The Long Run.

The future belongs to them.

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In my last essay, I set out some examples of the failure of our western political elites and their advisers and parasites to understand recent events. This week I want to discuss one of the reasons for this failure, and why, for that matter, critics of western governments are often just as confused themselves.

I will talk about Time, and especially our culture’s relationship to it, and to its meaningful passage. In that cryptic phrase, I suggest that our modern western culture, uniquely so far as I know, gives no larger significance to the passing of time, or thinks it leads towards or away from anything. All our cultural pressures are towards immediacy, instant gratification and short-term maximisation of financial or political gains. We scarcely understand now what the long term is, or how situations typically develop over time, and we are “surprised” by world events, not just because we make no effort to understand their origins, but also because the very concept of long-term strategy and planning no longer forms part of our intellectual culture. So when the “unexpected” happens, we are apt to try to find explanations for it derived from popular culture memes of master-plans and hidden conspiracies, because we don’t understand actual how actual long-term thinking and implementation work.

In one of my first essays, I looked at some of the broader historical and social reasons why the modern west finds the longer-term so difficult to understand, and I won’t repeat everything here. But I’ll try to explain why the meaningful passage of time is now such a difficult concept for us, then look briefly at examples (that you may find surprising) of successful approaches to the long term.

Until very recently, the passage of time has always had significance. Sometimes, time was the working-out of pre-ordained plans, sometimes it was endless cyclic repetition, sometimes it was progressive decline from a Golden Age, sometimes it was a teleological progression towards a final destination and the end of Time itself. The Christian myth is of an original Fall, of redemption, and progress towards a Last Judgement, all of which took place in Time, and which would conclude with the abolition of Time itself. Every day, the world moved closer to its predestined end.

God is working his purpose out
as year succeeds to year:
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near….

as we used to sing when I was a child. And around the world today, billions of people still believe in variants of this idea.

But the idea of the meaningful passage of time is not, of course, restricted to religion. Since the nineteenth century, most people have believed in the possibility and desirability of creating a better world than their current one. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to remember that ours is the first era for two centuries where parents expect their children to have a harder life than they did. Fifty years ago, it was generally accepted that governments had a duty to continue to make life better for their citizens: not through flying cars and other pop-culture symbols, but through practical measures to improve health, education and personal and social security. The idea that governments might choose not to do this would have seemed strange: the idea that they would actively seek to make the lives of their citizens worse would have seemed incomprehensible. As it began to sink into the popular mind that this was in fact the case, the Punk movement began to talk of a country with “no future,” and then thinkers such as Franco Berardi and later Mark Fisher developed the concept of “after the future”, when days would still pass, and events would still occur, but where there was literally nothing better, or even bearable to look forward to.

Of course, like all generalisations, this one is subject to qualifications. Some of the most important nations of the world (China and Russia come to mind) show a real determination to make the future of their citizens better than the present. In both cases there is also a profound historical dynamic at work, as the leaderships of the two countries see them taking the more important and influential place in the world to which they think they are entitled. And even in the West, which is where most of the negativity and misery about the future is concentrated today, the negative attitude developed fairly recently, and the reasons for its ascendancy are quite specific, as we shall see in a moment.

After all, it was not so long ago that popular culture in the West actually emphasised the longer term. The middle class preached the virtues of “saving for the future” and fustigated both the aristocracy and the working class for their allegedly frivolous behaviour with money. The family firm across generations, the long-term savings scheme, 99-year leases on property, the trees planted for grandchildren, even the construction of buildings intended to last more than a generation or two, all indicated a belief in an essentially stable society where investment today would bring benefits later. In my youth, children were told to get “qualifications” which might lead them to a ”good job,” an argument which would seem incomprehensible today. Whilst this could produce stultifying conformity (the man who spent his entire working life in the same office) it also demonstrated a confidence that made planning and investment for the future seem natural. The years spent qualifying as a doctor could lead to a long and valuable career as a family physician and pillar of the local community, when there were still local communities. The kind of progression lived by CP Snow’s hero Lewis Eliot in the Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels (1940-70), from bright grammar school boy through the Law, Academia and Government, reflected what was actually possible at the time (and indeed reproduced elements of Snow’s own life). Even today, many parents begin savings plans for their children to mature when they are adults, in the hope that there will be something to spend the money on, or indeed that there will still be money.

But for the most part, we no longer think like that. Indeed, we seem to be veering in the same direction as some conflict and post-conflict societies, where the economy almost always transitions away from long-term to short-term profits. The teacher of English becomes a taxi-driver or a fixer for foreign journalists, the legitimate businessman a smuggler. Notoriously, in Afghanistan farmers moved from cultivating wheat to cultivating poppy, because it was quick to grow and promised big profits, when you could not be sure whether your village would be there, or even if you would be alive, in a year’s time.

It’s not too great a stretch of the imagination to suggest that we are seeing a minor key version of that in the West today. Why, after all, invest in training and education for a job that soon may not exist, in an industry that may simply fold up? Why choose expensive medical training when everything may soon be done by machines? For that matter, why bother to become an expert musician when music will soon be produced completely by machines, and there won’t even be a need for conductors? As I’ve suggested, the West is increasingly consuming itself, its past and its culture, as much as it is recycling everything that can be sold for a quick profit. But why is this, when it was not so even a few generations ago? If we can answer that question we will also, perhaps, begin to appreciate why it is so hard for modern western culture to understand the mentality of those who think beyond the next five minutes. I believe there are two principal reasons.

The first is relatively uncontroversial in itself, though I don’t think its implications have necessarily all been thought through. The almost-terminal financialisation of western economies today is the ultimate by-product of the search for instant gratification that has been with us since the 1960s. But it has been given a veneer of intellectual respectability by theorists claiming that there is an actual thing called “the Market”, which automatically and optimally allocates resources in ways that we can never understand, if only we let it. No-one has ever seen this beast and no-one ever will (it is a secular form of Divine Grace, after all) but here is the enabling myth that makes short-term thinking not only acceptable, but actually desirable. If the market is perfect, then there is no need to look beyond the next five minutes, and planning of any kind undermines the perfection of the Market’s operations. Whatever happens was supposed to happen, and represents the best outcome that could have been hoped for. Offshoring your car industry must have been the right thing to do because that’s what the Market wanted. How do we know that? Because it’s what happened, and, after all, private companies are themselves only blind servants of the Market, who cannot decide anything themselves. (David Hume would have something to say about the distinction between Is and Ought here, I imagine.)

The egoistic Liberalism that has dominated our societies for the last generation or more has actually reinforced these tendencies, if that were actually necessary. When personal short-term economic advantage rules everything, then its overall effect is inevitably negative, or even suicidal, for the economy as a whole. However, there is no collective capacity to understand that. Closing factories and reducing R and D spending makes short-term economic sense to those who take the decisions, and among those who don’t take the decisions there is no coherent economic theory to explain why it’s a bad idea, since that requires understanding of the long term, and of the principle of the collective interest. But looting the assets of a company for which you won’t be working in five years’ time is in fact entirely rational behaviour if you accept certain prior assumptions. As a consequence, western decision-makers and pundits find themselves completely unable to understand what has been going on in, say China, for the last generation, and, where they deign to notice it, they imagine that the negative consequences for the West can be avoided by short-term gimmicks such as sanctions and tariffs. Even when they talk about “rebuilding” this or that capability, usually through tricks such as tax reliefs, it is clear they have no real idea what they are talking about.

But the effects of this ignorance go beyond just the economy, and help to shape an entire way of thinking about the world, which discounts and downplays longer-term initiatives of any kind. We can only do what we can imagine doing, and the necessary intellectual habits and disciplines for that on any scale and over any extended period have atrophied almost completely. Thus, in the case of Ukraine, it is imagined that if money is made available and orders are promised, the magic of the Market will ensure that everything necessary (whatever that is exactly, don’t ask us) will automatically become available, as defence and high-technology companies pivot instantly in response to market pressures. By extension, all this news about high-technology defence equipment coming out of Russia and China must be wrong, or at least exaggerated, since those countries have state-owned armaments industries, which by definition cannot respond so quickly to market signals.

The second, more speculative, explanation has to do with the way that politics and what passes for intellectual life in the West has developed over the last generation. Again, aggressive Liberal individualism is at the basis of it, but in a more complex fashion. I’ve already noted that previous societies, and many non-western ones even today, have a sense of the meaningful passage of time, and the possibility of a better future. Without such an orientation the idea of positive planning for the long-term is essentially meaningless, since the future can only be like the present, or worse. And this is the direction in which western political systems have increasingly moved since the late 1970s, the Anglo-Saxons as always in the lead. The most that politicians these days can promise is to try to find a way of slowing or possibly arresting an inevitable decline in employment, living standards, education and healthcare, in practice usually by sacrificing the interests of ordinary people to the interest of elites. But this defeatist mentality of learned helplessness—which would astonish the Chinese or the Russians, and many other countries—must have come from somewhere. Where did our culture learn to be helpless then? I think it’s a curious combination of the indirect influence of some modern philosophers, and the abandonment by the Left of mass politics and its move to the politics of micro-grievance. (The two are of course linked.)

I’ve often though that Keynes’s jibe about “practical” men being the slave of some defunct economist could be greatly extended: after all he did add that “(m)admen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” This is as true in politics and society as anywhere else. When I was young, hardly anyone had actually read Marx, still less other Marxist theorists, but the political climate of the time was saturated in second and third-hand ideas about an actual future drawn ultimately from Marx, whether they were seen as promises or threats.

The move of the Left away from the politics of class to the politics of individual grievance, which we won’t go through yet again here, was also a move away from the politics of collective action towards a better future to the politics of individual complaint against the present. (The Left effectively abolished the Future, and one could even argue that it embraced the Past in its electoral programmes of the last generation.)

Such a surrender, born of the cynical belief that after the end of the Cold War the Left should just lie down in front of the capitalist steamroller because it had no choice, also found an intellectual justification in what Anglo-Saxons (but not the French) call “French Theory.” Insofar as the term means anything, it refers to Anglo-Saxon readings, or misreadings, of the work of deconstructionist critics: principally, but not only, of Michel Foucault. Now I’ve defended Foucault and other thinkers of his generation in the past as primarily purveyors of common sense, albeit dressed up in typically French playful irony and shocking paradox. But not only do people persist in reading Foucault with utter seriousness, they pick out individual things from his vast and varied oeuvre and construct entire belief systems around them.

Foucault said an enormous amount, often contradicting himself, and often deliberately seeking to shock, but he certainly said on several occasions that “everything is power.” Every human relationship , every professional structure, all social organisation is based on power, and the mildest expression of power (a child being sent to bed for example) is simply an attenuated version of the worst type of threats and violence. Of course if everything is power, then nothing is, but my concern is less with the coherence of this type of thinking as such, and more where it leads. Why?

Well, because Foucault is believed to have said that power is an eternal and inescapable element of the human condition, no matter how disguised. Famously, he made no real distinction between public executions in the eighteenth century and modern prisons as expressions of power. Now as a number of critics have pointed out, this is a deeply conservative, even reactionary attitude, because it suggests that there is no point in even seeking to construct a better world, or in collective action of any kind. Structures of power will simply be replaced by other, less visible structures. It’s power all the way down. Cooperation, idealism, common purpose, sacrifice and altruism are at bottom just expressions of power. Justice, said Foucault on occasions, has no inherent content: it’s just an expression of power, and those who seek justice are in fact only seeking to capture and use the structures of power for their purposes.

Now there’s an uncomfortable amount of truth in that last statement, especially for the Social Justice fraternity. But if you push the idea too far, and say that all those who ever have striven, or ever will strive for justice are interested only in power, then you not only commit a historical nonsense, you foreclose any attempt at improving the human condition, ever. A strange position for those notionally of the Left to take. But of course it leads ineluctably to the kind of politics we have today: everything is power, and politics is simply the scramble to possess as much of it as possible. Nothing can ever change, nothing can ever improve, so let’s fight over what’s left.

The traditional Left introduced measures to combat discrimination targeted at objectively existing problems. Several generations ago, western governments introduced laws and procedures to make it illegal to discriminate in areas such as employment of the basis of sex or ethnicity. Subsequently, many countries introduced minimum wage legislation, and compulsory minimum conditions of work, backed up by regular inspections. These were actual responses to actual problems, and their success or otherwise could be measured.

What passes for the Left today no longer tries to address real problems, but purely conceptual ones. Its enemies are abstractions such as “racism”, “sexism” and, of course, “fascism,” which cannot be seen or measured, and which are ultimately based on subjective reactions (“that statement made me feel insecure.”) It follows that such enemies can never be beaten, because every time some alleged manifestation of an -ism is destroyed, a more subtle and deeply-hidden, version will take its place. In which case, of course, what’s the point, and why bother? Well, Foucault would have replied, because the discourse of anti-ism (and “justice” in general) acts as a mechanism for making certain people powerful. They are not powerful in curing alleged problems (these problems being insoluble by definition), but through dictating the understanding of the problems and monopolising the imagined solutions, as well as fighting vicious internal battles for power and control. And indeed, that is what politics largely consists of today: ferocious competition to occupy and dominate the Grievance Space.

In such circumstances, any kind of long-term thinking is pointless, because the situation can never change. Every apparent victory just means a strategic regroupment by those in power, and political activity consists in endless futile“struggles”. But of course these endless struggles provide careers, funding and a mechanism for disciplining supporters considered to be insufficiently committed (that was George Orwell clearing his throat.) Indeed, the mechanisms of politics today are set up for constant failure: you cannot “fight” against “marginalisation,” or “stigmatisation,” or “hatred,” or “for” “justice” or “inclusivity” or any other abstraction. You can, of course, take action to help individual people and groups in specific situations, but that’s very old-fashioned, because it presupposes the possibility of the creation of a better situation in the future. (In London a week ago I saw posters which at first I thought might be a joke: End the Stigma of Loneliness, they said. Presumably we would do better to call the lonely the “differently-relationed” or something, and then the problem would disappear. But of course lonely people don’t complain about being stigmatised, they complain about being lonely.)

So it’s hardly surprising that political parties whose platforms consist of endless and pointless symbolic struggles against abstractions don’t have much success with electorates. And by extension, parties and leaders who promise action, and claim that it is actually possible to at least change the situation, if not necessarily fully correct it, are currently doing well. But this is scarcely surprising.

Foucault was deliberately writing at the micro-level about domination and submission (reflecting, perhaps, his well-known hobbies) but for some time now this discourse has permeated the meta-level of politics. Nothing is worth doing, because everything is about power, and apparent triumphs will simply lead to more subtle forms of repression. In this bleak, despairing view of human nature, there is no room for idealism or altruism, except as mechanisms of power. All acts by governments and important individuals are simply predicated on the exercise of power, and always have been. Every political initiative is a disguised exercise to exert or increase power, and every act of every government should be interpreted in the lowest and most cynical of fashions. Collective action is thus pointless, because shadowy power elites will always rebound with more subtle mechanisms of control. There’s really no point in trying to do anything positive, so we might as well put an end to ourselves: after you with the pistol, then, but don’t spatter your brains all over me. It’s hardly surprising that depression, mental illness and suicide are prevalent among those who hold such views.

Such an attitude excludes any kind of planning for the future, and inhibits governments from trying to mobilise their populations the way that non-western governments do. Indeed, this bleak, hopeless, vision infects the very basis of western national identity. History at home and abroad is nothing more than episodes of power and domination. You may think that universal suffrage, compulsory education and welfare states were good things, but actually they were just cynical manoeuvres to ensure that elites retained dominance. You may think that the long struggle by European powers to abolish slavery in Africa was a good thing, but actually it was a cynical exercise to retain power and control by other means. You may think that the end of colonialism was a good thing, but actually it was just replaced by subtler measures of domination, since replaced by ever-subtler ones, which must surely exist, because in the end everything is about power. You may have thought that the Second World War was a struggle against evil, but that was all cynical propaganda to disguise crude attempts to grab power. And so on and so on and so on. Is it any wonder that no-one is prepared to die for countries that hate themselves, and spend half their time on their knees?

One important consequence of this way of thinking (not, I believe, imagined by Foucault) is that it presupposes enormously powerful, endlessly resourceful, highly organised powers working to exert and renew power in ever more subtle ways. And ironically, by definition, they must think and act over the long term. So the unavoidable consequence of the belief that everything is power, is the existence of some shadowy power elite that does think long-term, and does organise the affairs of the world in minute detail. The fact that no-one has ever seen them, that no two people can agree who and what they are or what they want, demonstrates that in the end this is a psychological question and not a political one. Whether we call them the Jews, the Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, or the current fashionable term the Empire, they must necessarily exist, if all is power, and action by others is pointless. And, as Foucault would no doubt have observed, there are plenty of people for whom the sense of helplessness in the face of overwhelming power produces a feeling of submissive, masochistic pleasure.

Well then, that’s how things increasingly are in the West. But rather than quickly run through how things are elsewhere, I thought it would be more useful to finish by going rapidly through a couple of cases of total western misunderstanding, caused by the incapacity to grasp what the long-term even means. Neither is likely to be particularly familiar to the average reader: each has lessons for the future.

Let’s start with South Africa in the apartheid era. This is a very complex story, hopelessly misunderstood today, that has somehow been assimilated into a narrative based on the Civil Rights movement in the US, with Nelson Mandela as a pale reflection of Martin Luther King. But to understand its dynamics we need to go back, yes, to the seventeenth century, at the end of the Wars of Religion. The Dutch East India Company established a resupply station near the modern Cape Town in 1652, which became a settler colony, and attracted further immigrants. In general these were members of the Reformed Church, professing a particularly radical variety of Calvinism. They were subsequently joined by French Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution under Louis XIV. The result, skipping lightly over the generations, was a profoundly religious, deeply conservative society of farmers, herders and nomadic pastoralists, speaking Afrikaans, a pidgin based on Dutch. Their culture was almost entirely Bible-based, and untroubled by the intellectual developments of eighteenth-century Europe. The Afrikaners increasingly came to regard themselves as the modern equivalent of the Old Testament Jews: given the land by God as a haven from persecution.

The British arrived to take control of Simon’s Town during the war with Napoleon, and kept it thereafter as a naval base and colony. British settlers arrived, more educated and politically liberal than the Afrikaners, who preferred to move away to the north-west, clashing violently with African tribes displaced by the Zulu conquests moving in the other direction. With the discovery of gold and diamonds, British and other immigrants flooded into the country and rapidly took over business, politics and government. By the 1920s, the Afrikaners, still nursing bitter resentment over the Boer War, felt they were second-class citizens in their own God-given country, marginalised and mocked because of their lack of culture and their barbarous language. The reaction, drawing on anti-British resentment and the Calvinist sense of destiny, was the formation of the Broederbond, a genuinely secret society aimed at restoring Afrikaner primacy. Working steadily away, infiltrating the public service, the private sector and all sorts of institutions and associations, they effectively achieved power with the victory of the National Party in 1948, and continued to expand their control of the South African establishment thereafter. Their first action on taking power was to evict English-speakers from positions of power and responsibility: quite quickly, Afrikaans became the working language of government and the power elite. The racial component—what we think of as apartheid—was introduced only gradually thereafter.

But of course it provoked widespread resistance, which in turn led to the conversion of the African National Congress to the armed struggle, its banning, and the imprisonment and exile of many of its leaders. Much could be written about the ANC, but I just want to emphasise two points. First, it could not exist today. The ANC and its associated groups were multiracial organisations, with whites, coloureds and Indians in senior positions, and their objectives were political, not based on racial demands. They sought a fundamental change in the structure of the country, and not, as so often on the continent, the replacement of one ruling elite by another. The second is that this was a long game, with no guarantees about the outcome. People gave their life—and often their lives—to a cause which might never succeed, and which often looked hopeless. The long-term strategy was firstly to keep the flame of resistance burning, notably through the actions of the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (“the spear of the nation” in Xhosa.) But the leadership knew that neither military action nor industrial and political unrest could by themselves unseat the regime, and that the theatre of sanctions and boycotts was not likely to impress a regime that believed it was defending its God-given land and civilisation from a massive conspiracy directed from Moscow. So the second element was long-term preparation to assume power when the regime eventually fell, as it did after the end of the Cold War took its enemy away, the cost of the wars in Angola became prohibitive, and the unrest in the country reached frightening proportions. The ANC was, indeed, the best-prepared liberation movement ever.

My second example has weird similarities to the first, notably its origins in teleological religious fundamentalism. In spite of the enormous scholarly and popular literature about Political Islam, it’s a concept which is so foreign to our modern political culture that we find it impossible to grasp. Essentially, it is a very long-term attempt to construct a Kingdom of God on Earth, initially in the lands of the old Caliphate, and in principle everywhere else as well. As conceived by the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in the 1920s, it foresees a society with no independent state, political system or judiciary, where society is run according to the strictest of Islamic principles. But this transition was to be accomplished gradually, perhaps over centuries, not by conquest as had been the case in the past, but at local level, building up social networks, taking over mosques and constructing a parallel society. Yet at the time, Arab society was modernising and secularising under the influence of the Mandate powers, and left-wing and Communist parties were large and growing. The objective must have seemed unreachable.

What changed was first the failure and corruption of the secular regimes that took over Arab states on independence, as well as defeat of the ideals of pan-Arabism, and also defeat and humiliation in the wars with Israel. Support for Islamist political parties began to increase, out of desperation as much as anything else. This showed up in Egypt, and most notably in Algeria, where the complete failure and the brutality of the FLN regime actually produced an Islamist-led movement that looked as if it would take power, and set off the brutal and terrible civil war of the 1990s.

But by then a new hope had appeared. In Afghanistan, foreign Muslim volunteers had fought against the Soviet occupation and a complete support system had been established, lavishly funded from the Gulf. A few years later, Muslim volunteers travelled to Bosnia to fight there. The idea of direct action against western powers seen to be frustrating the return of the Caliphate was suddenly on the table, together with the possibility (after the uncontrolled immigration since the 1990s) of radicalising the newly arrived Muslim populations. Both were pursued energetically, often by veterans of Afghanistan and Bosnia, ironically making use of the freedoms available in Europe which their own countries denied them. Britain was a particular hotbed of jihadist activity: “Londonistan” was a coinage of the time. Able to shelter for the most part behind laws protecting free speech and combating racialism, and manipulating post-colonial guilt, the Islamists became deeply entrenched in western countries and in many cases still are.

Although attention inevitably goes to the Islamic State and its brethren, this is only part of the story. The IS was itself a product of the invasion of Iraq, fighting not only against the Americans but against the Shia majority, and only really succeeding in the chaos of the Syrian Civil War. The fact that the IS was overthrown by western-supported forces and its “Emir,” Abu Bakir Al-Baghdadi killed in an American attack in 2019, has encouraged the view that the problem is “solved.” But in fact, this was only ever one competing strand of a much-longer term policy which is still in progress. Decades of patient work had delivered Islamist parties into power in Tunisia and Egypt after the Arab Spring, to the stupefaction of western experts, and those parties remain as strong as ever. Hezbollah has dominated political life in Lebanon for more than decade. Hamas was in power in Gaza for a similar period. All share the same objectives and the same methodology of patient ground-level organisation. (We shouldn’t be surprised: this is how mass political parties of the West used to work.)

If mass casualty attacks in Europe have now ceased, that does not mean that the Islamist campaign is “over.” Work on radicalising Muslim populations continues, and overtly Islamist political parties are starting to appear. Education is a priority: teachers are being threatened and verbally and even physically attacked, for teaching the theory of evolution or the equality of the sexes. And Islamists have themselves been training as teachers. The West cannot understand any of this, because it is unable to grasp the idea of long-term plans patiently worked out and adapting to circumstances. But there is one other problem as well. After Independence, large numbers of middle-class Algerians fled the FLN regime to settle in France, and succeeded in business and the professions. (Every dentist I ever had the Paris area was an Algerian.) They came to a confident, modern, secular and progressive state. Their descendants today, and their confreres from the region, come to a continent which has no story to tell, which is ashamed of its past and fearful for its future, where indeed there is “no future” and no hope, and things can only get worse. It’s hard to want to be a proud citizen of a country that hates itself. Islamism has a much better and more positive story to tell.

It will be clear, I think, that the future most likely belongs to those who combine long-term planning with short-term tactical flexibility, as these examples show. (And much more could be written about each.) But the West can’t even ask the right questions: thus, an organisation like HTS in Syria doesn’t “change,” it adapts to circumstances, and then again as circumstances change, while keeping the same objectives. Likewise, to take one final example of misunderstanding, much of the western commentary on Gaza and Lebanon tries to puzzle out the meaning of individual episodes, thus missing the point. The Grand Scheme hasn’t really changed in a hundred years—the recreation of the Biblical Israel—and the Israelis are taking advantage of the weakness of their enemies to move further in that direction. Consequently, the destruction of the Hezbollah leadership was carefully planned over many years, taking the lessons of the 2006 war into account. The objective was to destroy Hezbollah, and to lay waste to territory in Lebanon rather than to capture it. The interception of mobile telephone calls led Hezbollah to move to pagers, thus falling into a carefully-prepared trap. Since the fibre-optic system they used was by definition static, decisions could only be taken by in-person meetings. And long-term infiltration of the movement by the Mossad meant that they knew where the meetings would take place.

To repeat, the West doesn’t and can’t understand this sort of thing. It faints with excitement every time a Russian tank is destroyed in Ukraine. It cannot understand the long-term, and it cannot understand plans to progress to what their originators consider a better future. That future, I believe, belongs to those with a positive concept of it, and the will and patience to work to achieve it. I’m afraid that doesn’t seem to include us.