I don’t mean the world wars should be forgotten as historical events. The three-decade conflict of 1914 to 1945, best thought of as a single conflict in two phases, was the greatest catastrophe in human history to date, causing 100 million deaths, all told. The war ended with cities and factories in Europe and Asia in ruins, millions of displaced people, the rapid decolonization of the bankrupt European empires, the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power amid the wreckage, and the half-century Soviet-American Cold War. As long as civilization exists, that three-decade cataclysm will never be forgotten.

But when it comes to thinking about and making foreign policy, the world wars provide few if any “lessons of history” that are of value in today’s world. On the contrary, parallels with the events of 1914-1945 — whether drawn by historians, pundits, or policymakers — are likely to be harmful, by trying to impose anachronistic patterns on the realities of our time. 

The peddling of these false parallels — by media outlets in search of audiences, politicians striking heroic poses, and academics who want to be celebrities — has made the public think that today’s world is far more dangerous and unstable than it actually is. According to a recent YouGov poll, 22% of Americans think it is very likely that there will be another world war in the next 10 years, and another 39% think it is somewhat likely. 

Many of the alleged parallels that are cited are so abstract that they are also parallels between our age and many other periods in history as well — say, the Crimean War, or the age of the French Revolution, or the wars of the Reformation in Europe.

For example, Lord David Alton of Liverpool published an essay in February arguing that conflicts in the Middle East; tensions over Taiwan; the race to secure rare-earth minerals; and the growing alliance between China, Iran, and Russia — all suggest “parallels between the world wars and today’s circumstances.” Last year in Foreign Affairs, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins published an essay headlined: “The Next Global War: How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II.” He followed it up with an essay in Bloomberg headlined: “It’s Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There.”

More from this author

Left and Right get equality wrong

By Michael Lind

“Our world resembles the 1930s more than we might think,” Brands wrote, “Now, as then, the balance of power is shifting ominously. Violent autocracies are seeking expansive empires. Ties between authoritarian states are growing stronger; regional conflicts are becoming interwoven.” Then he added: “To be sure, the parallels are inexact.”

Indeed, they are so inexact as to be virtually nonexistent.

In the 1930s, outside of the Americas, most of the world was dominated by the British empire and other European colonial empires, with Germany, Italy, and Japan seeking to conquer other countries in order to establish their own regional empires. Where are the “violent autocracies” that “are seeking expansive empires” today? 

Putin’s Russia might fit the bill. It has invaded Ukraine to annex Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Post-Soviet Russia, which to date has not won its proxy war with the United States and Europe in Ukraine, can threaten other weak neighbors like the Baltic States. But it lacks the capacity to conquer much of Eastern and Western Europe as both Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany did.

Nor is China a suitable candidate. Chinese troops have engaged in limited border conflicts with India and harassed other maritime nations in the South China Sea. But those limited acts of aggression cannot be compared to Japan’s invasion and occupation of much of East and Southeast Asia before and during World War II. 

Compare this to 1914, when a German secret program envisioned not only an authoritarian German-ruled Central European economic bloc, but also the annexation by force of chunks of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.  Much of this was brought to fruition in 1918, when the treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceded Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States to Imperial Germany. The treaty’s other signatory was the new Communist regime of Vladimir Lenin, who had been transported to Tsarist Russia with the help of the German government.

Hitler’s territorial program was even more radical, involving the use of mass murder and deliberate starvation to depopulate Eastern Europe and Russia and make room for German colonists. No great power today, not even Putin’s revanchist Russia, has anything remotely resembling the grandiose plans of Imperial and Nazi Germany or Japan’s design for an autarkic Asian empire.

In the early 21st century, the equivalents of empires are competitive trade blocs that are established by diplomacy, not military conquest. In today’s multipolar world order, contemporary great powers use trade blocs to magnify their home markets. The goal is to promote national champions in large-scale industrial sectors, those characterized by increasing returns to scale — there’s a reason we don’t have mom-and-pop tire factories — or network effects — it’s better to have two rail lines linking 200 towns than 100 individual lines. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to NAFTA, has created a market of more than 500 million people, augmenting America’s home market of 340 million inhabitants. The European Union has more than 450 million people.

For its part, China, in addition to seeking bilateral economic agreements with countries around the world, has persuaded 14 other Asia-Pacific nations to join its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — without invading and occupying a single one of them. With its global Belt and Road Initiative, combining its overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” with its “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road,” China has sent bankers, development specialists, and infrastructure experts to countries, not soldiers. Beijing’s only acknowledged overseas military base is one in Djibouti, established in 2016.

Russia, with a mere 143 million people, has collaborated with Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan to form the Eurasian Economic Union, boasting more than 180 million people. The estimated 3 million inhabitants of the Ukrainian territories conquered by Russia add little to the population and home market of Russia’s Eurasian bloc, whatever the strategic value of the conquered territories might be to the Putin regime.

When it comes to military technologies and strategies, the differences between our time and the age of the world wars are also profound. Sudden cyberattacks on enemy infrastructure and telecommunications might be possible, but surprise attacks like Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union will not be repeated in our age of global satellite surveillance.

The age of mass conscription of citizens as cannon fodder in colossal wars is a thing of the past, too. As wars come to be fought by conventional missiles and drones and autonomous forces, along with technicians and special forces, mass armies with millions of conscripts are as obsolete as the cavalry. 

Moreover, as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, the individualistic citizens of one-child or two-child families, in “post-heroic” autocracies like China and Russia as well as in democracies, would be reluctant to serve in campaigns outside of their nation’s borders. In World War II, 40% percent of Americans who served were volunteers; 4 out of 10 American soldiers were volunteers in World War I, as well.

But according to YouGov, 60% of Americans who were recently polled say that in the event of a new world war, they would be unable to serve because of age or disability; 13% say they would refuse to serve if drafted; 9% say they would serve if drafted but would not volunteer; only 6% say they would volunteer for service.

More from this author

The roots of Trump’s realpolitik

By Michael Lind

Another source of confusion arises from describing all great-power rivalries, even indirect and limited ones, as “world wars.” In April, Fiona Hill, a former Trump national-security official, told Britain’s Channel Four, “We’re already in a situation where you could describe this as World War II structurally. We’ve got a hot war in Europe at the moment that’s had around a million casualties in terms of people either killed or severely wounded, millions of refugees, and all kinds of knock-on effects. That’s very similar to what happened in World War I and World War II.” 

It is more accurate to describe today’s geopolitical pattern as Cold War II, not World War III. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I between 1946 and 1990, there are two blocs — Washington and its European and East Asian allies and its Arab and Israeli allies in the Middle East against a loose coalition of China, Russia, and Iran. The grinding attrition of the war in Ukraine may bring to mind the trenches in World War I, but the war itself is similar to the proxy wars among America, the Soviet Union, and China that were fought in Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan in the first cold war. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I, the leaders of each bloc engage not only in limited proxy warfare, but also in arms races, space races, competition to win the favor of nonaligned nations, and various forms of subversion and sabotage, without bombing or invading each other’s homelands. And at some point, Cold War II is likely to end in a détente or what Boris Yeltsin called “a cold peace,” not in anything like the devastation, occupation, and reconstruction of defeated Germany and Japan eighty years ago. 

In addition to the example of the first Cold War, a historical comparison that might be useful is provided by the mercantilist rivalries of the 17th century through the 19th, when European powers like Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal fought limited wars outside of Europe with the goal of promoting their own commercial and industrial interests. The citizens of European countries often were little affected by these low-level skirmishes to control sea lanes or sugar islands or foreign markets outside of Europe.

But even these historical parallels, though more plausible than analogies with the world wars, should be handled with care. Unlike today’s Hollywood movies, today’s global conflicts are not an endless series of remakes of earlier stories. Rummaging through historical archives for specious precedents is a distraction from the necessary effort to understand what is genuinely new — and newly dangerous — in our own time. 

However, as Anthony Barnett observed of the War’s second son after Suez, the Falklands, history doesn’t just repeat as tragedy and farce, but also as spectacle, as media event. And if the War (it is still just about a definite “the”) is our national creation myth, it only became so once we started broadcasting it on repeat, sublimating violence and trauma into a televisual parade of trumpets and valour.

The mythologising started straightaway. Churchill’s words urged us into new conceptions of national prowess, his classical inflections designed to flatter us into thinking we were the Athenians and he our Thucydides. Soon his personal sense of moral destiny became a collective triumph, a pageant to be inspiringly viewed from the cheap seats of austerity Britain. And nowhere was the spectacle more spectacular than in the British war film. Enlisting Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Richard Burton, we turned our parents into hero-warriors — better, into Hollywood stars. For the children of the Fifties and Sixties, Daddy’s war could become theirs too. The testament of a previous generation turned entertainment for the next.

However, to judge from the fate and Zimmer frame of Michael Caine in his new (and possibly last) film The Great Escaper, the war film is dying on its feet. And the Second World War is now very much a grandaddy issue, possibly even just an issue for executors, morticians and undertakers. Caine plays Bernie Jordan, a D-Day veteran who absconds from his care home to attend the 70th anniversary of the landings. If it sounds too twee to make up, it is — the real Bernie became an overnight celebrity after his trip in 2014, before his death six months later. Genuinely unbelievable, though, is the fact that this is one of two films that will retell his story to be released this year, with the second inadequately substituting Sir Michael for Pierce Brosnan. The snout of the British culture industry has evidently sniffed out a winner.

The Great Escaper sparely retells Bernie Jordan’s weekend Odyssey, every detail designed to pull delicately on the heartstrings of the national psyche. There’s Bernie’s wartime romance with Irene (the late Glenda Jackson), consummated in flashback after a shuffle at the local swing night, and still strong after 70 years. There’s Bernie’s reconciliation with some pacified Germans in a café overlooking Sword beach. “What a waste,” he will cry, in a foreign field lined with white graves. But the film need only prod its audience with clichés. We are prepped from early-learning to receive them. The wash of waves and Michael Caine, flat-capped, staring out to sea beneath a commemorative D-Day banner, his glassy eyes blinking, his aged mind remembering. This is what a war hero looks like.

More from this author

Peep Show is a national humiliation

By Nicholas Harris

But Caine’s presence, as well as the film’s title, places The Great Escaper at odds with a very different lineage of war films, one of pluck and daring. Despite all the redcoats and pith helmets, Caine’s first picture Zulu leant directly on the beleaguered British underdog myth of 1940. And he went on to form part of the Shakespearean ensemble behind Battle of Britain, that epic Airfix commercial of 1969. For the other, still vaguely watchable productions from the time, see The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, The Great Escape itself and obviously Where Eagles Dare. (For a refresher, turn on ITV4 at 4pm this Sunday afternoon, or in fact any Sunday afternoon.)

All memoirs of the Sixties recall the intensity of this saturation. “I saw a film today, oh boy,” John Lennon sang in 1967. “The English Army had just won the war.” Geoff Dyer, born 1959, claims that before he was 15 he had only seen Disney cartoons, Alastair Maclean adaptations and a few other war and action movies. “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else,” remembered Christopher Hitchens. And this was part of a more general mania of cultural reproduction that gripped the supposedly Swinging nation, particularly among the young. Just as the war economy wound down, as actual conscription was coming to an end, culture was rearming. Kids read War Picture Library comics, the national equivalent to Marvel. Every boy was accompanied by a portable, idealised Unknown Soldier — at their peak there were four Action Men for every three boys in the country.

While the stories were not always uncomplicated, you never forget who the villains are, and who will and should eventually triumph. This was a Technicolor Second World War, gun-slinging and cocksure. It was what Britain needed. “We won the war… or did we?” went the cynical grumble as imperial pink faded from the map and the Union Jack was lowered East of Suez. But only the most reactionary portions of the British Right actually regretted fighting it. We’d lost our status — but we’d gained a cinematic universe to play heroes in, made all the more believable by being roughly justified. Few of these films mentioned the Holocaust or Nuremberg, but they didn’t have to. You knew the German characters were evil before you knew why — and you knew that your country had done something towards stopping them.

But, much like a child growing to see its father in a different light, our perspective on this past has altered. The war-film industry isn’t dead, but it is changed and chastened from those swashbuckling days. The self-confident silliness we once gorged on is gone. Instead, we’re drawn to the conflict’s murkier corners, background actors such as Turing and Oppenheimer who were as much victims of the War as they were its victors. The best war film of the last two decades, Dunkirk, turned the battle into an aesthetic masterpiece, a ticking set-piece of cold realism, with only a petit four of Churchilliana at the end to sweeten the horror. And, when we return to our wartime leader, the best we can do is turn Churchill into Gary Oldman’s pot-bellied pastiche, just at the very moment that his historical reputation needed intelligent defence, not sentimental reinforcement.

The real Bernie Jordan endured the same sentimentalisation, becoming advertising copy for P&O Ferries and a grinning, geriatric front-page sensation (a dehumanising process that The Great Escaper creditably critiques). The ultimate embarrassment, however, history repeating itself as spectacle and farce, was to come in 2020, when a cabin-feverish media seized upon Captain Tom Moore, a veteran of Burma’s “Forgotten Army” who had started walking across his garden to raise money for NHS charities. Tom became the face of a terrifying convulsion of Second World War parodism in British society, proving beyond doubt that it is still our only serviceable memory of national unity.

But how long until that memory fades? Harry Patch, “the last Fighting Tommy” from the war before, died only five years before Jordan’s great escape — and the death of the last D-Day witness, if not the last Second World War veteran, cannot be far off. Tribute to the obsessive qualities of internet historians everywhere, a Wikipedia page lists dozens of “notable” survivors in various states of decay, many in their second century. Jordan may not be the last to be immortalised in film (a Captain Tom biopic is in production), but the sense of leave-taking in The Great Escaper — bittersweetly conveyed by Caine and Jackson — gestures towards the War’s uncertain legacy as it moves irretrievably beyond living memory.

More from this author

The Lord of the Daily Mail

By Nicholas Harris

No doubt those generic Churchillian emphases — “tears and sweat”, “the beaches” — will kick about the English language for another century, like those moth-eaten scraps of Tennyson that still retain some anonymous poetic charge. Perhaps they will even be reworked into a khaki Henriad by some distant Shakespeare. But the magic of those grand metonyms — “Overlord”, “Alamein” — is already gone for most people. Soon they will seem as antique as Wellington’s rearguards in the Peninsular Campaign.

Clearly, popular feeling is still swayed by memories of the finest hour, by a faith that we’re capable collectively of doing the right thing. But we see it ever more cynically. When Boris Johnson bustled off to Ukraine to tour bomb sites and inspect sandbags, we all knew whose silhouette he was shrouding himself in. Yet at some point in the future, we won’t recognise it at all. We will see only the transparent present, unmoored from the epic past it once aspired to.

The main thrust of that moralisation has been to protect women from male sexuality; here is an instance of men seeking to protect themselves. They do so on the supposition that their vital energy has been dissipated and colonised by a culture, and an industry, of pornography that is predatory and dehumanising.

One might suppose, then, that this movement would find sympathetic allies among feminists who notice a symmetry of concerns. And surely there are such feminists. But we also hear alarm, in a register typical of today’s politics: these young men are displaying disturbing fascist tendencies.

Say what?

There may indeed be an overlap between the no-nutters and the online Right. That is certainly how it is characterised by those who find it threatening. If there is such an overlap, the common thread is surely the reappearance of “vitalism” as a point of orientation for young men who feel smothered and demoralised in a society that has little use for male energies. European vitalist thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. In the American context, the vitalist tradition is represented by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, William James and, arguably, Mohammed Ali. Its most vivid recent articulation may be found in the movie Fight Club, which depicted a masculinist revolt against the androgynising and enervating effects of a consumerist, white-collar existence that offers little place for male solidarity. Its current avatar is the notorious, beloved Bronze Age Pervert (BAP to his fans). As the historian TJ Jackson Lears points out in his forthcoming book Animal Spirits, the vitalist orientation does not appeal solely to men. It may be found also in “sex-positive” feminists going back to Margaret Sanger and Mabel Dodge in the 19th century.

Whatever meaning and political valence the no-fap movement has for its adepts, the journalistic Left’s ready identification of sexual self-regulation with “fascism” has a definite genealogy. Retracing this gives us a glimpse into a fascinating chapter of 20th-century social engineering, a programme of sexual “liberation” that is still with us and can feel, if not obligatory, certainly on the agenda for all who would be well-adjusted. Acquaintance with this history should disabuse us of the idea that the sexual revolution was an entirely organic eruption of cultural change, and that it happened in the Sixties. Sexual liberation was the goal of a therapeutic para-state whose organs sprang into existence almost overnight at the conclusion of the Second World War. Its political purpose was to forestall the possibility of fascism in the United States. It would be too simple to say the sexual revolution was a government psy-op, but neither has the role of government been adequately appreciated. With the spectre of fascism once again haunting the American political imagination, and attendant worries in some quarters about inadequate masturbation, this is an episode worth revisiting.

Suggested reading

The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussain

In the early Thirties, one wing of the psychoanalytic movement splintered off and became politicised under the leadership of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was convinced that fighting fascism would require a psychological transformation of the entire German population. Their susceptibility to authoritarian politics and attraction to the Fuhrer were due to the unhealthy festering of irrational forces in individual psyches, rooted ultimately in sexual “repression”. Through the efforts of Archibald MacLeish, arch-WASP literary man of the Ivy League and liberal activist, these ideas gained influence in the American security services during the war, and particular the OSS, which was planning for the reeducation of the Germans upon their defeat and subsequent military occupation. And, in fact, the US-led Allied High Commission took up this project of Freudian political therapy in its rule over the defeated Germans, which lasted until 1955.

To put the matter crudely, the Germans were going to have to start masturbating more. More seriously, the working-class family, with its sharply distinguished sex roles and ideal of a strong father, was found to be at the root of the political problem.

More from this author

What the Woke Terror shares with the French Revolution

By Matthew Crawford

Reich called himself a Freudo-Marxist. The term announced a political program that would require nothing less than a moral revolution, working at the deepest level of the individual. For society is not only unjust, it is sick. His project might reasonably be compared with that of Rousseau, whose popular works of sentimental reeducation supplied (however wittingly) the emotional idiom of the French Revolution, and the character ideal its enthusiasts sought to realise through that cataclysm.

Psychoanalysis was to be used for revolutionary purposes. Conventional Marxists made economic conditions the focus of their science; the Freudo-Marxist focused on moral conditions. Where the consummation of the Marxist project brings the withering away of the state, Reich’s political therapy required nothing less than the dissolution of the superego, that “sham social surface” and impediment to the instincts, which are taken to be pure and good. Here, too, we see an echo of the French Revolutionists’ Rousseau-inspired cult of sincerity or self-exposure. Let it all out.

The public tyranny of capitalist domination and the private tyranny of conscience form a circle of mutual support, on Reich’s view. Revolution cannot succeed unless it works ruthlessly on the psychological level. Indeed, revolution carried out on the level of economy and politics alone leads to bourgeois “defense reactions”, the most disastrous of which is fascism.

It is in the family that repressive authority is incubated and reproduced. Someone less invested in moral revolution may object that it is in the family that our faculties of moral perception develop, a gradual training of the affections whereby the child begins to apprehend an objective order of good. If all goes well, he comes to prefer virtue over vice through the mediating guidance and concern — the authority — of his parents. Reich would entirely agree, but with an opposite thrust. That is, he agrees that the moral sense is a product of authority, but insists that authority can only be repressive, never generative. It is always exercised self-interestedly, never generously for the good of another. Morality is the very thing that needs to be liquidated in the revolution.

As Philip Rieff puts Reich’s point, “A revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old political gangs and their leaders…. The destruction, then, of the ancient mystique of fatherhood defines the revolutionary task.”

Suggested reading

The importance of repression

By Park MacDougald

All this may be interesting as a nugget in the history ideas, but does it have any relevance to today’s politico-sexual landscape? Reich wasn’t just one more radical crank, fascinating to intellectuals but of little consequence. In fact, he was part of a larger intellectual movement that gained a substantial institutional footing in the United States in the decade immediately after Second World War.

One such institutional perch for Freudian ideas was the Army. The scale and intensity of violence in the Second World War are difficult for us to comprehend today. It was a war in which the civilian populations of entire cities were incinerated in a matter of hours. For B-17 bomber crews in the European theatre, the odds of surviving a complete tour of 25 missions was about 50% in 1943. We should not be surprised that of those American soldiers removed from service before completing their tours, approximately half were deemed unfit for psychiatric reasons. Sustained, abject terror will do that to a man. Of those who completed their tours of duty, many were deeply troubled.

Immediately after the war, the War Department undertook a study to determine the causes of psychiatric breakdown in American soldiers, using interviews to probe their minds. According to Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Century of the Self, the study was conducted under the guidance of refugee psychoanalysts from central Europe. The focus of these interviews, however, was not the soldiers’ wartime experiences but their childhoods. The stress of combat had merely triggered buried memories.

And what were the findings of the study? The problems of these broken soldiers were due, not to violence, but to the repression of violence, and of sexuality, typical of family life. Small town life in middle America, it turned out, was a breeding ground of precisely those unhealthy character traits that, under the right conditions, give rise to fascist movements.

In The Century of the Self, one Martin Bergmann, a US Army psychoanalyst from 1943 to 1945, speaks into the camera in a thick Mitteleuropa accent, recounting the train trip he took from the East Coast to the West Coast of his newly adopted country and his fascination with “what goes on in all those little towns”. His work gave him “a privileged tour into the inner soul of America”. What he found is that “the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America is very much in favor of the irrational”. It is “a much more problematic country” then you would think, given its cheerful self – image.

Suggested reading

Adam Curtis and the death of autocracy

By Aris Roussinos

The problem with Americans was that they were latent Nazis. Presumably this came as a surprise to those soldiers who had lately placed their young bodies in the service of a national effort to defeat the Nazi regime.

In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in America, a watershed moment in the emergence of the therapeutic state. As Curtis put it, “the Second World War would utterly transform the way governments saw democracy, and the people they governed”. The American government, in particular, would turn to the Freud family for guidance on how to control the enemy within, convinced that “hidden under the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces” that had led to the death camps. The inner lives of Americans were now something that needed to be managed. Anti-fascism in the United States would be a science of social adjustment working at a deep level of the psyche, modeled on the occupation government’s parallel effort in Germany.

“What is needed is a human being that can internalise democratic values,” said Bergmann, the US Army psychiatrist. “Psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done. It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital, free supporter and maintainer of democracy.”

One must pause whenever the word “democracy” is used in such utterances. In fact, a central premise of midcentury social management was precisely that the free contest of responsible citizens in democratic politics does not reliably produce a properly “democratic” personality. “Changing the inner structure of the human being” so he becomes a reliable supporter of a political program — creating a New Man — was supposed to be the hallmark of totalitarianism, but evidently appeared necessary to some significant part of the American political establishment. Liberalism would have to become, not anti-totalitarian, but rather a countervailing project of man-making, no less total in its reach.

Following passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946, its principal architects Karl and Will Menninger trained an army of hundreds of psychiatrists to fan out across America. In the late Forties, “psychological guidance centers” were set up in hundreds of towns, staffed by psychiatrists who “thought it was their job to control the hidden forces inside millions of Americans”, according to Adam Curtis. Thousands of counselors offered marriage guidance; social workers visited homes. As Robert Wallerstein of the Menninger Foundation put it in The Century of the Self, the operating assumption in these times was that “you could really change people. And you could change them almost in limitless ways.”

More from this author

How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

Freud’s daughter Anna was the guiding figure for the new para-state organs of psychological adjustment. Heir to her father’s movement, “her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis”, according to her nephew Anton Freud. Curtis points out that this evangelising spirit marked a shift from Sigmund Freud’s efforts to understand the psyche to Anna Freud’s mission to modify the psyche. While Sigmund had a tragic view of the human being, emphasising the irreducible conflict between self and society, Anna had a reformer’s faith in the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a technology of personal and social improvement.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the political soil in which these imported Freudian seeds would germinate. In his 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch notes that “around the turn of the century, social reformers began to refer to themselves as progressives rather than liberals”. He quotes a work titled Liberalism in America (1919) in which Harold Stearns offered a portrait of the ideal political personality as “scientific, curious, experimental…urbane, good-natured, non-partisan, detached”. I don’t know if they had yard signs back then, but these were the traits of what H.L. Mencken called “the civilized minority”. They were tied to specific political positions, opposition to which could be taken as signs of ignorance, superstition, and intolerance.

Lasch writes that in the early decades of the 20^th century, liberals convinced that the mass of their fellow citizens were impervious to reason believed they “would either have to master the new techniques of advertising and propaganda, … or seek to minimise the influence of public opinion on policy, … and see to it that policy – making was conducted exclusively by experts.”

In fact, both strategies became important. On the policy front, Woodrow Wilson addressed the growing gulf between popular preferences and progressive policy goals (recently exacerbated by an expansion of voting rights to less enlightened elements in society) by transferring political initiative and discretion from the democratically elected legislature to the bureaucracies of the nascent administrative state, where matters could safely be decided by experts. But it is the propaganda front that concerns us here, as it intersects intimately with the premises of Freudian political therapy.

The art of propaganda had taken great strides forward during the First World War, when popular fervour against “the Hun” was whipped up in the United States to support an unprecedentedly destructive war, the point of which nobody could say. Edward Bernays, one of the architects of the wartime propaganda effort, turned to advertising after the war as the logical venue for his craft (he would later put his talents in the service of the CIA). A nephew of Sigmund Freud, with whom he was intellectually close, Bernays developed his art on the premise that human beings are irrational, subject to subconscious drives that swamp any capacity for reflective deliberation.

More from this author

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

Between the wars, liberals in the United States were watching developments in Europe with unease as fascist movements began to get traction. In the United States, there was significant sympathy with European fascist movements, not only on the anti-semitic Right but also on the New Deal Left. The putative irrationality of ordinary people was beginning to look like an ominous political fact. The premise of irrationality offered a lever of social control through the manipulation of subconscious drives, while the gathering political threat provided a reason for the principled use of this lever to steer the masses away from dangerous territory.

In this period, Walter Lippmann and H.L. Mencken were influential among liberals in their embittered view of the public as unreliable partners in the democratic project. What was wanted was democracy without a demos. This becomes less paradoxical once you understand that the term “democracy” was serving then, as it does now, as a term of approbation naming something in no way dependent upon the procedures of representative government, and a character ideal defined in explicit opposition to the deplorable masses. The mantle of “democracy” was the homespun worn by liberalism when it went about in public, seeking a wider political legitimacy than would otherwise be extended to the preoccupations of a civilised minority pursuing “experiments in living”, to use J.S. Mill’s formula.

Immediately after the Second World War, this distrust of the people among America’s Northeastern Protestant liberals got joined to an imported version brought by European émigré intellectuals who had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a Nazi murder state that enjoyed a kind of terrifying democratic mandate, in the narrow procedural sense of winning the support of a majority in its rise to power. These émigrés were therefore understandably ill-disposed to the masses, and toward democracy in its primary sense of rule by the people.

The concerns of this politicised psychoanalytic movement got grafted onto the regime of technocratic administration that liberals had been advancing in the US for half a century. The fateful consequence, clearly visible in retrospect, is that the administrative state became the therapeutic state, with the “helping professions” serving as expert handmaidens to the new regime. Flush with victory in its first ideological war, confident in the surfeit of legitimacy that comes with victory, the government took up anti-fascism as a wider mandate of moral and social transformation.

At the same time, the academic discipline of sociology took an activist turn. The American-led occupation government in Germany favoured sociology departments in universities as a vehicle of German re-education. The effort was led by scholars returning from forced exile in the United States, some of them connected to the Frankfurt School. In the US, five collaborative works, together titled Studies in Prejudice, were sponsored by the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Scientific Research. Of these, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was the most influential. “No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today,” wrote Nathan Glazer in Commentary in 1954. The research was conducted by a group at Berkeley headed by Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School.

More from this author

The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

The massive study offered a set of criteria to discern personality traits said to indicate authoritarian tendencies. With the impressive machinery of social science, it ranked Americans on an “F Scale” where F stands for pre-fascist. An early version of its questionnaire to detect right-wing personality traits, deployed in California in 1947, was used in police work and in the psychological assessment of public school students.

The survey built on earlier studies conducted in Germany at the Institute for Social Research, but with a different slant. Openly Marxist in its original, Frankfurt iteration, it had placed its subjects on an authoritarian personality/revolutionary personality axis. (To the extent you are not revolutionary, you are authoritarian.) Repackaged for America, this was changed to an authoritarian personality/democratic personality axis. The shift of terms was well-attuned to the political idiom of the study’s American sponsors: in the United States, the vanguard named itself “democratic” rather than revolutionary.

Which is not to say that TAP’s adaptation of Freudo-Marxism to the American context was merely superficial. No less a figure than Peter Berger failed to see that an important shift had occurred between Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (addressed to a German audience in 1933) and The Authoritarian Personality (addressed to an American audience in 1950). Berger saw the latter as continuing the attack on the family coming from the Communist Left, which found the roots of “authoritarianism” in bourgeois-capitalist family structure. Accordingly, Berger saw the 1950 American volume as lending support to the commune movement that was gaining traction in Western Europe and America. Christopher Lasch points out that, in fact, “the general conclusions reached by Adorno and his collaborators fitted comfortably into a liberal consensus that condemned the allegedly repressive family patterns typical of working-class and lower-middle-class milieux and advocated as an alternative not ‘communes’ but the enlightened family patterns already adopted by the professional and managerial classes”. (451) These were the very patterns that would be demanded by capitalism in the coming postindustrial economy, which would accelerate an ongoing erasure of sexually differentiated forms of work.

Items contributing to the working class’s high scores on the F-scale included a belief in distinct sex roles and a “rigid” sexual morality. A woman with a “self-image of conventional femininity,” for example, was sure to develop an “underlying bitterness” which often took “deviously destructive forms”. We can note as well that, from the perspective of late capitalism, someone “clinging to femininity” is someone who has failed to become an all-purpose “human resource,” a labor unit minimally prone to pregnancy and maximally adaptable to the workplace.

Rosie the Riveter, that well-muscled emblem of the munitions economy, was one of the government’s most successful propaganda campaigns. In Norman Rockwell’s magnificently butch, 1943 image of Rosie for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, she has her foot resting on a copy of Mein Kampf. She would become the hero of capitalism’s next stage, in which feminism plays a structural role. The type of social science pioneered by TAP would provide expert grounds for the emerging bourgeoise sexual morality, in which sexual difference itself is viewed as a hangover from a lower stage of human development.

Suggested reading

Welcome to fully automated luxury gnosticism

By Marry Harrington

Another trait that earned one a high rank on the F-scale was a “punitive” and “moralistic” style of child-rearing. As Lasch writes, “The Authoritarian Personality revealed more about the enlightened prejudices of the professional classes than about authoritarian prejudices among the common people” who “may have good reason to… reject a middle-class conception of easy-going parental discipline.”

Rather than consider the pros and cons of sexually conservate attitudes, the authors of TAP treated them as manifestations of a “social disease”. Lasch points out that this influential work “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic — to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits.”

Around this same time, Alfred Kinsey released the first of the Kinsey Reports on Americans’ sexual practices (1948). It was a publishing phenomenon that had no precedent for sales in the 20^th century and became the focus of intense public discussion. Kinsey understood his work to be serving a “mass psychotherapeutic function”, namely, the eradication of shame. He also assimilated the nascent concept of the “authoritarian personality” to lingering sexual moralists of various stripes. Kinsey relied on his status as an entomologist (who just happened to turn his attention from beetles to humans) to claim for himself the persona of a disinterested man of science, rather than a cultural crusader.

In TAP and its antecedents we see the ground laid for a novel politico-cultural consciousness. It would become apparent only in the next cohort, the Baby Boom, perhaps because this consciousness required a generation of conditioning by government therapy and activist social science to achieve: we are groovy astronauts of the libido (as against our repressed parents). Whatever the reality of their individual mindsets, which are no doubt as various as that of any other generation, this is the official story told about the Boomers by their self-appointed spokespersons. At the same time, a new “professional managerial class” arose that would have a deep identification with expertise as title to rule and source of class solidarity

Suggested reading

The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Marry Harrington

This history is important not least for helping us to see that the century-long colonisation of ordinary people’s moral judgment by psychology, dating from the rise of the social worker in the 19th century, and more broadly the idea that common sense should defer to expertise located in a scientific clerisy, got a big boost from the psycho-sexual turn that anti-fascist politics took after the Second World War. Initiatives by the federal government spawned a wider apparatus of psychological adjustment, located in schools (above all, sex education), HR departments and any institution devoted to forming and policing character according to the priorities of a vanguardist minority. Given mid-century America’s institutional investment in fighting fascism, it became invested also in construing the world in such a way as to justify that investment. The world has ever since been saturated with something like fascism, however invisible it may appear to most people — especially after our grandfathers had defeated the real thing on the battlefields of Europe.

The valour of that effort was borrowed by social engineers and attached to their own campaign. The military campaign had required a self-confident and still mostly self-governing people to risk their lives on behalf of human dignity. The domestic campaign required cultivation of a diminished picture of the human subject, now viewed as an irrational tangle of psycho-sexual compulsions. However partial and inadequate the new anthropology, it became “too big to fail”. The politics of anti-fascism have proven highly elastic, adaptable to the needs of an expanding, therapeutic para-state that has not hesitated to substitute morally cognate terms such as racism and sexism for the original. These too are expressions of dark irrationality, and cunningly increase in society precisely by appearing to decrease.

With this pocket history in hand, we can speculate as to why the no-fapping movement could cause alarm. Keeping the appetites at a high pitch of activity, stimulating desire and then satisfying it, can serve as a political soporific. Porn may function as a soma of the masses and in particular of the male— that toxic element in society that has lately attracted special interest from the organs of political therapy. Untoward eruptions of ascetic self-command are inconvenient to the governing anthropology; they would seem to cast doubt on both the need for, and the means of, social management. Reciprocally, for men and women both, the experience of self-command can create a taste for more, and possibly even lead to curiosity about a corresponding political possibility long thought obsolete — that of self-government.

This essay is the first in a series I am calling the Archedelia Project.

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

The 18th-century wars, fought by rival European monarchs who could all converse in French with each other, were enviously admired in the bloody 20th century. They had allowed commerce and even tourism to persist — utterly unimaginable even in Napoleon’s day, let alone during the two world wars. These wars ended not in the utter exhaustion of collapsing empires, as in 1918, nor in infernal destruction, as in 1945, but instead with diplomatic arrangements politely negotiated in between card games and balls.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War and French America, for instance, was not drafted by the victorious British Prime Minister John Stuart, Earl of Bute. Rather, it was written by his very good friend, the French foreign minister Étienne-François de Stainville, Duc de Choiseul. It was he who solved the three-way puzzle the French defeat left, by paying off Spain with Louisiana and Britain with money-losing Canada, and regaining the profitable sugar islands for France, which still has them.

And rather than winners charging the losers with incurable bellicosity, as Versailles did with Germany, or stringing them up individually as war criminals, as in the ending of 20th-century wars, 18th-century winners were more likely to console the losers with something just short of “better-luck next time”. In a century during which there was war every single year without exception from 1700 to 1800, if one war ended, another necessarily started or at least persisted, allowing a “next time” soon enough.

By contrast, the ensuing 19th-century wars held no lessons at all for the 20th century, which was equally bereft of a Napoleonic superman at the start and ample tropical lands easily conquered later on. The Crimea expedition in the middle was mostly a counter-example of how not to wage war. The Franco-Prussian war was just as sterile. All it proved was that there really was only one Helmuth von Moltke who could win wars by parsimonious force, unlike his homonymous nephew, who lost a five-year war in its first five weeks; and that there really was only one Otto von Bismarck, who crowned his incomplete 1871 unification of German lands by refusing to unify all Germans, lest the world combine to make a bigger Germany smaller.

More from this author

How the Ukraine war must end

By Edward Luttwak

Clearly only the 18th-century precedents apply to the Ukraine War. Neither Putin nor Zelenskyy speaks French, but neither needs it to converse in their Russian mother-tongue. If they do not actually talk (Putin demurely said that he could not possibly be expected to negotiate with Kyiv’s drug addicts and Neo Nazis), their officials certainly can, and do so often.

When it comes to the persistence of commerce in war — the habit that Napoleon wanted to break with his Blocus Continental against British exports — every day, Russian gas flows to the homes and factories of Ukraine on its way into Western Europe. Ukraine transfers money to Russia every day, even as Putin attacks his faithful customer. And Ukrainian wheat is now shipped past Russian navy vessels to reach the hungry Middle East, after a negotiation unthinkable in 20th-century wars, or in Napoleon’s either.

In Russia, sanctions have certainly diminished easy access to imported luxuries in local franchised shops, but they still arrive via Turkey at a slight premium — or discount, depending how much Moscow previously marked them up. All over Russia, the sanctions have been felt in all sorts of ways because the country was actually more internationalised than anyone realised. (I arrived in Tomsk at 6am one winter morning, the temperature minus infinity, and the one place to eat was McDonald’s.)

But unlike China, which must choose between fighting and eating protein — some 90% of its chicken, pork and beef is raised on imported cereals — Russia produces all its own staple foods and can therefore fight and eat indefinitely. Neither does it import any energy, as China must.

More from this author

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

In other words, just as Russian propaganda has claimed from day one, the sanctions cannot stop the war materially. They have, though, played a large role in the flight of tens of thousands of elite Russians, once again diminishing the human capital of the largest European nation — as the Bolsheviks and Civil War did a century ago, and the opening of borders did again a generation ago. Still, the sanctions might yet cause trouble in the West, if the winter happens to be unusually cold. This is a subject on which Germany — which so enthusiastically applauded Angela Merkel for closing nuclear power stations and preferring Russian piped gas over American and Qatari liquified gas — has remained strangely silent.

As for tourism, after a cascade of restrictions on Russian visitors, in August, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex announced that a total of 998,085 Russian citizens had legally entered the European Union through land border crossing-points since the beginning of the war, with more arriving by air via Istanbul, Budapest, and central Asian airports. Other Russians have continued to holiday in the Maldives and Seychelles via Dubai, on the sound 18th-century principle that a war should not prevent gentlemen from taking the waters, or diving into them in this case. The confiscation of yachts from several Russians accused of proximity to Putin generated quite a bit of schadenfreude to the yacht-less everywhere in the early summer, but did not deprive a great many other Russians from the use of their bedsitters, apartments, houses, palaces and chateaux all over Europe.

This war, in short, will not end because of Russian suffering: it is not exactly the siege of Leningrad.

More from this author

Putin has made Nato stronger

By Edward Luttwak

So how can the war end? Herakleitos of Ephesus wrote that “War is the father of all things” — even of peace, since it exhausts the material resources and manpower necessary to keep fighting. It thereby induces the acceptance of lesser outcomes — even capitulation — as the costs of better outcomes keeps rising.

There is another kind of war termination — the kind that is peddled to innocent students in “conflict-resolution” classes, the kind that gains international applause and Nobel Peace prizes: war-ending not obtained by exhaustive war but by the benevolent intervention of third parties. This end can never yield peace. Its only product is frozen war, as in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the perpetual imminence of renewed war dissuades construction and the return of workers from Germany.

Peace achieved by the exhaustion of resources is the most durable form of peace because deprivation is better remembered than other people’s deaths. But of the two belligerents, only Ukraine can run out of material resources. Except now it cannot, because the United States has seemingly added Ukraine’s sustainment to its other entitlement programmes — a commitment augmented by whatever contribution the British and northern European countries care to make, and the relative pittance given by France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Suggested article

Why Ukraine's counter-offensive is working

By David Patrikarkos

In the days of Herakleitos himself, war was the father of peace principally because it killed off young warriors, forcing a relaxation of conflict until the next generation grew to military age. It was that process that weakened Sparta’s strength. In World War Two, the Germans were clearly running out of men by the end, when 16-year-olds served on anti-aircraft gun crews, and the Volkssturm conscripted men up to age 60. Some 5.3 million died in uniform, including 900,000 men born outside Germany’s 1937 borders, both Austrians and Volksdeutsche conscripted by the SS, which never acquired the right to conscript in Germany itself. The ever-worsening manpower shortage forced the SS to betray its most basic principle by recruiting non-Aryan troops, not only Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army of 130,000 at its peak, but also SS Turkic, Indian (ex POWs), and Arab units recruited by the Palestinian Mufti Amin al-Husseini.

As for the Red Army, it lost millions in defeat and pell-mell retreat in 1941 and then again in 1942, losing still more men on the offensive at the end. But in 1943 Russian generals no longer impatiently marched men over minefields instead of clearing them, nor sent them to attack without artillery support and tanks. By 1944, it was the Russian artillery that conquered battlefields by fire, and that is how Russia did not run out of men, even if its demography remained skewed for decades.

The Allies were never in such straits because the British evacuated from Dunkirk more than two-thirds of their soldiers in 1940, then drafted many South Africans and Indians for their North African misadventures. By late 1942, at El Alamein, they had vastly superior artillery in lieu of infantry, with more of the same in Italy from 1943, when fresh Americans, the French Army’s Moroccan Tirailleurs and Goumiers, and the free Polish II Corps did most of the hard fighting.

So it was not until 1944 that the exhaustion of the British army’s appetite for fighting emerged in insistent demands for the massive aerial bombardments of any significant resistance, or at least energetic air support at every turn. Having started much later, most American servicemen were not even tired when the war ended, with total losses individually tragic but demographically unimportant. This was even more true of all later American fighting, until now.

Suggested article

Putin's war is just beginning

By Harald Malmgren

In Ukraine, so far there is no question of war-ending manpower losses. In spite of a declining population, the number of male Ukrainians who annually reach military age is at least 235,000, or 20,000 per month. Ukrainian casualties, both killed or invalided out of action, have not exceeded 5,000 per month. As for Russia, colourful stories that relate the use of mercenary units and the lucrative contracts offered to combat volunteers are not true indicators of a manpower shortage: every month more than 100,000 Russian males reach military age, while the monthly average of killed and invalided wounded is under 7,000.

So the stories reveal something else: Putin’s refusal to declare war, fully mobilise the armed forces, and require conscripts to serve in combat, suggests he fears the reaction of Russian civil society. Yes of course Russian civil society had been silent on the war, or near enough. But its silence is not the silence of the grave signifying nothing. It was a very eloquent silence: fight your war but leave our sons alone.

When he made that announcement, his family was unravelling due to his father’s philandering. The boy’s response was to make himself “unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of life…”, according to his mother when she resurfaced after an eight month disappearance. His desires betrayed his insecurities. If he could not be loved, he would be powerful. 

The armour plate little Boris chose to cover these scars was Winston Churchill. It was always Churchill: Britain’s last world king. Absent a mother, he discovered a hero. Self-pity was sublimated into the desire for glory. 

Classical heroes conquer or bewitch their peers, they never compete with them. They are above the futile jostling of general life. They emulate backwards. Alexander the Great looked to Achilles; Julius Caesar looked to Alexander, and wept at his tomb; Napoleon looked to Caesar, and Churchill to Napoleon, whose glaring bust followed him around Westminster for decades.

Johnson decided to emulate Churchill — “the greatest statesman Britain had ever produced” — and stitch himself into this gold thread. Churchill was a holy presence in post-war childhoods. Boris memorised the captions of Churchill picture books. Fathers read selections from the Great Man’s speeches to their sons. Boys in the Sixties imagined themselves piloting Spitfires over green Sussex, as the sonorous, rousing, words of Churchill echoed in their heads. 

Boris never asked if he was emulating an illusion. By Eton his wish was Churchillian. Become Prime Minister. Win. The clown fez he wore for the next 40 years distracted his contemporaries from this ruthless fixity of purpose. 

More from this author

Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

That’s not to say this ambition was ever hidden. “My silicon chip”, he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, “has been programmed to try to scramble up this cursus honorum, this ladder of things”. Churchill proved indispensable to the climb.

Other Prime Ministers were haunted by Churchill (Thatcher), recklessly invoked him in wartime (Blair), or paid oily tributes to him (Cameron). On the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s death in 2014, Johnson one-upped them all when he wrote a bestselling biography of his hero, and the tribute act reached a new stage. 

The Churchill Factor was not about Winston Churchill. Faced with the man’s knotty and tragic life, Johnson turns away, blows raspberries with the material, and writes like P.G. Wodehouse. Churchill is the “beaver who damned the flow of events”; he is “like some burly and hungover butler from the set of Downton Abbey”; he is simultaneously a “crowbar of destiny” and a “hyper-gravitational astral body”. Johnson can doodle silly expressions on portraits of an icon — some of them are even snigger-worthy — but he cannot get close to the man. 

More from this author

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

To do so would be to look in a mirror. Johnson thinks he is attracted to Churchill because he was a hero, “the man who led my country to victory against all the odds”. More than a warlord, Churchill was the “best speaker, the best writer, the best joke-maker, the bravest, the boldest and most original” — all qualities Johnson would like us to associate with Johnson. He interposes himself into Churchill’s life, like a leaf pressed between the pages of a diary, then winks at his readers.  

Churchill, wrote Johnson, was the “inevitable” Prime Minister. By 1940 there was only one “man for the moment”. When Brexit was deadlocked in 2019 Johnson’s association with Churchill, the assiduously spade-worked notion that, give or take some hair, they were the same man, cashed out spectacularly. The mantle of inevitability passed to Johnson.  

His supporters believed that Boris was walking with destiny. Charles Moore used to tell anyone who would listen that Boris was a let down. Then the wastrel became Winston. Moore hailed the “controversial untrusted man who got it right, leads, unites the country, wins”. The “blond magnificence”, Tim Stanley wrote in October 2019, ought to be recognised for “the Churchillian figure he is.” (This week Tim was forced to concede that Johnson had become a more Chamberlainite “toast”.)

More from this author

The tragedy of Matt Hancock

By Will Lloyd

This was the point of The Churchill Factor. To kick enough biographical sand in people’s eyes until, when they looked up, they could no longer see where Churchill started and Johnson ended. Churchill’s detractors are “snobbish” and a “teensy bit jealous” — like Johnson’s. Churchill’s writing was a way of “dramatising and publicising himself” — like Johnson’s. Churchill’s disloyalty to party colleagues was “magnificent” — like Johnson’s. It becomes absurd. “In habits”, Churchill — and I can’t find another biographer who has made this claim — “superficially resembled a Bertie Wooster figure”. Just… Like… Johnson.

It becomes clear that Johnson does not understand why Johnson is like Churchill. They are spookily alike, but not due to their maverick political careers, not for the doughy and obvious reasons. You have to go back to the beginning. Churchill suffered through his own version of Johnson’s youth of neglect and distress. “Famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood”, writes Churchill in Marlborough.

Unhappiness evoked the same ambitions in Churchill as it did in Johnson: the conscious decision to be a classical hero, with all the ruthlessness and coldness such a choice results in. “He is bound to emerge historically as a romantic and glamorous figure”, wrote one sympathetic observer of Churchill in the Thirties, “but he is surrounded by corpses.” Suicides close to Winston Churchill included a brother-in-law, a former stepfather, a daughter’s lover, a former daughter-in-law, a son-in-law and a daughter. Johnson leaves behind two cratered marriages, and anguished relations with his platoon of children. I can picture both men wondering if this is the cost of greatness.

More from this author

Oxford University didn't cause Brexit

By Will Lloyd

The callousness of Johnson and Churchill was leavened by self-mocking qualities. Their vanity was excused by humorousness. Their witticisms are collected in stocking-filler pamphlets, like Tory Wildes. Often, both are compared to babies. Johnson, one biographer reckoned, was defined by “neediness”. Neville Chamberlain believed that Churchill, to the agony of his colleagues, was a “wayward child”. The Financial Times thought Johnson was a “man-child politician”, always on the cusp of having his ambitions devoured by his own gross appetites. During the war, Stalin’s ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, noted that “something of a small boy” lived on in Churchill. They are half-omnipotent, half-helpless. They looked at all times like overgrown toddlers. Ultimately, everything was subordinate to the small boy’s dream of glory and prestige.

Now that half his party is trying to slaughter its chief, The Churchill Factor makes for weirdly poignant reading. If Johnson hadn’t chosen all this you could almost feel sorry for him. “I think he doesn’t really know what he wants,” wrote Johnson about Churchill, and himself. They both just wanted more of whatever it was — acclaim usually — whenever they could grasp it. Such behaviour in peacetime, notes Johnson eight years before Partygate, “can be disastrous”. 

You become what you pretend to be. Johnson never really thought beyond Churchill the world king, hero of the finest hour, the growl on the radio. By emulating Churchill’s optimism, patriotism, and hopefulness, Johnson could finish Brexit, and take his historical place next to the most famous Englishman of all. Once he became Prime Minister, his inner world of make believe appeared congruent with reality at last. Johnson fantasised about monuments to himself, says Dominic Cummings. Johnson bumbled around Number 10, musing that the people would remember him after his death, like a Roman Emperor. Or Churchill.

Suggested article

Did Boris kill conservatism?

By Robert Saunders

The version of Winston remembered by Britain, and imitated by Johnson, is a false one. The picture is incomplete. In his last years Churchill said over and over again that he wished he had died in 1945. His beloved Empire was being dismantled. Communists dominated most of the Eurasian landmass. Socialism appeared to be the future of British politics.

Heroes are not supposed to go on. Either they die young, like Alexander did at 32, or their ludicrous self-image cannot be maintained in the face of the reality of the world. After a certain age, failure sets in like frost.  

Imagine, then, if Boris hadn’t survived Covid. A Prime Minister sacrificed for his people. All those early pandemic photos of Johnson bouncing unmasked through hospital wards suddenly charged with saintly light. Nothing beatifies, or erases error, quite like death. A romantic-cynical end, but then, as Johnson said: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.” 

Instead there is no romance. Only cynicism. He recovered, and received cake in a Tupperware. There will be no Downing Street booze ban, he says, because Churchill needed his brandies during the war. Johnson ends up resembling the post-war Churchill. Not heroic, but hamstrung. Confused and tortured. He can announce policies, make speeches, and sit on tiny chairs when he makes school visits. But the overall sense is of a man past his peak, his historic purpose fulfilled, limping on purposelessly, a hero out of time.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing. From the Mahabharata to the Iliad, it’s the central theme in the ancient world’s most immortal works. But something has happened to war-lit: first, the industrialisation of fighting, which Hemingway himself lived through and documented; then, the development of war technologies so terrible that battle itself came to seem unthinkable.

The world that has emerged since is in many ways (or at least in many places) a safer and more peaceful one. But what has become of those men who actually like danger, and for whom warfare has always been a proving-ground?

Some are still running into danger. There was a surreal echo of Hemingway’s love of danger in a recent wave of young Americans joining a conflict overseas, and then (albeit with less positive consequences) documenting it.

Hemingway was among the thousands who travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938, to support the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In February, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy issued a formal call to foreigners to join an “international brigade” fighting for the Ukrainian side against Putin’s invasion. At least according to Ukrainian reports, an estimated 20,000 have signed up to help — and many view what they’re doing as fightback against “a 21st-century version of fascism”.

More from this author

Incels could become the new Vikings

By Mary Harrington

You would think the Weird Online Right, the contemporary subculture most concerned with masculinity would approve of this risk-taking. A recurring theme in such spaces is the perceived subjection of manliness to the shrunken, heroism-free horizons of modern life and the culture of “bugmen” it has produced. Perhaps the most influential sacred text of this subculture is Bronze Age Mindset, an unclassifiable “exhortation” written in 2018 and now immensely influential among disaffected young men.

Written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, it blames modern comforts and the undue influence of women for the stifling and emasculating nature of modern life: “In fact everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison … represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy.” BAP extols the virtues of pre-Christian heroes of antiquity, and predicts that “Leviathan will not be able to hold itself together” whereupon “the age of high piracy will return”, enabling the men capable of it to develop “their ability to wage war”.

But instead of lauding their bravery, the Very Online Right tends to dismiss Zelenskyy’s resistance as a “fight to the death for globalist oligarchs like Soros and Kolomoisky” and mock any evidence of fear, regret or incompetence displayed by the young foreigners flocking to help. This so-called “Reddit Battalion” has been widely mocked for having reportedly compromised operational security on the battlefield by continuing to post from their phones while in a warzone: their compulsion to document their experience emitting signals allowing their location to be pinpointed and shelled.

Suggested reading

What men get wrong about masculinity

By Sarah Ditum

What’s going on here? One response might be that simply proving oneself as a man isn’t the only consideration in battle, and if you are there in service of a despised political agenda, you’re still not one of the good guys. But there’s something deeper at work, too: an ambivalence about the idea of masculinity and writing as such that runs through the conflicted contemporary debates about men, warfare, heroism and propaganda that now orbit the conflict in Ukraine.

For while Hemingway is long since a byword for “masculine” writing, there’s also a tragic sense in which his work traces the Twentieth-century demise of an older, more warlike form of masculinity, at the hands not of the “endless sallow night of matriarchy” but of technology itself.

War literature prior to the Twentieth century is often unabashedly heroic, even as it documents horrors. Tennyson’s 1855 Charge of the Light Brigade describes an 1854 battlefield in the Crimea in terms both terrible and stirring, then asks:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote in 1942, of his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I when he was just 19. “Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion.” The war that deprived Hemingway of his illusions about immortality also stripped many of confidence in military glory full stop.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, published 1921, draws a contrast between the heroic motto about dying for one’s country, and the reality of dying of poison gas in the trenches. In 1935, Hemingway expressed the same sentiment in an Esquire essay, where he stated that “in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason”.

Suggested reading

The rise of the literary noble savage

By Alex Perez

Even so, to Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was a clear-cut moral issue: a battle between good and evil, man and machine, via the horrifying industrial technologies of Twentieth-century total war. And if, as some historians argue, this conflict was in fact the true start of the Second World War, what started as a battle between man and machine ended with the machine’s victory, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A whole generation, slightly older than I am, grew up in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction: the fear that either (or both) sides in the Cold War might at any moment launch unstoppable nuclear-powered death through the air, obliterating millions in seconds.

Over the same period, conflict between nuclear powers avoided direct confrontation. Armies have shrunk, nationalism has been widely deprecated, and the world (unless you’re unlucky enough to live in a theatre of one of America’s or Russia’s proxy wars) is generally more peaceful than in Hemingway’s youth.

And while that has many upsides, it has also, paradoxically, created disaffected young men. For when national identity is infra dig, and open warfare is discouraged lest it set off nuclear Armageddon, what’s left for young men who thirst for danger and intensity?

Some find it anyway; some, too, also write about it, including my UnHerd colleague Aris Roussinos. As he said in 2014 of his experiences in Syria: “The hidden awful truth about war is how much fun it is.” But for those in the developed West, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most men remain in the “Iron Prison”. Many chafe at it, and seek to reclaim some form of masculinity, but few seem very certain as to how this might be done in practice.

Suggested reading

Lessons from a war zone

By Aris Roussinos

Some, too, write about the stultifying nature of the world in which they remain. Two realist writers emerging from the disaffected online Right are the short story writers “Delicious Tacos” and “Bad Billy Pratt”, both of whom document the nihilistic landscape of contemporary sex relations in an aggressively unsentimental style. And it’s hardly surprising that writers committed to (as Pratt put it to me) “the unfiltered truth” should focus on the sexual anomie of self-absorbed protagonists.

After all, modern life has become — in BAP’s words — “an economic zone arranged much like a work camp”, a regimented place “of incredible ugliness” and “hateful to the raising of boys”. It’s easy to see how, as Pratt himself might conclude, “the only fiction worth writing is incel fiction”. What, in that context, is left but the self, and the sexual warzone?

And with heroism, action or drama in short supply in everyday life, those hungry for intensity must resort to the world of computer gaming — or fantasy writers such as Mike Ma, described as “Chaotic 21st century pastiche of Hemingway, Kierkegaard, Kaczynski, and the guy in your econ class who wears combat boots”; or else the neo-reactionary sci-fi writer “Zero HP Lovecraft”, a “horrorist” whose self-published short story collection sold out in less than 24 hours.

Hemingway began his life in the shadow of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, and finished it in the shadow of Hiroshima. Over the same period, the raw, elemental struggles between man and man, or man and nature, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, grew more attenuated. His literary career was both as a “masculine” writer, but also as an elegy for a world where the conventionally masculine virtues of courage, risk-taking, stoicism and heroism were easily celebrated and widely accepted as culturally essential.

Suggested reading

The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussain

Since his time, the world has retreated steadily from conflict, toward mechanised and then mediated life; a process culminating in the radical safetyism and dematerialised common life of Covid lockdowns, and the online-first social life the pandemic ushered in. And now that we have virtualised social life to the point where any physical violence is foreclosed, even most arguments about masculinity now inevitably take place in the feminine key.

Young men, already restive, are growing mutinous under this regime. The lurid and angry literature emerging captures these men’s ambivalence: sickened by, but also usually still implicated in, the banality and perceived effeminacy of a modern world denuded of both danger and opportunity. We can only speculate on what may happen if (or when) such men leave behind the neutered disaffection off the internet, and start searching en masse for danger and heroism beyond the screen.

“I don’t want you to come,” she told me on the telephone.

“But I’ve had coronavirus recently Daphne. I can help you.”

“Yes, but I don’t want you to see me like this. I want you to come when I’m back to normal. I’ve not told you what happened after I left 16th Searchlight Company.”

I am an oral historian. I turn old women’s stories into books and in the process sometimes I cross the professional line. It is hard not to during a pandemic working with 17 isolated veterans all of whom served in the female army (Auxiliary Territorial Service – ATS) during World War II. The youngest is 96. Our conversations are often the only meaningful communication they have from one day to the next. After pleasantries and a quick health check, I ask these women to channel their younger selves.

Returning to her restorative tonic — the war — puts the mettle back in Daphne’s voice. She is quick to remind me that she only accepts guests when her hair is fresh set and coloured (soft chestnut). “In the army they encouraged us to take care of ourselves, that was very important.”

But taking care of herself in this new ‘war’ has proved almost impossible: cut off, alone and now suffering with Long Covid, Daphne is miserable. “I’m doing my best to stay alive for you. I want to make it to the book launch, but sometimes I wish I wasn’t here.”

Army Girls is my third project involving the extreme elderly and the first written during a pandemic. My newest friends are society’s exceptional outliers, with all the research suggesting that reaching a great age takes much more than good genes. Longevity requires optimism, ambition, and multi-generational friendships. Try retaining just one of those criteria with no technology (is your great-granny on Zoom?) and no visitors, while facing down what might well be your last year on earth.

Between the first waves of Covid-19 I visited my oldest friend, Ann. She is 107, lives in a care home and is (more or less) ‘compos mentis.’ By her own admission things have slipped a bit recently. Being alone hasn’t helped. Ann was born before the start of World War I; she can still recall Union Jacks spread out in her Buckinghamshire garden on Armistice Day, 1918, flirting with communism in the Thirties and counting bacon in World War II, but she has never experienced anything like this pandemic. “I just have to accept it, what choice do I have?”

During last year’s visit, our conversation was monitored (a carer kept guard in the corner) and timed. Ann struggled to hear what I was saying, (masks are deafening when you’re old). She stared blankly at my obligatory disposable apron and muttered “it’s time they uninvented plastic.” Post-vaccine, the process of visiting remains cumbersome. For some it is a deterrent. I am shooed out of communal areas despite swathes of impersonal PPE and a negative test. Ann shrugs, “I am currently working hard on forgetting the last 18 months.” Dig deep and Ann is still there but Covid has diminished her. She’s become the personification of our reduced humanity. She can’t wait to get to the end.

Marino Plata, Ann’s care worker who is full of love and song, shakes his head. “It was too sudden; the lockdowns were too much with too little explanation.” Marino is one of the thousands of experienced health care workers who have noticed an accelerated decline in their elderly residents during successive lockdowns and restrictions. “Ann at least understood what was happening, others didn’t. They were confused and desperately missed their visitors and activities. They died sad.”

Suggested reading

It's not our job to protect the NHS

By Timandra Harkness

Adam Gordon is a Professor of the Care of Older People and President Elect of the British Geriatrics Society. He saw Covid-19 wreak its worst. “At the beginning of the pandemic even for an experienced practitioner like me, I was affected; early on we weren’t sure how to treat patients with the virus. I still have flash backs, I’ll spare you the gruesome details.”

Adam reminds me that when coronavirus first came knocking, Britain was shamefully unprepared. Between 20,000 and 30,000 of our vulnerable elderly died unnecessarily and horribly. This nightmare scenario led to hastily revised practice: better PPE, strict lockdowns, no visitors. Britain could not keep climbing up the Covid-19 league of shame. And sure enough, fewer very old people have subsequently died. But has their last year of life been worth living?

Do not go gentle into that good night. The prophetic words of Dylan Thomas have proved almost impossible to live up in Covid times. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Not a chance if you’ve been locked up in your care home (or your own home), with no visitors and, crucially, no voice on the public stage.

“There’s the tension” admits Professor Gordon, “the competition between protecting people from the virus and their other needs was underestimated. It is nuanced.” And modern debate doesn’t like nuance. I was blocked and shouted down on Twitter by several influencers for querying their calls to extend the lockdown last summer. Too many only see one side of the ‘tension’ the professor talks about. After a terrible start, the restrictions Britain’s elderly had to endure were dehumanising to the point that many no longer wanted to live. ‘Deconditioning’ is the word he uses to describe their accelerated cognitive and physical degeneration.

Suggested reading

The new public health despotism

By Matthew B Crawford

“It’s dreadful to be alone and old,” explained another Anne. She was 96 years old and a former WWII junior commander in the ATS. Like 107-year-old Ann, she too had lived through an era when duty was the nation’s watchword; the press was censored, the people were conscripted, and hundreds of thousands of her generation died. It is that generation who have once more been in the firing line, but this time their duty was to be solitary and still. Pride is harder to wear in private. For the first time Anne watched Remembrance Day in November 2020 on television, rather than celebrating it with friends in her local church. It was a disappointing replacement. She sighed, “I wish someone would rub me out, I wish I could disappear.”

Anne was a Norfolk County Vice President of the Guide Association and mid-pandemic she reckoned that “the reason why Guiding has been so successful is that we were all involved together in our activities. Humans are built to be together.” Anne died in July 2021, most of her last year lived alone.

Professor Gordon admits that data has not been collected to track the unprecedented deconditioning that’s taken place over the last 18 months. Daily we are assailed with graphics charting Covid-19 cases and death rates, but there is no equivalent measure for the impact of loneliness, suicidal thought, feelings of abandonment and physical deterioration that the restrictions have induced in the extreme elderly. As 107-year-old Ann pointed out “I have terrible forgettery, this won’t be remembered.” Perhaps society is banking on that. When judgement day comes it will ask whether our very oldest, most precious citizens were ‘protected’ from Coronavirus. But who will ask if their last year (or two?) was worth being saved for?

Public health concerns over the spread of the virus have seen the human right to safety bulldoze other basic needs. Rectifying this imbalance is crucial as a second Covid-19 winter looms with large sections of the public already demanding increased restrictions. What will they mean for the extreme elderly? The average care home inhabitant is over 85, with a life expectancy of just two-and-a-half years, many won’t live to see the end of the winter. Has anybody asked them what they want? Do we really want to condemn yet more to a lonely death?

Suggested reading

Covid safetyism has gone mad

By Adam King

When I met her in the summer of 2020 Beryl may well have been the last ATS WWII Physical Training instructor alive and aged 99, with swollen legs in a heat wave and a pandemic, life was hard work. She worried about the modern world — “I think there’s more wrong today. It’s harder for you lot.” Things were certainly harder for Beryl who was struck by the contradictory game of national statistics: “In the Second World War in order to win they didn’t talk about death tolls, but in this current battle it is all we focus on.”

She wasn’t killed by Covid-19, but in February this year Beryl died, and her close friend sent me a message: “She rarely complained and she didn’t give up, but sadly, her last year was more like imprisonment since she was unable to see her friends thanks to coronavirus.” Like so many others, Beryl’s last months were collateral damage in Britain’s war against the pandemic.

As an NHS practitioner, Professor Adam Gordon has lived both sides of the problem. Given all he’s been through I’m embarrassed by my visible emotion during our conversation. In less than 12 months five women I work with have died. I managed to say goodbye to one and I’ve been to just one non-virtual funeral. The Professor confirms that Britain is sitting on a pandemic of grief; hundreds of thousands of people could not see those they loved most before they died and then were unable to give them an affirming send off among friends and family.

It is not just old people who have experienced depression; minus our elders, Britain has struggled with feelings of guilt and loss.

Yesterday Daphne, one of the 17 women featured in Army Girls who we met at the beginning of this article, left me a message. “I can’t get an appointment with my GP. I can’t work the new system.” But she has not given up. “When I get through, I am going to ask them to give me a pain shot so I can come to the book launch.” Many of her contemporaries haven’t been able to ‘rage rage against the dying of the light’ and aged 98, a Covid-19 survivor who is fully vaccinated, Daphne is determined to be the exception.

Unless, that is, a fresh wave of winter restrictions pin her and us down. Then we will need to push back and ask: who is really afraid? The very old? Or those seeking to control them?

An Evening with the Army Girls is at 6.30pm, 10^th November, National Army Museum, London. Tickets are £10. 

Army Girls: The secrets and stories of military service from the final few women who fought in World War II by Dr. Tessa Dunlop is available to pre-order here. 

Or so Khruschev hoped. But Stalin, it turned out, could not be so easily forgotten. This June, Russians named him the “most notable” figure in history for the 10th year running; and now, a mere two months later, a new poll by the the Levada Center has found that nearly half of Russians want a Stalin statue to celebrate the USSR’s victory over the Nazis — a figure that has nearly doubled in the past ten years. Surprisingly, this is largely driven by people under the age of 40, among whom support for a monument has quintupled over the past decade.

Around this point in articles on Stalin it is customary to observe that the Russians, unlike the Germans, have not reckoned with their dark past. But this comparison is not exactly apples with apples. If Stalin had killed himself in a bunker surrounded by Karl May novels after starting and losing a war that had led to the collapse of the Soviet regime then nobody would be talking about erecting a monument to him today. But Stalin won — beating Hitler, establishing a vast empire and making the USSR respected and feared in the process.

In fact, if Stalin is on the verge of making a comeback, then he is about the last significant figure from Russia’s past to do so. This is a country exceedingly keen on resurrection: it is, after all, the land that produced Nikolai Fedorov, a philosopher who believed that it was mankind’s duty to reconstitute the dead of all past generations, atom by atom, that they might live again and colonise space.

Indeed, I can’t think of another country that has destroyed or suppressed so much only to bring back so much. When Gorbachev implemented glasnost in the 1980s, the response of many was not to look ahead but backwards. Authors and artists who had been memory-holed were rediscovered and republished, while the crimes of Stalin, buried by Khruschev, were exposed. Suddenly it was possible to read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov without fear of punishment; it is no coincidence that one of Russia’s main human rights organisations, founded during this act of unearthing, is called “Memorial”.

Then Russia’s imperial past was exhumed. Nikolai II, the last Tsar, was dug up months before the USSR collapsed. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg once again, Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod and countless streets reclaimed their pre-Revolutionary names. Monumental buildings destroyed by the Soviets reappeared as shiny replicas: I vividly recall my first day in Moscow in 1997, walking down the street to the school where I was going to be teaching English to New Russians, when suddenly I saw looming ahead of me the golden dome and concrete shell of the Church of Christ the Saviour, reborn on the exact spot where the original had stood before the Stalinist regime blew it up. This was not the only cloned old building in the area: half a mile away, the gates to Red Square which I thought were ancient turned out to be a replica, as was the nearby Kazan Cathedral.

New monuments commemorating figures from history also appeared. The most notorious was Zurab Tsereteli’s enormous statue of Peter the Great standing on a toy boat in the Moskva River; the story goes that he had originally pitched it as a sculpture of Columbus to the authorities in NYC, but when they rejected (presumably on the grounds that it was terrible) he simply placed a different head on the body and had his good friend the Mayor of Moscow commission it instead.

Later, Tsar Alexander II got a monument in the grounds of the church of Christ the Saviour, while Dostoevsky got a giant statue in front of the Lenin Library in central Moscow — thus the great critic of revolutionaries got to cast his shadow over a building named after the greatest revolutionary of all. Meanwhile, the last Tsar and (most of) his family were buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 1998, seven years after their exhumation. They were canonised two years later.

Yet even as Russia was resurrecting symbols of its Tsarist and Orthodox past, so Soviet elements were already creeping back in. A monument to the Second World War-era General Zhukov was unveiled a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 1995. When Putin became president five years later, he almost immediately brought back the Soviet national anthem, albeit commissioning new lyrics from the 87-year-old children’s author Sergei Mikhalkov (who had written the original words for Stalin in 1944, and a second set in 1977).

At the eternal flame by the Kremlin Walls, the “hero city” of Volgograd was commemorated by its old name, Stalingrad. By the time I needed to get a police report for my US green card application in 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, first head of the Cheka, was waiting to greet me at Petrovka 38, headquarters of the Moscow police. There were also more innocuous manifestations of this fascination with the past — a TV channel called “Nostalgia” played back-to-back broadcasts from the USSR, while restaurants modeled on Soviet-era canteens were serving up compote and bowls of borscht.

More from this author

The War on Terror returns home

By Daniel Kalder

No doubt this is all a response to the war on memory and culture that was waged by the Soviet elites against their own people for much of the duration of the USSR’s existence. But it is also the case that the Soviets themselves had a complicated relationship with what had preceded them and were also quite keen on resurrecting selected bits of it. To begin with, they would not let their founder die — rather they preserved his body in a glass box, and spent decades declaring “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” And while the likes of Vladimir Mayakovsky composed avant-garde poems addressed to readers living in the future, the art that would dominate — Socialist Realism — owed much more to the 19^th century novels and poems and paintings the regime’s leaders had enjoyed in their youth.

Yes, the Soviets destroyed a lot of churches (and other religious buildings), but they also assiduously maintained the cathedrals inside the Kremlin, preserved the painted interiors inside Saint Basil’s and collected the finest examples of icon painting in a dedicated museum in the capital of world communism. During World War II, Stalin rehabilitated Tsarist era generals such as Kutuzov and Bagrationov to inspire the war effort against Hitler. Post-war, the Soviets reconstructed historic buildings that that had been destroyed by the Nazis, preserved entire villages as open-air museums, published scholarly and popular collections of folk tales, and even formed “folk orchestras” to keep alive traditional songs. Thus, the new civilisation was obsessed with and beholden to the civilisation that had proceeded it, (although these acts of recreation also entailed mutation, needless to say).

More from this author

What America can learn from Russia

By Daniel Kalder

Meanwhile Putin, now that he is ageing out of posing shirtless with tigers, has taken to penning long historical essays which are published on Kremlin.ru. In Russia, the past is always coming back. Viewed in that context, it’s as if the rising support for some sort of formal commemoration of Stalin is the terminal point of that urge towards resurrection, the last stage in a process that they can’t quite pull the trigger on.

You can understand why: Stalin was an evil, murderous bastard. But it’s important to realise that many Russians have reckoned with this: the Levada report notes that Stalin’s “repressions, executions and military blunders are well-known” and that “only a small number of Russians” would “completely deny these facts”. But Russia is also no stranger to monsters. Ivan the Terrible — who received his first monument in 2016 — murdered his son, murdered princes, slaughtered priests, massacred the population of Novgorod, implemented a reign of terror and invented the oprichniki, the prototypical secret police organisation. But “terrible” is a mistranslation of grozny, which in Ivan’s case might be more accurately rendered as “formidable” or “awesome.”

Suggested reading

How I fell for the USSR

By Julie Burchill

Now that the generation directly oppressed by Stalin is dying out, and a new generation raised on tales of heroism in World War II has come of age, it would seem that increasing numbers of Russians are coming to the conclusion that Stalin, like Ivan before him, was just one of those rulers who had to do terrible things to achieve great things. In fact, if you really want to see a monument to Stalin you don’t need to wait; according to Der Spiegel there are already quite a few busts and statues knocking about — they just tend to be out of the way. A Stalin in mosaic form very nearly made it into the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, which was inaugurated last year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Included in the original plans for the interior décor, he was ultimately dropped.

For now, however, Stalin lacks a grandiose monument. Perhaps he will never get one. But the truth is, Stalin began his long comeback during Glasnost, when the archives were opened; he returned with his victims. From that moment on it became impossible to keep him buried. And so, despite Krushchev’s best efforts, the old man’s back again — whether we like it or not.