At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office – Seamus Heaney, ‘From the Republic of Conscience’
With a Dublin Central by-election on the horizon, Irish politics appears to be descending into GUBU. The ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ prospect of alleged crime boss Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch taking a seat in Dáil Éireann looms large in a May by-election triggered by the resignation of former Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.
Supreme Court Justice Peter Charleton once inquired as to why I pleaded for John Gilligan not as a gentleman, but as a self-employed businessman. Gilligan’s singular presence and the shadow over the murder of Veronica Guerin engendered the Criminal Assets Bureau and The Proceeds of Crime Act 1996. This was the beginning of the end for Due Process in Ireland. In the interim, one form of organised crime mutated into another via NAMA and offshore accounts. Thus, Ireland’s Gangster Inc. of Cuckooand Vulture Funds was born.
Of course, Gilligan never held political office, but Hutch’s candidacy and near election to the Dáil in 2023 begs the question as to whether an alleged crime boss ought to be barred from holding political office. Any such prohibition would raise questions of definition, and indeed whether the activities of present or former office holders, including at least one former Minister for Justice I can think of, might fit that description.
There are obvious examples of corrupt politicians such as former Fianna Fáil T.D. Liam Lawlor, paid a small fortune by Beef Baron Larry Goodman, who remains one of the state’s richest citizens. During the 1980s a rogue’s gallery of grafters made their home in Leinster House. Today’s white collar criminals keep their finger nails clean, if not their toe nails, which remain firmly embedded in the dirt.
A drawing of Ned Kelly on a wall in Melbourne.
Art Imitating Life?
A hagiographic play recently staged in Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre offered an alternative take on the staid format of the party-political broadcast. Remarkably, the eponymous hero of ‘The Monk’ made a surprise appearance on stage on the opening night, taking part in a fictional live question-and-answer session with playwright and performer Rex Ryan.
The lineage of conventional – as opposed to de facto – Irish gangsters proceeds from Martin Cahill to Gilligan and the Kinahan Cartel, and on to Gerry Hutch. The Irish media display a morbid fascination mixed with veneration for their undeniable chutzpah – Martin Cahill’s costume clown appearances on multiple court appearances springs to mind.
It is certainly not an exclusively Irish phenomenon. In his autobiography, Geoffrey Robertson KC describes his fellow Australian’s veneration of the Wild Colonial Boy, Ned Kelly. Further evidence emanates from the global success of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1970), or the many films of Martin Scorsese exploring mobsters’ lives.
It should be acknowledged that politics has always had close associations with crime, and not just in a state such as Italy under Andreotti or Berlusconi. The distribution of patronage and the promulgation of laws are often to the benefit of sectional, corporate or individual interests, who endeavour, and often grease, political machines with filthy lucre.
A dirty business requires forensic and independent journalism, and may even compromise those intent on cleaning it up. JFK’s brother Bobby went full throttle against organised crime post-election, but the former seems to have relied on shady elements to win the Presidential election. That unrequited love may have led, one way or another, to Dallas, Texas.
As Boby Dylan put it in ‘Murder Most Foul’:
Then they blew off his head when he was still in the car
Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
‘Twas a matter of timing and the timing was right
You got unpaid debts and we’ve come to collect
We’re gon’ kill you with hatred and without any respect
We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face
We’ve already got someone here to take your place
…
That’s the place where Faith, Hope and Charity died
That infamous day certainly paved the way for the cabal now in office: ‘Business is business and it’s murder most foul.’
Terrorist to Law-Maker?
A criminal and law-breaker, or even a terrorist, can also become a unifying figure like Nelson Mandela, a national hero such as Michael Collins, or more ambiguously, a peacemaker like Gerry Adams. Perhaps Gerry Hutch is on his own Road to Damascus. He certainly portrays himself as a latter-day Robin Hood, bent on exposing the criminality of Garda Síochána. Who knows what he’d come out with under Dáil privilege. If so what could he achieve?
Gary Gannon, the pearl-clutching Social Democrats T.D. from the same constituency claimed to have been shocked at seeing Hutch on the ballot paper last time out. Former Taoiseach, and legendary recipient of brown envelopes, Bertie Ahern described Gannon’s comments as ‘absolute nonsense,’ and noted with moral ambivalence and some subtlety:
Gerry Hutch has been around as long as me. I won’t get into morals or ethics but I have trampled that ground for 40 years and Hutch has been kind to the community in Dublin Central in indirect ways. Whether we like it or not, he is respected by people which explains his 3,000 votes. It is not just younger people voting for him, older people I know voted for him. We can all say the self-righteous things we want but the reaction is what it is.
It is noteworthy that Ahern’s political machine was colloquially known as the Drumcondra Mafia. At least when Hutch was growing up in the area, there were few options other than criminality for raising oneself out of poverty. Moreover, as Balzac put it: ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’ Which among the wealthiest individuals in Ireland have not soiled their bibs?
The distinction between conventional robber and a new breed of corporate robber barons is unclear, or how to evaluate it in ethical or moral terms. Perhaps the writ of the Monk is preferable to the Cuckoo Funds making housing unaffordable for most of the population?
George Galloway making his post-declaration speech at the 2024 Rochdale by-election.
Protest Vote
By-elections are an ideal opportunity for one-off protest votes. Consider the recent case of George Galloway who won the seat of Rochdale by a landslide in 2023, before losing it in the 2024 U.K. General Election.
The Irish diaspora have long been adept at bringing out the vote, arranging transfers, and indeed scouring electoral registers for the dead and the dying. Gerry Hutch has called on disenfranchised citizens to register to vote – just as the Democrats in the U.S. continue to leverage disenfranchised minorities.
His candidature is not unlike what one used to see in the U.K. with the Monster Raving Loony Party and Screaming Lord Sutch. Yet Hutch stands a real chance. And what if one were to advise him, however guardedly, on how to beat the established parties?
Garnering acceptance among floating voters, and picking up precious transfers, would require him to articulate political objectives, at least in outline. Apart from being critical of the conduct of the Gardaí, what does he stand for?
The Dublin Central constituency has some of the worst poverty in the state, alongside new hipster wealth and significant immigration in recent years. A manifesto of sorts would be worthwhile, addressing the concerns of native Dubliners in particular, and hopefully encouraging greater acceptance of diversity. Tony Gregory brought great benefits to the area. An independent candidate like Hutch might be able to perform a similar role.
Corruption ought to be condemned, but violence should never be condoned. A reformed Hutch might have greater clout among troublesome elements than most politicians when addressing the current wave of violent crime. Recent fuel protests reveal Ireland to be on the brink.
It remains to be seen whether Gerry Hutch has any real ideas for addressing the enduring problems of access to housing, health and education, or the increasing lawlessness in city centre, as the State continues to fail in its primary duty to keep the peace.
Tom Wolfe in 1988.
Radical Chic
Tom Wolfe in his 1970 New Yorker essay ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers. Wolfe’s concept of radical chic lampooned individuals (not unlike jet setters such as Paddy Cosgrave and his ‘Whistleblower’ Café) who endorsed leftist radicalism to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.
In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class. One suspects, however, that their Irish equivalents would be wary of Gerry Hutch, but let’s see.
At one level I endorse his candidature as a means of giving the establishment a kick up the posterior, but it remains to be seen whether he possess any real ideas for addressing the issues I have alluded to. In the Kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Perhaps the best that can be said of Gerry Hutch is that he might prove to be a superior form of gangster than the rest.
The Sahel throughout history has been known for many things. To the historically inclined, it is the region that produced empires like Wagadu, Mali and Songhai, and cities of world renown like Timbuktu. Today, the Sahel represents something else entirely: instability, as it faces climate variability, insurgency, and fragile governance.
Stretching from Senegal in the west through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria and onward to Chad and Sudan in the east, this 6,000 kilometre zone has produced more military coups in the last decade than anywhere else on earth. Since 2020 alone: Mali twice, Guinea, Burkina Faso twice, Niger, and Sudan, the latter embroiled in a devastating conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces that has already killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. The media dubbed it the coup belt. Security analysts called it the Sahel crisis. Outside powers, Russia, France, the Gulf states, the United States, manoeuvred for influence in a fracturing landscape.
What almost nobody asked, at least not with any seriousness, was the historical question: what was here before?
Not merely before the coups. Before the colonial borders that manufactured these states, before the French administrative systems that shaped their governments, before the extraction economies that defined their relationship to the world market.
What was the political and economic life of this zone when it was organised according to its own internal logic, by its own institutions, on the basis of its own material conditions? That is what I seek to explore through this platform.
This is not out of a sense of reactionary nostalgia. You cannot understand what a place has become without understanding what it was, what forces transformed it, and which of those transformations built capacity and which destroyed it. Northern Nigeria today is associated, in the global imagination and in too much of the Nigerian imagination, with poverty, insurgency and dysfunction.
Boko Haram. Bandits. The caricature of Sharia law deployed by politicians as a tool of control. Coups next door. Violence and weapons spilling across borders drawn by colonial administrators through the middle of communities, trade networks and political relationships that had existed for centuries before European powers decided they had the right to divide the continent at a conference table in Berlin.
These things did not come from nowhere. To understand where they came from, we have to look at the land itself, how it shaped the people, and how the people shaped it.
The Shore of the Great Sea of Sand
Orthographic Map of Africa showing the Sahelian Zone. Source : wikimedia commons. Author : Flockedereisbaer
Sāhil in Arabic means coast or shore. In the imagination of the Arab geographers of the Middle Ages, the Sahara was not a wall. It was a sea. The camel earns its nickname, ship of the desert, honestly. It allowed merchants to make the months-long voyage across that vast expanse, linking the Mediterranean world to West Africa. The Sahel was the southern shoreline of that sea.
A shoreline is not a remote frontier. It is the first point of arrival. Goods land there, get taxed, get redistributed. The people who control the access points accumulate wealth and build institutions. The cities that grew along this shoreline, Timbuktu, Gao, Agadez, Aoudaghost, and later Katsina and Kano, were structural consequences of that position. Constantinople sat at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and extracted enormous wealth from that geography for over a thousand years. Timbuktu sat where the gold and salt trades intersected and grew exceptionally wealthy, connecting North Africa and the Mediterranean to the productive interior of West Africa. Whoever controlled such a position could tax trade moving in both directions, access goods otherwise unavailable, and hold a structural advantage over competitors. Geography does not determine history, but it sets the terms on which history unfolds.
The Sudan: Climate, Geography, Ecology
The African landscape is a varied one. Moving southward from the Sahara toward the equator, rainfall increases steadily and the vegetation responds in distinct bands. Each band runs roughly east-west across the continent, with the rainfall gradient running north-south.
To understand what this means in practice, follow an imaginary merchant setting out from Sijilmasa, the great Moroccan terminus of the trans-Saharan trade, sometime in the 11th or 12th century. He has loaded his camels with slabs of Saharan salt, bolts of North African cloth, and copper ingots from the Mediterranean world. His destination is the markets of the Sudan. His journey south will carry him through several worlds in succession, each one wetter, greener, and more densely populated than the last.
The northernmost inhabited zone is the Sahara itself: less than 150 millimetres of rain annually, vast, arid, traversable only with knowledge accumulated over generations. The Tamashek, Tubu and Amazigh peoples hold this world. They know where water sits beneath the surface and how the seasonal winds move. Our merchant cannot cross without them. He pays a toll and hires guides, folding the cost into the price his goods will command at the other end. The Sahara is dangerous and expensive, which is precisely why the goods that cross it are worth crossing it for.
After weeks of travel, the landscape shifts. The hard gravel plains of the deep Sahara give way to the Sahel proper, where annual rainfall runs between 150 and 600 millimetres. Semi-arid steppe. Thorny acacia scrub. A landscape suited to pastoral herding and seasonal movement, in most areas not adequate for settled cultivation. The few cities that exist here become all the more important for their scarcity. At Taghaza, our merchant loads additional blocks of rock salt, a commodity mined there by enslaved labourers under brutal conditions. Salt is so essential to life in the agricultural south that it commands near its weight in gold at certain markets. That simple fact drives the entire commercial logic of the Saharan world. At Timbuktu or Walata, he enters a different order of things entirely: a city of scholars, merchants and administrators sitting at the junction of the desert routes and the productive Sudan. He exchanges his salt and Mediterranean goods for gold, kola nuts and leather goods from the south. He hears news of the markets further inland. He weighs whether to press on or turn back.
He presses on. The landscape rewards his decision. Trees thicken. Grass grows tall between them. The soil deepens. The dusty, pale earth of the Sahara gives way to the red laterite soil familiar to anyone who has spent time in West Africa, rich and dense underfoot. Annual rainfall here ranges between 600 and 1,200 millimetres. The growing season runs long enough for reliable grain cultivation. Millet, sorghum, cotton, groundnuts. Cattle graze across the open woodland. Horses are kept and bred. Populations concentrate in numbers impossible further north. Cities grow large and stay large because the surrounding land can feed them across many consecutive years without exhaustion.
This is the bilād al-sūdān, the land of the black people, the broad belt of productive savanna the Arab geographers named and described across centuries of writing. In modern ecological terminology it carries the name Sudanian savanna, though the medieval Arabic name carries more historical weight. This is the zone our merchant has been trying to reach from the moment he loaded his camels in Sijilmasa. These markets, these consumers, and this world were the reason he carried everything across the desert.
He has arrived in the agricultural heartland of West Africa.
Further south still, the Guinea savanna thickens into closed forest, where rainfall exceeds 1,500 millimetres annually, the canopy closes over, and the tsetse fly kills cattle and makes cavalry warfare almost impossible. Powerful and institutionally sophisticated states flourished in this region: Oyo, Benin, Asante. Each connected to the same continent-spanning trade network through chains of regional merchants and intermediaries. Our merchant will not venture this far. His goods travel the rest of the way through other hands, through the networks of Mande-speaking Dyula traders and Hausa fatake who specialised in exactly this kind of relay commerce. He sells to them, and they carry his salt southward to people he will never meet.
What Each Zone Produces and Why it Matters
Salt commands near its weight in gold at certain markets.
Salt from the Sahara. Robin Taylor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Saharan mines at Bilma, Kawar, and Taghaza produce a mineral that the agricultural populations of the Sudan belt cannot produce for themselves in adequate quantities. Salt preserves food, seasons it, and maintains the biological functions of people and their animals. Without access to it, agricultural communities weaken and decline. This biological necessity is what drives human beings to organise caravans of hundreds of animals across one of the most hostile environments on earth, month after month, generation after generation.
Gold flows in the opposite direction. The forest zone of West Africa contains some of the richest alluvial gold deposits in the pre-modern world, worked by Akan-speaking miners in what is today Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. That gold fed the monetary systems of medieval North Africa and Europe. It funded the Fatimid Caliphate. It built the great mosques of Morocco. European monetary expansion from the 13th century onward depended substantially on West African gold long before Europeans had any direct access to West Africa at all. The forest zone also produces kola nuts, a mild, bitter stimulant that became the social currency of Muslim West Africa wherever Islamic law prohibited alcohol. Kola travels without refrigeration, remains potent for weeks, and carries ritual significance at ceremonies from Senegambia to the Niger Delta. Hausa merchants built entire trading empires on the kola circuit alone. The ancestors of Nigeria’s richest Man Aliko Dangote were Agalawa merchants who grew wealthy through the Kola trade.
Cotton cloth and leather goods move in every direction. The Sudanic region weaves and dyes cloth that North African and Saharan buyers prize. It tans hides into leather goods, sandals, saddlebags and harnesses, whose quality the Mediterranean world cannot match from its own resources.
None of these zones is self-sufficient. The pressure toward exchange is structural, not incidental. It does not require any particular ruler to decide to encourage trade. It arises from the complementarity of the zones themselves, from the fact that survival and prosperity in each depends on what the others produce. The political consequences of this logic are enormous. Controlling the transit points between zones, taxing the movement of goods across ecological boundaries, is one of the primary mechanisms of wealth accumulation in pre-modern West Africa. The empires that rise and dominate this region do not, for the most part, produce the commodities they trade. They sit between the producers and the consumers, and they tax the passage.
The Empires of the Sudan: Power Built on Position
Map of the Wagadu empire. Luxo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
The empire the Arabs called Ghana, and which its own people knew as Wagadu, built the first great demonstration of this logic. Rising in the western Sudan, probably by the 4th or 5th century CE, Wagadu sat between the gold-producing regions of the south and the North African merchants hungry for that gold. The state did not mine the gold. It taxed it.
The Arab geographer Al-Bakri, writing in 1068, recorded the precise mechanism. The king of Wagadu levied a tax of one dinar of gold on every donkey load of salt entering the country, and two dinars on every load leaving it. He charged five mithqals on a load of copper and ten mithqals on a load of finished goods. Gold nuggets found in the mines belonged entirely to the crown. Private citizens could trade gold dust freely, but the crown entirely monopolised nuggets, which could be used as money and accumulate political power. Al-Bakri described the king’s court audience: the ruler sat in a domed pavilion surrounded by horses wearing golden halters, dogs wearing golden collars guarding his doors, and ten pages standing to his right carrying shields and swords decorated with gold. Behind him stood the sons of subordinate kings, their hair interlaced with gold.
This is not just for the sake of flexing, although that played a part. It is a public display of the fiscal power the state extracts from its position in the trade network. The gold on those horses and dogs and sword hilts passed through Wagadu’s markets and Wagadu’s tax offices. They represent accumulated transit fees, turned into symbols of authority.
Wagadu extended its reach from Takrur in the Senegambia region east to the Niger, controlling the western trans-Saharan routes for several centuries. Its decline came gradually from the 11th century onward, through a combination of Almoravid pressure, internal rebellions, and the progressive southward shift of gold-producing communities beyond its reach. There is scholarly debate today about whether Almoravid pressure was military or commercial and how decisive a role it played in Wagadu’s decline.
Mali
Its successor took the same logic further and built something larger.
The Mali Empire of the Mansas reached from the Atlantic coast to the Niger bend at its height in the 13th and 14th centuries, incorporating the gold-producing Bambuk and Bure fields directly into its territory rather than simply taxing their output from a distance. This shift from transit taxation to direct control of production represented a significant intensification of the model. Mali did not abandon the transit fees; it added productive control on top of them.
The wealth this generated was genuinely staggering. In 1324, Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, performed the hajj to Mecca and passed through Cairo on the way. He travelled with a retinue reportedly numbering in the tens of thousands and distributed so much gold in Cairo and along the route that he single-handedly triggered an inflationary crisis in the Egyptian gold market. Contemporary Arabic sources record that the price of gold in Cairo had still not fully recovered twelve years later. One man’s pilgrimage gift-giving destabilised a regional monetary economy for over a decade. That is what the structural control of the Sudan’s gold output looked like in practice.
Mansa Musa Depicted on the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, 1375. public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Under the Mansas, Timbuktu became the intellectual capital of the Sudan. The Sankore Mosque and its associated scholarly networks attracted students and teachers from across the Islamic world. Mali’s trading diaspora, the Wangara and Dyula merchants who spread out from the empire’s commercial networks, carried Islam southward and eastward into regions the empire itself never directly controlled. They built mosques in market towns across the savanna, established the contract forms and credit mechanisms of Islamic commercial law, and created the social infrastructure that later Islamic reform movements would draw on and contest.
Songhai
Map of the Songhai Empire. HetmanTheResearcher, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The last and among the largest of the great Sudanic empires rose from within Mali’s shadow and eventually consumed it.
Songhai centred on Gao in the Niger bend, a city that had been a significant commercial centre for centuries before the empire’s rise. Initially a tributary state under Mali, Songhai began asserting independence in the mid-15th century under Sunni Ali Ber, a military commander of exceptional energy who spent nearly three decades in almost continuous campaigning, capturing Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473 and turning the Niger river into Songhai’s internal highway. Sunni Ali understood something that his predecessors had sometimes neglected: control of the river meant control of the grain trade that fed the cities of the Sudan, which meant leverage over the urban populations and scholarly classes on which commercial empires depended.
His successor, Askia Muhammad, who seized power in 1493 and built the empire’s administrative and intellectual infrastructure, brought Timbuktu to its peak. By the late 15th century, Timbuktu held a population that contemporary sources estimated at up to 100,000 people. The Sankore Mosque alone had 25,000 students. The city imported books from across North Africa and the Middle East and produced its own manuscript tradition that scholars are still cataloguing today. Askia Muhammad undertook his own famous hajj in 1496, arriving in Cairo and Mecca with gold but also with political questions: he sought a fatwa from the Egyptian scholar al-Suyuti legitimising his deposition of Sunni Ali’s dynasty. Religion and political authority were inseparable, and the caliphs and scholars of the east were the sources of legitimacy that Sudanic rulers sought.
Songhai’s collapse came suddenly. In 1591, a Moroccan army under Judar Pasha crossed the Sahara with something no Sudanic army had yet faced: firearms. At the Battle of Tondibi on the Niger, Moroccan muskets and cannon scattered a Songhai cavalry force many times larger. It was the first use of firearms south of the Sahara in a major engagement, and it exposed a structural vulnerability that the military architecture of the savanna empires had never needed to address before. Songhai fragmented. The Moroccan forces could conquer but not administer an empire of that scale from their North African base. The Sudan entered a period of political fragmentation that would define it for the following century.
Kanem-Bornu: The Ancient State of the Central Sudan
Kanem-Bornu at its greatest extent by Megartonius, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
While Wagadu, Mali and Songhai rose and fell in the western Sudan, a different political tradition took root in the east and proved more durable than any of them.
The state centred on Lake Chad, known first as Kanem and later as Bornu, appears in Arabic sources as early as the 9th century. The Dugawa dynasty that founded it controlled the central trans-Saharan corridor running through the Fezzan in modern Libya, connecting the Mediterranean directly to the Lake Chad basin and the agricultural lands to its south and west. Where the western Sudan empires built their power on the gold routes, Kanem-Bornu built on a different set of commodities: enslaved people, ivory and natron, the sodium carbonate mineral used across the Arab world for soap-making, food preservation and glass production.
Islam arrived at the Kanem court around the 11th century, making it one of the earliest Muslim polities in Africa south of the Sahara. The conversion was not merely spiritual. It gave Kanem’s rulers access to the networks of Islamic scholarship, commerce and political legitimacy that connected the Sudan to the wider Muslim world. The Mai sent students to study in North Africa and brought back scholars to staff his administration. He corresponded with the Sultan of Morocco and the rulers of Egypt as a fellow Muslim sovereign. Islam provided the institutional language through which Kanem-Bornu organised its bureaucracy, justified its laws, and conducted its diplomacy.
That bureaucracy proved extraordinarily resilient. The state survived internal rebellions, external invasions. The realm persisted after the forced relocation of its capital from Kanem, east of the lake, to Bornu, west of it in the 14th century, a massive institutional disruption that most states would not have survived. It survived the disruptions of the 16th century that destroyed Songhai. It adapted, reformed, and persisted across ten centuries of continuous existence, making it arguably the most durable state institution in West African history.
That durability rested on a resource base that demands honest accounting. Bornu was not merely complicit in the trans-Saharan slave trade. For long periods, it organised and profited from it at scale. The state taxed the movement of enslaved people northward through its territory. Elite households depended on enslaved labour for agriculture, craft production and domestic work. Military expansion into the territories to the south and west was partly organised around the capture of people who would be sold northward or retained within the state economy. This was not an aberration imposed on an otherwise pristine political economy. The capture of people was structurally embedded in how Bornu accumulated and distributed surplus, how its ruling class maintained itself, and how it funded the military capacity that kept it intact. A history that omits this is not an honest history.
Bornu’s influence radiated westward into Hausaland across many centuries. The political vocabulary of the Hausa city-states carries the fingerprints of this contact. The title Ciroma, used in Hausa courts for a senior ranked position, is a Kanuri borrowing from Bornu. Galadima, another major Hausa title, has the same eastern roots. The Bayajidda foundational legend, which we will examine carefully in the next essay, routes the origin of the Hausa states through Bornu for reasons that are not accidental. Bornu was the dominant power of the central Sudan for most of the period in which the Hausa city-states were forming their institutions. Its administrative models, its Islamic scholarly networks, and its commercial relationships all shaped what Hausaland became. The reign of Mai Idris Alooma was the Apogee of the polity and it would slowly decline in the centuries following his reign. I will cover his reign with the care it deserves in its own essay.
Bornu’s power and influence would wane over the centuries, driven by shifting trade routes, environmental changes and the rise of powerful rivals like the Usmanid/Sokoto Caliphate. The state met its end in 1900, when Rabeh Zubayr, a Sudanese warlord and former slave soldier who had carved his way across the central Sudan with a disciplined firearms-equipped army, besieged and destroyed the Bornu capital. Rabeh’s conquest coincided almost exactly with the arrival of French colonial forces from the west and British forces from the south. The three-way collision finished what a millennium of rivals had failed to do. Bornu, which had outlasted Wagadu, Mali and Songhai by centuries, fell not to any single force but to the specific conjuncture of the 1890s, when the internal disruption of Rabeh’s campaign intersected with the external pressure of European colonial conquest at the worst possible moment.
Our merchant from Sijilmasa, had he lived long enough and travelled far enough east, would have recognised the world of Bornu: the same logic of transit taxation, the same integration of Islamic commercial law into the fabric of trade, the same cities growing wealthy at the junction of ecological zones. But he would also have noticed something different about the political terrain further west, in the territory that Bornu influenced but did not control. A cluster of city-states, each independent, each competitive, each building its own institutions and its own commercial networks. Fragmented where Bornu was unified. Commercially distributed where Bornu was centrally administered. Younger in its political consolidation but extraordinarily dynamic.
Why Any of this Matters
The empires described in this essay did not exist in a separate, sealed-off past with no connection to the present. They were the product of specific material conditions, specific ecological positions, and institutional choices made over centuries. Wagadu’s wealth stemmed from the trans-Saharan trade, Songhai’s internal highway was the Niger river, and Bornu’s millennium-long anchor was the Lake Chad basin; these assets did not vanish with the empires’ demise. The geography remained. The ecological logic endured. Trade routes remained, at least until colonial borders, railway lines and artificial tariff walls were drawn through them.
What changed was who controlled them and in whose interest they operated.
The colonial partition of the 1880s and 1890s did not encounter an empty or stagnant landscape. It encountered the successor states of a thousand years of Sudanic political development, states that had survived the collapse of Songhai, the disruption of the trans-Saharan routes, and centuries of internal competition. What colonialism did was reorganise that landscape. It redirected trade routes toward coastal ports and away from the Saharan corridors that had sustained the interior for centuries. Wherever it preserved certain institutions, the emirate system in northern Nigeria being the most consequential example, it did so in forms useful to administrators rather than local populations. It created borders that cut through the agricultural zones, pastoral routes and commercial networks that the ecological logic of the region had generated over centuries. And it extracted resources with none of the internal redistribution, however unequal and often brutal, that the older state systems had practised. The Sahelian Juntas claim to have seized power to right those wrongs, but only time will tell.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, Military Leader of Burkina Faso. Source Bamjo226, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The coup belt is the inheritance of that reorganisation. The states collapsing today did not build on the institutional foundations of Wagadu, Mali, or Bornu. They were built on colonial administrative frameworks that prioritised control over capacity, extraction over development, and the convenience of outside powers over the coherence of local political economies. The Sahel crisis is not evidence that this region cannot sustain complex political life. The record described in this essay is the evidence against that claim. It is evidence that the specific political structures imposed over the last century have failed, and that understanding why requires going further back than the coups, further back than independence, further back than colonialism itself.
American journalist Amanda Knox joins Frank Armstrong to discuss the case of English nurse Lucy Letby. Knox was herself falsely charged with murdering her roommate Meredith Kerchner in Italy in 2007 and spent four years in prison.
Lucy Letby was a nurse working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester hospital. She was found guilty of murdering seven babies in her care in 2023, based primarily on statistical evidence and statements she made apparently implicating her.
Amanda has found parallels with her treatment by the British media, and points to major flaws in the prosecution case.
Ryszard Kapuściński in Imperium (1993) warned of three plagues, or contagions threatening the world: nationalism, racism and fundamentalism. He further identified one shared trait or a common denominator in ‘an aggressive all powerful total irrationality,’ arguing that ‘[a]nyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits its sacrificial victims.’
The lunatics have now well and truly taken over the asylum worldwide. We are now witnessing a new unholy war being led by evangelical Christians against Islam, just as earlier crusades emanated from Europe in the Middle Ages. And like those earlier wars, the acquisition of plunder is clearly a motivating factor.
Noticeably, the clearly sociopathic Pete Hegseth talks of the Iran war as God’s War, and the soldiery are briefed accordingly. Trump uses similar language, but holy wars often occlude terrestrial agendas. Add the dimension of rampant technology, wherein war is conducted remotely in video game sequences and one reaches a level of savagery reminiscent of the 1940s. Meanwhile AI plunders our libraries and distorts our reality with propagandist bombast.
Hegseth’s macabre ceremonies in the White House have included Doug Wilson, the founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He has stated that homosexuality should be a crime and that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As editor of The Princeton Tory, Hegseth also suggested that homosexuality was immoral.
In March 2026, soon after the start of the U.S./Israeli attack – branded with the biblical denotation Operation Epic Fury – it has been reported that military leaders told their service members that the war was ‘part of God’s divine plan,’ and that President Donald Trump had been anointed by Jesus. One commander quoted the Book of Revelation, and said the war will bring the second coming of Jesus Christ. The whole exercise has a distinct air of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1959).
The legendary punk band, The Dead Kennedys album In God We Trust Inc (1982) curiously presages our times, but none of what is being done in God’s name is properly Kennedyesque, or indeed genuinely Christian. It appears to be an extension of what Eisenhower warned of the existential threat of the Military Industrial Complex. Wars. As IG Farben and Bleichroder knew, wars are a great source of revenue.
The leading Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis is also a believer in God’s law. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman and purely for procreation. He considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful. In Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) he compares abortion to carpet bombing civilians. Sadly, murdering the civilian population of Iran does not appear to bother the zealots in the White House to the same extent as interfering with women’s reproductive rights.
Jonathan Sacks, the leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K. railed against extremism. In Morality (2020) he outlined positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good. Is all of this now lost on the Likud faction in Israel?
Christian jihadism, historically, also includes the horrendous conquest of South America by Spanish Conquistadors. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched at one level in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in securing oil. The war in Iran, now engulfing the entire Middle East, also has significant acquisitive elements, but is more obviously an attack on what is perceived in racial terms as a satanic culture.
Shortly before his death Sacks equated altruistic evil with the neoconservative group, who held themselves to be good and their opponents to be evil. This leads to the arrogant imperialist assumptions that ‘we’ are inflicting punishment for ‘their’ own good, and that killing multitudes will pave the way to democracy.
Both the late Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily pointed at Islam. Islamic extremism does provide graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. There is also evident in Britain a lack of integration, and a secessionism unconducive to any kind of harmonious multiculturalism. Recourse to genocide, however, seems to be the preserve of evangelical Christians and Zionists.
Osama bin Laden (L) sits with his adviser and purported successor Ayman al-Zawahiri (Foto: HO/Scanpix 2011)
Islamic Rage
Much of the Islamic rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East. The current phase began in earnest with the invasion of Iraq, and has culminated in this attack on Iran.
Christopher Hitchens’ worst intellectual error, inexcusable in my view, was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. He was, indirectly, supporting, though he might not have seen it, an even worse form of religious fundamentalism directed against another.
In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) the Palestinian author Edward Said author asserted that ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’ He cites our own Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that imagined communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism, like Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education. We have seen an all-too-great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.
In these straitened times extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies even self-immolation.
As the wheels come off the neoliberal economic system and the societal bonds wither, extremist Christian nationalism and the demonisation of the other has stepped into the void to provide solace.
Passion Conferences, a music and evangelism festival at Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, in 2013.
U.S. Evangelism
In the United States, we are witnessing an unholy synergy between Evangelical Christians and racism. Far-right demagogues have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism espoused by liberal elites, Harvard or straight socialism. All of these apparently emanate from the decadence of a mixed race cosmopolis. The fire is spreading to Europe, U.K and Ireland too.
Thus, we find a global descent into the extremist and racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. This is a product of a dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This leads to the demonisation of those we disagree with, evident also in social media vilification.
What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the rich chosen people from the disaster they inflict on others.
The now tarnished Noam Chomsky once claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history.’ Chomsky also claimed in a BBC Newsnight interview that nearly 40% of the American public believe that the Second Coming will occur by 2050. So, Pete Hegseth may be preaching to the converted.
Brazilian President Lula with Pope Francis 21.06.2023 Foto: Ricardo Stuckert/PR
Religion as Agent for Good?
Alternatively, in The Godless Gospel (2020) Julian Baggini calls for forms of religion shorn of hatred so we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion. He envisages a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth, causing as little harm as possible. There are clearly good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion presently lacking in moral clarity.
Above all, the atheist and perhaps the leading intellect left on the planet Jurgen Habermas recognises how religion engenders social integration, and can be a basis for communicative action, his core concept. As far back as 1978 he argued, from a secular perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. These would be religious ideas where we learn to communicate reasonably without resort to falsetto Jihadism.
The former Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires also appear to have shaped an empathy towards the wretched of the Earth. He preached tolerance and engagement, as well as social and economic justice. The present Pope has, encouragingly, in un-American fashion, condemned what is happening, however mutedly. Let us hope that he is untainted by the dark money of the Vatican and does not go the way of John Paul II.
Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.
Neo-feudalism
We appear to be witnessing Old Testament fury, but beyond the zealotry it seems that neoliberalism is morphing into neo-feudalism. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the Earth, which appears to be permitting a scorched earth approach, but this is a smoke screen. Institutional Evangelical Christianity is wedded to the exchange of goods, along with the exchange of gods. Drill Baby Drill.
The last word I leave to Clarence Darrow, who represented a progressive America of another era in his closing speech in The Scopes Trial:
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.——-, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
Those who suffer from toxic nationalism, toxic religious mania and toxic racism are beyond reason and must be overcome.
Feature Image: Some of Pete Hegseth’s tattoos, 2021
For this episode, we have asked our friend and contributor, Greek journalist and filmmaker, Alexis Daloumis, to sit in for an interview with Luke Sheehan about his newly released Documentary Belki Sibe.
Back in 2015 Alexis travelled in northern Syria to Rojava, to join the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and soon was deployed on the frontlines as a member of the International Freedom battalion.
His documentary depicts with unprecedented candour and rawness his eighteen-month journey through war and revolution, during the advances and victory against Isis, the liberation of Raqqa in 2017, until then, the Islamic State capital and stronghold.
The documentary also includes new footage and interviews from his subsequent visit in 2021 to the same places and cities where he once fought.
Now, as a journalist, his camera turns to scrutinize civil life and institutions under the autonomous Kurdish administration.
In light of recent developments, we asked Alexis to talk about the making of his documentary, his experiences on the frontlines and that of his comrades, as well as the potential dangers that loom over the area and its people, now that United States has withdrawn its support to the autonomous Kurdish administration in favour of the newly established Syrian Central Government after the fall of the Assad’s regime.
While Israel has made Gaza synonymous with its genocide, a rich cultural heritage, now largely destroyed, paints a completely different picture. The introduction to Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory Culture and Erasure states that the book serves as “a reminder that Gaza as we see it today in the media’s live-streaming coverage of the war, miserable, shattered and deformed is not the Gaza that saw the unfolding of many civilisations.”
The book is a compilation of papers and visual material presented at a two-day conference in November 2024 in London, a little over a year since Israel unleashed its genocide in Gaza. The level of annihilation and erasure – not only of Gaza’s infrastructure but also of its historical sites – made archiving and preservation more urgent. Palestine’s historical and cultural heritage is presented in the book through the contributions of various artists, historians, lawyers, curators, archaeologists, poets and journalists. Described as an ‘archive of Gaza in the present’, the book illustrates the process of archiving even as Israel continued to wage its destructive campaign.
There is also an urgency to archive. In 2024, halfway through the genocide before the ceasefire announcement, which Israel has now violated hundreds of times, the world was witnessing a replica of the 1948 Nakba. This time they were using sophisticated military technology resulting in unprecedented destruction of Palestinian lives, culture and heritage in Gaza. For example, camps established in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, during which thousands of Palestinians fled to Gaza, were bombed in Israel’s genocide: “The names of camps are becoming those of mass graves.”
With each massacre, Israel erases a part of Gaza. The compilation of essays and visual material in the book show not only the magnitude of destruction, but how much of that destruction is unknown to the West.
Salman Abu Sitta, for example, notes that Gaza is the only place in Palestine which never took down the Palestinian flag since before the Nakba. Gaza was also the first to play a central role in the anti-colonial struggle and refugee political organisation. Gaza’s traits are largely overlooked due to the colonial impositions inflicted on it. Indeed, as Abu Sitta notes, the term ‘Gaza Strip’ is a product of this recent colonisation.
Archiving Gaza is a decolonial act, happening at a time of political and demographic erasure. Many artists in Gaza have had their studios destroyed in Israel’s bombing, their work decimated, yet continue to express themselves and their wider communities in Gaza.
Thus, art became a way to document the genocide, using whatever materials were available. Some artists directed their efforts towards art therapy. One particular collection of images that stands out in the book is Ahmed Muhanna’s art work, drawn on the packaging of humanitarian aid boxes: “He began drawing on them, incorporating the stamped warning ‘Not for Sale or Exchange’ into his compositions – reframing it as an artistic and philosophical element.”
Several artworks now deal with memories of genocide, memories of Palestinians killed by Israel, memories of being still alive amid the erasure. Maisara Baroud states: “In my work, I express the story beyond the official narrative. It is the story of war that produces a tremendous capacity for harm, conquering distance, geography, and even the speed of sound to bring death to more people in less time.”
Prior to the genocide, Gaza was a thriving art hub, with residencies, art programmes, exhibitions and grants for artists. The art department at the Al-Aqsa University in Gaza was established in 1995, the same year the university was recognised, and it played a major role in promoting art through academic programmes. In 2021, recognising the restrictions as well as earlier destruction, the concept of the Sahab Museum (The Museum of the Clouds) was implemented, preserving material and digital works in a curated virtual space that is also an act of resistance. It decolonises Gaza through Palestinian memory, “providing an attempt to respond to the destruction of cultural archives, which lies at the heart of colonial policy.”
The book also documents Gaza’s deceased artists. One example is Fathi Ghaben, who died after inhaling white phosphorus. His paintings are synonymous with Palestinian resistance, depicting the Palestinian flag as well as other cultural symbols in his art, leading to his arrest and detention by Israel in the 1980s. Another Palestinian artist from Gaza, Mahasen al-Khatib was killed in October 2024, just hours after publishing her last artwork depicting Sha’ban al-Dalou, who was burnt alive following a strike on the tents outside al-Aqsa Hospital.
The striking discrepancy between Ghaben’s paintings and the art produced during the genocide illustrate both devastation and displacement. Apart from the bombed buildings, burnt vehicles, what stands out is Gaza and its population as a multitude of barely discernible figures. Masses of people awaiting food, landscapes of tents. Upon viewing the images, one pauses to think of the population’s individual identities in the midst of these scenes, and that is where the horror surges through.
Fathi Ghaben 1947-2024.
Rich Cultural Heritage
Shifting from past to present and back to the past again, the essays in the book attest to both Gaza’s rich cultural heritage, ancient civilisations and Israel’s erasure. Six thousand years of history have been battered into oblivion by Israel to sustain the myth of a barren land ripe for colonisation. Hosting two hundred archaeological sites, Israel targeted Gaza prior to the genocide in a bid to assert its fabricated narrative of ownership over the land through archaeology and excavations. The first archaeological discovery was made before the British Mandate in 1879 in Nuseirat – a statue of Zeus which now forms part of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. From 1967 onwards, excavations were carried out by the Israeli military.
Jawdat Khoudary, a Palestinian from Gaza, started his own private collection of antiquities after finding an Islamic glass coin. With over 3,000 artefacts dating back from 2000 BC to the Ottoman Empire, Khoudary eventually decided to establish the region’s first archaeological museum in 2008. In February 2024, the museum was completely obliterated by Israel.
The book refers to Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the word genocide and who identified eight dimensions: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral. Israel’s eradication of Gaza illustrates how each of these components is intertwined in the systematic erasure of land and generations of people.
The erasure also limits the Palestinians people’s struggle for self-determination. Israel destroyed numerous libraries in Gaza during the genocide, but before that, it had already looted most of Palestine’s archives during the 1948 Nakba, which are now held in Israel’s State Archive and the National Library. Quoting Palestinian scholar Mezna Qato, the book notes that Palestine’s history is under Israeli state surveillance: “To tell a history of Palestine now often requires seeking access through Israeli state keepers.”
The Islamic University of Gaza in 2021.
As a result of Israel’s colonial violence, Gaza’s exclusion from the rest of the world is amplified in several ways. Education is one example – Western universities do not engage with Gaza’s universities, as Israel’s colonial narrative is increasingly upheld in academic institutions. The exclusion of Gaza can also be traced back to the British Mandate and the 1948 Nakba, during which the entirety of Palestine faced restrictions on curriculum expansion and resources. Since October 2023, however, Israel moved from destruction to annihilation of Gaza’s education system. Other parts of Gaza’s history are also overlooked and largely unknown to the world, such as the history of aviation in Gaza and how this was also linked to Zionist colonial violence.
Archiving Gaza in the present, as the book title states, represents quite a contradiction. Archiving in the face of erasure primarily presents one dilemma, as the book states in the case of archaeology, “Given the ongoing humanitarian, economic and environmental crises in Gaza, identifying new archaeological sites is not currently a priority.” However, the altered landscape requires an urgency to channel efforts towards preservation.
But altered land presents a major problem. As the book shows, so much of Gaza has been lost that its very survival as a distinct entity has been placed in peril. Amid striving to safeguard their own survival in a land reduced to rubble, Palestinians are also aware of the necessity of preserving what can be salvaged, at a time when they are also preserving their own history of the genocide. International humanitarian law has failed Palestinians, as the book asserts. A Palestinian oral history thus becomes not only central but imperative. As the international community rallies behind the U.S. 20-point plan for Gaza, which upholds the Zionist narrative of a barren land in the current genocidal erasure, reclaiming Gaza in recollections, and wider Palestinian narratives, is an important part of decolonisation.
In complete defiance to the Zionist narrative, this collection of essays and photos stand as testimony to Gaza as Palestinians know and remember it.
Feature Image: Forced Displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip devastated by Israeli bombing, January 29, 2025.
It’s very possible that Renee Nicole Good reasoned, as I would’ve, that her whiteness would protect her when she put her Honda Pilot, dog in tow, in the path of ICE vehicles on a Minneapolis street less than a mile from where George Floyd’s last words were, just six years before, “I can’t breathe.” Unfortunately for Renee—a poet, wife, and mother of three—neither the historically privileged color of her skin nor her citizenship were sufficient to shield her from three shots fired at point blank range by an ICE officer after a brief and startling confrontation. The officer was briefly hospitalized and released the same day.
Ordinary Americans can add this outrageous bloodshed to a growing list of Orwellian events prompted by the Trump administration, which includes both the killing itself and subsequent state-propagated lies seeking to style Good as a ‘domestic terrorist’ and ‘professional agitator.’ Today, I woke to news of a flurry of resignations from top prosecutors: four senior leaders in the division that investigates police killings have resigned in protest, and six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have jumped ship, not to mention the FBI denying local MN authorities any access to their investigation.
David Langwallner’s recalls encountering judgments of monumental absurdity, involving ill-informed credibility assessments in the Irish refugee tribunal system.https://t.co/ISmEN7H5xe
Our times (and our enforcement officers) are trigger-happy, and the socio-political hot buttons have long since boiled over. There is palpable temptation—on all sides of the American partisan spectrum—to give into violence, or despair, or both. Reaching into an exhausted rattle-bag of the faith in which I was raised, “love thy neighbor as thyself” – a Levitical commandment echoed by Jesus of Nazareth—sits like a cold stone in my palm.
Christ was an effective radical because he knew when to flip a table and when to restore a sword-shorn ear lopped off in protest of his own arrest. Angry Americans flip tables with zeal. It’s the cathartic part, the part that soothes our sense of wounded moral dignity and our desire to see immediate justice. But I fear that until we understand the counterintuitive nature of this rattle-bag text – counterintuitive because we do not get to pick and choose the identities of our neighbors, and because we are completely entrenched as a society in ‘othering’ those outside our given and (especially) our chosen ‘tribes’ – we will continue to see blood in the streets and lies on the screen.
POTUS is set on besmirching the name and legacy of Renee Nicole Good—who died standing up for her neighbors. I’m certain we will not see these calumnies retracted any time soon. A closeted melancholiac, I’m left mourning Renee, a fellow artist, and imagining what it means to bring up my young son in such turbulent, hate-stricken times. I know I’m not the only one.
We might finally start living when we learn to kill each other with kindness. Until then, we seem doomed to proceed without the last two words and suffer the consequences.
SOMETHING GOOD by Haley Hodges
Sky, road, rain, one great
grey. Into this toothless homogeny
come fanged questions—
must we raise our children
in a police state? Was the grey,
say, two generations back
(grand grey to this grey)
softer, somehow? Fault fate
if you must. How to return
to iridescence—to joy—
despite this—despite all—
before we return to dust:
that’s our operation, our
immutable mandate. Let
slates be wiped and crammed
with this endeavor. Light,
it’s time. Come like cream
to the top. Crown each
seeking life, lives going
to the lengths men with guns
and covered faces go—
but oh, finally gently. And
for something good.
Feature Image: Uniformed HSI SRT agents in Los Angeles
The Turkish phrase Gözaltına alınıyorum translates simply as: ‘I’m being taken into custody.’ This was selected by the independent media outlet T24 as the phrase of the year for 2025. Had it not been that, in my view, it just as easily could have been Türkiye’de yargı bağımsızdır, meaning ‘the judiciary in Turkey is independent,’ a line repeated endlessly, like a tongue-twister, by Ministers and MPs from Erdoğan’s ruling party, the AKP. And yes, I’m being ironic.
On March 19, Turkey woke up to a morning marked by an operation aimed at eliminating the possibility of a change in power through elections, and declaring open war on institutional opposition.
The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and the opposition’s presidential hopeful, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody along with dozens of IMM employees and close members of his team. Shortly afterward, university students organized and gathered in front of Istanbul University main campus, marching toward Saraçhane, which is the location of the Istanbul mayoral headquarters, just a couple of kilometers away.
Then more people joined. And more.
Emergency bans on unauthorized demonstrations and marches were imposed at lightning speed. Metro and bus services were cancelled by government decree to block access to the area. The police presence and traffic checkpoints increased rapidly. Even these hastily implemented measures – designed specifically to prevent people from gathering in front of the IMM headquarters – failed to stop hundreds of thousands from filling the streets within hours.
In the days that followed, people maintained a vigil through the nights, both at Çağlayan Courthouse, where Mayor İmamoğlu was taken, and in front of the municipality building. They refused to leave the Squares.
While all this was unfolding, people like me – those watching from afar living abroad – fell into a grimly familiar ritual. Every morning around 6am, opening X (Twiiter) meant watching your entire timeline fill, within seconds, with posts like:
“I’m being taken into custody.”
“Police raided my home at dawn. I’m being taken into custody.”
“The police came to my apartment in Şişli around 4:30 a.m. Please take care of my dog. I think I’m being taken into custody.”
There were dozens of such tweets. Some days, without exaggeration, hundreds.
Turkey Isn’t Outside the West. It Helped Build It
Fast forward to today. Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with over 400 others, has been held in pretrial detention for nine months. Those detained include sixteen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP); his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan; his election campaign adviser, Necati Özkan; his drivers, Recep Cebeci and Zekai Kıratlı (whose names do not even appear in the 4,000-page indictment); his assistant, Kadriye Kasapoğlu; district mayor Murat Çalık, a two-time cancer survivor currently undergoing treatment; and hundreds of others I cannot possibly list here.
As I write these lines, social media is once again flooded with news of fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. The municipality’s deputy secretary general, the head of the fire department, Remzi Albayrak, and dozens of others have been taken into custody as part of the ongoing operations against İmamoğlu and his circle.
All of these individuals are accused of forming a criminal organization, corruption, causing public financial loss, and terrorism – charges that, over time, have increasingly been reframed as espionage, alongside several other alleged crimes.
According to legal professionals and academics, these accusations are laid out in an indictment of roughly 4,000 pages that does not read as if it were prepared with professional rigour. The document has been widely criticized for being grossly inflated, riddled with technical errors, filled with repetitive sections, reliant almost exclusively on anonymous “secret witness” testimony, and strikingly devoid of concrete or substantiated evidence. More troubling still, some of the more than 400 people currently in detention are not even named in the indictment, yet they remain behind bars.
Very recently, the European Court of Human Rights decided to fast-track Ekrem İmamoğlu’s case, specifically his application concerning unlawful detention. The application was filed by his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan who is himself currently in detention.
Yet the European Court of Human Rights, along with international institutions more broadly, is increasingly portrayed by the Erdoğan government, now in its twenty-third year in power, as anti-national, foreign-backed, and unpatriotic. In official rhetoric, these institutions are cast as insufficiently “domestic” and allegedly hostile to Turkey’s national interests.
This framing follows a familiar authoritarian script, but reality is more complicated, and far less convenient. Turkey is not an outsider to the Western political and legal order. It helped build it.
Turkey is a founding signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Council of Europe, making it legally bound by both the Convention’s provisions and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is also a party to the core United Nations human rights treaties.
What, then, is the purpose of this fabricated, anti-Western, exclusionary narrative?
‘Down With Tyranny, Long Live Freedom!’
The aim is to crush resistance, normalize sweeping losses of rights, freedoms, and prosperity, and impose a “new Turkey” modelled on a hybrid of Central Asian authoritarianism, Russian-style rule, and the institutional failures of parts of the post-colonial Middle East.
This vision is fundamentally incompatible with Turkey’s realities: its diverse socio-cultural fabric and, more importantly, its socio-political legacy of more than two centuries of struggle for democracy and modernization.
That legacy dates back to 1839, a decisive turning point in Ottoman history, when decades-long, Western-oriented reform efforts were institutionalized through the Tanzimat Edict. These reforms eventually led to the establishment of the first parliament and the first civilian constitution in 1876.
With the Tanzimat Edict, Ottoman subjects were recognized as equal citizens for the first time. Egalitarian reforms in areas such as taxation and military service aimed to ensure that non-Muslims, alongside Turkish Muslim citizens, bore the same duties and responsibilities toward the state.
The reforms also sought to guarantee the security of life, property, and honour for all citizens; to ensure property could be lawfully inherited; to establish transparency in judicial proceedings; and to prohibit executions without due process.
These principles were not merely rhetorical. Concrete regulations gave them legal force, and the constitution that followed formally limited and distributed the powers of the sultan.
In 1858, homosexuality was decriminalized, making the Ottoman Empire the second state in the world, after France in 1791, to take such a remarkable step.
The path toward building a republic grounded in parliamentary democracy and equal citizenship, however, was never linear. As in France, Italy, or Japan, and many other democracies, progress came through reversals and ruptures. The Ottoman Empire’s first constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved, only to be reinstated three decades later. As borders across Europe were redrawn through wars and upheaval, this turbulent process culminated in the founding of the Republic of Turkey.
Like other nations, Turks did not abandon the desire for a better future or the struggle required to build it. Today, however, all of this is under threat.
President Erdoğan has amassed more power than many Ottoman sultans and continues to seek more. Research by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg shows that Turkey’s democracy score stood at 0.17 in the early 1900s, rose to 0.53 in the early years of the republic, reached 0.74 in 2002 when Erdoğan’s AKP first came to power, and has since fallen back to 0.18.
It is no coincidence that a slogan more than a century old has returned to the streets: Kahrolsun istibdat, yaşasın hürriyet! meaning ‘Down with tyranny, long live freedom.’ It has been one of the most frequently chanted slogans at the Saraçhane demonstrations following İmamoğlu’s imprisonment.
For more than two decades, Turkey’s media has been monopolized by oligarchs handpicked by Erdoğan. As a result, the voices of ordinary, hardworking, middle class Turks have been largely silenced, especially abroad. Deliberate policies have severed society’s connection with the outside world, suppressed public expression, and helped cement an image of Turkey as a failed democracy which is a perception many in the West has accepted uncritically.
The Syrian war, and the years-long influx of refugees have reinforced this distorted view. Since 2012, Turkey has become nearly inseparable from Syria in the Western imagination, as if the country had absorbed another nation entirely. Over more than a decade, this association has come at steep economic, political, and moral costs, leaving Turkey and Syria almost interchangeable in the minds of outsiders.
It is precisely these deliberately erased realities of Turkey that I want to bring back into focus in this article.
Through its constitution, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, and until roughly a decade ago, it functioned as one, at least since 1950, around the same time many Western democracies were consolidating. Eastern Europe, by contrast, remained under authoritarian rule until the 1990s. Since 2017, however, Turkey has gradually morphed into an electoral autocracy, with steadily eroding rights and freedoms.
Yet Turkish society itself is not defined by these trends. Erdoğan is attempting to impose a regime change against the will of the people.
Even before the unlawful detention of İmamoğlu and hundreds of others, a 2024 PEW Research survey showed that 67 percent of Turks were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy. Among those under 35, that figure rises to 75 percent. Eighty percent of respondents support direct, electoral democracy, while 62 percent reject the idea of indefinite rule by a strongman.
In another striking example, 56 percent of people in Turkey believe that religious texts – given the country’s Muslim-majority population, in this case the Quran – should have no influence over the constitution or laws. This figure is several times higher than in other Muslim-majority countries, where comparable research could be conducted.
For context, the same survey analyzed thirty-six countries, including Tunisia, which experienced a brief period of parliamentary democracy between 2011 and 2021 and today scores slightly higher than Turkey on democracy indices. Yet Tunisia is excluded from the section of the study that examines the role of the Quran in politics simply because even asking such questions is socially unacceptable there, despite Tunisia being one of the West’s preferred points of comparison with Turkey. By comparison, the equivalent figures are 51 percent in the United States, 57 percent in Poland (referring to the Bible), 54 percent in Israel (Jewish scripture), and just 12 percent in India (Hindu scripture).
Only 17 percent of people in Turkey believe religious texts should influence national laws. By contrast, the figure is 66 percent in Indonesia (home to Bali, often perceived as a globally famous, relatively secular tourist destination), 22 percent in our complex, love-hate neighbor Greece, and 28 percent in the United States.
Why does this matter?
The overwhelming majority of Turks, regardless of religiosity or whether they vote for Erdoğan and the AKP, support Turkey’s constitutional definition as a secular, parliamentary, democratic republic. They want these founding principles to remain intact, and they are deeply dissatisfied with the current system of governance.
A new constitutional amendment is expected soon. Just as previous amendments were justified with buzzwords like “military oversight,” “judiciary status quo,” or “democratization,” the government is likely to use the cultural rights demands of Turkey’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, as a pretext for a full constitutional overhaul. In reality, these issues could be addressed through minor, targeted adjustments without rewriting the constitution.
In the near future, many will try to tell you otherwise. Please, don’t believe them.
Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory of just 151 km2, has been rendered internally displaced persons.
Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, Edited by Yousef M Aljamal, Norma Hashim, Noor Nabulsi, and Zoe Jannuzi (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a collection of twenty-seven testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza enduring the genocide. An immediate response upon reading through the chapter titles is: to what extent have we become desensitised as spectators or activists? And, moreover, what is the link, or disconnect, between this wider perception of a genocide occurring and a person living through it?
It begs the question, when reading through the testimonies, after more than two years how much can our mind take before the experiences themselves, narrated by survivors, merely become background noise? With the daily recounting of Israel’s kill toll being reduced to statistical data – a roll call similar to the reporting of Covid cases that gradually desensitised the listener – can our minds link back to the human tragedy?
Of course we should. For the chapter titles speak of a shattered, mundane reality. Birthdays morph into atrocities. Education is ruptured by bombs. A woman is widowed by targeted assassination. A husband is killed while searching for food. Entire families are wiped out. The details are so mundane, so quotidian, yet genocide is an immense, unforgivable laceration in both its experience and the memory if it. That memory should, and must, extend to the rest of us. Narratives can combat desensitisation, as long as we know what to prioritise.
In the foreword to the book, Ahmad Alnaouq writes:
Everyone on Gaza is now a citizen journalist, determined more than ever to confront and challenge the Western media narrative – the demonising and dehumanising of the Palestinians, the lack of agency recognised, and the distortion of truth.
This collection of testimonies directly challenges the Western hegemonic narrative which, even while reporting the official genocide kill toll, still finds ways of sanitising bloodshed and diminishing the humanity of Palestinian survivors. The kill toll is represented in two ways – as a statistic that either supports sporadic calls for accountability or offered in support of Israel “finishing the job.”
Yousef Al-Jamal references the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel in 2023, and for whom storytelling was an integral component of Palestinian history.
‘For centuries,’ AL-Jamal writes, ‘Palestinians have tended the rich oral history of Palestine, preserving cultural heritage, including folktales and stories about the land.’ This collection of narratives from the Gaza genocide is a contribution to Palestine’s oral history, and one that, due to its international dissemination, cannot be destroyed by Israel.
The personal narratives in this book speak of a disrupted simplicity, but not a disrupted normality. This includes death or killing, displacement, hunger, the tribulations of living and enduring life under a highly militarised genocide. We find the disruption of education and attempts to teach, as well as the full spectrum of forced displacement including of a Nakba survivor, along with attempts to rebuild a semblance of normality even as Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure. Even before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza faced immense hardships and restrictions which were normalised into manageable deprivation, even by international institutions.
For many Palestinians, as evidenced by several contributors to this anthology, the large scale killing meant that families were welcoming other relatives into their midst. At times it was orphaned children, as was the case with Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa, a mother of four children who began taking care of two children whose parents were killed when Israel bombed an entire residential block. In her description of forced displacement, Abu Ajwa writes, ‘The children witnessed dozens of martyrs’ bodies strewn on the ground. They cried intensely, while blood covered the streets.’
‘I hope war ends soon. Eight months of continuous killing exhausts us,’ writes Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, whose son was killed while riding a bike just 800m away from the family home.
Another recurring horror is Palestinians fleeing to supposedly safe zones, while Israel bombs move in the direction the displaced are heading, leaving not only a trail of displacement but bloodshed. The killing of Palestinian children, as described by the narrators of this genocide, encompass all ages. The visibility of Israel killing children is magnified when the writers note the dead children’s ages. Thus removed from the general term, the children take on meaningful identities; allowing the reader to recognise how Israel has attempted to obliterate Palestinians through its killing of the younger generations. Children killed on their birthday, children killed while sleeping, the tragedy is portrayed through the eyes of the living, bereaved and those unable to process their loss due to a perpetual quest for survival.
Their attempt to persist in living instead of perishing at times makes the writing of these recollections and experiences become slightly devoid of emotion. Emotion almost becomes a luxury when surviving a genocide, but the almost matter-of-fact narratives in this collection make grief all the more important, not only to grasp but experience. Israel has not only wiped entire families out and lacerated others beyond repair, it has also obliterated entire psychological processes that are necessary when experiencing traumatic events. In the midst of a genocide, Palestinians are unable to experience the grieving process.
Incessant worry about family members displaced in different locations around Gaza is another hardship Palestinians must endure. Without means of communication for the most part, relatives receive no news of each other. ‘Gaza is small, yet we have not seen each other since the war began. We have not reunited. I know nothing of my sons. My life’s dream is to reunite with them in one home before my death,’ Yusra Salem Abu Awad states in her narrative.
The script flips to a twelve-year-old boy, Youssef Qawash, writing about how he has lost his father and uncle in a bombing and not knowing whether his father’s remains will ever be discovered. ‘My uncles have searched in Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, but no one knows where my father is buried,’ Qawash ponders, noting that his father might still be buried under the rubble of destroyed houses.
The ramifications of starvation are reflected in Najlaa Al-Kafarna’s story. Her husband was killed while searching for food for the family on the third day of the genocide, which was their second day of forced displacement. Six other relatives were also massacred in their search for food. Her special needs son, Muhammad, is malnourished and lacks medication and physical therapy sessions.
Throughout most of the narratives in the book, the cry for food recurs. So does the lack of basic necessities, and the wearing of the same clothes through different seasons. We find the rationing of flour, and the shelling of a school while forcibly displaced Palestinians are baking bread. The deprivation is exacerbated by employment being almost non-existent during the genocide. Profound mental health issues as a result of ongoing trauma (Palestinians cannot speak of post-traumatic stress disorder) are also a common experience.
‘This war is larger than the 1948 Nakba. I am 91 years old,’ Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif says. Aged fifteen, he experienced the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and he notes the differences between the specific targeting of Zionist paramilitaries in 1948, and the widespread destruction of the current genocide in Gaza. One of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, he narrates his experience of displacement in 1948 and how his family settled in Gaza in the Nuseirat camp. ‘My testament to my children and grandchildren is to never leave Gaza. We cannot leave Gaza, and we cannot migrate again,’ Abu Seif asserts, noting the miscalculation in 1948 of an eventual return and of leaving to save their lives.
Narrating the Israeli colonial aggressions he has experienced throughout his life, he describes the genocide as ‘a war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature.’ The description is far more tangible than the word genocide will ever be, particularly now that the international community has diluted its meaning to preserve Israel’s impunity. A destruction of humans and nature is something that anyone anywhere in the world can easily envisage. This narrative brings the consequences of destruction, as well as fear, to the reader’s mind.
The entirety of this anthology also serves to highlight what a vibrant society Palestinians in Gaza had created before the genocide. Education stands out in particular as one of their achievements. Indeed the tenacity to attempt to study and teach throughout the genocide is remarkable. Ambitions are currently stilted, but dreams are still cherished, An awareness of the many hurdles to overcome in order to create a healthy society post-genocide is also to the fore in many narratives in this collection. As the UNSC hands over the rebuilding of Gaza to the U.S. administration, thus prolonging the genocide, these testimonies will stand in opposition to the U.S.-Israeli narrative. More importantly, they are a sliver of testimony from Palestinians that neither the U.S. nor Israel, have the power to annihilate.
Many good people will ‘do the right thing’ and spoil their vote this coming Friday. Many will ‘do the right thing’ and vote for one or other of the two candidates that have been shepherded onto the ballot sheet by the powers that be. Many will undoubtedly take the easiest option: blame the weather and not show up at all.
Of the usual fifty-odd percent of eligible voters, who arrive at polling stations as expected, more than likely the majority will vote for Catherine Connolly. In the unlikely event that more Fine Gael stalwarts from South Dublin, Cork and the more affluent suburbs show up, then Heather might rule the day – but that seems very unlikely.
Given the near inevitability of the outcome and the futility of participation in a game that has been rigged from the start, it’s hard to know which of the options is the most ‘right thing to do.’ Personally, if I manage to get the grass cut on polling day I will have done my civic duty.
As far as I can see, there’s about as much difference between the three options as there is any difference between the candidates themselves. In practical or political terms, both Heather and Catherine are on the ballot because neither will use the office of the Presidency to hold the main political parties to account in any practical or substantive way. Of course there will be lip-service to neutrality, wars, digital identities and so on, and perhaps we should be content with a bit of lip service. Either way, neither candidate poses any practical threat to the status quo. Neither candidate will use the office to effectively challenge those who have graciously paved the path to the Áras.
The major issues that face the nation: housing, health, immigration, public services and our neutrality will of course serve as talking points, but the Presidency will function in the usual perfunctory manner, as a kind of mood-music for the political establishment.
Aside from the machinations of ‘far-right extremists’, there appears to be no real appetite for practical change in Ireland. Nothing at least beyond a more trendy set of clothes for the Emperor. Crucially, neither candidate has any intention of raising any questions in respect of the behaviour of the three main parties throughout the Covid years. On that front the government, the opposition and both candidates are united. As Henry Ford said of his Model-T in 1919: “the customer can have any colour he wants, as long as it’s black.”
Seán Gallagher former Irish Presidential candidate.
No Big-Mouth Independents
The whips have ensured that no big-mouthed independents will appear on the ballot paper, independents who might have asked uncomfortable, unscripted questions. An independents who might have given those on the right of the political spectrum a place at the table perhaps?
Yet, it is not only right-wing extremists who are quick to recall the Covid years; the elderly who died, the money trails, the passports, the genetic vaccinations and so on. If not questions, then at least eyebrows are here and there being raised more generally in respect of issues like ‘excess deaths,’ and the increasing incidence of cancers in Ireland.
Even RTÉ is unafraid to admit that cancer was on the decline between 2011 and 2021 but that since 2021 the incidence in Ireland has soared, becoming the second highest in the EU in 2022. Today it is likely to be even higher. Excess deaths are another matter, but they too might step out from behind the shadows one day too.
It is perhaps unsurprising that most Irish voters do see differences between the candidates. To peruse the mainstream media in recent weeks, one would think we had a choice between chalk and cheese. In fairness, Irish voters apparently notice a distinction between Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael, and because Sinn Féin are in opposition and appear to often disagree with FFFG, voters see some differences there too.
I suspect that a growing number of Irish people (young people in particular) are coming to regard the apparent differences between the main political parties as purely superficial. During the Covid years the veil slipped for a time, as the three main parties showed their true colours, behaving in precisely the same manner: pandering to the same fears; promoting the same policies; advocating for the same pharmaceutical products; and pushing the same uncompromising agenda.
In truth, the difference between the main parties, like the difference between Catherine and Heather, is mostly ‘smoke and mirrors,’ entertainment created by the media for the purposes of buttering bread, earning a crust and paying the bills. Unfortunately, figuring out the truth requires intellectual investment, which usually pays poor dividends.
Perhaps we buy into notions of ‘difference’ between parties and between candidates because increasingly we lack that capacity to think deeply; to read a book instead of a tweet.
Despite the ascendancy of the soundbite, Irish voters are undoubtedly wearying of the same old packaging. The presidential Mary-model – featuring the heels, pearl necklace, Louise Kennedy suit and precision haircut – are the unmistakable hallmarks of the two Marys who have gone before. The familiar trappings at the very least have become dull and boring, if for no other reason that we grow tired of repetition.
The only evolution that Heather brings to the ‘Mary-model’ for Presidential success, is the fact that she is not a Mary. Those who will actually make a choice this Friday could not, and will not (in any significant numbers) vote for another Mary. If they do one can surely conclude that all hope is lost, both for Ireland and for the Oysters.
An evolution in our thinking, an intellectual escape from the paradigm of our post-colonial mindset, might be an impossibility, but that does not mean that we are not experiencing an evolution in how we see the world. We evolve cautiously, in small and slow increments. We may be insecure and await precedents to be established elsewhere in the U.K. or the U.S. but it does evolve.
The Mary-boat has sailed. It has had its presidential cruise and is scheduled to be up-cycled into something different, something ‘trending’ and a little bit more environmentally friendly.
Even my dachshund rolls his eyes and looks disappointed when I present him with a bowl of the dried dog-nuts we keep in the pantry. He has come to expect a few leftovers to be mixed in with the mundane.
Catherine Connolly.
‘An Element of Newness’
In respect of how the Presidential ‘rubber-stamp’ will be applied to legislation, Catherine might be no different to Heather, but she will bring a sufficient element of ‘newness’ and ‘difference’ to apply a veneer of ‘change’ lacquered on the planks of the same-old.
Catherine has a certain ruggedness about her, an edge that is ‘earthy’ and ‘progressive’. Her posters are less formal and contain a frequent, if veiled, nod to ‘pride’. Catherine hasn’t been wooed to the mainland to purchase a perfect smile. Unlike her competitor, there is nary a pearl necklace anywhere to be seen, and she is not afraid to wear an anorak, even when it’s not raining. There is something natural and home-grown about Catherine, and that certain-something will be sufficient to carry her all the way to the Áras.
When advanced capitalism sets the agenda for the general production of ‘news’ – costs increase the greater the scrutiny is applied to the issues. It would take a bit of depth and thought to arrive at the truth that there is little if any difference beneath the surface. It’s all about what’s trending, nothing more than that.
Authenticity (whatever that is when it’s at home) took a major hit from that oxymoron of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Deeper issues escape the mainstream media because they require some thought. The more of that commodity required of legacy media the less marketable and consumer-friendly it becomes.
In respect of the ‘vote-spoilers’, few if any media outlets reap a harvest from that small herd of ‘right wing extremists,’ a cohort who are insisting they smell a rat somewhere. That motley crew of racist, flag-wielding loopers, have been smelling plague rats for more than five years now. The left in Dáil Eireann on the other hand are preoccupied with more pressing issues: Ukraine, gender, Palestine and pay gaps for example.
The election naysayers will be ignored by legacy media. The spoilers will scarcely get a mention, and the inevitable low turn-out will most likely be described as ‘only marginally worse than usual’.
Why should we expect anything different? Irish tenants elected their landlords to the English parliament for far longer than we have been freely voting for more of the same. It’s only a pity Jim Gavin bowed out after failing to return money owed to his tenant, as the analogy would require no further reference. We have a long and established tradition of voting for who we’ve been told to vote for. It’s a cultural trait which is quite possibly an integral component of a post-colonial make-up.
Our respect for the authorities who preserve and protect us from each other is predicated on the belief that they care for us – much in the same way as a farmer cares for his herd of milch cows. They have our best interests at heart, and thanks to democracy they remain answerable to ‘we the people.’ All that is necessary to buy into the myth is to show up and vote.
Heather Humphreys.
Our Proud History
Yes, we did have a Revolution and a War of Independence. We have built a mythology around that brief period in our history. We like to forget that only a handful of right and left-wing loopers showed up on Easter Sunday, and those in charge were spat on before being executed. Subsequently, much of our nationalism was self-sabotaged and consumed in the crucible of the Civil War. What little remained expired in the protracted bloodshed of the Northern Troubles.
Ireland is a subservient nation. To suggest otherwise would be to deny the unprecedented scale of our wilful compliance during the Covid years. Lockdowns might have been insane, but we had the longest ones in Europe. In general, we love rules, we love imposing them upon each other, and we respect our masters, just as long as we get to eat some of the long grass in the summer.
That the Presidential election has effectively been rigged; that the party whip was employed openly and unashamedly by Harris and Martin; speaks volumes and roars into some cavernous region of our national psyche.
We elect politicians who act out of a desire to rise through the ranks, and allow themselves to be directed by a whip, rather than being guided by their consciences. Our system of politics has become indistinguishable from the one that it replaced in 1922. Our politics exists primarily as a means for promotion of ambitious individuals within political parties. Harris and Martin are obvious examples.
The system ensures that only ‘yes-men’ or ‘yes-Marys’ rise to the top. One need only look at the mediocrities that reach the top of the pile to confirm that hypothesis. But what if those at the top of the party-political system are presently saying ‘yes’ to other shadowy institutions and individuals?
Today we may be living under a regime that is little more than an elaborate form of puppetry. We call it a ‘liberal democracy’ because we have the right to select the puppets.
Neither Humphreys nor Connolly can see the ‘wizard behind the curtain’. That’s what makes them viable candidates and good politicians. Or perhaps they do see the wizard, but view him as most of the puppets do: as a kind of benign or benevolent entity, who brings ’employment’ and ‘economic growth’ in his big sack.
Either way, the globalist tyrant behind the sheet of ballot paper, the fat man pulling the levers and speaking into the megaphone, remains hidden from view at best. Worse still is when we are entirely grateful to have him pulling the strings.
