This is as true of our own time as any other. In an age of stark ideological cleavages everywhere, Muslims have been living through their own battle of ideas over the meaning of Islam in the modern world. The key faultline in this struggle is the question of the relationship between religion and politics. On the one side stand the Islamists; on the other, the moderates. I briefly discussed this split in last month’s Standpoint in the context of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE. Recent events—including the horrific terror attacks in Nice and Vienna, Peshawar and Kabul—further underline the importance of understanding it.

Islamism, simply put, makes Islam into a political ideology. For the Islamist, the fundamental Islamic doctrine that Allah alone is God means that Allah alone is sovereign, meaning that His law—the Shari’a—is the only valid law. In the Islamist view, the alternative to Islam is not Christianity or Judaism, but liberal democracy or socialism.

This is a highly exclusivist doctrine that brooks no compromise with other worldviews. In the view of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Muslim Brotherhood ideologue executed in 1966, any political system that is not Islam constitutes jahiliyya—an Arabic term connoting barbarism, ignorance and unbelief—and “Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half-Islam and half-jahiliyya”. The Islamist’s duty, then, is to overturn the jahili society through revolution.

If this is the goal, then the Islamists differ over how to achieve it. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS), the direct heirs of Qutb, the surest way to revolution is through violent jihad. “We believe that jihad in the path of Allah,” runs the thirty-fifth article of Al-Qaeda’s creed, “is the sound legal avenue that empowers the Muslim community to resume an Islamic way of life and to establish a rightly-guided caliphate on the prophetic model.” “Participationists” such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaat-i Islami in South Asia, by contrast, advocate participation within the established order in the hope of gradually transforming it from within. In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential advocate of the participationist approach, “one must not hurry to do something whose time has not come or pick the fruit before it has ripened”. Nevertheless, their goal remains, as a recent King’s College London report on the “Islamic Movement in Britain” puts it, “a comprehensive transformation within mainstream social and political structures” across the world.

Though it attracts the most media attention, this political form of the faith is highly contested in contemporary Islamic thought. At the forefront of the Islamic anti-Islamist movement is the Muslim World League. Described by Reinhard Schulze, author of the definitive work on the subject, as “presently the most important international Islamic organisation”, the Muslim World League was established by a group of Muslim scholars in Mecca in 1962. Its original aim was to develop an Islamic counter-narrative to the pan-Arab socialism of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser was the leading regional opponent of the Islamists, and some of the League’s leading lights in the early days were prominent advocates of political Islam. Among the members of its first Constituent Council were the influential South Asian Islamist ideologue Abul-A’la Mawdudi—the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami, Sa’id Ramadan—the son of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, father of Tariq Ramadan, and a leading Brotherhood activist in his own right, and Abu’l-Hasan al-Nadvi, the Indian scholar who introduced the Islamist concept of jahiliyya to Sayyid Qutb.

In the decades that followed, the League’s leadership continued to propagate key aspects of the Islamist ideology. In 1980, for instance, its then Secretary General Muhammad Ali Harakan delivered a speech in which he repeated the Islamist trope that Islam was under attack from “Zionism, Communism, Freemasonry, Qadianism [Ahmadi Islam], Bahaism and Christian Missionaries”. As recently as 2005, a Jamestown Foundation report described the League’s stance as “often radical and vehemently anti-American”.

Over the last few years, however, the League has moved decisively away from this position, adopting a strongly anti-Islamist stance rooted in what current Secretary General Muhammad al-Issa calls al-i’tidal al-islami—“Islamic moderation”. “The religion of Islam,” al-Issa explained in a recent interview, “has nothing to do with the political Islam that extremists are peddling nowadays”, for Islamism is “a new creation that distorts the meanings and purposes of [religious] texts to push partisan, extremists goals”. Muslims living outside the Muslim world, he insisted in another interview, ought “to respect the constitutions, laws and cultures” of the countries in which they live, and follow locally trained  imams whose values are aligned with the local culture. Nor should any effort be made, he argued, to defend those “false” Muslims “who have harmed Islam with their radicalism, their extremism, and sometimes their violence, including their terrorism”. Consistent with this, the League was swift to condemn the recent terror attack at Notre-Dame de Nice. “This crime,” al-Issa declared, “represents only its perpetrator. Islam totally disavows itself from it, and considers this atrocious crime the result of a terrorist ideology fueled by extremist concepts and terrorist propensities.”

Hand in hand with this anti-Islamist standpoint, the League has also committed itself to religious dialogue, embracing what the late, lamented Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called “the dignity of difference”. “There is nothing better than dialogue,” says al-Issa. “Through objective dialogue, things become clear.” In September of last year, the League signed the “Paris Agreement for the Abrahamic Family” with French Christian groups—an agreement, al-Issa explained, based on the values of at-tafahum wa’l-mahabbah—“mutual understanding and love”—and which embraced the inclusivist notion of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three “Abrahamic” religions descended from a common ancestor. In the same spirit, al-Issa has also met with a diverse range of religious representatives in the last two years, travelling to Moscow to meet Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, visiting the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, and hosting US evangelical leaders in Jeddah and Bishop Morcos of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Riyadh. He also paid a commemorative visit to Auschwitz organised by the American Jewish Committee.

The League’s new stance can be explained in part by its location in Saudi Arabia, which has pursued an aggressively anti-Islamist policy under reforming Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Just last month, the Kingdom’s Council of Senior Scholars designated the Muslim Brotherhood a “deviant” terrorist group, charging it with promoting civil strife, accusing Muslim societies of living in jahiliyya, and neglecting Islamic doctrine in its pursuit of power.

Yet the League’s position is also representative of a broader trend across the Muslim world. In August 2016, following the rise of Islamic State, an international conference of over 200 Sunni scholars met in Grozny, Chechnya, to determine the boundaries of Sunni Islam. The ideologies of IS, the “Salafi-takfirists” (those who label non-Salafis as unbelievers) and other extremist groups, the conference concluded, were driven by “the distortions of the over-zealous, the forgeries of the fabricators, and the misinterpretations of the ignorant”, and constituted a “dangerous deviation” from the authentic Sunni approach. The influential Indonesian organisation Nahdlatul Ulama—founded in 1926 to defend traditional Islam against Salafism—has likewise adopted an assertively anti-Islamist stance. In the view of its Secretary General, Yahya Cholil Staquf, “it is the spread of Islamist extremism and terror that primarily contributes to the rise of Islamophobia throughout the non-Muslim world”. In a similar vein, the UAE’s official Fatwa Council has expressed its “complete support” for the Saudi decision to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Baghdad-based Global Imams’ Council has just announced its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s widely recognised definition of anti-Semitism—in direct contrast to the Islamists’ fondness for anti-Jewish tropes.

Of course, as the recent terror attacks demonstrate, the ideology of Islamism has not gone away. As the French scholar Gilles Kepel notes in his recent book Away from Chaos, though Islamic State has been defeated militarily in the Middle East, the Islamists have bounced back from setbacks before, and preventing others from falling under their spell will depend in part on the successful reconstruction of Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, if the direction of travel of the Muslim World League and other leading Islamic organisations is anything to go by, there are promising signs that Islamism is being decisively excluded from the Muslim mainstream. At a moment when French President Emmanuel Macron claims that Islam is a state of “crisis”, we would do well to remember the literal meaning of that word—not a state of disrepair, but a turning point in the progress of a disease.   

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Of course, there was denial laced with self-pity (a fail-safe approach in such matters). Sitting in his untidy hotel room Maradona looked forlorn, like a child who had only just understood the consequences of its actions. “Me cortaron las piernas” (They have cut off my legs), was his response, laying the blame elsewhere. Had he read Rayuela by his fellow Argentine Julio Cortázar, he would have been struck by Jacques Vaché’s maxim: “Rien ne tue un homme comme d’être obligé de représenter un pays” (Nothing kills a man as much as having to represent his country).

Much has been made of Maradona’s duality, especially in the encomia that have followed the Argentinian’s untimely death last month. The two goals he scored against England in the Azteca stadium at the 1986 World Cup have come to epitomise two very different forces at play in his psyche. It is a point well made but, perhaps, made too often. First the sleight of hand—in this case “la mano de Dios” (the hand of God)—which took advantage of an oblivious referee; then the most elegant coup de grâce in a goal of sublime beauty. On the one hand the cheat; on the other the artist. Both goals—each in possession of genius—said as much about Argentina as they did about El Diego. Twenty years after the match, Maradona’s teammate, Jorge Valdano, sought to analyse what he had witnessed at close quarters:

With the second goal I realised immediately what it meant. Not only for Argentina. I have seen many goals but this one had everything. It had significance. In a match of the greatest importance symbolically, Maradona showed two characteristics of the Argentinian. In the first goal it shows the trick [cheat], that which is known in Argentina as picardía criolla [creole craftiness] or viveza [cunning]. Argentina is a country in which deceit [deception] is held in more esteem than honesty. But it also has another face. It is that of virtuosity and skill. With the second goal Maradona crowns the match with a work of art. It is skill, dribbling, la nuestra [our game]. Another esteemed factor in Argentinian football is that it is more important to know how to dribble than to know how to pass.

That England felt cheated reinforced a certain high-handedness prevalent in the English game, an innate ability to invoke “fair play”. A subconscious mantra had long obtained: foreigners cheat, we don’t. Steve Hodge, off whose boot the ball came before making contact with Maradona’s hand, was surprisingly impartial: “He took a chance, he cheated, and he got away with it.” Others weren’t so forgiving, especially the British press. But then both countries had form both on and off the pitch.

The unsanctioned and unsuccessful British invasions of the River Plate in 1806-1807 put paid to the idea of Anglo colonisation in South America. After all, the local criollos (creoles) were unwilling to substitute one colonial master for another. Even Lord Castlereagh realised “the hopeless task of conquering this extensive country against the temper of its population”. Thereafter the British employed a more nuanced approach to the region, and sought control “informally” through commerce. But it was through the British social clubs, established across the continent, that sport began to flourish.

In the 20th century, football would reinforce identity in a region made up of artificial borders. Each republic cast its own origin myth as exceptionalism. It was here that national spirit crystallised: in Uruguay it was la garra charrúa (tenacity), Brazil had futebol arte (art) and Argentina la nuestra (our game). The soul of the Argentinian game was a working-class one. In the potreros and baldíos (vacant lots) of Buenos Aires, the pibe (kid) would play with a pelota de trapo (rag ball), a sock stuffed with rags and a weight. This trope was furthered in the pages of the leading sports weekly El Gráfico. By 1948, football was being used in cinema to propagate a nationalist message. Pelota de trapo, which charts the rise of a kid from the barrio (neighbourhood) to the national team, unequivocally asked working-class Argentinians to define themselves not only parochially but also by their nationality.

In the same year, amidst great celebration, Argentina’s president Juan Domingo Perón nationalised the railway companies, the majority of which had been under British ownership. This was in effect an act of economic independence from Britain, one that Perón so firmly believed in that “if my political career, or even my physical life, were to end today I would die with the intimate satisfaction that I had paid off my debt to Argentina. Men perish. The patria [fatherland] remains and its well-being is what matters.” Perón also raised the question of Argentina’s “lost” territories and had school texts rewritten to include
Argentinian sovereignty of the Falklands. For a new generation of Argentinians, the British became synonymous with privateering—piratas (pirates) being the most common epithet, a sardonic nod to Francis Drake.

Born into the working-class slum of Villa Fiorito, El Diego would fulfil the myth of the pibe. His parents, Chitoro and La Tota, had come to the capital from the northern province of Corrientes on a wave of internal migration encouraged by Perón. Labelled los cabecitas negras (little blackheads), these urban poor were either darker skinned or of mixed race heritage. By extending the social rights of the working classes, Perón had engendered the loyalty of a swathe of society hitherto overlooked. Here was the Peronism’s heartland. Maradona would later state proudly, “Yes, I am a ‘blackhead’ and proud of it. I’ll never forget where I came from.”

Even as a ten-year-old, showing off his ball-juggling skills at half-time, he reminded spectators of a player from an earlier, more golden age. Before El Diego even started playing professionally he was already mired in nostalgia. He would become el pibe de oro (the golden kid) incarnate, having developed his skills on the hard-earth pitches of the slum. It was here he learned the art of being “clever” at someone else’s expense. As the saying goes: “El vivo vive del zonzo y el zonzo de su trabajo” (The smart one lives off the fool, and the fool off his job).

Driven on by an unshakable sense of his own destiny—and manifest destiny in case of Argentina—Maradona became the country’s most famous export, first at Barcelona then at Napoli. The realisation, shortly before the 1982 World Cup, that the Falklands conflict might have a different outcome from the one advertised by the junta, was a blow to El Diego. The tournament was also an unhappy one, which led Pelé to ask whether the Argentinian had the “sufficient greatness as a person to justify being honoured by a worldwide audience”. (The two would have an uneasy relationship over the years.) The fact that a junta with a stained human rights record had taken the country to war needlessly did not stop Maradona from exacting revenge on England four years later.

Once his playing days were over, El Diego’s life became a sequence of comebacks and conspiracies. He developed a penchant for Latin American populist leaders—Menem, Castro, Morales, Kircher, Chávez—who were always obliging both on and off camera. His private life, what was left of it, was constantly played out in public. A further low point was the firing of an air rifle at journalists outside his home in Buenos Aires. There was always umbrage to be taken and a fight to be picked.

It takes not only talent but also audacity and arrogance to become a great player on an international stage. So many have the former; so few the latter. However much El Diego believed in himself as a player, he was unable to maintain that same certainty for himself. The posturing, the verbal and physical aggressions, failed to mask that insecurity. Analysing the Argentinian’s career, one psychologist found that the “grandiose and delusional beliefs exact a heavy price on the psyche and Maradona paid in full. Flip over a messianic delusion and you’ll find doubt, insecurity and often self-loathing.”

Sadly, there will now be no regeneration, no resurrection, no return to former glories. In time, the failings and the false starts will be forgotten. Perhaps in death Maradona will be preserved. The myth will hold sway over the reality; the pibe de oro will no longer disappoint. But for Argentinians, Maradona will continue to epitomise a sense of Argentinidad (Argentine-ness) that they find difficult to articulate. In many ways, he mirrored the country that he loved. The irony was that he provided certainty for his people whilst unable to do so for himself.   

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I don’t suppose I was there much longer than half an hour, but the tide seemed to be drawing in fairly rapidly. I knew that the water would eventually rise above my head, and so I was for a while convinced that these were my final moments. There was little chance of a dogwalker straying this far from the school campus, so I didn’t bother calling out. For some reason, my instinct was not to panic but to smile. I felt almost relieved that there was no-one around to witness my humiliation. How absurd, I thought, that I should die in such a supremely pointless way by a river in Ipswich, lodged halfway into the ground, with nothing else to do but wait patiently to drown.

I didn’t perish. As an improbable weakling, I surprised even myself when I managed to haul my body out of the ground by grabbing on to a nearby boulder. Hardly a brush with death, you might say, rather an anecdote that I would later embellish for comedic purposes. That said, when I eventually got around to researching the topic on the internet I discovered that death by mudflats on the various coastlines of Britain is not as rare as one might assume. It hardly bears thinking about the number of people who die every year of easily avoidable accidents, some of whom at least achieve a degree of immortality through the annual “Darwin Awards” which are given to those who have eliminated themselves from the gene pool through their own idiocy.

Irrespective of whether or not I could have actually drowned that day, it was probably the first time in my life that I had ever genuinely felt that death was imminent. I suppose that the brevity of the human lifespan means that we are always close to death, so a little mental preparedness is no bad thing. For my birthday that year, my head of department gave me a card in which he had written a quotation from Samuel Beckett: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” I liked this conceit so much that ever since I have inscribed birthday cards to friends with reminders that they are one year closer to their doom. Sometimes I sketch a little skull in a party hat.

Perhaps one consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is that we will develop a more realistic attitude to human mortality. Ours is a closed casket culture; we don’t deny that one day we will stop breathing, but we don’t like to think about it or be reminded of its inevitability. We prefer to keep the Grim Reaper at a distance, like an annoying uncle at a family gathering who we know we’ll have to get around to eventually. Try to forget him as we might, he’s always at the periphery, sharpening his scythe by the vol-au-vents. 

It is a truism that the vanity of the modern age has engendered a reluctance to accept death as an integral part of life. People go to all kinds of lengths to extend their lives or ward off the signs of ageing, and wealthy entrepreneurs are pouring millions into research on “transhumanism”, a new field of study whose ultimate goal appears to be finding a cure for death. I remain unconvinced that immortality is necessarily an enviable condition. I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, and those elves always look miserable.

Besides, what would a life be with no prospect of cessation? Saul Bellow wrote that death is “the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything”. This concept reminds me of the playwright Dennis Potter’s final interview in March 1994, less than three months before he succumbed to the cancer that was ravaging his body. Describing his writing process in those final days to Melvyn Bragg, Potter noted that he would look out of his bedroom window to the plum tree below. “It looks like apple blossom but it’s white,” he said, “and looking at it, instead of saying ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’ . . . I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. And I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter.”

What Potter called “the nowness of everything” is not, he claimed, a revelation that one can appreciate without direct experience. But if proximity to death enhances the value of life, so too might a healthy recognition of its necessity. A number of years ago I happened upon a fascinating little ring in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, dating from the 16th century. The ring was enamelled with a skull, and bore the legend “behold the ende” on a hexagonal bezel, with the inscription “rather death than fals faith” around the edge. The “true lovers” knot and inscription strongly suggested that this memento mori had been made to commemorate a betrothal or a wedding. Even on the happiest day of their lives, this couple wanted to be reminded that their time on earth was finite.

Today, our relationship with death is not so immediate. In an age of medical innovation and vaccines that seem to be conjured overnight, it is little wonder that death acquires a sense of unreality. I cannot help but think that the intermittent panic around the coronavirus, a disease with a relatively low mortality rate, is partly down to our reluctance to reckon with a difficult truth. The black death, which peaked in Europe in the mid-14th century and carried away more than half the population, meant that people had to quickly learn how to live in a state of continual bereavement. Death became a part of the culture as much as a metaphysical consideration. It is this period which gave us the tradition of the Danse Macabre: pictorial cycles in which the living are seen either dancing or processing towards the grave, accompanied by skeletons. Often the figures are arranged in order of social ranking, with ecclesiastical and political figures at the head. I think it was Madonna who sagely observed that death (in the guise of coronavirus) is the “great equaliser”. If I remember rightly, she was immersed in a marble bathtub strewn with rose petals at the time.

Just as the bubonic plague led to a newfound fixation on death in art and literature, the horrors of the Second World War gave rise to the philosophy of existentialism. In his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Albert Camus argued that suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem”. That is to say, the fact that we haven’t killed ourselves is a proclamation of our investment in the condition of existence. There is something darkly comical about this viewpoint, yet perhaps there is some consolation to be found in contemplating the sheer absurdity of being alive. 

To find humour in death isn’t to degrade or deny the sanctity of human life, but rather to grapple with its finite nature. We are the only sentient creatures aware that we are going to die, and yet we persist with our daily chores and petty squabbles as though any of it mattered. It isn’t surprising that Terry Pratchett found such comedic mileage in the character of Death for his Discworld novels. In Pratchett’s rendition, the Grim Reaper is a sardonic figure with a fondness for cats and curry, endlessly baffled by humanity and their capacity to persevere with their useless lives. I read somewhere that medieval tarot cards occasionally depicted Death as wearing the piebald garb of a court jester. He has the last laugh, after all.

I find it reassuring when those on the cusp of death are able to retain their sense of humour. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, some of Christopher Hitchens’s religious acquaintances speculated publicly about the possibility that this most vocal of atheists might finally accept the light of God. His response was priceless. “If I convert,” he said, “it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

It is said that Oscar Wilde’s dying words were: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.” Perhaps this is too fanciful a story to be believed, and of course when it comes to witty deathbed declarations it’s difficult to get the timing right. Even if one finds the energy to conceive a devastating bon mot, how would one know when best to utter it? Spike Milligan circumvented this problem by requesting his epitaph in advance: “I told you I was ill.” It makes a refreshing change from some of the more mawkish efforts on your average tombstone.

The existentialists posit that we must find meaning in life in order to reckon with the absurdity of the human condition. In spite of how this might seem, it is an essentially optimistic worldview. It invites us to resist the temptation to indolence, and to celebrate the potential for creativity that lies in all of us. Nor are the consolations of an afterlife necessarily to be sought. Nietzsche mistrusted such beliefs, seeing in them a manifestation of the “will to destruction”. He deemed the Christian notion of Heaven to be little more than a “yearning for extinction” and a “cessation of all effort”. Quentin Crisp was delighted with the idea: “The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing’, he said. “Something to look forward to.”

Certainly it seems as though our fear of death might be a corollary of an individualistic culture and the commodification of the self as most keenly expressed through social media. The egoist sees life as a product and death as a glitch, but it does not necessarily follow that our existence has no value if we acknowledge that the world will barely change once we have left it. Life becomes bereft of purpose if we occupy too much of our time dwelling on its terminus; one risks ending up like Jack Gladney in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), who becomes obsessed with an experimental drug that will cure him of his terror of dying. At the same time, we are not best served by a culture that sees death as the great taboo.

Socrates had a simple answer. Having been condemned by the court, he proclaimed that there was nothing to fear from death because there could only be one of two outcomes: immortality or oblivion. William Hazlitt opens his essay “On the Fear of Death” by reflecting on the fact that we have been dead before. As relatively late additions to the long history of humanity, few of us are troubled by our former state of non-existence. “I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne,” he writes, “Why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?”

If the fear of death can be conquered at all, it will be through a process of honest reflection rather than endless preoccupation. There are many who claim that the fear dissipates with age, and that they regret wasting so much of their youth fretting over the inevitable. An elderly friend of mine once said as much to me, and claimed that she was perfectly content to die, given the richness of her experiences over nine decades. Hazlitt felt it too. The terror was far more present in his younger days, he tells us, “when the idea alone seemed to suppress a thousand rising hopes, and weighed upon the pulses of the blood”. I have a memory of early childhood, crying by my mother’s side because I did not ever want to die, and her consoling me by saying that only grown-ups—those with one tentative toe in the grave—should be ruminating on such matters. I am older now than she was then, and the natural anxieties I feel are not so acute. Maybe if I survive for another few decades I will find it amusing that death ever bothered me at all. One can but hope.

It is possible that there is simply no realistic prospect of subduing our innate thanatophobia. The playful skeletons of the Danse Macabre are forever capering in our shadows, so we may as well enjoy the performance while we can. Our fate is to be interred in the memories of other transient beings who are likewise destined to die and be forgotten. And perhaps that makes the comedy of life all the more special. 

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The past is indeed another country. Now, to meet or to speak to locals, to witness a Tibetan insult a Han Chinese . . . this is unimaginable for Xinjiang or Tibet. Tibet is closed to individual travellers and Xinjiang languishes in never-ending lockdown. They bear the brunt, but the chill extends to Inner Mongolia and to other minorities such as the Hui, a 10 million strong group of mildly Muslim persuasion present in many provinces.

Religion, education, culture and language are being forcibly constrained and changed; a hi-tech surveillance panopticon, an inflated police presence and a refined system of street-level informing mean that ethnic minorities are effectively living in an open prison. For some, it is a closed prison. A government white paper and press conference revealed:

From 2014 to 2019, Xinjiang provided training sessions to an average of 1.29 million urban and rural workers . . .Vocational education and training centres are tailored for people influenced by religious extremism and involved in minor violations of the law . . . Gaining a thorough understanding of the true nature and perils of terrorism and religious extremism, the trainees get rid of thought control imposed by terrorism and extremism and lead a normal life.

Shorn of euphemism, nearly 1.3 million minority citizens, mostly Uyghurs, “lead a normal life” in concentration camps. Originally the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denied the camps’ existence, but it was forced to turn to the Orwellian language of “training centres” by foreign analysis of its own documents and satellite photographs. The absurdity of claiming that over 11 per cent of Uyghurs are religious extremists, terrorists or lawbreakers is reinforced by the notion of many well-educated intellectuals, professionals or civil servants “requiring” low-level training.

Sadly, that is far from all. What is happening meets the criteria for crimes against humanity set out in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and for genocide under Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention.

How did it come to this? Why the impatience with the old policy whereby economic development and slow intermingling would eventually and without force erode differences from the Han Chinese who make up over 90 per cent of China’s population? Will a new policy, which prioritises “stability” and accelerated integration, work, and if so, what does that portend? Might it even encourage the “Three Evils” of terrorism, “splittism” (separatism) and extremism, which it is designed to combat?

As ever, the roots of change predate Xi Jinping, but he has been an accelerator. Minorities have long been unhappy at Han migration and petty racism; at the meaninglessness of the title “Autonomous Region”; at the predations of mining and other companies displacing traditional herders; at the lack of employment opportunities. Ilham Tohti, a moderate Uyghur professor now serving a life sentence, pointed out that less than 15 per cent of Uyghur graduates found jobs, a consequence of discrimination resulting in public services staffed by Han, whose lack of the Uyghur language caused “tremendous inconvenience to Uyghur citizens in their daily lives”.

Despair spilled over into protest and violence. That did not start with the 2008 riots in Tibet and the 2009 violence in Urumqi, the regional capital. But their scale, and later killings by Uyghurs in Beijing, Kunming and Xinjiang itself, reinforced the Party’s determination that minorities and Han would be made to “embrace each other like pomegranate seeds”.

Yet squeezing until the pips squeak has a broader rationale than containing what the CCP labels terrorism (in Tibet “terrorism” took the form of self-immolation), but which others see as acts of individual anger unconnected with outside Islamic movements. Other reasons for stability in short order are the rich mineral and other resources of Tibet and Xinjiang, while the land routes of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) run through Xinjiang.

Moreover Xi’s vision of a new Zhonghua minzu (usually translated as “Chinese nation”, but “Chinese race” is closer) is central to his “China Dream” and ideology—and ideology is central to his mission. At the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference and two months ago at the 7th Tibet Work Forum, Xi declared that “cultural identity is the foundation and long-term basis for strengthening the great unity of the Chinese nation”. “Other” is anathema to Xi, who called for enhancing “the recognition of Chinese culture by the people of all ethnic groups, better inheriting Chinese cultural genes in the  new era, nourishing Chinese cultural blood”. And “culture” is a highly political term, closely linked to “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”. “Culture” requires you to align with the Party. Its importance to Xi can be seen from his addition of “cultural confidence” to the “4 Confidences”, a crucial part of the CCP canon. If all that seems abstruse in London or Liverpool, it isn’t in Lanzhou or Lhasa.

There are seven steps towards cultural genocide.

First: “To destroy a people, you must first destroy their history”—a quotation, from a 19th-century Chinese thinker, used by Xi in his first address to the new Politburo in 2013. He was talking about attacks on China by foreign forces, but it is a lesson he is applying himself within China, both to how minorities are allowed to think about their past and to how they physically see the past, as mosques, monuments, cemeteries, and traditional housing are torn down.

Second, the French novelist Alphonse Daudet wrote that, “When a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison.” That key is increasingly being lost both in everyday and official life. This autumn there have been protests in Inner Mongolia, which has followed Tibet and Xinjiang in having “bilingual” education reduced to a rump.

Third, education is crucial. As Xi said at the recent Tibet Work Forum: “We must attach importance to strengthening ideological and political education in schools, put the spirit of patriotism throughout the entire process of school education at all levels and types, and bury the seeds of loving China in the depths of the hearts of every teenager.” This is not just a matter of ordaining the curriculum. In Xinjiang, with many parents in the camps or forced labour, hundreds of thousands of children are now put in state-run boarding schools and orphanages, where their language and cultural ties can be attenuated and broken.

Fourth, strangle indigenous culture by imprisoning intellectuals, historians, professors, poets, singers, artists and religious leaders. In addition to the extrajudicial camp system, in 2017 Xinjiang provided 21 per cent of China’s criminal arrests, despite having only 1.5 per cent of its population. Few, if any, of those incarcerated, often for long periods, have advocated anything remotely approaching the “Three Evils”. But they have advocated the maintenance of Uyghur culture, and that has become a political offence. (In Tibet, self-censorship and intimidation seem to make imprisonment less necessary.)

Fifth, prevent breeding. If that sounds brutal, it is. Forced sterilisation and compulsory abortions are common and documented, while the most effective form of contraception is to lock up in concentration camps those most likely to have children. According to official figures, in Uyghur-dominated Kashgar and Hotan, birth rates between 2015 and 2018 fell by over 60 per cent.

Sixth, devise and implement systems of social control. The camps and the threat of internment are the most prominent element, born out of the Party’s experience gained from the old system of “re-education through labour”, a form of extrajudicial detention in theory abolished in 2013. Urbanisation has made the “grid system” and “double-link system”, under which areas are divided into small parcels of families, effective means of informing, monitoring and clamping down. Twenty thousand party volunteers were sent into the villages of Tibet to assess and then intimidate. That number is dwarfed by the 200,000 in Xinjiang, part of a system of “family friends”, staying with Uyghurs, befriending, educating and above all monitoring them. Signs of religious or cultural devotion detected (for example, by asking children about their parents) lead to the camps. “Convenience” police stations, first introduced in Tibet, now stand every few hundred yards throughout Xinjiang towns.

Seventh, enlist technology. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform is a tool fed by all forms of surveillance, from CCTV to DNA and health records, from compulsory apps on phones which inform on sites visited to records of mosque attendance. This is the CCP’s new panopticon and Xinjiang is the laboratory.

The result is a massive intrusion into the lives of all minorities. For many it recalls the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution, which of course is exactly what it is: a new, technological Cultural Revolution. It breeds resentment. But as the Party points out with alacrity, there have been no violent incidents in the last three years. While most Han outside Xinjiang and Tibet appear to approve of the clampdown, persuaded by propaganda of the dangers of terrorism, some Han who live in Xinjiang are leaving, because of the tension and increased costs of security.

Some argue that the human rights abuses will inevitably lead to terrorism and revolt, as ethnic minorities, facing the loss of their culture and way of life, become desperate. In particular an atheist CCP is unable to appreciate the depth of religious feeling, whose roots no amount of material prosperity or threat of harsh treatment can dig out. Yet these are uncharted waters in terms of technological surveillance, control and anticipation. Not only would it be difficult for extremists to enter Xinjiang or Tibet undetected, but the simple business of living would bring them to notice before they might perpetrate a terrorist act.

That at least is the CCP’s intention. It depends on a continued capacity to underwrite the extraordinary costs of the repression and a willingness to ride out the potential costs imposed by the reaction of the outside world. So far Muslim countries have been silent, while the democracies are only beginning to stir. But the BRI may falter and the lure of a 1.4 billion people China market may be eclipsed by recognition that the CCP is guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. Will foreigners then be keen to deal with companies such as Hikvision or Huawei which are building the systems of repression? Will governments besides America sanction the responsible officials? And will they sanction the supreme leader who is ultimately responsible for ethnic policy and approval of the methods for implementing it? 

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Hardly a week goes by without discussion of “points-based immigration”—one of the few policies raised as a matter of routine in British focus groups over the last 20 years—or, in the US, Australia’s gun laws. Admiration of late has centred on its status as a prosperous, open, liberal democracy somehow able to manage Covid-19 without prior experience of Sars and with a close relationship to China (plus many Chinese immigrants).

I’m not saying one shouldn’t copy Australia. It is stable, orderly, well-governed and already steaming out of its shallow coronavirus recession. For decades, it has enjoyed uninterrupted growth, low unemployment, high immigration, and a high minimum wage. It’s often claimed the latter three cannot exist simultaneously, but in Australia they can and do. I grew up in the country and had a ringside seat at its system of governance when I worked in Canberra. Australians are good at running things.

But I do want to sound a note of caution. People admire Australia without understanding why it succeeds, and without asking whether other countries can simply import its methods. They fail to realise Australia’s governance values are relatively unusual, products of a distinctive political culture and electoral system—nurtured over 60 years—that may not travel.

First, however, it’s important to clear away some undergrowth—the authority-defying “Australian larrikin”. This figure is present in the country’s literature but does not exist outside it. While Australia has an intensely egalitarian culture and commendable social mobility, it is an authoritarian country and its police in particular expect compliance. That’s why the world has been treated to video footage of the Bill nicking pregnant women in their homes and dragging protesters out of cars. Australians are both the descendants of convicts and of their gaolers.

If John Locke is the father of the US Constitution and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith the fathers of British approaches to governance, then Australia’s dad is Jeremy Bentham, the bloke who described natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts”. He rejected the idea of natural or divinely given rights preceding the establishment of state authority, arguing that rights are creations of law, and without government there are none. Rights, in other words, come from states. The contrast with John Locke is immediate and obvious: for Locke, individuals and their rights come first, and government comes afterwards. The state for Americans is a bottom-up creation where citizens transfer to it by social contract only so much authority as is strictly necessary for mutual benefit and
protection.

Most importantly, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. To this day, the country has no Bill of Rights, and what rights do exist (usually at the state level in a federal system) are simple acts of parliament that can be repealed by a hostile government.

Aware that Bentham’s approach to institutions tended to produce electorates that saw the nation-state as a vast public utility, Australians put immense care into designing the country’s institutional arrangements and electoral system. There is little beautiful rhetoric in the late 19th-century constitutional debates of its Founding Fathers—a notable contrast to the American equivalent. There is, however, astonishing attention to detail and a willingness to pinch good things from other countries and civilisations: the secret ballot from the Romans, referendums from Switzerland, the Westminster system from Britain, an elected upper house comprised of senators apportioned equally between the states from the US, federalism from Germany. An obsession with policy detail still forms a major part of Australian governance.

Onto this was bolted several Australian innovations: compulsory registration and compulsory voting; voting on Saturdays; an incorruptible system of postal votes; equal-sized constituencies whose redistricting was managed by an impartial electoral authority; preferential voting blended with what is now called Single Transferable Vote; a secret ballot where—unlike the Roman and related systems—electors did not bring their pre-filled ballot to the polling station, but a state official gave them an unmarked, pre-printed one before they entered the voting booth. And, of course, the famous “democracy sausage” on polling day (Google it).

This modified form of the secret ballot went global. When you cast your ballot in a UK general election, you are using an Australian-designed system down to the finest detail—yes, even your pencils, mandated by Australian electoral officials to avoid the messiness of dipping pens. For many decades it was called “the Australian Ballot”, even by Americans. Notably, the developed country that makes least use of Australian innovations is the US, one of the reasons it struggles to make its elections free and fair. Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project ranks the American system 57th in the world. Among core Western democracies, it comes in at rock bottom.

This extraordinary regime began to emerge in 1860 and was complete by 1924. Even many Australians do not appreciate the extent to which it is a logistical marvel, more so given it was developed and perfected in a country with huge distances, heavy reliance on transport by bullock trains or pony and trap, and, for some of the period, no telegraph. It is the foundation of what economists call Australia’s “high state capacity”—roughly, the ability to get shit done—and is not easy to reproduce. This is not only because it is hard but because it involves thinking about politics in a different way, chiefly by rejecting US and EU “rights-talk” and Lockean social contract theory.

Locke, Smith, Mill, and Bentham had no empirical evidence for any of their claims. When Locke and later Rousseau argued, contra Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke, that man was naturally peaceful and industrious—born in freedom but everywhere in chains—they were not to know that the evidence points the other way. Scholars such as Steven Pinker did the research and crunched the numbers, finding that not only is there no evidence of rights in non-state, hunter-gatherer societies, the cultures in question were also violent horrors with a murder rate that makes modern Venezuela and medieval England alike look like oases of peace and plenty. Even the most advanced pre-modern civilisations usually had a weak or absent conception of rights, and where conceptions were strong, they were limited. Rights-talk among Roman jurists—and remember, Rome provided the parent legal system for the EU and all its member-states save Ireland and Scandinavia—was confined to property and to Roman citizens.

In following Bentham, Australia placed itself on Team Hobbes, and although like Locke a social contract theorist, Hobbes’s assessment of non-state societies turned out to be correct. Man, in the state of nature, really did live a life that was nasty, brutish, and short. Locke’s tabula rasa (the blank slate) is empirically unfounded. Australia’s founding fathers and the country’s approaches to governance are therefore explicable in part by luck, not choice. Australia got the science right by accident.

For decades, there was a consensus that it was impossible to centrally plan an immigration system, until what Douglas MacArthur once called “the giant unsinkable aircraft carrier” scuppered it. Like France, Australia is fond of grands projets. Unlike France, it enjoys success at seeing them through. However, this has limits: many of the claims—made by the likes of FA Hayek and others—about the scale of what economists call “the knowledge problem” and concomitant difficulties of central planning are true.

Those who remember the 2019 election may recall one of Labour’s manifesto promises: free broadband for all. It was routinely mocked (Boris Johnson called it “a crackpot scheme”), and rightly so. Australians in these islands were heard to observe that even we can’t do that. The Australian equivalent—known as the “National Broadband Network”—has been an expensive flop. Attempts to blame one of the country’s two major political parties for its failure assume—in hubristic Australian fashion—this is another thing the giant public utility that is AusGov can just do.

Then there was “Robodebt”, an elaborate scheme using algorithmic data-matching to track benefit overpayments. It was a disaster, and unlike the NBN cock-up (responsible only for slow internet), produced genuine hardship as people all over the country were stung with fake debts and ordered to pay up (or else). As of late November, Scott Morrison’s government has quietly shelved it and gone back to pen and paper. It’s also been forced to settle a class-action suit arising from the bungle for a sum north of a billion Australian dollars. This in a country with a modest population, low unemployment, and relatively few benefit recipients.

It’s significant, in my view, that Australia’s immense state capacity has foundered when it comes to “big tech”. Maybe we have to abandon the belief that we can technologise everything: it isn’t magic and there are many tasks to which it is unsuited. Relatedly, if Australia cannot make state-backed high-tech and algorithms work, it’s likely no-one can.

Australia’s exceptional governance is as odd as its egg-laying mammals, songless birds, and scentless flowers. Replicating it even in part requires an understanding of what lies beneath it, and the peculiar environment in which it developed. Failure to do this may mean attempts to transplant it to other countries fail as organ donations sometimes do, and to everyone’s detriment: donor and donees alike. 

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Helène was born in the Israel Zion Hospital, Brooklyn. In her autobiography, Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released, she vividly describes living in an Orthodox Jewish community where her entire world—family, friends, school, shops—was within a handful of streets. Her life was full of ritual. She shared a room with her Baba (grandmother) who kept a shisel—a special bowl of water—under her bed so that, on awakening, she could lean over and give thanks for the restoration of her soul before her feet touched the ground.

She prayed throughout the day—on entering and leaving rooms or houses, before and after meals, on washing her hands and lighting candles. Her food and clothes reflected Orthodox history and culture. But in her teenage years, she found the careful strength to ask questions about the place of women and the depiction of a wrathful God.

At 17, she married Mandel H. Fisch, a rabbi. They had two children and when they were old enough for kindergarten, she secretly began forbidden secular art classes at Brooklyn College, using her maiden name “Greenfield” so as not to be found out. Sadly, two years later in 1956, her husband died of cancer. According to tradition, she should then have married a man in her husband’s family to carry on his name, but she wanted freedom and took the step of creating a cover name (Aylonna is Hebrew for Helène) to enrol in a full-time art course which included classes with abstract painter Ad Reinhardt.

Helène, a promising student, was taken by Reinhardt to visit Mark Rothko on East 66th Street. His “huge studio was bare and immaculate, with a large bouquet of white chrysanthemums”, according to her autobiography. They talked about Barnett Newman’s sculpture Tsim Tsum, a kabbalistic term for the contraction of the infinite light of God to make room for the finite universe. For the first time since entering the art world, Helène felt comfortable enough to confess, in confidence, that she was from an Orthodox Jewish background. Rothko responded by talking about his Russian Orthodox Jewish life in a cheder—a religious school—from the age of five. He talked about Martin Buber’s essay “I and Thou”’ and said that “we may need our souls to have an encounter with God but it will not happen unless we patiently allow God to manifest”.

They talked through the afternoon and into dusk. He brought out his latest paintings to see what Helène thought of them. When they looked at his black and brown canvases, she told him she saw the void from Genesis and the line separating the black from the brown was the firmament dissecting the void.

Helène’s art career was both soulful and radical. In 1971, as a teacher at San Francisco State University, she invited a black woman with her baby to pose as Mary in her life-drawing class. Helène put the students’ pictures up around the university halls for Christmas, a move which got her into trouble because it was seen as an overly bold statement about racism and religion.

In her 1970s work The Breakings, she poured gallons of oil paint over panels lying on the floor. The top layer of oil would eventually form a skin over the wet paint beneath and when the panels were lifted up by four “midwives”, the wet paint would seep, drip and sometimes burst through, giving birth to new shape, new colour, new life.

In the 1980s, a project saw women carrying sacks of sand, stones and earth from devastated districts to healing areas. Japanese participants carried soil from Hiroshima to a river. American women rescued earth from military or nuclear sites across the USA, and then travelled miles to leave the sacks in places such as a park near the United Nations headquarters in New York.

In her last phase of art, which she called The Liberation of G-D, Helène placed a transparent overlay on each page of the five books of Moses and underlined every place where she felt there was a woman missing or a woman talked of in a misogynistic way or the idea of what she called a “patriarchal God” being wrathful and vengeful. She sat in a gallery and had projected on to her face the name of God that should not be spoken or the text prohibiting women’s voices being heard in synagogues.

So, I will watch the passage of Mary throughout Advent this year, with Helène Aylon by my side. I expect we will, at some point, hold the thought that Mary does not have the name of God projected on to her skin but has God literally in her belly. Perhaps Helène will see the humility of Mary carrying her baby from a dangerous land to a safe stable as a response to our current political upheaval and environmental ignorance. I believe that we will think about the messiah and mysticism and Kabbalah and the idea that we all have a divine spark within us. Helène will tell me about her painting and I will tell her about the feminine imagery of the Eucharist in my last book Sleeping Letters. We will contemplate the circular shape of birth, death and resurrection, her now in the afterlife and me, for the moment, on the ground. Together, I think Helène and I, hibernating with the image of Mary, will have the strength to remain side by side in the low winter sun and remember the voice of Rothko saying “wait for God to manifest” in this complex but inspiring world. And then, after taking our time with the long process of pregnancy, we will sit vigil all night waiting for the seep and burst of new paint. 

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Now, a quarter of a century later, the conflict is back in the news, with six weeks of all-out fighting this autumn, followed by a ceasefire in November—though this time with history reversing itself, and the Azerbaijanis claiming victory.

At first sight it might be hard to understand why this fighting is generating global headlines. The territory being fought over is tiny—hardly bigger than Kent, and much more remote. Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian-majority population was under 200,000 just before the Soviet collapse, and is down to around 150,000 now, at least half of whom have fled the region to escape the fighting. Their regional declaration of independence has never been recognised, either by external countries or by international organisations.

Yet Nagorno-Karabakh’s troubles do resonate worldwide, both because of Azerbaijan’s oil wealth and, more importantly still, because of the powerful backers supporting the rival sides.

One glance at the map reveals the explosive geopolitical dimension of the conflict. Armenia and Azerbaijan lie just south of the Caucasus mountains. To their north is Russia; to their south, Iran and Turkey. Christian Armenia has historically been a friend of Moscow, and the two countries have a defence pact. Muslim Azerbaijan, whose people speak a Turkic language that Turks half-understand, has close ties with Ankara, which backed its military offensive this autumn. So the latest open warfare in Karabakh, and the extent to which it has been contained, is also an expression of the relationship between Russia, which continues to view the post-Soviet South Caucasus as its backyard, and an increasingly assertive Turkey as the challenger.

History has added to the explosiveness of this geography. Armenians have complex feelings about their Azerbaijani neighbours. On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others—some 1.5 million—were killed in what historians consider a genocide (though the modern Turkish state rejects this label). So local Armenians did not welcome the boundaries Stalin then drew for the Soviet Union, under which, since the 1920s, Nagorno-Karabakh has been formally part of Azerbaijan. Some Armenians today consider Azerbaijanis to be also “the Turk”. And many members of both nations harbour bitter personal memories of the bloodshed, cruelties and war-related losses experienced during their own lifetimes.

From the 1990s to this autumn, the conflict was more or less frozen behind barbed wire and patrols, with both sides leading a limited and often miserable existence as a result.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s local Armenian government calls its homeland the Republic of Artsakh. While it cooperates closely with Armenia, which supports it financially and militarily, even Armenia does not formally recognise it as an independent country. Although the physical damage done to buildings in the capital, Stepanakert, by bombing from the nearby mountain city of Shusha, then in mainly Azeri hands, was soon repaired, the region remains isolated. With the railway line to Azerbaijan proper dismantled in the 1990s fighting, leaving just a memory, the territory’s last connection with the outside world is by a road known as the Lachin corridor, leading southwest from the local capital, Stepanakert, to Armenia proper.

If life has felt enclosed for the Karabakh Armenians, it has been less cheerful still for the Azeris who fell victim to the First Nagorno-Karabakh War of the 1990s. Local Azerbaijanis who had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh itself until then, many of them in Shusha (called Shushi by Armenians), fled their homes in that fighting. In 1993, the Karabakh Armenian forces also ventured right out of their traditional region and seized seven neighbouring districts of undisputedly Azerbaijani territory, to Nagorno-Karabakh’s west, south along the Iranian border, and east into the flatlands of Azerbaijan proper—a strategic move that ensured that Azeri forces could not attack or close the Lachin corridor. A total of about 600,000 local Azeris were displaced. Although they fled the area around Nagorno-Karabakh (more properly, Nagorny Karabakh, Russian for “Mountainous Karabakh”, as it is the last craggy outcrop of the Lesser Caucasus mountain range) many of them stayed as near as they could, at the start of hundreds of miles of Azerbaijan’s flatlands, which stretch all the way to the Caspian Sea coast and the capital, Baku.

Since the Karabakh war of a generation ago, Baku has seen its fortunes revive on a grand scale thanks to huge oil finds in the Caspian. But that wealth is impossible to guess at in the dilapidated flatland villages near the conflict zone. For a quarter of a century since, those hundreds of thousands of displaced Azeris have been stuck in camps. Some have made an existence on the edges of Azerbaijan’s other cities, but many remain near the mountain territory, living in commandeered schools or containers, waiting for a chance to return. Their plight has been part of Azerbaijan’s political mix ever since. Resentment has festered.

The fighting itself was swift and brutal. On September 27, Armenia announced attacks by Azerbaijan all along the territory’s border. Azerbaijan said this was a counter-attack, and the Armenians had attacked first. Azeri forces armed with cutting-edge weaponry advanced quickly. By October 8 they had moved into the mountains and taken back control of Shusha/Shushi. This was a loss of huge emotional significance to Armenians as the city is an ancient centre of learning in the South Caucasus, to which the separatist Artsakh government had announced, earlier in September, that it would move its parliament. Shusha/Shushi is also only six miles from the local capital, Stepanakert, whose people feared they would now come under attack. Between half and three-quarters of the local population fled. At least 5,000 people died in the fighting. By November 10, the Armenian Prime Minister, Nicol Pashinyan, had accepted a truce brokered by Moscow, freezing territorial gains and authorising the deployment of 2,000 Russian peacekeeping forces to the region to oversee the return of Azeri territory and police Nagorno-Karabakh on a renewable five-year basis. The guns have fallen silent. But this is not a peace.

As the dust settles on a still uncertain landscape, the question now is who has won and lost.

That Armenia and the Karabakh Armenians have come off worst is clear. News of the ceasefire was met with anti-government rioting in the Armenian capital. Although the presence of peacekeepers means return is possible, it is uncertain how many of the up to 100,000 Karabakh Armenians who fled this autumn will want to return to their territory on new terms, with parts of Karabakh and the surrounding area being handed back to Azerbaijan. Armenians, deeply attached to their past, are now also fearful that several historic churches and Christian monuments in territory either captured or due to be returned to Azerbaijani control are at risk, including the 13th-century Dadivank monastery in Shahumyan district just outside Karabakh, just as, during the fighting, the cathedral in Shusha/Shushi was damaged by Azeri shelling.

But the outcome for the other players in this drama is, at best, nuanced. True, Azerbaijan has notched up a military victory, gone much of the way to restoring the territorial integrity it lost in the 1990s, and created the hope that its internally displaced people can at last return home. This arises from the calculated risk it took that Moscow would not intervene militarily if it had backing from Turkey—rightly, as it turned out.

As a result, Azerbaijan’s 600,000 displaced people may soon be able to go back to homes bordering and inside Karabakh. But these days the seven border districts are full of ghostly ruined villages; Shusha/Shushi is also a ghost of its former self. Rebuilding will be a long and costly operation for Azerbaijan, and the return will need to be carefully managed.

Turkey’s gain is that its support for Azerbaijan has given Ankara a presence in Russia’s post-Soviet geopolitical backyard—which may serve as payback for Russia’s involvement since 2015 in Syria and Libya, which Turkey views as its area of influence.

Yet Russian deftness—President Vladimir Putin has spoken of intense telephone diplomacy—has given it the upper hand in the ceasefire, and limited Turkish aspirations.

In the wake of this conflict, Russia gets to keep peacekeepers inside oil-rich Azerbaijan—more than it achieved after the last conflict ended in 1994, and potentially a way to exert influence over leaders in Baku. Moscow has also blocked Ankara’s wish to deploy its own peacekeepers, fobbing Turkey off with a smaller role at a ceasefire monitoring centre outside Nagorno-Karabakh.

The crisis that the outcome of the war in Karabakh has unleashed in Armenia may also be considered a (smaller) plus for Putin, since the embattled Armenian Prime Minister, Nicol Pashinyan, came to power in 2018 after unrest that unseated a previous, and more solidly pro-Moscow, leader in Yerevan.

The task facing Russia will not be easy, however. In the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and high tension, Moscow’s peacekeepers will have to show sensitivity to both sides to avoid escalation. This reflects the greater responsibility for the region’s affairs that Moscow is now shouldering.

Russia now stands squarely in the centre of the process, says Tom de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe. But, he adds, whether that will lead to peace between its two ex-Soviet neighbours is another matter: “Putin might see reasons to push for a full peace agreement that restores relations between two important neighbours, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Then again he might not: if the two sides are in a state of suspended hostilities, that is a good reason for the Russian peacekeepers to stay. Russia’s agenda is probably more about projecting its own power and about trade routes than about long-term peace in the South Caucasus.”   

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So what is Macron’s world view? He set out the latest version in an interview within a little known geopolitics think tank on November 16, 2020, entitled: “The Macron Doctrine”, seemingly without even a blink of humility in acknowledgement of the 19th-century doctrine named after the US president James Monroe. The French president’s intellectual analysis is couched in the grandiloquent, some might say arrogant, tone so corrosive of his policies at home and abroad. It posits two processes for the future: first, reinventing international cooperation through multilateralism; second, “strengthening and structuring a political Europe”.

In his view, the first was already proving itself with cooperation on a solution to Covid-19 and in the fight against international terrorism. But Macron wishes to impel multilateralism further by unblocking international organisations such as the UN and the WHO. The second process is to give Europe “strategic autonomy” that will enable it to operate independently across areas from military operations to industrial policy in order to counterbalance what he calls the “Chinese-American duopoly” and the rise of hostile regional powers. In sum, a Macronist version of the Monroe Doctrine for a self-asserting and independent Europe, newly protective against incursions by other powers into its sphere of influence.

It is perhaps churlish to criticise Macron’s design when no other holistic plan for international relations has been forthcoming from other world leaders. But his grand strategy is founded on one fundamental and questionable premise: the coherence and solidity of the EU.

Ever since his Sorbonne speech in September 2017, Macron has called for Europe to organise itself independently and to project itself forcefully on the international stage. But that clarion call has been muffled by serious structural divisions between European member states in three fundamental areas: economics, culture, and defence.

Europe’s economic divisions along a north-south axis have been a feature since the 2008 financial crash. The split between the richer frugal northern economies and the profligate southerners was at its most brutal in 2012-13 over Brussels’ treatment of Greece. Papered over at the time, the structural economic weaknesses of the so-called “Club Med” of Greece, Spain, Italy, even France, burst through again with the Coronavirus pandemic. The question of financing economic protection against the pandemic and relaunching individual economies was feasible for the northern frugal states, but fiscally perilous for the southerners who were among the most indebted countries in the developed world. By June 2020, according to EU statistics, Greece’s national debt-to-annual-GDP ratio stood at 187.4 per cent, Italy’s 149.4 per cent, Portugal’s 126.1 per cent, France’s 114.1 per cent. The hard-fought battle to mutualise a small part of the debt has again pushed to one side the fundamental structural problem with the EU, the Euro: undervalued for some (Germany and the northern states) and overvalued for others (Italy and the southern states).

A 2019 German think tank report entitled “20 Years of the Euro; Winners and Losers” costed the impact of the Euro on individual states since its introduction in 1999. Its findings are hardly likely to encourage those non-Euro eastern and central European states to join up. Germany has gained by far the most from the introduction of the single currency; almost €1.9 trillion between 1999 and 2017, amounting to around €23,000 per inhabitant, with only the Netherlands also gaining significantly.

In all other states analysed, the Euro has resulted in a drop in prosperity: €3.6 trillion in France and as much as €4.3 trillion in Italy. In France, this amounts to €56,000 per capita and in Italy €74,000. Without a fundamental reform of the 19-member single currency, divisions between high debt, high unemployment southern states and the fortunate northern states will continue to act as a deadweight on the EU’s capacity to act internally, let alone project itself internationally.

Structural fissures are also deepening from east to west in the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the EU project. The latest manifestation is Hungary and Poland’s vetoing of the EU’s €1.8 trillion budget and recovery package. Their reason is Brussels’ political conditionality for the fund’s distribution being based on adherence to the “rule of law”. For some time Brussels, spurred by western member states, especially France, has not  taken  kindly to the  growing tendency of Eastern and Central European members to champion the nation state while refusing to sign up to western leaders’ “progressive” values. During the 2015 migration crisis their “regression” to national borders and refusal to take migrants, followed by restrictions on the role of the media and the judiciary, irritated western leaders insistent that such practices contravene EU values. Eastern leaders rightly point to their policies being popular and supported by strong democratic mandates in recent elections. Whatever the respective merits, Brussels’ cultural hegemony risks drawing a new Iron Curtain across the EU, not to mention the fact that many of these states preserve their national currencies. This east-west divide does not augur well in terms of the EU’s inner coherence as a basis for the Macron Doctrine.

By declaring Nato “brain dead” earlier this year, Macron hoped to frighten Europe into seriously instituting its own defence organisation. The Macron Doctrine requires it. But in an important speech the day after Macron set out his Doctrine, the German Defence Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, directly contradicted him by insisting that Europe must continue to rely on US security guarantees. AKK doubled down on her previous statements from October by declaring that “illusions of European strategic autonomy must come to an end” because “Europeans will not be able to replace America’s crucial role as a security provider”. She called for a reality check: “Without the nuclear and conventional capabilities of the US, Germany and Europe cannot protect themselves. These are the sobering facts.”

European divisions on defence are deep-seated and long-standing. The dividing line is between the camp who support Nato as the primary European defence arm and those who militate for an autonomous European army. Before Brexit, Britain was invariably the prime member state to speak up for Nato and to criticise the notion of a European army, usually against France’s advocacy of it. Without Britain’s cover, Germany has had to put its head above the parapet and thus come into direct confrontation with France. A diminished status for Nato in EU defence and Brexit could further divide EU members also along an east-west axis. Nato and Britain provide military protection for the Baltic states against potential Russian aggression. But with Macron much in favour of closer relations with Russia, eastern and central European states are fearful that French or Italian militaries might not be able or willing to defend the Baltic states, a scenario alluded to in November by German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

These fundamental EU divisions whether north to south or east to west are overlain by others of cross-cutting divisiveness. Some EU member states view the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline to Europe, hitherto championed by Germany, as a Trojan Horse. Similarly the Chinese “Belt and Road” infrastructure project to improve east-west regional connectivity has been welcomed by Italy and Greece as providing much needed finance to redevelop their ports (Genoa, Piraeus), but been decried by France and others for selling off Europe’s family silver or worse exposing Europe’s soft underbelly.

The Macron Doctrine attempts to look beyond the EU’s domestic divisions in the belief that a grand European project will unite member states and force them forward. Macron borrows much from General de Gaulle, the 50th anniversary of whose death he commemorated in November. From the General’s return to power in 1958 he set great projects as a goal for overcoming the divisions resulting from the Algerian War. The greatest of them was forging a France that could act independently of the two superpower blocs. As de Gaulle acknowledged: “It’s because we are no longer a great power that we have to have a great policy.” That required a strong independent defence built on France’s own strategic nuclear weapon, achieved by 1960, and, in 1966, withdrawing from Nato’s integrated command. To a large extent de Gaulle’s project was successful in terms of prestige. By the end of the decade France’s standing in the world was arguably greater than before the Second World War. But de Gaulle began his quest to restore France’s greatness with two overwhelming advantages over his young inexperienced successor: he had already saved France twice; and his project applied to just one state. The Macron Doctrine is intellectually cogent and startlingly ambitious. Gaullism in one country was achieved; but Macronism in 27 is a bridge too far.

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James told a widowed friend in 1904 he saw one vital function of the novel as relieving loneliness:

. . . the more one goes on the more one sees that the creation, the projection and evocation by hook or by crook, of some human and personal good company, for the mind and imagination of one’s readers . . . is as kind a turn as one can render.

His fiction demands—and rewards—a sustained act of attention that stands in opposition to a world—to cite Eliot again—“distracted by distraction from distraction”. He told his friend the Duchess of Sutherland in 1903:

Take, meanwhile, pray, the Ambassadors very easily & gently: read five pages a day—be even as deliberate as that—but don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step—& then the full charm will come out.

The charm of a James novel is an intense experience.

James’s precedent meant a lot to the early Ezra Pound, who in 1918 discerned in the Master—I think correctly—“the major James, . . . the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life”. For Pound’s friend Eliot (see his poem “Portrait of a Lady”), James’s late tales were an early model, as he rather grudgingly conceded, looking back from 1935: “One learnt something, no doubt, from Henry James, and might have learnt more.” Virginia Woolf, in her 1920 diary, recorded after a talk with Eliot that “A personal upheaval of some kind came after Prufrock, & turned him aside from his inclination—to develop in the manner of Henry James.” James has meant a good deal to other poets—to Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Delmore Schwartz, for example—and even more to novelists, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst (who admires “his double mastery . . . Both his insight into human behaviour and his deep interest in the novel as a form”).

When in 2018 I recruited a group of major contemporary novelists, including Jonathan Coe, Tessa Hadley, Paul Theroux and Rose Tremain, to contribute to Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote, they found inspiration in James’s wonderful notebooks, where he left private records of his ideas for stories, dozens of which remained unattempted at his death. Most of the writers brought James’s situations into the present, which involved a fascinating negotiation between his time and ours. Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, told the New Yorker, with reference to his fine story “The Poltroon Husband”, that “Rifling through the ideas of an immortal as if they were one’s own is uncanny and exhilarating . . . James’s ideas are very interesting, needless to say—packed with latent drama and very fresh, even though they’re more than a century old.” In all the stories there was an exciting dialogue between James’s time and ours—a proof that James still matters.

But you don’t have to be a writer to savour James, whose appeal to readers (as indeed to film-makers) is manifold: his great horror story The Turn of the Screw (1898) manages, as he hoped, to “reek with the air of Evil”; his novella The Aspern Papers  (1888) magnificently evokes Venice, but also sharply dramatises the problematic relation between editor or biographer and subject/victim; Daisy Miller (1878) sketches comically, then painfully, an American girl’s scandalous fate in Rome; What Maisie Knew (1897) is a brilliant novel about the moral journey of a child of divorce, told with quiet rage and a cool irony. In The Ambassadors (1903), a masterly comedy of intercultural misunderstanding, we follow the hero Lambert Strether through a morally ambiguous Paris which shimmers for him and us like “a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.” Always his great intelligence about point of view, his immersion of the reader in the experience and often the confusions of his characters, places us vividly with them in their uncertainties as they struggle to interpret and come to terms with their experience.

His works make demands of us, but they equally show or teach the reader how to approach them; they are lessons in interpretation, or in emotional intelligence. Thus late in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) our heroine sees that her betrayer Madame Merle realises she is no longer a dupe: “Isabel noted a sudden rupture in her voice, which was in itself a complete drama. This subtle modulation marked a momentous discovery.” Small shifts or breaks of tone can be “momentous” in James: as his career goes on, the energies of melodrama, or of tragedy, increasingly manifest themselves in his fiction without the conventional “great scenes” of confrontation—but nonetheless thrillingly. Often the most intense passages in James just involve characters coming to realise something life-changing; like Isabel realising how profoundly she has been betrayed, how beneath the calm everyday surface something evil and conspiratorial has been at work, something cold and ruthless:

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver. That is, she had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they were leaden weighted.

This transformative vision, moreover, shows us James the historian of women’s apparently undramatic careers, the “hater of tyranny”—finding grandeur in the quiet tragedy of a life, of a heroine deceived and entrapped for the fortune which has been bequeathed her exactly to give her freedom.

James followed his father, an eccentric Swedenborgian philosopher, in deploring cases of “flagrant morality”—the pharisaical, unreflectively judgmental attitudes of those impatient with nuances of interpretation, with the moral uses of the imagination. Anyone who has done jury duty will have realised how potently uncertainty or provisionality of judgment arouses terror and rage in those who lack what Keats called “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. James’s stance, related to the philosophical pragmatism of his eminent brother William, is quietly persistent, constantly searching and adapting to changing circumstances—and always makes room for more complex understandings, often nameless ones which aren’t pinned down with a label. Thus Sir Claude, the weak but sympathetic hero of What Maisie Knew, when accused of killing Maisie’s “moral sense”, makes a stirring defence of the child’s loving nature:

“I’ve not killed anything,” he said; “on the contrary I think I’ve produced life. I don’t know what to call it—I haven’t even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever met—it’s exquisite, it’s sacred.”

And at the climax of this awed speech, “sacred” suggests the way in which, at a moment when the traditional comforts of organised religion had been unsettled by Nietzsche, Darwinism, Biblical scholarship, James’s formal and moral experiments seek out forms of feeling and belief that will hold regardless, based in a sensitive, imaginative appreciation of human psychology.

Finally, in the age of cultural present-ism, of so many movements, honourable and necessary as they may be, which tend to regard the productions and values of the past as intrinsically corrupt and sinister, James offers a salutary though ambivalent perspective, seeing Western (and no doubt all) civilisation as both a flawed and tragic heritage and a healing if not salvific value.  He is far from denying the oppressions and cruelties on which the cultural achievements of our world have been built—but even so appreciates and cherishes the pleasures and consolations they bring. His hero in The Princess Casamassima (1886), sworn to carry out an anarchist assassination and awaiting his mission, undergoes an aesthetic conversion which drives him to speak out, in a way that seems more relevant than ever in our iconoclastic age, in defence of the accumulated artistic wealth he is politically pledged to destroy. He speaks up for:

. . . the monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable.   

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These communications are not from the outgoing President’s “Official Election Defense Fund”—though those are weird enough, with their faintly threatening language, graphs borrowed from Falun Gong publications, and $5 donation button that extracts $55 from your account through some digital sleight of hand. But they are the work of an organisation with which it shares some common ground. The LaRouche Political Action Committee, founded by the late eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, is unenthusiastic about empiricism, beguiled by exotic and impossible conspiracy theories, and keen on conjuring virtue from its own falsehoods. It also enjoys the vocal support of Roger Stone, the political dirty trickster who recently received a pardon from the Oval Office. Which means that its messaging—in a sense that will remain correct until 20 January—is Presidential in tone.

There’s difference, though, in the detail. In the increasingly confusing assertions made in courtrooms and on landscape gardening forecourts by the President’s personal lawyer, it’s often hard to tell who is being accused of what. The affidavits produced by Rudy Giuliani a week after the election were like a collection of dreams about mysterious unmarked vans and once-glimpsed “phoney” ballot papers. When journalists ask Donald Trump if, as QAnon supporters believe, he is secretly saving the world from Satanic paedophiles (think Rosemary’s Baby meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang meets Team America: World Police) then he doesn’t agree, but coyly avoids the opportunity to deny it. Useful vagueness descends.

The LaRouchians are much hotter on the specifics. And here, readers who thought, like John Major, that the United Kingdom is “no longer a great power” and “will never be so again” can allow their chests to swell with pride. “Before Election Day was over,” reports a recent LaRouche despatch, “a British-centered imperial elite—acting through Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence community and the media—moved into the vote fraud phase of its four-year-long ‘color revolution’ against the President, and decreed the green, fascist Biden/Harris team to be the imperial overlords of the United States of America.” This covert British reconquest was finalised, they insist, on November 11 at Prince Charles’s Green Horizon summit, where HRH, the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, his predecessor Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani’s successor as Mayor of New York, spent a day “putting the finishing touches on the ‘Great Reset,’ a global bankers dictatorship.” (This inside scoop is the reason why LaRouchians are now protesting under a banner that depicts Her Majesty the Queen, raging beneath the caption, “Trump Won! The Bitch Lost.”)

The LaRouche organisation is the Galapagos Islands of American politics. Everything is exaggerated and peculiar, but it tells you a lot about what’s happening on the mainland. It began as a fairly ordinary Marxist revolutionary group in Manhattan. (When researching its early history in the New York Public Library, I found Bernie Sanders on the mailing list.) In 1973 it underwent a convulsive transition into full cult mode, when its leader, a pipe-smoking ex-Quaker formerly employed as a management consultant to the shoe industry, decided that some of his followers had been brainwashed to kill him by the CIA. 

From this point, they specialised in harassment and outlandish accusation. Larouchians planted stories in foreign newspapers alleging that Henry Kissinger had murdered a waiter in Acapulco. They charged Noam Chomsky with conspiring to blow up New York with an atomic device. They asserted that William Rees-Mogg was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Their nonsense and madness was disseminated in their surprisingly glossy publications, whose pages now read like the photogravure ancestors of today’s conspiracy theory websites. Today, the organisation is enthusiastically pro-Putin, pro-China and pro-Trump. (One of their correspondents received White House accreditation in 2017, and members are sometimes invited to speak at conferences in Beijing.)

Their appetite for stunts has not deserted them. Last October, a town hall meeting held by the New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interrupted by a wide-eyed young woman who claimed to be an environmental activist with a plan to solve the climate crisis. “Eat the babies,” she declared, in an echo of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Ocasio-Cortez, presumably thinking that the speaker was suffering from some kind of mental illness, treated her kindly. But the moment went viral when online posters suggested, falsely, that the Congresswoman had concurred with this cannibalistic suggestion. “Seems like a normal AOC supporter to me,” cracked Donald Trump Jnr. “AOC is a wack job,” his dad tweeted back. The LaRouchians celebrated the success of their stunt. A day later, I found footage from one of their meetings at which the same young woman spoke, earnestly and haltingly, about the dangers of listening to Greta Thunberg. I hope, one year later, she has found her way out of the cult.

Lyndon LaRouche died last year, four years short of his century. But his golden period, if that’s the right term, ended in 1986, when his mansion in Leesburg, Virginia, was raided by the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in prison for scheming to defraud the tax authorities and deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from his supporters. The prosecutor in the case was the young Robert Mueller. Here, with this coincidence, is a lesson from history. One that tells us something about the tenacity of men who are used to bending reality and encouraging others to follow. LaRouche went to jail. But being locked in a cell didn’t stop him making another bid for the Presidency. Or asking supporters to send him their money. 

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