Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019.

But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places of origin, though those two places could be the one-and-the-same. For Covid19, Wuhan was certainly the first place; the root source, to use a tree analogy. The second source is the base of the stem, the place from where a pandemic fans out and becomes almost unstoppable.

In the case of Covid19, the events in February 2020 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – the jewel of the Italian Alps – were the origins of the pandemic. Without their role, Covid19 might have been a contained epidemic such as SARS (2003).

Since the near-run-disaster that was the SARS-Cov1 panic in 2003, the amount of useful epidemiological work on coronaviruses has been minimal. There was clearly research work being done, including in Wuhan. But that was mainly on the zoonotic origins of coronaviruses, and not on the administration of outbreaks. SARS-Cov1 was a severe novel coronavirus. Novel respiratory viruses – such as the 1918 influenza pandemic – are lethal, spread fast, and are hard to contain. More lethal than Sars-Cov1 was MERS which emerged around 2012. Yet preparations for a respiratory-illness pandemic were focussed almost entirely on a new strain of influenza. No prep for a new novel coronavirus. SARS-Cov2 was ‘tricky’, in that – less lethal but more transmissible than SARS-Cov1 – it fell on the cusp between being dangerously lethal and dangerously transmissible.

Geographic Analysis

The pandemic events of 2020 were not – at least not in any popular awareness – subjected to a proper geographical analysis. Most of the initial outbreaks of the SARS-Cov2 virus which escaped China were largely contained. There were relatively small outbreaks in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Seattle in the United States’ northwest; in some cases transmitted by passengers from a few cruise ships. And larger but still largely contained outbreaks in South Korea and in Iran. These outbreaks came directly from China. The containment of the Iran outbreak was facilitated by the West’s generally hostile attitude towards that country as a geopolitical ‘bad guy’; Iran was easier than most countries for the West to quarantine.

More problematic were the outbreaks in Spain and Italy, which can also be traced back to January 2020. In Spain the initial outbreak, direct from China, was more in the south; most likely linked to escapees from China. There was relatively little subsequent movement across the land border into France, though Andorra experienced a separate outbreak. The main risk from the south of Spain was the United Kingdom, given that, for many British people, southern Spain is either their first or second home. It would have been relatively easy to quarantine British arrivals from Spain; the British authorities ‘dropped a ball’ by being tardy here.

The main blind spot was that Spain is a western country, and westerners had become ingrained in the supposition that pandemics (and all things bad) come from other countries; or, more accurately phrased, ‘countries of others’. Guard rails that were up for China or Iran or even Japan and South Korea, were not there for ‘threats’ from West European countries.

The notion came about that the pandemic radiated out of southern China, rather than having flowed out of all of the places which had experienced outbreaks. When eyes should have been watching Spain and Italy, they were still firmly focused on China, and in a finger-pointing way.

The West could have learned much from China’s data about the impact of the new virus in terms of the demographics of victims and non-victims, and the extent and duration of their exposures and their symptoms. However, the western countries were more predisposed to put up the shutters with respect to that amazing country.

A large part of the problem in the 1918 influenza pandemic was the high numbers of younger adults who caught it and died from it. Covid19 was never like that. Data from China showed that few younger people had died from Covid19; unless, that is, they had had sustained exposures. For younger people, and for society as a whole, it was better for otherwise healthy non-allergic people to have early and tentative exposures to Covid than to be on tenterhooks awaiting what became the inevitable, and would become worse the longer the wait.

Milano-Cortina

More problematic than Spain was the coronavirus outbreak around and to the east of Milan – the ‘tech’ centre of Italy, and the fashion centre – and the connection of Milan to the ski resorts during the peak of the ski season; indeed during the February school holidays in Europe. Milan is the most monied city in Italy. It is an important entry-point for affluent techies on business, and for sundry one-percenters. Once the epidemic began in Wuhan, many of the monied of and around Wuhan (many were foreign nationals) had the nous to ‘escape’ – including to Macao and Hong Kong – before the Chinese central government closed the ‘stable doors’.

Milan and environs became a hotspot for witting and unwitting coronavirus refugees – affluent exiteers – just at the time Europe’s ten-percenters were heading to and from the ski resorts.

Further, there was the World Economic Forum, at Davos, Switzerland; a one-percenter retreat. A few of the delegates may have, unknowingly, arrived with Covid. Following the Forum, many delegates – coming straight from a transmissible environment – will have visited the other hotspots for the rich and famous; the other alpine resorts, and the principalities Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra. And San Marino, which is a centre for the world’s semi-licit arms trade. All of these places had significant outbreaks of Covid19 during February and March 2020. These were perfect environments for the rapid spread of SARS-like coronaviruses. While coronaviruses are not winter viruses as such – compared to other cold and influenza viruses – they nevertheless thrive in winter when not obstructed by those other winter pathogens.

Essentially the most significant locations for amplifying Covid19 were greater-Milan, the Italian skifields centred on Cortina and Livigno; though Torino in the northwest – host of the 2006 Games – probably experienced its share of the unchecked Italian Covid19 flow. From these places it spread to neighbouring countries: Austria, Switzerland, France, and Bavaria in Germany.

Who else was there at those resorts? The managerial class – the bureaucrat and technocrat nine-percenters of the most affluent cities of northwest Europe, especially those cities hosting international (Geneva, Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg) and national (eg Stockholm for one; and Paris and Berlin of course) governance organisations – were there with their older children. Fly-in, fly-out; a week’s break from the office with the family. In many cases parents on their own with the children while their spouses and ex-spouses enjoyed time apart from their children; elite parents and teenagers who would take the opportunities to socialise during the long après-ski evenings. They would mostly be back in their home countries by the first week of March.

Visitors from the Americas – from those same socio-business milieux – would have also been in these resorts at that time, and also in the capital cities of western Europe.

Covid19 didn’t stream into New York from China or from Seattle. It streamed in from the affluent centres of and close to alpine Europe, and from the business and political capitals of northwest Europe. Covid19 came into the Americas directly or indirectly from Italy to a much greater extent than it came from anywhere else.

Missing Maps

What was needed was good flow maps, much like those devised by John Snow, in London around 1850, to chart the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. Instead, the statistics most available were nationally-compiled accumulations of cases and deaths; not international flow maps showing the sequences as Covid19 moved from some places and then on to other places. Individual countries were making their own imperfect maps, with their own make-believe boundary walls. In reality these European borders were for administrative purposes only. Herein lay the problem of visualising the flows of infection; unjoined maps. Further, these case-maps were often unadjusted for the population sizes of each country or province; many maps simply showed that there were cases where there were more people.

For flow maps, you must remove the dots which represent cases resolved by time or, for a small minority of cases, by death. And you must provide per capita data.

These administrators literally failed to join the dots between their own patches and their neighbours’ patches. A glance at any Europe-wide case-map would have shown, by April 2020, a large cluster of cases from Geneva north towards Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and then west towards Maastricht and Brussels; this cluster straddled six separate national borders. (Seven countries if you include Italy, which is close to Geneva.) The conclusions from such a map would have been as obvious as those revealed by John Snow’s case-map of Soho (London) during the 1854 cholera outbreak there.

In early 2020, it was senior public servants, their families including their elderly parents, their staff, and the people they had meetings (and eatings) with who had been most effectively spreading and succumbing to the virus.

First and Second Waves

By July 2020, the Covid19 outbreak was largely contained in Europe. But at a cost, not only in terms of disrupted income-earning opportunities to the small-medium businesses personnel who contracted the virus from the holidaying returnees and who were most disrupted by stay-at-home orders. And also, the latent cost of the first wave included the loss of those many natural immunisations that commuters in large cities experience most days of their working lives; especially cities with international airports.

Thus, the countries which had experienced multi-month shutdowns rebuffed the pandemic virus at a significant hidden cost; a weakening of the immunity of the population, increasing the susceptibility of the so-far uninfected to a new wave of respiratory contagion. Populations in urban centres – historically, and especially immigrants to those cities from the provinces – have always been vulnerable to transmissible diseases. By August 2020 this was especially so, especially in those countries in Eastern Europe (with older and poorer populations) which had been minimally exposed to both the first wave of Covid19 and the other pathogens they would normally have come into frequent contact with.

While the pandemic was contained in Europe by July 2020, it was far from contained in the United States. In the United States, the covid curve was flattened, but at a high plateau. The downside of flattening-the-curve is that you get an extended curve, creating a pathogen reservoir for a second wave of infections.

The Grand Tour and the second wave of Covid19

In the eighteenth century, a time of very high economic inequality in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, a tradition developed among the sons of the then one-percenters to do a Grand Tour. For a few, that tour was somewhat intrepid; Joseph Banks did his grand tour on the Endeavour with James Cook. Lord Byron was another, whose tour was somewhat intrepid and was never completed.

For the majority of these entitled young men, there was a tourist trail that developed; the grand tour became a kind of hedonist pilgrimage. Principal stops included Paris, the Rhine lands (including Heidelburg) and Switzerland. Some of these early bohemian tourists headed directly from Switzerland to Italy; others ventured into Austria (especially Vienna) and the Bohemian capital of Prague.

In Italy there were several must-visit cities, including Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. The homeward journey likely included Sicily, southern France and places in Spain and Portugal.

Some grand tourists would also visit the ‘Near East’, the areas – including the Holy Land – defined by the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas.

The twenty-first (and late twentieth century) version of the grand tour is undertaken by the sons and daughters of American ten-percenters. In the United States in particular, working-life career-building requirements and surprisingly little annual leave strongly encourage this somewhat-elitist comparator to New Zealand’s OE. Young Americans have much less time than young Europeans to travel as tourists during their working lives.

In the modern Grand Tour, which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, young university-educated Americans with both left-elite (nine-percenter) and right-elite (one-percenter) backgrounds descend upon Europe. In 2020, this timing coincided with the re-opening of Europe after what the Europeans optimistically presumed was the end of the Covid19 pandemic. Further, European tourist hotspots were keen to welcome new waves of spending visitors, to help with their economic recoveries.

The second wave of the Covid19 pandemic began in August 2020, though this was not fully apparent until late September. The second wave was much more lethal than the first, and especially in Eastern Europe, where the (generally older) populations had largely escaped the first wave, but were particularly immunity-compromised as a result of the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic’s first wave.

The second wave began in places like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Czechia (especially Prague). And in Israel, another popular destination for American grand tourists. It was the American Grand Tour which brought the pandemic back to Europe, and with a vengeance; and which in turn instigated the further lethal waves of Covid19 around the world in 2021.

Unfortunately, thanks to inadequate specific-location-mapping and flow-mapping of the abundant Covid19 statistics, this flow of infections was only apparent to those who looked under the bonnet. By then, the national Wikipedia sites for Covid19 had lost their energy, showing increasingly outdated maps, and misplaced emphases on first-entry cases during the first wave. The accessible information was either too technical or too stale.

Popular Lore

In popular lore, the Covid19 pandemic was essentially a 2020 phenomenon. TV dramas and documentaries still emphasise that early period of the global crisis.

It was from the lethal second wave that the nasty new variants evolved, in 2021; and spread into and then from India, as the most spectacular example. Remember the Greek Alphabet soup, with the (British) Alpha and (Indian) Delta variants having been especially problematic.

The older Swedish scientists who emphasised the need to take a path – a path which accentuated the need for natural immunity to facilitate an early and complete end to the pandemic’s most dangerous phase – were proved correct as the pandemic raged through its most serious phase in 2021. Though you wouldn’t know it, probably too many interests did not want to make comparisons. Sweden’s politicians had been too slow to address the Stockholm outbreak in early 2020, when that country had an especially vulnerable elderly population; so, it looked as if the world had little to learn from that country. (Sweden had had significantly less influenza than most other countries, in 2018 and 2019; meaning that Sweden had unusually low death rates in the winters of those two years; meaning that they had plenty of ‘fuel’ for a tragic pandemic ‘fire’ in the spring of 2020.)

2021 also became the year of the Covid19 vaccine race; whereas 2020 had been the year of the missing PPE. The public health industry tends to place too much emphasis on immunisation through intervention versus immunisation through monitored natural exposures. This emphasis is valid for the most lethal of infectious conditions; the conditions for which we routinely vaccinate today. But for the below the radar circumstances of categories of common respiratory viruses with high complexity and low lethality – including known circulating viruses such as RSV, coronaviruses (the descendants of previous lethal coronaviruses), rhinoviruses, and influenzas –medicalised immunisations came to be emphasised while, with little awareness, simultaneous processes were lessening immunity to these types of virus. It was like taking one step forward and two steps back.

In the end, the pandemic was resolved through a natural immunisation process. 2022 was the year of Omicron. In 2022 the non-lethal Covid-Omicron variant ‘ripped through’ New Zealand and other places with previous minimal coronavirus exposure. This was a direct result of the failure and subsequent redundancy of the border-quarantine and other barrier methods of protection which were still in force in January 2022. Most New Zealand residents were exposed to covid that year.

Omicron had evolved in southern Africa in late 2021, from the earliest strain of Sars-Cov2. It became a natural immunisation force. Omicron was the invisible cavalry coming to the rescue; favoured in evolutionary terms over the Delta nemesis because it was more highly transmissible while being much less lethal than the previous covid varieties. More like the familiar but under-studied ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. Omicron stopped Delta dead in its tracks; a more effective weapon than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Lessons

I don’t think that western society has learned very much from the Covid19 pandemic. The importance of good mapwork and monitored natural immunisation barely formed any part of the long but largely useless narrative. Sweden’s alternative scientific path was forgotten, or derided, rather than learned from.

The next pandemic will probably also catch us unawares. It will be as different from the contemporary preoccupations of epidemiology, as Covid19 was. It may already be ‘hiding in plain sight’, as the coronavirus threat was in the 2010s. Family doctors should be routinely testing for all the various ‘bugs’ out there, and passing-on data about the various pathogens and cross-immunities which keep us healthy in daily life. We could perhaps have knocked out Covid19 in its early stages, by facilitating natural exposures of healthy people to low doses of already-circulating non-covid coronaviruses.

I think that future government-overreach mandates around lockdowns and mask-wearing will be hard to enforce, given the huge rightwards shifts in western politics this decade. But there may be opportunities for short smart protective measures, undertaken at local levels and in places such as retirement villages and rest homes. In particular, making high-grade (ie the more expensive types of) facemasks available to the vulnerable, with the warning that these should be worn mainly in high-risk environments, and not everywhere all the time.

Meanwhile

It’s great that Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, still popular hangouts of the rich and the not-so-famous, have been able to host a magnificent sporting event. These places have not been tainted by their association with the still recent pandemic. Despite being the places from which an outbreak of a significant new coronavirus fanned out to create a three-year pandemic that changed the world. That outbreak was probably containable, if we had acted with more nous and more knowledge of the common pathogens of daily life.

But who was looking at the Italian Alps in those heady ski-holiday days of February 2020? We were transfixed by China.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

A great academic campus? But note the roof of the Concentrix building.

A Green Way?

Or was it the 1990s’-built Languages Building?

Whoops, there goes Concentrix!

Hard Yakka. Auckland’s answer to the Christchurch Cathedral

Two days before present

The Martians have landed:

One Day before present: going, going, …

Unitec Stadium and Gymnasium (and there were state-of-the-art Squash Courts with a café popular with business staff and students). Once the home of Auckland basketball and netball. And the Auckland Blues – and business staff – trained at the gym, not so long ago.

Back to today:

Ouch, from late 2006 to early 2014 that was my modern state-of-the art workplace and teaching place!

Literally the home of the Schools of Communications and Business. Over those years, I had three offices in that building, and many great memories; and sad memories, too, losing two colleagues.

Near the Carrington Campus main entrance on Carrington Road South; erasing 1900s’ as well as 1990s’ history.

Penman House; only the pine tree remains.

(Who today knows where ‘norfolk pines’ originated? Hint, it’s a place not far away which been erased from our travel maps, despite being a Unesco World Heritage site. I was lucky enough to fly there from Auckland in 2024, when it was still possible. One of these trees is the signature tree at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.)

See this and other easily googled material about Robyn Hyde’s 1930s’ sanctuary. Fortunately, local MP Helen White was able to save a few heritage mementos from the house, just in the nick of time.

Oakridge House in June 2024 and in October 2024

Is that an oak tree? Sadly the Unitec Arboretum and Sanctuary Gardens have also gone. At least there are still oaks and norfolks in the Carrington precinct.

Oakridge House became the main sanctuary (especially 2017 to 2019) for the School of Business in the years after Unitec’s flagship business building was tenanted to IBM (in 2012, in an opaque high-level deal) and soon after was abandoned by IBM and became the Concentrix Call Centre. (I understand that the aim of the 2012 eviction was for Unitec to make money through renting out some of its key assets to lucrative high-tech tenants; the template was the University of Ballarat in Australia, with QUT Kelvin Grove being the template for a high level tertiary campus without being ‘saddled with’ heritage and green spaces which government accounts would construe as a ‘lazy asset’.)

There are very few photos of Oakridge House in the public domain; Unitec itself has been remiss in this aspect of the documentation of its past. Here is one poignant photo that I found, in an advertisement labelled “chimney demolition”.

Finally, below, is the former Childcare Centre and another former workplace. (My son attended the demolished childcare centre in the foreground. He was proud to have been a ‘Unitec student’. My 2016 office was in the former building in the distant background.)

Unitec has now formally merged with Manukau Institute of Technology. It is reputedly going to become a site for city edge tenement housing; some of it, but not all, ‘social housing’. The precinct will need schools, given that nearby schools Gladstone Primary and Mount Albert Grammar are amongst the most oversubscribed schools in the country. It takes little imagination to see that the remnants of Unitec at Mt Albert eventually will become a school (or schools), and that the ongoing Unitec presence of the new Tamaki Institute of Technology (it will probably be called something else) will be at the Henderson ‘campus’, a highrise sandwiched between the Waitakere District Court and the Henderson Library.

Q How do you acquire a small Polytech? A. Establish a large Polytech, then wait.

See Unitec’s extreme financial distress detailed in documents, RNZ, 4 September 2018. Unitec punched above its weight, when it could. Let’s hope that it has not been completely forgotten, by 2050.

And see my yesterday’s photo-essay on Scoop: Carrington: a site for sore eyes.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

It’s great that there is a new season (Season 9) of William Ray’s podcast series Black Sheep, which looks at contributors to New Zealander history, many little known, who were of dubious or ambiguous character.

Here I draw attention to a black sheep who I think trumps them all, Edward Arthur Wilson; though he doesn’t really qualify for William Ray’s series, because his black sheepishness only happened after he left New Zealand.

Edward Arthur Wilson, born in Birmingham England in 1878, arrived in New Zealand in 1901. He married Margery Clark in 1902; she was a recent immigrant from Queensland, though her mother had been born in Wellington in 1852. Both the Wilson and Clark families were members of the somewhat messianic Catholic Apostolic Church (not to be confused with the Roman Catholic church), founded originally by Edward Irving in the 1820s.

Wilson’s employment in England (1901 census) had been as a telephone inspector. In Wellington in 1902, he’s listed as a ‘stenographer’. Edward and Margery had two children, in 1904 and 1906.

In 1911 the family sailed to Canada. Margery and the two children were on the Mārama, arriving in May 1911; presumably Edward was already there. In the 1911 census of Canada, Edward is living with his family in Sunnyside, Calgary, Alberta; listed again as a stenographer. His story gets murky after that.

Apparently, he abandoned his family in 1912. He never returned to New Zealand, though his family did. I understand that he has living descendants in New Zealand. Margery identified herself as a ‘widow’ in the 1920s (in Auckland), and was listed as ‘next of kin’ to her co-resident brother during World War One.

Wilson appears to have worked as a shipping clerk for the ‘merchant navy’ for around ten years from 1912; work that seems to have involved lots of travel, much of it no doubt in dangerous waters. He apparently had a major prophetic vision while in France, in the early 1920s. (His apostolic upbringing will have primed him for this.)

Nostradamus meets Rasputin meets Charles Manson meets Bert Potter

Edward Arthur Wilson restyled himself as Brother XII. He created the Aquarian Foundation in 1927, in the context of radical theosophy. In that time in the early-mid-1920s, he wrote many prognostations about the fate of the world. At that time – in the problematic remission phase of the 1914-1945 Great World War, albeit before modern social media – there was a substantial audience for alternative narratives, given the perilous reality of the then world order.

The story of Wilson’s aquarian cult – based at Cedar-by-the-Sea, just out of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada – is well summarised in Fear, Distrust, and Black Magic, written in 2024 by Kristin D’Agostino for A-B Tech (Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College) in North Carolina, United States. (Follow the link to part one first: How a 1920’s Socialite Fell Under a False Prophet’s Spell; the focus here is on Mary Connally, Brother XII’s principal patron.) While Mary Connally was an heiress, most of her fellow aquarians were also from prosperous families, and many not young – contrast most of the 1960s’ aquarians) searching for some missing insights as to where the seemingly bankrupt world went wrong.

The Aquarian Foundation community existed in two phases, from 1927 to 1928, and 1928 to 1933. In 1928 there was an important court case in which the prosecutors, judge, chief witness and court gallery appear to have been mesmerised by Wilson. The case collapsed when chief witness Mary Connally gave Wilson a glowing testimony instead of the damning evidence anticipated.

In the second phase of the community, Mary Connally became a slave to Wilson and his new paramour and enforcer, Madame Z, aka Mabel Scottowe; aka Edith Mabel Rowbotham, a former schoolteacher. And the cult became increasingly obsessed with hoarding money.

It’s not for me to say much more – others have done that – other than to note that Wilson’s ‘death’ in Switzerland in 1934 was possibly faked, signed-off by a member of the Aquarian Foundation. (Though it would have been hard for a narcissist sociopath like him, if still alive, to have rendered himself completely invisible.) Madame Z later married a man called Edric John Douglas Agate in 1943. In the United States’ 1950 census they were living together in – Eugene, Oregon – as Murray D and Edith M Agate.

Other Material about Brother XII

De Courcy Island farm of notorious cult leader up for sale, 7 May 2021, Times and Colonist.

For Sale: The Former Home of B.C.’s Notorious Apocalypse Cult, 8 June 2021, Montecristo Magazine.

#177 Edward Arthur Wilson, 9 March 2026, BC Booklook.

XII Brother, ABC Bookworld.

5 things you probably didn’t know about the Gulf Islands, 11 Jan 2026, Vancouver is Awesome.

entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography

The Aquarian Foundation (about 1990), by James A. Santucci, professor of Comparative Religion at California State University; and The Aquarian Foundation, 18 February 2024.

Secrets of Brother XII, episode of Expedition Unknown (S.4, Ep.10) Josh Gates, 28 Feb 2018

The Dream of Brother XII, CBC podcast by Moss, Jennifer, 22 March 2016

ENCORE: Searching for Brother XII—the story of Nanaimo’s infamous cult leader, CBC podcast by Moss, Jennifer, 29 August 2016

The collapsing birth rate becomes front-page news, and a long-foretold financial crash? The Hub predicts 2026, Howard Anglin, a doctoral student at Oxford University

Works by John Oliphant, including Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-century Prophet and His Quest for a New World, 2006, Twelfth House Press

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Labour Party Policies

Last month the New Zealand Labour Party announced two policies: a second sovereign wealth fund, and a capital gains tax on non-owner-occupier real estate. For me, both are worrying, representing further steps in the financialisation of an already over-financialised economy. Then yesterday, I heard a story (Report highlights benefits of Kids KiwiSaver scheme, RNZ 13 November 2025) about a group philosophically in tune with the Labour Party lobbying for compulsory KiwiSaver accounts for children; accounts to be opened at birth (and presumably, for those not born in New Zealand, from the date of their being granted permanent residence) and subsequently subsidised. Further promotion of KiwiSaver would be a third financialisation policy.

To understand the issues that I am concerned about – issues about capitalism as understood by mainstream western parties including, indeed especially, Labour parties – a useful metaphor is a ‘mansion’. Our mansion has four spaces: a downstairs commons, a mezzanine, an upstairs casino, and – at the top – a penthouse. The spaces become progressively less inclusive with their elevation.

We note that Aotearoa New Zealand has, since the mid-1980s, become the world’s poster-child for neoliberal finance capitalism. And many, including myself, would argue that New Zealand’s relative (and now absolute) economic decline since the 1980s has been due to its even greater commitment – compared to other western capitalist nations – to the neoliberal financial project.

The Mansion

Money circulates in the downstairs commons (the real economy where goods and services are demanded and supplied) and the upstairs casino (where existing assets are traded, and where derivative assets are created). The casino has an exclusive penthouse annexe – an upper casino – for high rollers.

To our metaphorical mansion we may add a mezzanine, consisting of the government and the banks. We can think of these as regulating the flows of money between the commons and the casino. Money is a special kind of asset – a liquid asset – which flows throughout the mansion, facilitating all the different kinds of trade which take place there. The mezzanine is an active mediator; a pump, a valve, and a sump.

Markets in the commons are primary markets; places where goods and services are produced and bought. Markets in the casino are secondary markets; the casino is a place of trading and speculative gambling. The mezzanine connects the two principal spaces within the mansion.

Though I’m mainly concerned here more about the normal casino, not the penthouse, there is a narrative common among many Labour policy people – many of whom are nine-percenter elites, people in the political class who are not one-percenters – that the ills of society can be placed upon the one-percenters, the penthouse dwellers. These Labour people want the penthouse to be super-taxed, regarding the penthouse as both a fount of grabbable wealth and a place of entitled behaviour. Tax the bads, not so much the goods; and tax capital, not labour. They say. Tax the high-rollers and the landlords. The one-percenters have become a scapegoat for capitalism’s economic failings, allowing the nine-percenters to bask in a bourgeois bubble of self-declared virtue.

Generally, a policy of taxing ‘bads’ for the purpose of raising public revenue must be a policy of supporting those bad activities in order to protect the bad revenue stream. (An ideal tax on bads will generate zero revenue, because it will eliminate those bads.)

While the mansion is a metaphor for a nation’s grand economy of outputs, markets, and money, we note the complication that money also comes and goes through the front and back doors; out of and into other nation’s economies. (While this complication is not unimportant, we can pull away from this by considering the global economy as a complex of commons, casinos, and mezzanines; but no entrances or exits. The global economy is a closed economy. For my purposes here, so is the mansion economy.)

Relationship between the Commons and the Casino

When inequality is high or growing, more money flows from the working classes to the top-ten percent – the ten percenters – than flows the other way; the casino grows faster than the commons. Much of that money being pumped upstairs is profits, royalties, rents; including managerial ‘profits’ in the form of oversized salaries and bonuses. This is income saved rather than spent, meaning it migrates from the commons into the casino.

A significant proportion of income goes into the mezzanine: taxes, savings, debt-repayments, interest payments. Banks and governments then make key decisions about cycling such income back (ie downstairs) into the commons – the economy – or forward (ie upstairs) into the casino. Or it may sit, parked, in the mezzanine.

Thus, the mezzanine has monetary conduits into both commons and casino. Governments spend and save and borrow. When borrowing, governments issue new bonds which are subsequently traded in the casino; but the money raised is generally spent, by the borrowing government, into the commons. Banks may lend to either the commons or to the casino. When, in the judgement of the banks, the economy of the commons is not looking too flash, the profit-seeking banks will lend less to the commons (meaning lending less for the purpose of spending, including genuine investment) and more to the casino (meaning lending more for the purpose of ‘investing in’ existing assets or new derivatives).

We note that, through the processes of production and commerce, economic wealth – useful stuff – is created in the commons. And through the processes of saving and asset trading, financial wealth is created in the casino. The two forms of wealth, commonly conflated, are fundamentally different from each other. Economic wealth – actual wealth – includes both hens and their eggs. (Not golden geese nor golden eggs!) Financial wealth is claims on actual wealth (or on other claims). Gold – except in its industrial and dental and purely artistic uses – is an example of financial wealth; a claim on economic wealth, as are all forms of money. Traded artworks, too, are financial wealth.

We note that employees within the finance sector themselves operate in the commons economy, selling and buying goods and services; albeit, financial services.

Circular Flow

In traditional economic description, the injection of investment spending (controlled mainly by banks) offsets the outflow of saving. And the injection of government spending offsets the outflow of taxation. This is known as the circular flow, and was modelled in the 1950s by the hydraulic moniac machine, invented by the economist Bill Phillips who had worked as a teenager in the early 1930s on the Waikaremoana hydroelectric scheme. (Detractors of descriptions of economies which emphasise the circular flow over the price mechanism, may refer to Phillips’ hydraulic Keynesianism.)

The main impetus to economic growth – growth of activity in the commons – occurs when injections slightly exceed outflows; creating excess demand. (This is refuted by the neoliberal advocates of supply-side economics, who believe that growth is natural regardless of demand, but may be hampered by price distortions and other cost impediments.)

Other injections into the commons from the mezzanine or the casino include dissaving – ranging from the withdrawal of money from savings’ accounts to the sale of assets for the purpose of buying goods or services – and new consumer debt. Consumer debt can take place through the wealth effect, meaning that people with increasing financial wealth are encouraged to borrow against that collateral in order to purchase goods and services in the commons.

Price inflation can stimulate the spending of money parked in the casino or the mezzanine. With inflation, the purchasing-power of money erodes, creating incentives to spend it ‘downstairs’. But inflation also creates incentives to deploy money ‘upstairs’, by buying non-money assets with expected returns above the rate of inflation.

Goods’ types

The ‘bread and butter’ of developed, industrialised, economies is the production of ‘wage goods’, essentially meaning the goods and services that working class people buy; indeed many fortunes have been made from selling wage goods, especially addictive goods, which enjoy economies of scale. The most important wage goods are food, rental housing, clothing, transport, basic personal services, and entertainment.

The wealth effect, however, tends to favour ‘bourgeois goods’ over wage goods; in that sense we may say that money from working-class taxes and savings is ‘laundered’ through the casino, re-emerging in the commons as discretionary middle-class spending. Another part of the economy, which connects the commons directly to the penthouse, is known as conspicuous consumption – ‘vanity goods’ – basically spending which can only be undertaken by aristocrats and other one-percenters; think the ‘gilded age’.

A fourth category of consumer goods produced in the commons are military goods, built by the military-industrial complex, and principally facilitated by governments.

A fifth category is ‘illicit goods’ – goods and services which are either illegal outright, or are otherwise disreputable; the most obvious examples are the consumption of illicit drugs and sexual services. An important and understudied aspect of this fifth category is the extent that elites and counter-elites – the ten-percenters – generate demand for illicit goods. Economic theory treats illicit goods as any other type of consumer goods.

In addition to consumer goods, in the circular flow there are investment goods, which are important for economic growth. Investment goods become, for general purposes, the built environment. The demand for investment goods is largely derived from the demand for wage goods.

The two main threats to the sustainability of capitalism are excess flows – net flows – from the commons to the casino; and spending flows from the casino to the commons which undermine the demand for – and hence production of – wage goods. Capitalism is at its healthiest when workers are also consumers; and when workers don’t have to incur debt in order to buy wage goods.

When outflows into the casino exceed injections into the commons

This is a state of systemic unbalance, likely to happen when wages fall behind productivity; ie likely to happen when the incomes of the upper income-decile increase the most. The casino gets more populated with money, with the commons less populated. More play for some, and less pay for others!

Such unbalance leads to a form of structural recession; a shrinking of the real economy as the financial emporium upstairs expands. In such a structural recession, the commons starve – or at least suffer malnourishment – whereas the casino bloats and inflates.

The attraction of the casino is ‘financial return’, which has two components. The first component is yield, which is revenue extracted from the commons by asset-holders participating in the casino. The second component is capital gain, which derives when demand for existing assets exceeds the supply of existing assets, pushing up the exchange prices of those assets. This quest for – indeed the gamble for – capital gains is the reason why it is appropriate to call the upstairs financial room of the mansion ‘the casino’.

Government policies which facilitate flows of revenue into the casino from the commons are policies which fuel the capital gain process, by generating excess demand for existing claims; in effect creating more claims by making claims more valuable. The capital gains process gives the illusion of wealth-creation; but it is really the creation of financial bloat or inflated wealth, of excess claims. It occurs when speculation gives – at least in the short term – better returns than investment in the commons. It increases the claims on real wealth of the casino class vis-à-vis the incomes of the commons class of mainly working people.

What happens most of the time, however, is that financial wealth is not spent on goods or services; rather it is left in the casino, to inflate. Inequality begets inequality. When capital gains are the norm, the casino operates as an alternative form of compound interest. Regular compound interest occurs when interest yields outpace consumer price inflation; interest payments augment financial wealth while draining the commons of demand for goods and services. Casino compounded interest occurs when capital gains exceed inflation. Leveraged compound interest occurs when casino punters borrow money to buy assets; while risky, the growth of financial wealth made possible substantially outpaces the more ordinary and passive forms of accumulating compounded claims. When leveraged compound interest is taking place, banks in the mezzanine look to upstairs-lending instead of downstairs-lending for more of their profits.

Capital gains, and Labour policies.

We in New Zealand have become most familiar with real estate as the asset class which generates capital gains; so it is that asset class for which there has been most agitation – especially from the established ‘Left’ – for a capital gains tax.

The Labour Party is proposing a capital gains tax on ‘investment property’ as a future revenue source. To achieve revenue from such a tax, there have to be such capital gains, and therefore that part of the casino needs to be nursed to convert this problem into a solution.

Yet, in the casino at present – especially in New Zealand – capital gains are being made from just about every category of financial assets other than real estate. And Labour has no plans to impose a capital gains tax on any of these others: shares, bonds, gold, crypto-currency being the main types. Labour also plans to exempt owner-occupied housing, creating disincentives to labour mobility (homeowners moving to other locations, renting out the family home). But they do not plan to exempt young aspirants to property-ownership who can most easily get onto the property ladder by buying (and letting) houses in towns or suburbs other than where they live and work.

NZ real estate is too overpriced relative to financial fundamentals at present and in the foreseeable future; substantial capital gains seem unlikely to restart so long as the commons is in the doldrums. Though it seems that northern European nations, which kept a lid on property prices in the 2010s, are now ‘enjoying’ the financialisation of housing.

An unremarked-on form of capital gain taking place at present is in the bond market, especially government bonds which are regarded in many jurisdictions as risk-free. When interest rates fall steadily – not too fast, not too slow – then bond prices increase for a period of years; especially the prices of ‘long-dated’ bonds. (Though New Zealand has a rather thin government bond market, given its official aversion to government debt. This chart shows yields on US 30-year bonds; these bonds can be expected to generate large capital gains when interest rates finally fall in the United States.) Falling interest rates do not necessarily restore the downstairs-upstairs balance, boosting consumer spending, as most commentators suggest. The revival of the commons needs to be kick-started by spending – such as government spending – not merely by cheaper debt. As well as stimulating the market for bonds in circulation, lower interest rates create the expectation that banks will lend more funds into the casinoand thereby further boost the prices of financial assets.

If governments tax some forms of capital gain, but not others, they simply distort the financial marketplace, creating more ‘investment’ in those classes of assets not subject to the tax.

Replenishing the Commons

Money that flows into the casino and stays there is effectively withdrawn from the real economy, so the commons need to be replenished by the mezzanine with new money. In essence, that process of replenishment is known as quantitative easing; it’s essentially a process of expanding government debt – creating new liabilities on governments’ balance sheets and new assets on banks’ balance sheets. The requirement is that the new money is lent into the commons, and in the process spent in the commons; not lent into the casino or left in the banks’ sumps.

Super-Inflation

In near-normal times, replenishing the commons depleted of money maintains that normality, and therefore minimises financial risks. It’s normally OK if money – effectively play-money – circulates in the casino, so long as that money doesn’t interfere with vital markets such as the housing market. But such monetary bloat acts like a Sword of Damocles dangling over the commons.

A super-inflation problem comes when there is a sudden and unexpected cascade of reactivated money descending from the casino to the commons. When there is panic in the casino – as there was in 2008 – the mezzanine may replenish the casino with money, in the hope that the panic will ease and the money in the casino will stay in the casino. That’s what happened at the end of the 2000s, indeed with a degree of deflation; yet there was plenty of scaremongering that dramatic inflation might be a consequence of the monetary easing which took place then.

The principal Sword of Damocles which we face today is the world’s corporate casino-dwellers – the many private and public pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

Sovereign Wealth Funds

Sovereign wealth funds are funds which ‘invest’ public savings in the global casino. Some such funds may have restrictions placed upon them; these are usually funds which seek to promote certain sectors of the real economy, and are sometimes nationalistic in nature. This is the kind of second fund proposed for New Zealand, and is similar to sovereign wealth funds promoted by Roger Douglas in 1973, and the fund promoted by certain elements of the First Labour Government in 1937. (New Zealand’s present sovereign wealth fund is commonly known as the Cullen Fund, a superannuation fund, and is scheduled for liquidation in the coming decades.)

Countries for which sovereign wealth funds are appropriate are mainly those with large stocks of in-demand export commodities. The obvious examples in recent history are those of the oil-producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Norway; these countries have had large trade surpluses. Another country famous for its sovereign wealth fund is Singapore, which also has had large trade surpluses. Singapore borrows money, in Singapore’s own currency, to fund its fund. Singapore has a huge pool of private savings, which are channelled into that country’s public ‘investment’ fund.

New Zealand is the very opposite; it’s a country with a very long history of current account and trade deficits. The New Zealand government, like the Singapore government, effectively borrows to fund its fund. The new Labour-proposed fund is intended to divert certain monies (profits of publicly owned businesses) into this new fund – money that would normally be spent into the real economy and thereby supportive of the commons – and shunt it into the casino. It has been conceived of as a magic-money tree – a compound interest scheme – which will create future financial wealth. In reality, it will simply augment the Sword of Damocles which is already hanging over the economies of New Zealand and like countries.

Likewise KiwiSaver, which is a set of private pension funds, made semi-compulsory, shunting lots of money into the casino, and funded by incomes which could otherwise be being spent into – supporting – the commons. KiwiSaver breaks two of the most commonsensical rules of monetary literacy. It requires working-class New Zealanders to save money while simultaneously incurring debt, and requires them to prioritise this building of casino assets over their paying down mortgage and other personal debt. In addition, it requires New Zealanders to hope that their KiwiSaver balances will outpace inflation; indeed the balances are outpacing inflation in part by policies which boost the casino at the expense of the commons – hence facilitating structural recession – and which require Kiwi savers to take on systemic risks in order to achieve those above-inflation returns.

Magic Money Trees?

For modern mercantilists, the metaphor for money – as a strictly finite commodity – is ‘gold’. (In the mercantilist epoch in the past – the era of merchant capitalism in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries – the practical metaphor for money was silver.) The mantra of contemporary mercantilists is that “money doesn’t grow on trees” or that there is “no magic money-tree” or that there are “no money-making pixies”.

The mercantilists lampoon the idea of a magic money-tree, while themselves upholding their own implicit (compound interest) concept of a magic-money tree. (The different placements of the hyphen are so important here.)

The people who really promote the casino at the expense of the commons are the ones who believe that money has magic powers. In the end, money can only buy what is being produced at the time that it is spent. If there is a future cascade of casino-money landing in an economy which is in a state of collapse – and it was a near-run thing after 2008, and after 2020 – then saved money will become close to worthless. The only thing that will matter in a collapsed economy is the capacity of the commons to produce the necessaries of life.

The neoliberal financial project is a political programme of liberal-mercantilism; the conflation of private-property interests, governments that support those interests, and the fairy-tale view that wealth and claims on wealth are the same thing. This magic-money view is predicated on the idea that whole societies can become wealthy by destructively mining the world’s resources in order to create claims on the world’s resources. It is a project of linear economics in a world in which real and sustainable economies must, by the very nature of life, be circular. Money’s power lies in its circulation, not its extraction.

Intergenerational Equity

Intergenerational equity is not achieved by funding the casino and the magic-money tree of enhanced compound interest. This is what the ‘financial literacy’ industry claims. Through this approach, the young of today can only expect to be dumped-on tomorrow. Intergenerational equity is achieved by investing in a sustainable commons, not in magical compound interest.

The Global Arms Race

What seems to be happening is that, in addition to boosting the casino, western capitalism is becoming increasingly devoted to militarising the commons, and to forcing non-western countries to do likewise. A degraded militarised commons, with more guns and less butter, is – among other things – a second Sword of Damocles poised over us all. Yet our political classes are conspicuous in the lack of attention they are paying to the problems of militarisation and unsustainability, and most of the rest of us are too busy making ends meet or looking the other way.

Conclusion

The future of western capitalism depends on its investment in – support of – the commons, not the casino. While the casino may operate in parallel to the economy, largely as a sort of irrelevance, it also imposes a kind of severe danger – an avalanche risk, if you will – to the real economy upon which we all (including our elites and would-be elites) depend. The heightened risk is that the casino has been and is being supported by governments – indeed Labour governments – at the expense of the increasingly impoverished commons. The mansion depends on its lower floor; not its superstructure.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Today’s geopolitics is already coming very close to a war (mainly of words, so far) between Asia and Europe (both entities broadly and loosely defined). For geopolitical purposes we may call this a war of hubris and cant between East and West. Conveniently for the West, the words East and Evil start with the same letter, so it’s easy for westerners to conflate East and Evil to the initial E.

What letter do we give greater Europe, aka The West? G for Good? Or B for Bad?

Consider the six principal political leaders of the West: Rutte, von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, Trump, Netanyahu. What they have in common, to a lesser to greater degree, is their complicity re the genocidal Israel project. Can we call them Good? Clearly no. Can we call them Bad? Yes, we can.

It means that, from the point of view of an academic (ie disinterested to a point, not uninterested) Eurocentric observer, we are entering a geopolitical struggle between Bad and Evil. (Only people who advocate for the Israel project in its present form could claim that it’s Good versus Evil.) We note that the most obvious interpretation of ‘Bad’ is that Bad is the lesser Evil.

(We should also note that, from a Sinocentric or Russocentric or Iranocentric or Indocentric point of view, the expansionist West probably looks more like Evil than Bad. It may be that more people in the world perceive West to be the greater Evil and East to be the lesser Evil. The median viewer probably lives in India.)

From a Referee’s Eye

Let’s think of this geopolitical arm-wrestle as a game of rugby. The referee is obliged to favour neitherBad nor Evil. And it’s a game with an indefinite amount of ‘extra time’; only the teams themselves can call fulltime, though they may consult the referee. So long as the teams cannot agree to an outcome, the game simply continues ad infinitum. We may assume that each team has a very large ‘reserve bench’.

(We note that, and ignoring the case of Japan for simplicity, geopolitics from 1938 to 1990 was either ‘Good versus Evil1 versus Evil2’ or ‘Bad versus Evil1 versus Evil2’; it was multipolar then bipolar. For simplicity, for that historical war we may call Good/Bad the West, putting aside the issue of western motives and morality. In May 1945, Evil1 conceded to West and Evil2. In 1990, Evil2 conceded to West. There was no real argument about who were the winners and losers. There may be an argument about the use of the ‘Evil’ labels; but those labels accurately reflect the western view of both Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union.)

Most likely the referee secretly prefers the lesser Evil (Bad) to prevail over the greater Evil. But our referee is a professional, and must adjudicate according to the ‘plays’ that take place. A professional referee is neutral. Probably both Evil and Bad will try to cheat. The referee must deal with both sides’ cheating even-handedly. (Point of ethics. Would it be better for the game if such a referee is like a ‘bent cop’, in this case favouring Bad over Evil?)

What is the game’s best outcome if Evil is winning? Does Bad keep playing forever hoping for a Hollywood-style comeback? Or – if the only realistic alternative is total defeat – does Bad concede, offering a dishonourable draw in the hope that Evil will accept?

The Nuclear Option

What happens if, when we enter indefinite ‘extra time’, we abandon the rules and agree to start playing Nuclear Rugby; noting that this form of rugby involves both sides resorting to tactics of mass destruction. In the absence of rules, the referee relocates to Rapa Nui, hoping to be safe there. Further, the referee is now an observer, pronouncing on military advantage and nothing else; hardly anybody listens anymore. As before, the game only ends by mutual agreement; or by there being no players left alive.

Here we note that there are ‘third parties’. There are neutral nations which have joined neither team. And each nation has unwilling participants; people who do not like rugby. These people neither wish to support the same team as their government nor the other team; for practical purposes they are neutrals or pacifists, not traitors. They struggle to be heard above the noise of the binary contest. Then there are the non-human life forms on Earth; they are neutral third parties. Nuclear weapons, more than any other type of weapon, disproportionately affect third parties.

How does a game of nuclear rugby end? Is there an ‘offramp’ before The End? Presumably Evil will give up if it’s clearly losing; as eventually occurred in 1938 to 1990. But will Bad ever give up if Evil is winning?

If Evil is winning and Bad refuses to ‘sue for peace’, then the only hope for the birds and the bees is a quick extinction of all participating humans. Humanity’s only hope would be the survival of some neutrals; and the retention of a planet which can still support life. There will be no victor to collect the cup of Ashes.

The better option

Don’t play geopolitical rugby.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin – One of our least-discussed discriminatory ‘isms’ is what I call ‘lookism’. Discrimination on the basis of a person’s or a group’s appearance, noting in particular features of ancestry, age, and culture. Discrimination based on how individuals and peoples look to other people.

Discrimination on the basis of the presence or absence of ‘beauty’

This form of discrimination falls most particularly on females. Commonly we too easily see the death of a ‘beautiful’ woman as the greatest of all human tragedies, while regarding the death of an ‘ugly’ woman as the least of all such tragedies. The perfect victim is a beautiful woman.

Early yesterday (10 Sep 2025) I watched Al Jazeera Live, to get information about the Israeli attack on Qatar which had taken place about four hours earlier. (Refer Maps: Israel has attacked six countries in the past 72 hours, Al Jazeera, 10 Sep 2015.) At about 5:35am NZ time, the news network crossed to a White House press briefing, expecting to hear for the first time the official US take on the event.

Karoline Leavitt: “Today I would like to address the tragedy that had not received nearly enough media attention; the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska. Here are the facts that many outlets have shamefully and intentionally failed to report until the President drew attention to it. On August 22nd Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death on the rail system in Charlotte North Carolina by a savage career criminal. This is a public transportation system that many in the area use every single day to go to school and work. Iryna was on the train that night, travelling home from her job at a pizzeria, still in uniform from her shift. This beautiful innocent 23-year-old young woman was a Ukrainian refugee who had recently fled her country for a chance at a safer life and a promising new beginning here in the United States of America. But tragically, the public transportation system in a major American city was more dangerous than the active war zone that she left. … “

Eventual break-back: Cyril Vanier [Al Jazeera anchor] “We are listening in intently because we are expecting that there may be comments from the White House on Israel’s attack on Doha just a few hours ago.” After more than 10 minutes Karoline Leavitt, a beautiful blond woman, made her short White House response to the Israeli attack.

After a couple of questions, she said; “As I told you, the President was notified by the United States’ military that Israel was attacking Hamas …”. The language indicated that the President was notified by the United States’ military rather than by the Israeli authorities; and that the attack on Qatar was already underway when the President first heard of it. (Maybe the United States is a proxy of Israel, and not the other way around?)

Note that Leavitt’s tale of Iryna Zarutska suggests, if taken at face value, that the “active war zone” in Ukraine is relatively safe?!

Back to my story

I had heard about the Iryna Zarutska case earlier this week (refer BBC: Suspect in fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee charged with federal crime), so this tragic story was not as underplayed as the White House intimated. Violent crime is ubiquitous throughout the western world; much of it is senseless, committed by underclass perpetrators, many with mental illness. For many African and Native American communities, terrifying violence, including femicide, is an all too frequent fact of their lives and deaths. Pretty blond immigrant victims are the exception, not the rule.

Terror is also perpetrated by the western world’s ruling classes, and much of it is aimed at immigrants with black or brown skin.

Especially on Al Jazeera, because Palestine is on their patch and because they do not downplay the violence perpetrated by the Israeli Einsatzgruppen, we see many victims – especially mothers wearing culturally-traditional black clothing and head coverings. To western viewers, these victims look quite unattractive; they are all-to-easily dismissed as mothers-of-terrorists, mothers of future terrorists, and future mothers of future terrorists. These women look less like westerners than the Palestinian men do, making it particularly hard for some of us to identify with them as humans like us.

Lookism regards as the most tragic of victims the young, the blond, the blue-eyed, the fair-skinned, the slim (but not emaciated). Lookism favours long or plaited hair; uncovered heads. Lookism is racism, ageism, culturism, and individualism.

Stereotypes of bad people (and non-people) are ugly, and dark. A problematic piece of twentieth-century literature which perpetuates these stereotypes is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. These books became very popular with the ‘hippie’ generation, as well as with other generations which were into deeply problematic books such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand galvanised coteries of young men (and some young women, such as Liz Truss); her fans vary in age from 99 (eg Alan Greenspan) to 57 (eg Peter Thiel) to 19. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, became the launching-pad for the 0.001 percenters and for people who aspire to the success-cocktail of concentrated-wealth, power-sex, and techno-utopia.

(Note How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis, 2016, by Adam Weiner; Weiner observes that 500,000 copies sold in the crisis year of 2009. And note the tech-focussed New Zealand school curriculum changes, New push for AI as Education Minister Erica Stanford announces curriculum changes RNZ 11 September 2025.)

The techno-supremacist 0.001 percenters seem to like three types of literature. Ultra-individualist rationalisations of ‘rationalism’ such as Atlas Shrugged and books recommended by the Mises Society, certain types of science fiction (see Do billionaires even understand the sci-fi they’re inspired by? The Listening Post Al Jazeera 7 September 2025), and mythic fantasies, such as Lord of the Rings.

Back to Lord of the Rings (noting that this was mentioned in the Listening Post story, and that Peter Thiel has read it “over ten times” as an adult). On reflection, it is drawn-out racist fantasia in which Middle Earth is a thinly veiled map of Europe. Mordor is the former caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. And Mordor’s maritime allies were from the coasts of North Africa, the Barbary Coast. The ugly (thereby evil!) Orcs were seemingly without women (though Peter Jackson made a joke about this in the second movie) and children; certainly, if present in the story, we would have wished for the death of them as the ugly mothers and future-mothers of ugly terrorists. There was however a big and ugly female spider Shelob; an embodiment of all tropes of wicked ugly women.

The beautiful people – which very much include blond and other fair-skinned women – draw on Celtic, Scandinavian and possibly Ukrainian identities (noting The Counteroffensive: How Ukraine uses ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to frame its battle for survival Mariana Lastovyria Kyiv Independent 29 August 2014, and Ukraine and the Orcs: Leaders slip into ‘Tolkien mindset’ Gwynne Dyer Manawatu Standard6 May 2022). The Kievan Rus’ were a people of Varangian – ie Scandinavian – origin. Aryan, for sure. By this view, if you want to know if someone is good – or, on the other hand, ‘deserves to die’ – just find out what their race is!

Conclusion – Lookism

Mythology, especially ethnic and pseudo-ethnic mythology, is dangerous at the best of times. Ugly myths about individualism and the virtue of beauty – and their flipsides (collectivism, and the vice of ugliness) – create a recipe for conflict without any point of resolution. Ugly won’t concede because (by conflation) it’s evil; and ‘beauty’ won’t concede because either it’s evil too, or because its adversary is too evil.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The failing nation-states of Western Europe are not peacemakers. They are warmongers, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – the Coalition of Sanctimony and Hypocrisy. They are trying to frame the current geopolitical struggle between a unipolar versus a multipolar world order as a struggle of the ‘Democratic’ Axis of Good against a strengthening ‘Autocratic’ Coalition of Evil located through most of Eurasia.

Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says “whatever it takes“. Twice this year the coalition of sanctimony has derailed opportunities to end the Russia-Ukraine War through the re-creation of a neutral Ukraine. (The present war is already nearly as long-lasting as World War One.) The re-creation of a neutral Ukraine is the only available off-ramp to end this war.

The anti-peace phalanx that pretends to be pro-peace – headed by Merz, Keir Starmer, Ursula von de Leyen, and Mark Rutter (and formerly including Joe Biden and Boris Johnson) – represents the expression of a clear and open geopolitical strategy of eastwards expansion, both further into the Slavic Heartland (refer to Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, free on Google Books, published early in 1919 though mostly written late in 1918) and in Southwest Asia (aka the ‘Middle East’). (France’s Emmanuel Macron is more ambivalent than these others, and is expected to fade from the presentCoalition as his political career comes to an end, and as France becomes consumed by domestic problems.)

Considered to be the academic founder of the discipline of geopolitics, Mackinder – born in Lincolnshire, England – was then the Conservative MP for a Scottish constituency. In late 1918 – a critical pivot moment in world history – he held his seat in the House of Commons, with a comfortable majority in Britain’s immediate-post-war election. Mackinder saw the necessity of establishing a group of smallish neutral nation-states between the two potentially resurgent “Going Concerns” of defeated Germany and defeated Russia (Russia, then in a post-war civil war, and in the process of becoming the ‘Bolshevik’ Soviet Union). In line with Mackinder’s analysis, the World War reignited in the late-1930s partly as a result of those smaller states eschewing neutrality in favour of various mostly-failed attempts to form security alliances with former antagonists, and/or with Britain and France.

On the matter of Mackinder’s relevance to the 2020s’ world, note this quote re Heartland: Three Essays on Geopolitics, by Halford John Mackinder: “Heartland is a fascinating introduction to a pioneer of geopolitics. Halford Mackinder’s trailblazing ideas have influenced international politics to this day. His concept that world domination depends on the control of the global ‘pivot area’ or ‘heartland’ – the centre of the large land mass of Europe and Asia – has informed the political tactics and wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe through the decades. His theories have influenced politicians and political scientists for generations, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to a long line of U.S. presidents. In our times, the importance of Mackinder’s heartland theory for the United States’ fight to enforce global hegemony, Russia’s struggle to stay independent and relevant on a world stage, and China’s plans to establish a trade route between East and West, make Heartland essential reading for understanding our world.”

Ukraine and Israel as Western bridgeheads into the Eastern heartlands

In geopolitical context, both Ukraine and Israel can be seen as Western bridgeheads into the ‘Near East’ and ‘Middle East’ heartlands; bridgeheads against the west-resistant poles of Russia and Iran. Ultimately these geopolitical gambits seek as an end-goal the ‘containment’ of China; China being understood as the single biggest threat to the unipolar Western – essentially Christian, labelled ‘Democratic’ – world-order fantasy which prevailed especially in Washington in the 1990s. (In the Cold War, this geopolitical contest was presented as the battle of the Free against Communism.)

Since the demise of Joe Biden (dubbed ‘Genocide Joe’ by some, and not without reason), there has been a bifurcation of the western project.

The United States is most focussed on its Middle Eastern agenda (which, as in Obama times, very much includes geopolitical designs on Syria), so has doubled-down as Israel’s main sponsor of regional terror. Nevertheless, the self-appointed European coalition of sanctimony has been fully and consistently behind “Daddy’s” geopolitical interest in promoting Israel’s asymmetric war of aggression; and still is, despite some attempts to appear to be distancing itself from the Palestinian theatre of conflict. (On ‘Daddy’, see “Daddy” diplomacy: The politics of obsequiousness, Hugh Piper, Lowy Institute, 24 July 2025.)

Israel’s barbarism could only be tolerated by any group of countries if those countries had a ‘higher’ political purpose; namely opposition to a geopolitical adversary shared with Israel – an adversary which dares to resist western power. Any coalition facilitating Israel’s anti-human agenda (of erasing “human animals”, aka Amalek) has fully given up any claim to be considered The Good. In line with geopolitical realism, there are no Good Guys.

The European Coalition of Sanctimony quickly formed when peace threatened to break-out in Ukraine following the 28 February 2025 meeting in the White House. Their aim is to locate German soldiers in Ukraine; an insensitive act which to Russians would be as provocative as 1914 and 1941. If a post-war Ukraine is to have genuine peacekeepers, they cannot be belligerents; such peacekeepers would have to be there under the auspices of the United Nations, and only from countries which are verifiably neutral with respect to Eurasian geopolitics (India would probably qualify; so would South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria – and of course Fiji with its tradition of peacekeeping.)

The Coalition is, it claims, fighting for the ‘rules-based-order’ in one conflict while pushing-back against international law in the other (genocidal) conflict. A coalition of hypocrisy, indeed.

In the end, international rules are meaningless in a battle framed as Good versus Evil. Evil, by definition, does not follow the rules. So, if Good is to wage an unyielding war against Evil, why would Good handicap itself by following rules that Evil cannot be expected to follow? Laws can be applied to a real war – of A versus B – but not to a war when one or both sides claim to be Good combating Evil? For the sanctimonious, defeating the posited Evil is more important than following the rules.

These West European interests are pulling back from their unconditional support for Israel so that they can focus on their belligerence towards Russia. While they don’t admit the contradiction in their embarrassing support for one aggressor (Israel) and their adamant opposition to another (Russia), Israel’s war in Palestine has removed any possibility that the coalition can seriously claim the moral high ground.

In Aotearoa New Zealand – the little-West located in the far southeast – we need to show more empathy towards Asia, which has been invaded and abused many times by The West, and less towards West Europe which was last invaded by Asia in the fifth century (by Atilla the Hun). New Zealand (eg under Jim Bolger) once considered itself to be an Asian country. Now, New Zealand’s political class is at risk of reinterpreting the continent Asia – sixty percent of the world’s humanity – as a monolithic antagonist. Can the lands to the south of Asia – literally, Australasia – be trusted by Asia?

In geopolitical terms, the West are the aggressors – and the peace blockers – in both of the present faultlines.

The Central Issue: Unipolar versus Multipolar ‘World Order’

Realist scholars of geopolitics – including the conservative John Mearsheimer and the progressive development economist Jeffrey Sachs – are clear about the nature of and the openness of the western geopolitical project. They see the eastwards expansion of the west, cloaked in its narrative of sanctimony, as somewhat problematic.

A unipolar world order is not necessarily an overt dictatorship over every human on the planet. Rather, it is a system in which one central polity – potentially one man or woman, but more likely a technocracy of truth-guardians – has an effective global veto over the contest of ideas, should it choose to use that veto. In a multipolar world order, such vetoes may operate regionally, though there could be no ‘one-veto-to-rule-them-all’.

The first thing that people across the world should consider, is whether the one-empire world is a better aspiration than a multi-empire world; noting that empires come in both overt and covert forms, and that empires can vary from the somewhat benign (ie fraternal) to the severely malign. (Mackinder’s principal principle was that of ‘fraternity’.) Is a single benign empire best? The issues here are twofold: how easily can a benign empire become malign; and how can we be sure that a benign hegemon is really as benign as portrays itself? (We may note the more benign optics of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World compared to the chilling repression underpinning George Orwell’s 1984.)

The West’s illusion of being non-violent in achieving its objectives is a result of it using violence only as a last resort; the West favours heavy-handed diplomacy, known in earlier imperial times as gunboat diplomacy. Importantly – as we have seen in Palestine and Iraq, and as we saw especially in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam – the West will always resort to extreme violence if it feels it has no other choice. The West will always bring out its ‘big bazookas’ if it feels sufficiently threatened or sufficiently punitive.

The coalition of sanctimony, through Mark Rutter, let slip the truth that the President of the USA is ‘Daddy’. Another ingratiating word that I’ve noted, for example in Berlin Briefing podcasts, is ‘uncle’; a word that this year cost the Prime Minister of Thailand her job (see Thailand’s PM suspended over probe into leaked ‘uncle’ phone call with Cambodian official, Euronews 1 July 2025).

Daddy! says it all. The coalition wants a military presence in Ukraine. Please Daddy! Don’t stop the war in a way that obliges Ukraine to become a neutral country (eg in the way that Austria was obliged after World War Two).

Mackinder claimed: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Eurasia-Africa]; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” (Not unlike the Muldoon political stratagem which contributed to New Zealand choosing to adopt MMP. “Who rules the Cabinet rules the Caucus. Who rules the Caucus rules the Parliament. Who rules the Parliament rules the Country.”)

Mackinder, in his later writing, emphasised the lands between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea as the Heartland. The World Wars of the twentieth century can be seen as grabs by Germany for Ukraine, the heart of the Heartland. Which country is it today which – using ‘whatever resources it takes’ – most wants to gain effective control of all of Eastern Europe, including former Soviet republics. Who rules the European Union rules Europe. Who rules Nato rules the West. The United States’ role in Nato is diminishing. Who, who once played a back seat in Nato, is now muscling into the front row?

Let’s play Dominoes, noting that geopolitical advance is performed using various ways and means, soft power and economic power as well as hard power. From a European viewpoint, the final important dominos would be Georgia (an especially interesting prize, given the ambiguous statuses of Abkhazia as a seaside playground for Russia’s richest and South Ossetia), and maybe Belarus.

Further south, after Syria and Iran are neutralised by Israel and the United States (noting the events of 1953), there are – as dominoes for American imperialism – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Russia, with Belarus and Kazakhstan, would then be encircled. The geopolitical West then would be literally on China’s border; adjacent to China’s sensitive Xinjiang province (aka East Turkestan). It was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s published dream; to contain China, to effectively veto China as a ‘player’. Something like this was Brzezinski’s open conspiracy.

Conspiracy Theories

Yesterday we heard this (Donald Trump says China, North Korea and Russia ‘conspiring against’ US, BBC News, 3 Sep 2025) from the American president. Yes, he was probably baiting the media. But we have been told that only feeble-minded people believe in conspiracies. Are conspiracy theories only lulu-lala when they are espoused by anti-ruling-class people? Is it OK to laugh-off other people’s conspiracy theories while quite earnestly promoting one’s own?

I heard this just the other day on Berlin Briefing, Why military service is back on the table in Germany(14 August 2025; 28’20”); the 2029 hypothesis which is gaining all the hallmarks of a Euro-conspiracy theory. Young soldier: “For example, 2029, the date that is put there out in the room from all Nato allies…”. Nina Haase: “Hang on there, to explain what that means, the date 2029 is the date when most military experts seem to agree that Russia will be in a position theoretically to test Nato’s Article Five, so to test an attack on one of Nato’s countries to see just how Nato will react, whether the other countries will come to help, because that’s what Article Five means, an attack on one is an attack on all.”

A good reference for the 2029 story is Germany’s Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong?, Politico, Jessica Bateman, 29 August 2025, ‘”We are now moving from a war of choice to a war of necessity,” he [Carsten Breuer, the Bundeswehr’s highest serving general] explained. From security analysis he believes Russia will be capable of attacking NATO territory by 2029, with the caveat that this depends on the outcome in Ukraine and whether the war exhausts the Kremlin’. Remember Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass-destruction’!

Nobody ever says why Russia would want to attack a Nato country in 2029 or any other year; allegations-of-evil by western soothsayers notwithstanding. Russia has never aspired to possess Western Europe, and its hegemony over Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989 was entirely in the context of the finality of World War in Europe. The coalition of hypocrisy simply asserts this conspiracy theory as a justification for the militarisation of a near-bankrupt Old Europe, to deploy Donald Rumsfeld’s2003 putdown.

Western Europe is undergoing an Economic Implosion

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are all now in economic crisis; in fiscal crisis. Their spending cuts led to revenue constriction, meaning that less government spending has led to bigger (not smaller, as the neoliberals presume) budget deficits. With France it’s especially political, given the present fiscal crisis, the looming presidential election there in 2027, and the lack of unifying candidates to replace Macron in that role. (Marine Le Pen, who has become a potential unifier of the non-Centre has been barred from running.) The United Kingdom government is imploding too, and for similar reasons (though Nigel Farage, continuing to espouse fiscal conservatism, remains a less likely unifier). Many people in Britain think that the Labour Government cannot survive even half of its five-year term, despite Labour’s huge majority in the House.

In Germany, there is some pressure on the right for the CDU to dump its SPD coalition partner in favour of finding common ground with the populist-right AFD. But ‘Putin’ has become the number one political issue in federal Germany, and the AFD are – at least in Merz’s eyes – ‘pro-Putin’.

In principle, Merz could revive Germany’s economy – and enhance his own political fortune – by practicing Hitlernomics; reindustrialisation through a government-spending initiative to invest in rearmament. Whatever it takes. Hitler’s popularity in the 1930s increased because he got Germans working again. But Merz has agreed to buy Germany’s weapons from the United States, so that the arm-twisting United States can make more money and less war.

Most European countries are facing radical demographic change. To fight wars, they will need to exploit immigrant labour. Of course that happened in World War Two, too. One thing we hardly ever heard about, re WW2, was Germany’s reliance on and exploitation of ‘immigrant’ slave labour. Many of the victims of the Royal Air Force in wartime Germany were in fact slaves from the places the RAF was supposedly trying to save.

It all leaves the polities of the countries which make up the coalition morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt.

The Rise of the Conservative Left

The nuanced political chatter in Europe now is about the rise of the ‘conservative left’. And, indeed, it appears that the ‘populist right’ is moving leftwards on economic policy. In practice, that will mean a return to something like Keynesian economics. To a degree this is what is keeping Giorgia Meloni popular in Italy, while the handwringers and conservatives to her north are tanking in the polls.

In New Zealand, there is one authentic party of the conservative left; New Zealand First.

The three policy-axes which determine elections are: economic (progressive [left; fiscal pragmatism] versus neoliberal [right; fiscal conservatism]); cultural [multiculturalism versus dominant-culturalism]; and geopolitical [conciliation versus belligerence re foreign states].

In Europe and elsewhere, the Left (Die Linke in Germany) is ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, ‘progressive’ on identity politics (including open to immigration), and pro-peace. The Right (AFD in Germany) is becoming ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, is conservative on identity politics (including immigration), and pro-peace in Europe. Two-out-of-three (potential points of agreement) ain’t bad; especially as left-identity politics is slowly giving way to ‘bread-and-butter’ issues.

So the left-Left and the right-Left may be able to ally to form future coalitions which will oust the “Saatchi and Saatchi” (to quote the late Jim Anderton, as in ‘the difference between National and Labour is the same as the difference between Saatchi and Saatchi‘) centrist legacy parties of the hitherto mainstream political class. (We note that ‘coalitions of opposites’ are not unknown to history; for example, the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union in World War Two.)

The legacy parties, though divided on cultural/identity issues (as are the new parties), are firmly neoliberal (ie fiscally conservative, claiming the virtue of balanced budgets), supportive of Ukraine, and facilitating Israel’s genocidal erasure of Palestine’s indigenous population. The legacy parties can only survive if their opposition remains divided. With the rise of the conservative left – the right-Left – such division can no longer be guaranteed.

Prediction

My sense is that, on or before 2030, there is a one-in-five chance (20%) that there will be a nuclear exchange between the world’s ‘great powers’. That ‘Third World War’ will have been caused by the last-gasp resistance – on the part of the West – to the new reality of a multipolar world order. If such a ‘last gasp of the West’ exchange does take place, my prediction is that there is a 50% chance of a mass extinction event on a scale at least as great as that of 65 million years ago. That’s a 10% chance of a mass extinction event.

Nevertheless ‘nine-out-of-ten’ (or ‘four-out-of-five’) ain’t’ bad, meaning it’s more likely than not that the world does eventually settle down. I am predicting a 50% chance that the politics of Europe will decisively shift towards the ‘conservative left’ in this half-decade (or in the 2030s, towards the radical centre, parties like TOP in New Zealand); and that there will be enough common ground between the old-left and the growing conservative left to make it possible for the two-lefts to form coalitions against the withering centre; against the diminishing hurrah of today’s elite political class. Something like this did indeed happen in the 1930s; then the creation of a coalition against fascism pushed the old conservative politics to one side.

Summary

The world is facing a dangerous moment. Sanctimony and hypocrisy are not the answers. Fraternity, trustfulness, dialogue, neutrality, sympathy; they are the qualities we need to embrace and project.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Operation Gomorrah may have been the most cynical event of World War Two (WW2). Not only did the name fully convey the intent of the war crimes about to be committed, it, also represented the single biggest 24-hour murder toll for the European war that I have come across.

On the night of 27 July 1943, the RAF murdered 35,000, mostly working-class civilian residents living in the most densely populated part of Hamburg; a planned firebombing which started a sequence of events – a holocaust if not The Holocaust – that ended in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. (Note The bombing of Hamburg foreshadowed the horrors of Hiroshima, National Geographic, 23 July 2021.) A holocaust is a “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war” (Oxford Dictionary). [In The Holocaust, 31,000 Jews were shot dead in Kyiv in a single day in 1941; the worst single day of The Holocaust, I understand.]

Hamburg was, literally, a dry run for what came later; the aim was to maximise the number of barbecued civilians by, among other things, choosing perfect weather conditions for an experiment in incendiary murder. (Yes, I am literally using inflammatory language.) While the total death toll of the week-long operation has been estimated to be over 40,000, the toll arising from the night of 27/28 July 1943 represents about 85% of the total.

The Gomorrah chapter of Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory, 2018, gives a documented account of the moral duplicity surrounding Churchill’s bombing campaign. For a full story of the Allies’ firestorm holocaust, see Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, 2022, by James M Scott. (John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, is a survivor of the Tokyo episode, the raid that killed more people – over 100,000 – than any other in a single arsonous assault.)

Sodom and Gomorrah

These twin ‘cities of the plain’, which, if they ever existed, are now either under the Dead Sea or east of there, in modern Jordan. The key chapter in the bible (Genesis, ch.19) mainly emphasises Sodom, though Gomorrah was reputedly as ‘sinful’. The biblical story is ghastly, in its misogyny as well as its extollation of extermination of ‘others’.

Genesis (ch.19) tells us, when Lot (Abraham’s nephew) found himself, in Sodom, hosting two Angels/men, ‘the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”‘ The secret to understanding this is the biblical meaning of the word ‘know’; in this case the events took place in Sodom, and the guests had the appearance of ‘men’.

Lot replies: ‘”I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men …”.’ While the men of Sodom did not take up the offer – they favoured Lot himself – the angel-men saved Lot and his family. Then ‘When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.”‘ …

‘When they had brought [the four of] them outside, [the angel-men] said, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.” … Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.’ …

After the three survivors settled in a cave: ‘the firstborn [daughter] said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father.” … ‘Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father.’ (Thus, the East Bank [of the River Jordan] was repopulated!!)

Hamburg came to be equated with biblical Sodom, as deserving victims for a particularly barbaric form of mass murder. Neither Churchill, nor his bomber commander Arthur Harris, could know that only 35,000 Hamburgers would die as a result of that night’s operation. There is reason to believe that Churchill and his savants were looking for many more than hundreds of thousands of Germans to be ‘de-housed’ over the incendiary bombing campaign. (Dehousing was the euphemism used by Churchill’s men; compare with ‘resettlement’ for the trip that the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto made to Treblinka.)

Hamburg and the Gomorrah holocaust

Why Hamburg? Basically, because it was there. Though it was/is a large industrial and mercantile port city, the terror target was workers, not the works which employed them. The National Geographic article notes, with gallows-humour irony: “After noticing that Brits whose homes were struck by bombs were less likely to show up to work, analysts determined that destroying Germany’s largest cities and towns would likely cripple Germany’s war efforts.” Hamburg was close to England, and could be reached without flying over occupied land. And Hamburg was defended by a radar system of sorts, though not as sophisticated as British radar. The first British bombing raid on Hamburg was very much a technology test-run; refer The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War – and Still Baffles Weathermen, Irena Fischer-Hwang, 28 November 2018, Smithsonian Magazine. The second British raid on Hamburg was the real thing, a particularly dry run to really get the Gomorrah holocaust underway.

Hitchens (p.178) says: “Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July I940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating exterminating [my emphasis] attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland would help to bring Hitler down’. Arthur Harris, later the chief of RAF Bomber Command, realised the significance of these extraordinary words … he kept a copy of this letter.”

Hitchens (p.181) citing Bishop Bell speaking in February 1944 in the House of Lords: “Hamburg has a population of between one and two million people. It contains targets of immense military and industrial importance. It also happens to be the most democratic town in Germany where the Anti-Nazi opposition was strongest. … Practically all the buildings, cultural, military, residential, industrial, religious – including the famous University Library with its 800,000 volumes, of which three-quarters have perished – were razed to the ground.” While dead and dazed people may have low morale, and therefore have an arguable incentive to wage a civil war against their own government, they – especially the dead – are uniquely unable to overthrow a ruthlessly militarised government.

We might note Hamburg’s anthropological links to England. At a time of high racial – indeed racist – sensibilities, Anglo-Saxon supremacy was a very real thing. The area of Germany around Hamburg is the ‘Hawaiki’ of the Anglo-Saxon people; Lower Saxony is the ancestral motherland of the English. The class-consciousness and revengeful bloodlust of the English political class outweighed their ethnic consciousness. This was not true for the German Nazis, for whom the English were racial equals; Hitler and his crew really did not want to kill English people. Nazi Germany wanted the United Kingdom to become a neutral country, as Ireland was, and as the United States was before December 1941. Nazi Germany’s policy was to enslave, resettle, and murder Slavs and Jews and Gypsies; not to kill or dehouse Englishmen and their families.

The ‘elephant in the room’ was Josef Stalin.

Hitchens (p.191): “There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure to open a second front.”

Hitchens (p.198): “Overy [in The Bombing War 2014] recounts how on 28 March 1945 Winston Churchill, clearly growing sick of the violence he had unleashed as victory approached and the excuses for it grew thinner, referred (in a memorandum) to Harris’s bombing tactics using these exact words. He urged, none too soon, that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no attention, and right up until 24th April 1945, his bombers continued to drop incendiaries and high explosives on German cities, turning many thousands of civilians into corpses.” [Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, and VE Day was 8 May.]

Point of Interest: Churchill contested three elections, all after VE Day, all using Great Britain’s ‘first-past-the-post’ plurality system. He won just one of those three, though even then – in 1951 – his party got fewer votes than a Labour Party seeking re-election at a time of great difficulty for left-wing parties worldwide. Churchill’s Conservative Party got way-fewer votes than Labour in 1945 and 1950. The pressure on Prime Minister Clement Attlee to call the UK snap election of 1951 (one-third of the way through the term of his elected Labour government) can be understood as a successful example of political cunning on the part of the British establishment; literally a King’s coup.

A Scale of ‘Evil’?

While I generally hesitate to use the word ‘evil’, it may still be useful to grade very powerful people on a zero-to-ten scale of malevolence. On zero we might have the pacifist version of Jesus. On ten would be some very powerful person who actively sought nuclear ‘Armageddon’ (which would destroy life, not just humanity). After recently reading some quite difficult literature about World War Two, this is where I would place five powerful leaders:

• 9: Josef Stalin
• 8: Adolf Hitler
• 7: Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill
• 6: Harry Truman

I need to read more about Truman; though, his legacy seems to have been airbrushed much as Churchill’s has been, and I might decide to upgrade him to a 7.

I would also note that these leaders had their close and powerful henchmen, whose ‘evilness’ can also be rated on such a scale, for example:

• 9.5: Lavrenty Beria
• 9: Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler

Overall regimes can be better or worse than their leaders. I would rate both Stalin’s ‘Communists’ and Hitler’s ‘Nazis’ as both 8.5. Thus, Stalin’s regime was not quite as bad as its two most notorious figures. And Hitler’s regime was even worse than Hitler; that’s certainly not being kind to Hitler! (Stalin’s atrocities, the equal of Hitlers, were mostly committed in peacetime; the vast majority of Hitler’s were committed in wartime.)

‘Favourites’ as intimate (though not necessarily sexual) friends of powerful leaders

Churchill’s regime was not as bad as Churchill. Though Churchill had two favourites, both active members of his regime – especially his ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ – who were worse than him (possibly worse in one case, and definitely worse in the other). The ‘possibly worse’ one was Brendan Bracken, Minister for Information. Bracken, the prototype for ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, was Churchill’s Goebbels. Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ was a conflation of the Ministry of Information and Orwell’s wartime employer, the BBC. (Born in Ireland, Bracken was sometimes rumoured to have been Churchill’s ‘love child’, though that supposition is most likely untrue.) Surprisingly little has been written about BB.

The ‘definitely worse’ favourite was German born (Baden Baden) and educated (Darmstadt and Berlin) scientist, Frederick A Lindemann; who was granted the title Lord Cherwell in 1941. He built his career in Britain at Oxford University, becoming Professor of Physics there in 1919. He also became a bit of a wartime ‘test pilot’, managing to establish his loyalty to the United Kingdom. His close friendship with Churchill lasted decades, beginning in 1921.

Frederick Lindemann, aka Lord Cherwell

In my assessment, Lindemann is the closest individual yet to a ten-out-of-ten on the above-suggested scale of malevolence. Let’s say that, if World War Three comes and someone like Lindemann has as much access to the levers of power as Lindemann actually had, then the world would be a goner. (In Lindemann’s defence, it has been noted that he was fond of children and animals. Likewise, another man; one with a famous moustache.)

Frederick Lindemann exerted a beguiling influence over Churchill. When Churchill was not in power, in the 1930s, Lindemann ran a private think-tank for Churchill. In the 1930s he allegedly undermined the scientific development of radar, which proved critical to the defence of Britain from Luftwaffe attacks; indeed, Lindemann seems to have shown a lack of interest in military defence; his thing was the elimination or dehumanisation of ‘others’. Lindemann “was one of the first to urge the importance of atom bomb research” (Where to Read about Professor Lindemann, The Churchill Project, 6 May 2015); indeed “Following his 1945 return to the Clarendon Laboratory, Lindemann created the [United Kingdom] Atomic Energy Authority”, Wikipedia.)

I will illustrate the Lindemann problem with quotes from these three sources; some may argue that I have made a biased selection, but so be it:

• The Most Powerful Scientist Ever: Winston Churchill’s Personal Technocrat, Madhusree Mukerjee, Scientific American, 6 August 2010
• The ‘Gomorrah’ chapter of Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory 2018
• The Prime Minister and the Prof, by Malcolm Gladwell (transcript), 13 July 2017

Mukerjee: “Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindeman was responsible for the government’s scientific decisions.”

Mukerjee: “Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.”

Gladwell: “I think that’s the crucial fact about Lindemann. One time he’s asked for his definition of morality and he answers, ‘I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.’ … The man who defined a moral action as ‘One that brings advantage to my friends,’ was best friends with Winston Churchill.”

Gladwell: “Lindemann becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind.”

Mukerjee: “On most matters Lindemann’s and Churchill’s opinions converged; and when they did not, the scientist worked ceaselessly to change his friend’s mind.”

Mukerjee: “The mission of the S branch [Churchill’s nearest equivalent to DOGE] was to provide rationales for whichever course the prime minister, as interpreted by the Prof, wished to follow.”

Mukerjee: “Department heads ‘began to realize that, like it or not, the Prof was the man whom Churchill trusted most, and that all their refutations, aspersions, innuendos or attempts at exposure would not shift Churchill from his undeviating loyalty to the Prof by one hair’s breadth,’ wrote [economist] Harrod. So it was that the Prof would pronounce judgment on the best use of shipping space, the profligacy of the army, the inadequacy of British supplies, the optimal size of the mustard gas stockpile, the necessity of bombing German houses – and, when the time came, the pointlessness of sending famine relief to Bengal.”

Gladwell: “An argument took place at the highest reaches of British government. The question was what was the best use of the royal air force against the Germans? … One school of thought says, ‘Let’s use our bombers to support military activities, protecting ships against German U-boats, destroying German factories.’ The other school of thought argues that bombing ought to serve a bigger, strategic purpose. In other words, ‘Let’s use bombing to break the will of the German people, let’s make their lives so miserable that they give up.'”

Wikipedia: On dehousing, Lindemann says “bombing must be directed to working class houses. Middle class houses have too much space round them, so are bound to waste bombs”.

Gladwell on Lindemann’s dishonesty: “Lindemann’s memo to Churchill. It’s very matter of fact; it’s all about what the data says except for one thing. That’s not what the data says. The Birmingham-Hull study reached the exact opposite conclusion [about working-class morale] that Lindemann did.”

Gladwell: “Other experts [eg Henry Tizard] in the government, critics of strategic bombing, point out immediately that Lindemann’s numbers are ridiculous, five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.” [Hitchens (p.205) claims that the numbers of civilian casualties were only ten percent of what Lindemann had promised. If you multiply by ten the number of civilians – mostly workers, their families, slaves, and refugees – killed in the totality of the Gomorrah holocaust, you get a number bigger than deaths in The Holocaust; this would be a measure of Lindemann’s intent.]

Gladwell: “One of Lindemann’s friends said, ‘He would not shrink from using an argument which he knew to be wrong if, by so doing, he could tie up one of his professional opponents.’ Lindemann wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German cities.”

Gladwell: “Most historians agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. 160,000 US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many of Europe’s most beautiful cities were destroyed and German morale didn’t crack; the Germans fought to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he said that the war could have been won six months or even a year earlier, if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.” [Note that the whole Gomorrah holocaust killed more Japanese civilians than German civilians; as noted in Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, the Hamburg dry run led more-or-less directly to the fire-bombings of almost every urban centre in Japan.]

Mukerjee: “‘Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me,’ muttered a furious Churchill in 1941, after a member of the House of Commons had raised questions about the Prof’s influence.” [Gladwell: that “row occurred in 1942 and it occurred over strategic bombing”.]

Mukerjee: “Cherwell believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world. ‘Those who succeed in getting what everyone wants must be the ablest,’ he asserted. The Prof regarded the masses as ‘very stupid,’ considered Australians to be inferior to Britons, advocated ‘harshness’ toward homosexuals, and thought criminals should be treated cruelly because ‘the amount of pleasure derived by other people from the knowledge that a malefactor is being punished far exceeds in sum total the amount of pain inflicted on a malefactor by his punishment.'” [Enjoyment arising from the punishment of the wretched outweighs the suffering of those wretched!]

Mukerjee: “Eugenic ideas also feature in a lecture that Lord Cherwell (then known as Professor Lindemann) had delivered more than once, probably in the early 1930s. He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes.”

Mukerjee: “New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. … ‘Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?’ Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with ‘the mental make-up of the worker bee.’ This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: ‘Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap.’ The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, ‘led by supermen and served by helots.'”

Mukerjee: “At least no one would demand votes on behalf of an ape. … To consolidate the rule of supermen – to perpetuate the British Empire – one need only remove the ability of slaves to see themselves as slaves.”

Gladwell: “How can you have a real debate against Churchill’s best friend? Friendship comes first.”

Gladwell: “The US starts sending over so many ships that, by late 1943 when the famine in Bengal is at its height, there’s actually a surplus of boats on the allied side. In fact, in 1943, the British actually start shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just not to India. … British ships full of grain are sailing right past India on the way to the Middle East to be stored for some future, hypothetical need. They might even stop and refuel in Mumbai, but nothing leaves the ship. … Why is Lindemann [as Paymaster General] refusing to help? It doesn’t even make illogical sense. Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries like Canada and the United States offered to send food to India, the British say, ‘We don’t want it.’ They turn down help. Lindemann seems completely unmoved by India’s plight.”

Gladwell: “Black people, according to a friend, filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable to control. But I’m not sure that we’re seeing Lindemann here; I think we’re seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with an issue about India. He’s obsessed with India. In the years leading up to the war, Gandhi is building his independence movement within India and Churchill hates Gandhi. Churchill is furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw materials from India, meaning that the master is running up a debt with its supposed subject. … Why was Lindemann so adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was adamant that England could not help India and Lindemann was a loyal friend.”

CP Snow (1960), cited by Gladwell: “The Lindemann-Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of court politics that we’re likely to see.” [hmmm!]

Gladwell: “The best guess of how many died in the Bengal famine of 1943 is three million people. Three million. After the war, the British government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the investigation was forbidden to consider, and I’m quoting, ‘Her Majesty’s government’s decision in regard to shipping of imports.’ In other words, they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine without investigating the cause of the famine.”

Hitchens (p.197): “Gas attacks were contemplated by Winston Churchill. … Overy writes ‘The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated – deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted. This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945’.”

It also paved the way for the potentially devastating anthrax attacks on Germany which would have taken place in 1944 had the American-led D-day offensive been unsuccessful; contamination from such attacks would have rendered parts of Germany uninhabitable for a human lifetime. (See my Invoking Munich, ‘Appeasement’, and the ‘Lessons of History’ 13 March 2025, which mentions both the Bengal famine and the anthrax program as well as the Hamburg holocaust.) The anthrax program bears the hallmark of Lindemann; the abandoned anthrax operation was dubbed Operation Vegetarian, in part a likely reference to Lindemann’s famed dietary obsessions.

Hitchens (pp.200-201): “It is surprising that Sir Max Hasting’s Bomber Command (first published in 1979) has not begun to change opinions. … Sir Max deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt [south of Frankfurt] on 11 September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way, a military target). Hastings: ‘The first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity’.” (Lindemann went to school in Darmstadt. Victims most likely included his former classmates, teachers and their families.)

Hitchens (p.206), on the battle between Frederick Lindemann and Henry Tizard (the scientist who stood up to Lindeman, and paid a price): “Why is the only considerable account of this battle trapped inside [a] small, obscure volume that the reader must retrieve from deep in a few impenetrable scholarly libraries? Why is it not taught in schools? Why has nobody written a play about it? I suspect it is because this story, if well known, would undermine the shallow, nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill as the infallible Great Leader, a cult to which, surely, an adult country no longer needs to cling.”

Hitchens (p.205): “Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. He was supported by Patrick Blackett, a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day. He would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and be ennobled as Lord Blackett. Blackett independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high. ‘Both were slightly out. But they were nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was. Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact ten times too high, as the postwar bombing survey revealed.” [The actual destruction of German cities was only one-tenth of what Lindemann had hoped and argued would be the case. Given the actual hundreds of thousands of barbecued German civilians, Lindemann had been arguing for millions.]

CP Snow (1960), cited by Hitchens (p.205): “It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing. … Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.” [Strikingly, although the post-war years have generally been regarded as ‘more benevolent’, the Gomorrah holocaust continues to ‘fly under the radar’. Indeed, so much so that Churchill’s speeches have been nominated as part of New Zealand’s schools’ draft English curriculum! (And that matter of Churchill was not raised by the New Zealand media; they were more interested in the ‘controversial’ possibility that Shakespeare might be compulsory.)]

Winston Churchill was not a nice man. His ‘favourite’ – Frederick Lindemann – was rather less nice.

Lessons

War itself is the problem, and the first casualty of war is truth. Drumbeating for war is cheap, and sabres are easily rattled. We stumble into wars without having any realistic idea how they might end; casual war becomes forever war. Wars involve multiple nasty people from the outset, and other similarly nasty people come to the fore during war, sometimes completely behind the scenes.

War changes much but solves little. World War Two was the first war in which civilians were targeted on an industrial scale. It ended, in Europe at least, in a Pyrrhic manner, with Josef Stalin’s USSR as the annihilist of Nazi Germany.

War in the modern age of globalisation means this and more. In a twenty-first century World War, while targeted civilians will be high on the murder list, the biggest death-counts are likely to be of untargeted civilians – residents of semi-belligerent and non-belligerent countries – and of completely guiltless non-human life forms.

If the Americans hadn’t successfully prosecuted D-Day (Operation Overlord) in 1944, I believe that Winston Churchill would have used the RAF to unleash his anthrax bombs. The Scottish island of Gruinard is only now becoming habitable, after eighty years of anthrax contamination. Imagine parts of Germany becoming uninhabitable – for nearly a century – had Operation Vegetarian been executed.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

‘Rational Expectations’ is a problematic theory in economics. Here I want to focus more away from economics; and more on the meanings of ‘rationality’ in decision-making, than on the problematic ambiguity of the word ‘expect’ (and its derivatives such as ‘expectations’). ‘Expectation’ here means what we believe ‘will’ happen, not ‘should’ happen; a rational expectation is a prediction, an unbiased average of possibilities, formed through a (usually implicit) calculation of possible benefits and costs – utilities and disutilities, to be technical – and their associated probabilities.

A rational decision is one that uses all freely available information in unbiased ways – plus some researched information, bearing in mind the cost of information gathering – to reach an optimal conclusion, or to decide on a course of action that can be ‘expected’ to lead to an optimal outcome to the decision-maker.

All living beings are rational to a point, in that they contain an automatic intelligence (AutoI) which exhibits programmed rationality. For most beings, AutoI is fully pre-programmed, so is not ‘intelligence’ as we would normally understand it; for others, that programming is subject to continuous reprogramming through a process of ‘learning’, true intelligence. In addition, beings of at least one species – humans – have a ‘manual override‘ intelligence (ManualI), which is our consciousness or awareness.

AutoI is an imperfect, though subversive, process of quasi-rational decision-making. Brains make calculations about optimal behaviour all the time; calculations of which we are not aware. (Richard Dawkins – eg in The Selfish Gene – would argue that these calculations serve the interest of the genotype rather than the individual phenotype.) For humans at least, full rationality means the capacity to use ManualI to override the amoral limitations of AutoI.

Rational decision-making, through learning, may be called ‘intelligence’. Though intelligence has another meaning: ‘information’, as in the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ (CIA). It is perfectly possible to use unintelligent (stupid?) processes to gather and interpret intelligence!

Even when rational processes are used, many good decisions will, with hindsight, have inferior outcomes; or many good forecasts will prove partly or fully incorrect. It’s mostly bad luck, but also partly because intelligence is rarely completely unbiased, and partly because the cost of gaining extra information can be too high.

Expected Value, aka Expected Outcome

There is a simple rationality formula – familiar to students of statistics and of finance – which can yield a number called an ‘expected value’. In this expectations’ formula, a high positive number represents a good decision and a higher positive number represents a better decision. A negative number represents a bad (ie adverse) expected outcome, although sometimes all available expected outcomes are ‘bad’, meaning that the better course of action is the ‘lesser evil’. A positive number indicates an expected benefit, though not a necessary benefit. Negative possible outcomes represent ‘downside risk’, whereas positive possible outcomes represent ‘upside risk’.

(It is important to note that, in many contexts, a negative number does not denote something bad. A negative number may indicate ‘left’, as in the left-side of a Bell Curve; or ‘south’ or ‘west’ as in latitude and longitude. In accounting, a ‘deficit’ by no means indicates something bad, though President Trump and many others are confused on that point [see Could US tariffs cause lasting damage to the global economy? Al Jazeera 7 April 2025, where he says “to me a deficit is a loss”]; and we note that the substitution of the term ‘third world’ for ‘global south’ suggests an inferiority of southern latitudes. In double-entry bookkeeping, items must add to zero; one side of any balance sheet has negative values by necessity. A deficit, in some contexts, represents a ‘shortfall’ which is probably ‘bad’; but also a ‘longfall’ – or ‘surplus’ – is often bad, just think of the games of lawn bowls and pétanque.)

A simple example of rational decision-making is to decide between doing either something or nothing; for example, when contemplating asking someone out on a date. The expected outcome of doing nothing – not asking – has a value of zero. But, if you ask the person for the date, and you evaluate the chance of a ‘yes’ as 0.2, the utility of a ‘yes’ as +10, and the disutility of a ‘no’ as -1, then the expected value calculates to 1.2; so, the rational decision is to ask (the calculation is 10×0.2–1×0.8). This example is interesting, because the more probable outcome is a ‘no’, and a ‘no’ would make you less happy than if you had not asked the question; nevertheless, the rational decision here is to ‘take the risk’. (‘Risk averse’ persons might have rated the consequence of ‘rejection’ as a -4 rather than a -1; they would calculate an expected value of -1.2, so would choose to not ask for the date.)

Political Decision-Making when Catastrophic Outcomes are Possible

A rational calculation allocates values and probabilities to each identified possible outcome. A favourable outcome is represented by a positive number, a neutral outcome has a zero value, and an adverse outcome has a negative value.

A basic favourable outcome may be designated a value of one; an outcome twice-as-good has a value of two. An outcome an ‘order-of-magnitude’ better has a utility or happiness value of ten. The same applies to adverse outcomes; the equivalent disutility scores are minus-one, minus-two, and minus-ten.

An aeroplane crash might incur a score of minus fifty to society and minus ten million to an individual. The probability of dying in such a crash, for an individual, getting on a plane is probably about one in 100 million. If it was less than one-in-a-million, hardly anybody would get on a plane. (The chance of winning NZ Lotto first division is about one-in four-million.)

We should be thinking like this when we think about war. What kind of risk would we be willing to take? A problem is that the people who provoke wars do not themselves expect to be fatal victims.

A catastrophic outcome could range from minus 100 (say a small war) to minus infinity. An outcome which meant the total eradication of all life on Earth would come close to minus infinity. However, because of the mathematics of infinity (∞), any outcome of minus infinity with a non-zero probability yields an expectation of minus infinity. So for the following example, I will use minus one billion (-1b) as the disutility score for such a total catastrophe. A catastrophe that leads ‘only’ to human extinction might have a value of minus ten million (-10m). A holocaust the size of the 1943 RAF firebombing of Hamburg might have a catastrophe-value of minus one thousand (-1,000). A catastrophe the size of the 1932-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern Europe (which included 14,000 murders including the Holocaust, and much additional non-fatal suffering) might have an overall catastrophe-value of minus a hundred thousand (-100,000).

(Could we imagine an outcome of plus infinity: +∞? Maybe not, though certain evangelical Christians – extreme dispensationalists – pray for Armageddon; “dispensationalism views the progression of history in stages that begin in the Garden of Eden and ends in the paradise of the New Heavens and New Earth“. Thus, what might be minus infinity to most of us could be plus infinity for a few. There is an analogy of ‘wrap-around-mathematics’ in geospace; a longitude of +180° is the same as a longitude of -180°. And, in another example, some people believe that there is little difference between extreme-far-right politics and extreme-far-left politics. On this topic of extremes, the mainstream media should avoid the mindless repetition of hyperbole – as in a comment recently heard that President Trump’s tariffs may amount to an “economic nuclear winter“.)

My Example – the Ukraine War

In an example with some relevance to today, we might consider the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’. I could assign a modestly favourable outcome of +1 with a 50% probability, a very favourable outcome +10 with a 10% probability, and a catastrophic -1,000,000 with a 1% probability. (All other possibilities I will treat here as neutral, although my sense is that they are mostly adverse.) I calculate an expected value of minus 9,998.5; practically, minus 10,000; this is an average of all the identified possibilities, a catastrophic risk rather than a prediction of a major catastrophe.

This decision to persevere with the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ is only rational if the only alternative decision – to abandon the NATO- backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ – comes up with an even lower expected value. (These two alternative decisions would be characterised by New Zealand’s former Ambassador to the United Kingdom – Phil Goff – as ‘standing up for Good in the face of Evil’ versus ‘appeasement of Putin’.) It seems to me that catastrophe becomes much less probable, in my example, with the ‘appeasement’ option than with the ‘defence’ option. (In the case that Goff was commenting on, his implication was that the 1938 ‘appeasement’ of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain led to either an increase in the probability of catastrophic war, or an increase in the size of catastrophe that might ensue.)

Morality Fallacy

One view of morality is the identification of some Other as Evil, and that any subsequent calling out of that (Evil) Other must therefore be Good. Further, in this view of morality, the claim is that, if and when hostilities break out between Good and Evil, then Good must fight to the ‘bitter end’ at ‘any cost’. (When we see Evil fighting to the bitter end – as per the examples of Germany and Japan in World War Two – we tend to think that’s stupid; but Good fighting to the bitter end is seen as righteous.)

Of course, this kind of morality is quite wrong. The idea that one must never surrender to Evil is a moral fallacy, based on the false (binary) idea that one side (generally ‘our side’) of a dispute or conflict has the entire ‘moral-high-ground’ and the other side has the entire ‘moral-low-ground’. Further, a victory to ‘Evil’ is surely less catastrophic than annihilation; a victory to Evil may be a lesser evil. Choosing annihilation can never be a Good choice.

Most conflict is nothing like Good versus Evil, though many participants on both (or all) sides believe that their side is Good. Most extended conflict is Bad versus Bad, Bad versus Stupid, or Stupid versus Stupid; although there are differing degrees of Bad and Stupid. Further, in the rare case when a conflict can objectively be described as Good versus Evil, it can never be good to disregard cost.

Morality in Practice

True morality requires a broadening of the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘self-interest’.

The important issues are benefits and costs to whom (or to what), and the matter of present benefits/costs versus future benefits/costs. In a sense, morality is a matter of ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Is it beneficial if something favourable happens ‘here’ but not ‘there’? ‘Now’, but not ‘then’? To ‘me’ or ‘us’, but not to ‘you’ or to ‘them’.

Human ManualI is very good at inclusive morality; AutoI is not.

It is natural, and not wrong, to prioritise one’s own group; and to prioritise the present over the future. The issue is the extent that we ‘discount’ benefits to those that are not ‘us’, and future benefits vis-à-vis present benefits. And costs, which we may regard as negative benefits. A very high level of discounting is near complete indifference towards others, or towards to future. An even higher level of discounting is to see harm to others as being beneficial to us; anti-altruism, being cruel to be cruel.

Then there is the ‘straw man’ morality much emphasised by classical liberals. ‘Libertarians’ claim that certain people with a collectivist mindset believe in an extreme form of altruism, where benefits to others take priority over benefits to self; such an ethos may be called a ‘culture of sacrifice’, benefitting by not-benefitting. While this does happen occasionally, what is more common is for people to emphasise public over private benefits; this is the sound moral principle that libertarians really disapprove of.

Thus, an important part of our ‘rational calculus’ is the private versus public balance; the extent to which we might recognise, and account for, ‘public benefits’ in addition to ‘private benefits’.

So, when we complete our matrix of probabilities and beneficial values, what weight do we give to the benefits that will be enjoyed by people other than ourselves, to other people in both their private and public capacities. Should we care if another group experiences genocide? Do we gloat? Should we empathise, or – more accurately – sympathise, and incorporate others into a more broadly-defined ‘community of self’?

If we have a war against a neighbouring country, should we care about how it affects other more distant countries through ‘collateral damage’? Should we care about a possible catastrophe if it can be postponed until the end of the life-expectancy of our generation? Should we care about the prosperity of life forms other than our own? Should we care about the well-being of our environments? Should we care more about our ‘natural resources’ – such as ‘land’ – than we care about other people who might be competing for the use of those same resources? If we have knowledge that will allow us to make improvements to the lives of others so that they catch up to our own living standards, should we make that knowledge public and useful? Should we account for the well-being of people who live under the rule of rulers who we have cast as ‘Evil’ (such as the burghers of Hamburg in 1943)?

One important morality concept is that of ‘reciprocation’. If we accept that others have the right to think of us in ways that compare with how we think of them, then we must value their lives much as we value our own lives. If I live in Auckland, should I value the life of a person who lives in New Delhi nearly as much as I value the life of someone who lives in Wellington? I should if I expect persons in Mumbai to value my life nearly as much as they value the lives of people in New Delhi.

Reciprocal morality can easily fail when someone belongs to a group which has apparent power over another group. We may cease to care whether the other group suffers our wrath, if we perceive that the ‘lesser’ group has no power to inflict their wrath onto our group. We may feel that we have immunity, and impunity. They should care about us, but we need not care about them.

It is through our ManualI – our manual override, our consciousness, our awareness – that we have the opportunity to make rational valuations which incorporate morality. Our AutoI, while rational in its own terms, is also amoral. We can behave in amoral self-interested ways – even immoral ways – without being aware of it. Our automatic benefit-cost analyses drive much of our behaviour, without our awareness; we cannot easily question what drives our Auto-Intelligence.

Our AutoI systems may – in evolutionary terms – select for degrees of ignorance, stupidity, blindness as ways of succeeding, of coping. AutoI protects us from having to face-up to the downsides of our actions and our beliefs; especially downsides experienced more by others than by ourselves. And they tell us that we are Good, and that some others are Bad.

Pavlovian Narratives

We come to believe in other people’s narratives through habit or conditioning. AutoI itself has a cost-cutting capacity that allows speedy decision-making; it adopts reasoning shortcuts, in the context that shortcuts save costs. We build careers – indeed our careers as experts in something – by largely accepting other people’s narratives as truths that should not be questioned and that should be passed on. We enjoy belonging to ‘belief communities’; and we are ‘pain-minimisers’ at least as much as we are ‘pleasure-maximisers’; it may be ‘painful’ to be excluded from a community. We too-easily appease unsound public-policy decisions without even knowing that we are appeasing. We turn-off the bad news rather than confronting it.

Our beliefs are subject to Pavlovian conditioning. And one of the most painful experiences any human being can suffer is to have beliefs cancelled as ‘stupid’. So we unknowingly – through AutoI – program our auto-intelligences to protect our beliefs from adverse exposure; and, if such protection fails, to denounce those who challenge our belief-narratives.

One form of cost-cutting-rationality is ‘follow-the-leader’. It’s a form of ‘conclusion free-riding’. We choose to believe things if we perceive that many others believe those things. An important form of ‘follow-the-leader’ is to simply take our cues from authority figures, saving ourselves the trouble of ‘manual’ self-reasoning.

With AI – Artificial Intelligence – we delegate even more of our decision-making away from our moral centres, our consciousnesses, our manual overrides. We allow automatic and artificial intelligence to perform ever more of our mental labour. It’s more a matter of people becoming robot-like than being replaced by robots.

Pavlovian rationalisation is heavily compromised by unconscious bias. Beliefs that arise from uncritical ‘follow-the-leader’ strategies are unsound. They lead us to make suboptimal decisions.

Why War?

Many people, including people in positions of influence, make decisions that are sub-rational, in the sense that they allow auto-biases to prevail over reflective ‘manual’ decision-making. There are biases in received information, and further biases in the way we interpret/process information.

Unhelpful, biased and simplistic narratives lead us into wars. And, because wars end in the future, we forever discount the problem of finishing wars.

When we go to war, how much do we think about third parties? In the old days when an attacker might lay-siege to a castle, it was very much ‘us’ versus ‘you’. But today is the time of nuclear weapons, other potential weapons of mass destruction, of civilian-targeting, and drone warfare. Proper consideration of third-parties – including non-human parties – becomes paramount. A Keir Starmer might feel cross towards a Vladimir Putin; but should that be allowed to have a significant adverse impact on the people of, say, Sri Lanka; let alone the people of Lancashire or Kazan?

Proper reflective and conscious consideration of the costs and benefits of our actions which impact on others should be undertaken. Smaller losses are better than bigger losses, and the world doesn’t end if the other guy believes he has ‘won’. Such considerations, which minimise bias, do allow for a degree of weighting in favour of the protagonists’ communities. But our group should never be indifferent to the wellbeing of other groups – including but not only the antagonist group(s) – and should forever understand that if we expect our opponents to not commit crimes, then we should not commit crimes either.

War escalates conflicts rather than resolves them. And it exacerbates other public ‘bads’ such as disease, famine, and climate change. War comes about because of lazy unchecked narratives, and unreasoned loyalty to those narratives.

Further Issues about Rational Expectations:

Poor People

It is widely believed by middle-class people that people in the precariat (lower-working-class) and the underclass should not gamble; as in buying lottery tickets and playing the ‘pokies’. But ‘lower-class people’ generally exhibit quite rational behaviour. In this case, rare but big wins make a real difference to people’s lives, whereas regular small losses make little difference to people already in poverty or in poverty-traps.

The expected return on gambling is usually negative, though the actual value of a big-win cannot simply be measured in dollar-terms. $100,000 means a much greater benefit to a poor person than to a rich person. Further, the expected value of non-gambling for someone stuck in a poverty-trap is also negative. It is rational to choose the least-negative option when all options are adverse.

Policy Credibility

Here I have commented about the rationality of decision-making, and how rational decisions are made in a reflective, conscious, moral, and humane way. However, there is also an issue around the meaning of ‘expectations’. While the more technically correct meaning of expectation is a person’s belief in what will happen, the word ‘expectation’ is also used to express a person’s belief in what should happen.

(An expectation can be either what someone will do, or should do. Consider: ‘Russia will keep fighting’ and ‘Russia should stop fighting’. To ‘keep fighting’ and to ‘stop fighting’ are both valid expectations; though only the first is a rational expectation from the viewpoint of, say, Keir Starmer; the second is an ‘exhortation’.)

The phrase ‘rational expectations’ is used most widely in the macroeconomics of interest rates and inflation. The job of Reserve Banks (‘central banks’) in the post-1989 world is to condition people (in a Pavlovian sense) into believing that an engineered increase in interest rates will lead to a fall in the inflation rate. This is called ‘credibility’. The idea is that if enough people believe a proposition to be true, then it will become true, and hence the conditioned belief becomes a rational belief. If people come to believe that the rate of inflation this year will be less than it was last year – however they came to that belief – then it should dowse their price-raising ardour; it becomes a contrived ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

War

The same reasoning may be applied to warfare. If, by one side (especially ‘our’ side) talking-tough (and waving an incendiary stick), people on both sides believe that the other side will dowse its asset-razing ardour (due to fear or ‘loss of morale’), then the belief that a war is more-likely-to-end may in itself lead to a cessation of hostilities. While unconvincing, because humans are averse to humiliation, it’s an appeal to ‘our’ AutoI (automatic intelligence) over our less credulous ManualI (manual override, our reflective intelligence). It’s the ‘credible’ ‘tough-man’ (or iron-lady) narrative. In this sense, Winston Churchill was a credible wartime leader.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

To understand antisemitism, we need a meaning for ‘semitism’, and another -ism to contextualise semitism.

Literally, semitism means the promotion of the Semitic people, whoever they might be. The most appropriate comparator for ‘semitism’ is ‘hamitism’, relating to the ‘hamites’ or ‘Hamitic people’; analogous to the ‘Semitic people’. These are archaic terms, befitting the nineteenth century pseudo-sciences of eugenics, physiognomy and phrenology; semitism is a bible-derived concept of a preferred race, and of racism.

Our particular interest in 2024 is in two subsets: a racial subset of the Semitic people known as the ‘Jewish People’, or the Jewish ethnos or ‘nation’ (ie where a nation is a ‘people’ rather than a sovereign territory; and a racial subset of the Hamitic people, known today as ‘Palestinians’. Semite is named after Noah’s son ‘Shem’; hamite is named after Hoah’s son ‘Ham’. The biblical ‘curse of Ham’ was invoked in particular with regard to Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the putative father of the Canaanites, especially including today’s Palestinians.

While the Palestinian Arabs have been deemed by some Christians and Jews to belong to a cursed ethnicity, the mythistorical Jewish ethic line – descended from Shem – came to be known as a (or ‘the’) chosen people. Hence semitism (or philosemitism) is the presumption of the exceptionalism of the Jewish ethnicity. Antisemitism, then, can be regarded as a dislike or disapproval of the Jewish ‘race’. (For a few though, antisemitism seems to mean a denial of this presumption of exception.) Likewise, antihamitism, while it could be understood as a denial of the curse, is probably best understood as an analogue of antisemitism; as a dislike of or disapproval of the Palestinian ‘race’. In their most extreme forms, antisemitism and antihamitism are both presumptions in favour of the expulsion or genocide of an ethnic people. Both forms of discriminatory hatred need to be equally condemned.

While there is no scientific evidence that there was ever such a thing as a Jewish race or a Palestinian race, there are Jewish ethnicities (plural). Many people who have taken DNA tests will have some of their ancestry defined as Sephardic Jewish or Ashkenazi Jewish; but never simply ‘Jewish’. (Nobody will have Christian or Muslim as an ‘ethnicity’.) These Jewish ethnicities show in these tests because of widespread historical exclusions, within Jewish communities, of non-Jews as marriage partners; thus these initially religious communities may be classified as ancestral endogamies and, on that basis, as ethnicities. We should not be distracted; Judaism is the foremost (ie progenitor) of the monotheistic religions. Jewishness is a meme, not a gene. A ‘secular Jew’ – or a ‘secular Muslim’ – is an oxymoron; a non-religious adherent to a religion.

Endogamy cultures can be problematic, not so much because of inbreeding within a limited gene pool, but mainly because of the antipathies caused by self-segregation. In some places there has been widespread and mutual self-segregation; the West Russian ‘Pale of (Jewish) Settlement‘ which lasted formally for over a century (until World War 1; and informally for much longer) was one such territory in which endogamy bred hatred and hatred bred endogamy. Reciprocal apartheid. Further, the lands of that former Pale were particularly coveted in the 1930s by the German National Socialists for the realisation of their Lebensraum policy.

Antisemitism as a panoply of Christian Judeophobias

Orthodox Antisemitism

In the years between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Eastern Mediterranean was politically and then culturally, a ‘Hellenic’ (ie Greek) empire; a cultural empire which gained two unofficial capital cities, Byzantium and Alexandria. That empire was Romanised from the first century BCE; ie subject to the political (but not cultural) hegemony of Rome.

Judaism, as the vanguard for monotheism – a novel religio-cultural phenomenon – became a successful proselytising religion, especially within the Hellenic cultural sphere. In say 200 CE, by far the majority of Jews in the world were converts. Judaism’s spiritual home city was Jerusalem, the principal city of Judah/Judea. There were also many Jewish converts in the territories to the north and east of Jerusalem; and there were still rabbinical Jews in Babylon (in modern Iraq), which is where early Jewish intellectuals decamped to after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

With the rise of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century CE, this new aggressive monotheism largely displaced Judaism in the Roman empire; many Eastern Mediterranean Jews either converted to Christianity, or emigrated. Many of the emigrants travelled west; with many migrating Jews converting many of the ‘pagans’ (especially Berbers) of the Western Mediterranean to monotheism. These people, initially mostly in the African ‘Maghreb’, became the Sephardic Jews.

Just as in the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, the new aggressive faith used the rhetoric of cultural-racism against Judaism, the hitherto established faith. Thus Orthodox archbishops such as John Chrysostom of Constantinople waged a vicious rhetorical war against the Jews. (Refer Simon Schama, Story of the Jews, episode 2.) Central themes of this rhetoric were the alleged complicity of the Jewish priesthood in the execution of Jesus Christ (by Christians deifying Jesus, his crucifiers therefore became guilty of deicide); and a greater tolerance for the practice of moneylending, in particular the usurious practice of ‘making money from money’.

In turn, those loyal to Judaism saw the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity as a ‘slippery slope’ away from monotheism; ie, away from the First Commandment of Moses.

Schisms

Christianity may be understood as the first of the great schisms. Islam later became the second schism from the Jewish branch, and Roman Catholicism the second schism of the Christian branch. After that, Protestantism became the great schism from the Catholic branch, during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Just as Calvinism became the most anti-Catholic form of Protestant Christianity around the year 1550, 1,200 years earlier the emerging Greek Christian Orthodoxy (based in Byzantium renamed Constantinople, now Istanbul) became the most virulently anti-Jewish form of Christianity. In contrast, the Islamic schism from Judaism did not promote a hatred of the parent religion. Islam was never antisemitic in the way that Orthodox Christianity was.

The Islamic – or Koranic – variant of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism rapidly proselytised in North Africa and Southwest Asia; this process – both cultural and military – was known as ‘Jihad’. While Islam proved popular, in part because of its tax advantages in Islamised territories, it was tolerant towards monotheistic non-converts; Jews with Muslim overlords generally prospered. (Muslims became known as Ishmaelites, in reference to Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, the mythical father of the Islamised – largely ‘Hamitic’ – races.) Christianity was the least tolerant of the three monotheist branches of biblical Judaism.

The Russian Jews

In the second half of the first millennium, all three monotheisms were seeking converts among bordering polytheist populations. Judaism continued to make progress in two main areas, in addition to the Western Mediterranean. These were Yemen (and subsequently Ethiopia), and Khazaria.

Khazaria (the Khazar Khaganate; see map) was a mixed European and Turkic territory to the north of the Caucasus Mountains, in modern-day southwestern Russia; mountains which include Europe’s highest, Mt Elbrus.) It is this region that gave to people of European ethnicity the label ‘Caucasian‘.)

The Khazar Khaganate dates from 650 CE, and lasted in some form until the early 13th century.

In the eighth century, the Khazarian people – especially the ruling class, realising that it was not a matter of whether to convert to monotheism but to choose which faith to adopt – had three to choose from. Realising that they would have less socio-political autonomy if they adopted either of the two religions on their doorstep, they chose Judaism. As converted Jews, they were deemed subsequently to be descended from Ashkenaz, a son of Noah’s other son Japheth. The Khazarites became  the Ashkenazi Jews (albeit not a popular view within the twentyfirst-century Israeli secular priesthood; refer Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). In the year 1000 CE, for example, this was the most populous Jewish community in the world.

Around the year 1220, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish polities in those steppe-lands were erased by the Mongol invaders. The predominantly Jewish population of Khazaria fled into the emerging Russian territories; Slavic lands whose people were then consolidating their faith as Orthodox Christians. (Religious ‘water’ and ‘oil’ didn’t really mix; there would be minimal assimilation between these two populations.)

In later centuries, these Ashkenazi Jews almost certainly mixed with other Jewish groups who had moved east, especially from the Central Europe. (In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, Eran Elhaik, using DNA analysis, establishes the ethnic predominance of the Khazarites within those Jewish communities of the Pale.)

Catholic Antisemitism

The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and (Roman) Catholic churches was a slow-moving affair, which covered most of the second half of the first millennium CE. By and large, Catholicism acquired the same antisemitism, though developed a greater degree of pragmatism towards Judaism.

Orthodox Christianity and Islam emerged as much bigger geopolitical threats than Judaism to Catholic western Europe. Judaism receded to the periphery of monotheistic West Eurasia (to use the sensible name adopted by James Belich in his 2022 book The World the Plague Made, noting that North and Northeast Africa also belonged to this geopolity).

The basics of the European geopolitical fracture that still stands today were established during the reign of the Frankish emperor, Charlemagne. By the early ninth century, Catholicism prevailed across the entirety of Western and Central Europe. (There were still ‘pagan’ pockets – eg, in Scandinavia; otherwise, the border established by Charlemagne is that of today’s European Union. We note that the Catholic parts of the former Yugoslavia are in the European Union, and the Orthodox and Muslim parts of that former union are not. We also may note that Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are exceptions; they are more Orthodox than Catholic. And we note that the post-Catholic Protestantisation of northern Europe occurred many centuries after Charlemagne.)

Simon Schama (in his Story) notes that Judaism came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; this suggests that the Frankish kingdoms (which became France) had been a significant recipient of the racially diverse Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean. And it suggests that the (still relatively small) Rhineland (western German) population of Jews in Medieval Europe also arrived via that French route.

In the centuries either side of 1000 CE, the fusion of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures seems to have created a synergy, creating a cultural high tide of tolerance and intellectual osmosis. An interesting consequence may have been the emergence of modern banking. Pure banking developed in a Mediterranean world in which money-lending (usuary; charging interest) was prohibited by Christian and Muslims, though was pragmatically tolerated when the money-lenders were Jews. (Early banking was a side-hustle of rich Italian and Spanish merchants, who made written promises – promissory notes – and ‘cleared’ them among each other. They invested the money in their possession – their mercantile profits – to finance ventures; as financier shareholders of each venture, they would take a share of the profits or losses.)

It was Christian Kings and Princes who did much of the borrowing from Jewish moneylenders; these entitled overlords had a propensity to turn to antisemitism when they become insolvent. The Catholic world became especially prickly towards its cultural rivals, including Judaism, in the later decades of the 12th century.

Antisemitism in western Europe seems to have emerged around the same time that Catholic Crusader groups had conquered much of the ‘Holy Lands’ (the Levant; modern Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) from both Muslim and Orthodox overlords. Tolerance and pragmatism towards Jews largely fell apart in Spain, England and France in the twelfth century, leading to expulsions of Jews from those countries; and the boosting of the Rhineland population of Jews. Shama mentions the problem of antisemitism emerging in England during the reign of the Crusader King (Richard ‘Lionheart’; 1189-1199); indeed, Richard’s mother Eleanor had been responsible for expelling Jews from her ancestral territory of Aquitaine. Jews were expelled from Spain in stages from the 12th to the 14th centuries; and from England during the 13th century.

This is about the same time (early twelfth century) as when the Khazarite Jews had to flee (northwest into West Russia) from the Golden Horde established by the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.

Neither Shlomo Sand nor Simon Shama mentioned the terrible atrocities committed upon Jews – especially in western Germany and Switzerland – during the first and biggest round of the Black Death (1348 to 1352; the ‘Plague’). But it’s true. Many Jews were scapegoated and grotesquely murdered; accused of having poisoned the wells in many central European towns.

Christian Poland, which was less affected by the Black Death than Western Europe, gained a reputation for relative tolerance towards Jews. So, it is likely that Eastern and Western Europeans converged in the territories we today call Poland, creating a relatively cosmopolitan population of Jews; Jews who practiced their faith while also mixing more easily with their Catholic (and later Protestant) neighbours; that is, more easily than the larger populations of Jews further east were able to integrate with their Orthodox neighbours.

Protestant Antisemitism (including Christian Zionist Antisemitism)

While the Bible (Old Testament) became more important for Jewish populations in recent centuries, the newer Talmud was a substantially more important text in the practice of Judaism in the medieval period.

It was the Protestant Christians during and after the Reformation who first took to the Bible – both Testaments – as literal statements of history and prophecy. Jews suddenly played an affirmative role as the spiritual and biological ancestors of Christians; of particular importance, they played an important role in Christian prophecy (including apocalyptic prophecy), especially in the momentum to re-establish an ethnoreligious state called ‘Israel’.

Further, Protestantism – especially the more Evangelical forms (eg Calvinism) – was attractive to the expanding Plague-recovery mercantile communities of Northwest Europe. Under the auspices of the reformed Church, the sanctions against usury – sanctions against making money from money – were increasingly downplayed. Christians could do business with Jews again; soon enough though, these two mercantile-religious communities became rivals. While Jews were no longer proselytisers, the mercantile Protestants (especially the Dutch) were eager expansionists, expanding their new capitalist domains throughout the much of the world; although only encroaching on the coastal communities of the Islamic World of the Indian Ocean rim, and of the ‘Far East’.

Protestant antisemitism was born out of capitalist rivalry; and out of the new Christian racial tropes, which facilitated the acceptance of intensely racist forms of slavery. In the nineteenth century – in the era of emerging ethno-nationalism within Europe, and emerging racial supremacism – the Jewish ‘nation’ became a rivalrous irritant to increasingly nationalist Christianity. Further, as Shlomo Sand observed, in Eastern Europe, a more dangerous form of ethno-nationalism emerged; one which built on the original Orthodox tradition of antisemitism. This eastern rivalry had morphed from being mainly religious to mainly ethnic; especially Slavs versus Jews.

To the west of Europe, in the now geopolitically dominant United Kingdom, Christian Zionism became a thing. While (Protestant) Christian Zionism had its roots in the Puritan era of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, by the 1830s the upper crust of even Anglican society wanted Jews to be ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’. Although the United Kingdom elected a Jewish Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli – in the 1860s, this only reinforced latent antisemitism amongst his dour political rivals. (Queen Victoria found Disraeli to be more personable than his political opponents.)

Anyway, through that century, there was increasing (mainly Christian) talk in the United Kingdom and Western Europe about re-establishing a Jewish homeland, though not necessarily in Jewish biblical home-lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The possibility of an expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine emerged, however, as the then overlords of the Levant – the Turkish Ottomans – appeared to be presiding over of a dying empire. The European ‘great powers’ were lining up to divide the ‘Middle East’ – an annoyingly Britocentric term – between them.

This possibility didn’t stop the British ruling-class antisemites from concocting (just after 1900) a plan to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Uganda. While Uganda is a pleasant and fertile territory in Africa, this resettlement proposal tells much about the irredeemable racism of West Europeans towards the presumed ‘inferior’ races; especially but not only Africans. And it shows zero sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities regarding their biblical homeland.

Meanwhile the antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe – mainly in the then Russian Empire – continued as Slavic nationalisms were gaining pace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to their destinations of choice: United States and United Kingdom.

For European Jews, the interwar crisis began in 1924 when the United States closed down their immigration from Europe; and the United Kingdom pretty much did the same thing. The United States’ near-prohibition of Jewish immigration lasted until the mid-1950s. It was only after 1924 that large numbers of Eastern European Jews looked to emigrate to (British Mandatory) Palestine; that’s where British and American immigration policy deflected them to.

Then, in the 1930s, the German National Socialists (Nazis) started both scapegoating their Jewish residents (effectively blaming them for the Great Depression, on account of apparent Jewish overrepresentation in the finance industry) and coveting their lands in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the newly independent Baltic States, and especially Soviet Russia.

The new Jewish residents in British Palestine recreated the segregated lifestyles they had known in Russia, creating much animosity between them and their new Palestinian neighbours. Pretty much by definition, these settlers were Zionists, because they were recreating the biblical promised land of Zion, even though they would rather have gone to the United States. The indigenous Palestinian population resented the new settlers; not because of their ethnicity, but because of their insensitivity and exclusiveness; an insensitivity comparable with many prior experiences of other indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonisation.

Many immigrants from the west Russian territories were Socialist Zionists; indeed, it was that leftish faction which largely ruled modern Israel from its formalisation in 1948 until the mid-1970s. Other interwar settlers included the fascist Zionists of the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. Still others – including the Irgun, which became Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party – were on the less-extreme political right. All of these settler-Zionist factions formed resistance militias that became anti-British (ie anti- the new post-Ottoman overlord of the southern Levant) and (after the 1929 uprising) anti-Palestinian. (Just as Hamas is a resistance militia today.) The anti-Palestinian aspect of this settler militancy became, over time, increasingly racist; it became antihamitic, a racial prejudice as problematic as antisemitism.

Around 1940, the Lehi fascists tried to do a deal with Adolf Hitler. Both the Nazis and the Lehi wanted the European Jews to leave Europe. The Lehi wanted a mass transfer of that population to their new Zion in the Levant. Great Britain, in particular, was in the way. From the British point-of-view, the time to create an exclusively Jewish homeland had passed; the logistics of a mass resettlement programme during World War Two were impossible, and racism had passed its peak in the United Kingdom.

For Hitler, those logistics of a mass transfer to Jews to Palestine were always going to be problematic; exponentially more so once Germany was at war with Britain. Instead, Hitler reconsidered the British antisemitic plan to transfer the European Jews to Africa. After May 1940 there was a pro-Nazi puppet government installed in Southern France – the Vichy regime – which had control over France’s imperial territories. Hitler formulated a plan to settle the Eastern European Jews to Madagascar! While never practical, Winston Churchill certainly made such a transfer quite impossible. The United Kingdom invaded and conquered the Vichy French territory of Madagascar in 1942. (Who said the British military was overstretched in 1942? In that year, Winston Churchill argued that Australian troops should stay in Europe. John Curtin, the new Australian Prime Minister, wanted those soldiers to return home to defend Australia.)

Hitler’s options for the Jews substantially narrowed. His antisemitism and desire for lebensraum had left him committed to the removal of this population, but with no destination to remove them to, and few resources to do the removing. The rest became tragic history – from 1942 to 1945 – of the worst possible kind.

Still – even after the Holocaust – the pro-Israel antisemitic United States denied immigration entry to Jews, except that is for a few handpicked ones. Most holocaust survivors of World War Two were left with only one option; to migrate to British Palestine or (after 1948) to Israel. The Lehi (who fought the British during WW2), the Irgun, and the socialistic Haganah all served as ‘freedom fighters’ from 1946 to 1948. This was a successful militant insurgency. The British departed as soon as the United Nations was formed; they couldn’t wait to leave. The United Kingdom supported the creation of an ethnocratic sovereign state as the eventual solution to its longstanding antisemitic project of resettlement, indeed hoping that large numbers of British-resident Jews would join the refugee Jews in the new state of Israel.

Israel had been a longstanding antisemitic project, with the object of both cleansing Europe of Jews and creating a Europe-ish sovereign state in the ‘Middle East’, a state that would help to project a European-style foreign policy in a region which was set to undergo full decolonisation.

Conclusion

Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state, which – if it wishes not to be a pariah state – must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. It is not exceptional – the rules do not allow for exceptionalism – and the rules do not allow for the new nation to promote an alternative form of racism that’s as bad as antisemitism.

Jews are an ethnically diverse people with a shared cultural heritage; Judaism is a culture rather than a nation. A significant number – though not a majority – of the Jewish people live in the nation-state of Israel, a nation state that’s 76 years-old and counting. It’s a nation which presently pursues a relatively soft form of antihamitic Apartheid within its internationally accepted boundaries, and a much harsher form of antihamitism within its occupied territories. There is a clear analogy between the occupied territories of Palestine today and the occupied (and client) territories of Europe’s belligerent powers in the 1940s.

All nation states’ governments are equally able to be criticised; by those countries’ citizens, by residents and by non-residents. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; it’s criticism of the way that nation-state projects itself across the wider world, and about how it racially and culturally discriminates (sometimes with extreme violence) against people or peoples over which the Israeli authorities have a duty of care.

Past victims of racism have more reason than most to avoid being present perpetrators of racism.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

A few days ago I watched a recording from Al Jazeera of Earthrise Systems Change. The news banner at the bottom of the screen told this story:

“One person killed and at least five others injured in a car-ramming attack in central Tel Aviv. Medics say all victims in Tel Aviv attack are foreign tourists. Suspected attacker has been shot dead by Israeli Police. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mobilized Police and army reserves after Tel Aviv attack. Israeli police say attacker tried to run over people on a busy promenade in central Tel Aviv. Two Israeli women were earlier killed in a shooting in the Jordan Valley area of the occupied West Bank. Israel carried out strikes on Gaza and Lebanese port city of Tyre early Friday morning. There is increased tension after Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque in Occupied East Jerusalem twice on Wednesday”. And, in the preceding news bulletin: “Israel’s Iron Dome intercepts rockets from Gaza” and “airstrikes on [Tyre, Lebanon] in response to the barrage of rockets from Hamas”.

The recording was from live TV at 8:30am on Saturday 8 April 2023; that’s six months before the Hamas attack which triggered the present ongoing trashing of Gaza by the Israel Defence Force. (Nearly 45,000 Gazans are known to have been killed by the IDF, many other unverified deaths, and many other excess deaths due to illness, injury and inadequate nutrition. The big unknown is the number of Gazans presently alive in Gaza. I would be surprised if it’s as many as two million.)

After 7 October 2024, the Israelis authorities instructed the western mainstream media to treat the Hamas attack as a blue-sky event, something perpetrated ‘out of the blue’ by people – people who were “terrorists” because they were terrorists; aka “human animals”. The “liberal” western press obliged. When Benjamin Netanyahu said ‘jump’, the media moguls effectively said ‘how high?’ Since then, like Groundhog Day, media copywriters have been playing the game ‘Israel says’.

Israel demands that western audiences take into account 4,000 years of history to understand its position as the putative ‘tangata whenua’ of the Southern Levant. But it will not countenance the people of Gaza or Eastern Jerusalem having even a year of their history being allowed as evidence of understanding ‘Why?’.

The key point from the second paragraph quotation is that various relatively small tragedies (too small to make it as more than a byline in the western press) – perpetrated by both civilians and military on civilians and military – arose from a cynical police/military operation on one of Islam’s most holy sites, the Al Aqsa Mosque on East Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, aka Haram al-Sharif.

These provocative attacks ‘wind-up’ Muslims – especially Palestinian Muslims – understandably; indeed, that would appear to be the intent of ‘mosque-storming’ in and around Israel. And Hamas – a resistance (and service-providing) organisation in Apartheid Israel/Palestine – which may be compared to the ANC in Apartheid South Africa – feel obligated to ‘fire rockets’ to provide a degree of optics saying to Israel and the World “we are still here”.

Recently I learned about the 1929 attack on Al Aqsa. In p.262 of Shlomo Sand’s 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People – a reasoned argument that Judaism is historically important as a religious faith, but not as an ethnicity – Sand notes that the founders of the modern state of Israel that Palestinians were of the same ethnicity as the ‘Jewish race’, but that they pulled back sharply from that position after “the Arab uprising of 1929”. “After the 1929 ‘pogroms’ these Muslim peasants became complete strangers with astonishing speed.”

What were the these ‘pogroms’, a word mostly associated with anti-Jewish events in the western part of the pre-1917 Russian Empire? In the Wikipedia entry 1929 Palestine riots, in [British] mandatory Palestine, the British “Commission found that the incident that contributed most to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration […] at the Wailing Wall on 15 August 1929″. The context was that “From the late nineteenth century onwards pictures and postcards often depicted a rebuilt Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sometimes next to Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock and sometimes in their place [my italics]” and “Arab fears of Jewish immigrants ‘not only as a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future’.”

(I will say no more about that regrettable set of tragedies, but will note my article from last Friday – Israel, Syria, and the Map of the ‘Millennium’, Evening Report, 6 December 2024 – which gives ongoing context to the fears of Zionists and Christian Zionists razing the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rockmosques. I will also note that, in light of the weekend’s events in Syria, that the eschatological optics relating to an imminent Armageddon arising from Russian and Iranian presence in Syria have now diminished.)

There have been many provocations relating to the sacred Al Aqsa Mosque. I’ll mention just one more, the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005 began when the 1982 “Butcher of Beirut” (Ariel Sharon) “made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount”.

Provocations matter, and the provocateurs generally are fully aware of what they do. They start wars, little or big.

The Temple Mount site is sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews. When in the eleventh century Muslim ‘Infidels’ occupied the Jerusalem holy site, it precipitated the classic Crusades. Western Christians, highly offended by this occupation, raised an army – the First Crusade – which in 1099 ended with the murder by Crusaders of every Muslim occupier of that sacred ‘Holy Land’ city. 88 years later, Muslims under Saladin in 1187 recaptured Jerusalem; Saladin spared the city’s Christian inhabitants, in part to avoid harm being done to “the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque”. “Upon the capture of Jerusalem, Saladin summoned the Jews and permitted them to resettle in the city”.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are faiths with the same mythistorical (a neologism utilised by Shlomo Sand) point of origin. Much cousinly blood has been spilt in terms that appear ridiculous in hindsight, just as much blood has been spilt in internecine conflict between different groups of Christians and between different groups of Muslims. Jews at least seem to have hit-on each other less, although the Zionist present trope of “self-hating Jews” is a major source of provocative rhetoric in the current conflict.

It is the ethnicisation of ‘peoples’ (ethnobiological and pseudo-ethnobiological collectives – ‘nations’ in the nineteenth-century sense of that word – as Shlomo Sand defined ‘peoples’) that leads to racial supremacism and ethnic cleansing. That causes so much grief today, much of it under the guise of religious conflict. So it was, also, in the first half of the twentieth century.

So much ethno-violence results from wilful provocation. And it happens when our institutions – including the mainstream television networks – look the other way. Playing ‘Israel Says’ is not ethical journalism.

I just rewatched DDN’s The Truth About October 7 Exposed (Youtube), which draws on the work of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. Eleven minutes in, it notes “the response to our film on October 7 has been interesting. The response has not been to criticize and pick apart and say that we’ve got it wrong. They didn’t do that at all. What they do is simply ignore you.”

The worst things happen when we, and especially our trusted institutions, choose to look the other way. When institutions succumb to narratives of the ‘Israel says’ variety, they are professionally corrupt. We need contests of ideas, contested narratives, not a ‘lay-down misère’.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

I was concerned when the story broke last month about inappropriate subediting by RNZ staff of ‘wirecopy’ from international sources such as Reuters. The wire-tampering story broke with particular reference to stories about the war in Ukraine; and, at least for that story, it needs to be understood that Aotearoa New Zealand is an aligned party to that military conflict, so certain sensitivities will apply.

I was then concerned when RNZ chief executive Paul Thomson called the RNZ subedits “pro-Kremlin garbage”. For background see Mediawatch: Further fallout as RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’, Evening Report, 18 June 2023. For a senior professional communicator, the RNZ CE set a particularly bad example.

Subsequently, RNZ has undertaken an audit of stories published on its website, so its possible to check out the bias of the sub-edits. It turns out that there is a clear anti-Washington rather than pro-Kremlin sub-editorial line. A number of the stories brought to light – and corrected – relate to Latin America; in addition to stories featuring Ukraine, China, Taiwan, Israel and Ireland. (I have heard it said that the sub-editor in question is not only pro-Kremlin, but also has a disposition towards anti-democratic regimes. I cannot agree; I would assess the sub-editor in question to be an old-fashioned democratic left-winger who, in Cold War times, might once have had some pro-Soviet sympathies.)

Before looking at specific themes of the sub-edits, I present the following quote (8’20”) from Mediawatch, RNZ’s Russiagate, 14 June 2023.

The programme features Hayden Donnell talking to RNZ’s Anna Thomas about the purpose of subediting a “pre-subbed” wired story from an international news agency: “It’s already gone through a pretty robust process at Reuters or AP or wherever you’re sourcing it from. Most of the time it’ll just require an editor formatting it to in-house style, maybe removing some Americanisms, cutting it to length, and plonking it on the website.”

And then: “What can [ie should] you edit with wirecopy? Even if you agree with this person’s edit, the heart of the issue is that you cannot take copy and make substantive changes to its meaning. But you can add context, you can delete sections for length, you can insert relevant local information or quotes. If you cannot make any changes at all, that’s untenable.” [I have sub-edited bits of this second quotation to shorten it, to remove repetition, and to make it more like written rather than spoken language.]

The problem is that even very small additions, deletions and substitutions can subtly alter the meaning of a text. That’s of course a problem here, and it is clear that there has been an intent to steer the meaning in an anti-Washington direction. By way of contrast, disinterested subediting will be like a ‘random walk’ [a statistical concept] meaning that, on average, altered meanings are unbiased. Subeditors who are close to an issue may display unconscious bias, whereas outsourced subeditors (including robotic subeditors) who are distant from the issues in a text may be unbiased but ‘noisy’; such subeditors will on average make more mistakes, and will struggle to appreciate nuance in a text.

While the problem subeditor in question was clearly inserting an anti-Washington bias, his defence may well have been that he [other media stories refer to ‘he’] was correcting a pro-Washington bias in the material he was working on. Certainly, in any Goodies versus Baddies narrative – inherent in war stories – academic or journalist disinterest is largely absent from most stories; these are narrational contexts where a person who is not overtly on one side is too easily characterised as being on the other side. As the question goes: ‘Which side are you on?‘.

Editorial biases are commonly worse than sub-editorial tampering. These in particular involve the decision whether or not to run a story. While these are often dictated by the fast-moving news cycle – meaning that stories about Covid19, for example, were biased towards the beginning of that pandemic, and created an ‘exceptionalism’ towards that disease at the expense of contextual discussion and other health risks – they also reflect self-censorship (partly but not only because of the fear of the wrath of authorities or other power-brokers).

Another form of bias arises in the need to create headlines which will draw readers to a story; a bias compounded by the fact today that most stories have ‘click-bait’ headlines (hyperlinks) which are even more sensational and less qualified than the actual headlines to the stories.

‘Loaded’ Language

Consider this story: Organization of American States head ‘one of worst in history’ – Ebrard. The changes made and then unmade are listed at the end of the story.  With respect to former Bolivian president Evo Morales, the mischievous subeditor replaced “resigned under pressure” with “resigned and fled under threat”. Both versions are essentially true, though the original (and restored) version may have understated the danger Morales faced; or perhaps the modified version overstated the danger.

We also see, in that story, the clause “a presidential vote that the OAS said was rigged” was changed (and unchanged) to “a presidential vote that the OAS claimed was rigged”. This leads to the issue of the degree to which some synonyms are more ‘loaded’ or ‘accusative’ than others. (Note here that if the original story had used the word ‘claimed’, there would have been no issue; the question is the motive of the subeditor in making the change.)

Aside

A common sort of story takes the form ‘A abuses B’, where ‘to abuse’ means any action that is in some sense ‘bad’. Consider this story, about the November 1975 regime change in Australia (commonly known there as ‘The Dismissal’). The allegation is of Washington involvement in precipitating this particular political crisis.

This is an A abuses B story, where (in this case) ‘A’ is the American CIA, ‘abuses’ means ‘dismisses’, and ‘B’ means ‘the elected government of Australia’. The story at its most disinterested level is [passive voice] that ‘The Government was dismissed’. In the active voice, the most neutral version is that ‘sources said that the Dismissal was instigated by the CIA’. The next level would be ‘sources claimed that the Dismissal was instigated by the CIA’. Up another notch would be ‘The CIA allegedly instigated the Dismissal’, or [passive voice] ‘The CIA was accused of instigating the Dismissal’. Finally, the most overt form is the unqualified ‘The CIA instigated the Dismissal’.

In the various stories we read and hear, many which are in the ‘A abuses B’ form, we will encounter the full linguistic range from neutral (‘something bad happened’) to the presentation of an accusation as a fact. Actually, the way a story is narrated is ‘rhetoric’; and neutral rhetoric can be a way to intentionally downplay something, just as accusative rhetoric upplays that same story.

Back to the Main Narrative

We see this in this RNZ story, Two activists involved in land dispute killed in Brazil: police, in which the restored headline is in the passive voice and the word ‘said’ is only implied. The inappropriately sub-edited version is in the active voice with the abused named without ‘alleged’ as a qualification: ‘Death squad shoots dead two Brazilian land activists’.

This story Chile passes bill to boost taxes on rich, spur investment, small business shows that the subversive  RNZ sub-editor is coming from a somewhat conventional left-wing perspective, and not from an autocratic ‘far-right’ Russian perspective. People who are anti-inequality don’t usually regard Russia these days as an exemplar country.

This story for a while contained an inserted and unqualified allegation of a “2014 US-based coup”:Serbia accuses Ukraine and unnamed EU country of Air Serbia bomb hoaxes. It’s an example that shows the anti-Washington stance of the sub-editor. Indeed, articles like these are not the correct place to debate the extent of United States’ involvement (or otherwise) in the regime-change event in Ukraine in February 2014.

In this story we see the explicit anti-Washington subeditorial stance with respect to China over Taiwan, and also the more neutral word ‘says’ preferred by the subeditor over the word ‘worries’ with respect to Japan: South Korea’s president seeks closer Tokyo ties after latest North Korea missile launch. Yet this story’s subediting uses the rhetorical word ‘blunders’ with respect to China, not exactly an endorsement of Beijing.

Finally

I would regard Paul Thomson’s use of the rhetorical word ‘garbage’ to be more problematic than the sub-editors’ word ‘blunders’. Garbage is ‘waste’, not ‘lies’. Waste is a reality of life that should be regarded as normatively neutral, not wicked. In ecology and sustainable economics, waste is indeed a ‘good’, not a ‘bad’; an input as well as an output. It is not professional to oppose bad rhetoric with worse rhetoric.

And, I wonder if the mischievous subeditor has a point in interpreting much of the copy that came his way as having its own bias. If the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT was trained only on copy acceptable to today’s western authorities and power-brokers, would the bot’s outputs really be any more truthful than the ‘pro-Kremlin garbage’ that a frustrated socialist RNZ minion was (for a brief while) turning out?

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

I was intrigued to see this Daily Telegraph story – King Charles’ coronation: Australian man Simon Abney-Hastings could be rightful heir to British throne (published NZ Herald, 9 April)  – about an Australian resident who could be said to be the rightful king of the United Kingdom and those Commonwealth countries for which that monarch is the constitutional head of state. The ‘mistake’ here happened in the 1470s, in the reign of King Edward IV. That was the same decade as the establishment in England of the Caxton Press.

Some context, for me, is that, on that very day – Easter Sunday, 9 April 2023 – I was watching the episode of Shakespeare’s histories (The Hollow Crown: Henry VI part 2) in which Edward IV became king. Further, the whole sequence of Shakespeare’s histories – from Richard II, through the Henrys, to Richard III – gives a critical insight into the evolution of the first modern nation state (namely Tudor England) and the wider context of that evolution. (Of course, it is also preferable to know a bit about the actual history, and not just Shakespeare’s late Tudor dramatic narrative. Useful counter-narratives – again, historical drama rather than actual history – are the Philippa Gregory televised dramas The White Queen and The White Princess, both recently available on Netflix and TVNZ+.)

Shakespeare’s history plays begin in the 14th century, in the decades after the Black Death in Europe from which the pre-existing feudal power structures could not survive as before (refer James Belich, The World the Plague Made 2022, and see RNZ James Belich: how the Black Death led to the rise of Europe); though the elites of the time could not have understood that. The monarchies of Europe represented a thin veneer of overlordship, in a world where most people had a local lord to serve, but were affected little by their lords’ lords.

France as we know it today was divided into three overlordships, the Kingdom of France, the eastern Duchy of Burgundy, and the western territories whose king was also the King of England. Richard II, the first king in the Shakespearian sequence, was born in Bordeaux (now France). And it was in the times of Richard II that an English public servant, Geoffrey Chaucer, led what might be called the ‘English-language-movement’ which formed one of the central pillars of late-Tudor English/Welsh nationalism. Indeed, Shakespeare’s histories were themselves a coherent nation-building narrative.

(The second main pillar of the emergent English nationalism was a fake Romano/British ‘history’ of England which for the most part omitted the Anglo-Saxons – the actual English – and instead traced the nation’s origins through a series of British kings (including Arthur, Lucius and Leir) back to ‘Brutus of Troy’, and, before that, to ‘Albion’, fourth son of Neptune. Refer Fake History [2021] by Otto English, Historia Regum Britanniae [1136] by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and The Stories of Albion and Brutus from Our Island Story [1905] by Henrietta Marshall. The third pillar was the printing press, established in England for over 100 years before Shakespeare started writing his histories; meaning that the dramatic stories of late-medieval English royalty – more or less true, and, as always, biased by the zeitgeists of their authors – were widely known.)

Usurper Kings of England

A central matter of contention in Tudor England was that of the ‘usurper kings’, of which Shakespeare had four to contend with: Henry IV, Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry Tudor [Henry VII]. The latter was Queen Elizabeth’s Welsh grandfather, and the aging Queen was a capricious presence during the time of the Tudor literary renaissance. Authors and publishers who displeased the Queen on personally sensitive matters were liable to – and sometimes did – have their right hands chopped off. (Refer The Elizabethans 2011, by A.N. Wilson.)

The underlying issue in the history of these kings was the rules of dynastic succession; rules which tended to be refined as situations arose. Definitely a good part of the issue was ‘patriarchy’, meaning the precedence of males over females. In England one rule was established through the Treaty of Winchester in 1153, which meant that succession could and should pass through a female line, even if that female herself would not be accepted as Queen regnant. The result then was the House of Plantagenet as (French-speaking) rulers of England and much of France. The Plantagenet line in England ended in 1485 with the accession of the House of Tudor.

In the Kingdom of France, the succession rule was less clear. In 1337, based on the English rule, King Edward III would also become the King of France. (Under the rule that applied, say, when Queen Victoria became Queen in 1837, Edward’s living mother – Isabella – would have been the Queen regnant of France and well as the Queen consort of England.) However, the French, had pulled a swifty, understandably, and adopted the Salic Law rule that monarchical succession could only take place through a fully male line. The result was that, in France, a new royal house was established in 1328, the House of Valois.

The outcome was that England was at war with France – on and off – for over 200 years. And the episode of 1415 (with its battles of Harfleur and Agincourt), in the reign of Henry V, became for English nationalism and national identity, what Gallipoli became for New Zealand nationalism exactly 500 years later. Henry V is the (slightly flawed) hero of Shakespeare’s narrative; things fall apart on account of the untimely death of this young king in 1422, just months before King Charles of France also died.

(There is a clear link between the 1994 animated movie The Lion King – suggested here – and Shakespeare’s histories; though in these adaptive stories historical chronology doesn’t matter. Simba the ‘Lion King’ is Henry V; and ‘Scar’, Simba’s uncle, is clearly Shakespeare’s Richard III.)

The years from 1337 to 1453 have been dubbed The Hundred Years War, and were all about Edward’s claim to the French throne; these claims did not actually subside until 1550, in Tudor times. The campaign of King Henry V to reclaim (on behalf of his great-grandfather Edward) that throne represented England’s last success in that war. France’s King Charles VI (‘the Mad’), following Agincourt, acquiesced by naming Henry as heir to the French crown, and ‘giving’ his daughter Catherine to Henry as his wife. In the end though, The Hundred Years War was an embarrassing defeat for England (as was Gallipoli for New Zealand), and this humiliation represented the backdrop to Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 1.

The Hundred Years War gave way in England to the War of the Roses. This war was again about dynastic succession. Edward III had five sons. Richard II represented the end of the first of those five male ‘lines’. He was deposed in somewhat murky circumstances by ‘Henry Bolingbroke’ who represented Edward III’s third ‘Lancastrian’ line. (We should also note that this third line had two branches, a ‘legitimate’ line and a later ‘legitimised’ Beaufort line through the mistress of Henry Bolingbroke’s father.)

The second male line of Edward III was the Clarence/’Mortimer’ line, and the fourth line was the ‘York’ line. Based on the English rule, the correct King of England in 1450 was Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. This Richard was the unambiguous heir to Henry VI through Edward’s fourth line, and was ambiguously the rightful actual king (through a mix of male and female ancestors) on Edward’s second line. The situation was further confused by the eventual birth of Henry VI’s son (another Edward, called ‘Ned’ by Shakespeare) in 1453, a boy widely assumed to have actually been fathered by the Duke of Somerset, a divisive character on the Beaufort line. Henry VI came to an accommodation with Richard of York; Richard, rather than Henry’s son, would become Henry VI’s successor. The accommodation was not accepted by all, resulting in the War of the Roses, and the assassination of Richard of York. These events are graphically depicted early into Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 2.

The outcome was another battle, through which Richard Plantagenet’s oldest son Edward deposed Henry VI. The new king, largely undisputed in the 1460s, became Edward IV. There were rumours that Richard of York was not Edward’s true father; hence (according to the Telegraph story) the possibility that the ‘true’ king of England today is an Australian called Simon. But Edward was a good and well-regarded king; well-regarded, that is, except in the matter of his choice of wife, Elizabeth Woodville. (Hence the story of the White Queen.)

So rumours of Edward’s illegitimacy only surfaced after the marriage, spread by those who had other ideas about who should be Queen consort. A result was some changing allegiances and a resurgence of the Wars of the Roses. Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne in 1470. Following Edward’s re-restoration in 1471 – after the Battle of Tewksbury, where Henry VI’s teenage son Ned was killed – Henry VI was then assassinated much, in the manner that Richard II had been killed 70 years earlier. Shakespeare did not have to resort to fiction to write his dramatic regal potboilers.

We should note here that ‘illegitimacy’ was a substantial complicating factor in the rules of succession, and was an issue that could be manipulated by both monarchs and their foes. (Hence the well-known dramatic claims and counter-claims around the [Tudor] King Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth; claims that embroiled the sisters of Henry VIII as well as his daughters.)

The next usurper was Richard III, who Shakespeare had to present as the epitome of evil in order to make the next usurper look good. This Richard was the younger brother of Edward IV, played in The Hollow Crown dramatically by Benedict Cumberbatch. In the plays Henry VI and Richard III, Richard murdered Henry VI, his own older brother George (of Clarence) – both killed by Richard personally – and, by order, dispatched the two sons of Edward IV. We normally presume that Richard was next in line, and indeed he had already become King Richard III on the basis of Edward IV allegedly being a ‘bastard’. But Richard’s older brother George had two surviving children, a girl Margaret (Margaret Pole in the White Princess) and a boy Edward. This Edward (or Warwick) was thus the rightful king under both the English rule and the Salic Law, as the senior male descendent of Richard of York. Margaret’s many descendants (including Simon of Australia) had claims to be the rightful monarch based on the law of 1153, and this claim holds good regardless of whether Edward IV was legitimate or not.

The final battle of the Wars of the Roses was Bosworth, in 1485, whereby Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in battle, and thereby usurps the crown. Henry’s familial claim goes back to the ‘legitimised’ Lancastrian line (the Beaufort line) from Edward III’s mistress Katherine Swynford; and is contentious, depending on how legitimate the legitimisation of Henry’s ancestress really was. Henry Tudor was also a great-grandson of France’s King Charles ‘the Mad’, the rival of Henry V in 1415. (Henry V’s widow went on to marry Welshman, Owen Tudor.) To improve his prospects of his acceptance as King, Henry Tudor – Henry VII – married the eldest daughter of Edward IV (Elizabeth, the White Princess), though this may not have (as supposed) established legitimate Plantagenet descent, given the Telegraph story that Edward IV himself could not have been fathered by his father.

A footnote here is that, in the 1540s, King Henry VIII once again pursued the claim of the King of England (going back to 1337) to the throne of France. Game of thrones, indeed! Knowing that he was a great-great-grandson of Charles ‘the Mad’ will have bolstered Henry’s claim, at least in his mind. Henry VIII only averted bankrupting the English Crown by having previously looted the monasteries of the Catholic Church; actions that played a major role in initiating the Europe-wide religious ‘culture war’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. (And we note that Joe Biden is now in Ireland, commemorating the 1998 ‘Good Friday Agreement’ which can be understood to be the true end of that culture war.)

Monarchy in a Modern Context

In the post-feudal days of absolute monarchies, these dramas of Kings – monarchs with absolute power – had a much bigger impact on their subjects than in preceding medieval times. Nevertheless, monarchy – constitutional monarchy – has something to offer today. Tudor England was arguably the first ‘nation state’ in the modern sense of that nationalist concept. A proper nation state needs to be politically self-contained, and of ‘goldilocks’ size: not too big, not too small; neither an empire nor a principality.

The present view of a pure nation state is of a ‘republic’, with a president rather than a king. (Or ‘chairmen’, in the case of ‘Peoples Republics’.) The problem today is that democratic republics have highly politicised ‘heads of state’; they lack the symbol of the ‘crown’ to preside over a depoliticised public domain.

A form of democracy with a hereditary veneer which sits above the world of politics may actually be a winning formula. The late Queen Elizabeth II was much loved because she was a constant in our lives during times in which too much else seemed to change too much. It doesn’t matter so much who is monarch these days, but we do like our monarchs to be presentable to the point of being regal; we probably do not wish for a King Henry IX any time soon.

Yet we still like the idea of certainty as to who will be next monarch, and we do like there to be a genuine bloodline basis to that rule. Most of us will be grateful that the official rule now – at long last – treats females as equals to males. And matters of legitimacy can be sorted out by DNA testing, although somehow that seems too sordid for Kings and Queens.

One idea may be that monarchies should follow a matrilineal succession rule. Indeed, a matrilineal rule might have been a good idea in the past. Then – to forge political unions and to ensure relatively pure bloodlines – first cousin marriages were far too common.

In a matrilineal system, we will always know that the mother is indeed the mother. Actually, on the matter of legitimacy, we really would not worry, under a matrilineal system. (Jesus was reputedly not the natural-born son of his mother’s husband; not a problem.) If our Queens were more like Catherine the Great than Queen Anne – or like Richard of York’s wife Cecily, or Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou, or Edward III’s mother Isabella of France – then the possibility of a greater diversity of paternal genes would strengthen the royal gene pool.

Regardless of the precise succession rules, I, and I sense many others, favour a democracy with a monarchical veneer than an overtly political republic such as United States or France; or than a quasi-democratic overly political republic such as Russia. (Or than a People’s Republic!)

Back to the Henry V and Shakespeare

Shakespeare would have been familiar with the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli had a very particular take on the concept of being ‘cruel to be kind’. A ‘Prince’ had to be ‘credible’; and his credibility most likely had to be established by a bout of actual cruelty early in his career, or in the careers of recent ancestors.

Shakespeare applauded Henry V as a ‘good’ Machiavellian prince.

The most famous passage from Shakespeare’s play, from the Siege of Harfleur, follows. (Note that Shakespeare emphasises the symbolism of England’s not very English patron saint: St. George. This symbol – the unfurled banner of St George – is central to the particular and peculiar English/Welsh nationalist agenda of the late-Tudor literary establishment.)

Here is the famous, very martial, passage (imagine Kenneth Branagh in his classic role):

Henry V: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

And here’s the less-quoted passage soon after (addressing the Governor of Harfleur, relating to the fate of the civilians of Harfleur), following the military success of Henry’s siege (and noting that this passage is used to establish what can charitably be called Machiavellian mercy):

Henry V: How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array’d in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?
What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d?

Governor of Harfleur: Our expectation hath this day an end:
The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated,
Returns us that his powers are yet not ready
To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king,
We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy.
Enter our gates; dispose of us and ours;
For we no longer are defensible.

Henry V: Open your gates. Come, uncle Exeter,
Go you and enter Harfleur; there remain,
And fortify it strongly ‘gainst the French:
Use mercy to them all. For us, dear uncle,
The winter coming on and sickness growing
Upon our soldiers, we will retire to Calais.
To-night in Harfleur we will be your guest;
To-morrow for the march are we addrest.

Now, cast Volodymir Zelenskyy (in February 2022) as the Governor of Harfleur; though making precisely the opposite response, in part because the threat he faced seemed less credible. What would Shakespeare make of the present Siege of Ukraine?

Afterword – ‘Credibility’ in Policymaking today

I kid you not, this same Machiavellian ideal of ‘credibility’ is central to the modern practice of central banking, in particular with respect to ‘anti-inflationary’ monetary policy. This idea is, literally, textbook monetary economics. (Believe me, I’ve taught from that textbook!)

In this role, the Governor of the Reserve Bank takes the role of Henry V. And the citizens of New Zealand (or wherever) are the citizens of Harfleur. Surrender takes place when the citizens acquiesce to Henry’s threat, meaning that they – in their heads – truly believe that inflation is beaten. (An analogous analogy is that of St George; bank governor Adrian Orr takes the role of George, and inflation – or strictly, ‘inflationary expectations‘ – is the dragon. The dragon is truly dead when the people believe it to be dead.)

(The irony in the present inflationary episode is that New Zealand and other countries had a decade of very low interest rates, very low inflation, and low inflationary expectations. The monetary-policy hawks were deeply frustrated that easy money was not translating into inflation. When the Covid19 supply-chain issues, the great resignation, and the Ukraine War all happened at once, there were rising prices but no inflationary expectations. Expectations were that when the ‘perfect storm’ was over, prices would once again behave as we had become used to them behaving. A ‘cost-of-living spike’ is not the same thing as inflation. It was the Reserve Banks themselves, by talking up inflation, who stoked the very expectations that they are now trying to slay.)

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

I wasn’t good at French in my final year of high school. My classmates had five years of language studies behind them. I had three. As a result of my woeful grip on the language, I wrote a terribly bad essay in my final French exam.

The more I read of ChatGPT’s output, the more I am reminded of my final French essay. I could not express the complex ideas I wrote in my English essays, so instead, I repeated the question a lot and clumped together words and phrases that sounded like they kind of went together. There was no logical thread, no cogent argument.

It was a bit like the perplexing, digressive, buzzword-rich oratory stylings of Donald Trump.

I have been a university lecturer, tutor and marker for coming on two decades now and late last year a student submitted an essay that I sent off to the university integrity team, explaining that it was “bad in a new and different way”.

According to Turnitin (our detection software), it wasn’t plagiarised. It didn’t read like it had been written in another language and run through Google Translate. The grammar was impeccable but there were glaring non-sequiturs and it danced around the question, which it repeated several times, but didn’t actually answer.

I didn’t hear back from the integrity people. They probably didn’t know what to do about it and may have been busy, as it was the end of the teaching year. I had also said it wasn’t urgent, as it had failed against my marking key, meaning the student, whose marks had been poor all along, would have to repeat the unit anyway.

New teaching year
A couple of weeks later ChatGPT was made available to the public, joining the dozen or so other AI writers available to people who want AI to string together their sentences.

Now, heading back into a new teaching year, having spent the summer chatting with ChatGPT, I am in conversations with my colleagues about how we should proceed. I teach journalism and my colleagues are from a range of arts and communications disciplines.

Collectively our feelings are mixed, but I’m looking forward to letting my students know about this leap forward in communications technology.

I plan to explain it in the context of the other leaps and lurches I’ve lived through.

This won’t be the first to make swathes of workers redundant. I remember the angst in my industry about digital typesetting usurping the compositors and typesetters, replacing vast numbers of them with far fewer graphic designers.

ChatGPT will undoubtedly take some jobs, but it’s the donkey work of the writing professions. It frees us up to do the innovative fun stuff. Also, while ChatGPT is big and shiny, we’ve known that AI writing is on its way for a long time.

In 2018, Noam Lemelshtrich Latar summed up the progress in our field to date in his book Robot Journalism: Can human journalism survive? He documented the many workplaces already using AI writing software and concluded that there was still work to be done. There still is.

Essay capacity underwhelming
Much of the media racket over ChatGPT this summer has been about its capacity to write essays, and so I have read several essays it has written, and I can happily report that I am underwhelmed by them, but also fascinated by the challenge we face in getting better at describing the ways in which they are bad.

This task is part of the mission humanity more broadly is facing in figuring out what it is that people can do that robots can’t. If robots/AI writers are going to do the donkey-work writing in workplaces, that is not something we need to be training graduates to do.

Graduates need to be able to do things an AI language model can’t, and they need to be able to articulate their skill sets.

So, I will be generating AI content in my classrooms and we are going to set to work pulling it apart, in search of its failings and foibles. We’ll do this together and learn about it and ourselves as we go.

Another big theme in the media hype has been ChatGPT’s ability to “do the marking for us”. This, in my opinion, is rubbish. Sure, you can copy-and-paste some text into ChatGPT and ask it for a comment and a grade, but every university I know of demands more of the markers than a simple comment and grade.

If only it was that simple. But, no. We have to describe the specific criteria every piece of work will be assessed against, and the expectations ascribed to each criterion that will result in the award of a specific number of marks. This forms a table called a rubric, which is embedded in our unit websites and getting the assignments and rubrics out of that software and into ChatGPT would take longer than the tight time allocation we get to mark each piece.

Besides the software we mark in is already replete with time-saving tricks, like a record function so you can speak rather than type feedback and the ability to save commonly used comments.

‘Getting to know students’
In addition, failing to read the assignments would inhibit the “getting to know your students” process that marking their work facilitates, and so I imagine it to be the sort of drain-circling behaviour used by failing teachers on their way out of the profession — as student assessment of teachers who cheat in their marking is going to be on par with teacher assessment of students who cheat in their assessments.

Cheating is a key word here. While ChatGPT is new, universities have longstanding policies and charters that use words like “honesty and fairness” in relation to academic integrity. These are being underscored and highlighted in preparation for the start of semester and hyperlinked to paragraphs about AI writing.

Honest use of ChatGPT will involve disclosure about how it was used, and what measures have been taken to verify its content and iron out its wrinkles. It then joins the swath of online tools we encourage our students to use to prepare them for the professions they’ll enter when they graduate.

For my first year students these will be professions that have adjusted to the existence of AI language models, and so their new graduate brilliance will need to be focused on things only humans can do to make the world a better place. This is how I’m going to frame it in my classes, when our next semester starts.

Dr Kayt Davies is a lecturer in journalism at Curtin University. She is a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. The article was first published in The West Australian and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“Antlers grow through a mechanism that is very similar to cancer. But, because deer can keep that growth in check, they are extremely resilient to cancers. …

“Sardinia’s own dwarf deer, a relative of Ireland’s giant elk, was eradicated within a hundred years of human colonization, some 9,000 years ago.”

Thomas Halliday, Otherlands, p.46

Cancer is one of those c-words which we resile from. The essence of cancer, as a disease in the body, is that a part of the body becomes a tumour which has a ‘malign’ growth imperative; a cellular reproduction program which eventually colonises the body and – if insufficiently checked – kills that whole of which it is a growing part.

A ‘sufficient check’ may sometimes be instigated by the body’s immune system, or may be the result of a ‘rescue mission’ in the form of medical treatment. A third possibility is that the cancer is ‘self-aware’, and at some point contains itself; aware that by killing the whole body it also kills itself.

Deer antlers would appear to be a cancer which the body itself is able to check before that tumour’s growth becomes unsustainable. The ‘intelligence’ of the whole is able to stem the growth of the part, but without destroying that part.

Humankind

The problematic relationship of the human species to Earth – the body-planet – is unmistakable. Humans are a species which threaten the survival of the whole; the whole of which humans are a part. And that is a cancerous threat; a malign growth imperative, from the point of view of Nature; from the perspective of the Earth-ecosystem.

Humankind, homo sapiens, has arguably been a cancer from its very beginnings. Some fauna – such as Sardinia’s dwarf deer – became extinct very soon after human intrusion. Human beings have always had a disproportionate impact on their host ecosystems.

It has now become a mainstream view that the Earth is entering a human-created mass-extinction event. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said yesterday (at the Montreal COP15 Biodiversity Summit): “Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction”. (UN chief urges strong global nature deal to end ‘orgy of destruction’; Reuters, 7 December2022.)

How can the threat posed by humanity to Nature be sufficiently checked? Rescue is out of the question; that would mean an intervention from outside of Earth!

The statistically most likely outcome is that the Earth will reach a tipping point – as in the ‘mass extinction’ events in the distant past – and flip to an altered state which does not have a place for our species, and most other species we know today. When pressed, most of us do accept that this is indeed the most likely outcome. Many of us find this possibility acceptable, however, because we believe – in hope – that the ‘when’ will be beyond the natural lifetimes of everyone on the planet today.

There is another possibility. It requires that the cancer itself be intelligent; noting that intelligence springs from self-awareness. If we (as individual humans) have cancer, we do not expect our tumour – or tumour cells – to be self-aware. But, if we are a cancer, we can be self-aware; we can be aware that the destruction of our whole means the destruction of all the parts of the whole; including the cancer, ourselves. That awareness gives us the capacity to check ourselves; to become a good cancer.

For humanity to be a good cancer – an intelligent self-aware cancer – means humanity has a long-term future; accepting our history as a cancer, while also ensuring that we do not continue to be malignant. We could be like the antlers of a stag, a beautiful accomplishment that stabilises once it has grown sufficiently; we could be intelligent ‘antlers’, a good cancer.

Shall we continue to play the role of a malign tumour? Or shall we be a benign, self-aware, non-suicidal, self-limiting cancer? Can we choose? Or do the myopias and rivalrous divisions within humanity prevent us from protecting the Earth, of which we are a part?

The answers I gave on Tuesday, Predicting the Coming Quarter Century, are both ‘no’ and ‘yes’. The cancer is clearly at an advanced stage. And it’s not curable; indeed, we do not and should not want the Earth to be cured of us. My optimism is that we may navigate the coming critical years. And that – say from 2050 – the Earth’s cancer may enter remission. If so, we, the cancer, may thrive by becoming a good cancer, a survivable cancer, a cancer which the Earth can live with.

To be a good cancer means possessing the individual and collective behavioural awareness that the survival of the Earth ecosystem in its current state is at stake. The tumour of humanity can thrive, as a part of the Nature we cherish in our better moments, once it becomes benign. We need a win-win outcome: Humanity thriving, and Earth surviving in its familiar hospitable state.

Postscript

A cancer is a disease from within which undermines and kills its host; if unchecked. This understanding applies to all our human systems in which individual – or tribal – behaviour may undermine the host system.

Thus, scientists should not undermine science, economists should not undermine economics, communicators should not undermine communication, governments should not undermine government, businesses should not undermine business.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.