An Apology, An Apologia And an Actual Example.

All I can manage this week, sorry.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer a full-length essay this week. I was unpleasantly ill for most of last week, and just about managed to crawl to the desk to do the final edits and press the Continue button on Wednesday before flopping into bed. More recently, I was traveling for several days, and I’m frankly still feeling rather fragile. And then finally, I drew the Hermit twice in a row earlier this week in my daily Tarot Card reading, and yes it’s telling me to calm down and withdraw into myself a bit. I get the message. But at that point the Protestant Work Ethic popped its head round the door with a disapproving look on its face. “You can’t just do nothing” it said, disgustedly. So the solution I negotiated with the PWE was that, after three and a half years, more than two hundred posts and umpteen hundred thousand words, I’d write a very short article just reminding newer readers, especially, what the purpose of this site is, and why that purpose makes it relatively unusual.

OK, the title of this site is Trying to Understand the World. It is not Things I Hate and People I would Like to see Die, it is not Which Side I Support, or What Governments Should Do About X or Y, it is not I Don’t Know Much About This But Someone Should Do Something or Here is the Unknown Conspiracy behind Every Crisis. That is to say that I am trying to make use of what I have seen and done and think I have learned, over fifty years, to try to shed a little light on of some of what’s happening in the world today, what it means and how it might develop, and so reduce the general level of confusion and improve overall understanding a little bit. That’s a modest objective, and some people at least seem to find it’s a useful one, but it does mean I occupy something of a micro-niche in the great sprawling carnivorous jungle swamp that is Internet writing. The approach, as I often say, comes from engineering. Politics, like engineering, is about forces, bodies, stresses and types of materials and energies. Politics, like engineering, is about broad tendencies rather than specific predictions. Just as an engineer can say “this bridge isn’t safe, it will fall down before too long,’ it is possible, with experience, to look at a new government, a peace treaty or a ceasefire and say the same thing.

Politics has rules and it has standard processes. Things that have been tried before will be tried again, and in many cases what didn’t work before won’t work now, although that won’t stop politicians trying. Pieces of pragmatic advice (“when you’re in a hole, stop digging”) never lose their pertinence but have to be re-learned by every generation. The overall result is that it’s often possible to look at some situation in the world, and think to yourself: This seems to be following a well-known model and progression, and from general principles I think I can see what’s going on here, and where things might end up. The requirements of course are that you have a least a minimal current understanding of the situation, and that you have enough general background in political processes and crises as a whole. This is why you won’t find me pontificating about Venezuela, where I have no background at all, or Thailand and Cambodia where what I used to know is badly out of date.

Needless to say, this is not how most writers on the Internet see their role, and that’s why I want to distinguish the way in which I see mine. But then my professional background is in two areas—government and academia—which are fairly Darwinian, in the sense that if you don’t know what you are talking about, no-one listens to you. That said, what I consider to be the problem for many other writers working in the same area is less expertise as such—since there are usually some people with the relevant background—but rather the failure to distinguish between explanation and justification, or between analysis and advocacy, or even to recognise that such a distinction is necessary. Now there are entirely acceptable reasons for advocacy, and circumstances where it’s appropriate, but the problem arises when it’s confused with analysis, and often presented as if it were. The result is that much of the coverage of Ukraine or Gaza is at the level of the sports-fan site, and whilst you can deduce broadly what objectively happened (as in other contexts you can discover who won the game), it’s all wrapped up in cheerleading, and in bad-mouthing of the opposition. And if you’ve never been professionally involved in Russia/Ukraine issues, or questions of the use of modern military technology by large-scale forces, or you have no experience on the ground in the Middle East, then you’re exactly in the position of the sports fan who’s never played professionally, cheering for their side on the Internet. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, and there is room for everything, but it’s not the part of the Internet I choose to inhabit.

One result is that much writing on these two crises is incestuous and repetitive, citing the same sources and repeating the same stories, but also endlessly re-using the same vocabulary. This, it seems to me, is as much a matter of self-protection as anything: it’s necessary to understand and follow the rules established by the side you have chosen, so as not to be suspected of harbouring a secret sympathy for the Enemy. So it’s obligatory, apparently, to refer to Russia’s “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine in 2022 if you are to avoid attracting criticism by one side, although for the life of me I cannot understand why, since it was obviously not the case. And all references to the period 2014-22 are excluded because mentioning them would be an unfriendly act. Many articles I come across on the Internet actually seem nervously defensive rather than informative: trying above all to persuade readers of their ideological purity, lest they be suspected of a sneaking sympathy for the other side. And when you don’t do this, readers become nervous and uneasy. So I have written articles saying that a Russian victory in Ukraine is inevitable and the consequences for the West will be severe, which apparently code me as “pro-Russian.” But I have also written articles saying that Russia will find the end of the war very problematic, and will probably not get the pan-European security treaty it wants. That is coded as “anti-Russian.” So whose side am I on?

That kind of question is only possible, it seems to me, for people who have never learned to think properly, or who have long since forgotten. It is the result of pressure to elide distinctions between fact and opinion, such that your team is not only objectively winning, but its cause is and always was entirely just, everything its spokeshumans say is true, and all its leaders are saints. The result is writing which is useless as anything else but sermons addressed to the already converted. Let’s assume that you are an intelligent and fair-minded reader, tired of the falsifications of the Grauniad or the New York Times, and wanting to find out more about Ukraine. So you start paging through a few alternative sites and indeed this looks refreshingly different, until you come across phrases like “Ukro-Nazis” and “Banderite regime”, your own national leaders described as “war criminals,” and your own countries described as “lapdogs,” At which point you stop reading and go back to the Grauniad.

Because of course such sites are not trying to inform, still less to convert. They are engaged in a ruthless competition for clicks and money from the same limited audience, and they hope to obtain them by displaying the most unbending loyalty possible to the party line, and shouting insults as loudly as possible. After all, if you are, say, the proprietor of a small Internet site writing about world events and dependent on subscriptions, how are you going to mark yourself out on the subject of Gaza, which, for commercial reasons, you can’t avoid addressing? You don’t know the region, you don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, you don’t even know enough about the local media to know what to read in translation. Your grasp of military technology is fragmentary and you don’t know anything about urban combat. The fantastically complex political structure of the region is beyond you. So what do you do? You shout. You try to shout louder, make more extreme accusations, more extreme demands, and use fewer nuances and more obscenities than any of your competitors. The result is a phenomenon comparable in some ways to trafficking amphetamines and cocaine, where people pay to be brought into a state of anger and over-excitement. Because in reality, just understanding things isn’t very exciting, and indeed can make the world seem a duller and less exciting place. Anger and the sense of moral superiority that it engenders are much more exciting. It’s surprising how often I’ve come across people who simply wave away shelves of studies, decades of research, battalions of witnesses, and the lived experiences of entire communities, because they prefer to stick with the received ideas and emotions that they picked up twenty years before at University, and not get out of line with the opinions of group they identify with, and which still makes them satisfactorily angry. So it has to be accepted that not everyone is equally interested in trying to understand the world.

I was going to stop there, but I actually felt a bit better this morning, so I thought I’d add one short example to show the difference between analysis and advocacy (or abuse or anger, since they seem to be much the same thing.) So let’s try to answer a simple question related to Gaza: why has the international campaign been so totally ineffective in changing the behaviour of the government of Israel, and even its western supporters? Now note that this question, which has a straightforward answer, requires no special understanding or knowledge except a familiarity with how political campaigns succeed and fail, and how governments deal with them. Since I have both, I feel qualified to comment.

To begin with, of course, some would deny that the campaign has been a failure. Indeed, I’ve seen many self-caressing articles expressing wonderment and delight at the millions of demonstrators in the streets. But this is the typical amateur error of confusing input with output. No matter how many zillion protesters there are, the effect on governments has been little to nothing. This seems strange, and indeed it is strange, given that any competently-organised campaign would have achieved much more. What does a generic competent campaign look like, then?

First it has a clear objective, which is simple and which is at least theoretically achievable. In this case, it has to be the end of the killing and the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from Gaza. Second, this has to be encapsulated in a discourse with slogans that are clear and understandable, and that everyone can identify with. So let’s agree on “stop the slaughter in Gaza.” Demonstrations in national capitals could also ask governments to “stop allowing the slaughter,” and to put pressure on Israel in all sorts of ways. Third, slogans have to be supported by other media to reinforce the message: there’s no shortage of photos and videos of dead children, and to the question “what do you mean by the slaughter?” there are libraries full of grisly evidence. And finally, in your discourse and method, you need to encourage participation from as wide a section of the population as possible, using themes that bring people together.

Above all, there is one fundamental tactical political point: you have to impose your discourse, your framework, your vocabulary on the problem, and not let the other guy do so. That keeps the government on the back foot, responding all the time to questions like “why won’t you stop the slaughter?” and having to find ways of justifying themselves.

Now, all that is fairly elementary. But have you noticed anything like that happening at all? I haven’t. Literally none of these sensible and productive steps have been taken at any noticeable scale. The amateurism and incompetence are stupefying, unless, as I’ll discuss briefly later, there is an ulterior motive. No, demonstrators have been told to wave Palestinian flags, and to chant “Free Palestine.” I’ve watched heartbreaking videos of parents burying their children retweeted under that rubric: “Free Palestine.”

Opponents have therefore auto-castrated themselves from the start by accepting the discourse of Israel and its supporters, that this is a war between “Israel” and “Palestine” and their respective armies, in which civilians are unfortunately dying. Moreover, whereas “Defend Palestine” might have been (barely) an effective slogan, “Free Palestine” is a slogan which has literally nothing to do with the current slaughter. The “Palestine” cited here is not Gaza, nor even Gaza and the West Bank. In this context, “Palestine” means the whole of the British Mandate Territory, including what is now the State of Israel. Thus “freedom”, from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea, means the forcible dismantlement of the State of Israel and the expulsion of its Jewish community. And whilst that is never going to happen in any reasonable timescale, even if it did, in a decade or two, how is it supposed to stop the suffering and death in Gaza today? Obviously, it isn’t. So the Opposition’s pitch to those shocked and disgusted by Israeli actions in Gaza is to say, “here’s a Palestinian flag, come with us and demonstrate for the end of Israel and the dismantlement of the Jewish state.” That’s going to bring out the crowds.

Of course, this appeals to a certain edgy, transgressive tendency in the West that likes to talk abut Israel as a “colony” or its army as an “occupation force” and its citizens as “settlers.” Indeed, when you see a publication put “Israel” in inverted commas you know you’re in that self-consciously transgressive space. But so what? How does that help anyone? All it does is to make the lives of western governments easier. Few are enthusiastic supporters of Israel: most see Israel as the lesser evil compared to a militant fundamentalist Islamic movement bent on Israel’s destruction, and chaos in the region. The fact is that arresting “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators is a hell of a lot easier than arresting “Stop the Slaughter” campaigners, and opponents of Israel’s actions have thoughtfully handed all the cards to the bad guys.

But surely, you say, what about all these accusations of genocide? Well, that’s another unforced error that plays into the strengths of the government of Israel and its allies. Why? Well I could write far more about this than I have time to write or you would have patience to read, but let’s just stipulate that (1) genocide is at best a flaky and incoherent concept, based on outdated racial science (2) it’s a crime necessarily committed by a named person, that can only really be examined in a court, with reams of complex and often contradictory evidence (personal experience) (3) convictions for genocide are almost impossible without cheating and making stuff up and (4) an immensely technical and hard-to-prove crimes has degenerated into a term of abuse wielded by all against all.

The Genocide Convention is a Cold War document, originally supported by wealthy right-wing anti-communist exiles in the US. By making signatory nations responsible for preventing and punishing it within their jurisdiction, the expectation was the the Soviet Union could be accused of failing in its duty through the movement of population groups after 1945 and the changing of national boundaries. (A great many humanitarian good-thinkers went along with the idea as well, of course.) But genocide as described here is not actually a crime, but the aggravation of a crime, and it requires proving that named individuals have carried out, or directly ordered entities that they effectively control to carry out, one or more of a number of activities with the intention of destroying “in whole or in part” a religious, racial, ethnic or national group. Since there is no agreement on what “a part” means, since it’s not clear that any of these named groups have an objective existence anyway, and since trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the contents of somebody’s mind is, well, tricky, it’s not surprising that genocide convictions are almost impossible if you stick to the rules.

But the result, of course, is to make a free present of this complexity to defenders of Israel. Well, says one avuncular, chin-stroking lawyer, it’s all very difficult, you see, and there’s this case and that case, and Intent is very problematic, and here the judges said, and of course social media is not evidence, so in the end, well, I’m not at all sure genocide could be established. So nothing to see here. The reality, of course, is that the evidence for Crimes Against Humanity is overwhelming, and the threshold (“widespread and systematic”) has obviously been reached some time ago. (The ICC has recognised these issues in its indictments.) But that’s rather become lost in the chants of Genocide! Genocide! by people who assume, as they often did in the past, that their moral fervour can somehow be translated into automatic convictions by an obedient Court.

Is this just a stunning level of incompetence? Or are there other issues? Well, on the one hand, there are Islamist groups who would see the partial or total destruction of Gaza as a reasonable price to pay for the advancement of their own agendas involving the re-establishment of the Caliphate. There are eschatological tendencies in some versions of Islam (for example that which influenced the Islamic State) that take seriously prophecies of final apocalyptic battles for Jerusalem leading to the return of the Mahdi. But as always it’s hard to know how far their practical influence goes, and how far, if at all, it affects the behaviour of states in the region..

It’s much easier to understand the self-castration of western, and especially European, political movements. For decades now, Palestine has been a vaguely-defined feel-good cause for parts of the European “Left.” I remember seeing yellow and black Palestinian scarves on sale at left-wing functions at least a generation ago. Because the Palestinians are weak, and have little capacity to influence how the West sees and treats them, they are relegated to the status of pets, endlessly cooed over but not given any practical help. Indeed, it’s arguable that 7 October 2023 was a big disruptive shock for parts of the European Left as it turned out that the pets were capable of exercising agency themselves. Does the “Palestine” lobby actually want the suffering to end? Well, given the way they’re acting, you could be forgiven for thinking not.

There, I’m sliding into speculation, and I’ll stop. But I don’t think anyone with experience of running political campaigns, or resisting them from within government, would argue with much of the foregoing analysis. And that’s what I mean by analysis: it’s an attempt to answer the question of why popular western opposition to the slaughter in Gaza has been so ineffective. I may be right (I think I am) but in any event that’s the way I intend to keep writing.

Meanwhile, another Paracetamol, and I’ll see you at greater length next week. Oh and yes, I almost forgot.

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And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.