Tory Sovereignty

You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's Napoleon has been criticised for playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many French critics. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, The Duellists, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.

The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in The Taste of Things).

The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.

The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as Blade Runner and Alien, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the core issue of Brexit, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.

Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of liberals - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.

The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like Rafel Behr to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. 

The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.

Kissinger and Empire

The running joke about Henry Kissinger was not simply that so many better people died before him, but that he continued to be fêted by the political establishment despite his judgement having been proved repeatedly wrong by history. Détente is a dead letter, not only with regard to post-Soviet Russia but to China as well, where America's "pivot to the Pacific" is a strategy geared to raising rather easing tensions. The military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina are long gone and whilst the later Latin American "pink tide" was hamstrung by neoliberalism, South America is clearly not the wholly compliant partner that Kissinger envisaged in the hemisphere. His advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons has, thankfully, never been adopted by any power. The final irony is that he died at a time when the limits of the "shuttle diplomacy" that he pioneered in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War have been all too visible in the Middle East where the Biden administration has refused to restrain Israel and very publicly disavowed its role as an honest broker.

Kissinger's role as a diplomatic "superstar" was one of the odder cultural developments of the early-1970s. It owed a lot to his presentation as a cosmopolitan intellectual: his heavy German accent being a performative melding of Old World expertise in the service of the dynamism of the New World. In fact, he had lived in the US since he was 15 (his family fled Germany in 1938) but carefully cultivated his outsider status while being the consummate insider. Kissinger owed his advancement to the utility of his theorising about the balance of power, in particular his idea that it could be personalised (he was a fan of both Metternich and Bismarck), the most famous example of this in action being "Nixon to China". Thus foreign policy was bent by ego and domestic ambition. But for all the focus on "legitimacy" and "order" in international affairs, Kissinger's theorising was ultimately just a smokescreen for the right of the US to act as the global policeman and to exercise its power without restraint: might is right. As Thomas Meaney noted in the New Yorker, "If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority". 

Today, under Biden as much as under Trump, the US doesn't really care about image-management, at least beyond its own borders. And that bipartisan contempt for the wider world reflects the realities of American power, not the personal preferences of individual politicians, let alone State Department employees. Kissinger's elevation to international celebrity owed everything to the watershed marked by the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. This promised a future of greater geopolitical instability, one that appeared promptly in the form of the 1973 oil crisis, and thus stimulated a public desire for the better management of the emerging world system (what would, in time, become the Washington Consensus). Amidst the war crimes in Cambodia and Bangladesh, it's easy to forget, as Joann Wypijewski noted in the NLR Sidecar blog, that "Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither."

Meaney picked up the thread in a more forthright article, also for the NLR Sidecar blog, where he emphasised that the acts attributed to Kissinger were a continuation of American foreign policy rather than a divergence. "Was it so unexpected that the country that had fire-bombed Japanese civilians to get Tokyo to the table also fire-bombed Cambodians in an attempt to get Hanoi to one as well? Was backing the massacre of Timorese an unusual follow-up to backing the mass-killing of Indonesian ‘communists’? Was it so shocking that the political class that had installed the Shah would also ease the way for Pinochet? Was Dr. Kissinger’s record in the Middle East really worse than that of his old nemesis Dr. Brzezinski? For what set the man apart, one may have to look elsewhere." And that elsewhere was image-management, which centred on a personally frutiful contrast of European cynicism and American naivety: "The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism."

As Meaney concluded, "His trademark method was to find ulterior reasons for what the state was doing already." Again, it's worth contrasting this with the present moment where the US has made little attempt to rationalise, let alone justify, its indulgence of Israel. Beyond the usual obeisance towards a two-state solution and mild censure of settler attacks in the West Bank, the Biden administration has offered no substantive criticism of Israel's behaviour, leading to the conclusion that it will be perfectly happy if the Palestinians are wiped off the map once and for all. Its regional goals are clearly Israeli-Arab normalisation and the restraint of Iran, goals that Biden has pursued just as reliably as Trump did, and the underlying purpose of that is to ensure that the US retains a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil supplies, which has been the guiding principle of its policy in the region since the Second World War. But why the lack of pretence now? The reason is simple: while the bipolar Cold War required a war of position, the era since 1989 has required merely a war of manoeuvre, evident in the spread of NATO to Russia's borders and the dependence of China on US Treasuries.

In a timely coincidence, the Guardian published a long read by Tom Stevenson on American empire the day after Kissinger's death. This was a salutary reminder that for all the talk of American decline, or the end of the unipolar world, the US remains the global hegemon with a preponderance of financial and military power "so great that its very extent [has] served to disincentivise other states from challenging it". But this is rarely acknowledged, any more than the foreign policy consistency between Bush, Obama and Trump is. Instead, we are regularly regaled with tales of how a change of administration in Washington might jeopardise America's defence of democracy overseas. As Stevenson asks, "Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution?" One obvious explanation is that countries like the UK and Japan, which slavishly follow US policy in foreign affairs and act as continental-scale aircraft carriers for the US military, are unwilling to admit that they are satellites of empire rather than sovereign states. Kissinger dignified the dealings of heads of state through a diplomatic theatre inspired by the Congress of Vienna. For that he was always welcome in elite circles.

Against Science

Simon Wren-Lewis thinks that the political right has a problem with facts and science. There's an immediate philosophical issue here in that Simon implies that the right's attitude to facts and science is uniform because he assumes that facts and science are synonymous. But this isn't the case. The right has a high respect for facts, albeit narrowly defined, but it has an innate suspicion of the ambition of science. Facts are objective certainties: their truth is indisputable. But while some on the right have a flexible view of what constitutes a fact - the contents of the Bible, or the "reality" of race - the core conservative tradition of pragmatism, exemplified by Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, sees facts as limited by experience. In other words, facts exist in the realm of reality rather than speculation. As Oakeshott famously put it, "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss". This doesn't mean that conservatives are positivists, or that they limit their sympathy only to certifiable truths. For example, that antinomy of "fact to mystery" clearly excludes the mystagogy of the Church of England and the monarchy. 

In contrast, science operates on probability - the likelihood that something is true - because certainty is limited.  The edge of science is a venture into the unknown and the scientific method is more than simple empiricism. Knowledge progresses through the refinement of working hypotheses, which means it is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. The discipline of economics, Simon's specialism, has often been criticised for its pretension to scientific rigour, particularly in its reliance on mathematical models, but this is to imagine that economics deals in facts of a mathematical nature. It doesn't. Economics is a social science, which means that its truth is often contingent, hence the prevalence of stylised facts: general principles that hold in aggregate but for which contrary evidence can always be found at the granular level. That facts and science are not synonymous is not just pedantry. It points towards an important distinction in conservative thought between the familiar and the unknown, which is another way of saying between practice and theory.

Simon describes the right's problem thus: "Why does the political right increasingly seem to be on the wrong side of facts and science, and what should scientists do about it? One answer to the first question comes from asking another. Do some on the left, by which I mean those whose views are to the left of the positions adopted by the current Labour leadership, occasionally have problems with facts and science? My own answer would be that some can, at least in the area I know best which is economics. The example that is freshest in my mind is UK inflation." That "occasionally" is doing a lot of work. His specific argument is that "the inflationary episode we have recently been through in the UK was in part generated by higher energy and food prices, but it was also a result of strong labour markets, where unemployment was low by recent historical standards and vacancies were very high. ... some on the left were much happier talking about imported inflation than labour markets being too strong. Many claimed inflation was profit led. Yet the evidence so far for the UK is pretty clear that profit shares, outside of the energy sector, have remained pretty stable." 

This ignores that the left is not necessarily viewing the "episode" as simply another random event that can be empirically assessed. Rather leftists tend to see it in historical terms as part of a longer trend (a stylised fact, if you prefer), commencing in the late-1970s, that has suppressed working class incomes and boosted returns to capital, leading to today's high levels of inequality. The short-term stability of profit shares in sectors other than energy is not incompatible with this. The tendency to accuse the left of a utopian obsession with the future means that its engagement with history tends to be occluded. For example, critical theory is deeply embedded in historical reasoning as much as social science but is commonly presented as unmoored from both. The qualifiers in Simon's statement - "some", "many" - and his use of "happier" indicates that he recognises that the left has exhibited a range of opinions, both in respect of the latest bout of inflation and the secular trends of the last half-century, but he is obliged to construct a left strawman in order to establish a commonality with the right, namely the power of ideology: "My point is not that left and right are much the same. They are obviously not, and the right has power while the left do not. Instead it is to suggest one source of reality denial is ideology." 

This sails dangerously close to the centrist conceit that everyone bar the centre is driven by ideology, which requires Simon to indulge a form of horseshoe theory in which both left and right are vulnerable to self-delusion: "The ideological source of the left’s focus on profits rather than a strong labour market is obvious. On the right, neoliberalism typically argues against state ‘interference’ with firms and markets. Both climate change and lockdowns are about the state taking measures to avoid extreme externalities. Equally a libertarian ideology would see both policies as restricting personal liberty". Again, that "obvious" is doing a lot of work. In fact, there are plenty on the left who consider an obsession with profit to be merely vulgar, in the Marxian sense, and who would prefer to focus on the clear differentiator between left and right that Simon himself identifies, namely power. The claim that neoliberalism argues against state interefence with firms and markets suggests that Simon really doesn't understand neoliberalism either in theory or practice, though I suppose that "typically" might allow him a degree of leeway. 

Neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of state power. While inspired by Austrian economics (or classical liberalism, if you prefer), it is a pragmatic of how to introduce the market into a social democratic framework. Despite all of the "reforms" since 1979, Western European economies remain fundamentally social democratic, hence we still have state interference, large public sectors and high rates of taxation. Even the US, with its private healthcare and weak labour laws, is recognisably the social democratic polity built between the 1930s and 60s, despite the Reagan revolution. The equivalence of neoliberalism and libertarianism is also naive. While the election of Javier Milei to the Argentinian Presidency may prove a damp squib because he is clearly just a neoliberal with a daft haircut, the vote itself was decided by the specific difference of what was sold as libertarianism. Getting rid of the central bank and dollarising the economy is not neoliberal practice precisely because it curtails state power.

At this point in his argument, Simon executes a sharp turn to highlight the return of the "paranoid style" (a la Richard Hofstadter) to conservative politics, mainly in the US but also in the UK and particularly in the media: "To see how this paranoid style sits far too easily with today’s politics on the right we can look at right wing media, and in the UK with the strong crossover in recent years between those writing in that media and Conservative political leaders and their advisers". The problem with this turn is that ideology does not neatly segue into conspiracism. The one is a collection of beliefs, not necessarily consistent or coherent, while the other is a style of reasoning that posits a singular "key" that explains manifold phenomena. The purpose of Simon's swerve is to establish a line from the media's indulgence of untruth to the Conservative Party's rejection of scientific expertise ("One of our former Prime Ministers made his journalistic reputation doing just this by making things up about the EU"). 

But this isn't convincing. Telling lies, or being "economical with the verité", is not the same as having contempt for science. All politicians lie and mislead - consider the current leader of the opposition - but few of them were trained in the art at newspapers. The Johnson adminstration's disregard for scientific advice, which has been on ample show during the pandemic inquiry, was clearly the product of a more fundamental disregard for the lives of others and a blasé attitude towards public health. That can certainly be attributed to ideology, but the ideology in question is the traditional Tory one, marked by a contempt for the common herd and an aversion to further empowering the state bureaucracy at a time of crisis. Boris Johnson did not mark a departure from Tory values, any more than the pursuit of varying degrees of austerity by successive administrations from 2010 onwards did. The last 15 years have obviously been frustrating for a Keynesian, but to imagine this came about because of a recent rejection of facts and science, rather than a recapitulation of the traditional Treasury view, is - well - paranoid.

Simon's blogpost dribbles away into inconsequentiality and an appeal to liberal virtue: "The most effective way of tilting the scales back towards reality and science is to endeavour to ensure these politicians and this political viewpoint are kept well away from power in the future". Good luck with that, mate. This obviously ignores the structural dimension, and it is here that he could benefit from addressing the analyses of the left, notably Marxists like David Harvey and Robert Brenner, on the long-term causes of the current moment, from the spatio-temporal fixes of capitalist accumulation to the crisis of profitability and secular stagnation. So long as the political system is designed to block any challenge to capitalism, and so long as neo-Keynesian economics seeks to preserve capitalism through a "synthesis", we will see politicians spouting nonsense and denying facts. As Antonio Gramsci put it, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".

Human Resources

The term "human shield" is en vogue at the moment because of the claim by supporters of Israel's military action in Gaza that Hamas are using the civilian population to hide behind. A number of people have pointed out that this makes no sense given that meat-based shields aren't very good at stopping bullets or shells. A human shield, properly speaking, is a hostage whose life is threatened by the person being shielded. But given the way in which the IDF is pounding Gaza regardless of the safety of the civilian population, it clearly does not regard Palestinians as hostages whose lives are to be cherished and it clearly has not prioritised the safety of the Jewish and other hostages seized on the 7th of October either, to judge by its indiscriminate bombing and the slow progress towards a ceasefire and hostage-exchange. The IDF's ostensible target is Hamas who, we have been repeatedly assured, are hidden in underground bunkers. But Israeli forces aren't using "bunker-busting" ordinance but simply flattening the buildings above ground, and so far they have provided little verified evidence of Hamas's network of tunnels or substantiated their claims to have killed "thousands" of Hamas fighters. Israel's goal appears to be to destroy the shield, i.e. the urban fabric of Gaza and its civilian population. 

This appears to be an example of the Dahiya doctrine, developed by the IDF in Lebanon in 2006 and later employed in Gaza during the 2008-09 war, which treated civilians and their homes not simply as collateral damage but as an asset to be denied to their opponents: "We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. [...] Harming the population is the only means of restraining [Hezbollah]". This doctrine is a classic counter-insurgency approach whose roots lie in the repressive policing of the European empires from their heyday in the 1880s through to their dismantling in the 1950s. The genocidal free-for-alls of earlier centuries were replaced by a more systematic policy in which native peoples were seen as a valuable resource. Not necessarily one to be preserved, but as one to be denied to the insurgents, both as a source of supplies and funding and as a protective environment within which they could find shelter. One form in which civilians are treated as a resource is through internment. 

In Northern Ireland, this was justified on the grounds of a plausible suspicion of the internees' involvement in terrorism, but the reality - notably in the case of Operation Demetrius in 1971 - was that many innocent people were caught up in the sweep, which inflamed tensions and led to a rise in violence, while the partiality of the Stormont authorities (no Loyalists were interned in the operation) contributed to the decision to suspend the Northern Ireland Parliament and introduce direct rule from London. Internment in Israel/Palestine takes two forms. There is the classic detention without trial, not only of those suspected of being active in the armed resistance but of ordinary civilians, notably women and children, guilty of no more than throwing stones or haranguing IDF soldiers. It's no secret that Israel seeks to always have a large stock of Palestinians in prison as a contingency for its own troops or Jewish civilians being taken hostage: so that it has sufficient resource to agree a hostage exchange without the need to release actual Hamas or Hizbollah fighters. The second form that internment takes is Gaza itself, and increasingly areas of the West Bank, where barriers and blockades create what are in effect open prisons.

A notable early example of mass-internment was the British action in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The British commander, Lord Kitchener, employed a traditional scorched earth policy to stop the rebels living off the land, burning crops and slaughtering or confiscating cattle, but this was combined with an innovative approach to civilians. Where previously these would be left to fend for themselves, which essentially meant condemning them to a forced march to less hostile territory, or allowing them to die through famine, the British decided to incarcerate them in "concentration camps". In effect, to take the families hostage and deny the rebels their material and emotional support. Though not death camps in the sense we would come to know during the Second World War, these places were characterised by malnutrition and disease due to systematic neglect. Of an interned population of some 100,000 Boers, roughly a quarter died, mostly women and children. 

Since then, wars have typically been fought less between armies than between the military and civilians. Even the First World War, which is emblematically remembered in the trenches of the Western Front, saw more civilian than military deaths. The Second World War was a notable example of this with the  destruction of urban populations through mass bombing (and finally nuclear weapons) being as distinctive as the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish population of Germany and occupied Europe. One war where military deaths did exceed civilian, though not by much, was the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975. This was similar to the Boer War in the use of a scorched earth policy (specifically the use of defoliants like Agent Orange) and of civilian relocation (the Stragetic Hamlet Program). It ultimately failed because of the contradictions between a military counterinsurgency strategy centred on "search and destroy" and a pacification strategy that required territory to be held and services provided to the civilian population to win "hearts and minds". What Vietnam (and indeed Northern Ireland in the 1970s) proved was that counterinsurgency is usually more anti-civilian than anti-insurgent, something that is only too apparent in Gaza right now.

The popular historiography of Israel focuses on the relatively brief military campaigns against the Arab states: the 1948 War, the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This focus is as partial as calling the Israeli military, the most powerful in the region and one that has overseen significant territorial expansion beyond the post-1948 Green Line, a defence force. The other perspective, that of the Palestinians, has focused on the forced expropriation of land and the displacement of the population, starting in 1948, along with the routine harrassment and eviction of the civilian population by both the IDF and settler groups since then. What the current war in Gaza has made plain is that the conflict is at heart between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. It isn't really a military contest at all, despite Hamas's attempts to cast it as such. This has been reinforced by the opportunistic attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, as much as by the Arab states sitting on their hands under the watchful eye of the United States. 

The defence of Israel's actions has included the conflation of all Palestinians with Hamas and the suggestion that civilian Palestinians are no more innocent than "Nazi civilians". Inevitably, criticism of the state of Israel in its aggressive policy has been interpreted as antisemitic, not just by Israeli politicians or Jewish groups in the diaspora, but also by non-Jewish politicians in countries like the US, UK, France and Germany. In some cases, voicing the common line - that Israel has the right to defend itself as it sees fit, that Hamas have brought this on the Palestinians of Gaza, and that calls for a ceasefire are pointless until Hamas is destroyed - is simply a way of indicating fealty to Washington. This, rather than a desire to further stomp on the left, is undoubtedly the main consideration for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party hierarchy, though the opportunity to do a bit of stomping will naturally be taken anyway. Opportunism also underpins the willingness of the National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany to align themselves with the political establishment.

It's worth at this point returning to the history of the Second Boer War. The British government's claim of "military necessity" for its concentration camp policy and its domestic opponents' charge of a "policy of extermination" have obvious echoes today, though it's important to note that no modern politician is willing to use that latter phrase as Lloyd George once did. It isn't hyperbole to talk of Israel pursuing a "policy of extermination", particularly when senior Israeli politicians and military personnel are employing exterminationist language themselves. In fact, the evidence is more compelling this time round. The avoidable civilian deaths of the Second Boer War could be attributed largely to incompetence rather than design, and it was true that improvements made after the public outcry significantly reduced the mortality rate. While Israeli ministers are circumspect enough not to chant "Death to the Arabs" at every opportunity, they are openly advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. That such rhetoric is tolerated by Western states, however uneasily, shows that the problem is not the human shield of Palestinians but the political shield provided by Washington and its allies for genocide.

A VARcical Start to the Season

There is an air of familiarity at the top of the English Premier League, with Manchester City leading Liverpool and Arsenal and the usual suspects close behind, though Tottenham Hotspur appear to have replaced Manchester United as the seasonal anomaly: a team that aren't as good as the pundits claim but who have certainly been lucky. The good fortune that saw Erik ten Hag's team of misfits finish third last season (their goal difference was a paltry 15, which should have consigned them to sixth or seventh) appears to have run out, and luck may be about to do a flit from Ange Postecoglou's refashioned Spurs as well. What Tottenham's recent stumble indicates is that they remain a shallow squad who will probably struggle against teams in the top third of the table on most matchdays, despite the relatively good results achieved against Liverpool at home (that notoriously disallowed Diaz goal) and Arsenal away (a game in which Jesus missed a sitter and Jorginho uncharacteristically gave the ball away). 

The other familiar feature, beyond Chelsea stuck in mid-table, is the interminable chuntering over VAR. For all the obvious errors and angry managerial reactions, this has been a strange debate because it scrupulously avoids the central issue, namely that the obvious incompetence is because the system is controlled by PGMOL. As the Spurs-Liverpool fiasco made clear, the interaction of the match officials lacks process discipline and suffers from over-familiarity ("That's wrong that, Daz"). The obvious flaw is that the official's discussions aren't broadcast. Where that happens, such as in rugby, public exposure encourages both a clear protocol - explicitly state the on-field decision and what is being checked - and militates against ambiguous, blokeish idioms. The whole idea of referees checking their own homework and, as Mike Dean cheerfully admitted, consequently seeking to protect their "mates", was obviously flawed from the start. That said, there was never much likelihood of the technology being introduced without PGMOL being in control of it. 

A long-standing bleat by well-paid pundits is that former players should be encouraged to become referees, which has always struck me as evidence of those pundits' unworldliness. Getting ex-pros to work their way up the ranks as referees isn't going to happen. They don't need the money these days and certainly not the aggro. But there is a good case for them being fast-tracked in as specialist VAR assistants, not simply because of their experience playing the game but in order to maintain some emotional distance between the VAR booth and the officials on the pitch. Of course, this would be akin to putting potential pundits in charge of VAR, and you can imagine the reaction of PGMOL to that, but then if all pundits had to serve an apprenticeship as VAR assistants, would that actually be a bad thing? It might even improve the quality of punditry by encouraging match commentators to be less willing to rush to judgement (though probably not Garry Neville).

The international football break - aka the interlull - has come at the thirdway point of the season, with all teams now having played 12 games. At 27 points and third behind Manchester City on 28 and Liverpool also on 27, Arsenal are slightly worse off than at the same stage last season, when they has 31 points and were 2 ahead of Guardiola's team. The rationalisation among fans is that our dash to the front in 2022 was ultimately undone by conceding too many goals and thus points in the final third of the season, largely due to injuries to key players such as William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu. City paced themselves better, as they usually do, finishing strongly after beating us home and away in February and April. It is widely assumed that Arteta has decided to sacrifice some of the goal-scoring verve that marked the opening third of last season in order to make us more secure at the back. Controlling games better, in the manner of City, and increasing the depth of the squad, should not only make the team more efficient but more durable. Beating City at the Emirates in October might be a taste of that.

However, though our goals scored has dropped from 30 to 26, our goals conceded has only improved from 11 to 10. But an average of a little under a goal a game is probably is as good as it will get: City have now conceded 12 (albeit 4 of those were in today's game at Stamford Bridge). What matters is whether that rate can be sustained through to the end of the season. The last time Arsenal conceded fewer in the opening third, 9 in the 2015-16 season, they finished second behind Leicester City after conceding 13 and 14 in the middle and last thirds (and also losing their shooting boots in that middle third, scoring only 17). With injuries beginning to mount up, Arsenal face a key set of games after the interlull, running through to New Year's Eve, that could go a long way to determining whether Aretea's strategy has a chance of working. The coincidence of games against Liverpool and West Ham United either side of Chrismas, back-to-back fixtures that essentially ended our title tilt last April, offers the chance of psychological redemption.

In terms of the balance of the team, the key issue remains our limited options up front. Though Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz have clearly given Arteta more variety, we just as clearly need another specialist forward who can lead the line as effectively as Jesus but with more reliable end-product. Eddie Nketiah remains a useful backup, as he proved against Sheffield United, but he isn't the sort of dominant striker that Arsenal require. If the team can keep on City's coat-tails until the end of the year, then they may well make a move in the January transfer window. At the other end of the pitch, the demotion of Aaron Ramsdale in favour of David Raya has divided fans, not least because the Spaniard doesn't appear to be that much of an upgrade on the popular English stopper. Time will tell whether this proves an astute tactical move by Arteta, but it is the first test of the much-vaunted "connection" that the club has established with the fanbase over the last couple of years.

In midfield, Thomas Partey's time at the club increasingly looks like it will come to an end this season, his persistent injury problems meaning that he can't be considered a key cog in the team in the way that Declan Rice has quickly become, despite his occasional dominant performances. Rice hasn't been a revelation exactly - he was propping up West Ham for years and always looked comfortable for England - but it's noticeable how much better he looks in a more technical team. If Arteta's endurance strategy is to pay off, it will depend to a large degree on Rice providing drive and defensive security in the middle of the park consistently until May. Jorginho looks like what he is: an experienced pro who can fill-in, but that simply makes him an upgrade on Mohammed Elneny. For all his popularity, the Egyptian is likely to leave by the end of the season while the Italo-Brazilian is unlikely to play more than twenty games. In brief, Arsenal will probably need to bring in another defensive midfielder next summer. 

In terms of the creative roles, niggles for Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli should prove transient, though there remains a concern about the load on the England player. There is also the now perennial hope that Emile Smith-Rowe will finally get a break on the injury front. But it doesn't look like Reiss Nelson or Fabio Vieira are going to make the grade, or secure Arteta's lasting confidence, which amounts to the same thing, so there's every chance the manager and Edu will be in the market for another wide player. Kai Havertz hasn't lived up to his billing, however I have a sneaking suspicion that he could yet be pivotal (I'm obviously just hoping he repeats the trick of scoring the winner in the Champions League final). He's overdue a spectacular goal; or even just an ugly one. His languid style of play has irritated some Arsenal fans, though the player he reminds me of (based on  limited exposure through old videos, it should be said), with his astute positional sense and heading ability, is one George "Stroller" Graham. 

Overall, it's been a fascinating start to the season, with no one team setting the pace in the way that Arsenal did this time last year, and with plenty of unpredictable results and some very good games featuring late drama, such as today's 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Manchester City. As ever, what will matter is consistency in the middle third of the season and then the ability to tighten the screw in the final third, which ultimately reflects the depth of squads as much as tactics. Arsenal look more capable of lasting the distance this time round, though it is going to take some luck - or at least the absence of bad luck - on the injury front, while City are unlikely to repeat their treble triumph of last season and might even prioritise defending the Champions League over another Premier League title. The biggest threat to last season's top two is likely to be Liverpool, who despite looking chaotic at times have crept into second and have the muscle memory of a consistent run to the title to call upon, not to mention the incentive of winning the title in front of their fans rather than a Covid-emptied stadium. It promises to be a vintage season. Let's hope it isn't decided by dodgy VAR.