Month: Apr 2026

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

The distant roar of a B1 Lancer

One minute I’m listening to the repeating call of a nuthatch. A few minutes later, the distant roar of a B1 Lancer bomber heading for Iran. I’m in the Cotswolds, about ten miles from RAF Fairford. Iran, and as Trump would have it, Iranian civilization, is under immediate threat. (They are as I write gathering in Islamabad for ceasefire talks.)

I’m wondering how the world got into such a mess. How conservative America having elected Trump hasn’t drawn a line when it came to his excesses in the Near East. (Or his pandering to Putin, and disdain for Ukraine. Though the likes of Tucker Carlson are challenging his support for Israel.) Or how they came to elect a charlatan in the first place. This is my attempt, and it is only an attempt (and written, at a distance, by a Brit), at an explanation. Apologies for its length. But if you’re interested in such things, do give it a read.

I’ve always advocated for liberal democracy in this blog, for parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech and association. At the same time, I’m a traditionalist, a lover of country, our institutions, our way of life. I’m sure of my ground on issues of climate change and immigration, race and gender. But in an open, non-ideological society my views may not carry the day.

We’ve always found consensus but now, in the USA, the very idea of consensus is under threat. For decades the far left were seen as a potentially subversive force, and for many on the right social agendas and immigration were seen in the same light. But the actual processes of democracy were only questioned on the fringes. No more.  

I’ve found it useful, especially in the American context, to explore the roles of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals as precursors to the current debates, and current events.

Neo-liberals focussed on free markets, de-regulation and limited government. Individuals were left to help themselves, with minimal support from the state. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, while economically liberal, and more interventionist when it came to foreign engagements, advocated an explicitly socially conservative agenda.

Early neo-cons such as Irving Kristol had intriguing backgrounds as Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s: their opposition to the straitjackets of Soviet Communism morphed in the post-war years into an advocacy of unfettered free markets. The counter-culture of the 1960s was anathema to them. Also anathema were Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had left the existing dispensation regarding race in place. Not so the Johnson reforms.

To liberals back in the 1970s and 80s neo-conservative ideas constituted a separate world. In a sense they triumphed with Reagan but any social conservative agenda never really took hold. Nor did it, as you’d expect, under Clinton, but in the House of Representatives in the 1990s Newt Gingrich did draw up battle lines. You didn’t communicate with the other side. Universities and the radicalism of both faculty and students, and policies of positive discrimination became, the more so as decades passed, anathema to many. Identity politics on the left as they impacted race and gender became defining issues. So too a government which attempted to dictate on education and welfare.

Both sides dug in their heels, both sides demonised the other. Men who worked across the floor of the Senate like Edward Kennedy and John McCain are remembered as relics from another age. The Obama years, aided by Trumpian malice, only served to harden these battle lines. Issues were weaponized. Conspiracies, not least the birthing conspiracy invented around Obama, became common currency. When conspiracies take hold in a society, they are hard to counter, so much more with the growth of social media.  

Many of the left demonized the right on issues of race and gender and immigration. Climate change was drawn into the argument. Changes allowing electoral funding by third parties exacerbated the divide. What had seemed to the political centre-left to be a debate they would win, all in good time, as they’d seen every debate won over the post-war years, was of a sudden very much open to question. What could be seen as arrogance on the left would only have riled the right further.

Battle lines were hardened during the first Trump administration. Battle was joined, and it became brutally one-sided, in January 2025 when Trump returned. Just how much should we pin on Trump? The MAGA movement which he’s help crystallize is small state and conservative and, compared to the hardened neo-liberals, naïve. Trump’s deal-making philosophy gave an opening to others with a far more thought-through agenda, above all the radical neo-conservative agenda of the Heritage Foundation. What the likes of Irving Kristol back in the 1970 and 80s could surely never have envisaged is the venom of the attacks on government institutions and the universities.

It’s given space to outright opponents of democracy such as the libertarian tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Where might unconstrained free markets take us? Democracy could only be an impediment. Just where might AI in the hands of the likes of Thiel and Musk take us?  And Thiel is now giving lectures on the Antichrist, venturing as far as Rome. Whether the Christian nationalism of the likes of Pete Hegseth goes that far, I don’t know. Hegseth of course has the weaponry.

If we are liberals by inclination and belief, especially if we’re watching all this fury from the relatively safe remove of the UK and the even further remove of the Cotswolds, must we wait on the mid-terms and see how much the Iran fiasco has damaged Trump?

An early indicator might be the Hungarian election next week. Can this new breed of autocrats, hiding behind a democratic veneer, so subvert the democratic process that there is for some countries, Hungary, and, in that terminal scenario, the USA, no way back?

Stepping lightly on the earth

I talked about Iranian* civilization in a recent post. Two days ago Donald Trump threatened that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ if Iran did not accede to his demands. Last night he relented. But the arrogance and idiocy of the threat, and of the man who issued it, are embedded in our minds and will be in our histories forever.

One of the greatest of poets, from the fourteenth century, of the civilisation he would destroy had the measure of the man. Below are two stanzas from Hafez’s poem ‘Life’s Mighty Flood’. It carries a message beyond the comprehension of the dictators and would-be dictators of this world.

The span of thy life is as five little days,/ Brief hours and swift in this halting-place;/ Rest softly, ah rest! while the Shadow delays,/ For Time’s self is nought and the dial’s face./ On the lip of Oblivion we linger, and short/ Is the way from the Lip to the Mouth where we pass/ While the moment is thine, fill, oh Saki, the glass/ Ere all is nought!

Consider the rose that breaks into flower,/ Neither repines though she fade and die–/ The powers of the world endure for an hour,/ But nought shall remain of their majesty./ Be not too sure of your crown, you who thought/ That virtue was easy and recompense yours;/ From the monastery to the wine-tavern doors/ The way is nought

To bring him further down to earth I can offer a few words from what seem an unlikely source (but it rings true), the last chapter of Chloe Dalton’s wonderful book ‘Raising Hare’:

‘As we jostle for space on this planet, about missteps and paths lost, and feel the fragility of all our hopes and all that we hold dear. I think of the hare. Stepping lightly on the earth, taking cover if the wind blows. We are not so dissimilar. If we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up for a while, catch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.’

The American president’s sanity is fragile. So too the world he threatens. He looks to the skies and armament and the ruin of others. The grass may never, will never, glitter for him. But it will cover him.

*We in the West had always (until 1935) called Iran ‘Persia’, even though it refers to only to one province of the ancient land of Iran.

Easter messages

It’s Easter Morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace in the Middle East. No doubt Pope Leo will do too. (See later!) Donald Trump will not listen. But the main headline today is the rescue of an American pilot shot down in Iran. What might have been the other big news story is the first sighting by the Artemis astronauts of the other side of the moon. My sense – our collective sense – of wonder is tempered by the sense that we’re in a space race with China, more serious than the old Russian one, that space could be militarised, that Musk wants to get us to Mars.

Violence where it isn’t explicit is an undercurrent. Trump is part of a long tradition, where violence is visited on civilians. It is as if Netanyahu’s disregard for life in Gaza and the Lebanon and the West Bank has opened a door in Trump’s mind. He will bomb Iran, in his words, ‘back to the Stone Age’.

It is a little realised truth that when the USA has gone beyond its own continental borders and attacked another much older civilisation it has always come off worse. Vietnam looked to be a forever warning. It wasn’t. The Second Iraq War took on a country which occupies the territory, Mesopotamia, of arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Moving into tribal Afghanistan, America in the end proved no match for old loyalties. And now Iran. Iran – ancient Persia – is one of the world’s great civilisations, of a depth and indeed humanity (in its broadest sense) which the USA has never achieved. The current government of Iran is, in the long history of Persia, an abomination.

I’ll quote here from an article by Pankaj Mishra. ‘Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persia civilisation. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez [and others] assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that privileged the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics’.*

It’s worth remembering here that for almost fifteen hundred years since the rise of Islam Christianity remained a tolerated, albeit subordinated, faith under the rule of multiple Islamic states.

Bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ has an irony all its own when asserted by Trump. It should hardly go without saying that Obama and the Europeans’ approach to containing the nuclear aspirations of a brutal regime in Iran was the better approach. Contain the regime, allow the country to function, and wait on a time when some measure of individual freedom can be restored.

There is a long and terrible tradition of violence against civilians in war. Cities stormed could be obliterated, as was Carthage, citizens murdered, raped, enslaved. There is by contrast a nobility in defence, as we saw in the two World Wars. But even then… think of the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Also of Tokyo in the firestorm of April 1945, when clusters of bombs ‘blew open two thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm’. The raid ‘destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg the two years earlier’. Curtis LeMay, the man behind the Japanese raids, won later notoriety ‘ for remarking that the USA should bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.*

This is the language and level of malevolence practised by Donald Trump. The Stone Age should be Iran’s destination too. It is a convenience of war to elide an enemy’s military and its people. It would behove Trump and Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth to imagine themselves under the bombs their air forces rain down on Gaza and Iran and the Lebanon. As we ordinary folk can. Imagine themselves working with the doctors and nurses who tend the dying and wounded. The Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by all members of the United Nations, outlaws the ‘wilful killing of persons not involved in conflict, as well as ‘wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health’, and ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity’. 

We’ve had Pete Hegseth leading prayers at the White House. He is a proponent of a new-wave ‘Christian nationalism’, which by some extraordinary sleight of hand weaponises Christ. He argues for ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’. Iranians are religious fanatics? All Iranians? Can that be any greater a fanaticism than his own? I won’t labour this further now, but whatever we had in World War Two, or in Vietnam, or in the Gulf or Afghanistan, was an attempt to establish, or restore, and embed the ‘old’ rules-based order. Where nations traded and cooperated and we in the West hoped that in time that commercial contact would bring all of us closer together. Now we have the main proponent of that world order taken over by men of violence.

Just how many of us in the UK have registered this agenda, how many who understand when we are enjoined to join the fight just what that fight, that battle, might be? A holy war propagated and proselytised by … let’s leave as ‘men of violence’.

Christian nationalism is the USA has evolved out of more traditional right-wing policies. Just how that has evolved out of small-state and family values American conservatism is a subject for another time. At what point did it become specifically illiberal?

I will sign off with words from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this Easter Sunday morning. ‘On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power…’ He has a battle on his hands against those, amongst them a good few American Catholics (and Protestants), who see their faith as an ‘onward march of Christian soldiers’.  

* Quotations from two articles in New York Review of Books, dated 9th April, by Pankaj Mishra (‘A Bitter Education’) and Joshua Hammer (‘A Man-Made Disaster’)