Unless you look like Sydney Sweeney or can talk like President Trump, who is going to pay attention to you? That’s why, in the 21st century’s noisy attention economy, being an intellectual practically obliges you to choose an apocalypse and make it your own. It’s a lucrative racket: everyone loves a good dramatic story, and there is precious little accountability — by the time people might ask why your prediction never came to pass, they have already moved on to consume the next supersized threat, no matter which side of the aisle you’re standing on.

To wit, in the years after 9/11, we were told by both the Left and the Right that religious fundamentalism imperiled us all. During the Iraq War, then-President George W. Bush ping-ponged between several terms to describe the Great Evil: Islamic radicalism, militant jihadism, and Islamofascism, that last term popularized by the British journalist Christopher Hitchens. Liberals, on the other hand, braced for domestic theocracy from the religious Right. Books like political strategist Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy and Left-wing journalist Chris Hedges’s American Fascists cast Bush-era evangelicals as crazed millenarians bent on world domination. When Right-wing Christians used slogans like “We’ll take back our country for Christ,” Hedges insisted it meant literally taking up arms for the Lord.

The Bush and the Obama years also gave us the climate apocalypse. In 2010, the climate activist and environmentalist Bill McKibben declared that we no longer lived on Earth, but on a different planet altogether, called “Eaarth,” because it was already broken beyond repair due to extreme climate change. Republicans countered that President Barack Obama was the existential threat: a secret Muslim, a Kenyan socialist, and the architect of scary “death panels,” wherein ObamaCare bureaucrats would decide the fate of the elderly. Maybe, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck mused, Obama was the Antichrist. 

Then came Brexit and Trump, and the liberals insisted that — actually — the Donald, not Bush or Obama, was the new Hitler, and that he and Vladimir Putin were about to construct a new world order ruled from Mar-a-Lago and the Kremlin. Then came Covid, the closest the 21st century has actually had to a real biblical plague. Before the virus receded, we were supposed to believe cities were dead forever, office work was finished, and, as Anthony Fauci suggested, we would never shake hands again. After a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the pundit class settled on a second American civil war as the coming storm. 

And yet here we are, and the extravagant prophecies that flood our inboxes keep going unfulfilled. Sharia Law never arrived in Brussels. Putin and Trump never got around to uniting to divide the globe between them. The cities everyone buried in 2020 as superspreader sites are full again. And the second civil war, five years after its publishing boom, has yet to produce a single skirmish, unless we count the anti-ICE rebellion in Minneapolis that has since gone quiet. The past decade has delivered plenty of genuine crises: growing inequality, the aforementioned pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and now the disruptive technology of generative artificial intelligence. Indeed, Trump is hastening the end of American supremacy abroad; the liberal order that followed the Cold War is coming apart in real time. 

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The Me Decade — 50 years later

By Ryan Zickgraf

But the trouble with crying wolf is that it crowds out the actual, more mundane issues. Our contemporary problems in America don’t look like the Left Behind franchise or The Handmaid’s Tale. They look like slowly decaying media and institutions, an impotent Congress that can’t handcuff the executive, an economy in which the young can’t afford a house, and a state that can’t build anything. Our doomsday prophets point at the sky, which prompts us to watch for the cleansing fire rather than look around at the leaking pipes. 

It’s clear that, even more than two decades into this century, we still haven’t learned our lesson about being distracted by vote-or-the-sky-will-fall proclamations. Enter the Left’s newest doomsday prophecy: End Times Fascism. What’s coming, co-authors Klein and Taylor aver, is Armageddon, or at least a bespoke secular version of it. The book’s thesis is that three overlapping tribes of “end timers” have fused into a single coalition under Trump and a multinational version of MAGA — as contradictory as that sounds. 

First come the religious zealots, an alliance of “Jewish and Christian supremacists” — Zionists and Mike Pence-style evangelicals — fixated on building the Third Temple in Jerusalem and supposedly willing to “actively court World War III” to get there. Then come the tech titans, who have cozied up to Trump since the 2024 election. Finally, there are the ethno-nationalist preppers, the Right-wing radicals who imagine the nation-state itself as a purified bunker, which means the West should cast all undesirables out and isolate itself from the world, shutting the international door behind us. 

It’s also not just an America or Israel problem, the book says: every spot on the map is seen as a “testing ground” for the same overarching international Right-wing agenda, whether it is President Nayib Bukele’s prisons in El Salvador, President Javier Milei’s chainsawing of the Argentinian economy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s closed borders in Italy, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s citizenship purges in India. What unites these disparate groups, the authors argue, is a kind of elite supremacism — white, Jewish, techno, or ethno — and “their common abandonment of the very possibility of a stable future.” Each has made peace with catastrophe, and some are hastening it, confident that they will be among the chosen few who survive wars, climate disaster, or economic insecurity: souls raptured to heaven, minds uploaded to the cloud, bodies hurtling in rockets to the stars or, at the very least, living in gleaming AI-powered smart cities in Silicon Valley walled off from the rest of humanity. They are an elite “few ascending to a gated paradise while the rest of us are abandoned to the floods and fires of the damned.” 

As is standard for contemporary soothsayers, End Times Fascism reaches for a Historical Bad Guy to prove the point. Today’s leaders, the authors argue, are like Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but even more dangerous than the fascists of the early 20th century. Not because they’re more evil, but because their technological tools are more powerful: “We are saying that our world is more dangerous than their world: its weapons deadlier, its technologies vastly more potent, its media more connected, its climate more unstable, its concentrated wealth more global in reach than at any point in human history.” The rhetorical move here is to keep the old boogeyman label but inflate the stakes: they are not just fascists, they are cyber-fascists with nukes, bioweapons, and superintelligence. Call it Armageddon inflation. Every apocalypse narrated to us that fails to arrive must be replaced by a larger one, like a Marvel sequel that can only raise the stakes by threatening the multiverse. 

Klein has toured this territory before but more modestly. Nearly 20 years ago, her polemic The Shock Doctrine argued that elites and governments exploit wars, coups, and hurricanes to ram through their agendas, especially wish lists of pro-corporate policies. It was a sharp book about political opportunism and how vultures show up to dine on the carcass. End Times Fascism is the spiritual sequel to The Shock Doctrine, but the argument is expansive: today’s oligarchs, the authors write, “aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood.” In other words, exploiting the disaster has been upgraded to manufacturing it; now the vultures are killing the animal themselves, to feed on their metaphorical flesh. 

There is a real lack of self-awareness here. The Left often calls out the Right for taking a messy set of actors with wildly diverging interests and welding them into a single cosmic enemy. At the GOP’s recent midterm convention, speakers like Sen. Ted Cruz dusted off a new version of the so-called Red-Green Alliance — the idea that socialists and Islamists are secretly conspiring together in a plan to destroy the West. That is an incredible reach, but so is grouping together figures ranging from Mark Zuckerberg, Benjamin Netanyahu, Curtis Yarvin, and Tom Brady (he of the $150 million bunker mansion in Miami) as part of a kind of new MAGA-flavored Evil Empire. 

Another problem is that the book’s own evidence keeps pointing somewhere less metaphysical. It opens with a genuinely strong set piece with biblical overtones: on a mountaintop in the dead of winter, two men unveil a vision of a gleaming city rising from “wastelands of rubble and rivers of blood.” The mountaintop is Davos in January 2026, and the prophets are the Trump consiglieres Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, while the city is “New Gaza,” rendered by AI in a PowerPoint deck with clouds parting and golden light pouring down. That’s exactly as grotesque as it sounds, and Klein and Taylor are right to be appalled. But is this much different than what the architects of the Afghanistan or Iraq War had in mind for those countries’ postwar reconstructions? The fantasy of turning a devastated Middle Eastern country into an investor’s paradise hardly began with Jared Kushner. Two decades earlier, Paul Bremer sought and failed to remake occupied Iraq through low taxes, foreign investment, and privatization. 

End Times Fascism also awkwardly yada-yada’s over regimes that don’t quite fit in the narrative of tech CEOs, ethno-nationalists, and MAGA. In the introduction, there’s a brief concession that “parts of Iran’s ruling Shia elites are indeed steeped in dangerous end-times theology” before the book races back to “the mounting apocalypticism closer to home.” China’s authoritarian rulers — who are building the actual surveillance cities the authors fear — are conspicuously missing. Is Beijing with the Empire or the Rebel Alliance? Or is it sitting out Armageddon?

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A Left case for the Great Books 

By Valerie Stivers

Despite End Times Fascism’s claim to the contrary, there is little evidence that anyone — not Trump, not Elon Musk, not Stephen Miller — is trying to end democracy, America, or the world intentionally, whether for ill-gotten gains, big viewership numbers, or a seat in paradise. There is, however, abundant evidence of greed, opportunism, and a ruling class eager to exploit our economic and geopolitical turmoil to bend, not break, the world order. But those are old sins and they don’t need a new theology to explain them. Sometimes the rich and the powerful just pursue their own self-interest. Was the title Shock Doctrine 2 not available?

The authors are correct that something ugly is happening in American politics. But Trump is now paying the price politically, with record-low approval ratings and the defections  of erstwhile fellow travelers like Tucker Carlson, who has since suggested that Trump, in fact, may be the actual Antichrist. Most Americans are not ideologically driven, whether by Marxism or MAGA; they care more about gas prices than white supremacy or wokeness. 

But who actually wants to read about gas prices? The doom-scrolling that defines our information ecosystem always requires fresh new doom to consume, so our pundit and political class keep going back to the lab. End Times Fascism was published in the same week as the nationwide freakout about the Rise of the Robots in the wake of an Anthropic employee’s tweetstorm about how AI could kill us all “by the end of the decade.” Meanwhile, Peter Thiel will soon lecture again about the Antichrist. 

We’re quite literally in a doom loop. But it doesn’t have to be. Lest we forget, it’s the 20th century that remains the bloodiest, most destructive in human history. The defining feature of this century is the wild-eyed, fantastical, and increasingly surreal rhetoric and images about the end of democracy, America, the West, the universe, and everything, paired with the agonizingly slow but steady decline of our existing politics and institutions, unmitigated by the creation of new ones. One century looked like Armageddon; this one talks like it.

Correction: an earlier version of this essay misstated the reported cost of Tom Brady’s Miami bunker.

If there is an infinity of universes, as some scientists speculate, the cosmos may contain an infinite number of Russell Brands. It follows that if there is a God, he must surely be a malevolent one. There is, however, an upside to this nightmare. Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.

Doubling has its comic aspects. If a monstrously fat man in pink tights and a sombrero crosses a stage, and a moment later another monstrously fat, similarly dressed man does the same, the audience are likely to laugh. In Freudian terms, they can avoid the mental labour of coping with difference, and by economising on psychical energy in this way they can release it in the form of laughter. Most humour involves a sense of incongruity, and in this case, ironically, it is sameness which is incongruous in the sense of out of step with the way things usually are.

If this were to happen in real life, however, it would probably be more eerie than funny. I was once on a flight to Sydney, waiting for the aircraft to take off, when an enormously tall Japanese man, not a common sight, entered the plane. He was followed almost immediately by another Japanese man well over six foot tall, and he by another, and so on until fifteen or so of them had lumbered down the aisle. This was pretty spooky until I discovered that it was the Japanese basketball team en route to the Australian Olympics.

Pure repetition is unnerving. Exact identities don’t happen in everyday life, which is why Nietzsche thought that words such as “leaf” were fictional because they implied that all leaves are the same. It’s also why identical twins have a sacred status in some cultures, “sacred” meaning both blessed and cursed. The fact that the alien children in John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos all look the same is part of what makes them so sinister. We are speaking of the uncanny, which means something both strange and familiar — familiar because it’s exactly like something else we know, but strange because this repetition is creepy.

One reason we enjoy rhythms and rhymes is that they combine difference and repetition, thus avoiding a monotonous thud on the one hand and a disorientating diversity on the other. “Baa baa black sheep” is fine, but “Baa baa black bull” has a surfeit of sameness. Pure identity is tedious, while pure difference would be unintelligible. Hell is traditionally thought to be less agonising than boring. It has the eternal sameness of shit.

It’s much the same with aliens, who are never very alien. They may have weird eyes, but at least they have eyes. If they were entirely different from us it’s hard to know how we could be aware of them. Perhaps a couple of them are sitting in your lap right now. Aliens may be tiny and greenish and stink of sulphur, but otherwise they look much like Jonathan Ross. More to the point, they bear a remarkable resemblance to both William Hague and Dominic Cummings. In fact, there are people for whom aliens, who touch down on Earth occasionally, are the only acceptable kind of immigrants, given that they presumably don’t intend to take our jobs, houses, primary school places or PhDs.

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Beware the new leviathans

By Terry Eagleton

An interplay of sameness and difference can be found everywhere you look these days, and its technical name is narcissism. To be besotted with yourself is clearly an example of sameness or self-identity, but it also involves treating yourself as though you were someone else, and thus a degree of difference or self-alienation. You treat yourself and your body with exquisite care, as though you were carrying a precious but sickeningly fragile vase in your hands. Putting items in this brittle container, an activity traditionally known as eating, is a particularly fraught affair. There has probably been no civilisation for which food was simply food, but it’s rare to find one like our own where it’s scarcely food at all but invasion, potential poison, crime against non-humanity (eating meat), moral blackmail, emotional manipulation or a slavish surrender to patriarchal demands.

The opposite of treating yourself as Other is treating the Other as oneself. In ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate other is the monster, some deformed creature which civilisation needs to shut out in order to preserve its sanity and stability. The monster in Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus seems to be the Sphinx, but in the end it turns out to be the blinded, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus himself, the king who is driven out of society and reduced to a homeless beggar. Shakespeare’s Lear is a later version of this tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, it is the hideous Furies who threaten to subvert social order, while in Euripides’s Bacchae it is the god of orgies and erotic love, Dionysus.

In all these cases, society can only survive if it has the courage to recognise something of itself in the monstrous Other which confronts it. It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released. The social order must recognise that its stability rests on the violent repression of these life-giving, death-dealing forces; only then can it be truly secure. When you meet your double, so legend has it, you die; but it might also be the occasion for a transformed existence.

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary; and if Wolf reads the work, as of course she will, and runs into Klein with a knife conveniently to hand, one fears that the legend might turn out to be true. Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism, while Wolf was once a liberal feminist and darling of the Democrats who groomed Al Gore in how to give a convincing imitation of a human being.

She is now a conspiracy theorist who has a cavalier way with the facts, has compared Barack Obama to Hitler and thinks that people who are vaccinated against Covid don’t really feel human. She appears regularly on podcasts with Steve Bannon, who is said to have expressed disapproval of his children going to school with Jews (Wolf is Jewish). One of the two Naomis, then, embraces a paranoid form of politics, while the other does not. As Samuel Beckett remarked of one of the two thieves on Calvary being saved, it’s a reasonable percentage.

Nobody’s afraid of Naomi Wolf, but what she stands for these days is deeply alarming. The real Naomi, i.e. Klein, is regularly confused with the unreal Naomi, i.e. Wolf, and her book is among other things an exorcising of this embarrassment. A similar situation used to exist in Britain, where there was a real Stuart Hall, a Left-wing cultural theorist from Jamaica, and an unreal Stuart Hall, a slick TV performer and fawner on royalty who ended up in prison.

Why do so many conspiracy theories originate in the United States? One answer lies in the vast size of the place. This means that Americans are accustomed to a fair amount of personal space, and are particularly sensitive about that space being “invaded”. An American might say “Excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the citizens of Beijing. Smoking is taboo not only because it can kill you, but because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one hygienically sealed body and another. The model of human contact is infection. Rather as smoke becomes invisible but remains all-pervasive, these apparently separate bodies are caught up in some terrifying web of secret powers, and thus by no means as free and autonomous as they think.

Conspiracy theorists, for whom (like the paranoid) nothing happens by accident, are out to give a name to this system, whether you call it the political state or the work of a bunch of paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy. In doing so, you have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent, so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame.

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How the truth fell into disrepute

By Terry Eagleton

You can also combat the sealed-off bodies syndrome with new forms of bonding and brotherhood like the Proud Boys. When a pandemic breaks out in this situation, it isn’t the virus which a lot of citizens regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipresent, but the state which seeks to protect them from it. At a time when bodies need to be hygienically sealed off from each other in order to survive, they cast off their masks, demand liberty or death and sometimes end up with both. They insist on the right to breathe together, which is the literal meaning of the word “conspiracy”.

In Dostoevesky’s chilling tale The Double, a timorous clerk called Golaydkin is persecuted by a smirking, malicious doppelganger whom he finally kisses in a despairing attempt at reconciliation. In doing so, however, he merely seals his doom, as he is driven away in a coach by a fearful coachman who is no less than Death itself. The real Golyadkin is destroyed by his phantom double.

No observer of the current American scene can doubt that this may happen there too. The Left, after all, is accustomed to defeat: our adversaries have more tanks than we do, not to speak of a lot more money and control of the means by which they can propagate their lies. What the big bad Wolf represents may trump what the real Naomi stands for in every sense of the word. But Klein has one monumental advantage: what she says, give or take a bit, is true. So you must either prove her wrong or create a world in which truth doesn’t matter anyway. That project is already far advanced.

The romantic penumbra that surrounds the dictatorship in Cuba to this day is a good example of the moral leeway still granted to projects that are nominally socialist, or which seek to transform humanity in some way. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, progressive hearts which are “bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US… suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society”.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years, and today’s Cuba is mainly of kitsch value, its youthful revolutionary heroes preserved as a piece of sixties nostalgie; its diminishing achievements — education (Fidelista indoctrination) and internationalist healthcare (Cuban doctors sent overseas have been likened to indentured labour) — implausibly trotted out to justify over half a century of dictatorship.

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Red alert: the childish fad for socialism

By James Bloodworth

And so a new generation of political “seekers” have turned to China for their ideological sustenance.

Beyond the mere worship of money and power, there is not much to like about the government in Beijing. The programme of socialist modernisation launched four decades ago by Deng Xiaoping has produced an authoritarian state capitalism overseen by a dictatorship which censors the internet, bans independent trade unions and pursues an aggressively imperialist policy in the South China Sea.

What the Chinese regime shares with the Stalinist USSR is contempt for ethnic minorities and civil society. Over recent years China has arrested a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and placed them in forced labour camps. As Nick Cohen writes for The Observer, evidence of their criminality includes “wearing a veil or headscarf” and the “avoidance of alcohol”.

The esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked in an interview for Desert Island Discs in 1995 if communist utopia would have been worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. Yes, the historian replied. The most charitable interpretation of Hobsbawm’s remarks was that it was at least plausible in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s USSR was the only alternative to a western capitalism which looked increasingly like the handmaiden of fascism. Of course even that is a stretch: there were plenty of individuals at the time who eschewed fascism without embracing Stalinist mass murder.

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A cautionary tale for today's 'woke' movement

By John Gray

But does anyone truly believe that contemporary China is forging an egalitarian new civilisation? Income inequality in China exceeds that of the United States. Moreover, when it is not herding Uighurs into the Gulag, the Chinese Communist Party is busy suppressing young Chinese Marxists who have noticed the gap between official rhetoric and the corrupt and unequal reality.

Yet much like during the Cold War, a roll-call of useful idiots have faithfully stepped forward from deep within the cosseted bosom of western liberal democracy to defend China from criticism. Some, undoubtedly chasing clout on social media, have decided that “Muslims are treated better in Russia/China than in the United States”. This is concerning — the “journalist” in question has sixty six thousand followers — but easy to dismiss as inane online prattle. Still, behind the hot air merchants stand “progressive” organisations that have taken the decision to align themselves with the Chinese state while one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century unfolds.

The Morning Star, long an uncritical mouthpiece for authoritarian communism, describes evidence of Chinese persecution of the Uighurs as “laughably weak”, despite mountains of material from independent human rights organisations demonstrating the veracity of the claims. (The paper has history here: The Morning Star’s predecessor The Daily Worker faithfully toed the Soviet line, defending the pact with Hitler and the murderous show trials in Eastern Europe, while of course never mentioning the millions of people being worked to death in the Gulag). It is shameful that the British Left treat The Morning Star with reverence as an alternative to the capitalist press.

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How the Left lost all purpose

By James Bloodworth

But The Morning Star is not the only culprit; new organisations are springing up to do Beijing’s dirty work. Today we have the “Progressive International”, launched in 2020 by prominent leftist luminaries including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (among others). The Progressive International says it wants to “defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism”, yet it has aligned itself uncritically with the Qiao Collective, a vehicle for the promotion of Chinese imperialism combined with the sort of authoritarian nationalist groups that the Progressive International were ostensibly founded to oppose. The Qiao Collective brooks no criticism of the CCP and either denies the persecution of Uighur Muslims, or portrays their oppression as a function of legitimate “anti-terrorism” policy by Beijing.

Together with denial and obfuscation when it comes to the projection of Chinese power, the Qiao Collective pushes Chinese state media which depicts western nations as in the grip of strife and malfeasance. The Russian television station RT has long deployed a similar tactic. Western audiences are urged to scrutinise their own governments and to “Question More” — until RT turns its attention to Russia, when this critical approach is replaced by the party line from the Kremlin.

This glaring double standard is evident to anyone who isn’t trying to make a name for themselves as an anti-American talking head. Just as the Soviet Union accused the West of “warmongering” (sometimes justifiably, as in Vietnam) while it sent armies to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to prop up bloody dictators, the Chinese State and its obsequious mouthpieces extol the virtues of racial justice in the US, while incarcerating a million Muslims in concentration camps.

It is perhaps understandable, although no less egregious for it, that the Chinese state should seek to downplay its misdeeds and calumnies. Stranger is the spectacle of progressive-minded commentators credulously lining up to offer the Chinese state their support.

Depressingly, a permanent feature of politics seems to be a stubborn rump of ideologues whose criticism of their own government co-exists with a need to develop a corresponding loyalty to another unit. Orwell called this phenomenon “transferred nationalism”. For Orwell, transference has an important political function: “It makes it possible for [the transferer] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”

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Ideologues miss Orwell's greatest lesson

By James Bloodworth

Authoritarian, rapaciously capitalist China is merely the latest “camp” that stands ready to be embraced by those who are temperamentally inclined to transference. “We examined the source data on the claims of millions of Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps,” said Max Blumenthal, the American left-winger and son of a former aide to Bill Clinton, on RT earlier this year. “We haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims,” he added.

Blumenthal is the founder and editor of the far-Left news site The Grayzone. In the past, The Grayzone has supported grisly dictatorships in Syria and Venezuela for no reason other than the latter’s opposition to western liberal democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao have both approvingly tweeted a Grayzone article which sought to rubbish claims that China is persecuting its Uighur population.

The Max Blumenthals of the world may be base and cynical (Blumenthal’s politics took a 180 turn following a 2015 trip to the Kremlin), but in this postmodern age, it’s apparent that people still yearn to be part of something bigger than the self. Materialism and solipsistic self-betterment are not enough though. They have limited appeal next to the desire — felt in the days when Wells visited the USSR, and even more strongly felt today — to be part of a world historical struggle between good and evil. Whether or not this quasi-religious impulse is transposed onto an atheistic communist tyranny is largely beside the point. The search for a tyrannical fatherland, a steady ideological pole to cling onto in tumultuous times, continues unabated.

With the emergence of the contemporary pro-China useful idiot in mind, it is worth paraphrasing the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, himself a believer at one time in the big idea of communism, who noticed: “when there are no more worthwhile banners, people start to march behind worthless ones”.