Cassandra Voices

Category: History

  • Nordic Mythology & Iceland’s Sustainable Transformation

    Renewable energy transitions have increasingly been recognised not only as technological and environmental imperatives but also as drivers of community resilience, socio-economic innovation, and energy security. In the Nordic region, ambitious renewable energy policies and high shares of renewables in energy consumption reflect a shared commitment to sustainability that encompasses social participation, democratic engagement, and community-level agency (Nordic Energy Research, 2023). The Nordic energy tradition, where energy systems are deeply intertwined with the social and economic fabric of society, resonates with themes from the region’s oldest cultural narratives.

    Norse myth repeatedly ties elemental forces to human life and transformation. In the Poetic Edda, the prophecy of Ragnarök depicts fire as both destructive and transformative: “Hot you are, and rather too fierce… the fire scorches the fur” (Grímnismál, stanza 57; Bellows, 1936). Beyond mere destruction, the myth narrates the rebirth of the world, where a new earth rises green from the waves and life begins anew (Völuspá, stanzas 59–62). This cycle of destruction and renewal provides a compelling metaphor for contemporary energy transitions: they are not only technical shifts but societal transformations that reshape communities, economies, and regional identities (Norsetraditionschurch.org, 2024).

    The Norse concept of the Three Norns – Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld – who weave the threads of past, present, and future can inspire the context of energy planning, they serve as a symbolic reminder that decision-making must consider historical legacies (Urðr), current conditions and needs (Verðandi), and future consequences (Skuld). This framing underscores that sustainable energy transitions are not only about technological deployment but about long-term societal foresight, learning from experience, and anticipating intergenerational impacts.

    Within this broader Nordic and mythological context, Iceland’s renewable energy experience exemplifies how energy-based enterprises can act as agents of both environmental sustainability and inclusive socio-economic development, reflecting the kind of long-term, multi-stakeholder foresight highlighted by Mukhopadhyay and Ianole (2018). The organisational strategies and governance mechanisms observed in Icelandic initiatives reflect wider regional patterns of collaborative planning, community-centred engagement, and long-term resilience building. Together, the insights are central to understanding how energy systems can function as mechanisms of sustainable transformation and shared prosperity.

    Turf houses have been constructed since Iceland was settled in the 9th century.

    Linking Myth to Practice: Iceland’s Energy Enterprises

    Iceland’s renewable energy sector exemplifies the ‘destruction > transformation > renewal’ paradigm. From the early, state-led hydropower and high-temperature geothermal projects to today’s community-integrated industrial strategic enterprises, energy has served as a tool for economic revitalisation, social equity, and environmental stewardship. The foresight suggested by the Three Norms is evident in multi-generational planning, which considers historical reliance on fossil fuels (Urðr), present community and industry needs (Verðandi), and future sustainability and climate obligations (Skuld). Iceland’s energy-based enterprises demonstrate that technological innovation must go hand-in-hand with social licence, governance structures, and community integration to achieve long-term success.

    Case 1 – Baseload Power Iceland: Decentralised Geothermal for Local Development

    Baseload Power Iceland focuses on small- to mid-scale geothermal plants designed to tap underutilised low and medium-temperature resources. Unlike large-scale national utilities, Baseload develops modular and flexible plants situated close to local demand centers. A prominent example is the Kópsvatn geothermal plant, which generates both electricity and heat for surrounding communities. The enterprise’s community-integrated approach ensures partnerships with municipalities, landowners, and local utilities, creating strong stakeholder alignment and minimising opposition.

    Socio-economic impacts are wide-ranging: the project generates local employment across drilling, construction, and ongoing maintenance; it provides affordable energy access for households, farms, and small businesses, reducing heating and electricity costs; and it supports productive energy use in sectors such as greenhouses, aquaculture, and fish-drying facilities, securing local food security and small business resilience.

    By reducing reliance on fossil fuels, the initiative also strengthens household economics and insulates communities from global energy price shocks. Baseload’s model strongly contributes to SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) by embedding energy provision within social, economic, and ecological frameworks. The community governance structures enhance local agency, demonstrating how small-scale renewable initiatives can empower residents, encourage participatory decision-making, and stimulate multi-sectoral growth. Baseload thus offers a replicable blueprint for integrating energy entrepreneurship with social and environmental objectives in other geothermally active regions (Baseload Power Iceland, 2024).

    Case 2 – Fjarðarorka: Wind-to-Green Ammonia for Regional Industrial Transformation

    Fjarðarorka is spearheading one of Iceland’s largest renewable industrial initiatives, combining a 350 MW onshore wind farm in Fljótsdalshreppur with a green ammonia production facility projected to produce 220,000 tonnes annually. The ammonia targets maritime decarbonisation while positioning East Iceland as a hub in the global green fuel economy. The project carries significant regional development implications: East Iceland has historically faced economic marginalisation and population decline, and the Fjarðarorka initiative offers a pathway toward reversing these trends. The project supports high-skill employment in construction, operations, logistics, and chemical processing; drives infrastructure improvements, including roads, grid capacity, and data systems, which have spillover benefits across other sectors; and stimulates diversification in local industry.

    The Orkugarður Austurland platform, which engages landowners, municipalities, and businesses in planning and benefit-sharing, exemplifies community-centered governance and anticipatory planning. Environmental and social sustainability are central: the project is expected to avoid approximately 500,000 tons of CO₂ emissions annually, supporting Iceland’s climate commitments. These outcomes align with SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) and SDG 13 (Climate Action), illustrating how large-scale, export-oriented renewable energy projects can simultaneously drive regional equity, stimulate regional economy boost, and maintain environmental sustainability (Fjarðarorka, 2024; Daily Northern, 2024).

    Case 3 – Geothermal District Heating System: Public Infrastructure and Socio-Economic Equity

    Iceland’s geothermal district heating system provides energy to over 90% of households, representing one of the world’s most advanced examples of public energy infrastructure. Its socio-economic benefits are long-term and multi-dimensional. The system provides affordable energy access, dramatically reducing household heating costs and enhancing quality of life. Macroeconomic resilience is also strengthened, with estimated contributions of 7% of GDP through fuel import savings and support for energy-intensive sectors such as greenhouses, tourism, aquaculture, and fish processing (Atlantic Council, 2022).

    Social equity is embedded, as coverage spans income levels and geographies, while public ownership and regulatory oversight ensure that clean energy benefits are widely shared. These outcomes contribute directly to SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). The system exemplifies anticipatory planning consistent with the foresight symbolised by the Three Norns: past experience (Urðr) informs present operation (Verðandi), while future sustainability (Skuld) is safeguarded through careful governance and long-term investment. Iceland’s geothermal district heating demonstrates how public infrastructure can simultaneously promote community wellbeing, industrial competitiveness, and sustainable energy transition.

    Table 1: Organisational Approach, Community Impact, and SDG Relevance of Icelandic Energy-Based Enterprises

    Enterprise / Project Organisational Approach & Strategy Key Community & Socio-Economic Impacts Relevant SDGs
    Baseload Power Iceland Modular, decentralised, community-integrated; partnerships with municipalities and cooperatives Local job creation; affordable energy; support for productive uses (greenhouses, aquaculture); regional economic diversification 7, 8, 11
    Fjarðarorka Wind-to-Ammonia Large-scale, export-oriented; multi-stakeholder governance; industrial transformation focus High-skilled employment; regional infrastructure; stakeholder participation; regional economic revitalisation 7, 8, 9, 13
    National Geothermal District Heating Publicly owned; long-term planning; robust governance; operational efficiency Affordable universal energy; industrial co-benefits; macroeconomic savings; social equity; population retention 7, 8, 11

     

    Gullfoss, an iconic waterfall of Iceland.

    Takeaways… Cross-cutting Policy and Business Insights

    The Icelandic experience demonstrates that decentralised and community-integrated energy systems, such as those pioneered by Baseload Power Iceland, can empower local economies by providing reliable, affordable, and clean energy backed by strong social license to operate. Embedding projects within community priorities and governance structures enhances resilience, encourages local stakeholder engagement, and aligns long-term economic development with sustainability objectives. For policymakers, this underscores the importance of regulatory frameworks that not only enable smaller-scale projects but also incentivise partnerships between public authorities, private enterprises, and local communities. For business leaders, the lesson is clear: energy investments are more sustainable and viable when they are socially embedded, responsive to community needs, and designed to generate local value alongside financial returns.

    Large-scale, export-oriented renewable projects, exemplified by Fjarðarorka’s wind-to-green-ammonia initiative, highlight the strategic potential of renewables to drive regional industrial transformation. By stimulating diversification in historically mono-industrial areas and generating high-skilled employment, such projects can reverse patterns of outmigration and economic stagnation. Their success, however, depends on transparent stakeholder engagement, governance mechanisms that ensure equitable benefit sharing, and careful environmental stewardship. For business leaders, these projects illustrate that commercial competitiveness increasingly requires balancing economic ambition with social and environmental accountability. Policymakers, in turn, are reminded of the need for frameworks that integrate industrial, energy, and regional policy, enabling innovation without compromising equity or environmental protection.

    The geothermal district heating network further reinforces the critical role of sustained public investment in achieving equitable, inclusive, and resilient energy systems. By providing near-universal access to low-cost heat, the system has stabilised household expenditures, supported energy-intensive industries, and reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels. The macroeconomic benefits are substantial, but equally important are the social gains, including improved energy security and reduced exposure to energy poverty in rural and urban communities alike. For businesses, reliable, low-cost energy inputs facilitate operational planning, encourage competitiveness, and encourage innovation. For policymakers, the Icelandic experience signals the value of maintaining public oversight or strong regulatory safeguards for critical infrastructure, ensuring that energy transitions advance both economic and social objectives.

    A cross-cutting lesson across all examples is the imperative of multi-stakeholder governance. The Icelandic model shows that energy transitions are as much socio-political undertakings as technical or economic ones, requiring inclusive institutional arrangements that integrate energy planning with land use, regional development, and community priorities. Platforms that bring together communities, governments, investors, and academia not only enhance legitimacy but also improve project outcomes by anticipating and mitigating potential conflicts. For both business leaders and policymakers, the emphasis is on designing systems where commercial ambition, social license, and sustainable development objectives are mutually reinforcing rather than in tension.

    Conclusion

    Iceland’s energy-based enterprises exemplify how clean energy can be a lever for both economic and social development, balancing technological innovation with community empowerment and sustainability. From small-scale, community-embedded geothermal projects to large industrial wind-to-ammonia initiatives and long-standing public heating systems, the country demonstrates that energy transitions are not only technical but deeply social and economic endeavours.

    By linking these practical examples to Nordic mythic narratives, the analysis highlights the importance of foresight, resilience, and intergenerational thinking in energy planning. The cycle of Ragnarök ‘destruction > transformation > renewal’ together with the guidance of the Three Norms, emphasizes how past experience, present action, and future consequences must be integrated to achieve socially, economically, and environmentally resilient energy strategies. Iceland’s approach thus offers a practical blueprint for designing energy systems that are technically sound, socially inclusive, and economically transformative, with lessons extending well beyond the Nordic context.

    Feature Image: Francesca Ungaro

    References

    Atlantic Council, 2022. A geothermal leader: The case of Iceland. [online] Available at: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/a-geothermal-leader-the-case-of-iceland [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Baseload Power Iceland, 2024. Projects & community energy. [online] Available at: https://www.baseloadpower.is [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Bellows, H.A. (Trans.), 1936. The Poetic Edda. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation.

    Daily Northern, 2024. Fjarðarorka plans large wind farm in Fljótsdal to reduce emissions from Iceland’s fishing fleet. [online] Available at: https://www.dailynorthern.com [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Fjarðarorka, 2024. Wind-to-Ammonia Project Overview. [online] Available at: https://fjardarorka.is/en [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Larrington, C., 1999. The Poetic Edda. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Mukhopadhyay, B. & Ianole, R., 2021. Community level impact of solar entrepreneurs in rural Odisha, India: the rise of women led solar energy‑based enterprises. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 42(4), pp.472–503. [online] Available at: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=114240 [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Nordic Energy Research, 2023. Nordic energy statistics 2023: Renewable transition and societal impacts. Oslo: Nordic Energy Research. [online] Available at: https://www.nordicenergy.org [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    Norsetraditionschurch.org, 2024. Ragnarök: The fate of the gods in Völuspá. [online] Available at: https://www.norsetraditionschurch.org/post/ragnar%C3%B6k-the-fate-of-the-gods-in-v%C3%B6lusp%C3%A1 [Accessed 17 March 2026].

    ThinkGeoEnergy, 2021. GeoENVI: The many economic benefits Iceland got from using geothermal energy. [online] Available at: https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com [Accessed 17 March 2026].

  • Podcast: Ward Bosses and Alligator Bishops: Irish Americans and Tammany Hall with Terry Golway

    For this Saint Patrick’s Day episode, Luke Sheehan asked Irish-American historian and New York history expert Terry Golway to help create an overview of the Irish American experience, with a focus on post-famine migration and the infamous Tammany Hall.

    Episode Credits:

    Host: Luke Sheehan

    Music: Loafing Heroes – ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

    Produced by Massimiliano Galli – https://www.massimilianogalli.com

     

  • ‘The Deep and Inveterate Root of Social Evil’

     

    It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy … if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head
    Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers

    What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?
    Charles Trevelyan

    At the end of March last year, during what proved a marvellously sunny spring, a horticulturalist friend imparted the rudiments of potato cultivation. Granted, I wasn’t a complete novice. I knew about chitting (allowing seed potato to sprout in an egg box on a sunny windowsill) before planting, and banking (piling earth on a potato plant as it grows), but his instructions elevated my gardening to another level. An area knotted with grass and weeds would be transformed into neat potato hillocks – or ‘lazy beds’ – within a few hours, breaking that ground up for further cultivation in subsequent years.

    First, my guide carefully measured the length and width of each bed, using string attached to an iron stake to mark the boundaries, thereby giving each plant space to thrive. Next, he layered a bag of manure along the length of each row, sprinkling potash on top, and placing chitted potatoes at even intervals atop.

    Then began the real work, mainly using what he referred to as a Fermanagh spade with a long thin blade that lifted the sod on each side over the potatoes, sealing them off and creating a small ditch between each row. The cherry on top was a sprinkling of pine needles to cover the gaps and keep the weeds at bay.

    Initially the effort required to lift and turn the sod defeated me. My height seemed an unshakable impediment until, after much grumbling, I grew accustomed to lowering the spade sufficiently to use a thigh to make the lift. After another lesson I was equipped to dig my own beds, allowing me to go forth and evangelise about how easy it is to grow the tuber.

    Beyond occasionally removing nettles and thistles, I expended no further labour on the potato beds over the course of spring and summer. A potato’s vigorous growth in Irish conditions easily outpaces any weed and requires no watering. Then, after just over three months, my ‘earlies’ were ready, and, as any grower will smugly volunteer, there’s nothing quite like the taste of your own, not to mention the joy of letting everyone know about it.

    In growing potatoes, it felt as if I was partaking of an ancient ritual. Yet the potato plant solanum tuberosum is an exotic, native to the Americas, probably introduced to Ireland by Basque fishermen, rather than Sir Walter Raleigh, in the early seventeenth century. Potatoes are a very modern phenomenon in Ireland.

    Nonetheless, it is a remarkably fecund crop in Irish conditions. Thus, before the Great Famine, an acre of potatoes could amply feed a family of six, as well as sustaining pigs and fowl. Indeed, prior to the famine half of all potatoes were fed to domestic animals, which were primarily used to pay the rent, with little meat consumed on their farms. At that time, an acre of grain was reported to produce about 4,200 pounds of saleable produce, while an acre of potatoes yielded as much as 72,100 pounds of food for subsistence.

    Such abundance seems miraculous, but as Virgil’s Georgics warns us: ‘The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.’  Over-reliance on any subsistence crop brings great danger, and the dependence of the Irish poor on the potato was extreme. Indeed, an entire rural economy, benefitting a largely absentee landlord class, was built around it.

    The wars of the seventeenth century led the Irish peasantry to take advantage of its unique nutritional profile – unlike wheat it contains all eight essential amino acids – and suitability for small scale storage, but not largescale export. In retrospect, Henry Hobhouse opined that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazy bed, was in the end the most damaging.’[i] In the meantime it allowed the Irish population to scale heights in the mid-nineteenth that still haven’t been returned to.

    Peasant Funeral in the Mam Turk Mountains of Connemara, Ireland.

    Modernity

    In Rot: A History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan explores the modernity of Ireland’s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He details how ‘[p]otatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work large, export-orientated farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds.’

    Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Scanlan asserts that ‘[t]he staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potato failed.’

    In their impoverishment, ‘[t]he Irish poor made complex wagers on their rent and potato yields, hoping to find any marginal advantage. They knew that changes in a day’s trading price of crops and livestock in London might ruin them.’ Scanlon therefore argues that ‘the Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.’ He suggests that Ireland’s rural economy had many features of a squalid modern slum, where faith in luck, supernatural or otherwise, prevailed, just as ‘pyramid schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation’ are evident today.

    An early nineteenth century German visitor to Ireland, Johann Kohl, had never seen anything like Irish poverty, wherein ‘Irish labourers had no national dress, no institutions of peasant life that could contest the power of their landlords.’ This was a society in terminal decline, stemming in particular from the departure of its remaining tribal leaders in the early seventeenth century Flight of the Earls. This permitted the seizure and plantation of the entire country, heralding a steep cultural decline, including the gradual loss of the native tongue.

    The Great Famine would provide the coup de grâce that shattered the bonds of social life and civility. That is not to say societal collapse was inevitable – the famine of 1741 actually had a higher proportionate death toll, but its ill-effects did not linger in the same way. By 1845, however, a seemingly inexorably rising population was placing intense pressure on scarce land. Most of this remained in the possession of landlords, who cared little for their tenants and were often seeking to convert small, intensively cultivated plots into extensive pasture, in conjunction with a rising class of indigenous ‘strong’ farmers.

    Ireland’s social segregation, especially in the wake of the Act of Union – reflected in and reinforced by sectarian divisions – was the underlying cause of the country’s vulnerability to famine. There was certainly sufficient food to feed the population – only in 1847 did grain imports exceed imports – but most produce was destined for the English market.

    It’s hard to imagine a disaster on a similar scale occurring in England at that time, or any major European country for that matter, where landowners maintained a more paternalistic relationship with their tenants. Notably, the proposal by the leading nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell, himself a landlord, to embargo food exports for the duration of the Famine was greeted with derision in Westminster.

    Signs of such scarcity in a more urbanised country would surely have caused a major political upheaval, as in the case of the French Revolution which has been described as an extended bread riot. Ireland did experience a Young Irelander rebellion in 1848, but the starving populace were unable to summon a coherent resistance.

    The Blame Game

    A colonial discourse had long been evident in English accounts of the Irish, going back at least to Giraldis Cambrensis in the late twelfth century. These are akin to the ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes that emerged in Western accounts of the Islamic world, and depicted the Irish as lazy, dishonest, prone to violence and thus requiring civilising.

    By the mid-nineteenth such stereotypes were joined by the discourse of political economy, positing that ‘the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world.’ Edmund Burke argued that God would not look kindly on ‘breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature.’

    Irish reliance on the potato as their primary foodstuff was considered an affront to this spirit of capitalism. Many blamed the potato for Paddy’s laziness, ‘whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.’  The economist Robert Malthus maintained that until they starved, they would not learn.

    The leading civil servant for Ireland over the course of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was ‘some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principle article of national food.’

    The sanctity of the market would have an important bearing on the nature of famine relief. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, then Prime Minister Lord Russell said would impel them ‘to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.’ Extensive public work schemes therefore substituted for direct aid to the starving, who were forced to expend what little energy they possessed building roads to nowhere.

    Most insidiously in 1847 an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief was introduced by William Henry Gregory (ironically the future husband of Lady Gregory the co-founder of the Abbey), an M.P. for Galway. The ‘Gregory Clause’ caused thousands to lose their land in order to avail of the meagre relief available, forcing many into emigration aboard coffin ships.

    As a result of the failure of the crop and these cruel policies up to a million starved or died of disease, and another million emigrated. Unlike after the 1741 famine, the population would not increase, as often their land was converted to pasture, which by then had become more profitable than tillage.

    Old lazy beds.

    Potato Myths

    In Rot, Scanlan refers to numerous sources claiming the Irish peasantry ate on average between 12 pounds and 14 pounds (c.6kg) of potatoes per day. He takes issue with the veracity of these accounts, however, arguing that ‘the idea of a heroic Irish appetite for potatoes revealed a thriving British colonial vision of Ireland.’

    He admonishes ‘credulous’ historians – including this one – for uncritically accepting reports that the Irish poor seemed unusually healthy compared to the British working class ‘a view that indulges in one of the most durable colonial myths that of the strapping and noble savage.’ He asks pertinently: ‘why reject only the insults and believe only the claims that flatter the Irish.’

    Scanlan’s argument that the level of potato consumption was purposely exaggerated appears valid: he adduces evidence to the effect that eating such gargantuan quantities would have caused digestive difficulties. Nonetheless, in years of plenty at least, the rural Irish were surely healthier than their British working class counterparts, who were already consuming a diet high in sugar and refined wheat, deficient in protein and lacking fresh fruit and vegetables. In a rural setting highly nutritious wild foodstuffs would have been foraged or hunted. Moreover, most Irish children were not by then forced into hard labour inside factories, and, moreover, there were no ‘satanic mills’ in the countryside diminishing air quality.

    Scanlan also effectively dismisses the notion that there was anything peculiarly noxious about the much-maligned lumper potato, which prevailed over other varieties at the time of the famine, arguing ‘[h]ad the blight not struck, another people’s potato would have taken its place, and the Lumper might have to be considered a treat.’

    ‘The weakness of potato crops,’ he writes, ‘was not the individual variety of potato planted or the mode of planting, but the genetic liabilities of using sets, rather than seeds.’

    A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine in Ireland.

    Legacy

    Dependency on the potato plant was a product of war. Its cultivation then allowed unprecedented numbers to inhabit rural Ireland. What was really lacking in that culture was the application of demographic brakes, as the population continued to expand despite decreasing access to land. This is perhaps best attributed to the absence of an indigenous political and cultural leadership from the seventeenth century. A form of social atomisation seems to have occurred, where the individual family unit took precedence over the wider tribe or tuath.

    The arrival of the potato plant to these shores is responsible for the size of the Irish diaspora around the world. Far fewer would have survived the conflagrations of the seventeenth century without it, and the rural population would not have expanded in similar fashion on a grain-based diet.

    The mostly callous response of the British government to the Famine probably ensured that Ireland could never be comfortably integrated into the United Kingdom. Yet conversely it also accelerated Ireland’s absorption into the Anglophone world. This paradox yielded a distinctive national literature in English. Also, ironically independence was achieved primarily by the descendants of the petit-bourgeois strong farmers that saw their holdings expand in the wake of the Famine. Kevin O’Higgins’ description of his colleagues as ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution,’ makes sense in this light.

    Despite largely being ignored in mainstream discourse today, the cultural legacy of the Great Famine lingers. It may be identified in an unhealthy relationship to sex, and the absence of a gastronomic culture, and also, arguably, in a prevailing sense of futility that still pervades rural Ireland.

    Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot is an important contribution to scholarship on the Great Famine, maintaining a dialogue with an unhappy past we often occlude. Perhaps those of us still living here suffer from a form of survivor guilt that prevents us from adequately engaging with its legacy.

    The attention Scanlan points to the “complex wagers” pursued by Irish peasants in unstable markets is a particularly useful insight, presenting an agency that is usually denied to passive victims. This may also inform our understanding of modern Ireland, where the political class display all the skill of the middleman in attracting foreign capital, but rely increasingly on insecure taxation income from this source – a bit like our ancestors relying on the remarkable fecundity of the potato.

    [i] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..

  • Carnsore Point: Ireland Goes Nuclear

    In 1977 Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce, Desmond O’Malley, announced the government’s intention to build a nuclear power reactor at Carnsore Point, where the Irish Sea meets the southern Atlantic. Members of Cork Friends of the Earth, along with other groups and individuals, decided to oppose the idea.

    Four rallies by opponents of nuclear power took place each August at Carnsore Point in Co. Wexford from 1978 until 1981. I attended each rally and helped to write reports and observations in a fringe peace magazine that I helped to produce, called DAWN – an Irish Journal of Nonviolence.  I won’t attempt to write a comprehensive account of the anti-nuclear campaign. I recommend Simon Dalby’s pamphlet as a good starting point for anybody researching the matter.

    I want to mention about half a dozen names: Mary Phelan, Eoin Dinan, Adi and Sean Roche,  Christy Moore, American scientist Keith Haight and his South African born wife Maureen Kip Sing (Chinese ethnicity), Petra Kelly (German Green Party MEP), some of whom I encountered.

    Simon Dalby studied at Trinity College Dublin for his first degree and subsequently did a Masters at what is now the University of Limerick. He wrote an account of the Carnsore anti-nuclear rallies and the national campaigning of various anti-nuclear groups. This was published in A4 pamphlet form by DAWN magazine. A comprehensive history of the antinuclear movement remains to be written, outlining the pro- and anti- arguments put forward in public meetings and radio-tv discussions during those years.

    Simon Dalby’s article, ‘The Nuclear Syndrome. Victory for the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement’  was first published in Dawn Train No. 3 Winter 1984-85 and is now lodged in the University of Limerick archives. The U.L. description begins: The collection comprises published and unpublished material collected by Simon Dalby for the preparation of his MA thesis, Political Ecology: A Study of the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement, for the University of Victoria (Canada) in 1982. Published material includes articles; books, booklets and pamphlets; conference proceedings, speeches and public lectures; EEC communiqués; newsletters; periodicals; press cuttings; reports; and treaties and acts.

    German MEP Petra Kelly 1947-1992.

    First Rally

    The first Carnsore rally was held in August 1978. Attractive posters listing ballad and rock groups that had agreed to perform were circulated around Dublin, Cork and other towns. Get to the Point was the slogan. Right from the start free music was on offer to protesters. I am not sure if a chartered diesel train termed The Anti-Nuclear Express was arranged by Mary Phelan that year, but I took the train from Westland Row station down to Rosslare with Mary Condren. Passengers brought drinks and sandwiches for the trip and were ferried by buses to the rally site. There they were greeted by volunteers directing them to a huge marquee on which they could place sleeping bags and groundsheets. Information about toilets, a concert and public discussion venue, and food. Another area was available for people who had brought their own tents.

    Mary Phelan was originally from Waterford City and had lived in West Germany for a few years, where she befriended German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly (whose Irish-sounding name came from her stepfather, a U.S. army officer stationed in Germany). Mary Condren was a Dubliner who had studied in Hull University and became interested in feminist theology and journalism. She obtained seed money from feminist contacts in the USA, notably New York, and asked Mary Phelan to co-run a Resources Centre in Rathgar Road.

    The resources centre was supposed to earn rent from groups using the facilities and gradually become self-financing. That aim was not fulfilled alas. Many anti-nuclear activists visited the Resources Centre, even though it was not intended as a central contact point. The downstairs office was used to cut stencils and roll off on a Gestetner inky duplicator copies of their magazine called Contaminated Crow.

    I worked in a basement office with Mary Condren honing my journalistic skills by producing a student magazine called Movement. Every other month with half a dozen people I also used the basement and the resources centre to produce a cut-and-paste periodical called DAWN.

    We had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with disposable carbon ribbon cartridges – a laborious process that took 2 or 3 days to complete. On alternate months we met at Rob Fairmichael’s home in Ormeau Road Belfast. From early morning we could hear the rumbling of machinery in the Ormeau Bakery behind the house as daily bread was being baked for delivery around the city. A small backstreet business in the Lower Ormeau called The Print Workshop printed issues of DAWN at reasonable rates. Some of our pamphlets were prepared with typeset, after special fundraising, and laid out mainly by Rob. He was a good self-taught layout artist.

    The first rally drew everal thousand, including Sunday afternoon visitors from Wexford and other counties. There had been light rain on Saturday, but Sunday was glorious sunshine. On Monday morning an aerial photograph appeared on the front page of the Irish Times, making a great impression. The next day an eminent Professor of Jurisprudence at UCD, John Kelly, also a top politician in Fine Gael, issued a statement warning the government of the day, Fianna Fail, not to treat the protesters like children. He mentioned huge sit-down protests by antinuclear activists in Tokyo. The professor’s warning may have been somewhat exaggerated, but the publicity was gleefully welcomed by rallyists.

    On Sunday many individuals spoke from an open-air stage about their nuclear concerns. Visitors from France, Germany and Italy spoke of their vehement opposition. A continental European contribution to an Irish protest movement undoubtedly worried mainstream Irish politicians – they envisaged co-operation in the EEC with governments, bureaucrats and captains of industry. Instead they encountered opposition from unmoneyed, ad-hoc, uncontrollable protest groups.

    Free music concerts, headlined by Christy Moore and others, entertained crowds in the evenings. People sitting near the stage enjoyed free music. Others listened in other locations to amplifiers.

    Christy Moore

    Post-Rally Clean-Up

    After the crowds went home a lot of detritus had to be collected and carefully tidied away by voluntary workers. The latrines were maintained with copious shovels of sand and sprinklings of Jeyes Fluid during each rally. Then they were filled in. Recyclable bottles and drinks cans were brought to wherever money could be received. Paper was buried in pits for eventual decomposition. My colleague Eoin Dinan worked the latrines and supervised other maintenance activity. Ordinarily, he drove a taxi in Dublin. During the years of the Carnsore protests he made friends with people and went on to help  found the Dublin Food Co-Op.

    Eoin Dinan was a quiet individual who didn’t give platform speeches, but he contributed constructive suggestions at committee meetings. His taxi experience came into play when the Children of Chernobyl project was set up by Adi Roche and her husband Sean Dunne after the 1986 accident which released huge doses of radiation, connected to a host of diseases.

    Eoin helped with transport convoys carrying medical supplies, food and bottled water from Rosslare through France, Germany and elsewhere to hospitals in Belarus. It would be interesting to see maps of the routes taken. People in the UK, Germany and North America soon began to emulate the Cork project. Adi Roche published her book The Children of Chernobyl about the work, badly interrupted by the Covid lockdown of 2019-20.

    Adi Roche in 2024.

    Friendly Internal Criticism

    Some friendly criticism of Carnsore appeared in issues of DAWN. For instance, in number 51, probably from September 1980, Auveen Byrne of Cork Friends of the Earth remarked in a personal capacity: ‘…it involves en masse camping and thus mainly attracts ‘young trendies’ and passes up the opportunity to influence the greater portion of public opinion.’

    Also, in 1980 an unsigned article by a trade unionist said: ‘The third Carnsore anti-nuclear rally simply marked time for the movement to stop nuclear power and uranium mining. He added that ‘the six-pack brigade were bored’ by the dragging on of the event and the resort to recorded muzak on amplifiers when live concerts were finished.

    In DAWN 73 in the autumn of 1981 I signed a personal article with the headline ‘Labouring the Point – Which Way from Carnsore?’ in which I noted the declining numbers attending. I finished up with a suggestion that instead of being anti-whatever, interested activists might positively organise an Ecology Festival at a different venue and stress positive living.

    I met Maureen Kim Sing, an ethnic Chinese in exile from apartheid South Africa, and her academic freelance journalist husband Keith Haight from the U.S.. They spoke with detailed knowledge of nuclear power and radiation releases at Carnsore and meetings of groups at various venues throughout the year. Keith sold a couple of articles to the Irish Times and contributed many others to U.S. publications. They also spent time campaigning against apartheid.

    At Carnsore and elsewhere they conducted nonviolence workshops. Later they went to France and had a baby girl called Kim. She had automatic French citizenship, was brought to America when Keith resumed academic life, and has lived in continental Europe since Keith died in March 2005 and Maureen died in January 2006.

    Mary Phelan’s friendship with German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly, and Mary’s fluency in German, were important for forging links with anti-nuclear activists on the Continent.

    Although Petra Kelly visited Dublin for antinuclear conferences, I don’t think she visited Carnsore, but she did develop a strong rapport with the head of the ITGWU (today known as Siptu) John F. Carroll. They produced a pamphlet called ‘A Nuclear Ireland?’ in 1978, which was highly influential and came as a shock to government decision-makers.

    Mary Phelan presented on RTE radio programme on ecological and environmental matters. Later she worked on a Dublin FM channel called Radio Liffey, I think. After that she went west of the Shannon and lived in Galway from where she drove a campervan turned into a mobile studio. As a freelance radio documentary producer she interviewed the travel writer Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore Co. Waterford. A 4-part series was broadcast by the national radio.

    In the early 1970s Mary helped produce a 12-page feminist magazine called Wicca in Dublin. She had a daughter who as a young adult went to India and was profoundly affected by chemical damage done by multinational companies. She remained in India promoting non-polluting energy systems and lifestyles. Mary Phelan died suddenly in March 2015. Her passing and key role in the anti-nuclear campaign was not noted in the national newspapers.

    Adi Roche was nominated by the Labour Party to contest the Presidential election of 1997. Eoin Dinan became her driver during the campaign and was described thus in an Irish Independent report: ‘Eoin Dinan, a Project director, former taxi-driver and quiet, supportive presence, is acting as her driver and personal support. Joe Noonan, a poker-faced Cork solicitor, veteran of the [Raymond] Crotty legal challenge to the SEA and friend of 15 years, is on hand for legal expertise.’

    It was a bruising campaign with five candidates, Mary McAleese eventually received 45.2 percent of the votes after the first count. Roche limped in with a mere 6.9 percent. She was later awarded the Tipperary Prize and other honours for her Chernobyl work.

    Dervla Murphy.

    Reminiscences

    Full Tilt: from Ireland to India with a bicycle, was the travel book that launched Dervla Murphy as a major travel writer. In 1981 she published a book in London called Race to the Finish? – the nuclear stakes.

    She was unimpressed by the Carnsore protests, which apparently she attended but did not speak at. On page 55 she caustically noted: ‘In 1979, at the Carnsore Point demonstration in county Wexford, I was aghast to find myself surrounded by Women’s Libbers, IRA representatives, Abortion for All, Hari Krishna and Co., the Communist Party of Ireland and sundry other enthusiasts for whom I feel little or no sympathy. In a rigidly conservative society like Ireland’s such hangers-on make it more difficult for the embryonic anti-nuke movement to gain support.’

    So what did the Carnsore anti-nuclear movement achieve? Firstly, it was an independently run, decentralised movement of Irish citizens and supporters from other countries. That cosmopolitan protest initiative caught mainstream politicians off guard.

    Moreover, Carnsore brought many individuals together who, after 1981, promoted environmental and non-consumerist lifestyles. Organic vegetable growing was promoted in Dublin and other areas. It is likely to have brought support to the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas. Some of the protesters eventually left the city for the countryside and contributed to wholesome rural alternatives. Major political figures today visit, in muddy wellingtons and raincoats, youth-oriented musical events like the Electric Picnic to pay tribute to The Youth, also called the yoof.

    Now that the ‘six-pack brigade’ are a lot older I wonder do they ponder the moon and the stars, and wonder about the meaning of it all? Do they reminisce about Carnsore and tell children and grandchildren about the good old days of free music?

  • 360-Degree Leadership in Times of Crisis

    ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ – it takes a lot more than these kind of words today to get listened to, followed, and to exert influence and effectiveness over time. Effective change leaders remove barriers to employee success. Leaders of unsuccessful change tend to focus on results, and more often than not employees don’t get the supports they need for change. ‘Process’ and ‘people’ components of leadership are both equally critical, and therefore hard to prioritise since in reality they run parallel.

    A 360-Degree Leader

    The qualities that a 360-degree leader possesses, as per John Maxwell’s work, include adaptability, discernment, perspective, communication, security, resourcefulness, maturity, endurance, and the ability always to be counted on. This list is certainly not exhaustive but does capture the essentials.

    The difficulty in generalising this skillset is that they can differ across markets, crises, industry, and perspectives in specific contexts. For such individuals, who are or aim to become 360-degree leaders, there is also a form of assessment that provides feedback in which their skills, effectiveness and influence as an executive, leader or manager are evaluated. This is an effective process in organisations to give leaders clear feedback from their peers, employees and managers. At the same time, this is mostly done in context, e.g. how any process is conducted for a Human Resources director would differ from Sales Leader or Communications Head. Both the process and feedback are tailored to roles and contexts.

    (a) Influence

    The role of influence is critical to leadership. It is not only about ensuring compliance, but also the commitment essential to drive change, and therefore includes the ‘people’ part of the change most. At the same time, looking at wider stakeholder expectations today, developing a ‘reward culture’ also goes a long way.

    In particular, when the immediate fire of a crisis is over the leaders must reflect on who rose to the occasion, who struggled and why. Several organisational roles will change post-crisis and therefore leaders can strategise who they want to be at the table both during and after the crisis to head to the new normal.

    During periods of business-as-usual, influence can shape and affect long-term strategy making, talent acquisition and retention mechanism as well as seek knowledge and business partners as fitting.

    In some cases, where exercising command is difficult, since leaders are working in peer groups and therefore the dynamic is different, i.e. not the typical leader-follower setting, influence comes out to be the strongest and the most effective trait that an individual can demonstrate. This is because it involves leading across levels, including peers involved in the same stage.

    (b) Operations and Strategic Management

    The effectiveness of good leaders can be demonstrated firstly by mobilising realistic and time-bound goals; secondly, laying out clear objectives and setting up the deliverables; thirdly, by building high-performance teams; fourthly by creating a risk-resilient company culture; fifthly by creating organisational knowledge building; and finally by creating a culture of value.

    For sure, however, these are not magic bullets, nor meant to address the challenges or promote business growth overnight. The strategies and planned action that leaders take within firms, whether a large corporation or Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME), would be largely determined by the stage of growth where a company find itself at a given point in time. In addition, building a reward and trust culture would make employees more confident in making decisions and not being risk-averse.

    Besides effectively managing operations, business development, consolidation or a strategic integration of mergers and acquisitions, new research by McKinsey shows that leaders have the following six broad functions: Aspiration; Inspiration; Imagination, Creativity, Authenticity; and Integrity. When it comes to either managing culture at the workplace or leading others through crisis, leaders also need to develop the right mindset based on introspection and self-awareness, which are equally critical skills. Several studies by Sloan and HBR show that it is the mindset, adaptiveness and change that leads to growth and, at times, survival.

    (c) Leading through Crises

    A crisis is very often systemic in nature and call therefore for solutions that are not quick fixes. In the business world, depending on the nature and scale of a crisis which can make or break a business in the medium-to-long-term needs careful identification and scrutiny after early detection signs become evident. Over the years, studies have evidenced that there is a strong correlation between organisational culture, learning, market orientation, the degree of risk and resilience embedded within the firms. The role of leadership is undeniably paramount.

    Most often, it requires that rare ability to dive and drive through the unknown against the known patterns from the past. Leaders should gain new insights, work through new patterns, and determine timely and effective responses to any crisis. For example, during the pandemic, the primary function of leaders of large or high-growth firms was driving innovation, exploring new markets, and enhancing market share.

    When the pandemic struck, the immediate focus shifted to reducing costs while maintaining the essential liquidity! Most firms, big and small, faced supply chain and logistical impediments, downsizing the firms and other operational challenges on a daily basis. All of this while working through health and safety issues, managing remote working and also offering empathy to employees and their families.

    d) Talent Recognition and Retention

    During team meetings it is a good practice to delegate to the right people and establish ‘who’s who’ and ‘who’s doing what’ to avoid confusion and overlap of roles. Leaders need to break through the inertia for business continuity today, while increasing the odds of mid-to-long-term success by focusing on the few things that matter most. Above all they need to listen to advisors and smart people to seek insight and information from diverse sources, and not only from in-group sources. Effective leaders always extend their antennae across the diverse ecosystems in which they operate, while also creating a culture of accountability and transparency during tough times.

    e) Leading Change

    Most research on organisational change, cognitive flexibility of both leaders and followers, and also managing fast change illustrates a necessary connection between the ‘process’ and the ‘people’ part of the change. These 3Cs that unite effective change leadership are a) Communicate – leaders and followers need a continual discussion on the larger purpose of the change and how it would connect to the organisational values, and more importantly establish the purpose of change by focusing on ‘what’ and the ‘why’. B) Collaborate – aligning organisational values with personal values is something that effective leaders constantly strive for; we can nonetheless admit that doesn’t always happen. It is a level above when cross-cultural leaders bring people together to plan and execute change going beyond barriers of borders and boundaries. They should also include employees in decision making and thereby in a way solidifying their commitment to change while promoting inclusivity. C) Commit – research shows that leaders who negotiated a change successfully are resilient and persistent, and willing to step outside their comfort zone. On the contrary, unsuccessful leaders failed to adapt to challenges, started a blame culture while creating a toxic workplace environment, and were impatient with a lack of results.

    f) Leading Remote and Hybrid Work

    With hybrid working becoming increasingly formalised, leading a remote workplace becomes a key priority. This sudden change in the working environment comes with pros and cons and is new to all employees. So they need leadership to guide them through the transition.

    If your business has employees with more remote working experience than you, let them take charge. Feed off their expertise and appoint them to your business’ remote leadership team. This is the time for them to step up.

    Have communication plans ready. Many employees will have an area where they can relax and have a quick chat with colleagues, and a separate area where they can discuss pressing work issues.

    Businesses can recognise their ‘at-risk clients,’ who can cope with this eventuality to a certain extent. Similarly, losing staff can have the ripple effect on a small business of losing a clients, leading to a loss of revenue. A lack of profitability, in turn, leads you to have to make hard decisions as to which members of staff are worth retaining. Maintaining a ‘punishment’ or ‘fear’ culture makes people afraid of taking decisions and being accountable for their actions.

    Leading Dynamic Capabilities in SMEs

    Research into leadership shows how significantly they can affect the morale and confidence of staff (or followers). This will depend on the extent to which leaders perceive mistakes either to be opportunities for learning or leads to them brutally nudging their followers, thereby damaging the self-worth of the latter.

    As Sir Richard Branson once said, ‘clients do not come first, employees come first. Take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.’ Leadership, by its nature, can cultivate the foundation of a culture that empowers employees to achieve the company goals and allows you to recognise how vital each of their contributions are to furthering those goals. At the same time, the pandemic showed how important it is for a leader to diversify efforts and strive to innovate for future success.

    The core of any leadership’s role is to develop dynamic capabilities that allow organisations to respond and adapt effectively to rapid changes to the external environment. This includes sensing opportunities and threats, seizing opportunities, and transforming the organisation accordingly. This is particularly important for SMEs who may not have the scale or resources of larger firms but can excel through agility and innovation.

    By embedding a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and resilience, leaders can position their SMEs not only to survive crises but emerge stronger. This involves empowering employees at all levels to take initiative, encouraging experimentation and calculated risk-taking, and maintaining open communication channels to gather feedback and insights.

    Inherent Volatility

    Markets today are defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Thus, leadership can no longer be confined to positional authority or tactical decision-making. It requires a 360-degree orientation, one that integrates strategic foresight, operational discipline, emotional intelligence, and which exerts influences across hierarchies and functions. Effective leaders today must navigate crises not just by reacting to disruption but by proactively reimagining systems, realigning cultures at every level of the organisation.

    For SMEs in particular, the imperative is clear. Developing dynamic capabilities is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity. These capabilities, whether it’s cultivating a learning mindset or institutionalising innovation, allow small firms not only to survive shocks, but to emerge stronger and more competitive to shifting market demands.

    Crucially, leadership in this context is not merely about managing transitions; it is more about stewarding transformation, mobilising collective purpose, creating meaning in moments of ambiguity, and holding the long view while delivering in the present.

    As Peter Drucker rightly opined: ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.’

     

    Feature Image: A highway sign discouraging travel in Toronto, March 2020

  • Grandmothers’ Fight for Stolen Generation

    Review: A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland.

    Between 1975 and the first half of 1978, it has been estimated that the Argentinian dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla killed and ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people. As far back as 1984, the National Commission of the Disappeared People (CONADEP) estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were disappeared by the dictatorship from 1975 to 1983.

    The rationale that “If they were taken, there must be a reason,” employed by Argentinians during the dictatorship in a bid for personal safety is immediately imparted in Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book, A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Avid Reader Press, 2025). The book tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – a group of grandmothers whose sons and daughters were disappeared by the dictatorship, and whose grandchildren were kidnapped and illegally adopted by members of the dictatorship’s state institutions.

    The book opens with the kidnappings of Jose Manuel Perez Rojo and his wife Patricia Roisinblit, who were both involved in left-wing activism and resistance with the Montoneros against the right-wing turbulence in Argentina that culminated in General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship. Jose and Patricia’s toddler Mariana was taken to her grandparents by the parents’ kidnappers. In her late stages of pregnancy, Patricia gave birth to a boy while detained at the School of Naval Mechanics, known as ESMA.

    The book focuses on the Roisinblit family as it traces both Argentina’s dictatorship history and that of the Abuelas. Rosa Roisinblit, who passed away in September this year at the age of 106, was one of the Abuelas’ founding members. For Rosa, the disappearance of her daughter and abduction of her grandson altered her existence from a person who completely avoided mention of politics to a driving force behind the organisation that openly challenged the dictatorship. At first through persistent presence and silent protest at Plaza de Mayo, the Abuelas would find themselves at the helm of exposing the systematic disappearances of dictatorship opponents and their stolen children.

    Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla swearing the Oath as President of Argentina, 29 March 1976.

    Videla’s dictatorship attempted to avoid the scrutiny which the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ignited. Argentina obscured its description of opponents, and by doing so widened its net to encompass not only those involved in resistance but also anyone remotely linked to the disappeared detainees. The author notes, “For the junta, these covert abductions were the perfect tool: brazen enough to incite fear, but subtle enough that Argentines could pretend they weren’t happening.” As the “disappeared” started making its way into conversations and rhetoric, Videla himself utilised the word in a press conference to bolster dictatorship impunity: “The desaparecido is an unknown … they are an unknown entity, neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared.”

    Of Jewish descent but born in Argentina, Rosa at first turned to Jewish organisations and even the Israeli embassy for help, but none was forthcoming, despite the fact that many Jewish people had been detained and disappeared by the military dictatorship. Videla’s manipulation of Christian values to justify atrocities was also either tolerated or supported by the Catholic clergy in Argentina, leaving the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared with little recourse. It was during one such futile meeting that Azucena Villalfor, the mother of a disappeared detainee, determined to stage a protest at Plaza de Mayo – a gathering for relatives of the disappeared to recognise and know each other.

    Fourteen women gathered for the first meeting and the group later called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. It was from this group – the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – that the Abuelas formed their own distinct group, as they were looking for both their disappeared children and grandchildren.

    The Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires, where the grandmothers have consistently protested since 1977.

    When Rosa joined the group of women, she realised that some stories of the disappeared children held some commonality – some women were also looking for their grandchildren. As support for their mission grew, some people came forward to report that their neighbours suddenly were raising babies, despite no earlier signs of pregnancy. The first inklings that the junta in Argentina had systematically abducted their grandchildren came when two Uruguayan children were located in Valparaiso after being abducted from Buenos Aires in 1976. The transnational operation was linked to Operation Condor – a US-backed plan that sought to eliminate all Communist and socialist influence in South America, and in which Argentina also participated.

    Alfredo Astiz, a naval officer who worked as ESMA, was tasked with infiltrating the group, posing as the brother of a disappeared detainee. The bodies of two mothers and a nun, supportive of their cause, were discovered decades later in a mass grave as a result of this operation.

    The Abuelas followed up on clues to piece together the broken narratives that could shed light on the disappearances and illegal abductions, since it was clear that no help from the state would be forthcoming. The military would not divulge information about the disappeared and it was through contacting other human rights organisations and a breakthrough in genetic testing that the Abuelas were able to prove the identity of the stolen children they eventually tracked down, and those of the children who came forward after the fall of the dictatorship in 1981.

    Cohen Gilliland gives a detailed account of the forensic anthropology that was employed to identify the remains of the disappeared buried in mass graves, as well as the setting up of Argentina’s National Genetic Data Bank in 1987. American geneticist Mary King devised a grandpaternity test that would allow the analysis of DNA samples from the grandparents and grandchildren to prove their family lineage. Cohen Gilliland writes: “In many cases, such as Rosa’s, the Abuelas were looking for grandchildren who had disappeared while still in their mothers’ wombs.” Following the return to democracy, the grandpaternity test became accepted as evidence in court cases relating to the abducted and illegally adopted children of the disappeared.

    Argentina’s truth commission report noted the abduction of the disappeared’s children, stating: “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.” The report also lauded the Abuelas’ work and determination to establish not only the identities of the stolen children, but also the contribution of their efforts towards seeking justice for crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.

    “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.”

    Despite the scientific success of genetic testing, several of the abducted grandchildren who came forth, as well as the Abuelas, did not anticipate the ramifications that disappearances and abductions would have on the affected families. Amid campaigns to discredit the Abuelas, and lawsuits contesting custody, the book illustrates how the dictatorships tore families apart and created new ones founded on torture, disappearances, abductions and lies. Reconciliation with biological family at times came at a cost, where justice was achieved at the expense of psychological trauma. Justice did not necessarily ease the endured past.

    This trauma is highlighted in the book through Rosa’s story and her search for her abducted grandson, Rodolfo, who was given the name Guillermo by the couple who raised him. While Guillermo – as he is referred to in the book – swiftly seeks out the truth about his identity, he is also faced with the repercussions of the decision. The psychological and emotional toll is evident as he navigates through two distinct realities: one in which the dysfunctional and abusive family he grew up with disintegrated, and the other in which he sought to reconcile himself with the history of his biological family, which should have belonged to him.

    One memory Guillermo narrates is his adoptive mother asking him, at the age of eight, what would happen if another woman claimed to be his mother. As memories of his past contend with the present, and the contradictions arise, particularly the discrepancies in his upbringing, Guillermo faces a major identity crisis. “You kidnapped the grandson of the vice president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,” he told Francisco Gomez, his adoptive father who worked for the military.

    Yet Gomez’s eventual arrest and its effects upon his adoptive mother brought a new round of implications for Guillermo, who found it difficult to distinguish emotionally between healthy and traumatic bonds. Even within his biological family, Guillermo and his sister became estranged over the rupture caused by the dictatorship’s abduction, despite the fact that Guillermo went on to become a lawyer and participate in bringing the dictatorship perpetrators to justice alongside the Abuelas.

    Milei shaking hands with Donald Trump in February 2025.

    Cohen Gilliand’s book is particularly important at a time when Argentina’s right-wing government is resolutely waging war against memory institutions in the country. Argentina’s quest for justice already faced hurdles during Mauricio Macri’s presidency, but current President Javier Milei has exceeded Macri’s measures since the start of his tenure, attacking not only sites of memory but also directly targeting the Abuelas. In a decree that was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies in August this year, Milei sought to remove the autonomy of the National Genetic Data Bank. This book treats the delicate subject of disappearances and abductions with dignity, yet with the clarity and sense of justice that must be employed against dictatorship oblivion.

    Feature Image: The mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo enter the former Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics detention center.

  • Diabolical Healers

    Intriguingly, women held more or less equal power in many of the African continent’s varied societies prior to its violent colonial subjugation. Gender equality was, however, viewed as a challenge to imperial hegemony by colonial administrators – more familiar with women in Counter-Reformation Europe attired in nun’s wimples ‘in order to prepare them for a life of seclusion.’

    A new work, The Heretic of Cacheu (Penguin, Random House, London, 2025) by Toby Green exhumes the records of a Portuguese Inquisitorial trial from 1665 into apparently deviant conduct of one such matriarchal figure in Cacheu – at that point ‘the most important Atlantic trading town in Senegambia.’ This was the first African region to be drawn by the Portuguese systematically into the transatlantic slave trade, the appalling legacy of which we contend with to this day.

    Senegambia.

    Eric Williams argues that ‘slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.’ The deeply troubling treatment of slaves on American plantations produced a form of dehumanisation, and hierarchical conception of human ‘races.’ Apparently ‘the curse of Ham’ assigned a lower status to dark-skinned people, an idea that perhaps allowed their overseers to sleep at night.

    Walter Rodney has previously explored how slavery corrupted preexisting forms of dependence known in West Africa prior to the Portuguese arrival. The legal status of slaves in Cacheu, however, depended absolutely on the Roman concept of slavery, wherein the master held a power of life and death over his human chattel.

    The forcible removal, of up to thirteen million men, for the most part – only eleven of whom survived the dreaded passage – caused profound dislocation and lasting trauma to societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Green observes how, just as in war time Britain where women took on industrial work after men were sent to the front line to be slaughtered, ‘during the political conflicts in Africa generated by the transatlantic traffic women’s labour burden increased – as did the opportunities to capitalize on this for some women.’ One such was Crispina Peres, the most successful trader in the city of Cacheu, ‘who was such a catch that during her life she was married to not one but two captain-majors of the town.’

    Both she and her husband Jorge Gonçalves Frances were of mixed heritage – Portuguese fathers and West African mothers. This gave them a competitive advantage, as they were able to inhabit both worlds, and trade effectively using an array of languages. Interestingly,Crispina was the dominant partner, due in no small part to Jorge’s persistent infirmities.

    Her husband’s illnesses led Crispina to engage with the djabakós – traditional healers with knowledge of local herbs and their properties. The djabakós ‘helped with fevers, difficult childbirth, worked with the bodies of the dead and provided succour to all those hanging on to the worlds of the living.’ According to Green, ‘[t]he importance of the djabakós in Cacheu spoke to the fact that African political power remained dominant.’

    At that time in Cacheu, as in Europe, ‘the health of the body and the spirit were seen as integrated’. Thus, ‘healing the body also required healing the spirit,’ which gave rise to strange – in the minds of colonial authorities – practices, including animal sacrifices. Moreover, many of these healers also practised Islam, which challenged Christian supremacy.

    Green observes that disease was rife in Cacheu ‘because this was a town at the heart of a period of crisis-driven transformation;’ further opining that ‘periods of crisis and the collapse of an existing sociopolitical culture are often accompanied by disease.’

    Slaves on the West Coast of Africa, c.1833 (oil on canvas) by Biard, Francois Auguste (1798-1882).

    In the sixteenth century, therefore, smallpox and other infectious diseases wiped out an incredible 95% of the population native to the Americas. This was exacerbated by hunger and economic hardship, ‘alongside the psychological crisis felt by many Native Americans at the brutally violent end of everything that they had known and which had brought them security.’

    Green also alludes to the plague of alcoholism afflicting the post-Soviet Union society of Russia, which is strongly connected to the decline in life expectancy there by up to five years in the early 1990s. This raises a question as to what lies behind the current stalling and in some cases decrease in life expectancy across Europe, and the U.S.. While COVID-19 has been a factor, excess deaths in many countries have actually increased since 2021. The data might imply that we are witnessing an unravelling, at least, of an existing sociopolitical culture. Green, who is also an historian of the Covid period, might attribute this to the trauma of lockdowns.

    It may seem inappropriate to compare our present era with the violent convulsions of the seventeenth century, but Green’s observation about waves of disease and premature death causing ‘fear and panic, generating scapegoating, gossip and hatreds’ might reasonably also be applied to the Covid period in the West. A comparison between the colonial role of the Inquisition in the seventeenth century and the role of the WHO in Africa in more recent times might also be ventured, although Green resists making this explicit.

    He does, however, connect health policy with the exercise of authority more generally: ‘historically those who diagnose the condition in the first place are generally those who then are empowered to claim the authority to heal it.’ In our time, the African continent was subjected to inappropriate guidance for a disease such as Covid, a disease which had little impact on its overwhelmingly youthful population, while drawing resources away from more beneficial programmes with lasting benefits.

    Similarly, at that time in Cacheu, Senegambian healers knew how to apply local plants to reducing swellings and fevers, while European apothecaries usually relied on imported salves from Europe, which tended not to be useful in such a setting.

    Ultimately, the Portuguese officials could not tolerate a high profile figure in Cacheu such as Crispina Peres routinely turning to the djabakós for assistance. Green argues that ‘the imperial assault on West African ways of healing both inaugurated a form of medical colonialism and was a key factor in the shifting balance of power between European empires and West Africans at this time’

    Finally, it would be mistaken to see Crispina Peres as either a saintly or even heroic figure. During her trial, which lasted three years and resulted in her having to perform penance, she openly acknowledged the cruelty she visited on her own slaves. Thus, she admitted to imprisoning a household slaves named Eiria, saying she would die without confessing. This poor woman was indeed kept in shackles until she died. It goes to show perhaps that simply empowering women won’t necessarily lead to perfect conditions on Planet Earth.


    Feature Image: Fortress of Cacheu

  • The Journalist as Public Intellectual

    Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.

    The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.

    There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.

    The Criteria

    A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.

    It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?

    Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.

    1. Karl Kraus

    In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.

    Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

    His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!

    In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’

    He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’

    Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.

    Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.

    Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.

    He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.

    The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.

    As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?

    The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.

    1. Jonathan Swift

    The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.

    Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:

    I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

    Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.

    How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape

    And out of context but an elaboration of the above.

    To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

    Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:

    Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

    Or

    It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

    1. H.L. Mencken

    In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).

    Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:

    Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

    The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.

    1. Christopher Hitchens

    Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view  The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!

    1. Ryszard Kapuscinski

    The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.

    Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
    Travels with Herodotus (2004)

    Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:

    Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

    All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.

    The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:

    Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.


    Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood

  • Public Intellectuals: Voltaire

    Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.

    It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.

    Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.

    So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.

    Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
    1. Freedom Of Speech

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.

    Ronald Dworkin  towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:

    Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

    Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.

    In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.

    Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having  They are merely his intellectual offspring.

    Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
    1. Religion

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

    The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.

    Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’

    Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.

    On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.

    Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.

    Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.

    In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”

    and

    God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

    Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
    1. Miscarriages of Justice

    It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

    In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.

    On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.

    At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.

    He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.

    He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.

    Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.

    In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.

    A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.

    He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:

    …You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?

    Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies

    Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’

    Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
    1. Post Truth

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

    and

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other

    Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

    1. Self-Care

    We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s

    The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

    and

    Let us cultivate our garden.

    And he did so for twenty-five years.

    So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.

    He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.

    He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.

    Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon

  • Review: Chile in Their Hearts

    U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were detained and executed in Chile during the early days of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Investigative reporter and author John Dinges, who has written extensively about Latin America and Operation Condor, investigates the earlier premise that both men were murdered by the Chilean military upon direct orders from the U.S. government. Chile in Their Hearts: The Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup (University of California Press, 2025) finds no evidence to confirm direct US involvement, upon which earlier books, as well as the 1982 film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, were based.

    Dinges wastes no time in affirming the outcome of his research. In the early 2000s, thousands of declassified documents pertaining to the dictatorship were released, including some relating to Horman and Teruggi. ’I had long thought the movie’s theory of the case was highly probably, and I set out to find the evidence to prove it,’ Dinges writes in the introduction. The author also reveals a personal interest, having lived in Chile during which time he met Horman once, and was friends with Teruggi.

    Charles Horman

    U.S. involvement in Chile’s destabilisation, brutal military coup and dictatorship is well documented. Thus the theory of U.S. involvement in the execution of both men is plausible. The only mention, however, of direct U.S. involvement rests on a statement by Rafael Gonzalez, a  National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent who was on the scene at the time of Horman’s detention, and who retracted his testimony years later.

    Frank Terrugi

    There is a certain note of dejection that immediately strikes the reader in this book. Dinges’s meticulous research rests on careful scrutiny of documents, the court files and interviews, through which he pieced together a picture that reveals no direct U.S. involvement. This is disconcerting when one considers the extent of U.S. involvement in toppling the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

    Elimination of the earlier premise is also compounded by the absence of a known motive for why Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were targeted and killed by the Chilean junta, other than them being leftists.

    ’The evidence I found,’ Dinges writes, ’led me to conclusions I had not expected, especially about the U.S. role.’ However, the author notes that the U.S. is not entirely lacking in culpability. ‘The evidence demonstrates definitively that the U.S. Embassy and State Department shielded the Pinochet regime by hiding the truth, conducting a sham investigation, and sanctioning Chile’s official coverup of the murders.’

    Dinges devotes separate chapters to the backstories of Charles Horman and his wife Joyce, and Frank Teruggi, who arrived in Chile separately. Both men  met in Chile through their involvement in the Fuente de Informacion Norteamericana (FIN). Chile had become a safe haven for those fleeing oppressive dictatorships across Latin America. At a time when U.S. activists had mobilised against their country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Chile offered alternative, participatory politics as part of the socialist reform implemented by Salvador Allende. At the time, Chile was hosting around 20,000 foreigners.

    Salvador Allende in 1972.

    Both Horman and Teruggi became involved with left-wing movements in Chile. Horman was carrying out his own research into the assassination of General Rene Schneider, while also working with Chile Films, which brought him into close proximity to socialist and communist groups. Teruggi became involved with the Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios (FER, Revolutionary Students Front) and also became friends, and willingly involved with, the Movimiento Izqueirda Revolucionaria (MIR, Revolutionary Left Movement). Notably, Teruggi had also been on the FBI’s radar for his antiwar activism in the U.S..

    Valparaiso, the port city which was central to the plotting of the coup, emerges as a key component of the earlier premise of direct U.S. involvement. Both Horman and Teruggi had taken photos of military ships in the port, to be published in the magazine Punto Final. Horman’s presence in Valparaiso and his conversations with Captain Ray Davies, the head of the U.S. Military Group in Chile –  as the coup was underway – were central to the narrative around his death. For decades, Horman’s execution and disappearance were linked to him having unearthed information about U.S. involvement while in Valparaiso, condensed into the phrase “he knew too much”.

    U.S. Complicity

    Dinges uncovered no documentary evidence to support this premise, but the book illustrates two main components that can be proven. One is about the U.S. embassy’s painstaking efforts to shield the Pinochet dictatorship from accountability over Horman and Teruggi’s murders. The other concerns the U.S. failure to investigate important leads on both men’s executions. These findings illustrate the U.S. intent to prioritise diplomatic relations with the Chilean junta at all costs.

    Both Horman and Teruggi were reported as missing to the U.S. embassy. Their disappearance, however, is described by the author as representing to the embassy, ’an awkward inconvenience, a snag in the U.S. determination to help the junta succeed.’ The U.S. embassy could have investigated the detention and execution of both men, but orders from Washington, specifically from Henry Kissinger in the immediate aftermath of the coup, directed otherwise: ’The first thing for us not to do is to give the appearance that we are putting pressure on them.’

    Thus, U.S. embassy officials upheld the dictatorship’s official narrative, which shifted from statements that no foreigners had been murdered, to denying the military operations that led to Horman and Teruggi’s detention and subsequent executions. One cover story disseminated by the Chilean military and taken at face value by U.S. diplomats was that both men were killed by leftist snipers in the aftermath of the coup. The State Department repeated this narrative to the media, allowing the U.S. to deflect questions on why it had failed to investigate.

    With the U.S. rigorously maintaining the dictatorship’s official narrative, it stands to reason that the gaps would be filled by analysing the contradictions spouted by the Chilean dictatorship and U.S. officials. Dinges explains that this was Ed Horman’s process. Having travelled to Chile to investigate his son’s execution and disappearance, and encountered enough ambiguity and insufficient solid evidence from U.S. officials, Ed Horman concluded that the Chilean military would not have acted without U.S. complicity.

    Dinges writes, ’The mere absence of such evidence cannot be used to argue that such evidence must exist. Or, as I tell my students in teaching the techniques of investigative reporting, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absent evidence.”’

    While direct U.S. involvement can be ruled out for want of evidence, Dinges shows that upholding the Chilean dictatorship’s narrative aided the U.S. embassy’s refusal to investigate. One new piece of evidence that Dinges unearthed and included in his book is that Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who worked for the CIA and DINA, and who was responsible for the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, knew the identity of Frank Teruggi’s killers. U.S. officials failed to pursue this lead.

    U.S. officials also failed to follow up on the evidence gathered by Raul Meneses and Jaime Ortiz, the two Intelligence Military Services (SIM) investigators who told Ed Horman that his son had been executed, despite their names being included in an embassy draft letter dated 1973. Meneses’s report detailing that Horman had been killed on the orders of DINA agent Pedro Espinoza was destroyed by SIM. In 1987, the U.S. State Department hesitated to accept Meneses’s testimony. Embassy officials also knowingly withheld information and failed to call in the FBI to investigate the cases.

    Photographs of victims of Pinochet’s regime.

    National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation

    Such wilful negligence had legal implications. In 1991, the cases of Horman and Teruggi were among the first to be made public by the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. Nine years later, the Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in the Chilean courts, but the judicial investigation was based on the interpretation of declassified documents, rather than hard evidence. By 2003, the court’s attention had shifted to the presumed U.S. involvement and Davis was charged with Horman’s murder, on the premise that the latter “knew too much”, based upon Gonzalez’s initial statement, later retracted.

    Despite the U.S. coverup for the Chilean military, Dinges’s examination of court records do not reveal evidence of direct U.S. involvement. In his discussions with Judge Mario Carroza –  well known for his role in investigating crimes related to Operation Condor – Dinges notes that the Chilean courts required ‘an assumption deemed to be reasonably based on other established evidence.’  According to Carroza, the charges against Davis were so weak, ’It would have been easier to convict Henry Kissinger.’

    Dinges also recalls research by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archives, and investigative author Pascale Bonnefroy, who conducted extensive research into Chile’s terror under the dictatorship. Neither unearthed evidence regarding US involvement in Horman and Teruggi’s executions. Reflecting Dinges’s own research, Bonnefroy stated that assumptions were being made upon association and liaison, rather than documented evidence.

    This is perhaps an unsatisfactory conclusion to such detailed investigation into this snippet of U.S.-Chilean history. Even as Dinges lays bare the logic guiding his research, readers cannot help but grapple with the question of whether there is more to the story. While Dinges writes with both logic and humanity, it is in the acknowledgements that Dinges pays tribute to the questioning of the unknown, particularly to the Horman family, who remained committed to uncovering the truth. Dinges’s research narrows the search, but the heart will keep searching.