.

In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).

In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.

Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.

You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.

And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.

Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.

That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”

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Licorice Pizza: a forgettable nostalgia flick

By Esther Manov

Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés.”

There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.

All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.

The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.

The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.

Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.

In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.

Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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Why I am fleeing to the hills

By Aris Roussinos

By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

Whenever these gangs reappear in public view, responses tend to fall into two categories. The first laments the youth and vulnerability of the victims and wonders which public-sector measures could be implemented to stop such things happening again.

The second type points out that the safeguarding lot are keen to talk about anything but the ethnic disparity between the victims (usually young, white, and working-class) and the rapists (usually of South Asian heritage, often though not exclusively Muslim). The implication is usually that if only we stopped bowing to political correctness, and allowing mass immigration into the country, nothing like this would ever happen.

One side blames poverty, inadequate sex education and institutional safeguarding failures; the other, immigration and political correctness. But there’s another aspect that neither side wishes to acknowledge.

That is, a subset of adult men takes an intense sexual interest in very young girls. This isn’t specific to one culture or ethnicity: today’s report from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial describes the grooming and abuse of a 14-year-old in a setting with different sociocultural traits and far more money, but which otherwise follows much the same pattern as that suffered by the girls in Hull and other UK towns. And we’ve embraced a culture that normalises extreme and ‘kinky’ forms of sexual self-expression — including for adolescents — while our medico-legal and cultural frameworks blur the official age of consent.

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Taken together, this results in a culture where even lovingly parented and closely supervised girls routinely encounter opportunistic pervs. Meanwhile, girls who are neglected, unloved or otherwise vulnerable are left with few defences against their attention. Why do neither the anti-immigration side nor the safeguarding hand-wringers want to confront this? Because sexual freedom is of net benefit to everyone who’s already empowered — including most of the angry editorial-writers on both sides.

This worldview holds that all forms of sexual activity are legitimate, and our freedoms on this front should be constrained only by consent. Perhaps the central contributor to this worldview is the cultural theorist (and paedophile) Michel Foucault, who made the case in History of Sexuality that there are no sexual crimes as such. Rather, there are only acts that we choose to construct as harmful.

Foucault took this up to the point of suggesting that children can in some circumstances participate in sexual activity without being harmed. We find traces of this argument in, for example, the Seventies campaign to cut the age of consent to 14 or in some circumstances 10. Further traces can be found in the Gillick v Wisbech 1986 legal case that blurred the legal age of consent by establishing doctors’ right to prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without their parents’ knowledge, where the girl was deemed mature enough.

Even as Foucault blurred questions of childhood sexuality, and Gillick opened the door to doctors condoning (safe) underage sex, pop culture was full of the voices of men pushing at legal restrictions on sexualising under-16s. It was 1981 when Ted Nugent released the song ‘Jailbait’, which includes the line “I don’t care if you’re just thirteen”. There are plenty more such works.

As an adolescent in the 1990s, I recall being beeped by van drivers from some time before 16. In 2002 a 15-year-old Charlotte Church took legal action against a website which was counting down the days until she turned 16 and could legally have sex.

And a quick straw poll of my Twitter followers asking for recollections of when they began to be hit on by adult men returned hundreds of replies, giving an average age of 10-12.

Would even more men be willing to admit desiring very young girls if it weren’t frowned upon? One study showed that men took longer to admit finding a female image attractive if he’d been told she was 14 or 15. This suggests that, unsurprisingly, men are more hesitant to give expression to desires they know are socially unacceptable. And the flip side of this is that, implicitly, we should make sure men are vigorously encouraged to go on repressing these darker desires.

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But that’s not what either sex is encouraged to do today. Rather, both sexes grow up to an insistent drumbeat of ‘sex-positive’ feminism, which asserts (with Foucault) that all sexual expression is valid provided it’s consensual. And the bandwidth of that expression is considerably wider than it used to be, because children are exposed to porn around the age of 11 or even younger.

Studies show porn use normalises violent ‘sexual scripts’ for boys, while for girls pornography use is associated with participating in group sex, either voluntarily or coerced, and also agreeing to unwanted sex acts. (Presumably these register as ‘consensual’ and are therefore valid and empowering.)

Growing up amid such imagery, we find young women today expressing a desire for intimacy bound up with violence, such as in this TikTok video where a girl longs for “the type to give you forehead kisses but also the type to choke you”.

Meanwhile, on social media, teenagers claim casual sex is a game, emotional intimacy is cringe and drug and alcohol abuse is something to celebrate. It’s now easier to see why the Hull grooming gang case may have been difficult to prove.

Consider ‘Anna’, one of the victims, who was 16 when the abuse started. The fact that she was over 16 meant investigators reportedly had to show that she did not, in fact, consent to being threatened, bruised, choked and violently raped.

How are police supposed to tell the difference between consensual and abusive choking and rape, when we can’t agree sexual acts such as choking are bad or even reach consensus on the proper age at which someone’s deemed capable of consenting to them?

Scandal after scandal breaks, and we go on pretending this culture is fine and all we need is better ‘consent’ education or more effective policing. But it should be clear by now that ‘consent’ is no protection from predators.

And neither are the police. They can only punish clear and provable violations of commonly-held public norms, which have already taken place. We have so thoroughly stripped sex of norms that it often only becomes possible to demarcate rape in cases where a girl is so grotesquely underage or unwilling that no one could seriously argue she ‘consented’.

No one wants to confront this. Instead, every time the scandal bubbles up again we bicker a bit about racism and safeguarding, then go back to sexual liberation as usual. Because in practice, protecting young girls from the seemingly ineradicable minority of hebephilic predators doesn’t just look like handing out contraception or telling girls not to talk to strangers.

Along with tougher sentencing for abusers, preventive measures might mean restrictions on pubescent girls’ social lives, so they’re less exposed to opportunistic predators. Such an approach might also seek to get skimpy and figure-hugging clothing off the shop rails — especially in outlets aimed at adolescents.  It might call not just for ‘education’ on how to make sense of pornography, but serious efforts to suppress it — not just for children but everyone.

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It might include not just ‘education’ in how and where to ‘consent’, or avoid pregnancy while leading a promiscuous life, but widespread social deprecation of sexual promiscuity. It might even mean re-evaluating the idea that it’s possible have both a stigma-free sexual culture and also public norms that keep predators away from young girls.

And even though all of these measures together might add up to greater protection from sexual abuse, some will claim they’re indistinguishable from the ‘patriarchal’ constraints on erotic freedom that sex-positivity has been working so hard, for so long, to do away with. Others will say I’m victim-blaming, and really what we need to do is teach rapists not to rape. But given that making rape illegal hasn’t stopped rapists raping, it’s hard to see what a few classes would achieve

As long as we keep resisting any constraint on our erotic freedom, we’re effectively asking young girls to be the change we want to see in the world. The cost of our ongoing failure to expunge the dark underbelly of male sexuality and attain liberated, empowered universal erotic utopia is counted on their youthful bodies.

The grooming gangs are a unique evil. The men who commit these crimes should be punished to the utmost. But the racialised atrocities conducted within those gangs are on us too: a grotesque caricature of a sexual culture in which we all collude.

Liberal adults demanded the right to sexual self-expression — including even loveless, violent, commercial, kinky, no-holds-barred or violent acts. Now we have it. And so do frightened, lonely, unloved, impoverished female children in depressed cities up and down the country.

How else are we to explain the two most disturbing causes trumpeted by modern progressives: of paedophilia and of polygamy? To some extent, they can’t be compared. Polygamy remains legal in a number of countries — from South Africa and Malaysia to Iran and Morocco. Paedophilia, on the other hand, has long been considered beyond the pale, and is effectively banned across the world. Most countries have an age of consent — and those that don’t, such as Sudan and Afghanistan, require a couple to be married before sex is legally allowed.

And yet, in America of all places, activists are now campaigning for the destigmatisation of paedophilic desires. To remain horrified is bigoted; we need to feel empathy for the “suffering” that paedophiles face. What makes this movement even more disturbing is that its advocates are not confined to some progressive fringe: even those whose jobs it is to end child sexual abuse now support it.

Only last week, Elizabeth Letourneau, Director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at John Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, tweeted: “Many adults with sexual attraction to children want help to control it, hate the feeling, don’t want to act on it. Helping them prevents #childsexualabuse. Stigmatizing the conversation puts kids at risk. #prevention.”

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She was responding to the debate sparked at Old Dominion University earlier this month, after word spread around campus that one of its professors, Allyn Walker, had released a book over the summer titled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. The book, according to its blurb, “offers a crucial account of the lived experiences of this hidden population”. In reality, all it offers is a disconcerting defence of paedophilia.

Walker, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, is concerned for the well-being of ‘minor-attracted people’ or MAPs, the new preferred term for individuals attracted to children. When asked about the use of MAPs in a recent interview, Walker responded: “I think it is important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them. It is less stigmatising than other words like paedophile.” In other words: let’s not hurt the paedophiles’ feelings.

Throughout the interview, Walker deploys terms taken straight from the social justice playbook — as if paedophilia were just another sexual preference in need of its own Pride. Activists talk of “lowering stigma”; of a minority that is “at-risk” and “universally maligned”. As far back as 2017, in a PhD thesis titled Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals, Walker notes how “child pornography as a harm reduction technique has previously been theorised to be a potential strategy for MAPs to maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”.

Although A Long, Dark Shadow was published in June, Old Dominion did not place Walker on leave until November 16^th, after students began to protest. A petition was launched, making clear that paedophilia “should not be considered a sexual preference” and Walker should be fired. It has received more than 14,000 signatures.

Yet despite such overwhelming condemnation from the student body, the university’s statement regarding the situation was short, vague, and inadequately critical of Walker’s views. For Walker, however, the university’s action reflected the “gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus”. Walker’s critics’ disapproval was part of a “coordinated effort” against the LGBTQ community and academic freedom.

I am a firm defender of academic freedom. And I believe the problem of paedophilia needs to be studied. But that does not mean that we can ignore the danger destigmatising paedophilia poses to children. We should not be normalising the idea that it is tolerable to fantasise about sex with children. A university and a university press should not be pushing this kind of harmful material.

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And yet this dangerous tendency to tolerate every and any proclivity, no matter how wicked, has become widespread: along with paedophilia, polygamy — a practice which should have ended centuries ago — is making a comeback as an acceptable form of relationship. Last year, Utah enacted Senate Bill 102, which lowers the penalty for polygamy from a felony to an offence on par with a traffic summons, as long as the new spouse consents to the marriage. Even pop culture is embracing the trend. Just this week, millennial influencer Lauryn Bosstick posted her thoughts on polygamy to her 1 million Instagram followers: “i am in to freedom of choice. i don’t waste my energy worried about what people’s relationship choices are – everyone’s different. if not hurting anyone & it works for you, go for it.”

But polygamy is harmful — to women, in particular, but also to society in general. Earlier this year, I interviewed Dr Dan Seligson on my podcast about its harms and dangers. He explained that polygamy actually breeds poverty in societies. It turns the human female into a commodity, destroys trust in society, and produces unhappiness in families. Growing up in Somalia, I have seen this all first-hand: my father had four wives. Not one of them was happy; not one of them thought their union was empowering.

And yet proponents of polygamy in the US today model their movement on the successful (and legitimate) campaign for same-sex marriage, pretending it is a similar form of liberation. Two practising polygamists summed up this tactic in a peculiarly supportive recent New Yorker profile: “I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”

Here is where the slippery slope becomes a terrifying cliff face. Ingeniously, ‘minor-attracted people’ and polygamists are seeking the protection of the progressive umbrella. They want recognition as ‘maligned’ minorities who have been marginalised and overlooked by society. They want the freedom to love whomever they want, regardless of a person’s age or number of other partners. And it is working. The social justice movement is heeding their calls.

At the core of what we are seeing today is an assault on Western civilisation. In the West, we have a general moral framework. We share a broad understanding of right and wrong. But our norms and values are under attack. We have abdicated our responsibility to make moral judgements — and evil has started to seep in.

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There will be some who claim that I am overreacting; that those arguing in favour of destigmatising paedophilia and polygamy are small groups who live in the dark corners of Twitter and will never have any real staying power. But the first steps have been taken. The path ahead is clear. As activists like Allyn Walker insinuate themselves into the social justice fold, the ranks of their warped campaigns will swell.

I have been a vocal advocate for women, children, homosexuals, apostates, and religious minorities for the past two decades. I believe in giving the voiceless a voice. I have also been a free-speech fundamentalist. But there must be a red line. No matter the context, there will never be anything progressive about paedophilia or polygamy.

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

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Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

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How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

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Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it:“I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a justified parallel. Dune is as central to science-fiction as JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece is to fantasy.

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) on general release we finally have a decent film adaptation. Villeneuve has done for Herbert what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien in the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). But dig a bit deeper into the comparisons, and I fear that team Tolkien comes off worse.

Let’s start with the central character in each story: Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s epic and Paul Atreides in Herbert’s. Both embody the archetype of the reluctant hero. On screen, they’re portrayed by similar actors — Elijah Wood as Frodo and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. These are very much of a type: one part leading man, two parts haunted Victorian doll. Chalamet, though, oozes charisma, while Wood merely gains our sympathy. Score one to Dune. 

Then there’s the rest of the cast — which in the case of Dune meets the multi-ethnic criteria of contemporary film making. The Rings trilogy, almost 20 years older, does not. This is hardly Jackson’s fault — nor Tolkien’s for that matter. There’s an obvious difference in context between a fantasy world inspired by Nordic legend and the galactic melting pot of the far future. 

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As for gender balance, it must be admitted that Tolkien’s tale is a bit of a Boy’s Own adventure. Nevertheless, Jackson did his best to push female characters to the forefront. It hasn’t been so difficult for Villeneuve. For a start, the source material provides more to work with — for instance the “Bene Gesserit”, an order of terrifying space-nuns. Also Villeneuve was able to change the sex of one of the originally male characters, the scientist Liet Kynes, without it making much difference to the plot. I’m not sure Jackson could have done the same to, say, Gandalf. 

Still, such excuses won’t cut much ice with today’s progressives. We can expect their tutting disapproval to be layered on top of previous attacks on Tolkien and everything he supposedly represents. 

Dune is a progressive view of the future — it features a revolution against the established order. Tolkien’s fiction, on the other hand, is portrayed as nostalgic and reactionary — a yearning for a golden age that never existed. After all, what are the Hobbits except idealised Little Englanders who’d have definitely voted for Brexit?

The irony is that Lord of the Rings was once at the cutting edge. Though first published in the mid-1950s, it didn’t become a publishing sensation until a decade later — around the same time as Dune in fact. Both novels achieved cult status with the counterculture of the late 1960s. This was a more comfortable fit for Herbert, the free-thinking Californian, than for Tolkien, the tweedy, Catholic Englishman. Yet the latter did once observe that his political opinions “lean more and more towards Anarchy”.

The narcotic obsessions of the Sixties are lavishly catered for in Dune — whose entire plot (spoilers ahead!) revolves around a perception-altering substance called “Spice”. There is rather less druggery in Tolkien’s fiction, but some have interpreted the “pipeweed” of the Hobbits as consisting of more than tobacco. Certainly, one can see why the hippies were so entranced by the bucolic, laid-back lifestyle of the Shire. 

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A strong current of environmentalism runs through both books. However, while Herbert was a self-taught ecologist, Tolkien’s obvious distaste for industrialisation strikes his critics as sentimental and unsophisticated. Herbert’s ideas appear to be more astute because they’re informed by scientific and technological speculation. Though the events of his novel take place 20,000 years into the future, they clearly relate to the concerns of our own time. 

Let’s start with the desert world of Dune itself, also known as Arrakis. The planet is the only source of the aforementioned Spice — a drug that enables humanity to navigate between the stars. Without it, space travel would be impossible. Wars are therefore fought to control access to this indispensable resource. 

One only has to substitute crude oil for Spice to see what Herbert was getting at. For a book written in the early 1960s — years before oil shocks of the 1970s — he was well ahead of the curve. To drive the point home, his description of Dune and the culture of its native inhabitants is saturated with words and concepts adapted from Arabic and from Islam. 

Herbert tackles some other contemporary concerns — for instance the risks posed by artificial intelligence. In the future he imagines, AI has been forbidden: the most solemn of religious commands is “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.

A technology that hasn’t been banned is the “Axlotl Tank” — an organic machine used by a branch of humanity called the “Bene Tleilax” to give birth to clones. The horrible suggestion is that because the Bene Tleilax are exclusively male, the Axlotl Tanks are all that remain of their females. This is the bio-politics of surrogacy taken to its ultimate, ghastly conclusion. 

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You won’t find biting social commentary like that in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story was more expansive; it was about something that will never change, which is the corrupting effect of power. Yet this is where Tolkien is superior to Herbert. His heroes — and heroines — pass the test because they refuse to accept the world-changing power that the Ring would confer upon them.

My favourite passage in all of Tolkien is where Frodo freely offers the Ring to Galadriel. For a heart-stopping moment, the elven queen is tempted. It would, after all, be better for her to wear the Ring than the evil Sauron. Yet she understands that she too would be made monstrous by it: “All shall love me and despair!” And so she refuses Frodo’s gift. 

Frank Herbert’s hero, however, does not refuse. There is no actual Ring in Dune, but there is ultimate power. Paul Atreides takes it. Later he has second thoughts, but not before his galactic Jihad has killed sixty billion people and sterilised ninety planets. Bit late to turn pacifist after that. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Herbert did say that the “power attracts pathological personalities” and that his stories were meant as a warning that “superheroes are disastrous for mankind”.

And yet in the sequels to Dune, Paul’s son, Leto, takes up where his dad left off. In fact, he turns himself into a giant worm (don’t ask) and imposes an absolute dictatorship on the known universe for next three thousand years. Crucially, Herbert provides him with an excuse — the “Golden Path” — meaning a super-human vision of the best possible future for all mankind. Any unpleasantness along the way is justified by the greater good. 

I think we’ve heard that one before. 

In 1965 Tolkien was sent a copy of Dune. The next year, he was sent another one. Writing back he confessed that he was familiar with the book — and disliked it “with some intensity”. As usual, the old man was right. 

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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By Shaul Ladany

Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.

Yes, we expect those things. We desire them. They comfort us. They tell us we have nothing to do with these people. They are an anomaly, a curio, a fascinating oddity that will not come again. A biography of Josef Mengele is being written as I type. It will likely be a best-seller for these reasons, though I do not want to read it.

Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Eichmann trial for the Atlantic magazine, wrote this in 1962 of her subject: “We fear him because we know that he is sane. It would be a great comfort to us if he were insane; we could then dismiss him, with horror, no doubt, but reassuring ourselves that he is not like us.” 

It feels morally necessary to distance oneself from the perpetrators of the Shoah because in that is expiation, the removal of complicity, and, therefore, sanity. But it is not useful, and it teaches us nothing.  Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” does not work either. It may be an intellectual’s gravest insult — Arendt the grumpy don judging Eichmann the functional idiot — but ennui is hardly a useful response to a shocking eruption of mass murder.

It is comforting, of course, to see Nazism as the rise of the stupid — Hitler’s credulous army of chicken farmers — but that is not true either. Many of the leading Nazis were highly cultured, or from highly cultured families. The father of Reinhard Heydrich — Hitler’s “man with the iron heart” and Eichmann’s overlord — founded a conservatoire. Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer was Heinrich Tessenow’s assistant at 22. Members of the Einsatzgruppen, the  elite paramilitary death squad, had a disproportionate number of PhDs. And of the fifteen people who sat around the table at the Wannsee House to plan the Final Solution to the invented problem of Europe’s Jews, seven had doctorates in law and another a doctorate in political science.

For every chicken farmer in the Nazi high command there were two lawyers.  There were ideologues and functionaries; fellow travellers and the ambitious; greedy souls who wanted the Jews’ homes, businesses and the shoes of their children. Some were very odd, of course. Himmler went looking for the Holy Grail (too much Wagner?).

No strategy of emotional distancing works and, anyway, history proves you wrong. Anti-racist education has failed, and anti-Semitism thrives again. It seems its brief absence post-war — a copious pause, an exhaustion, a burning out — was the anomaly. This willingness — this desire — for distance is at least part of the cause.

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We cling to the singular monster narrative, but the opposite is true. Nazism would not have thrived without its millions of collaborators and bystanders; as Gellhorn said” “eager thousands obeyed him [Eichmann]…. there was endless work for willing hands”. Without them it would have begun and ended in Munich in the early 1920s, a small, repulsive stain on a city rather than a twelve-year Reich that was supposed to last for a thousand years. One can spend too long imagining parallel futures for the Weimar Republic. But that is comforting too.

They enabled it, and that, in its totality, is its lesson and its terror. That is why it is necessary to put devil’s horns on Eichmann and Heydrich; on Streicher and Mengele. That is why Auschwitz, which appeared most recently in an X-Men film as a creation myth for a superhero, is debased into myth. More than 37% of the vote went to Nazis in July 1932 and this was a full seven years after Adolf Hitler exposed what he wanted in Mein Kampf. They only had to read it. Did they?

The Austrians greeted the Anschluss with garlands of flowers and why not? They requested the union in 1918 and when Hitler entered Vienna 90% of the population greeted him as Jews committed suicide or were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes. Later, the Jews of Paris were not rounded up by the Gestapo. They were rounded up by the French police. In Lithuania and Ukraine natives did not wait for the Germans to massacre the Jewish population. They started themselves, knowing their retrospective defence was on its way.

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There were rescuers, of course, many thousands of them — remember Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who waged his own war on Eichmann and lost everything, dying in a Russian prison after the war, and Princess Alice of Greece, mother to the Duke to Edinburgh, hiding the Cohens — but they were not representative. It was your neighbours who would send you to your deaths.

Why such complicity? It is disorientating to compile a tidy list of the causes of the Shoah (studying Nazism will give you a horror of lists by itself) but it must be done. And the most important element is not economic collapse, or thwarted nationalism, or the Versailles Treaty, or the implicit weakness of the Weimar Republic or the useful idiocies of Communism.

It is Christianity, and that is as uncomfortable a truth as the realisation that Adolf Eichmann and the rest of his gang of mass murderers were ordinary human beings. (The wife of the commandant of Auschwitz complained that her husband did not sleep with her enough, distracted as he was by the murder of Jews and Roma.) Nazism was its own religion, it is true, but the Shoah flowered amid two thousand years of anti-Jewish hatred, warped by Nazism from contempt into a death sentence. Christianity did not order the death of Jews. It merely wanted them to live in shame. They were more useful that way.

This is the complicity we dare not name. It is easier to pass the devils’s horns from the Jews to the architects of the Final Solution than to understand what enabled the one to kill the other: the deicide myth, the founding story of Jewish power and Jewish malice. This, from the gospel of Luke: “To the cross, to the cross with him!” This, from the gospel of Matthew: “His blood be on us and on our children”. This, from the gospel of John: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do what your father desires”. To Saint Gregory they were “slayers of the Lord.” To Saint John they “surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts”.

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“What then shall we Christians do” asked Martin Luther, “with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First their synagogues and churches should be set on fire…” There isn’t a positive image of Jew in European culture before the Enlightenment. Gotthold Lessing’s play The Jews (1749) failed on the Berlin stage because the hero was a Jew. The audience could not believe it.

In his book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) the historian Raul Hilberg noted that the canonical law and Nazi law proposed many of the same measures. In 1965 the Second Lateran Council retrospectively removed the charge of deicide from almost all Jews — it was passed by 2221 to 88 of the assembled bishops — and that is surely an admission that millions in history have believed these libels.

But millions do not make good villains, either morally, or narratively. They do not make particularly good victims either. That is why Stephen Spielberg ruined his potential masterpiece Schindler’s List by emphasising a pretty girl in a red coat, the only colour in the film. That, to paraphrase Mel Brooks’s The Producers, is your victim.

Instead, we prefer to emphasise the gaudy monsters, which only serves to make the Shoah more mysterious and, in the end, meaningless. For if so few are responsible, who can take responsibility? Nowadays, if you are not committing mass murder, you can consider yourself benign. “The private conscience is not only the last protection of the civilised world, it is the one guarantee of the dignity of man,” Martha Gellhorn concluded after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Or, to put it another way, demonise the few and we cease to be afraid of what we should fear most: ourselves.

My grandmother fell on me to protect me; then, when she was hit by the room’s door, blown off its hinges, she cursed and used Hitler’s name. We were lucky; in the adjacent basement several of our neighbours were killed. Somehow, we were not.

It was only while I was a refugee in Budapest that I learned Hitler’s first name: Adolf. Then, at some point between the entrance of German troops into Hungary in March 1944 and my deportation aged eight that summer to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, I added to my vocabulary the name Eichmann. At the time, it was just one name among many others. Little did I know that almost 60 years ago to the day, I would stare him directly in the face as he stood trial for helping to organise one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history.

After the termination of the war, and our return to Belgrade to search for relatives who had survived, I learned from my mother’s cousin the words Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mauthausen and Dachau. She had been deported to Auschwitz, but, being young and healthy, was spared the Gas Chamber and assigned to a bloc where prisoners’ items were sorted. There she found the luggage of my maternal grandparents, allowing us to know the exact day in which they were killed.

In 1948, following the end of the British Mandate over Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel, what remained of my family immigrated from Yugoslavia. Within a very short period Israel’s population more than tripled in size, largely thanks to the influx of Holocaust survivors. But for some unclear reason, nobody spoke about what they had seen.

People, especially the young, tried to integrate with and mimic those who had been born in Israel, the “Sabres”. What we had been through didn’t seem to matter. At school, for instance, everybody in my class knew that I was the only Holocaust survivor — yet nobody ever asked me what I had gone through during the war years. Enforced reticence was standard, and it continued during my compulsory military service and academic studies.

Even within families, there were two types of behaviour: absolute silence, where children and spouses never heard the tragic stories of the Holocaust experiences; and families like mine, where we discussed our experiences at every meeting. It meant I knew the survival and death story of every family member, but never mentioned them to anyone else.

But then, with the Eichmann trial, everything changed. At once, everybody wanted to talk about the Holocaust; the survivors opened up, and their stories started to flow.

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The trial was held in Beit Ha’am, the major arts centre in Jerusalem, and broadcast daily for hours on the two existing radio stations. There were pages and pages of reporting each day in the newspapers. Overnight, that unwritten taboo of speaking on personal Holocaust history disappeared. Just as the number of Holocaust survivors was starting to dwindle, the term “Holocaust Survivor” became a term of praise.

You could order in advance an entry ticket to the trial, if you wanted to just to sit and listen. During the first weeks it was almost completely booked out. I managed twice to get a ticket. My late wife, who had survived Kristallnacht, visited just once. That was all she needed to conclude that before us was a monster.

Eichmann sat motionless in his glass cubicle. On occasion he would answer “Ja” or “Nein” without any flicker of emotion. On the few occasions that he gave a more detailed response, it was to merely explain how he was just a small unimportant clerk who had followed orders.

What did we think of this defence? Well, suffice it to say that for his execution — the first and last in the state of Israel — hundreds of Israelis volunteered to be the hangman. Hannah Arendt may have concluded he was proof of the “banality of evil”. We, however, did not. He was an evil man who oversaw evil deeds — and that, I suspect, is how he will always be remembered.

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Certainly, his trial is remembered in the way Israel sees itself today. Perhaps more than anything else, it forged the notion of “Never Again” into our national consciousness; an attitude which the world has learned to accept.

So when Israel decided to punish the plotters and the executors of the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, when 11 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian assassins, most of the world accepted the rounding up and punishment of those behind the atrocity.

At the time, I was an Olympic racewalker — and one of the six surviving members of the team who did not return home in a coffin. That was, I am convinced, a matter of luck. The apartment I was staying in — between two others that were attacked — also housed two members of Israel’s shooting team. The terrorists probably knew this and avoided our apartment for fear of facing armed resistance. Either way, Evil had come looking for me a second time — and missed me again.

This time round, though, courtesy of Eichmann, the playbook had been written. We knew how to respond. In 1978, when Mossad finally located Ali Hassan Salameh — the mastermind of the Munich massacre — Israel didn’t think twice about making sure the terrorist joined his forefathers. Eichmann had unified and emboldened us. “Never again,” was our response.

Last month, during a Passover dinner, I asked the children around the table if they knew who Eichmann was; of course, unlike me when I was their age, they all did. And that is perhaps the most important result of the trial. Just as Jews have been remembering Moses’s exodus from Egypt for over 3,000 years, Eichmann — and the Evil he represented — will never be forgotten.

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”

Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.

Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.

Of course Jews were not Greeks, and of course they could not be permitted to live alongside other, healthier races — of whom the healthiest was the Nordic. “Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community. What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.” Hitler knew that there was nothing particular about man. He was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not evil. The truest evil was to do as Christians did: to oppose the ways of the world.

The Nazis, of course, did not succeed in their attempt to redefine for Europeans the parameters of morality. Their Reich did not last a thousand years. Their programmes of euthanasia and genocide are not commemorated today as models of enlightened statecraft, crafted in accordance with ancient wisdom and modern science. Quite the opposite. Today, across the Western world, the Nazis serve as the very archetypes of evil. The old supernatural cosmography that for centuries structured how people in Christendom understood the dimensions of hell may no longer possess the currency it once did; but the concept of hell itself still endures. It has become difficult, since the liberation of the death camps, to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky. A belief in the satanic as Christians had long construed it, as a literal demonic force, may have faded in the West; but not the conviction that evil is to be identified with a single, sulphurously charismatic figure. Who needs the Devil when there is Adolf Hitler?

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Who indeed needs Jesus? It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the more Nazism has come to shadow the imaginings of people in the West, the less they have gone to church. Other regimes in European history have aspired, as Hitler did, to eradicate the hold of Christianity; but only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings.

This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. Today, when we ask ourselves “what would Hitler have done?”, and do the opposite, we are as obedient to the weathering effects of Christian morality as our forebears were when they wondered “what would Jesus have done,” and sought to do the same.

Nietzsche, declaring in a famous parable that God was dead, declared as well that in the great cave that had once been Christendom His shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. It is there in our readiness to use “fascist” as the ultimate insult; to sanctify those who suffer oppression; to regard racism as a sin beyond compare: a shadow that continues to define for us, even in this godless age, the meaning of evil.

Yet he had played an active role in an industrial-sized enterprise of human cruelty and malevolence. There was something deeply unnerving about this: the disproportion between the smallness of this man and the Himalayan magnitude of the Holocaust. It didn’t seem to add up.

As a criminologist, I have been trained to think that evil is a social category or label that dominant groups impose on less powerful “Others” – the marginalised. If there’s a “criminology of evil”, it’s a criminology of how modern states and their elaborate network of enforcers succeed in demonising people who can’t or won’t follow the rules of the system. According to this account, evil people aren’t really evil; they’re just the convenient victims of the “problematic” use of state power. They’re the symbolic scapegoats we invent to signal our virtue so that we can feel good and exorcise our demons.

Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, while recognising his quotidian evil, readily fits in with this. Far from being a monster, Eichmann, in Arendt’s eyes, is a “thoughtless” Everyman. Even his motives, according to Arendt, were bland and boring, more to do with needy imperatives like pleasing superiors, career advancement and wanting to be liked.

But there’s another part of the story of human evil that Arendt and today’s criminologists cannot or do not want to confront. This is the part that has to do with the monstrousness of monstrous people. It’s the part that’s so squalid and viscerally disgusting that we can’t help but stare at it, shocked and dumbfounded by the scale of human wickedness grimly staring us in the face. It’s the stories that, as the renowned scholar William Ian Miller puts it, “sicken us in the telling, things for which there could be no plausible claim of right: rape, child abuse, torture, genocide, predatory murder and maiming”.

If there’s a genre to which these stories belong, it’s horror. And yet there’s no criminology of horror. Indeed, all of those sharp insights about “the banality of evil” quickly lose their edge the closer we venture toward that region of, to quote Miller again, “dark unbelievability”.

If, as I have, you’ve watched a lot of ISIS atrocity propaganda, or listened to the testimony of those who narrowly missed appearing in it, you’ll know all about dark unbelievability. It’s the sheer insanity of filming a toddler shoot a defenceless man, of filming a group of hostages being decapitated, of filming a man burned alive in a cage. It’s the sheer depravity of inventing ever more creative ways to torture and kill people because you think your fan-base will love it and your enemies hate it.

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Granted, there was a method to ISIS’s madness. The group murdered people on camera — 2,375 in all, between January 2015 and June 2020 — because it wanted to terrify its enemies and inflame its supporters. And, like any terrorist group, it also wanted maximum exposure and publicity. But there was also an undeniably expressive quality to ISIS’s violence which can’t simply be reduced to cold means-ends logic. ISIS murdered not just with savage efficiency, but with hot exuberance and glee.

For a recent lecture on Trinidadian ISIS militants, I pulled out a particularly gruesome video that I planned to show. Uploaded to the internet in the summer of 2014, by which point ISIS had captured Mosul in Iraq and declared the formation of the caliphate, it shows a jihadi in military fatigues holding up a severed head.

“Hello, my name is John,” he says in a mock English accent, performing the role of ventriloquist. This is followed by howls of laughter, from both the militant and the person filming. “See, he doesn’t smile today,” the militant adds. “Right now John look like he died of natural causes,” a voice with a Trinidadian accent says off-camera. More riotous laughter.

These men are clearly enjoying themselves, which surely raises the spectre of a kind of evil that is anything but banal. Or does it?

A sanitised, sociological reading of the video would conclude that the laughter is an expression not of sadistic delight but of nervous energy; the men are laughing because they’re secretly horrified. They’re desensitised to killing and have been brutalised by war. It’s a way for these men to bond, and if they’re violent and thuggish it’s because they’re following the script of toxic masculinity. Indeed, the whole spectacle before us is determined by the situation, and not the predispositions, choices, desires or quirks of the men themselves. As the social psychologist Albert Bandura puts it: “Conducive social conditions rather than monstrous people… produce heinous deeds. Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.”

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Let’s leave aside the question of whether the men in the video are “decent, ordinary people”; though I suspect that cutting a man’s head off and then laughing about it on camera is reason to doubt such a proposition. Instead, let’s probe the sly determinism inscribed in that  causal reference — “led” — in the above quotation from Bandura. Who or what led ISIS western militants to Syria? And who or what led them to cut off heads and laugh about it?

The typical sociological account of western ISIS militants would have it that everything but the agency of the militants themselves led them to go to Syria. Western imperialism led them. Slick ISIS videos led them. Their bruising experiences with the British security state led them. The Iraq war led them. Islamophobia led them. The caliphate-fantasy led them. Shadowy recruiters led them. Insecurity, identity-confusion, trauma, boredom — all of that somehow led them. And, then, once they got to Syria and Iraq, peer pressure, PTSD, fear, the need to belong — all of that led them to enslave people and commit terrible atrocities.

But none of this explains anything. It doesn’t explain why the so-called “Beatles” — the British ISIS beheading outfit — spent a lot of time taunting and degrading their victims prior to killing them. It doesn’t explain the insanity of the ISIS videos. It doesn’t explain the laughter of those Trinidadian ISIS militants. It doesn’t explain all the “useless violence”— as Primo Levi called it — that ISIS committed both on and off camera; the sort of violence that, as Levi explained, has no purpose other than creating pain.

More than twenty years ago, the political theorist C. Fred Alford brilliantly dissected the famous Stanley Milgram experiments that were carried out at Yale University in the 1960s. The subjects in the experiments, called “teachers”, think that they’re delivering shocks to a “learner”, who is actually in on the experiment with Milgram. The learner is a middle-aged man with a heart condition — or so Milgram informs the teacher. The teacher’s task is clear: he must flick a switch on the generator and deliver an electric shock to the learner when he fails to memorise word pairs. The shocks begin at 15 volts and go up to 450.

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Alford concedes that the teachers do not appear to like their job: “They ask the experimenter not to go on, they talk about how worried they are about the learner. They smoke too much and sweat furiously…they complain, they hesitate…” Yet most deliver the electric shocks. “All they have to do… is just say no, and mean it. Less than half do,” Alford writes.

Milgram interpreted this finding as evidence of “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority”. But Alford doesn’t buy it, and is struck by a little discussed detail that recurred throughout the experiments: namely, the grotesque laughter, “the giggling fits at the shock generator”.

“What if these men are giggling in embarrassed pleasure at being given permission to inflict great pain and suffering on an innocent and vulnerable man?” Alford asks. “What if what the teachers really want, what they long for, is permission to hurt someone?” Milgram rejected this conclusion outright: the teachers in the experiment are slavish, not sadistic. But he presented no evidence for this view.

Whether Alford is right about the teachers’s laughter remains to be seen, but his broader psychoanalytic perspective, which recognises the agency of people who do evil and the pleasures they take from controlling others through violence, captures something Arendt missed in her account of evil as “banal”.

Extensive footage from the Milgram experiments can be viewed on YouTube and you can judge for yourself whether or not Alford was onto something. Or there are those dark recesses of the internet, stuffed with videos of horrors inflicted by people who, pace Arendt, are terrifyingly terrible: ISIS butchers, chainsaw-wielding Mexican cartel murderers, serial killers armed with screwdrivers and many more grotesque figures.

And therein lies the problem with Arendt’s account of Eichmann: she was so bewitched by the smallness of the man that, to this day, it dulls us to all the thoughtful malevolence that surrounds us, should we dare to look at it and see it for what it really is.

For speed and scale the deportations went unmatched: 424,000 people were despatched by train in just 52 days, from 14 May to 9 July. In this fleeting window Hungarian Jews became the single largest group gassed at Auschwitz. The crematoria couldn’t cope with such “over-supply”, and Commandant Rudolf Höß ordered special fire pits dug — filling the camp with noxious smoke. According to Primo Levi, “there were weeks when only Hungarian was heard in Auschwitz”.

Physical annihilation was undergirded by Eichmann’s elaborate psychological strategy. Sophisticated Budapest Jews who might escape or resist were pacified by newspaper reports that only “ost Juden” from Hungary’s nether regions were being removed as “undesirables”. Many only saw through the lie, if at all, when deportations reached Budapest’s outer suburbs in early July — just before Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Head of State, halted them under diplomatic pressure from the Western Allies and neutrals.

Throughout the deportations, and across Hungary’s length, Eichmann deluged Jews with ever more complex regulations covering the minutiae of daily life. These instilled a false sense of permanence which inhibited hiding or escape: “why would the authorities go to all this trouble if they were just going to get rid of us?”

Even as deportations rolled on, Eichmann conducted elaborate negotiations for fanciful “rescue schemes” including, but not limited to, the infamous “Blood for Trucks” project involving Rudolf Kastner — the proposed barter of one million Jewish lives for 10,000 Western motor vehicles for use on the Eastern front against the USSR. The aim, Eichmann later acknowledged, was not just to split Western powers from the Soviets, but also to distract Hungary’s Jewish leaders from counter-organising: keeping minds busy and hopes alive.

All the while Eichmann treated Jewish leaders in Budapest to flashes of menace.  One day he promised them a return to normality “after the war”, the next he would snarl “Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!” With studied cruelty Eichmann arranged the ghettoisation of Hungary’s Jews to begin on Sunday, 16 April: the first day of Passover, 1944.

Eichmann did many things in Hungary; the one thing he did not do was simply “obey orders” — indeed over time he defied them with gathering frequency. That autumn as inevitable defeat became ever more apparent Eichmann, helped by local enthusiasts, intensified his efforts, instigating newly inventive means of eliminating Jews in Hungary and the Balkans through “death marches” and localised killing sprees. In doing so, Eichmann subverted instructions from Himmler who ordered cessation as part of a delusional plan to negotiate with the allies.

This “Eichmann in Budapest” should be recalled while contemplating the later Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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By 11 May 1960 a fugitive Eichmann had lived for a decade in Buenos Aries as “Ricardo Klement”, a rabbit farmer and, later, Mercedes-Benz factory worker, an immigrant hailing from the German minority in Italy’s South Tyrol. That evening Mossad agents, following a tip-off, kidnapped “Klement” from the street outside his house as he walked home from the bus stop after work.

Ten days later a drugged-up Eichmann left Argentina on false papers aboard an El Al flight supporting a diplomatic protocol visit timed to cover his extraction. Fearing a rescue bid by any Nazi sympathiser network while refuelling, the plane exceeded its permitted milage. By touchdown in Tel Aviv it was flying on vapours.

Preparing the prosecution case took almost a year. Eichmann’s trial commenced in Jerusalem’s brand-new Bet Ha’Am theatre on 11 April 1961 before three Israeli judges. Eichmann was accused of fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The unusual venue arose from unprecedented international interest: over 400 journalists sought accreditation, and the country had no courtroom large enough.

Controversy raged around the trial. Eichmann’s removal, a triumph of spycraft, was a flagrant breach of Argentina’s sovereignty. Israel’s authority to try crimes occurring outside its borders, enacted by (and against) non-citizens prior to its foundation seemed, at best, dubious. Sixty years on, however, discord persists less in regards to the trial’s legal foundations and more because of how courtroom events were theorised by one writer: Hannah Arendt.

Arendt, a pre-war Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, travelled to Jerusalem to observe the trial for The New Yorker and confront the government that caused her own life’s profound dislocation. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) consolidated her reflective articles for the New Yorker published that year. Its subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, became synonymous with the trial: it’s how most people “know” about Eichmann.

Unfortunately, Arendt was utterly, appallingly, wrong about the man she saw, or thought she saw, in Jerusalem.

“Banality” appears just once in Arendt’s main text: in the very last sentence. Reflecting on Eichmann’s clunky, formulaic, farewell prior to execution Arendt opined: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summoning up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, world and thought defying banality of evil.”

The “banal” designation comes at the narrative’s end but condenses observations made in memorable passages throughout including “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect he was a clown”. 

Observing 55-year-old Eichmann’s bureaucratic bearing, ponderous speech, and petty jealousies Arendt deemed his key role in genocide motivated not by fanatical anti-Semitism (his denial of which she accepted), but “thoughtlessness” in its most literal sense. Arendt used the word to connote not “forgetfulness” but absence of autonomous cognition. She took Eichmann’s seeming “inability to speak” as evidencing incapacity to think. Such a person, Arendt reasoned, greets the “Führer principle” joyfully – relieved from the agony of forming opinions.

Arendt’s verdict bled through her book’s cover into mainstream pop psychology. The “banality of evil” became a banality itself thanks to excessive invocation at dinner parties and in newspaper columns. It escaped Arendt that Eichmann, who she dismissed as uneducated, was playing a clever game.

Understanding Eichmann requires less focus on transcripts of the 1961 trial and more on a collection of late 1950’s recordings from informal seminars in Argentina. These were attended by numerous former and aspirant Nazis, and taped by Dutch sympathiser-journalist Willem Sassen, who hoped to write a book rehabilitating the Third Reich by proving the “Jewish propaganda” about the “slaughter of six million” to be a hoax.

Following lengthy conversations with Eichmann, Sassen abandoned the project, having been told precisely what he didn’t want to hear, and from the horse’s mouth — the “propaganda” was true.

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Regrettably these recordings, though known of in 1961, were available to the court only in fragmentary transcripts: the full cache didn’t re-emerge until 1999. If they had been played at trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem would read very differently. (Fortunately, an analytical summary is now available in Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in 2011.)

On the penultimate recording in a long series (68 tapes) Eichmann, articulating his role in the Holocaust reflects on his divided nature, says: “I the cautious bureaucrat, that was me, yes indeed. But I would like to expand on the issue of the ‘cautious bureaucrat’ somewhat… This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood which is my birth right.”

A terrifying crescendo is reached with these words “No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if out of the 10.3 million [worldwide] Jews… identified we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied… We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood… if we had eliminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects”. Contemplating repentance, Eichmann exclaims “I could do it cheaply for the sake of current opinion… [but] for me to deeply regret it, for me to pretend that a Saul has become a Paul… I cannot do that”.

Sassen’s Holocaust denial project ended abruptly soon afterwards.

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Before Adolf Eichmann was Ricardo Klement, he was Otto Henninger and before that Adolf-Karl Barth. At war’s end, under yet another name, he was captured by the allies but escaped. We shouldn’t be surprised if one so used to disguising his identity might also conceal his complex nature. Genocidal bent and aptitude for dissimulation was not temporarily sequential: they were interlaced aspects of personality. Long before adopting false names Eichmann mastered self-concealment.

In the 1930s and 40s Eichmann wove elaborate biographic myths to create confusion. He convinced Jewish interlocutors of linguistic gifts he didn’t possess in Yiddish and Hebrew, and forged a story of upbringing amid a notorious “Templar’ German community in Palestine known for anti-Semitic violence. These motifs, fused with deep knowledge of Zionist literature in translation, allowed him to disorientate Jewish interlocutors: simultaneously opening up an unexpected connection and a register of menacing threat.

Yet despite her analytical faults, we shouldn’t condemn Arendt harshly — as some have. Critics like Deborah Lipstadt allege Arendt arrived in Jerusalem with a commission from The New Yorker and a suitcase bursting with ideas she wanted to demonstrate. They attribute to her a drive to render Eichmann a worked example of her thesis in her 1951 masterpiece the Origins of Totalitarianism about the moral disabling of individuals which a supercharged ideology possessed of state-power can achieve.

This is unfair. Arendt didn’t see in Eichmann what she wanted but what he projected. Arendt’s evaluation is consonant with that of many journalists reporting on the trial with no ideological axe to grind. It’s just that her intellectual subtlety was outflanked by Eichmann’s psychological one. As Stangeth points out, Eichmann lead “a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon”, the assumption philosopher Arendt carried that “someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood”.

Conversely Israeli Police Captain Avner Less, who interrogated Eichmann pre-trial, was sharper. “After the end of the first hearing [interview], I was convinced that Eichmann wasn’t telling this story for the first time,” he said afterwards: “I had the feeling this man had been rehearsing it somewhere.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem wore a mask, yet pulling that mask off doesn’t pull the rug from under Arendt’s Totalitarianism. Historical sociologists take the deep conditioning of the Third Reich seriously; contemporary behavioural psychology confirms our susceptibility to manipulation by authority figures. Paradoxically Eichmann’s performance supports Totalitarianism’s thesis: he could ably present himself as one deformed by totalitarianism because he helped to fashion it and deform others.

And so, under questioning, Eichmann presented himself both as one for whom obedience was the supreme virtue and as a mere “messenger” operating an intermediate administrative ‘clearing house’ for orders. Though he couldn’t evade conviction he hoped to slip the noose by passing himself off as a cog in the machine.

Curiously his counsel, Cologne lawyer Robert Servatius, took a contrary approach. Servatius asserted not that superior orders absolved Eichmann from subjective moral responsibility. Rather, he argued, the order’s receipt and discharge objectively subsumed Eichmann’s personal actions into “Acts of the German State” raising the shield of “sovereign immunity” — a more plausible legal argument then than now. The defence concluded on 15 August.

Judgment came on 11 December. Rejecting Servatius’s “Act of State” defence, Eichmann was found guilty on all counts. The defendant’s interpretation of events was likewise dismissed: Hungary proved Eichmann’s distinct moral agency: he was not just “obeying orders”.

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A sentence of execution by hanging followed on 15 December, and was carried out on 31 May 1962. Eichmann’s body, like his victims’, was cremated: the ashes scattered at sea to prevent a grave attracting Neo-Nazi pilgrims.

It has become fashionable, since the Sassen tapes emerged, to despatch Arendt’s thesis, or at least a representation of it, to the winds of oblivion too. Her “banality of evil” thesis should, it is argued — because of its contextual inapplicability to Eichmann — be banished from the moral Lexicon per se. This however risks an empirical misreading of both Eichmann and his trial.

Eichmann was both a calmly meticulous administrator and a murderous anti-Semite. The punctilious observer of office routine and arranger of index cards is far better placed to achieve genocidal aims than the volatile smasher of windows.

The infectiousness of the genuine “banality of evil” was demonstrated, inadvertently, at trial by the defence counsel. Robert Servatius, himself entirely innocent of complicity in genocide witnessed to its precondition by unthinking, and at the time scandalous, reference of the gassing at Auschwitz as “medical matters”. The lawyer meant no offence — he had, as a former inhabitant of Nazi Germany, simply internalised the euphemistic language by which such things were referred to under the Third Reich.

If we discard Arendt completely, we risk something worse than misreading Eichmann. We chance missing the mask calculated evil wears before us now.