Russians had plenty of reasons to protest, yet very few of them did. This was not because of repression; as flawed and corrupt as he was, Yeltsin was no authoritarian. You were free to mock and deride the head of state, and many did. The issue was that hardly anyone saw the point of protesting as they were too busy struggling to survive. Half a decade into Russia’s experiment with democracy, the state had effectively disintegrated. Thieves and “violent entrepreneurs” rushed in to take advantage of the chaos, and most people accepted there was nothing they could do about it.

Yet one group of Russians refused to accept this national humiliation: the elderly. It was common in those days to see pensioners demonstrating, especially if you worked in central Moscow. I regularly passed by groups of communist babushkas standing in front of the statue of Marshal Zhukov just off Red Square (men were a less common sight; I attributed this to the drastic decline in male life expectancy). In their shawls and overcoats, these old women looked just like the ones you saw lighting candles in churches, except they read Lenin instead of the Bible and held aloft banners featuring the hammer and sickle instead of icons.

At the time, this struck me as a strange and exotic spectacle. My own grandparents, born during the First World War and raised in “Red Clydeside”, the epicenter of radical Scottish leftism, were not political at all. Whether they had been in their youth I did not know. The only activist pensioner I knew of was an old lady from the village of Lumphinnans, who had dictated a memoir of her life as a communist activist; my mother had typed it up for her. We regarded her as “a character”.

In Russia, the radicalism of the old was just as futile, but much more depressing. The Communist Party was led by a mediocrity called Gennady Zyuganov, who had inherited leadership of the proletariat when everybody with talent quit to get rich. In 1996, he ran against Yeltsin for the presidency, who at the time had a 6% approval rating. Zyuganov came within a whisker of winning the first round, but then Yeltsin staged a remarkable comeback, supported by state- and oligarch-controlled media, which blacked out all coverage of the communists. Yet this did not bring out the masses in revolt, only the elderly, and the regime knew it could ignore them. It saw the sea of gray hair and knew that the frail opposition had no place in the future being built.

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By Daniel Kalder

And so, powerless as they were, the pensioners performed ritual acts. Banners were waved, speeches were given, rallies attended, and holidays celebrated (I remember picking up a flyer for an event commemorating Stalin’s birthday at my local cinema). These protesters had spent their entire lives under communism and endured war and hardship — but they also remembered moments of triumph, like the Red Army raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, or Yuri Gagarin beating the Americans in the space race. Now they were being told that their sacrifices were in vain and all that meant nothing. I did not blame them for taking to the streets. To do nothing, to say nothing, would be to admit defeat and acquiesce to their own humiliation.

Around a decade later, I moved to Texas and stopped thinking about elderly protesters. That is, until the second Trump administration got underway. The American variety first came onto my radar when Elon Musk’s DOGE laid siege to USAID, and congressional Democrats, some of whom were considerably older than the Soviet gerontocrats the Western media had once mocked, turned up at the head office to try to gain access. Out of power, these ancient politicians suddenly looked incredibly frail: I couldn’t help but notice their implausible wigs, their halting speech, the tremble in their voices as they attempted to lead a chant that quickly faltered. I saw how easy it was for a security guard to ignore them.

Since then, anti-Trump protests have been held across the nation, and, as many have observed, they are a lot grayer than they were the first time around. At first, I ignored the online snark about “boomer liberals”. But when I reported on a protest against redistricting at the Capitol in Austin in August, it was impossible to ignore the abundance of white hair, the tie-dye t-shirts and occasional wheelchairs. The energy levels were low. Like the wizened Democrats outside the USAID building, the protesters attempted to start up a chant, but it was hesitant and unenergetic and soon died down.

I hadn’t seen so many angry pensioners since Russia. But whereas the babushkas were performing rituals that dated back to the dawn of communism, these elderly Texans were following a script that was written during the heyday of their youth in the Sixties — those heady days of sex, drugs and protests against LBJ and Nixon. Their homemade signs bore profane messages like “GOP Guarding Old Pedophiles”, “Abort Greg Abbott”, and “Fuck ICE, Fuck Trump”.

The aesthetics of it all were very poor. When the rock band Country Joe and the Fish led the crowd in a chant of “FUCK” at Woodstock, it was about youth and sticking it to the man. More than five decades later, the same generation was still in rebellion mode, but the swearing had a crotchety, yelling-at-the-TV energy. When I stumbled upon a No Kings protest in a small town in the Texas Hill Country several weeks later, the atmosphere was more congenial. It ended in time for lunch, and some of the retiree protesters went to get barbecue. It was a nice day out, I suppose, but it wasn’t the future. Like the old communists in Russia, these pensioners had assumed the world they had built would last forever, but now they could feel it receding into history. And just as the regime in Moscow ignored OAP protesters, so Trump was not remotely threatened. He responded by posting an AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a plane over a crowd and dumping shit on the protesters.

Where have the young people gone? It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t like a good protest: two years of marches against the war in Gaza demonstrated that. Nor is it true that they have lost faith in politics; the recent triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates that they are as easily gulled by charismatic charlatans as every generation that came before them. Perhaps it’s that, rather like the music of Country Joe and the Fish, the story that’s being told just doesn’t resonate in 2025. Trump as tyrant/Hitler/existential threat to democracy etc is a boring, rebooted narrative that didn’t work the first time around, and which doesn’t actually address any of their concerns. And so, as the second Trump administration proceeds, we can expect the median age of the protesters to creep steadily upwards.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to join together and express disapproval, even if it changes nothing — just as those babushkas in Moscow did. There’s something existential about it. But I also wonder whether the best way to spend your final years is in a fit of rage, shaking your fist at a man who will himself very soon exit the stage of history.

For me, the bleakest aspect of today’s geriatric protests is not the ease with which they are ignored, but rather that they reveal the impossibility of escaping from the corrosive effects of American politics. When I see videos of protesters piling unsteadily out of assisted-living facilities, handmade placards in hand, I don’t think “fight the power!” Instead, I imagine retirement homes across the country where the TV is permanently tuned to MSNBC and CNN, and the residents are in a permanent state of febrile rage and terror, fulminating about Trump all day.

Anything — knitting, bridge, chair yoga — would be better than that. I remember a story a friend in Moscow told me about his wife’s 95-year-old grandmother. She had lived through everything from Stalin’s terror to the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. However, unlike the impoverished babushkas I saw on the street, she lived with her family, was well looked after, and enjoyed good health. She could have rested in those final years, satisfied that she had made it safely to the end, surrounded by her great-grandchildren. Instead, she watched the news obsessively and fretted about the future of Russia.

Given that she was not going to live to see any of the apocalyptic scenarios she was concerned about come to pass, my friend thought that she was upsetting herself needlessly. “Why are you so worried?”, he would ask. But she couldn’t help herself. And so she kept fretting until one day she suffered a fall, dying a week or two later. History rolled on regardless.

There’s a lesson in there, I think. I prefer the way my own grandparents spent their last years — watching game shows on TV, reading books, gardening on their allotment. Dylan Thomas was wrong: given the chance, you absolutely should go gentle into that good night.

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action’s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.

From a personal perspective, I’m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn’t just criminal damage, it’s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June’s attack came before the group’s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest the total costs here could hit £55 million.

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be “terrorists” is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain’s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn’t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London’s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist’s dream, and every public order commander’s nightmare. And that’s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity — but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it’s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.

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The police can’t control Britain’s streets

By Dominic Adler

To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK’s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public… for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. If that sounds flexible, it’s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as “temporary provisions”, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.

Crucially, the term “terrorism” was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here — existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favoring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.

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Beware Keir Starmer’s secret police

By Dominic Adler

Why, then, wasn’t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list of proscribed organizations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall’s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour’s confusion over Palestine. The party’s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by “Gaza Independents”. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party’s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the “populist” Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn’t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper — but on this issue they’ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing’s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that’s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I’m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act’s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers’ errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it’s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it’s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers — but also other, subtler tools.

On that day in 1768, an unsettled throng of around 15,000 people — “an unarmed giddy mob”, according to one chronicler — had gathered outside the King’s Bench prison in London to protest against the imprisonment of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes. He had been charged with seditious libel for criticizing King George III and the Prime Minister in his newspaper The North Briton. Concerns over freedom of speech and individual liberty were at stake, fueling the crowd’s discontent: troops had been sent to guard the prison in anticipation of trouble. But tensions soon boiled over. A judge read out the Riot Act and ordered the crowd to disperse, but when it defied the order, with some individuals throwing stones, the soldiers turned their guns upon the demonstrators. Among the dead was a blameless publican’s son who was mistaken for a leading agitator, hunted down, and shot dead in error. The incident inflamed popular fury, and sparked wider disturbances all over London. The disturbances were so severe that it was rumored the shaken King contemplated abdication.

Certain common ingredients can be found in incidents throughout history in which the state and the populace have clashed disastrously. They include an intensifying political tension, which finds its flashpoint in a single issue; a large crowd of mainly peaceful protesters, a small minority of whom are bent on violence; the deployment of troops; continuing provocation from an element in the crowd; confused and exasperated official warnings; and finally, excessively forceful military retaliation against demonstrators that results in the death of blameless civilians.

From the Champs de Mars massacre in Paris, 1791, to the grim events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, this pattern repeats itself. And Donald Trump’s decision to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles recreates many elements of these historical clashes. In an unusual presidential move against what he dubbed “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, the troops were drafted in against the explicit wishes of the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Newsom’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. Indeed, the LA police chief, Jim McDonnell, said that he was confident that his police department could handle the demonstrations on their own, and that the arrival of the Marines would only make things more difficult.

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The National Guard troops were said to be receiving two days of training on civil unrest in batches of 2,000, including crowd control and the protection of property. It isn’t much time for schooling a force of that size in the nuances of civic policing. Yet, in the past when the military has been enlisted to quell civilian protest, what plays out long-term is rarely the promised imposition of order. Should the gamble misfire, the ensuing casualties instead lead to the rapid radicalization of an even larger number of citizens in outright opposition to the state.

On 17 July 1791, for example, a different National Guard appeared in front of a crowd of up to 50,000 people at the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were there to sign a republican petition demanding the removal of King Louis XVI, who had attempted to flee France with his family in the previous month, and been forced back to the city. Early in the day, a small group of vigilantes in the broadly peaceful crowd had discovered two men hiding, and summarily hanged them in the apparent belief that they were foreign spies. The nervous Paris mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly characterized all the petitioners as “brigands”: he declared martial law, dispatching the National Guard, who ordered the protestors to disperse. When the soldiers were insulted and, by some accounts, pelted with stones, they opened fire, killing between 30 and 50 people.

Thereafter, the working people of Paris abandoned trust in the more moderate revolutionaries who had previously been their leaders: the path was set clear for the rapid rise of the radical Maximilien Robespierre. The latter ensured that, in November 1793, the former Mayor Bailly was executed on a scaffold specially erected for him in the Champ de Mars, a pointed retribution for his role in sending the National Guard there just over two years earlier. The desired restoration of order was replaced by violent radicalization.

As in most situations of this sort, Mayor Bailly — mistakenly, as it turned out — had deemed the introduction of the military helpful for containing unrest in volatile circumstances. Similarly, when Harold Wilson first sent troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, it was a response to weeks of violent sectarian rioting which had exhausted the capabilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force that was also perceived by many Northern Irish Catholics as biased in favor of Protestants. People were aware even at the time, however, that this seemingly unavoidable course of action was nonetheless fraught with dangers: a Guardian editorial warned that if the presence of British soldiers “can give both police and rioters time for reflection and for tempers to cool, they will contribute to peace. But officers and those who are giving them their orders should have no illusions about the gunpowder keg on which they are now sitting.”

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By 30 January 1972, a large number of metaphorical and literal explosions had already detonated, resulting in the deaths of civilians and soldiers alike. The calculated risk was facing worsening odds. The events of Bloody Sunday in Derry carried broad echoes of St George’s Fields: a banned march, anti-internment protestors demonstrating against unjust incarceration, sporadic stone-throwing and petrol-bombing, a confusion of rioters and peaceful marchers, and an increasingly keyed-up soldiery. After members of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic marchers, the Northern Ireland conflict intensified sharply: the events were described as the best recruiting sergeant the Provisional IRA ever had. In post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, the lesson has been learned: during the current spate of severe rioting in mainly Protestant towns, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has called for back-up from UK-wide police forces: it has not asked for assistance from the army.

In a historical context, there is something unusual about President Trump’s decision to call the troops into LA: it has not been forced upon him by necessity, but engineered by choice. Indeed, many high-ranking former military figures have expressed their unease. Despite a measure of far-Left violence and the torching of some self-driving cars, certainly worthy of police containment, the current unrest has not remotely approached the level of disorder seen in early-Seventies Northern Ireland. Nor is it comparable to the last time troops were called into LA itself, during the 1992 Rodney King riots in which 63 people died and thousands were injured. Indeed, Trump’s mobilizing of the National Guard in a civilian setting has already had a catalyzing rather than a restraining effect upon public protests, which have spread to numerous cities across the US.

Much of America is now waking up to the profundity of the presidential power-grab. The rather lackluster military parade in Washington on Saturday, in which the Army’s 250th anniversary coincided with Trump’s own birthday, contained less civic vigor than many of the “No Kings” demonstrations in 2,000 cities and towns across America. The slogan itself knowingly harks back to the American Revolution and the rejection of arbitrary authority that sits at the very heart of the United States.

Where can the dispute go next? The potential for further conflagration is still there. The president’s rhetoric before Saturday’s parade — that “any” protestors would be met with “very big force” — made no apparent distinction between violent and peaceful protestors, leaving it to journalists to clarify with his press secretary that he continued to support the rights of the latter. Thus far, the active role of the National Guard has been limited. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement, and Trump’s order currently sits in a kind of legal limbo: a federal court has ruled that his actions were illegal, while the appeals court put that ruling temporarily on hold. Yet by describing protestors as “insurrectionist mobs”, Trump has been laying the verbal groundwork for invoking the 218-year-old Insurrection Act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, which allows the president to deploy the military directly to suppress an “insurrection”. It was notably not invoked on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol, with some violently assaulting the police.

In the US, once described by John F Kennedy as a “nation of immigrants”, the question of immigration has now become a cauldron of contention. But the time-honored mechanisms for solving problems with democratic argument and consensus are being swiftly eroded. The old cross-party courtesies and conventions, which do more than most people realize to oil the moving parts of a nation, are being replaced by open contempt and muscular force: last Thursday a Democratic senator for California, Alex Padilla, was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed for seeking to ask a question during a news conference held by the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The murder by a lone gunman on Saturday of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife, was an even bleaker signal of an overheating political system.

President Trump, who avoided the Vietnam draft in his youth due to “bone spurs” in his heels, has now developed a growing escalatory instinct, a taste for combat and constant drama. It is telling, perhaps, that seconds after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear last July, he began yelling “Fight! Fight!”. A fight needs enemies, and Trump is locating them — not among the world’s despots, but among his fellow Americans. The President is turning up the heat in a country long held together by a unifying national ideal which he is now vigorously dismantling. Is he ready for what he could unleash? Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland, where democracy did indeed catch fire, can only watch his dangerous game with a sense of foreboding: an elderly child, in a room stuffed with kindling, playing with matches.

                                                                       Tom Lehrer, 1945

Lehrer wrote the song during his sophomore year at Harvard, mocking the (in his estimation), effete school’s pretensions to a football team. I saw him regularly in Harvard Square in the Sixties during my employment there, clerking at Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. They had dictionaries in 250 languages, and I had to have sufficient knowledge of the stock to direct the seekers after knowledge.

In the late Eighties, I moved from Manhattan to Cambridge. Part of the impetus was the appointment of the late Bob Brustein as head of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Bob was an important theater critic, theoretician, and director. He’d brought me to the Yale Rep in 1977 as a CBS Writing Fellow, and put on my feet my first pair of Bass Weejuns.

He left Yale for Harvard in 1979 to run their American Repertory Theater, and sent to me that invitation longed for by any artist: “Come and do whatever you want.” I did. We staged the world premieres of many of my plays — Oleanna, Boston Marriage, The Cryptogram, and The Old Neighborhood — at the school’s Hasty Pudding, and later moved them to New York.

We disagreed absolutely about aesthetic philosophy; and I am in his debt for many years of unconditional support on the order of that of the Chicago cops for their partners: “Fuck it, you’re right; and if you’re not right, fuck it anyway.” Bob was the quintessential Old-School Liberal, who’d “defend to the death my right to say it.”

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Why didn't Jews vote for Trump?

By David Mamet

We premiered my play Oleanna at the Pudding in 1992 with Rebecca Pidgeon and Billy Macy. At the dress rehearsal an audience member, a student from Brown, said, “Don’t you think this play is politically irresponsible?” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase.

I had an office in Harvard Square for 15 years, among the dour proto-elites. For, other than the perpetually soused jokesters of the Harvard Lampoon, no one seemed to be having any fun.

The Lampoon folks were the leaven in that self-satisfied atrophy. Doug Kenney and Michael O’Donoghue took the Lampoon commercial with the National Lampoon, and its inspiration of Saturday Night Live. May Harvard be remembered for them, and for Tom Lehrer; and for Bob Brustein, traditional liberals all. And may the school be disgraced in perpetuity for its anti-liberal, disgusting antisemitism.

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By Jacob Howland

When Harvard was ordered to revert from “Affirmative Action” to merit-based admissions in the Sixties, they magicked up a policy of “Geographical Representation”. The then-dean of admissions explained that too many of the successful merit-based applicants came from the “doughnuts” around American cities; a Jewish student replied, “They aren’t doughnuts, they’re bagels.”

Harvard, once laudable as the cradle of Abolition, persisted into the 21st century in sophistry: excluding Jews by alleging the probity of admissions’ policies of “personality”. Yes, they acknowledged race-based admissions were now illegal, but the school was free to exclude applicants whose “personalities” (read race) were deemed unsympathetic.

Now, though, they openly support Jew-hatred, abiding anti-Jewish riots. What are the students actually “protesting”? If it is Israeli national policy, why target and vilify fellow students?

Claudine Gay, disgraced ex-president of Harvard, explained that the call for murder of Jews was not hate speech, per-se, but must be considered in context.

Yeats wrote, “How can you compete, being honor-bred, with one who, were it known he lies, was neither shamed in his nor in his neighbor’s eyes?” Gay knew no shame, and, though deposed, her pitiable and despicable shamelessness remains the school’s policy. For, ordered to observe not only school policy, but US anti-discrimination laws, they first refuse then extrude a “task force,” and then sue the government which seeks to enforce compliance.

Harvard’s pathetic response to the violence has been the creation of a “task force.”

1) What “task force” has ever accomplished anything? 2) No “task force” is required, just enforcement of the school’s policies, and compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

The school’s response that they are defending the rioters’ free speech is one with the disgraced Gay’s “it depends on context”. “From the river to the sea,” and its like, are calls for the murder of Jews. Incitement to violence is not free speech. Harvard broke and continues to defy the law, pandering to radicals.

Why would Harvard do so in contravention of law, custom, decency, and their supposed mission of education?

For money.

They have had a bloated endowment, tax-exempt status, and income from the full-fare foreign students. Harvard, finding all at risk, turns on the government, and insists on its right to abandon Jewish students and retain exchange students whose criminal behavior invalidates their visa status

Harvard is dead and stinking to high heaven, and will not consider apology, let alone reform. It should be stripped of support, both governmental and individual. Affronted students, Jew and non-Jew, should resign and look elsewhere. What could one possibly learn at such an institution, after having learned it does not believe in human dignity?

Historically, Ivy League schools flogged the prestige of their diplomas as a luxury marque, supposedly a fungible indication of status, independent of further utility (e.g. education).

Now, I, like many, view an elite degree in the “soft sciences” (read “froth”), as a mark against a job applicant. Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning (1914)), observed the universities’ degeneration into mere merchandising. His book was originally subtitled “An exercise in depravity.”

The official name of the six British-owned counties in Ulster is “Northern Ireland”, but Irish republicans like Kneecap wouldn’t call it that because they don’t see why part of the country should have a name other than just “Ireland”. They might be slightly happier with the North of Ireland, or the Six Counties, or (as the novelist Flann O’Brien suggested) “the sick counties”. The group aren’t interested in post-colonialism, as so many students in Britain are, because they don’t believe that the term applies to their own situation. Northern Ireland is the fag-end of British colonialism, not a condition which comes after it. And though the Northern Irish middle classes now speak like almost everyone else of diversity and democracy, it’s still a sectarian state, one gerrymandered into existence a century ago to ensure that Protestants remained permanently in power.

Kneecap speak Irish and use the Irish form of their names. They would have attended Catholic schools in West Belfast where the Irish language is taught, just as it’s taught in most schools in the Irish Republic. The difference is that a lot of children in the Republic feel no more enthusiasm for learning the native language than many British children do for learning French or Latin, and a lot of them speak it as poorly as the British do French. It is, however, the official language of the nation: like other things in Ireland a polite fiction.

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In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

There are, for example, two versions of the Irish constitution, one in Irish and the other in English, both of which state that in the event of a conflict of interpretation between them, the Irish version will be deemed to take priority. But the Irish version is widely believed to be a translation from the English version, meaning a copy assumes precedence over an original. Like other colonial peoples, the Irish were plagued by the sense that they were copies, mimic men, parodies of their metropolitan proprietors. It’s said that the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, on hearing that a wealthy American had arrived in Dublin to buy up original poetic manuscripts, took to writing the original drafts of his own work, complete with queries, deletions, hasty last-minute additions and the like.

Learning Irish in Belfast, however, is a more meaningful affair because it’s bound up with your political identity, and the language has grown there more rapidly than anywhere else on the island. The Falls Road in nationalist Belfast is full of advertisements for Irish-language classes, fraternal trips to Celtic Brittany, lectures on renowned Irish women and so on. Like war, culture is the continuation of politics by other means. Gerry Adams doesn’t speak Irish well, but it would be unthinkable for him not to speak it at all. Irish is also the everyday language of the so-called “Gaeltachtaí” or Irish-speaking areas in the Republic, where motorists can easily find themselves lost without trace because there are no English names on the road signs.

The Gaeltachtaí, which comprise only about 1% of the Irish population, are the fruit of the Gaelic League of the early 20th century, which revived a language on the point of extinction. Branded as uncouth and inferior, in steep decline because of its association with poverty and backwardness, it was the daily speech of most of those millions who either died in the Great Famine or were driven into exile by it, so that the death or departure of the Irish was coupled with the threatened demise of their native tongue. It was the nationalist intelligentsia who tried to retrieve the indigenous culture, and who were, on the whole, remarkably successful in doing so. Today in Ireland there are academically outstanding schools which teach everything through Irish, as well as writers who write only in Irish and families who speak only Irish at home, so that the children grow up bilingual. Newcomers to the country discover after a while that phrases like “ya fuggin’ gobshoite” aren’t actually Irish at all.

Kneecap must strike some English people as a curious throw-back. Didn’t all that nationalist militancy die with the Anglo-Irish Agreement? But the group is a reminder that nothing could be further from the truth. The guns may have, for the most part, fallen silent, but some traffic roundabouts (and occasionally some people) are painted red, white and blue, and there are pubs a Protestant wouldn’t drink in. Nowhere in Europe, for both good and ill, is there a more tangible refutation of the claim that ordinary people aren’t interested in politics. It’s true that many of the younger generation find politics a turn-off, but there are also those like Kneecap who are passionate about it, and the reason for this is that nationalism is a form of identity politics. It’s in this context of identity politics — of, say, gay rights or the women’s movement — that the group should be seen. Far from being archaic, they are the latest thing. From the Seventies onwards, revolution may have gradually given way to questions of identity, but nationalism can encompass both. This, no doubt, is why it has proved by far the most powerful form of radicalism in the modern age, starting with the partial independence of Ireland in 1921, and going on to dismantle one colonial state after another.

Kneecap are alleged to have shown support for Hamas and Hezbollah, an accusation they claim takes their words out of context. They might argue that making such statements are an attempt to outrage their audiences, and aren’t to be taken seriously. But many in Kneecap’s audiences would find little to outrage them on this score, and in any case the complaint that your words have been taken out of context has become the dreariest of clichés, as in “When I called you a contemptible little shit, my words were taken out of context”. More to the point, what context could they have possibly been taken out of? Perhaps you were quoting or joshing or pretending or just blind drunk, but it isn’t likely.

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Will Kneecap sell out?

By Darren McGarvey

The fact is that revolutionary nationalists, unlike Right-wing nationalists like Trump or Modi, tend to be internationalist in outlook. Nationalism is seen often enough as an inward-looking, chauvinistic affair, but some Irish nationalists in the early 20th century were keenly interested in anti-colonial struggles in India, Egypt, South Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and were quite the reverse of provincial. One of them, Frederick Ryan, who crops up briefly in James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited an English-language anti-colonialist newspaper in Cairo.

It’s this history which lies behind Kneecap’s shouts of solidarity with anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, though it’s to be hoped that they don’t support the Hamas atrocities of October 7. Their opposition to Israel’s massacre in Gaza, however, is entirely understandable. These young men, too, belong to an ethnic group, the Gaelic Irish in the North, which has been hassled and humiliated over the years, treated as second-class citizens and as captives in their own country. The architect of South African apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, once expressed his admiration for the set-up. Their parents and grandparents will have encountered social prejudice, discrimination and perhaps even torture and death. Kneecap don’t, like some of their generation in Northern Ireland, dismiss all this as ancient history and turn instead to Taylor Swift.

It is, of course, possible to make a fetish out of history, as one can make a fetish out of territorial unity. Republicans call for a united Ireland, but unity isn’t a good in itself. If justice would somehow be served by carving England down the middle, it would be a plan well worth considering. But division is objectionable when it happens in the name of oppression, and the partition of Ireland, one of the most brazen political stitch-ups of the last century, is exemplary of this. A large group of people were deprived of their right to political self-determination in order to preserve the privileges of another group of people who were doing well out of colonial rule.

As I write, Kneecap is still taking heat because of some deeply offensive remarks about both Hamas and Conservative MPs. For this, they should clearly be brought to book. And yet Irish republicans are no strangers to hostility from across the water, where the image of the Irish has been either one of lovable rogues or disgusting barbarians. Since we’ve had the former in the shape of The Pogues, it’s no doubt time for the latter.

Today, the parliament is electing former professional footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili as Georgia’s new president, and the protestors aren’t happy. Kavelashvili is a former member of the incumbent pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party (though now ostensibly an independent) and a strong proponent of the “Global War Party” conspiracy that the West is driving Georgia into conflict with Russia. Worse, he is also a co-author of the controversial “foreign agents” bill that forced organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as agents of foreign influence.

But what most irks the protesters is the fact that he has no degree. “He’s a fool without even a university diploma,” is the phrase I hear over and over. The Soviet reverence for education lingers, a Georgian friend explains. That he was once a professional sportsman (albeit not a very good one) is irrelevant. “My Grandad voted for Georgian Dream,” says Georgi, a young activist handing out flyers, “but now he feels betrayed because they elected this idiot.”

Kavelashvili is known to be a puppet; he is easily controllable by the ruling Georgian Dream party and by Bidzina Ivanishvili (known generally as Bidzina), Georgia’s richest oligarch, former prime minister, founder of Georgian Dream and the man who runs the country. But there are so many who would do Bidzina’s bidding, surely, they could find a puppet with a university diploma? I ask

“That’s the point,” Georgi answers. “Bidzina wants to humiliate society. He is a true authoritarian. The message is simple: I’ll elect my horse, and you’ll suck it up.”

***

Recent events in Georgia are grimly familiar. The general election in October saw the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream win 53.9% of the vote (with 37.7% for the opposition coalition).

The opposition, and international observers, accused Georgian Dream of electoral fraud. Georgian NGO, The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy reported “serious (electoral) violations”, including “intimidation, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, unprecedented levels of voter bribery and expulsion of observers from polling stations”. Other accusations included violence in polling stations, suppression of media, intimidation of opposition voters, compromised voter privacy and so on. The central election commission carried out a partial recount involving about 12% of polling stations and 14% of votes but claimed there wasn’t “a significant change to previously announced official results”. 

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, whom Georgian Dream had previously endorsed but is now firmly anti-government and pro-Western, had declared that the opposition coalition was set to win. “European Georgia is winning with 52% despite attempts to rig elections and without votes from the diaspora,” she tweeted.

Things are so febrile because the election was about far more than just who governs Georgia. It was a test of the country’s democratic health as it sought — theoretically, as far as Georgian Dream was concerned — to join the EU. Brussels had previously warned Tbilisi that a free and fair election was essential to continue its trajectory to membership; it also warned that any fraud could lead to the revocation of Georgia’s visa-free regime within the Schengen Zone.

The government chose fraud. The European Commission said that it could not recommend opening membership talks for the EU “unless Georgia reverts the current course of action which jeopardises its EU path”. Tens of thousands duly hit onto the streets. The Georgian interior minister announced the purchase of several new water cannons in anticipation of more protests over coming weeks.

The government refuses to back down. Nor will the protestors, who believe they are facing a simple choice. In early November, the former prime minister and current opposition leader Giorgi Gakharia laid out the essence of things. “In Georgia, we are connected to Europe through democracy, and to Russia through autocracy,” he told me. “These elections are so important because they are about the clash between the European or Russian orientation of the country, and therefore between these two different political paths.”

Across eastern Europe, the central foreign policy problem (and, given its penetration of their politics, often domestic problem) for many states is Russia. For those who want a better future the choice is exactly what Gakharia laid out: on the one hand, Europe, democracy, and strategic partnerships with the United States; on the other, a future of Kremlin-controlled governments that hoard power, enrich their leaders, and kowtow to Vladimir Putin.

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The West is goading Georgia

By Thomas Fazi

One evening, a few days after Syrian rebels overthrew Bashar al-Assad, I saw a man on Rustaveli, waving the independent Syria flag. “This flag is a token of solidarity between us and the Syrian people,” he told me. “Syrians fought for 12 years to get rid of a brutal dictator backed by the same enemy who seeks to subjugate us here: the regime of Vladimir Putin.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In 2008, Russian troops rolled into Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions. They have squatted there ever since. But during the election campaign Bidzina said that Georgia provoked the conflict and should apologise to Russia. For a country’s de facto leader to blame his own people for their invasion by a more powerful neighbour is perhaps the most sinister form of political self-abasement I have encountered.

The people were predictably outraged. Georgian Dream tried to row back on the statement, but the damage was done. And the comments were instructive because they show the world the influence Putin has even when he doesn’t invade or kill: he turns leaders into toadies, as surely as he seeks to turn nations into colonies.

And it’s all done under the threat of force. “If you don’t vote for us, the Russians will invade. Georgia will become another Ukraine” was another Georgian Dream election pitch. Exercise freedom of choice and Russia will hurt you: the threat wasn’t even veiled.

Just over a month after the election, on 28 November, the government announced that it had “decided not to bring up the issue of joining the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028”. Until then, protests had been generally calm but at that point they erupted, largely due to provocation from violent riot police, which, like all enforcement arms of an authoritarian state, also began to target journalists.

In the Marriott hotel media centre on Rustaveli, I met Alexander Keshelashvili from the independent Georgian Online publication Publica. He was covering the protests on the night of 28 November, just after the government made its historic announcement. Things were tense but peaceful. He was standing by the side of a building with a few other journalists when a mob of police ran towards them. He felt someone grab him and drag him to the police lines. Then around six to eight of them formed a circle around him and began to beat him. They didn’t even tell him he was under arrest; they just punched and kicked him.

“At first, I thought it was a mistake. I was shouting, ‘I’m a journalist,’ but I heard some bad words regarding my profession, so I knew they had targeted me deliberately.” Alexander was taken to hospital where he was told he had signs of concussion, as well as that the police had broken his nose in several places, for which he needed surgery.

The parallels with Ukraine’s 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution are hard to ignore; and when I spoke to Georgians they agreed. That revolution also began when a pro-Kremlin government (led by President Viktor Yanukovych) decided to turn away from the EU and towards Moscow after Yanukovych reneged on his promise to sign the EU accession agreement and chose instead to join Putin’s Customs Union. The people came onto the streets and did not leave until Yanukovych had fled to Russia.

Walking around Rustaveli, echoes of Maidan were everywhere. Activist civil society is blooming just as it was in Ukraine a decade ago. Protestors are coming together to get organised. Legal assistance is provided to those arrested, first aid facilities are set up.

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In truth, anything the protestors can do to increase their collective potency is now a necessity. Just as the Yanukovych government did during the Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution, Bidzina’s government has hired gangs of thugs known as “Titushky” to intimidate and beat up protestors. People were eager to show me videos of them attacking protestors, often women. One evening, I saw a row of home-made shields by the side of the road — planks of wood with handles nailed into them, amateurish parodies of riot police shields — for people to defend themselves the next time the police got violent.

The Titushky have spawned a reaction. One young activist, Tornike Mskhiladze, has set up an anti-Titushky group. “Tbilisi is really small. I know five of the Titushky. Methadone addicts with criminal convictions. After doing this work, police will wipe their convictions. I know how fucked up their lives are. They are the scum of the earth, like the worst people you can imagine. And they beat up women and the press,” he told me.

People, he explained, had begun to feel unsafe at the protests even though they were protesting peacefully. “So I started asking around: who wants to defend our citizens because our police are now working with criminals. We must defend ourselves with our bare hands. Many people joined me. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t like I created a group or anything.”

Shame is an important tool of opposition here. As I walked up to a street protest one evening I saw the police congregating by their vans, almost all wore masks — it was striking sight in a country still theoretically a democracy.

Georgi explained it to me. “In the beginning when police were beating the protestors opposition media would discover their identities from video footage and then go to their parents’ house and ask their mothers what they thought of their sons beating their fellow citizens. Their mothers would often start crying and wailing that their sons would never do this. After that, the police started wearing masks.”

It’s clear that that protestors will not be intimidated off the streets. But the question remains: where does this all go politically? To try to answer it I speak to Giga Bokeria, the leader of the opposition Federalists Party, and a man who likes to chain smoke and discuss Winston Churchill. “I want to be clear,” he says, puffing away. “When we talk about the moving toward the EU here, we are not talking about it as an institution only. It’s about an overall civilisational choice.”

This is why, he explains, the protests intensified after 28 November. “For one month the protests were purely about elections. After the [EU] statement all the fears about Georgian Dream, which were clear to some, but maybe not so clear to others, or they didn’t want it to see it, were confirmed.”

This includes many Georgian Dream supporters, who didn’t think the government would turn away from the EU. Now they are out on the streets. “You have to understand,” he says, “that for Bidzina it’s not about four years in power, it’s about eternity in power for the status quo that he creates. And for that he needs to break the will of society.”

Will the government get more violent? Could they start open firing on the people? Most Georgians I know dismiss this. This is not Ukraine or Russia, is the response I get. Bokeria, though, is more circumspect. “I can’t exclude that unfortunately. And it’s good you mentioned Maidan. There are a lot of parallels. It’s not led by any political group; indeed, it’s completely decentralised, but now we see first signs of self-organisation: every day different groups organise demonstration in different locations, and they coordinate themselves.”

He continues: “Now, I didn’t mention Maidan because government propaganda is referencing it to frighten people, to make them think that if they continue to resist there will be bloodshed and that it will be followed by war from Russia. But it’s our duty as citizens of this country to do what we can to defend our sovereignty and individual liberty.”

Beyond that, though, is the inescapable engine of geopolitics. Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a transit hub for trade and energy between Europe and Asia, while its position along the Black Sea and proximity to Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East further amplify its importance. If you want to counter Russian influence in the Caucasus region, you need Tbilisi. Conversely, if Russia can erode its democratic institutions, it gains greater leverage over the entire region.

The lesson of Georgia is as clear and unignorable as that of Ukraine. You can never be Putin’s ally: you either stand up to him or become his serf. Georgia as well as Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan, are all now frontlines of the West. Their people are battling to uphold the systems we built. We help them in their fight, for our sakes as much as theirs.

Over the past 10 months, however, there has been a notable exception to this rule: at anti-Israel protests, where masks are still not just the norm but often mandatory. Sometimes, a keffiyeh will be fashioned into a balaclava; more often, a surgical mask or N95 respirator will be worn. All three were on show outside of last week’s Democratic Convention.

Yet it was more than 1,000km away, in a populous suburban region adjacent to New York City, that the latest battle in America’s mask wars was unfolding. Earlier this month, legislators in New York’s Nassau County signed the country’s first mask ban into law, a strange inversion of the mandates that prevailed state-wide between 2020 and 2022. Although exceptions for health and religious grounds may make the law unenforceable in practice, it threatens recalcitrant public maskers with a stiff fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison.

The legislation was introduced by local lawmaker Mazi Pilip, a former IDF paratrooper who gained a national profile when she ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat vacated by the disgraced George Santos, and signed into law by county executive Bruce Blakeman. To justify the new law, Pilip raised the alarm about Gaza protesters “hiding behind the mask and terrorising the Jewish community”, while Blakeman argued that the anti-mask bill “protects the public”. Like the mandates it inverts, then, the ban has been presented as a means of keeping the citizenry safe from a real and immediate danger.

Pilip and Blakeman are Republicans, so to a certain extent the ban reinforces the Covid-era partisan split over masking. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Indeed, the first high-profile New York politician to endorse such a measure was Democratic governor Kathy Hochul. In June, after a viral video seemed to show pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassing Jewish passengers in a subway car, Hochul was reported to be considering a ban on face coverings on public transit, and several Democratic state legislators drafted a bill doing just that.

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Versions of the same idea had also been floated on both the Left and the Right in response to an upsurge in shoplifting and other crime in the wake of the pandemic. Widespread masking clearly played some role here by enabling thieves to conceal their identities from employees and surveillance cameras. Though he stopped short of calling for a citywide ban, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, suggested to small business owners last year they should ban customers who refused to uncover their faces.

A paradoxical secondary effect of the draconian rules imposed during the pandemic was to create conditions for a severe collapse of public order in urban areas. For one thing, the collective retreat of much of the population from public spaces in effect abandoned large areas of cities to homelessness and delinquency. Meanwhile, universal masking norms — combined with cutbacks in policing —helped create conditions for impunity for petty crime.

But there are deeper roots, too. The Left-wing embrace of masking on public health grounds also coincided with the prominent role of antifa during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, another source of major public disturbances that year. “Black-bloc” masking, long practised by antifa militants, gained greater respectability as face-covering became nearly universal in pandemic-era Left-wing protest.

By the time of the October 7 attacks, the continued progressive attachment to Covid precautions and the greater acceptance of black-bloc-style tactics ensured that anti-Israel protests were heavily masked affairs from the outset. The concentration of protest on elite college campuses evidently strengthened protesters’ resolve to conceal their identities, given most were students worried that the public exposure of their activism might derail their promising careers.

The Nassau law, then, is a response to several highly contingent developments of the past few years. But even so, the bans themselves and the issues they raise aren’t new in American or New York politics. Indeed, prior to 2020, a mask ban had been on the state books since 1845. Back then, a law was passed to squelch the “anti-renter” movement of tenant farmers who had revolted violently against the harsh terms dictated by their landlords, donning elaborate Indian costumes when attacking their nemeses. The landlord-allied state government responded by making it illegal for three or more people congregating in public to mask, with an exception made for “masquerade parties”.

Nor did the ban fade entirely into obscurity along with the anti-renter movement. Over the recent decades, New York police used the 1845 law to arrest anti-globalisation protesters, Occupy Wall Street militants, and Pussy Riot supporters, as well as to constrain the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, extensive litigation followed a 1999 Manhattan rally by the latter group, in which city officials prohibited them from covering their faces. Anti-masking laws in several other US states were devised specifically to rein in the Klan — a precedent sometimes cited by lawmakers advocating crackdowns on masked Gaza protesters, whom they claim are engaged in a campaign of racist intimidation.

These older mask ordinances have faced legal challenges, as the Nassau law likely will. So far, American jurisprudence has remained divided on their constitutionality, with some courts finding that masking is not a form of expression and thus enjoys no first-amendment protection, and others determining that the anonymisation enabled by face coverings offers a means of protecting the expression of unpopular views. Those arguing against the right of Klan members to mask have made a case critics of Gaza protests have repeated recently: that masks are a tool of intimidation. “[A] faceless figure strikes terror in the human heart,” as a 1990 Georgia Supreme Court decision put it.

Yet we are, of course, living in very different times. And what sets apart the new round of controversy isn’t just the conversion of the mask into a symbol of politicised public health, but the contradictory effects of the new electronic media landscape on how we conceive of our public identities. Perhaps most obviously, online existence has made younger generations of protesters take the constant availability of anonymous or pseudonymous modes of expression for granted. Today, every one of us, when we communicate by way of a digital profile, is at least partly “masked,” which makes our publicly exposed faces feel all the more naked. This is all the more true as facial-recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous and accurate.

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Thus a paradox emerges: at the same time as they furnish new means of anonymisation, digital technologies also elevate the risk of exposure. Political protesters in the late 20th century were unlikely to have their participation made public unless a news camera happened to capture them. Conversely, in today’s crowdsourced panopticon, any public activity is a viral video waiting to happen, which might well upend the life of anyone unlucky enough to become the main character of the day. Our technologies incite us to make our views public on a scale rarely possible for prior generations, and at the same time threaten us with dire consequences if the expression of those views provokes a backlash.

As long as these conditions hold, several things will be true. The availability of anonymous means of expression online, as well as the premium accorded by the attention economy to the extreme, will ensure that controversial and often hateful views enjoy a visibility they wouldn’t have otherwise. This, as well as the general decline of public order exacerbated by the collective retreat into digital life, will continue to provoke a general sense of unease and vulnerability, creating constituencies for various sorts of “safetyist” appeals — such as laws targeting disinformation, hate speech or masked protest.

And in the meantime, the conflict over mask bans will remain legally and politically unresolved because it pits two goods against each other: on one hand, freedom from intimidation carried out under the cover of anonymity; on the other, the protection of unpopular views from retaliation. As long as it can be plausibly claimed that both of these values are severely compromised, an end to this decade’s mask wars is unlikely to arrive soon.

The fog of war was real, though involved no confusion about body counts or potential crimes against humanity. Instead, the burning questions were about whether a Jewish student at Yale really had been “stabbed in the eye” by pro-Palestinian protestors as was initially reported, or whether she had accidentally got in the way of some exuberant flag-waving; whether a UCLA student had been “beaten unconscious”, or instead fallen over in a chaotic kerfuffle and gone deliberately limp. Never mind for the moment what atrocities were or were not being committed in Gaza: more to the point, did pro-Israel supporters at UCLA knowingly risk the life of someone with a severe banana allergy, by throwing several pieces of the fruit into the “liberated zone” there?

Enterprising postgraduates across the land were seizing their media moment, perhaps breathing a sigh of relief that there was now a good excuse not to finish that dissertation for at least one more year. At Columbia University, Johanna King-Slutzky — a 34-year-old specialist on the Romantic imagination — apparently drew upon acquired reserves of Byronic hyperbole to suggest to journalists that fellow protestors who had deliberately barricaded themselves into a university building were at risk of “dehydration and starvation”. Upon questioning, she clarified that she wanted the powers-that-be “to not violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid”; a counterfactual scenario which, she admitted after further probing, had not yet happened, nor had even been threatened. Near-universal derision followed, absolutely correctly.

Though Columbia hogged most of the headlines, many other universities had encampments too. Visiting Cornell to give a talk, I saw its version: a huddle of tents, cringe-inducing artwork, and earnest placards in a corner of the main quad, sporadically erupting to the sounds of loud hailers and chanting. One of the main spokespeople for the Cornell protest was 30-year-old Momodou Taal: a British postgrad and veteran of many previous media interviews, who also happens to be the great-grandson of former Gambian President Sir Dawda Jawara. (Here I should declare a personal connection: it was on Taal’s podcast last year that philosopher Judith Butler first aired the perfectly sane theory, later prosecuted in her new book, that the Pope, Vladimir Putin, J.K. Rowling, and I are the four horsemen of the “anti-gender” apocalypse.)

Back in November, a CNN report about the impact of the war upon US college students included an interview with Taal, and described how he was tired of being questioned about whether he supports Hamas or not. As a black Muslim, he said, he “felt like there was an implicit presumption in the question that he supports terrorism”. Granted, an unfair connection with his race and religion might be the best explanation for the presumed association: or maybe it was Taal’s tweet from 7 October, still publicly available, which stated: “Today has shown us what is possible when you are organised… It’s not about the numbers. But how you organise and execute”.

In short, then, the past week served up ample material for riotous mirth or contemptuous eye rolls. Though many students are sincere and well-intentioned in their objections to what is unfolding in Gaza, watching self-appointed leaders role-playing at Left-wing radicalism in the hope of future glittering career prizes will never not be ludicrous. Equally, approaching a bloody war like a rabidly partisan football fan on matchday, as Taal seemingly does — automatically primed to deny atrocities committed by your favoured side, and to downplay the devastating effects on opponents — is hardly a sign of moral sainthood, albeit that the phenomenon is now near-ubiquitous.

But there are more alarming aspects to this situation other than the presence of narcissistic millennials. Scorn should also be reserved for those supine university bosses who — having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes — have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, and are cracking down excessively on behaviour they used to tolerate or even encourage. At Columbia, university president and member of the House of Lords Minouche Shafik eventually gave up on negotiation and brought in police against protestors, resulting in more than 100 arrests. At the University of Texas in Austin, riot gear and pepper spray were employed against those camping out; the encampment at UCLA was also flattened by law enforcement, with 200 arrested there. There have also been large-scale arrests at Dartmouth, George Washington University, Massachusetts Amherst, Wisconsin-Madison, and other places too.

It is often remarked that the modern liberal quest to free both self and society from traditional cultural norms and boundaries tends to coincide with increased acceptance of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. Even so, it is rare to see institutions openly inciting both liberation and repression at the very same time. Small wonder that susceptible young people are confused. “I thought that this university accepted me because I am an advocate, because I am someone who will fight for what they believe in, no matter what,” mournfully recounted one Vanderbilt alumnus, originally lauded by faculty and administrators for making a stand against perceived oppression, but now expelled for the very same thing. You can laugh with enjoyable schadenfreude at the naivety; but you should probably also be horrified at the unprincipled ease with which Frankenstein has set the dogs upon the pious, guilt-ridden young monster he had a hand in creating.

Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism). Just as the modern Left either tends to cheer or stay silent as Right-coded views are eliminated from the academy either by stealth or by force, many on the supposedly freedom-loving modern Right apparently have little to say about the violation of the basic right to peaceful speech and assembly, when it comes to defending the perceived interests of Palestinians. (Though some of the university protests sought illegitimately to impose a heckler’s veto upon the free speech or movement of others, many did not.)

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There has also been relatively little pushback against the sort of hyperbole purporting to justify aggressive managerial and police interventions on campuses; even where its format and tone vividly reminds one of the activist guilt-tripping of which the modern Left is so fond, and the Right normally so critical. Many cultish identitarian tics familiar from social justice activism turn up in pro-Israel discourse about the protests, and yet remain uncriticised from the Right. These include: a total failure of charity when it comes to construing the various motives of pro-Palestinian and anti-war activists, collapsing all of them into a single simple narrative of “hate” towards Jewish people, despite evidence to the contrary; exhortations to move from subjective perceptions of antisemitism by particular Jewish students or groups of students to immediate protective or punitive action (or both); the glossing over of reasonable disagreement between Jewish students on, precisely, whether the protests are antisemitic or not; and accusations of confusion and self-hatred towards those who dissent.

The emerging rubric seems to hold that when those with whom you have little political sympathy complain of intense feelings of threat, in response to still objectively small levels of risk on campus overall, you can minimise and scoff away with impunity; yet when your own family, friends, or political allies do it, we are suddenly plunged into the sort of dramatic counterfactual territory also beloved of King-Slutzky and her ilk. No doubt such sympathy-dependent reactions are understandable wherever they are found, and particularly in those Jewish people deeply worried about antisemitism; but the whole point of rights to free speech and assembly is that they are supposed to be rigorously maintained even as polarising emotions swirl around society, demanding that they be partially rescinded for some particular group on the basis of imaginary future scenarios.

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Columbia is a parody of radical activism

By Kat Rosenfield

Often in thrall to the American cultural landscape, elite UK campuses such as Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL now have their own, somewhat more repressed, versions of the Ivy League protests. And here too, there are influential voices urging us to take all or most such protests as evidence of deep-rooted antisemitic hatred. Only yesterday, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan told Sky News that: “What we don’t want is our campuses becoming unsafe environments for students or staff and going down the route that you see in other places like the US” — as if it was obvious that US campuses were now unsafe places for students, simply in light of the protests there. And as in the US, UK university bosses are being exhorted by some to prioritise the subjective feelings of certain Jewish students over the feelings of others — including those of other Jewish students participating enthusiastically in the protests, or who feel unaffected by them.

A Times column by the Prime Minister on Wednesday suggested he is committed to rooting out genuine antisemitism from universities, while preserving freedom of speech and the right to protest, including against Israel; and of course, that is exactly what he and others in power should be doing. But the task will be fiendishly difficult, requiring nerves of steel to avoid hastening the slide of our academic institutions towards the suppression of lawful speech, all in the alleged interests of certain identity groups. In attempting this, perhaps it will help to remember that, whatever the ideological struggles to come on manicured college greens, in elegantly appointed quads, or in scruffy common rooms, they will have almost nothing to do with what is happening on the ground in Gaza.

It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968. And this is no coincidence — many of the protesters see themselves as revivalists, resurrecting the pose and the politics of a more heroic era. But a closer examination of the trajectory of the 1968 generation reveals the Columbia crop to be little more than a patchy historical shadow. Because while the 2024 generation are ultimately the grandchildren of 1968, they are also its epigones, and placing the two political movements side by side is an object lesson in the difference between the authentic and ersatz.

Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 Columbia University protests, was a typical New Leftist. He entered college from the mid-Sixties middle class — apolitical, yet vaguely jaundiced. He longed for an “intellectual avant-garde”. He had tired of watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold from the side-lines. He drifted in such frustrations until discovering Malcolm X who taught him that “the division in the world is between the oppressed—who are mainly people of color—and the oppressors—who are mainly white”. In a phrase, this is how Rudd and the New Leftists could link their domestic situation to Vietnam and American foreign policy.

This was key to turning the Civil Rights movement into a larger New Left. The batons, German shepherds, and firehoses that the racist South used as its weapons had already permanently changed how Rudd, and many in his generation, viewed their country. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and the student wing of the civil rights movement served as their activist model. Their villain was George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who was taken to define America at home. Once Vietnam was thrown into the mix, New Leftists could think of their nation as George Wallace home and abroad — racist, fascist, and irredeemably imperialist.

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This 21st-century movement opts for a similar synthesis, tying their Gaza activism to their anti-racist background. Like the original New Left, the culture war over American society in the last decade has led them on a journey from racial optimism to remorseless antagonism. It began with Barack Obama, the Zoomer John Kennedy. Charismatic and cool, Obama symbolised an ascendant “post-racial” America when the nation could still believe in change through traditional political channels. But Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, Michael Brown’s 2014 shooting, and the Ferguson Riots began to punch holes in this fantasy before, like the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Donald Trump’s election and George Floyd, radicalised a generation.

Once at college, the institutional pressures were there to bake these ingredients into a very 1968 mould: the 2024 student protesters sound and act like the New Left because they are trained by an institutionalised New Left at elite universities. This is why the intone the very same language and misapply identical principles. In 1968, Rudd founded his protest upon Columbia’s “racism and support for imperialism”. Now, 56 years later, Jawuanna McAllister a Cornell University student protester defines her philosophy: “we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist… none of us can be free… unless all of us are free”. It’s Freaky Friday — the student protest edition, except this time there is no generation gap on campus.

But though they imbibe and spout the same ideas, the modern protest movement dwells in a completely different context to its grandparent. In the Sixties, elite colleges and universities were institutionally conservative: the University of California even prohibited all political activity on campus. It was that total (and unreasonable) prohibition which prompted the original free-speech movement. At Columbia meanwhile, Mark Rudd sipped sherry with “tame and bloodless” professors in dreary afternoon seminars on Aristotle. At Swarthmore, future Weather Underground leaders Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin endured curfews, dined on white tablecloths, and organised formal dinners.

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Today, these very same campuses actively market themselves as Left-wing activist finishing schools. Cornell’s student union features a plaque commemorating armed takeover of the building in 1969. At Atlanta’s Emory University, Arts and Social Justice Fellows help students translate their learning into “creative activism in the name of social justice”. And Columbia, which is euphemistically called “Protest Ivy”, brings activist alumni to campus to woo potential students, while its two-semester core “Contemporary Civilization” is effectively a reading list for the 2024 activists. On the list are as many texts on the Haitian Constitution (three) as there are on the American, while the post-1945 readings are devoted exclusively to anticolonialism, race, sex and gender, and climate change. Unlike the Boomers who lived in a conservative social milieu amid establishment liberal ideas, the Zoomers scarcely encounter any contemporary notion to the Right of the Combahee River Collective or Frantz Fanon.

And this gets at the heart of the crucial difference between 2024 and 1968. Rudd, and his contemporaries, rebelled. Their movement, and its excesses, were born amid social upheaval and intellectual ferment. This certainly resulted in some misjudged actions and overheated rhetoric: when I interviewed Rudd, he freely admitted this. But one can understand, if not always defend, the New Left’s actions because of the scale of the political context. They imagined themselves battling racist oppression at home and imperialism abroad — because they were. In 1963, George Wallace had vowed to preserve segregation forever. Selma’s Bloody Sunday was a current event. Western imperialism was a present-day fact. What LBJ saw as the domino theory in Vietnam was instead a final act in Vietnam’s decades-long quest for independence, which America was denying through its war.

This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden. Protesters fundamentally misunderstand the very injustices they protest. And, trained by the old-New Left, they see American racism as frozen in 1968 amber, even though the material basis for racial inequality has fundamentally shifted. In 1968, to be black was to be in the American underclass: in 1960, only 10% of African Americans held a middle-class job. But the very victories of Civil Rights have changed that equation.

William Julius Wilson, the preeminent urban sociologist of his era, finds that class has become stickier than race in determining life chances. For the half of all black families that are now middle-class as a result, this is good news. And though they still suffer the worst, working-class African Americans are the victims of the same globalised economy as their white and brown brethren. There has not been a complete revolution: drive along any of America’s 955 Martin Luther King Boulevards and you will see reasons for pessimism. African-American men are still disproportionately victims of police violence. But this no longer a product of racialised legislation, but of the fact that poor Americans, of all races, are the disproportionate victims of a militarised police state.

And in several ways this is worse than 1968. Because this time it is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole. Benjamin Netanyahu can more easily ignore shrill exaggerations: the war grinds on; Palestinians suffer. The Zoomer Left hasn’t responded to this reality — it doesn’t even try. Instead, it sets about exemplifying Rob Henderson’s luxury belief motif, where anti-war activism confers social prestige on the educated elite. The cultural geography of the current protests is equally telling in this regard. These protests are stationed at elite campuses, the “Ivy plus” institutions where children of elites predominate. The New Left admittedly started with upper-middle-class kids at elite schools. But hundreds of middle-class state colleges eventually erupted in protest. In 1970, normie Kent State University in Ohio became the symbol of a mass youth rebellion.

Anti-racism at home and Zionism-as-imperialism abroad is a nifty way to redirect focus from this reality. And just as Tom Barson, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia uprising, has written, the roots of the tumult are not so much social anomie as it is “deflection”. Otherwise, the student elites might observe their professional middle class has gobbled up 83% of the America’s wealth since 1989. Or that the income gap between college and non-college was a mere 10% in the Seventies (today it is 70%). They could notice that the just over 500, mostly urban, coastal counties where they reside is home to 70% of all wealth, and that an epidemic of “deaths of despair” tears through the thousands of counties left behind. They might even notice that today it is college that separates the underclass from everyone else — and that it should be the cause of social protest, not its incubator.

The Columbia protesters are too coiled up in political introversion to notice these historical ironies. And that is why they will only end up repeating the greatest Sixties irony of them all. After all the fury of that decade, its greatest political achievement was to pave Richard Nixon’s route to the presidency, shattering the coalition that had carried LBJ to a landslide in 1964. By broadcasting the worst of the modern Left to America and its “silent majority”, these students can do the same, sabotaging the current government and boosting a crook to the White House.

This was to be the largest demonstration yet for Ireland’s nascent anti-immigration movement, hyped on social media as a countrywide show of force. While the inchoate movement has already changed the tenor of Irish politics, putting the country’s fragile coalition government on the back foot, it so far has no electoral representation. The Bank Holiday Monday protest aimed to change that, channeling a disparate set of local protest groups, fuelled by social-media anger, into a national electoral force for next month’s European and local elections.

“We’re expecting quite a big protest here today, all right,” Andy Heasman, the tweed-capped Dublin European election candidate for the Irish People party, an umbrella coalition of populist independents, told me. “There’ll be a lot of people here from the inner city. So we’ve a message to give them today that we’re ready to stand up for the Irish people, whether it be for immigration, housing, the indoctrination of children that’s happened, the NGOs, which have captured our media, and politics and government policy…” As I spoke to Heasman, his colleague filmed me on her mobile phone — perhaps the most marked trait of the activists on the march was a suspicion of journalists bordering on hostility, derived from the belief that the Irish press is working to marginalise them as extremists. “We wouldn’t talk to [state broadcaster] RTÉ,” an older woman, who had been loudly condemning what she called “Sharia Féin” told me: “Sure, if I said the sky was blue they’d say I said it was red.”

As the crowd assembled to march through the city centre, the delegation from Newtownmountkennedy, the rural Wicklow village where protestors clashed with Gardaí over the bussing in of migrants from central Dublin, shuffled to the front behind their banner to loud cheers. Maybe two or three thousand protestors had turned up, the Garda officer overseeing the demonstration told me: the organisers placed the figure at far more, and the Irish press at far less. As they marched through central Dublin, waving Irish tricolours and shouting “Get Them Out” and “You’ll Never Beat the Irish”, bemused tourists watched on from pub terraces. Working-class Dubliners were heavily represented, along with older couples from the provinces and a remarkable number of populist influencers, their selfie-sticks wavering in the air. Outside the GPO, the site of the Easter rebellion that eventually created the modern Irish state, Gardaí Public Order units in body armour separated the thousands of marchers from a few dozen Left-wing counter-protestors, waving Palestinian and Spanish Republican flags and chanting “Refugees are welcome here” through loudhailers. Sinn Féin, previously a staple of pro-migration activism, was notable for its absence: with the anti-immigration movement cutting into its support base in working-class Dublin, Ireland’s largest party has begun to pivot on its previous pro-migration platform, now voicing opposition to “open borders” and the new EU migration pact.

But that wasn’t enough for the protestors, loudly shouting “Sinn Féin traitors” and booing every time the party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s name was mentioned. There was something of a pantomime atmosphere as the folk villains of the moment were named from the podium, to loud boos from the crowd massed outside Dublin’s grand neoclassical Custom House. Taoiseach Simon Harris, Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman, Justice Minister Helen McEntee were all met with boos and shouts of “Get them out!” from the crowd, as a speaker vowed to “clear that cesspool of a Dáil out”. So did Gardaí head Drew Harris, a controversial Northern Irish appointment “who learned his craft well with the RUC”, as the independent MEP candidate Malachy Steenson, a Dublin solicitor and former candidate for the Republican-Socialist Workers Party, told the crowd. “We are the risen people,” he declared, “and we have it within our power to change this society forever. And if we don’t take this opportunity in June, well then it’s over. Don’t come back whinging and saying ‘we should have done something’. Get out in June and make that change.”

Yet it is unclear whether the widespread popular dissatisfaction over migration will actually make an electoral impact. Recent polls show that Sinn Féin’s support has grown in recent weeks, while the different parties presenting themselves for popular acclaim in Dublin are competing for the same enthusiastic but not necessarily large voter base. The Midlands-Northwest constituency for the European elections alone is running 10 different anti-immigration candidates, while Dublin shows an equally crowded roster for a narrow vote share.

Insofar as the Irish press has covered these parties — which is not very far at all — very little effort has been made to analyse their platforms outside the immigration question. Yet while sharing the same podium, and making a show of unity against what they see as a hostile matrix of government, media and NGO lobbies, the parties competing for the popular anti-immigration vote represent a wildly differing policy mix, from the libertarian and anti-EU stance of the Irish Freedom Party, the largest party in attendance, to the continental-style Identitarianism of the National Party, standing on a “remigration” platform and railing against “global capital” from the stage. The Sinn Féin breakaway party, Aontú, the only immigration-sceptical party with a seat in the Dáil, and standing on a socially conservative, social-democratic platform, was not in attendance. Significantly more Left-wing than the Right-wing parties with which Irish leftists often bracket it, Aontú is perhaps the best positioned for an electoral breakthrough, and is now a regular staple for soundbites on the Irish television news.

“I’m sure that once this election is out of the way, there will be a reconfiguration, an amalgamation of various parties,” Hermann Kelly, the sharply-suited leader of the Irish Freedom Party told me. In Kelly’s eyes, the opportunity is there for the taking: “Within the last six months, there’s been an absolute sea change in that a nationalist consciousness has started to rise again in Ireland,” he said. “Look at the polls, 79% of Irish people have had enough of mass immigration. So the political class are still mouthing the same words, but the people out there on the doors are all telling them we’ve had enough. Hey, we never consented to be colonised. Ireland is different from Britain in that we were never a colonial power, never colonised anyone else’s country, and we don’t expect it to be done to ourselves.”

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Standing on a diametrically opposed platform to the Irish Freedom Party’s long-term goal of leaving the EU is the radical-right National Party, whose new leader, the farmer James Reynolds, recently ousted its unsettling founder Justin Barrett. Barrett, given to approvingly quoting Hitler and wearing an SS uniform at protests, has in turn created a new, more or less openly fascist party, Clann Éireann, while running against Reynolds in the Midlands constituency on the same National Party ticket due to a convoluted internal feud. “We’re not pro-Brexit, we have a very different outlook to the British,” Reynolds told me. “And I think that Hermann Kelly’s outlook is as much fixated on leaving the European Union as it is on doing anything disruptive to change it from within, which is my intention. I believe there’s going to be a huge Right-wing surge in the next European elections. I want to be part of it. I think I can achieve much more within the European Parliament than if we were outside.” Citing his links with Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party and Hungary’s Mi Hazánk, Reynolds’s National Party represents the Irish wing of a European Right-wing political strand quite absent from Britain.

Yet even still, Irish liberals and Sinn Féin activists are wont to describe the nascent Irish Right-wing as a British plot. While the tortuous logic of this claim does not bear much scrutiny, what was instead most striking was the degree to which the protest was framed within the language and symbolism of Irish nationalism — indeed, it arguably represents a Rightward shift in the long and historically very politically diverse Irish nationalist tradition, which has in recent decades tilted the other way under Sinn Féin’s leadership. “We fought the Brits for 800 fucking years, and we beat them,” one speaker bawled at the microphone to loud cheers, “and we’ll beat these fucking cunts too.” Protestors waved the Irish Republic flag of the Easter Rising and sang along to Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of the rebel song “The Foggy Dew”, as speechmakers quoted Patrick Pearse, alluded to the ancient Irish tradition of aisling poetry, lamented the loss of the Irish language, and referenced the rebel justice mechanisms of the Civil War period: one speaker declared his wish to “appoint local people as justices” to “arrest all the traitors”.

At the same time, Steenson declared that the Irish government’s recent attempt to blame the migration crisis on Sunak’s Rwanda plan was populist misdirection. “They’re “trying to play on the old prejudices against the British government,” Steenson told the crowd. “They’re trying to get us to blame the Brits for the immigration problem in this country. The British government are doing what the Irish government should be doing… What they should be saying to Rishi Sunak is: when your plane takes off from whatever airbase in England, keep a few seats on it, land it at Baldonnel [airbase near Dublin] and we’ll fill the rest of those seats.”

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After the protest, Steenson, a Eurosceptic, described to me his hope to “reunite our country as a sovereign state — the sovereign Irish Republic… free from all imperialist powers, whether it’s Britain, Europe or the United States or anywhere else. We will determine our own destiny.” But asked whether he saw the protest movement translating into electoral success, Steenson was more equivocal. “I suppose we’ll know the answer to that on 8 June. There are a lot of people standing, and I think that the stronger candidates will prevail, hopefully,” he told me. “We know who stood with us, and we know who stood against us.”

Yet Monday’s protest, while large, was perhaps smaller than the organisers had hoped. While a significant majority of Irish voters support immigration restrictions, the degree to which the energy of the largely social-media-based protest movement can actually make an electoral impact remains, until next month, an open question. Some candidates, such as social media influencer Gavin Pepper and radio talk-show host Niall Boylan, command large audiences, yet as Reform’s performance in Britain’s council elections shows, an outsized media platform does not necessarily translate into electoral success.

The Euroscepticism of candidates like Steenson and Kelly’s Irish Freedom Party is also a marginal position in Ireland, a country whose urban economy has rocketed as the European tax home of American corporations, and whose sizeable farming constituency is largely dependent on European subsidies. To British eyes, more radical parties such as the National Party are remarkable for the degree to which their slogans are accepted by the essentially “normie” crowd — yet they are so far without any electoral representation. If Monday was an attempt by the aspiring leaders of the movement to gauge the turnout they can command, June’s elections will provide the answer as to whether it can reshape Ireland’s political system, or remain a loud and angry voice shut outside power. While Dublin’s anti-immigration marchers vastly outnumbered the pro-migrant counter-protestors, it is Ireland’s voting majority, sitting quietly at home, who will determine the country’s political future. And for all that Monday’s protestors revile them, Sinn Féin remain by far Ireland’s most popular party — and seem destined for power.

Yet these laid-back types could also be political militants because their militancy lay in their laid-backness. For them, switching off and chilling out were quite as political as counting votes. What was at stake, as in many political crises, was the definition of politics itself. Did it begin and end at the ballot box, or did it include what you ate and the way you made love?

All of which is to say that the student revolt of the late-Sixties was aimed at cultural revolution, not simply political change. It was aware that genuine political transformation must be rooted in people’s lived experience, not just in their views on agriculture or foreign policy. Culture in the broad sense of customs, values and habits of feeling was the soil in which politics had to bed down. If bedding down in a different sense was so important, it was partly because sex was fun, but also because it belonged to the inner, personal sphere that any political change worthy of the name had to recreate.

In this, the hippies and yippies were taking their cue from the very middle classes they deplored, who had launched their own long cultural revolution in Europe a few centuries earlier. One of the finest achievements of this innovation in morals and manners was the realist novel, though even that rich resource pales in comparison with the mighty intellectual revolution we know as science. What was being transfigured was not only sense but sensibility, as the old aristocratic values of courtesy, hierarchy and lashing the odd peasant yielded ground to thrift, conscience, self-discipline, industriousness and marital fidelity. The Roundheads were gradually ousting the Cavaliers.

There aren’t many peace-and-love druggies among the students currently occupying their campuses. If they are clamouring for peace, it is for a ceasefire in Gaza right now, not for some future world which has transcended violence, and they have no delusions that an end to the slaughter will involve any kind of love-in. They are, in a word, more canny, pragmatic and less idealistic than their Sixties’ forebears, as well as more sceptical of the belief that getting stoned and having it off are the highroad to heaven. In this sense, they are like most other students today, except for sleeping in the cold and being beaten up by the police. Ever since the era of Thatcher and Reagan, students almost everywhere have become more cautious, self-interested and self-seeking, some of which can be attributed to the political times in general and some of it to changes in higher education in particular. Being hugely in debt, as almost all students are these days, inclines you to conservatism. It ties you to the status quo and makes you less likely to step out of line.

It’s therefore all the more impressive that in a bleak season for political radicals, dissent has broken out on a sizeable scale in those bastions of corporate capitalism and managerial gobbledygook which a few years ago were still dimly recognisable as universities. But though the demand for justice has slept, it isn’t dead. In fact, of all human impulses it is one of the hardest to extinguish, however many police riots may try to crush it.

The students who are currently protesting against the massacre of the innocent in Gaza are essentially consumers. For eye-watering fees, they purchase a commodity known as education from institutions for which the value of learning has long since given way to the overriding criterion of value for money. As a former university professor, I used to take advantage of this monetisation of academia by offering students those of my insights into literary works which they could afford. For a mere fiver, for example, they could have one of my moderately interesting but hardly world-shaking comments on the character of Macbeth, while those who could afford to pay four or five times this amount would be treated to a stunningly original analysis of Wuthering Heights. I even ran a hire purchase scheme for those who couldn’t pay for my critical remarks on the nail, allowing them to tip in a small amount each week or even to engage in a spot of barter, exchanging my ideas about Jane Austen for a chocolate cake or an Aran sweater.

Universities, in however privileged, aloof a fashion, were once centres of humane critique, subjecting the priorities of the social order to the test of long-accumulated wisdom and expertise; nowadays, they are almost as locked into the marketplace as Tesco, even if their product is rather less tangible. Today’s students are creatures of this system, and have known no alternative to it, apart from the protests around Iraq; the last large-scale political drama in which a good many British students took part was the miners’ strike of the early Eighties, now some 40 years behind us. Since then, the more politically minded among them have channelled their energies into either ecology or identity politics.

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Even so, there are those among them who are reluctant to see their fees being used to prop up Israel’s war. There is, one should note, little or nothing in this for these students themselves. Altruism may not be politically fashionable, but for all the efforts of the rich it isn’t quite extinct. If you’re gay, disabled, a feminist or part of an ethnic minority, your political activity is largely in the service of others; but there’s likely to be a personal dimension to it as well, which isn’t so true of a white middle-class American who protests against the bombing of Palestinian hospitals.

There’s a danger, even so, of war in the Middle East becoming identity politics in New York and California, a danger to which some of the US pro-Palestinian protestors seem alert. In fact, there’s not much that postmodern America can’t turn into a question of identity. A small minority of these dissenters are vile antisemites, so it becomes easy to pin this charge on the movement as a whole. It also becomes possible for some Jewish students to reframe what’s at stake in terms of Jewishness rather than the dismemberment of innocent civilians. It’s known these days as controlling the narrative. If you can’t morally defend Israel’s campaign of terror, then talk about something else such as your right to cross the street. Distraction and displacement are the order of the day. Crowds are redefined as mobs, while non-students who pitch in are branded as foreign agitators. Among some US politicians, the talk is not of starving children but of free speech and freedom of assembly. As American student activists are eager to point out, there’s a lot of discussion in the States about academic freedom at a time when universities in Gaza lie in ruins. Violence on the West Bank goes unmentioned, while violence at Columbia hits the headlines.

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Meanwhile, the doublethink continues apace. Yes, the mass killing in Gaza is regrettable, but it’s the only way of rooting out Hamas. In violation of one of the most basic of all ethical principles, the end justifies the means. So, would annihilating a million Palestinians in order to exterminate the enemy be acceptable in principle? Yes, the Right-wing fanatics now running Israel are an embarrassment, but the Israeli state must be defended at all costs. Yes, champions of Palestine have the right to make their voices heard, but too many  of them are pro-Hamas zealots in thin disguise, including the teachers and social workers who bring their children from Kennington and Walworth for marches in central London.

Traditionally, students bear the double burden of being both reviled and ridiculed. If they are smeared as social parasites, they are also mocked as idealists with their heads in the clouds. Yet the US student movement of the late Sixties was a power to be reckoned with in national politics, while its counterpart in France brought masses of working people out on the streets and almost unseated a government. Not bad going for a bunch of guys studying Plato or the pancreas.

Did they triumph? Certainly, such politicised “raids” on cherished artistic artefacts and spaces seem evermore common today, from statue topplings to Old Masters splattered with soup. Last weekend was no exception: at Trinity College, Cambridge, an activist protesting the Israel-Palestine conflict destroyed a 1914 Philip de Laszlo oil painting of Lord Balfour using red spray paint and a box cutter.

Much has been written about how this represents an attack on the West’s values and legacy. But surely, if this were what we believed, the response to this vandalism would be swift and punitive. And yet no such response was forthcoming: Trinity College managed little more than a limp expression of “regret” and an offer of counselling to anyone affected. At the time of writing, no arrests have been made. A cloud of official forgetting seems already to have settled over the event.

This is less bewildering, though, when you understand the “intervention” by Palestine Action not as an attack on our artistic heritage, but as a profoundly conservative expression of that heritage: in particular, of the modern legacy of permanent revolution, inaugurated by 20th-century radicals such as the Situationists.

For this group, the 1958 art critics’ conference was just one more deplorable iteration of the “society of the spectacle”, a pervasive form of capitalist tyranny propagated by mass media and consumerism. Here, image-making takes precedence over material reality, while obedience is ensured by dissolving organic social relations. Needs are replaced with commodified desires, consumers become purely passive, and capitalism becomes inescapable.

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The Situationists set out to break down this regime by challenging “the spectacle of a false encounter”. They developed disruptive forms of performance, participation and collective authorship. Cultivating randomness, they sought everywhere to re-invigorate the masses by disturbing the manufactured consumer spectacle.

Did it work? Well, yes and no. The Situationists were certainly influential. And their legacy has spread well beyond the art world: the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, for example, were explicitly inspired by the Situationist International. Was it radical, though? Again, yes and no.

In one 1966 manifesto, the Situationists decried “the bygone excellence of bourgeois culture” — a legacy they believed had already given way to ugly managerialism governed by “the rhythm of the production line”. In this context, “the university is becoming”, they argued, “the honest broker of technocracy and its spectacle”. Within this flattened, hollowed-out infrastructure, the Situationists argued that “the banality of everyday life is not incidental, but the central mechanism and product of modern capitalism”. And, they argued, to resist it “nothing less is needed than all-out revolution”.

This would, they imagined, free the entire accumulated legacy of the now-defunct bourgeois order for revolutionary purposes, enabling radicals to “destroy the spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of commodity society”. This “liberation of history” would spell the end of all repression, in favour of “revolutionary celebration” and “untrammelled desire”.

Or so they hoped. The manifesto heavily influenced the Paris ’68 riots: Situationist slogans were distributed by the “Occupation Committee of the People’s Free Sorbonne University”. Half a century on, though, re-reading the Situationists’ declarations evokes a sense of both admiration and tragedy. Admiration, for how prophetic they were; tragedy, for how partial their revolution turned out not to be.

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Given now-common complaints about universities enabling the spread of technocratic managerialism, it’s hard not to see the Situationists’ critique as prescient. And in this context, taking a box-cutter to a 1914 oil painting might make sense — for the world that painting depicts has already been emptied of meaning, and there’s no legacy to protect.

Except there is: the legacy of the ‘68ers themselves. Today, just over half a century on from the riots, it’s the inheritors of the Situationists and ‘68ers that command the heights (such as they are) of contemporary culture. Radical critique is the default mode of the modern academy; you’ll struggle to get funding for research that doesn’t set out to problematise, deconstruct, decolonise, queer or otherwise liquidate the last moribund fragments of the bourgeois culture Debord was already pronouncing dead in 1966.

The art world, meanwhile, has comprehensively re-institutionalised the once-revolutionary style of Situationist intervention, via an often publicly-funded infrastructure whose default stance is also — within certain limits that artists violate at their peril — radical critique. And across academia, the arts and the rest of the progressive consensus, untrammelled desire is so unchallengeable a good that those trying to restrain their own masturbatory habits are traduced in the press as fascists. Meanwhile, respectable academia and publishing knocks ever louder on once-forbidden sexual doors, such as bestiality or paedophilia, while government-funded quangos dole out hundreds of thousands in grants for hardcore sex films masquerading as “art”.

In other words: everything the Situationists called for is now institutionalised. And the final tragic irony of this partial triumph is the way Situationist-style interventions, staged for the camera, critique “spectacle” through spectacle itself.

For Debord never anticipated the internet. His critique of “spectacle” targeted mid-century mass media: cinema, radio, and television. These forms had one thing in common: they were one-to-many. The effect of such image-making was to impose the synthetic, consumerist fantasy-world of the ‘spectacle’, in a tyrannically top-down way. In response to the autocratic stranglehold this exerted over the public imagination, the aim of Situationist praxis was to jolt the masses from mediated passivity into active, decentralised re-engagement with the world’s strangeness — and its revolutionary possibilities.

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What happens, though, when the media is no longer one-to-many, as it was in the Sixties, but many-to-many, as is the case with social media? Back in the Noughties, when social media first exploded, the leftist arty circles I frequented at the time responded to this new decentralisation of image-making with a revived interest in Situationism. Creative collectives sprang up; performance art and street protest merged; it seemed for a moment that internet-enabled image-making and subversive organising might offer a way out of the deadening passivity of mass consumerism.

How naïve that all seems in hindsight. For these supposedly liberatory new forms were almost instantaneously colonised by the spectacle they sought to disrupt. The interval between the first spontaneous, playful flash mobs and the adoption of this format by marketers was vanishingly brief. And a decade or so on, such content is the bread-and-butter for a new, still more total, economy of spectacle — in which all of us, all the time, are called to be both content and consumer.

Clickbait creators skip from discourse to discourse, spreading discordant viral material; even brutality and horror have currency less for the reality they represent than as the spark for online discourse. Street fights; stabbings; cannibalism; servants falling out of windows: it’s all fodder for the dispassionate-seeming phone camera, and for those farming chaos for engagement. In this economy, too, street protests exist only to the extent they’re represented in the digital spectacle: every such gathering attracts the same complaints of mainstream press cover-up. Smaller-scale protests, meanwhile, increasingly explicitly orient themselves toward the virtual, prioritising not political change but pure virality, whether via soup-based interventions, vandalism, or bodily fluids.

To what extent does any of this transgress anything? Well, some kinds of subversive intervention in the image-making space still incur real-world punishment. Even a regime supposedly ordered to permanent revolution retains some taboos. But the list of genuinely forbidden opinions and acts doesn’t seem to include vandalising paintings of dead politicians. On the contrary: damaging a surviving fragment of bourgeois culture reads less as revolutionary today than as an act of slavish devotion to orthodoxy.

And the only way to make it even more completely orthodox is to stage it for the camera. Today the Situationists’ subversive energy has been re-absorbed by a new orthodoxy — one even more completely governed by commodified “spectacle” than that of Debord’s time.

No wonder, then, that the Trinity vandal is clearly a dutiful young consumer, transporting her vandalism kit in a Mulberry Cara backpack: a limited-edition designer accessory that retailed for £995 when released, and still sells for hundreds second-hand. In the new order she represents, vandalising the crumbling remains of bourgeois culture is less radical than routine: only a slightly more pronounced version of the “queering” and “decolonising” that every generation of progressives has been engaged in since ‘68. And the calculated staging of this act in turn signals the total recapture of Situationist disruption, as merely another form of digital spectacle.

The Trinity event reveals today’s crop of young pseudo-activists as they are: suffocatingly conservative, iPhone-wielding foot-soldiers for the reigning dogma of permanent revolution. Designer backpacks on their shoulders, they dance on the weed-choked tomb of a civilisation their grandparents destroyed: “confused and empty chatter about a decomposed culture” is all they have.

Before he did so, he said: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all.” He live-streamed his self-immolation on the gaming platform Twitch.

Here is a chilling collision of the digital and the analogue, the 21st century and the medieval. A US national (a member of the armed services, no less) felt he was digitally complicit in a war being fought on the other side of the world; and streamed his protest in the nowhere of cyberspace. Yet the form of his protest, which fits into a centuries-old tradition, could not have been more primal and embodied.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “luxury beliefs” — political positions or radical ideas that the privileged adopt as a mark of status, and whose trickle-down effects tend to be borne by the less privileged. There are lots of reasons — ulterior motives, if you like — to hold a political position or go on a march. You might hope to impress girls with your keffiyeh and combat trousers. You might hope to acquire radical chic, to fit in with your peers, to épater la bourgeoisie. You might like the thrill of a bit of mild crowd violence, in a safely policed environment, as you holler your demands to defund the police. There are any number of peripheral reasons you might wave a banner or put a brick through a window.

What you don’t do for a luxury belief is set yourself on fire. If you set yourself on fire, there isn’t the slightest chance that your act of protest is a pose. There’s an ungainsayable level of commitment there. The Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, stung by music-press sneers that the band were wannabe punk-rock posers, once took the opportunity of an interview with the NME to carve “4 REAL” into his arm with a razorblade. Self-immolation is that gesture squared, that gesture cubed. It literalises the declaration made by Nelson Mandela on his commitment to jail in a Pretoria courtroom: “It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

It is a uniquely spectacular and paradoxical form of protest, though. It is not instrumental in any obvious way. The suicide bomber is prepared to give his life to destroy his enemies. The soldier in war is prepared to risk his life to attack or defend a territory or a flag. But the self-immolator makes a gesture whose only feature is the demonstration that his cause is more important to him than his life: a suicide-bomber without victims.

Self-immolation doesn’t seek to build networks of resistance (unless, and improbably, by social contagion). It doesn’t threaten or cajole. It doesn’t negotiate or even imply negotiation. It’s at once flagrantly egotistical and self-annihilating. We could think of it as the symptom of a diseased or distressed mind — as something essentially nihilistic. But the systematic way in which it has been used as a form of protest century in, century out — and that it still holds an appeal in the modern age — makes that hard to sustain. If anything, it’s idealistic — inasmuch as it holds as an article of faith that self-destruction can carry a meaning beyond itself. It’s a ritual.

But what is that ritual doing? Every form of protest is, one way or another, a rhetorical appeal: it seeks to persuade. And most forms of rhetoric seek to gather the communicator and the audience into some sort of coalition: to make a “we” from a collection of disparate individuals. But sitting on a pavement in flames makes no appeal for solidarity or fraternity: it marks you out as a person absolutely isolated from his or her fellow man. It’s a communication that extinguishes the communicator in the process. It bids for martyrdom, sainthood, Buddha-nature.

It’s not an accident, then, that self-immolation as a form of protest is or has been primarily associated with religious traditions. (It comes, among other things, with the Dalai Lama’s qualified seal of approval as a “practice of non-violence”.) The most famous act of self-immolation in living memory is that of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức — who set himself on fire in the summer of 1963 at a busy road junction in Saigon in protest at the regime’s persecution of his co-religionists. The press photographs of his burning went round the world. (Whether the monk would have approved his death being used on the cover of a multi-platinum album by Rage Against the Machine is a question for debate.)

And fire itself, as the medium, comes with religious overtones built in in any number of traditions: it’s a symbol of the divine. Fire is what humans stole from the gods. It’s the elemental symbol of our mastery and our hubris; it’s the basic human technology; and it’s the thing that the animal in us fears, that we flinch from by instinct. It’s the “red flower” in Kipling; Eliot’s “intolerable shirt of flame”. To embrace it as a manner of death has an intuitive symbolism that garnishes the sheer extremity of the act in a way that no other form of suicide can.

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There’s an awful sublimity to it: an unspeakable impulse to violence, extravagantly articulated, but turned inwards. The 1963 image of that burning monk is powerful not just because it’s so shocking, but because the image is so beautiful. The semi-translucent curls and billows of the flame wrap the perfectly composed human figure at the centre of them: Quảng Đức sat unmoving, in the lotus position, as he burned. His death was a conscious and ostentatious act of self-possession in the face of (we can safely assume) unbelievable physical agony. The paradox, again: an act that appears to be an extreme response to powerlessness; an act that seeks to demonstrate superhuman control.

Is Quảng Đức the inspirer of Airman Bushnell’s extraordinary and terrible death? We can’t know, because the act consumes the only person who could tell us why they are doing it or what they hope to achieve. But we do know that self-immolation has been a feature of protests among even apparently secular Westerners for decades now. There were periodic self-immolations in the US in protest at the Vietnam war. It was the self-immolation of a Tunisian stallholder, Muhammad Bouazizi, that sparked the Tunisian revolution, and self-immolation was a feature of the wider Arab Spring.

Perhaps the enduring attraction of this terrifying, self-destructive gesture of resistance implies that it has become something dangerously fitted to the digital age. That it has, in fact, become a meme.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day. (Hilariously for our mutual friends, one of the presumed bodyguards is in fact my fellow philosopher friend Rob.)

Hustled by the Union’s reassuringly military-sounding bursar into a secret upstairs room in the building, I check Twitter. Rishi Sunak has tagged me in a supportive tweet. This will be the least weird thing to happen to me all day.

The morning had not started brilliantly — two consecutive trains cancelled, and I’d had to scramble around to find a local taxi driver who didn’t mind a four-hour round trip to London at short notice. By the time I made it, fairly late, to the driver taking me to Oxford, I had already aged several years.

Looking back, the younger version of me didn’t like the Union much, and I hardly ever went there. An institution completely independent of the wider university, it is mostly devoted to having debates. Back then, I thought it was an intimidating and archaic place, full of strident, cocky types who all wanted to be Prime Minister. I didn’t feel it was really for the likes of shy, awkward, comprehensive-schooled me. I certainly didn’t imagine that I’d one day be interviewed by its president about my views on gender.

I switch up my Kendall-Roy look to business-casual in a tiny bathroom, and then chat to committee members and Union staff. They seem excited but tense; occasionally, one wheels away to talk urgently on the phone. At one point, there is a muttered conversation about the welfare rooms being manned and ready to receive visitors. I wonder if that might be a slightly problematic verb to use.

For a while, as we wait, there is dead silence outside in the street, and I start to suspect that the whole thing is going to be rather anticlimactic. Eventually I hear the familiar sound of chanting outside and feel oddly relieved. At least I know this script — and not only from my former workplace.

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Last November, I participated in a debate at the Oxford Union’s fellow institution, the Cambridge Union. There was a protest, and an attempt at disinvitation there too. So it seems I’m now a veteran of Oxbridge’s least athletic student Varsity match — and though it pains me to do so, I’m afraid I am going to have to declare the Light Blues the winner.

The motion we debated at The Other Place was not about sex and gender at all, but about whether there is a right to offend. Spoiler alert: I was on the side that argued that there is. The atmosphere as I entered that chamber was sombre and tense. Throughout the event, various young people bobbed up and down to denounce me, mostly for things I hadn’t ever said or written and didn’t believe.

Some appeared to think I was arguing that offence was a positive duty rather than a right (I wasn’t). Others didn’t care what I was saying, or indeed what I had ever said, but just wanted to feel the thrill of the pointed finger. In an update to the traditional mediaeval scenario, one organised chap read out his prepared denunciation from an iPad.

Protestors outside could be heard banging drums loudly, providing an unsettling percussive accompaniment to the speeches inside. The volume of drumming and yelling would increase each time I spoke, as coordinating messages flew between audience members and protestors.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called Kass cunningly disguised as a six-foot-plus man in a tuxedo. The results of Kass’s intervention upon my emotional equilibrium can be seen in the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars, which coincidentally aired on the same day as the Oxford event.

Under false pretences, Kass had auditioned to speak for my side of the motion, arriving at the Union in full male-associated attire and dining convivially with me first, before sensationally dropping the act in order to denounce me as “disgusting” to everyone in the chamber. And things only went downhill from there. I was the only female speaker in the debate. Standing at full height next to me during their speech, Kass described to the audience how frightening it was to walk about the streets of Cambridge at night thanks to women like me.

In comparison to all this, the Oxford audience this week barely made any effort to make me feel awful. In fact, they offered enthusiastic applause as I entered the room. And in an unprecedented turn of events, many of my main objectors seemed actually to have read my book.

Even the four protestors who tried to create a rumpus inside the building were relatively meek. One stood up and shouted something, then left. Two others also shouted slogans rather apologetically, unfurled a flag, and threw some leaflets before hastily exiting too. The most intrepid of the four, dramatically unveiling a “No More Dead Trans Kids” T-shirt, used superglue to stick one hand to the floor right in front of me, but still complied docilely when five police officers — armed with blue plastic gloves and solvent, a lot of forms to fill in, and some very patient smiles — eventually arrived to sort it all out. The careful act of glueing itself seemed a bit Blue Peter.

After a nervous build-up, I started to enjoy myself, and it appeared to me that others in the chamber did too. There was a full and frank exchange of views, including some robust criticism of my position. Intellectual blows were landed on both sides. The Union President cornered me on an academic study that I didn’t know much about, while I managed to confuse him about which sense of “gender” he meant exactly (though, given the infinite flexibility of the term, who can blame him?). Various students queued up to quiz me on what they perceived to be errors in my reasoning, evidence base or attitude. I answered as best I could.

It seemed to me that the four protestors were not representative. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that many in the chamber were pushing back against the sort of tired and hyperbolic cliches usually wielded to shut them up. Certainly, there was little apparent sympathy in the room for the superglued superhero, eventually escorted out to the sound of good-natured cheers and some booing. At times, the atmosphere bordered on riotous rather than rioting.

I found all of this quite promising. And even during the earlier Cambridge event, there had been another hopeful sign, not featured in the documentary. When it came to the moment for those in the packed room to file out and vote, the majority voted for our side of the motion, and the existence of a right to offend.

At both Cambridge and Oxford, I also had several enriching encounters with staunch defenders of my right to speak. A lot of these were with young gender-critical feminists, fired up by noticing the obvious inconsistencies and injustices in a supposedly “kind” worldview that tells women to put their own needs last. Some wanted me to sign their copies of my book. Others were keen to tell me their own stories of horrible social shunning for their beliefs.

One first year Cambridge student told me that, after writing a mildly gender-critical blog in defence of me, she had been ostracised and shamed by all the other women in her college year group, as well as by her own tutor. Another story I heard on Tuesday was about a young lesbian who had read my book and watched my talks, decided to defend my free speech publicly, and been kicked out of the Oxford LGBTQ+ student society as a result.

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Other supportive students in Oxford, neither feminist nor anti-feminist, just seemed fed up with being emotionally blackmailed into stifled silence by a small group of childish and histrionic narcissists — among which they doubtless would include the occasional lecturer. And from within each Union, the committee members responsible for inviting me were totally impressive, standing resolute against pressure and showing exemplary resilience in the face of harsh criticism from some peers.

And I’m afraid I have even more disappointing news for those with unhealthy emotional attachments to the present culture wars. There were — indeed, undoubtedly still are — plenty of students who feel like this at my former workplace. I know they are there, either because they told me outright at the time, or because they demonstrated it to me via the open, inquisitive way they conducted themselves in the classroom.

I am sure that such students exist in every single UK university at the moment; I suspect there are thousands of them out there right now, muttering inwardly while listening to ever more dramatic tales of self-centring woe from fellow students, or eye-rolling inwardly as their lecturers give them pious homilies.

These students are a largely untapped asset to the project of detoxifying the current discourse around identity politics. Thanks to their relative youth, they tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other. Many have sufficiently rebellious or anarchic instincts to shrink from blatant attempts to manipulate and guilt-trip them. They are sick of being imprisoned in other people’s shame, guilt and paranoia. All we have to do is set them free.

This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?

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In looking at some of the media coverage of my Oxford trip, it’s striking to me that certain journalists’ idea of balanced reporting is to interview, on one hand, Stock the supposedly offensive speaker, and on the other, students who say they feel threatened and frightened by my terrifying words. (The rough format goes as follows. Student: “I just feel exhausted constantly having to justify my existence every day!”. Interviewer: “What do you, Stock, say to the students who feel exhausted having to justify their existence every day?” Me, looking at said students, apparently with enough energy to drum and chant for hours: “Erm … I’m not sure. Maybe get their iron levels checked?”.)

Yet these are not the only students who have interests at stake. There are those who long to have robust arguments and vigorous disagreements with peers and elders, free from the fear that they will say something offensive and be punished accordingly. But these students don’t seem to get interviewed remotely as often. I don’t believe it’s because they wouldn’t speak to the media, in principle. Or at least — I think that if we collectively made it easier for some of them to ask for such things, greater argumentative disinhibition would become a more accepted norm quite fast, and a generation would collectively breathe a sigh of relief.

I don’t know how the younger version of me would look at present committee members, so impressively self-assured and full of vim, but this version of me (the Kendall Roy wannabe, that is) looks on with great affection and respect. In standing firm and holding a space where students are free to engage with big ideas in time-honoured, age-appropriate ways — whether by arguing, shouting, laughing, emoting wildly, or indeed glueing themselves to wooden floors — they are doing the world an enormous service. Perhaps we can relax a bit about the future after all.

But the great Victorian year of protest actually feels more recent than it has for decades. In its chaos and its power, it resembles our own historical moment, buffeted by populist uprisings and social turmoil, climate rebellion and violent insurrection. “We can take that place,” one man said confidently as he pointed to the Capitol on January 6. “And then do what?” responded his partner in crime. “Heads on pikes!” the first replied without really having the slightest idea of what to do next. As in 1848, radical and even violent protests are now expected, sometimes even desired, but without any clear programme or manifesto. Revolution doesn’t seem unlikely anymore, but at the same time, it’s hard to concretely envision a post-capitalist world.

Whether it’s the bolsonaristas invading the Brazilian National Congress, the gilets jaunes assembling spontaneously in the streets of France, or the “square movements” following the 2008 crash, the more traditional repertoires of contention that characterised the past century seem to be changing both on the Left and the Right. But far from being on the verge of a carefully planned coup d’état or a new social order, contemporary revolts instead resemble that tumultuous mid-century upheaval: “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” as Christopher Clark notes in his gripping new history, Revolutionary Spring. “The people of 1848,” he adds, “could see themselves in us.”

While the inter-war period and the rise of fascism has often been raised as a comparison for our present, Clark offers us a different and more accurate analogue. Far from being a failed revolution as Karl Marx had thought, 1848 successfully transformed Palermo, Paris and Vienna, and reverberated in Chile and Martinique. The year progressed not as chain or domino effect, but more like our own “populist revolts”: nearly simultaneous, interconnected and rooted in common socio-economical changes, but without being directly caused by one another. It was the “particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century”. “People, groups and ideas,” Clark says, “flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities” with “profound consequences for the modern history of Europe”. The world, as Bismarck recalled in his memoirs, would never be the same after. Of course, at the time, the hopes of radicals were crushed. Many fled into exile in the United States or London, like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, or Marx himself. For them, the disillusion was intense and the prospects of an immediate socialist transformation had rapidly vanished. But in the years to come, 1848 transformed how liberals, conservatives and socialists alike would relate to politics.

In response to the revolts, which were largely defeated, significant constitutional changes were passed, that slowly defined our modern representative politics and shaped for good the nature of the state and government. These new political constellations were more open to reform and to the aspirations of the moderate elements of society, but the state apparatus was significantly expanded, with the establishment of armed police forces trained to combat insurrections. The armed civic state is taken for granted now, but it was a marked novelty after the period spanning from the Vienna congress of 1815 to 1848. Most regimes had obviously been repressive, illiberal and change averse, but were also, as the historian Paul W. Schroeder has noted, inefficient and quite reluctant to use brute force against their own citizens. This allowed for a proliferation of conspiracies and popular revolts.

For a long time, ordinary people did not demonstrate, rally or strike, but would rather parade in mocking routines, seize grain, invade fields, attack tax collectors, destruct tollgates or sack machines. Conflicts unfolded generally at a local level, with a narrow focus and without coherent political aims. And revolutions themselves were rather the preserve of austere figures such as the Italian Robespierrist Philippe Buonarroti, who favoured revolutionary dictatorship over mass movements, convinced of the difficulty of involving the multitudes. Despite censorship, it was, in fact, Schroeder observed, “relatively easy and safe to promote revolution”. As a result, in 1848, the authorities of Europe weren’t ready to respond properly to the insurrections, used instead to small and carefully-planned uprisings.

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In that year, something quite different emerged for the first time. As Clark writes, the uprisings were “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep” rather than anchored in the “seditious conspiracy” characteristics of the 1830s. The revolutionary ideas “reverberated in cafés and political clubs, circulating in communicative networks that were incomparably denser, socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late-eighteenth-century predecessors”. Even if there weren’t yet “political parties capable of disciplining their members or binding them to commonly agreed positions” or “doctrinally authoritative ‘ideologies’”, it marked the beginning of the end of a certain form of protest. From here on, not only the middle classes and liberals renounced revolution for good, but the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades.

As the sociologist Charles Tilly later argued in the case of France, 1848 therefore stands in the middle of two crucial intertwined changes that would transform the repertoire of collective action for the following century. The first involved the centralisation of the state into a more complex apparatus, internally coordinated and with enhanced means of coercion. This was coupled with an unprecedented expansion of capital, producing a large and modern working class which populated large units of production. And within this new nexus of capital and state, social movements as we know them began to take hold within an emerging civil society. Change couldn’t be the product of a few heroes dedicated to the revolution, but had to come from organised and ideologically-driven masses. If class struggle was the steam of History, it would now require strong and sophisticated engines to move forwards and channel collective struggles into specific directions. The “social”, as Clark notes, could now “be grasped as an autonomous category, irreducible to politics”.

This transition wasn’t just a concern for revolutionaries. Even conservatives, as Eric Hobsbawm noted, “would have to defend themselves in new ways” and “to learn the politics of the people”. “Public opinion” — a distinctively liberal notion — could not be ignored any more. Defeating insurrections or censoring the press was not enough, and influencing and controlling the masses would become increasingly important over the next decades, shaping a new form of statecraft and political activity. It marked, Hobsbawm argued, “the end…of the politics of tradition”. As the rate of literacy increased, all political forces had to develop their own ideological apparatuses to shape the mentality of large groups, through political newspapers, youth movements or rallies. Politics was slowly embedded in a “thick” civil society, with a large range of deeply networked organisations and institutions that served as intermediaries between citizens and the state. Parties became not just machines to conquer power, but mediators between institutions and citizens, embodying the interests of mobilised and conscious social groups.

This kind of politics, that culminated with the total mobilisations of the first half of the 20th century, would shape the whole political spectrum. From socialists and communists creating their own counter-society within capitalism, to fascists who, while they crushed unions and labour organisations, still tried to fully integrate a broad range of voluntary associations and organisations within the fascist state. In that sense, everything was political, from the sport club to the local newspapers. This held for much of the 20th century, where even during the post-war period, politics remained transactional, and programmes and reforms generally reflecting pre-electoral deals with specific constituencies. It’s only with the more individualised ethos following the century’s own year of global protest, 1968, that this settlement began to unravel, opening the space for the more speculative and public relations-driven public sphere of the Eighties.

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And with the demise of social democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective engines to define human needs and collective endeavours slowly disappeared in favour of a more atomised civil society. That is why, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe recently argued, “our political world…retained its external appearance, but if you crack open the shell, there’s nothing inside”. The formal institutions of democracy are still there, but are “divested of popular energies and innovation”. The populist explosions of the 2010s marked therefore what we could call the final disintermediation of politics, an exit from the associative structures that shaped politics for a century: parties, unions, mass organisations. And while the era of apathetic citizens characteristic of the Nineties has come to an end, the renewal of social turmoil and ideological battles hasn’t brought back such engines. People assemble and demonstrate not on the orders of parties and unions leaders but through the spread of messages and call for action posted on social media. We have been plunged back into the spontaneous, disorganised and unpredictable world that shaped 1848.

In the newly digitalised public sphere, political figures combine a strong and charismatic authority with a less mediated relation with their base. They speak to them through Facebook, Twitter, or even their own social media platform, rather than the outmoded bureaucratic structures of the mass parties. Within such a shift, in a sense ending the dynamic that began in 1848, even ideologies are not stable but rather, like in the era of Tocqueville, “an archipelago of texts and personalities across which [are] plotted quite idiosyncratic courses”. Large and influential newspapers have been replaced by a proliferation of media platforms, shaping the ideas of evanescent crowds on specific issues rather than precise political projects. Even the decorporation that went along the proletarisation of labour echoes this. Rather than a labour movement built upon a formalised labour market, we have witnessed a proliferation of the “working poor” and the “Uberisation” of workers. Social conflict has itself deserted the workplace, where the “great resignation” replaced coordinated strikes and mass labour militancy.

Whether it be the syncretic nature of their ideas, the irruption of spirituality into politics, the resurgence of violence, the tension between representation and direct forms of democracy, or even the rise of influential feminist figures and writers, our past decade has allowed the rebirth of the radicalism that ended with the mid-century revolutions. A world that would probably appear more familiar to Blanqui than Jaurès. Politics is now everywhere, but in a very different and more elusive sense than during the mass mobilisations of the 20th century.

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But among all these similarities, there is a difference. If 1848 led to an ascendency of the centre and the idea of superseding politics through technocracy and scientific government, our time appears to be heading the other way. Technocracy has been shattered, and the ability of the state to effectively govern is at its lowest since the late Sixties. Even if the idea of revolution has made a comeback, we still lack of engines to actually allow collective forms of decision making and to politicise human needs. Despite the development of new forms of digital engagement, the participation of citizens remains narrow and unable to sustain enduring political participation. There isn’t a week without headlines mentioning a riot or spontaneous assemblies or demonstrations. But the question still remains: what’s next?

But as Tocqueville had himself experienced, the end of an era is always an unpredictable process. “I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end,” he wrote in his Souvenirs, “and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever”. If the agony of the old can be a long and a painful thing it also, as the story of 1848 demonstrates, opens history to unexpected turns and innovations.

It had been an unusual trial. In protest cases, it is not uncommon to find defendants who choose to go without an advocate, since those defending themselves are, quite rightly, given a little more latitude than lawyers. Usually, protesters’ evidence about their beliefs is kept short, for the sake of time and simplicity, or even proscribed altogether, when the limits of any “reasonable excuse” defence can easily be determined in advance. But the defendants here, with the agreement of all parties, were allowed to explain their motivations at considerable length. The jury heard nearly four hours of evidence about the science of climate change, its consequences, and government policy.

All of which turned out to be, strictly speaking, irrelevant. Because once the evidence had been heard, the court decided that, on all the facts of the case, the “reasonable excuse” defence did not allow for a protest at the top of this bridge.

The right to protest is an important one, protected first by our Common Law and then by the European Convention. But there must be limits, even where no violence is used and no damage caused. Those limits in the British courts, though, are surprisingly hard to discern.

At least part of the reason for the judge’s ruling was that the public has no general right to access the Dartford Bridge, much less to climb it. Indeed, it is a criminal offence even to walk onto it. For protests on other roads, a jury might, depending on circumstances such as how long the disruption lasts, be told that the question of reasonableness is up to them.

Nevertheless, the unrepresented defendant was not prevented from asking the jury to find that their actions were reasonable — and so I was not prevented from arguing that they were not.

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Anyone facing conviction and imprisonment ought, surely, to be permitted to give reasons for their actions, even if those reasons do not amount to a legal justification. If you are caught with a knife, no court would seek to prevent you from telling the jury that you forgot it was in your pocket — despite the fact that the appeal courts have decided that forgetting is no defence. But should a Crown Court be expected to put aside several hours for evidence about climate change? There are 60,000 cases in the queue after all.

But attempts to shut down environmental discourse in court have not ended well. David Nixon, who in his trial ignored a judge’s direction not to refer to climate change, and then refused to apologise, was recently sentenced to eight weeks’ imprisonment. Unapologetic contempt of court must be punished, sometimes harshly, but the general view at the Bar is that the justice system was not the winner there. The case made the courts look harsher than they are.

Judges are in a difficult position, because the law is a mess. The main problem is how to interpret a “reasonable excuse” defence when a defendant’s rights to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Assembly are engaged. The uncertainty became a problem, in 2018, in an appeal from a Magistrates Court trial about a protest at an arms fair. The District Judge had decided that the obstruction of a highway was reasonable, and therefore not criminal, because — in essence — the protest was peaceful, orderly, worthy, and short. Nothing hugely problematic about that.

But the Crown felt that the judge’s reasoning had gone awry, so appealed the acquittal. And in the course of agreeing with that complaint, the High Court introduced an idea that has complicated things ever since. When judges have to determine whether a law is compatible with the European Convention, they have to perform a “proportionality assessment”, and the High Court said that, in protest cases, a proportionality assessment could simply replace the question of reasonableness. The trouble is, proportionality assessments are very, very complex.

The case then went to the Supreme Court, which condoned the use of proportionality assessments. They also suggested — somewhat offhand and in passing, it seems to me — that this task could be carried out not only by magistrates but also by a jury. Even the most die-hard of activist lawyers see that move as, well, innovative. And many of the rest find it completely bananas. Juries cannot sensibly be asked to perform legal analyses that High Court judges might take days to decide. The result is that it has become very difficult for those attending a protest to gauge their level of exposure to criminal liability.

There are some, of course, who appear to think that there should be no limits on non-violent, yet disruptive, climate protests. A month ago, a few days before the Dartford bridge trial began, Jolyon Maugham KC and others signed and publicised a declaration entitled “LAWYERS ARE RESPONSIBLE”, in which they asserted, among other things, that they would “withhold their services in respect of action against climate protesters exercising their democratic right of peaceful protest”.

There are a number of problems with this approach. First of all, most of the signatories are solicitors, who unless they apply to join the Crown Prosecution Service are in no danger of being asked to prosecute anything. And none of the handful of barristers who signed, I am fairly sure, is on the CPS advocates list, so they too are quite safe. Moreover, although the declaration does not actually go so far as to say in terms that these cases ought not to be prosecuted by anyone, that is the clear implication of a declaration of “conscience” — that is, of what they believe to be the morally correct attitude.

Maugham, of course, punched it all up in the Guardian. “Sometimes the law is wrong”, he noted sagely. Well, yes. But by what mechanism should the enforcement of the law be changed? By Parliament, and the law being applied the same to everybody? Or by the whims of barristers’ consciences?

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A solid causative link between “climate justice”, however you choose to define it, and stopping your fellow citizens from moving about has not yet fully revealed itself to me, even acknowledging the “press attention” argument. But I would have happily and vigorously defended the Dartford protesters, just as I defend people accused of much more unpleasant crimes.

The so-called “Cab Rank” rule, according to which barristers cannot turn down cases, should discourage the public from identifying lawyers with their clients. If you know that a barrister could have refused to act for an unpopular client, you are more likely to believe that he or she approves of their actions. But it seems that the administration of justice could benefit from raising awareness of this traditional, non-partisan approach to barristers’ work: Insulate Britain, for example, has threatened to prosecute me “in the years to come”.

This is an alarming development in activists’ attitude to the Rule of Law. And since climate protest is on the rise, with enormous Extinction Rebellion protests planned for this weekend, the administration of justice — the fair application of the current law to all citizens — must not be undermined.

Trowland and Decker have just been handed sentences much stiffer than climate protesters have been used to receiving. While this may well have some deterrent effect, the actions of Just Stop Oil and similar groups are not going to abate any time soon. Both protesters and the public need to know how the law will balance their respective rights, and in what circumstances. Climate change is an issue of great public concern, but the criminal courts are not the forum for litigating government policy from first principles.

The focal point of the protests is Dublin’s East Wall, where, in November, after the government converted a state building into a migrant residence without consulting locals, hundreds of people started to gather week after week. By December, the demonstrations spread to other areas — Drimnagh, Finglas, Ballymun and Fermoy. Rather than losing steam as each month went by, the protests continued to intensify, sprouting across the country. And as they did, it became clear that they were different from other anti-migrant demonstrations in Europe.

Last month, a group of 300 anti-migrant protestors clashed with a smaller counter-protest outside the Shelbourne Hotel in central Dublin. The demographic profile of each faction revealed something curious. As one might expect, the anti-migrant protesters were from the working-class areas where the migrants are being housed, while the counter-protesters were largely middle-class liberals. More surprising, however, was the significant proportion of women among the anti-migrant contingent.

One of the principal motivating factors behind Ireland’s anti-migrant protests concerns a number of reports of migrants mistreating women and even young children. Last week, for instance, a male migrant allegedly walked into Temple Street Children’s Hospital and announced that he wanted to rape children. This week, a migrant was charged by the Gardai with the sexual assault of a teenage girl.

A few days earlier, unfounded rumours circulated about a migrant from a camp in Finglas sexually assaulting a woman. The impact of such incidents is borne out in national polls: in one recent survey carried out by The Business Post, only 38% of women supported building new homes for migrants, compared to 55% of men. As The Irish Independent noted: “The view that Ireland has taken in too many refugees is notably stronger among women in working-class communities.”

If true, the government’s official depiction of Ukrainian women and children fleeing war and persecution doesn’t seem to be taking hold in the minds of voters. And the reason for this seems straightforward: it ignores a surge in non-Ukrainian asylum seekers piggybacking off Ukrainian sympathy. The Business Post recently reported that “the number of international protection applications in the first half of last year had gone up by 200% compared to an average increase of 25% in such applications across the EU”. Elsewhere, the government’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth reported that, of the roughly 20,000 non-Ukrainian asylum seekers, 50% are single males. In other words, there is a glaring dissonance between the Government’s official depiction of women and children fleeing the Ukrainian war and the observed reality of suspicious young single men from non-Ukrainian countries rapidly increasing.

In any other European country, such a scenario would be ripe for a Right-wing populist party to make electoral headway. But Ireland’s modern political landscape has no equivalent to Le Pen, Orbán, or Trump. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have ruled Ireland for a century. The former positions itself as more traditional and working-class, and the latter as more secular and pro-business — but, by and large, they govern identically. Over the past decade, as any legacy of Right-wing attitudes dissipated from the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, anti-establishment angst had channelled itself into support for the rising Sinn Féin party — to great success. Under the slogan promising “time for change”, the party’s first-place position suggests it will take control of the government in the next election. Unless, that is, the anti-migrant protests overshadow Sinn Féin’s rising star.

These working-class protesters are the same demographic as Sinn Féin’s reliable voter base. As Dublin City University Professor Eoin O’Malley discovered after polling individual issues, “Sinn Féin support is correlated with anti-immigrant sentiment”. Meanwhile, The Business Post poll referenced above indicates that while 75% of Fine Gael and 71% Fianna Fáil supporters believe that only the far-Right oppose taking in refugees, that figure dropped to 45% among Sinn Féin supporters.

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This anti-immigrant sentiment contrasts starkly with the Sinn Féin party leadership, which perhaps explains the three-point drop from its all-time high last June. It is noticeable, for instance, that the East Wall protests were actually located in Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s constituency. A number of placards showed a photo of McDonald with the words “Traitor” written across it. Similarly, protests in Finglas singled out the local Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis for condemnation.

Amid such a politically hostile climate, Sinn Féin’s detachment from its anti-migrant working-class base is starting to open the door to something modern Ireland has never experienced: Right-wing populist parties, the most prominent being the Irish Freedom Party (IFP). Led by Hermann Kelly, an ally of Nigel Farage, the IFP has primarily campaigned for an Irish exit from the EU since it was founded in 2018. It should be stressed that it remains on the margins of Irish politics and is yet to register any serious uptick in the polls. But Kelly and the IFP are starting to position themselves as the party of the protestors, and it seems unlikely that they won’t be listened to. At the recent Shelbourne Hotel protest, for example, IFP Chairman Michael Leahy gave a prominent speech, no doubt hoping to encourage former Sinn Féin voters to switch to his party.

For his part, Malachy Steenson, the anti-migrant protests’ unofficial leader, appears willing to give the IFP a chance. Steenson, a solicitor with a history of advocacy in the broad republican movement, has maintained neutrality on any specific party monopolising the protests but frequently speaks alongside IFP members at demonstrations. In 2021, he gave a speech at an IFP demonstration, while last June he attended the IFP Ard Fheis (annual party conference), where he was photographed next to Kelly and Leahy. While Steenson might not officially label himself as part of the IFP, and is always referred to as a “guest” when he appears at their events, he is certainly friendly with them.

Of course, whether this translates into meaningful change remains unclear. The IFP’s challenge will be to turn this spark of popularity into a political machine. Can the IFP recruit the popular Steenson to run on its behalf? Can the party field enough candidates across many localities? Does it have the bureaucratic nous to conduct a campaign and, eventually, state operations? Can it appeal to voters less persuaded by its core objective of leaving the EU to increase its numbers?

These questions are yet to be answered, but it is not inconceivable that the energy of the anti-migrant protests will converge around the IFP. Perhaps the next election won’t mark IFP’s ascendence — but if conditions stay the same or deteriorate, Sinn Féin could find itself staring at an exodus of voters for whom Right-wing populism is suddenly palatable.

In 1979, furious Iranians marched in towns and cities across Iran, holding up pictures of Khomeini. Now they march once more: equally as enraged, equally as determined to bring revolution.

It’s been six weeks since protests broke out after the murder of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman, at the hands of Iran’s brutal and sinister morality police, uniting different parts of society across age, class, and ethnic boundaries. Women now burn their hijabs daily and cut off their hair. Parents boycott schools. Protestors continue to line the streets. All the while, Iran continues to be strafed by international sanctions, a failed nuclear deal, and spiralling inflation and unemployment. The people have had enough.

The regime, though, fights back. It has cut off the internet, desperate to strangle coordination between protests and to stifle the flow of information out of Iran. But that’s impossible: with the help of VPNs, social media is driving international awareness, with protests breaking out in solidarity across dozens of countries. Yet still the crackdown continues. Iran State TV and its various News Agencies are pumping out regime narratives almost 24/7. Forced “apologies” by protestors who have supposedly seen the error of their ways — after, I would guess, much torture — are now a daily feature on evening TV. And, of course, the killings never cease; the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organisation estimates that more than 200 Iranians have been murdered to date.

When I look at the Iranian protests in 2022, I cannot help but compare them to 1979. There are clear parallels: the fact the protestors just want the mullahs gone; the centrality of the hijab; a background of economic decline; rumours of Iran’s leader being weakened by cancer. But there is one difference this time: speed.

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In January 1979, just a month before the revolution, Khomeini was still in exile, as he had been since 1963. From a cottage in Neauphle-le-Château, in the French countryside near Paris, Khomeini continued the work he’d begun in Iraq: recording revolutionary sermons, speeches, anti-Shah rhetoric, and the ideology of the Islamic Government onto cassette tapes, which were then sold in Europe and smuggled into Iran. These were then broadcast and duplicated by mosques and distributed — illegally, of course — throughout the country. It was through this system that Khomeini, who was obviously barred from appearing on Iranian media, was able to mobilise Iranians to action. It took him years.

Today, however, the thousands of Iranians pouring onto the streets are likely to have been mobilised in the space of just a few hours by communications technologies that did not exist in 1977-79. Yes, it is now harder than at any other point since internet came to Iran to access it properly. But the government’s ban is not total. Email providers, including Yahoo Mail and Mail.com, are blocked, but, for some reason, Gmail, iCloud, and ProtonMail are not. It’s tricky for the protestors to mobilise, but it’s not impossible.

On the face of it, this can only be good. A popular revolution can only succeed if it’s, well, popular. But digitally powered protests carry as many disadvantages as advantages and, when it comes to turning them into successful revolutions, counterintuitively, perhaps even more. Here, the benchmark is the ultimately unsuccessful 2011 Arab Spring, which took place in the age of early social media: when Facebook was already established and Twitter was booming, but Instagram was in its infancy. It has been called the Facebook Revolution and it bears comparison to Iran today — in particular the case of Egypt. There, protestors hoping to overthrow the dictator Hosni Mubarak endured many of the hardships Iranians have faced over the last decade or so: police brutality, electoral fraud, lack of political freedom and liberty, and economic turmoil.

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Their response was clear: revolution, powered by social media. As Fawaz Rashed, an Egyptian protestor, described at the time: “‎We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” The demonstrations kicked off on 25 January 2011, known as Police Day in Egypt, and never looked back. Facebook pages such as “We are all Khaled Said” — which gained 100,000 followers in three days after spreading images of a man murdered by Egyptian police for exposing on-duty drug taking — were key fora of the revolution. The #Jan25 hashtag became collective, digital rallying cries, unifying the people around the first protests before the Egyptian government blocked the internet for five days. It was all too much. Three weeks later, Mubarak resigned. The revolutionaries had won.

Or had they? Mubarak was gone. But who would replace him? Social media had enabled Egyptians to mobilise hundreds of thousands onto the streets. This gave Mubarak a choice: cling on to power through massacres of a scale unknown even in Egyptian history or back down. He chose the latter. But the structural strength of social media — its ability to transform every Egyptian protestor into their own mini-broadcaster, amplifying messages and helping to mobilise others — proved to be the revolution’s downfall. Social media is, by nature, diffuse. It is not built around the architecture of central nodes, be it states or, in the case of revolutions, leaders.

So, when Mubarak fell, there was no one to replace him. Millions across the world watched in awe and triumph as he scuttled from power. But the job was only half done. The revolutionaries had no one to replace him. They had no leader — only thousands of Facebook accounts that were incredibly effective in getting the message about Mubarak out, but obviously unable to govern in his place. The revolutionaries had meandered into a void, into which Muhammad Morsi and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood gratefully stepped. A few years later, after attempting to make himself a de Facto Pharoah, he was overthrown by the former General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — in essence a Mubarak Mark II.

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Now contrast this with 1979. Many date the beginning of the 1979 Revolution to the January 1978 student protests in defence of Khomeini, after the government newspaper Ettela’at labelled him a “British Agent” in an article entitled “Iran and Red and Black Colonization”. Simply put, the revolutionaries built their protest around the figure of Khomeini. Indeed, the revolution was said to have succeeded when his plane from Paris touched down at Tehran airport on 1 February 1979.

Fast forward to today, and Mahsa Amini’s name has become shorthand for Iranian revolutionary aspiration; her hashtag has been tweeted millions of times. But she can never be more than a martyr. No leader has yet emerged. Instead, the protests are organised by different people or groups in different cities and towns on an almost ad hoc basis.

The truth is that if the mullahs were to collapse tomorrow, there are no signs that a democratic movement would sweep to power. Opposition groups such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq have their supporters, but they remain far from being a government-in-waiting. It is far more likely that the security state — led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps — would step into the void and make apparent what is already largely a fact: that Iran is no longer a clerical state but is now ruled by a Praetorian Guard.

In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down. They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win.

Until that time, the mullahs will continue to cling on as murderously and barbarously as they always have, and Iranians will continue to die. For years Palestinians would say they needed a Saladin. They were wrong. What they need is a Ben Gurion. What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini. Until that happens, this will only ever be half a revolution.

I was lying on a sun lounger when a call came through to ask if I would like to take part in The Reunion, a Radio 4 programme bringing together those involved with Occupy to reminisce about the significance of that movement. I wearily declined. Being over 2,000 miles away from the steps of St Paul’s made this an easy decision. But I may have declined anyway. My protesting days are over.

“I have sung Joan Baez’s We Shall Overcome for years, but nothing has changed” was how an old friend of mine expressed the same weariness — not so much a cynical acceptance of the status quo, more a feeling of being beaten down by political reality. Many of the friends I made during the Occupy protest had various sorts of breakdown after the camp was cleared. Some made for the woods to find themselves again, some were burnt out and plunged into depression, others found the emotional wherewithal to reboot their protesting energy, and I admire them for this. We Shall Overcome began life as a Methodist hymn, words taken from the letter of Paul to the Galatians: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Protesting, even to the point of civil disobedience, has a great deal of religious energy about it — one might even say Christian energy. It is not insignificant that protester and Protestant share an obvious etymology. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul was exhorting his fellow Christians to place faith above the religious law. His major concern was a distant dispute about circumcision, but the philosophical way he addressed this issue — setting faith and law against each other — has provided a kind of justification for protesters ever since. It makes no difference that this may be a misreading of Paul, whether the target is the government or the Pope, the disruptive energy of Galatians has reshaped the world. So why am I rooted to my sun lounger? Am I not convicted by this inaction, especially as I am slapping on the sunscreen whilst directly facing the Sea of Galilee, a few miles from where all this disruptive energy was first expressed, at least in my tradition?

Yes, there are things about the “spirituality” of the protestor that have come to bother me, not least an overconfidence in what they think of as “doing good” — an overconfidence that can spill over into self-righteousness, that abiding condition of many on the progressive Left. Is it really OK to block the path of ambulances on their way to hospital or people trying to go about their legitimate business? If the cause is weighty enough, the means can be justified. This can provide a dangerous licence to behave badly, the virtue of the cause obscuring an obligation to common human decency. But there again, if the cause is something like the Civil Rights movement and yes, even the Climate Catastrophe, then emergency measures can feel necessary. I wish I knew how to square this circle.

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Back in the late Sixties, the two famous Czech writers, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, began an ongoing spat about the value and dangers of the protesting mindset with respect to the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. Following a period of liberalisation and democratisation — “socialism with a human face” they called it — the Soviet Union sent half a million soldiers into Czechoslovakia to reverse the changes. Eight months of protest followed: some sabotaged street signs, some set themselves ablaze. Havel admitted that there was no hope, but nonetheless proposed “risky” protest. In a fierce essay called Radicalism and Exhibitionism (1969), Kundra went for the jugular.

“Havel states that no hopes endured, but unlike most people this does not arouse in him resignation or defeatism, but on the contrary a strengthened longing for action. But to what end action, when no hopes endured? … Such action has only a twofold aim: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality.

“In this way what was originally a purely moral attitude (the rejection of the unjust world) has turned into pure moral exhibitionism. The effort to publicly demonstrate the beauty of one’s own morality outweighs the effort to change things for the better…”

I do not want to take a deep dive into Czech politics, but it should be said — contra Kundera — it was protesters and the memory of those who had given their lives during the Prague Spring that kept the energy going and helped topple the Soviet regime in 1989. And, of course, Havel became President. This is the moral dilemma: Kundera has, to my mind, a compelling point about the moral exhibitionism of protest, but Havel seemed to be on the right side of history.

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This same energy of protest is now being focused, not just against those who deny the gravity of the current environmental crisis, but also against the Tories whose indifference to the cost-of-living crisis seems evident to many of us. Around 1,500 people packed Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday evening to protest that “Enough is Enough”, and call for a national day of action on 1 October. Another movement called Don’t Pay UK is co-ordinating a mass non-payment of energy bills and blockades of petrol stations. As a church we are thinking about establishing ourselves as a “warm bank” for local people who may have to choose between food and heating, even in a relatively prosperous place like Kew.

But we want affordable energy and we want environmentally friendly energy — not necessarily a straightforward combination. We want to stand with the people of Ukraine, but we flinch when the Russians turn the gas off. I can’t say I like the look of this coming Tory government and their cold-heartedness towards the poor. But it’s not all about the Tories.

Protest is often a legitimate cry against the detrimental impact of human action towards the world and especially the most vulnerable, but it is not always the best means of providing solutions, especially ones with full democratic legitimacy. “We shall overcome” is not a programme of action.

So am I still the protesters’ friend? I may be tired and still a little burnt out, but I know what I have to say: of course. Because in the end, despite all my Kundera-like pessimism of human nature, I am equally Eeyore-ish about change ever taking place without grassroots political pressure. So perhaps I should lift myself off my metaphorical sun lounger and get back involved. I still feel a little emotionally burned from my experience during Occupy. I too felt the darkness after it ended. And I do still fear the way in which protest can become morally high on its own supply of virtue. But I must get over this debilitating melancholy. Sometimes we have little choice.

Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after being savagely beaten in France’s highest security jail by another inmate — an Islamist terrorist. Since he was beaten and suffocated almost to death, anti-French riots have engulfed several Corsican towns. If he dies, local politicians warn, the violence could explode into a “generalised revolt”.

The latest riot, in the northern town Bastia on Sunday, was the most violent event in the Mediterranean island for decades. At least 7,000 people — equivalent to one in nine of the town’s population — laid siege to government buildings.

The prefecture, the local tax office and the post office were all set alight. More than 650 Molotov cocktails, as well as pétanque balls and agricultural bird-scaring rockets, were hurled or fired at riot police. They replied with more than 4,000 stun grenades, before running out of ammunition and being forced to retreat to their barracks. One gendarme was shot in the neck with a hunting rifle.

Amid this chaos, the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, arrives in Corsica today for two days of emergency talks with the island’s government, which seeks greater autonomy from Paris. With the French presidential election less than a month away, with war raging in Ukraine and with the Covid pandemic showing signs of reviving, the last thing that President Emmanuel Macron needs is a violent rebellion in Corsica.

But why such violence now?

The best known of the jumble of Corsican armed separatist groups, the Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu (FLNC), gave up its “armed struggle” in 2014. Four years later, a single government for the island with expanded powers was created, run by a coalition of “autonomists” (people who want more independence within France) and “separatists” (those who want complete independence from France).

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In 2017 the Macron government offered steps towards greater autonomy (without using that word). But its proposals were blocked as unconstitutional by the centre-right majority in the upper house of the French parliament, the Sénat. Nothing much has happened since then.

So frustration has built, especially among many young Corsicans who look back to the “independence struggle” of the Eighties and Nineties as a golden age. They have embraced the identity politics of the 21^st century: unlike their parents, they reject any element of “shared” French-Corsican identity. They see themselves as the oppressed colonial subjects of France.

Many of Sunday’s protesters were students or school children — although most of the violence came from a roaming band of 100 or so older people wearing black hoods. For these younger generations, Colonna, a convicted murderer, is a folk hero — a Corsican version of Bobby Sands.

“The young feel themselves exalted by this struggle,” said Professor Xavier Crettiez, an expert on political violence in Corsica. “Nationalism has acquired an aura for many young people, which has become mythified as the years go by.”

Corsica won its independence from Genoa in 1755 and installed the first fully democratic system of modern times, two decades before the United States. The island was conquered by France in 1769 during a brutal war but reclaimed its independence during the French Revolution. In an attempt to keep the French at bay, Corsica formed an unlikely “union” with Great Britain for three years up to 1796.

Although French for over two centuries now, Corsica does not “feel French” — not for many Corsicans and not for visitors. It has its own language, related to Italian, and is controlled by a secretive family clan system, rather like Sicily or Sardinia. Although political violence has almost vanished, the murder rate remains twice as great as in France as a whole.

On my first trip, I drove away from the airport and came across a car driving around a roundabout the wrong way. A few minutes later, I came to another roundabout and another car driving the wrong way. The Wizard of Oz sprang to mind. “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas any more.”

To be a working shepherd and an active terrorist could happen in only a few places in the world, including the well-named Ile de Beauté. Colonna’s status as a folk hero is puzzling to outsiders, and also to many Corsicans, but says much about the attitudes of some on the island to violence, to politics and to France.

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After four years on the run, Colonna was convicted in 2006 of murdering, with two associates, the most senior French official on the island, the Prefect Claude Erignac. In 1998, Erignac was shot three times in the back while walking to the opera in Ajaccio with his wife. He had challenged the impunity of the Corsican criminal clans which were deeply entwined with — though not wholly responsible for — the mostly low-level separatist violence of the Eighties and Nineties.

Colonna has consistently proclaimed his innocence but his conviction has twice been upheld on appeal. Among young nationalists, there is widespread belief that Colonna was both not guilty and a courageous fighter for Corsican freedom. How can he be at once innocent and a freedom fighter? This contradiction is rarely addressed by his young worshippers.

Paul-François Paoli, a cultural writer and historian of French-Corsican relations, told Le Figaro: “Colonna doesn’t represent all Corsicans but that part of Corsica which sees itself as exclusively Corsican… If there was a hero in this tragic affair, it was Prefect Erignac who was doing his duty in fighting against the power of the mafia, which has since strengthened its stranglehold on the island.”

There is, however, another reason why Colonna’s near-death has caused such a furious and violent reaction. Part of the much-splintered Corsican nationalist movement is anti-Muslim. Many other Corsican separatists accuse France of being more tolerant of Muslims than Corsicans.

It was unsurprising, then, that they seized upon the fact that Colonna’s assailant, Franck Elong Abe, 36, is a Cameroon-born Islamist, who was originally arrested by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to a series of French jails. Abe also had a record of violence against other prisoners, but was nevertheless made the overseer of the gym at the high security prison near Arles. According to French media reports, he was at one time friendly with Colonna and they played table-tennis together.

Their relationship was not to last. On March 2, Abe beat and suffocated Colonna when they were left alone by prison guards for eight minutes. His motive remains unclear, though reports suggest that Colonna may have made insulting remarks about Islam.

Whatever the truth, some of the rioters in Corsican towns accuse the French authorities of allowing Abe to kill Colonna — or at the very least of culpable negligence. The march in Bastia on Sunday assembled behind a banner reading in Corsican, “French state assassins”.

Paul-François Paoli said: “The fact that he is an Islamist poured oil on the fire… It suggests to some people that the French prison service is kinder to Islamist terrorists than to Corsican nationalists… And it’s not a big step from thinking that there was a plot to eliminate him. And those Corsicans who already made Colonna a hero now have an excuse to make him into a martyr.”

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There is another Corsican oddity to the Colonna saga. The shepherd-terrorist had three principal lawyers during his three trials. One has since been blown up in his car, in what was presumed to be a mafia hit. Another, the moderate nationalist, or “autonomist”, Gilles Simeoni, 54, has become head of the unified Corsican government which was created in 2018. The third Eric Dupond-Moretti, is Justice Minister in the present French government. Simeoni will be at the heart of the talks with the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, today or tomorrow.

Before leaving Paris, Darmanin said his government had “heard the demands of elected Corsican politicians on the island’s institutional, economic, social and cultural future”. He was ready to launch an “unprecedented cycle of discussions” on the “evolution of Corsica within the Republic, according to the requirements of the Constitution”. Darmanin added, however, that such discussions could only happen if the violence ended.

Each word was carefully chosen. The Macron government is offering to resume progress towards a more autonomous status for Corsica, but the centralising French constitution — which speaks of “one indivisible” republic — puts limitations on what can peacefully happen.  But while polls in the past have suggested that only a small minority of Corsica’s 350,000 people want complete independence — not least because the island’s public services and transport links are heavily subsidised by French mainland taxpayers — support for greater autonomy is growing.

Gilles Simeoni, the head of the Corsican unified government, is trying to harness a volcano but also risks being destroyed by it. The violent unrest has brought the Macron government back to the table but Simeoni’s vision of a kind of Scottish or Catalan devolved status for Corsica could be swept away by an explosion of more extreme, nationalist feeling.

Simeoni said this week: “We need a political process at the highest possible level. When a logic of serious confrontation begins, as we have seen with young people (in Bastia), a grave incident could happen at any moment. We are not immune from a generalised revolt.”

Nothing much can happen before the French election is over on 24 April. Macron is heavily distracted by the campaign and by the Ukraine war. The talks, if they begin, will take months. The secular French state is praying that its former Public Enemy Number One will now do a great service to the state that he detests. All he needs to do is to carry on living.

In many ways, these divisions are unique: they are not draped in the usual identitarian focus on race, gender and sexuality that has come to define the West. Rather, they are between those minority groups which embrace a sense of victimhood and those which reject it; between the strong, self-determining subject capable of rational judgement and between the vulnerable subject who demands protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contentious case of indigenous participation in the Freedom Convoy.

Even in my own family, the truckers’ protest sparked an unprecedented sense of discord and division, both on and off reserve. In recent weeks, I have spoken with several relatives and their contacts who participated in and organised portions of the Convoy. What emerged was a sense of division that is a microcosm for a more fundamental rupture in mainstream Canada and beyond.

This is to be expected: no matter how hard policymakers and even indigenous leaders try to convince us otherwise, the issues faced by indigenous people are not so different from those faced by people around the world. Like so many groups, they are torn between the demand for freedom and the demand for safety. It is a conflict faced by governments and populations that predates Covid-19 — but which has become manifest with lockdown measures and the resistance to them.

While Trudeau dismissed the protests as sexist, racist outpourings of white supremacy, the indigenous participants I spoke to were keen to emphasise their diversity. Some indigenous people arrived in full regalia; a mother marched with a papoose on her back and two small children in traditional dress. “We met so many people from every background,” said an Ojibwa woman from a Northern Ontario reserve who helped organise protestors in her area. “Because we’re just like everyone else. We want the mandates to end. We want freedom of choice and autonomy over our own bodies. We want a good life and we want our children to have a good life. We want the same things.”

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She pointed to problems on reserves but linked these to broader issues in Canadian society. “Like the rest of the population, we have suffered from so many drug-related deaths and suicides. Covid just made that worse. We don’t want that anymore. We’re so sad seeing this and we’re just hoping for change. Just like everyone else.”

Yet many in the indigenous community disagreed. Leaders issued statements condemning the protests, and in particular the use of traditional ceremonies and objects by both indigenous and non-indigenous people without “permission from us in order to proceed”, dismissing them as “ignorant acts of cultural appropriation”. While there was some controversy about a kitsch “pipe ceremony” that was posted online, the broader message underscored that ceremonies and ceremonial objects only have a place in certain approved protests and in relation to certain approved issues. Indigeneity, it appears, is the sole province of those who toe a certain line. And that line is not about freedom, but safety and protection.

Indeed, all these pronouncements highlighted was the insularity of Canada’s indigenous movements. Grand Council Chief Reginald Niganobe said: “Once again, we ask that you please remain vigilant within your communities where you are continued to be needed.” In a statement shared on social media, he argued: “It is counter-intuitive to the progression of our communities to be caught up in anti-government sentiment which fails to address the complexities of Anishinabe realities.”

Others framed the protests as a clear indication of racist inequality in Canada, pointing out that an indigenous-led convoy would have been met with swift suppression. The author of one such piece reflected that while some indigenous people might be attracted to the movement’s anti-establishment rebelliousness, “this is not the cause that we need to get behind because they’re not here to help our issues”.

But as Kenan Malik recently observed, racial specialness has often been used as a means of dismantling cross-race “fusion” movements that threatened the existing order. Take the struggle that brought together poor black workers and poor white farmers in the American south during the early 20th century. Rather than organising together, white workers were persuaded that their interests lay not in their class position but rather in their racial uniqueness. Of course, certain groups undoubtedly suffer individualised issues. Historically, however, the distinctiveness of one’s struggle was preached precisely to destroy the power of solidarity movements to achieve change.

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And this is a danger that still runs deep today. Indigenous people are constantly invited to believe that their problems are distinct and rooted squarely in the past. When news broke last summer about the alleged existence of unmarked children’s graves at a Kamloops residential school, the media was awash with tales of suffering and horror. While many indigenous people did suffer greatly in these schools, it is important to note that not all children attended them. Nonetheless, a predictable narrative began to emerge: that, however indirectly, all indigenous people are essentially traumatised by this past. As one academic put it at the time, indigenous people have “ongoing issues in our communities that are a direct result of these schools”, and the failure to recognise this ensures “that new generations are continuing to suffer”.

Such claims about the colonial trauma experienced by all indigenous people have not been dampened by more recent evidence that the evidence of mass graves is shaky. It fits too well with the dominant ideal of the indigenous victim. As one young woman put it: “We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will never end.”

With victimhood now all but regarded as an innate indigenous characteristic, it is hardly surprising that indigenous frauds have started to fabricate entire identities grounded in this trauma: Saskatchewan professor and public health expert Carrie Bourassa was revealed last year to have fabricated claims to indigenous heritage, appearing publicly in elaborate dress as ‘Morning Star Bear’ with attendant melodramatic theatrics. While organisers of the Freedom Convoy have similarly been outed for making shaky assertions about their mixed roots, it is interesting how long Bourassa’s claims went undetected.

Bourassa climbed the career ladder for years, steadily growing bolder with expanded claims to indigenous heritage and cultural roots. Why? Because Bourassa told a story that people wanted to hear. She talked of suffering, addiction and “endemic” sexual abuse — experiences that were likely a far cry from her comfortable middle class upbringing in Regina. “Everybody around me was either an alcoholic, drug addict or suffered from some sort of addiction,” she embellished. “There was a lot of violence in my family.”

True or not, here we had a story of a virtuous indigenous victim — the sort of victim that inspires a carefully positioned Justin Trudeau to be photographed with a single tear running down his cheek; the sort of victim that legitimises his decision to exclude indigenous citizens from obeying his draconian emergency laws without needing to explain why.

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And for the people I spoke to, this can have an unintended effect: it makes them feel like frauds because that narrative of trauma is not their experience. Even if it were, I am not convinced it would be capable of fulfilling their desires for more control and freedom to decide how to live their lives.

Quite the opposite. As indigenous scholar Dian Million has warned, this narrative of virtuous victimhood runs expressly against claims to self-determination, a long established goal of indigenous communities. This is because when we assume victimhood, we often relinquish power. Constantly invited to confess endless tales of suffering and damage, the call for “self-determination” fades into “self-management” and the therapeutic “empowerment” of outside agencies.

And this is echoed throughout Canada at large. In recent years, indigenous communities have started to groan under the weight of expanding bodies of surveillance. It’s striking, then, that during the recent protest, truckers spoke of the encroachment of endless managers into their work, subjecting them to increasing surveillance, such as fitting their trucks with cameras in their cabs. And like indigenous leaders’ disavowal of indigenous participants’ demands for freedom in favour of safety, so too did the truckers’ unions retreat into threats, seeing their main role as providing not self-determination but safety.

Indigenous experiences, then, are a microcosm of Canada. We are not so different. Like so many others, some of us reject the vision of virtuous victimhood. And it is testament to the power of this unity that our community leaders should respond with such horror. They’ve finally sussed out that we too are the “Average Joe” — and as one indigenous participant told me: “The average Joe has had enough.”

Watching the mainstream accept, or even welcome, such incivility, in defiance of public health directives that had banned even the smallest of public gatherings, was a dizzying experience. After months in which Americans had been cajoled and sometimes ordered into staying isolated and indoors, the script had suddenly changed.

It changed yet again after January 6, 2021, when “riot” no longer meant an eloquent expression of the “language of the unheard”, something to be championed or at least sympathetically understood, but a despicable betrayal of the nation, akin to treason or terrorism. For the establishment, norms around civility seemed to matter only as a weapon against the Right.

For the political scientist Alex Zamalin, however, the problem with America is simply that there is too much civility. A self-defeating desire for moderation and compromise at the expense of radical-Left politics, he argues in Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in America’s Obsession with Civility, is “everywhere you look”.

According to Zamalin, “a consensus narrative” has emerged in American elite political discourse. While he avers that without civility, our “everyday life” would be impossible, he argues that “politics is not everyday life” — it is a distinct “arena of power and struggle”. And our obsession with finding “common ground” with opponents and preserving “nonpolitical” spaces in our society is holding back anti-racist movements.

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Zamalin is certainly right that politics shouldn’t be everyday life. Preserving the political character of politics — that is, making sure that it remains an enclosed arena of competition over power — is as necessary as protecting everything outside that arena from politics’ crushing intensity. We might describe civility, rightly understood, as the formula that lets us keep politics in its proper place — as an intense but limited contest among rivals who see each other as belonging to the same community.

For Zamalin, however, civility is a central theme of American history, and it has always been an arm of white supremacy. In its historical sections, Against Civility offer a wearingly familiar story that pits villainous white racists and misguided black moderates like Booker T. Washington against virtuous radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcom X.

In Zamalin’s telling, the failures of America’s black radicals are inevitably the result of their having adopted “white” standards of civility. When Martin Luther King, Jr. excluded the gay writer James Baldwin from the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights leader was, Zamalin argues, “applying the same standards of civility found in the white racism he denounced”. Two decades later, when Baldwin, in a public conversation with Audre Lorde at Hampshire College, declared that he couldn’t understand why Lorde, a lesbian feminist, insisted that black women faced struggles distinct from those of black men, he too was replicating the moral failures of whites.

It is hard to understand why prejudice against gay men or resistance to feminism among black intellectuals should require explanation in terms of white people’s moral failings, or what this has to do with civility. Unless, of course, one shares Zamalin’s implicit premise, common across a swath of the American Left, that only white people possess real moral agency. When black people err, it is through a kind of excursion into, or infection by, whiteness. Indeed, white people appear in this conception as the authentic protagonists of history, which they drive forward by their nefarious will to dominate.

The role of non-whites, by contrast, is to offer romantic but ultimately ineffective resistance. Every generation’s valiant struggles for justice are suppressed by open enemies and unreliable allies who insist on upholding civility rather than seeking racial equality. That this narrative might be insulting, given that repeatedly trying the same thing and failing is a sign of political ineptitude, doesn’t seem to compute.

Zamalin appears equally dense about recent history. In his account, the years since Trump’s election in 2016 saw elite moderates punish those who bravely spoke out against racism, such as former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In fact, Kaepernick’s activism was lionised by the mainstream media — GQ magazine named him “Citizen of the Year” in 2017 — and led Nike to offer the ex-quarterback a multimillion dollar sponsorship and his own branded clothing line. Likewise, while the Black Lives Matter movement might seem to have imposed its slogans throughout many of America’s prestige institutions, Zamalin can only see it as a force at the margins of society, “dismissed” and “treated with disdain” by elites.

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It is certainly true that BLM has not managed to effect meaningful changes to American law enforcement, except insofar as violent protests and riots in the summer of 2020 lead many municipal governments to constrain the policing of sensitive neighbourhoods, causing a spike in crime that has led to hundreds more murders than might otherwise have taken place. But while it has been unable to achieve substantive legislative changes, BLM has been taken into the bosom of American elites, neutralising the movement’s radical potential while draping the country’s institutions in the moral authority of anti-racism.

Zamalin cannot seem to comprehend the double-sided nature of the contemporary politics of anti-racism. As an ethical discourse, it is hegemonic throughout US universities, corporations, offices of government, and even the military. At the same time, it appears totally impotent as a political force. Making sense of this would mean sounding the strange gulf between discourse and power in our era. It would mean, for example, asking how Donald Trump — who, as Zamalin recognises, flamboyantly transgressed norms of civility — managed to violate all the political pieties of the conservative establishment only to fail to achieve any of his goals once in office.

For the nationalist and anti-establishment Right, Trump’s orgy of incivility was the beginning not of its empowerment but of a detour into spectacle, in which the imaginary pleasures of “owning the libs” and annoying the media took precedence over winning actual political victories. The January 6 “insurrection” was the ultimate drama in this theatre of resistance. Clueless conspiracy theorists stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, as if, once freed from the shadowy forces holding him back, he might finally accomplish his stated goals.

No sensible person on the Left should wish such a fate for their own side. Or rather, sensible people on the Left might grieve that their own side has for years been caught up in the same fantasies of uncivil resistance, and the same unmooring from the realities of power, that now characterise the populist Right.

In the 21st century, the dramaturgies of protest against the Iraq War led by groups like Code Pink were as elaborate as they were ineffective. These protests were the template for the Left’s resistance to Trump a decade later — both were noisy, lame, and brought Nancy Pelosi to power as Speaker of the House.

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Incivility of this sort is dangerous precisely because it is impotent. Theatrical gestures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Met Gala in a “Tax the Rich” dress and Trump’s mockery of journalists share with the BLM riots and January 6 a common perversion of the difference between politics and everyday life. Performative incivility disrupts our normal, non-political lives with attention-seeking dramatics while at the same time draining politics of its specificity and substance.

What we need is not more incivility — more self-aggrandising antinomianism by narcissists posing as radicals — but a painstaking recommitment to a kind of civility that, by keeping politics off the streets, out of schools, and out of our private lives, channels it back into contests over policy.

If we want real change, from the Right or the Left, we need to depoliticise everyday life and repoliticise politics. If we do not, we will remain stuck together in an unbounded arena of shrill, but pointless, symbolic struggle.

The story blew up for no other reason than Canadian politics is not usually known for producing unruly sights like this one. While broader Western politics have been marked by rising populist fervour against elites over the last half-decade, Canada has, true to stereotype, remained quiet, contented, bland and unexciting. The patron saint of liberal elites was, after all, re-elected last year and continues to rule over a country that prides itself on its inoffensiveness.

There is every reason to believe that this is how things will remain: the global populist revolution that gave us Trump, Brexit and the gilet jaunes has had a hard time getting a foothold in Canada for structural reasons. It is unlikely that the protesting truckers will have changed many minds, much less public health regulations, or accomplished anything other than increasing traffic congestion in Downtown Ottawa. The industry association representing truckers has disowned them, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, while a recent poll put nationwide popular support for the convoy at a paltry 28%.

Canada’s general incompatibility with populist politics goes back to its roots. Ask an American why the United States was founded and he might say something like: “We had a revolution to secure freedom and government of, by and for the people…” The foundation of Canada was an explicit rebuttal to this notion.

As a country, it was designed to serve as a bulwark against the spectre of revolution and the idiom of popular sovereignty. Its two main political cultures descend from peoples who were defined by their conspicuous non-participation in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French, from which much of the modern rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the will of the people is derived.

Subsequently, the evolution of Canada’s political identity can be thought of less as having a liberal or conservative orientation, but as, quite simply, anti-revolutionary. This means that when change does happen, it is actively managed and mediated by elites at the top rather than brought about by uprisings from below. Though the country has had its own bouts of populism of the Right and Left varieties (and a few failed revolts), it has never been the dominant tradition.

This is because historically, Canada’s elites have proven to be expert not merely at resisting the pressures of revolutionary change but at pre-empting the causes of it.

English Canada was shaped in large part by Loyalist refugees who fled north because they did not want to be a part of the revolutionary experiment of 1776. Disavowing Yankee radical individualism and republicanism, the colonies that would become Canada were suspicious of mass democracy, more deferential to authority, and more mindful of communal obligations: they were said to be “more Tory than the King” and their progeny retained the so-called “Tory touch”.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, looked south of the border with horror (as many Canadians do now) at the chaos of the American Civil War and vowed to establish a strong central government that would have unquestioned supremacy over its constituent provinces. Thus, modern Canada was born in 1867 with the motto “peace, order and good government” — a somewhat authoritarian-sounding reply to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

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French Canada is different but the same. Its people are the descendants of pious habitant colonists who were insulated from the influence of the Jacobin revolution across the Atlantic by the British conquest of Quebec in the Seven Years War.

Macdonald’s chief French Canadian ally, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, claimed that despite the trauma of defeat, the conquest was actually a blessing in disguise sent by Providence to save French Canada “from the misery and shame of the French Revolution”. The Ancien Régime, with its spirit of conformity and obedience to Catholic orthodoxy, lived on in Quebec until the Sixties, when secular nationalism replaced Catholicism as the de facto state religion.

In that decade, Canada would prove yet again that it was the anti-revolutionary country par excellence. While American cities burned in riots over race and the Vietnam war, Canadians smugly congratulated themselves for living in “the peaceable kingdom”. When, in 1968, the streets of Paris, Chicago and Prague were racked with revolutionary violence, Canada witnessed a peaceful transition of power to the new generation as embodied by a charismatic action-intellectual named Pierre Trudeau, who unlike LBJ, Nixon or De Gaulle, was definitely with it.

The first Trudeau’s rise to power, much like the second, was greeted by fawning crowds and adoring fangirls: it took on the feel of a Beatles tour and was dubbed “Trudeaumania”. What might have looked like a spontaneous democratic outpouring was actually the result of backroom dealing by ruling party elites, who recruited Trudeau and practically fast-tracked him to the premiership: Canada’s own Ancien Régime had found a way to adapt itself to the Age of Aquarius.

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Trudeau’s chief task was to keep Canada together in the face of Quebec separatism. With the exception of the brief terrorist October Crisis of 1970, which Trudeau met with heavy-handed repression, his 16 years in power were marked by vigorous but non-violent political debate culminating in the 1980 Quebec independence referendum. Unlike other interethnic hotspots, say Northern Ireland or the Balkans, Canada resolved its divisions through the ballot box — and through occasionally heated but mostly boring conferences where elites could hash things out.

Fast forward to the second Trudeau. The world is once again living through revolutionary times. But Canada seems to be immune. US or UK conservatives might look at the insufferably progressive rhetoric of Justin Trudeau and wonder why ordinary Canadians haven’t tossed him out in favour a more populist alternative. Have they all been brainwashed up there?

Yet once again, like Macdonald and Trudeau Sr. before him, Justin Trudeau is the face of a Machiavellian elite that can maintain itself in power by diffusing and pre-empting the pressures of revolutionary change. Looking past the often-deceptive rhetoric and surface-level imagery, one will see that Canada is not nearly as liberal, progressive or cosmopolitan as it is perceived.

Trudeau Jr, like his father, is a promoter of official multiculturalism and is fond of uttering slogans like “diversity is our strength”. But as Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath has pointed out, unlike the United States, the Canadian government “does not engage in race-based classification of citizens [just as] the census does not impose racial categories”.

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And though Canadian universities are prone to indulging in critical theory jargon — as a certain University of Toronto psychology professor will be able to tell you — Canada has nothing like the American policy of “affirmative action” or race-based admission quotas, which is the source of interminable racial and ethnic animus in the US.

When it comes to immigration, Trudeau has been depicted by both liberal fans and conservative critics abroad as a bleeding-heart advocate of open borders. But look at Canada’s actual immigration system; in many ways, it is far more stringent than the US immigration system was under Trump. Canada may not have a border wall but it has a ruthlessly efficient “bureaucratic wall,” in addition to having invented the famous “points system”, emulated by Australia, and now the UK.

What shocks, particularly from the American vantage point, is that Canada has its own version of “mandatory E-Verify”, an employment verification policy for the purposes of immigration enforcement. In the United States the measure is usually only advocated for by hard immigration restrictionists. Not even Trump (for understandable reasons) and the Republican establishment are willing to support it. 

The drivers of Right-wing populism — divisive racial preferentialism, permissive immigration policy, a widespread sense of the loss of control — are thus not present in Canada. In other countries, pandemic restrictions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the latest in a long line of elite excesses that long predated Covid-19.

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But in Canada, whatever the policy on restrictions or vaccine mandates, absent those other factors, the camel’s back is not nearly so overburdened. Save for in the perpetually dissatisfied energy-producing region out west, populism will remain a hard sell. It is simply not favoured by Canada’s political culture.

This is not to say that the truckers are “un-Canadian” as their liberal opponents will paint them, though the decision by some of them to carry Confederate and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags does not help — nor does desecrating the National War Memorial. Shameful hooliganism aside, there is a place for dissenters in what is still (contrary to their cries of “tyranny”) a free country. 

They will just have to accept that they are up against one of the most entrenched and hegemonic ruling classes anywhere in the Western world: the “Laurentian elites” and their instrument for wielding power, the Liberal Party. As veteran journalist Peter C. Newman once observed, they have “reigned longer over Canada than … Communists ruled Russia”. If the Freedom Convoy is looking to overthrow this regime, they will have a very long drive ahead.

Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.

It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.

The Netherlands has been in partial or full lockdown since November, primarily due to the pressure of patients with the Delta variant on the hospital system and one of Europe’s least efficient booster campaigns. But just over a week ago, the restrictions were loosened — albeit in a strikingly surreal fashion.

In the Netherlands today, brothels can open but museums can’t. You can sweat, unmasked, in a gym but you can’t sit in a bar nursing a quiet gin. “You can come together in the Veluwe [in the country’s Bible Belt] to talk about a 2,000-year-old book, but you can’t get together in Amsterdam to talk about a book from last month,” as Albrecht put it.

So last Friday night, I was among 50 people who snuck into De Balie under the cover of darkness — for fear of the police turning up — who signed a big, black book to join the community, and prepared to enjoy a night of much-missed comedy. “The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason is about democracy and the rule of law, the solace and consolation of culture, experiencing something together that culture can give, seeing a bit of light after two years of darkness,” said Albrecht – something of an unusual opening blessing.

Everything about the evening was as absurd as the situation in the Netherlands. The crowd devoutly wore face masks and staff religiously scanned coronavirus ‘QR code passes’. But the comics were not announced in advance, photos and recording were banned, and the whole affair had the illicit frisson of an under-age boozing session.

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Yet De Balie is far from alone in its rebellion. Across the Netherlands, bars and restaurants have been opening regardless of the restrictions – especially in towns near the German and Belgian borders. On Saturday, for instance, 30 hospitality venues threw open their doors in Horst aan de Maas in protest. Last Wednesday, some 70 museums and galleries around the country decided to ‘open’ as temporary hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms – including world-renowned institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw, and Amsterdam’s oldest theatre, De Kleine Komedie.

“We have a problem with the fact that hairdressers and nail bars and commercial activities can be open, and we can’t,” explained Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker. “We support everything we need to do in order to keep people safe. But this policy just seems contradictory and it seems to favour the commercial sector over the cultural one.”

Even the Dutch government appears to recognise this inconsistency. In a bizarre moment during a recent press conference, Mark Rutte emphasised that the Dutch have a constitutional right to protest, and that temporary openings could be viewed in this regard. “The right to demonstrate also applies to sectors like the hospitality industry, and I can imagine that mayors could look at ‘what’s allowed for a little while’… with the emphasis on ‘a little while’,” he said. “So if they want to open for a few hours to show ‘we are demonstrating’, then it’s up to the mayors how they deal with that.”

If it was an attempt to shunt on responsibility for enforcing his restrictions to local government (even though this is actually their structural role in the Netherlands), it soon backfired. Last week, 31 mayors — including Amsterdam chief Femke Halsema and non-conformist Breda mayor Paul Depla — wrote to the Government, pointing out that short-term policy-making is “reaching its limits” and putting local enforcers in a perilous position against a growing mood of civic disobedience. “It is in fact impossible but also undesirable for the state to use repression to forcibly convince Dutch citizens that the measures are correct,” they pointed out.

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Ahead of the Government’s next coronavirus press conference tomorrow, it also emerged at the weekend that the country’s medical advisory body, the Outbreak Management Team, wants cultural and hospitality venues to reopen alongside everything else until 8pm each day.

No doubt it would be a welcome move; but is it too little too late? In the Netherlands, the damage from these lockdowns has become increasingly evident. In the government’s most recent press conference, new health minister Ernst Kuipers admitted that two-thirds of young people are suffering from loneliness. Even since the November partial lockdown, the SCP, a social and cultural government think tank, has found that psychological wellbeing had dropped, particularly among the young.

And as for the affected industries, it’s unlikely that, even if the restrictions are lifted, business will be able to return to normal any time soon. Thousands of people working in the hospitality and culture sectors have simply given up and looked for work elsewhere. Many will be in coronavirus quarantine, after coming into contact with someone who has been infected. And for those who do want to return, it won’t simply be a matter of turning up to work the day after an announcement is made. An orchestra can’t just suddenly pick up bows and be ready to perform again next week: they need advance notice to plan.

“You see that the Netherlands is mentally exhausted with the pandemic and all of the restrictions — young people but also a lot of others,” said Concertgebouw managing director Simon Reinink on Wednesday, as the orchestra gave a protest rehearsal in front of a crowd of 50 people. “The one thing that can give meaning to life is the cultural sector. There has been a chronic underestimation of the importance of culture for people’s psychological health and wellbeing — and this is a huge problem.”

And as more rules are broken, mainstream civic disobedience risks becoming a habit; this is a country where ‘rules’ (like soft drug laws) are already treated flexibly and even the prime minister admits society tends to be “slightly anarchistic”. “Rules only work if they rest upon social and political agreement,” pointed out the group of mayors in their letter last week. “For example, almost everyone in the Netherlands understands and respects the importance of stopping for a red light. Enforcement powers are there to bring the few offenders into line and issue fines.”

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Despite last week’s mini-revolts, that remains a sentiment shared by most of the country. While “wappie” Dutch vaccine sceptics and pugilistic rioters sometimes make a lot of noise, 89.2% of the population is double jabbed, and almost 55% are boosted. Most of us have done our bit, we’ve followed the rules, despite their inconsistency and blunt capriciousness.

But all the signs suggest that we have reached a turning point: the latest reports suggest that while mostly-Omicron coronavirus infections are ramping up, the number of people needing hospital treatment is relatively stable.

In one, a white supremacist shot anti-racism protesters in cold blood, and was acquitted because of his skin colour. In the other, a teenager tried to defend a community from violence, and ended up shooting two criminal lunatics in self-defence.

But why are these stories so irreconcilable? It’s a good rule of thumb that where people find it impossible to agree, it’s usually because there’s a fundamental difference in their assumptions about the world.

The Rittenhouse argument is just such a case. It’s powered by a profound disagreement about human nature: one that fuels many of the most intractable modern culture wars, from Mumsnet bunfights about babycare to arguments about classroom discipline and what the police force is for.

Are humans naturally good given the right circumstances? Or are we flawed and in need of threats and guidelines to keep us on the straight and narrow? The split is a legacy of radical ideas stretching back to the revolutionary 18^th century.

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Perhaps the most famous proponent of intrinsic human goodness is Rousseau, who claimed in Emile (1762) that children are born virtuous. As Rousseau sees it, we only need freedom, love and the right environment to spontaneously come to an understanding of what’s right.

When Emile was first published, it stood in stark challenge to the then-dominant view, emerging from the Christian tradition, that humans are tainted by ‘original sin’. From this vantage point, we’re naturally flawed, and must always struggle against our less virtuous instincts. Rousseau’s claim so appalled adherents of this then-dominant view that copies of his book were burned in the street.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The high-status view among contemporary elites is unmistakeably Team Rousseau.

At the tiniest scale, it’s expressed in the school of parenting that believes it’s wrong or even cruel to teach children how to live. I’ve written before about the currently popular ideas of ‘attachment parenting’ and ‘gentle parenting’, which emphasise self-discovery in a loving environment over routine, authority or punishment — and about how these views skew wealthy and liberal.

In education settings, the same idea appears as ‘child-centred pedagogy’, an approach that emphasises individual pathways and discovery over rote learning and teachers as authority figures. And at the biggest scale, it crops up as the claim that all the root causes of crime are external to humans: poverty, trauma, discrimination and so on. From this perspective, if we could only replace policing with tailored community services that eliminated these root causes, there would no longer be any crime.

Even outbreaks of mass public disorder are treated by Team Rousseau as an unfortunate-yet-understandable response to bad governance: when BLM protesters in Baltimore toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus last year, the Democrat politician Nanci Pelosi responded by shrugging it off as a natural expression of that community’s wishes. If the community doesn’t want the statue, she said, “the statue shouldn’t be there”. From this vantage point, public unrest is something akin to the weather: a naturally-occurring phenomenon in which leaders must strive to create the conditions for goodness, or else “people will do what they do”.

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If angry 18^th century moralists burned Rousseau’s book on education, today the moral majority is more likely to dogpile people who disagree with the belief that we’re all born good. Katherine Birbalsingh, headteacher of ‘Britain’s strictest school’, Michaela Community School in London, recently faced demands that she be fired after she referenced ‘original sin’ in the context of teaching. From the Team Original Sin perspective, as Michaela’s deputy head Jonathan Porter argued last year, providing empathy and interesting lessons won’t guarantee you good classroom behaviour. To Porter, children aren’t so much naturally good as capable of being habituated to the good. But that, he suggests, means making clear statements about what you believe to be good, setting rules on that basis, and enforcing them consistently.

This might be doable within a single school with a strong leader, such as Michaela. What happens, though, when a sizeable proportion of the ruling class think this approach is not just misguided but immoral?

Last summer, rioting broke out first in America and then worldwide —prompting US Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that order was important in and of itself and suggesting the army should be deployed to quell the riots. The ensuing shouting-match between Team Original Sin and Team Rousseau ended the career of the NYT’s comment editor.

Implicitly, then, for Team Rousseau, disorder is understandable when people are oppressed, while order is a nice-to-have, and only attainable if you create the right conditions to draw out people’s natural goodness. In schools, we can only expect pupils to behave if the teacher’s doing it right. And in the public square, we can only expect people not to riot if we abolish systemic oppression.

Applying this model to policing means diverting resources from enforcing order to addressing social issues. San Francisco, for example, voted last year to redirect $120m of funding from policing to community projects, with the aim of eliminating the causes of crime rather than simply punishing criminals.

But there’s always the nagging worry: what do you do with people who persistently refuse to have their natural goodness drawn out? And here, perhaps, we find a clue as to why Team Rousseau tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.

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As a child, Rousseau himself wasn’t allowed to play with other children. And it’s conceivable that more daily rough-and-tumble with his peers might have tempered the rosy view of natural childish virtue presented in Emile. When people who have led sheltered lives apply Team Rousseau beliefs in less rarefied settings, the result isn’t always as salutary as hoped. Even innocent experiments and self-discovery can impact negatively on others — especially where the experiment (innocent or otherwise) is in how far you can push one of your classmates.

For Team Original Sin, Birbalsingh advocates dealing with such schoolyard conflicts by imposing norms of public order: that is, ‘tight behaviour systems’ and ‘high expectations’. For Team Rousseau, though, it’s less clear what to do.

Research suggests that empathy-based ‘restorative justice’ approaches to school discipline yield mixed results at best. And when applied to law and order, Team Rousseau likewise runs aground on the problem of those who refuse to be rehabilitated. In San Francisco, as the focus of law and order has shifted to rehabilitation, incidences of burglary are rocketing — a fact that seems down to a minority of repeat offenders.

What can be done about this, especially where police no longer get involved? One plausible consequence is rising vigilantism. We can’t know definitively what motivated one teenager with an assault rifle to travel to a riot zone; perhaps he really was just attracted to the mayhem, and looking for a reason to join in. Or perhaps he thought he was making a last, heroic stand for order and in defence of those unable to defend themselves.

For when public norms of order collapse, or are undermined in the name of empathy, the only law that remains is that of brute strength. In San Francisco, even previously committed opponents of gun ownership are now responding to the disintegration of public order with talk of buying weapons.

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Most of the Rittenhouse culture war boils down to an argument over whether Rittenhouse was the bully, or the one who stands up to bullies. But what this argument ignores is the fate of those who are neither bully nor challenger. The weak, the old, the frightened or otherwise defenceless.

Perhaps the empathetic elites of Team Rousseau are simply secure enough in their leafy suburbs or gated compounds to ignore any unfortunate side-effects of treating order as secondary to freedom. But this raises the troubling possibility that sacrificing public order for empathy and individual freedom is, in practice, less high-minded than a dereliction of care to those that can’t defend themselves.

Worse still, the lesson from Michaela is that at root this isn’t really about scruples at all. It’s about a crippling lack of moral self-confidence. For you can’t set clear rules and form habits unless you have a clear idea of the good — and it’s this vision of the good that is the true missing piece.

Team Rousseau insists that human goodness is natural rather than ordered and enforced, and this in turn affords its believers the right to withhold judgement, and avoid making clear statements about the good. In practice, then, this amounts to an elite right — a duty, in fact — to shirk the central responsibility of elites since time immemorial: moral leadership.

And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold.

But from the images of the violence that were soon shared across the world, there didn’t seem to be much of that famed Dutch moderation, openness and reasonableness on show. While the rioters left destruction in their wake, it later emerged that the police had directed live rounds of fire at rioters, leaving four people with gunshot wounds. As Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans — who initially likened the protests against the Netherlands’ latest coronavirus restrictions to a World War Two bombardment (before retracting the war analogy after facing a barrage of criticism) — said, there was a “bitter irony” to the location of such wanton violence.

Dutch leaders were quick to paint the riots as acts of hooliganism rather than protest, with commentators citing the existence of group chats where people reportedly said things such as: “Where’s the protest? I want to riot.” Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb called it “an orgy of violence” that drew “a number of people who had no intention of acting peacefully, but who were there to riot, to confront the police, and to destroy public property”. Dutch caretaker justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus echoed his comments, saying that a protest against a controversial (and as yet unimplemented) idea to restrict access to certain areas for unvaccinated people was hijacked by football hooligans and criminal low-life.

But just 10 months after a the country was gripped by nationwide riots in protest at an earlier coronavirus curfew, such an explanation seems overly simplistic. I can’t be the only person here in the Netherlands left wondering why some of the country’s 17.6 million citizens are so visibly out of control and alienated from the majority. This isn’t some new phenomenon: the Dutch police have been highlighting the increasing violence of protesters for several years.

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According to the latest reports, it seems that rioters in Rotterdam were made of a number of disparate groups, motivated for a range of reasons. Football hooligans, young men with nothing to do, harbour workers with low wages and job security, and those suffering from the national shortage of decent housing were all ripe for civil disobedience. As MP Attje Kuiken says: “It’s a poisonous cocktail.”

But behind their resentment — which includes recent anger at a nationwide ban on fireworks this New Year — there are clearly bigger social problems. A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).

As in many other Western countries, there is a deep polarisation in Dutch society, and increasing distrust in politicians. This was exacerbated when the Government fell in January over a scandal in which tens of thousands of parents — most of dual nationality — were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud and forced to pay back every cent they had ever received, with devastating consequences for their financial, personal and children’s wellbeing. Last week, the Dutch highest court officially apologised for upholding unlawful tax office rulings. But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated.

After elections in March, resulting in a hugely splintered outcome, Dutch political parties are still unable to form a government — a telling picture about the difficulty in finding common ground. Those who voted for change are no doubt disappointed by the continued presence of the same establishment faces around the table, led again by liberal Mark Rutte. Meanwhile, newish far-Right parties such the Forum for Democracy have delighted in exploiting the pandemic to undermine “the political elite”. As Amsterdam University cultural anthropologist Dr Danny de Vries tells me: “Just a few days ago one of them publicly threatened another politician in the chamber, saying his time would come when tribunals are held to hold him accountable for ‘corona crimes’” Only last week, the leader of FVD, Thierry Baudet, compared corona measures to Nazi Germany.

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Yet the country’s political leaders have hardly earned a glowing report. For all their confidence in their liberal, efficient and wealthy society, they have been behind at every step in the pandemic. The Government was one of the slowest in Europe to start vaccinations, and now that it has one of Europe’s highest infection rates, it has just started offering boosters. Moreover, despite being perfectly well aware that there have been at least 31,000 corona deaths (as recorded on death certificates), the Government continues to put a much lower figure of “officially-tested positive deaths” front and centre on its dashboards. Conveniently, this number (18,966) is less than neighbouring countries like Belgium, which have always recorded suspect deaths too.

And so while there is broad support for vaccination and the Dutch have fully vaccinated 84.7% of adults, trust in government policy and leadership has plummeted recently. There have been U-turns on policy, with nightclubs open one minute, and then closed the next, and an imprudent loosening of most restrictions at the end of September. With coronavirus infections at record highs in the past week, and hospitals saying they will soon have to make decisions about who gets the IC beds, virologists are talking once more about the need for a full lockdown — and it’s not only the coronavirus sceptics or protesters who are looking at December with sinking hearts.

When he appeared on a morning chat show yesterday, Nijmegen mayor and chairman of the National Security Council Hubert Bruls was keen to emphasise that most people are not out on the streets rioting. That’s true, and it’s difficult to say whether the Dutch have more coronavirus sceptics — or, indeed, hooligans — than anyone else (although the head of Viruswaarheid corona protest group Willem Engel, adds a certain flair to events with his experience as a former dance teacher).

But anyone who has ever tried to stand in a queue in the Netherlands will realise that there’s a widespread sense of assertive individualism here, which is not often restrained by social norms such as politeness or the-other-person-was-actually-first. Basic rights like freedom of speech, movement and protest, are also grounded in the constitution, which has meant that it is very difficult for a government to restrain them. This has led to a surprising number of civilian court cases about coronavirus policy (eventually overturned by the courts).

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As a Brit living in the Netherlands, I’ve been surprised how much opposition there has been to following relatively minor rules such as wearing a face mask in certain places; the mere prospect of showing a coronavirus pass for entry is enough to cause a spiky hour of debate in most social groups, where it’s likely that at least a few people will disagree with their existence as a matter of principle.

Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.

The current struggle with organised crime has laid bare gaps in policing capacity, and a sense that a liberal but illogical weed policy is not helping (because smoking weed is tolerated, but growing it commercially is a punishable crime). Young men are apparently attracted to act as “collectors” of drug shipments in containers at Rotterdam harbour or criminal errand boys, and there’s a desperate need to offer other opportunities to certain groups of young people — something that has been recognised by the new mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma.

The recent violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism. As the authorities launch an official investigation into the gunshot wounds sustained on Friday night, and police forces are deployed across cities to stop-and-search as bars close at 8pm, this isn’t a time to sit back and dismiss the rioting as an “orgy” of criminal activity. It’s time to sift through the ashes.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August to protect property during a Black Lives Matter protest after widespread arson and vandalism the night before. He ended up shooting three men that night, killing two, in what he claimed were acts of self-defence. All of the shootings were captured on video, some from multiple angles. He tried to retreat from everyone he shot that night, resorting to deadly force only when he was cornered, physically attacked, or threatened with a gun. At no point did he continue shooting after ending the immediate threat.

Although prosecutors attempted to argue that, merely by being present with a gun, Rittenhouse, now 18, had “provoked” the protesters, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence that Rittenhouse had done anything to threaten anyone or initiate conflict in any way. The defence, by contrast, was able to show that Rittenhouse, far from picking fights, attempted throughout the night to avoid or defuse conflicts with protesters.

The trial confirmed that the real villain of the night was the first man Rittenhouse shot, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum. This was the most important shooting, because it set in motion the events that led a crowd to assault a fleeing Rittenhouse, allegedly in the belief that he was an “active shooter”, and which led to Rittenhouse shooting and killing Anthony Huber, who was attacking him with a skateboard, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who advanced on Rittenhouse with a drawn pistol.

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Rosenbaum, a convicted child-rapist and domestic abuser, had no connection to the protesters. He was a disturbed man who had been released from a psychiatric ward earlier in the day and who, according to video evidence and multiple eyewitness testimony, had been belligerent and threatening all night.

According to both Rittenhouse and one of his companions, the Army veteran Ryan Balch, Rosenbaum told members of their group: “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I’m going to fucking kill you.” Later in the evening, he found Rittenhouse alone and began chasing him across a parking lot. After first attempting to run away, Rittenhouse wheeled around and shot the advancing Rosenbaum. The closest eyewitness to the shooting testified that as Rosenbaum approached the defendant, he yelled “fuck you!” and lunged for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun. The other main clarification at trial came from Grosskreutz, who admitted that Rittenhouse only shot him after he pointed his own gun at the teenager.

Many of the initial media reports that painted Rittenhouse in a sinister light turned out to be false — for instance, Grosskreutz’s claim, which he repeated in multiple interviews, that he had been shot with his hands up in a position of surrender. Rittenhouse did, as was reported early on, “cross state lines” to get to the protest, but only from Antioch, Illinois, a border town that is a suburb of Kenosha, which is where Rittenhouse worked and where many of his family live. He did not transport the gun across the border, and although it is legally murky whether he was allowed to be carrying it — he was 17 at the time — the judge threw out the charge because of ambiguities in the law.

Yes, he was a supporter of Trump and Blue Lives Matter, but there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as alleged by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, or a “domestic terrorist,” as alleged by Pressley and Ilhan Omar. He was not a member of any militia group, despite the misguided representations of his initial defence team. He was not out “hunting” anyone.

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The most damning evidence against him, which was not admitted at trial, was a video from a few weeks prior in which he joked about shooting looters. But again, there was no credible evidence that he initiated or escalated conflict with anyone that night. He lied about being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), when in fact he had only received CPR training, but this was hardly relevant to the shootings. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been there, but the same was true of nearly everyone there that night. They were all defying a curfew. Many of the protesters were also from out of town. Some, like Grosskreutz, were also carrying illegal guns.

From the beginning, the case against Rittenhouse relied on obfuscating the actual events of the night in favour of mythmaking: easily debunked misinformation, moral and emotional appeals to the justice of the protester’s cause, the racial identity and political sympathies of Rittenhouse, the far-Right politics of some of his most vocal supporters, rhetorical flights against “white male tears” or “fascism”, and arguments about the United States’s gun laws or the biases of its criminal justice system. One index of the confusion surrounding the case is the number of Twitter users who appear to have only recently learned that Rittenhouse’s assailants were white.

Indeed, even on the Left, those reporting on the case or following it closely have tended to conclude that Rittenhouse was not the monster he was initially painted as. Long pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, while drawing attention to the extremism of some of the militia members who showed up to protests, to the general atmosphere of chaos, violence, and racial tension that summer, and to the role of Right-wing media in stoking outrage over rioting and property destruction, concluded that Rittenhouse himself was more or less a foolish kid with conventional politics who got in over his head. Last week, Ryan Grim of The Intercept tweeted: “People should be prepared for Rittenhouse to be acquitted on all the major charges”.

Emotional reactions, not to say irresponsible tantrums, are to be expected after a divisive trial such as this one. Commentators on both sides will say stupid things, and there will be no shortage of people on Twitter making triumphant racist memes about Rittenhouse or declaring that the verdict gives licence to MAGA wingnuts to hunt down liberals and shoot them for sport. Today, nearly every national issue in the United States is what the blogger Scott Alexander has called a “scissor” issue — one that is not merely divisive but in which the opposing sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality. The Rittenhouse verdict is no different, even if in this case, unlike in the Brett Kavanaugh or Covington Catholic controversies, we can know with reasonable certainty what actually happened.

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What happens next will be a litmus test for the country. Despite the uncertainties inherent in jury trials, the two main trials to come out of last summer’s unrest, this one and the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reached the correct verdict, though this is cold comfort in a country where the two main factions are defined by their mutual mistrust and loathing. Already, Republicans have begun pouring salt into the wound, and it looks as if the verdict will cement Rittenhouse’s reputation as a conservative folk hero — an innocent man smeared by corrupt politicians, a partisan media, and biased Big Tech companies.

Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced against all evidence that a cold-blooded murderer has been set free due to the colour of his skin, with leading politicians declaring the verdict a “miscarriage of justice” and asking the Justice Department to pursue what could only be described as a political prosecution of the Wisconsin teen. These are signs that the scars opened over the past few years will not be quick to heal.

Yet some on the Left have already begun to signal that things got out of hand last summer. They are admitting, for instance, that “defund the police” was a stupid and politically toxic idea, that riots and arson lead predictably to violent chaos and should therefore be discouraged rather than cheered, and that some of the police shootings that initially sparked outrage — including the one that set off the riots in Kenosha — were based on initial reporting that, had it come from Fox News or the Right-wing Twittersphere, would have been clearly labelled as disinformation.

Many of these things were obvious at the time, and it can be frustrating now to observe those who only found the courage to say the obvious after Joe Biden won the presidency. But it is better than the alternative, which is to continue denying the reality in front of their faces. In this case, the reality is that Rittenhouse was found innocent of murder, and correctly so. Biden, to his credit, has already stated that “the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. One hopes that his allies will listen. To refuse to do so is only to court more tragedies.

A BBC article from 2001 notes that opponents of globalisation believe “it leads to exploitation of the world’s poor, workers, and the environment; “makes it easier for rich companies to act with less accountability: and “that countries’ individual cultures are becoming overpowered by Americanisation.” On the other hand, “those in favour of globalisation claim it “should make everyone richer… [while] trade links can encourage countries to respect human rights”.

Twenty years on, it is clear that the opponents of globalisation were entirely correct, and the supporters were utterly wrong. And yet, their brains broken by Brexit, Britain’s liberal commentariat continue to advocate globalised food supply chains purely as a result of Remainer tribalism.

The BBC’s neutral tone at the turn of the millennium is almost unimaginable in today’s hysterical discourse, where opposition to globalisation has been re-coded as a political signifier, entirely randomly, from a reasoned Left-wing argument to an irrational prejudice of reactionary and probably racist deplorables. Likewise, the Left has seemingly abandoned its commitment to localisation and the preservation of unionised, national labour in favour of cosmopolitan dreams of unfettered globalisation.

In Britain this bizarre polar inversion is manifest in the political discourse over the current supply chain crisis. The fundamental problem causing empty shelves in Britain today is not Brexit itself, but the over-complexity of supply chains maximised for efficiency in good times, but which are dangerously fragile whenever the system meets a shock. By over attenuating supply chains on a global scale, and centralising food production for the benefit of the supermarkets, the system was unable to cope with the pandemic’s cascading aftershocks, from energy crises to labour shortages, still working themselves through the global economy. 

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This is a global supply chain crisis caused by a worldwide slow-motion, but accelerating collapse of globalisation. As the American economist Matt Stoller underlines, globalisation “has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.” Now, we’re beginning to see what it looks like when it doesn’t. 

Take meat processing as an example. For decades, in search of efficiency, supermarkets have centralised the processing of meat in gigantic mega-abattoirs, forcing small regional abattoirs to close and crowding out local farmers. The working environment in these places is so appalling and exploitative, and the pay so low, that they can only be staffed by immigrants from poorer regions of the world. As a result, more than two thirds of Britain’s meat processing labour force is made up of migrants, making the nation’s food supply dependent on the free flow of foreign labour, and on the nationwide distribution of live animals and processed meat to a tiny number of centralised hubs.

This is an entirely unsustainable as well as immoral state of affairs. As the commentator Richard North, an expert on the meat industry, observes, the number of abattoirs in Britain has shrunk “from 3,326 units in the 1960s to a mere 156 in 2020”, with the result that “the meat industry structure in the UK is already so concentrated as to be unsustainable”. As soon as the system meets a shock, as it has now, it is unable to cope..

Yet even before the current shock, the centralisation of meat production was eroding the resilience of Britain’s food supply. In 2018, 34 separate organisations, from the National Trust to the Women’s Institute and the RSPCA, lobbied the Government to halt the collapse of Britain’s network of small regional abattoirs, “a huge national asset” closing “at an alarming rate”. As Christopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust observes has noted, “large scale abattoirs require workers to carry out highly specific, often highly mechanised, procedures as part of the slaughtering process and employ relatively large numbers of narrower skilled, lower paid people in one location”. Instead, the Government should support the creation of more local and smaller abattoirs, “where each worker is required to be more highly and multi-skilled, with the flexibility for part-time work”. This would benefit rural areas where local employment is rare and “facilitate the creation of new premium markets for distinctive meat products from local breeds and the expansion of related businesses such as butchers and farm shops”.

But instead, this vital opportunity to reform the sector into one dependent on high-skilled, high-paid labour working in significantly better conditions is being squandered. Instead, cheered on by their useful idiots in Britain’s commentator class, the corporate food lobby has leaned on the Government to re-open the floodgates to low-paid migrant labour, keeping a broken and exploitative system on artificial life support. 

The current system is simply unsustainable and exploitative to agricultural workers. As the radical Left farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance noted in their 2016 manifesto, “the rural economy… is vulnerable to competition from global markets and to aggressive price bargaining from cartels of processors and distributors (supermarkets)” with the result that “less than ten per cent of earnings from the UK food industry go to UK farmers and fishermen”. 

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Already, the labour shortage is allowing farm workers to demand higher wages, a process which should be allowed to continue, not just because it’s fair but also because it builds resilience into the system. A Britain where the farming sector is forced into decline by global competition is a Britain highly vulnerable to global shocks of the kind we are experiencing now. And yet, as the Landworkers’ Alliance warned back in 2017, the corporate farming lobby is addicted to the current system, with organisations that have the Governments’ ear like the National Farmers Union “more focussed on developing super-efficient mega-farms capable of competing in a cut-throat global market, than in producing the bulk of the UK’s food supply through a network of secure family farms”. 

The globalisation of supply lines according to the logic of the free market is also a disaster for the environment. As a Greenpeace investigation revealed last week, the growing consolidation of Britain’s dairy industry into a handful of American-style megadairies is allowing global food corporations to feed cows soybeans sourced from Brazil’s endangered Cerrado ecoregion. The impact has been profound: it has accelerated deforestation and global warming, forced cows to live in miserable and unnatural indoors conditions in giant sheds and driven small dairy farmers here in Britain out of business. 

Yet aside from moral questions, the supply chain of soybeans is also extremely liable to disruption in times of crisis, such as the drought — the worst in over a century — currently devastating Brazil’s farming sector. Shortages of soybeans caused by environmental collapse in Brazil or by blockages in the global shipping system will mean future shortages of milk and cheese, an absurd situation in a country like Britain blessed with abundant rainfall and lush grass. 

Such built-in vulnerabilities are dangerous as we head into an era of permanent crisis. Indeed, as the Left-wing economist James Meadway warns, though Brexit has exacerbated Britain’s exposure to supply chain disruption, “it is a parochial mistake to single out Britain’s leaving the EU as the primary cause of the crisis”. Rather, what we are experiencing “is the first tremors of the generalised environmental collapse of this century. Gas prices are not going to come down any time soon, and the supply chain crisis will not be resolved this year — or even next.” 

Crisis is the new normal: and to sustain the very basic good of food security, Britain will have to become more self-reliant, decentralising supply chains in pursuit of resilience rather than efficiency and reshoring food production as far as is possible. This isn’t a leap back to the Middle Ages, as online critics howl: Britain was 78% self-sufficient in food as late as the 1980s, and returning to localised production and supply chains should be considered a vital strategic goal.

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And yet, in a stunning example of cognitive dissonance, we see liberal commentators who warn of the looming catastrophe of climate collapse simultaneously arguing that fragile globalised supply chains are somehow both desirable and permanent. Like the famous quote that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it seems it’s easier for these people to imagine total civilisational collapse than not being able to eat Kenyan strawberries in midwinter. 

The Left-wing anti-globalisation protestors of twenty years ago were right then, and their newly localist conservative successors are right now. Instead of mocking the Government’s tentative steps towards re-localisation of the nation’s food supply as the backwards fantasies of nostalgic Brexiteers, our stubbornly parochial Remainer comment class should for once step back and observe the changing world around them. 

The global supply chain crisis is forcing the Conservatives to abandon their free-trading dreams as neoliberal ideology gets crushed by stark reality. This is an unalloyed good, and should be supported and encouraged as far as possible. The Government is correct to say that today’s supply chain meltdown is “a failure of the free market and not of the state” and that businesses “have become drunk on cheap labour”. The current crisis is an opportunity to rebalance Britain’s food system into a fairer and more resilient model, and the Government, finally being forced towards good policy by events outside its control, needs to hold its nerve. 

“Who is society?” asked Thatcher in 1987, in an interview for Woman’s Own magazine. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The unravelling of both state provision and large-scale political organisations was fertile ground for new forms of politics. Thatcher cannot have been pleased when one of these sprouted at Greenham Common RAF Base in Berkshire. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp was an embodiment of women taking their lives into their own hands, taking responsibility for themselves and their actions, and not being held back by the fact of being women. Like a muddy, plural, mirror image of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, it reflected the new individualism in an emerging form of political dissent.

There has always a danger in reading history backwards from where we are now, of finding in it the seeds of how we understand the world today precisely because we’re looking for them. Out of the Darkness — a new book of stories about Greenham — is told by women who were there 40 years ago. It explicitly eschews any claim to be an official history, but the claim that the Women’s Peace Camp had a lasting influence on politics still deserves to be taken seriously.

Begun by a handful of peace campaigners who walked from Cardiff to the gates of an air base chosen to house American nuclear Cruise Missiles, the camp grew organically after a few people decided to stay on. It wasn’t initially women-only, but after several discussions, a vote was taken and the few men were asked to leave the camp.

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The initial decision seems to have been pragmatic. “They didn’t do the washing up, help with the food, look after the kids,” said Jill ‘Ray’ Raymond, “they get drunk, they are violent and they won’t do the washing up.”

Bear in mind that 1981 was only six years after the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, seven years after contraception became available on the NHS, and eleven years after the first Women’s Liberation Movement conference in Oxford. Social expectations that women would do the housework and childcare, and defer to men, were still strong.

Some of the women also felt that non-violent direct action would be easier without men around, as situations were less likely to escalate. “Some of the squaddies wouldn’t want to hit a woman so they were more careful about violence,” said Fenja Hill. “It was probably less violent because there were no men.”

As the camp grew, though, its existence as a women’s peace camp became more important. Josetta Malcolm, who has since identified as non-binary, described their experience of a women-only camp as being “like therapy, it was like a political awakening…. to just see how things linked up about patriarchy, and nuclear arms, and war. Actually to be in a women-only space and then have your voice heard as a woman is so empowering.”

We can see in this a shift of emphasis from a shared external aim — getting nuclear weapons off the site — to more nebulous goals based on what we would today call identity. Certainly, it was an early example of who you are being as important as what you want to change. But in fact, the focus of the camp was never solely on a shared political aim. There was no plan, no organisation, no strategy and no leaders. These were seen as virtues, not failings.

The method of Non-Violent Direct Action, NVDA, rests heavily on each person taking personal responsibility for what they decide to do. There is no top-down discipline, just “affinity groups” that decide together what action to take. That makes it hard to predict, control or counter. Actions like blockading gates when the mobile cruise missile launchers were trying to leave the base, or cutting through the fence to dance on top of missile silos, disrupted military operations and in some cases embarrassed the government.

Without elected leaders, nobody is accountable to anybody else, except directly and informally. This was seen as in itself revolutionary, modelling an alternative form of society, one without hierarchies. Even the different camps at different gates were not identified by military names or numbers, but by non-hierarchical colours. Each camp developed its own character. Green Gate was spiritual, healing, close to nature. Turquoise Gate was vegan and Violet a refuge for carnivores. Orange Gate was home to families and had the best cake. “Main Gate” became Yellow Gate.

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This diversity of the different camps was also seen as symbolic of a wider cause. Feminism was supposed to have room for all sorts of women, who might disagree politically or tactically, but nevertheless be united by the fact of being women. Shared life experiences bound them together, but it was assumed that simply being a woman was enough to outweigh differences.

Even deciding who was, or was not, a Greenham Woman was seen as needlessly divisive. “A Greenham woman is any damn woman who wishes to call herself a Greenham woman,” said Lorna Richardson. “I think it’s antithetical to both the spirit and the practicality of Greenham to divide women into camp women who lived there, and visitors who did not.”

The absence of structure and organisation came with limitations, however. Penny Gulliver recalled occasions when Blue Gate was asked to create a diversion for a big action planned by Yellow Gate. After she and her Blue Gate companions broke into the base and got arrested, “then you’d find out they’d had a row at Yellow Gate about who was going to take the pictures and then they called it off, but nobody came and told Blue Gate!”

Visual and symbolic protests were important. The Greenham veterans talk about reclaiming myths and symbols, witches and spiders’ webs, Moon Goddesses and the hand symbol, forefingers and thumb tips touching, that portrays the vulva. This idea of protest as performance or work of art today typifies a new kind of politics, less concerned with taking power and more with provoking an emotional response, both in those witnessing and in those taking part.

“I think Greenham gave me the confidence to be a woman — to be who I was.” said Sue Say, “and recognise that’s not always going to be the same as someone else.”

It’s not new for individuals to gain a sense of their own capabilities, their independence and agency, through taking part in political action. What is relatively new, though, is seeing such internal change as an end in itself. Asked about the lasting impact of Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, many of those involved talk about changes in themselves. Some of them became therapists, including Sue Bolton, for whom “it was about going right back into yourself and realising the whole thing starts from you… And then you change the whole world, just by being yourself and finding out who you are.”

Slogans like “Greenham Women Everywhere” and “Carry Greenham Home” evoke a sense of the camp, not as a tactical campaign to change UK defence policy, but as a state of mind. The mantra “The Personal Is Political” comes up again and again.

That phrase was first used by 1970s feminists, drawing attention to the fact that their home lives, who raised their children and even their intimate relationships were connected with the public world of politics. Laws governing access to abortion and contraception, or the legality of sexual relationships, had a direct effect on private lives. Many women went on from Greenham to work in women’s refuges, in social work or feminist campaigns.

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But while women at Greenham were discussing what they should eat, how to share out the domestic work and what it meant to sleep with women instead of men, the meaning of the phrase evolved. Instead of somebody’s personal life reflecting political changes that needed to be made in the public realm, that personal life could itself embody change. Egalitarian cooking arrangements, lesbian sex or cutting off your long hair could be political acts in themselves.

Some aspects of life as a Greenham Woman are familiar from more recent political campaigns. A loose, non-hierarchical structure with no clear goals or strategies was adopted by the Occupy movements. Self-organisation on the basis of an identity, or shared lived experience, rather than around an external political goal, is now a permanent state of affairs. The Extinction Rebellion protests use aspects of Non-Violent Direct Action, though the movement does have leaders and centralised planning.

What has become a central feature of extra-Parliamentary politics, though, is the focus on self-expression. “I want my name on the list of people that says, ‘I do not think nuclear weapons is the right way to go,’” said Margaret McNeill. “It’s putting my name to this invisible charter that says ‘I was there, I witnessed this’.’” Today, the motto “Not In My Name’ has become a familiar sight on demonstrations; it is usually less of a threat to remove from power an elected government, more a disavowal of some policy or action that will go ahead anyway.

The struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers and Thatcher’s Conservative government was not about coal. It was about who had power in the country. The Greenham Women wanted to erode, if not the physical power of guns and missiles, the legitimacy of holding that power. They wanted to change the policies of those in government, but not to take that power for themselves. They explicitly rejected systems that centralised power, but they wanted to be visible, and to render visible aspects of themselves and their lives that they felt had been ignored or devalued.

Thousands of women spent time at Greenham, from a few hours to several years, and later said it changed their sense of themselves and what they could achieve. But did the camp succeed?

The last cruise missiles were removed from Greenham Common in 1991 — but most would say that the end of the Cold War did more to bring that about than the constant presence of women at the camp. Some of the women stayed on until the land was finally returned to being a Common in 2000, after almost 60 years of military use. It is now home to arts and business projects, nature reserves and open space.

You could interpret these two changes as victories for decentralised, women-led, non-violent campaigning. Or you could say that change happened when those inside the fence, those with the political, legal and military power, laid down their arms, took down the fence and crept away. But whichever you think is true, Greenham still became a prototype for the shape of political protest today.

The union has a proud and illustrious history. Since 1918 — the year of its founding as the “Firemen’s Trade Union” — it has played a hugely significant role in delivering better conditions of service for the nation’s firefighters and improving public safety. It is in no small measure thanks to the FBU that firefighters have been able to enjoy decent pay and pensions, collective bargaining rights and enhanced health and safety standards, while the public has benefitted from the union’s tireless campaigning for robust fire cover provision in local communities.

The union plays a big role, too, in the wider labour movement, always punching above its weight and standing alongside other workers in the fight for a better, fairer society.

I was proud to join up as a member of the union when becoming a professional firefighter 24 years ago, and prouder still to be elected to represent my work colleagues as an official in various positions for much of the period afterwards. Trade union activity, as it does for most officials, became a major part of my life.

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The betrayal of Paul Embery

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So when, in 2019, I lost my job with the union — at the time I served as a full-time official on its national executive — it came as a bitter blow. My great crime was to give a speech at a rally called by the non-partisan, pro-Brexit campaign group Leave Means Leave. The rally took place on 29 March of that year — the date that the UK had been scheduled to leave the EU until, controversially, the Theresa May government and Brussels agreed to a delay. Other speakers were drawn from across the political spectrum and included Kate Hoey MP, the chair of Labour Leave.

There were thousands in attendance at the rally from all walks of life and of all politics and none. Some were rank-and-file trade union members. For others, this was their first public demo.

I attended the event in my own private time (it took place on a Friday evening) and spoke in my capacity as the national organiser of Trade Unionists Against the EU, a marvellous little group of principled activists with which I have been involved for some years. There was no mention whatsoever at the rally of my role as an FBU official, nor of the union itself.

That evening, however, and without prior notice to me, the general secretary of my union — an old friend but a vociferous opponent of Brexit — issued a public statement condemning me and others from the Left who had spoken at the rally as a “disgrace to the traditions of the labour movement”. I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell me where this was heading.

Within a fortnight, I had been placed under investigation. Four weeks after that I was suspended. And within two months, I was in front of the union’s executive council defending myself against a raft of disciplinary charges — some of which were completely unrelated to my appearance at the rally but had plainly been dredged up for good measure by the senior official conducting the investigation. As a 20-year trade union official, I had represented countless members in the disciplinary arena and knew a witch-hunt when I saw one.

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In working as a columnist for UnHerd, I had apparently prejudiced the interests of the union. In sharing a platform with those who would normally be considered political opponents, I had allegedly breached a union policy stipulating that FBU officials must not engage in joint campaigning with traditional opponents during the referendum (that the rally in question was taking place three years after the referendum and was therefore plainly beyond the scope of the policy seemed to cut no ice with my accusers). In publicly criticising leaders of the labour movement for their attempts to subvert the referendum result, I had again apparently acted in a way prejudicial to the union.

It was this final charge that led to my being removed from my role and banned from holding office again in the FBU for two years. I received other, though lesser, sanctions for the other “offences”.

The backlash across the FBU and media was fierce. Many people understood acutely that the sacking of a union representative for expressing a personal view in his own private time conflicted with the deep and longstanding traditions of the labour movement. Wasn’t our movement supposed to defend the principles of free speech and the right to dissent? Did we no longer tolerate the expression of alternative views? As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas argued in my defence:

“The history of the movement in Britain has always been one of debate, argument and civil disagreement. Union members have always been allowed to argue for positions contrary to their union’s own view, as long as it is made clear that they are representing themselves or another organisation. The Left’s traditional commitment to freedom of expression, and indeed the necessary right to express personal dissent, demands that union officials are not held captive to their union’s line at all hours of the day and in all situations.”

He was right, of course. But I reminded people that this was a new age, one in which a different kind of Left was increasingly imposing a rigid conformism in the public square — especially on Brexit, where things were presented as a struggle between good and evil. It seemed that my union leadership had fallen prey to this phenomenon.

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My internal appeal was rejected, but I chose to fight on. In February of this year, my claim for unfair dismissal came before the employment tribunal. The case was heard over three days. The union was represented by Oliver Segal QC, one of the country’s leading employment silks. I shudder to think how much was paid out in membership contributions to secure his services. I represented myself.

Judgement was handed down on 4 August. There it was on page one: “The claimant was unfairly dismissed under the Employment Rights Act 1996.” Judge Robin Postle did not spare the union leadership’s blushes. “It would appear right from the start of the investigation process conducted by the vice-president that there was an agenda to have the claimant removed” … “The investigation looked like no more than a witch-hunt, a fishing exercise” … “The tribunal overwhelmingly felt the matter was pre-determined” … “Quite how the claimant [in writing for UnHerd] had breached that rule was a mystery to the tribunal” … The union’s argument that a policy written specifically and exclusively for the 2016 referendum was still in force three years later was “a nonsense” … “How could any fair-minded member come to a reasonable belief on the facts that the claimant had committed any form of misconduct?”

An additional argument from the union — that my claim was invalid on the grounds that I wasn’t technically an employee of the organisation — was flatly rejected.

The ruling was a bittersweet moment for me. I am of course glad that, after two years, justice has finally been served, but I remain a proud member of the FBU and retain a deep affection for the organisation. It is filled with good people driven by noble ideals. It just happens that, on this occasion, they were badly let down by a leadership which tried to muzzle a dissenting voice and, in doing so, caused an awful lot of reputational damage. So, all things considered, I’ll not be popping any champagne corks.

Instead, I shall continue, as a rank-and-file member, to use whatever influence I possess to change the FBU for the better, and to support the union’s commendable campaigns to defend public safety and improve the working lives of firefighters. It is these things that brought me into the union in the first place. And, in the end, it is these things that matter most.