U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were detained and executed in Chile during the early days of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Investigative reporter and author John Dinges, who has written extensively about Latin America and Operation Condor, investigates the earlier premise that both men were murdered by the Chilean military upon direct orders from the U.S. government. Chile in Their Hearts: The Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup(University of California Press, 2025) finds no evidence to confirm direct US involvement, upon which earlier books, as well as the 1982 film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, were based.
Dinges wastes no time in affirming the outcome of his research. In the early 2000s, thousands of declassified documents pertaining to the dictatorship were released, including some relating to Horman and Teruggi. ’I had long thought the movie’s theory of the case was highly probably, and I set out to find the evidence to prove it,’ Dinges writes in the introduction. The author also reveals a personal interest, having lived in Chile during which time he met Horman once, and was friends with Teruggi.
Charles Horman
U.S. involvement in Chile’s destabilisation, brutal military coup and dictatorship is well documented. Thus the theory of U.S. involvement in the execution of both men is plausible. The only mention, however, of direct U.S. involvement rests on a statement by Rafael Gonzalez, a National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent who was on the scene at the time of Horman’s detention, and who retracted his testimony years later.
Frank Terrugi
There is a certain note of dejection that immediately strikes the reader in this book. Dinges’s meticulous research rests on careful scrutiny of documents, the court files and interviews, through which he pieced together a picture that reveals no direct U.S. involvement. This is disconcerting when one considers the extent of U.S. involvement in toppling the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Elimination of the earlier premise is also compounded by the absence of a known motive for why Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were targeted and killed by the Chilean junta, other than them being leftists.
’The evidence I found,’ Dinges writes, ’led me to conclusions I had not expected, especially about the U.S. role.’ However, the author notes that the U.S. is not entirely lacking in culpability. ‘The evidence demonstrates definitively that the U.S. Embassy and State Department shielded the Pinochet regime by hiding the truth, conducting a sham investigation, and sanctioning Chile’s official coverup of the murders.’
Dinges devotes separate chapters to the backstories of Charles Horman and his wife Joyce, and Frank Teruggi, who arrived in Chile separately. Both men met in Chile through their involvement in the Fuente de Informacion Norteamericana (FIN). Chile had become a safe haven for those fleeing oppressive dictatorships across Latin America. At a time when U.S. activists had mobilised against their country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Chile offered alternative, participatory politics as part of the socialist reform implemented by Salvador Allende. At the time, Chile was hosting around 20,000 foreigners.
Salvador Allende in 1972.
Both Horman and Teruggi became involved with left-wing movements in Chile. Horman was carrying out his own research into the assassination of General Rene Schneider, while also working with Chile Films, which brought him into close proximity to socialist and communist groups. Teruggi became involved with the Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios (FER, Revolutionary Students Front) and also became friends, and willingly involved with, the Movimiento Izqueirda Revolucionaria (MIR, Revolutionary Left Movement). Notably, Teruggi had also been on the FBI’s radar for his antiwar activism in the U.S..
Valparaiso, the port city which was central to the plotting of the coup, emerges as a key component of the earlier premise of direct U.S. involvement. Both Horman and Teruggi had taken photos of military ships in the port, to be published in the magazine Punto Final. Horman’s presence in Valparaiso and his conversations with Captain Ray Davies, the head of the U.S. Military Group in Chile – as the coup was underway – were central to the narrative around his death. For decades, Horman’s execution and disappearance were linked to him having unearthed information about U.S. involvement while in Valparaiso, condensed into the phrase “he knew too much”.
U.S. Complicity
Dinges uncovered no documentary evidence to support this premise, but the book illustrates two main components that can be proven. One is about the U.S. embassy’s painstaking efforts to shield the Pinochet dictatorship from accountability over Horman and Teruggi’s murders. The other concerns the U.S. failure to investigate important leads on both men’s executions. These findings illustrate the U.S. intent to prioritise diplomatic relations with the Chilean junta at all costs.
Both Horman and Teruggi were reported as missing to the U.S. embassy. Their disappearance, however, is described by the author as representing to the embassy, ’an awkward inconvenience, a snag in the U.S. determination to help the junta succeed.’ The U.S. embassy could have investigated the detention and execution of both men, but orders from Washington, specifically from Henry Kissinger in the immediate aftermath of the coup, directed otherwise: ’The first thing for us not to do is to give the appearance that we are putting pressure on them.’
Thus, U.S. embassy officials upheld the dictatorship’s official narrative, which shifted from statements that no foreigners had been murdered, to denying the military operations that led to Horman and Teruggi’s detention and subsequent executions. One cover story disseminated by the Chilean military and taken at face value by U.S. diplomats was that both men were killed by leftist snipers in the aftermath of the coup. The State Department repeated this narrative to the media, allowing the U.S. to deflect questions on why it had failed to investigate.
With the U.S. rigorously maintaining the dictatorship’s official narrative, it stands to reason that the gaps would be filled by analysing the contradictions spouted by the Chilean dictatorship and U.S. officials. Dinges explains that this was Ed Horman’s process. Having travelled to Chile to investigate his son’s execution and disappearance, and encountered enough ambiguity and insufficient solid evidence from U.S. officials, Ed Horman concluded that the Chilean military would not have acted without U.S. complicity.
Dinges writes, ’The mere absence of such evidence cannot be used to argue that such evidence must exist. Or, as I tell my students in teaching the techniques of investigative reporting, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absent evidence.”’
While direct U.S. involvement can be ruled out for want of evidence, Dinges shows that upholding the Chilean dictatorship’s narrative aided the U.S. embassy’s refusal to investigate. One new piece of evidence that Dinges unearthed and included in his book is that Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who worked for the CIA and DINA, and who was responsible for the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, knew the identity of Frank Teruggi’s killers. U.S. officials failed to pursue this lead.
U.S. officials also failed to follow up on the evidence gathered by Raul Meneses and Jaime Ortiz, the two Intelligence Military Services (SIM) investigators who told Ed Horman that his son had been executed, despite their names being included in an embassy draft letter dated 1973. Meneses’s report detailing that Horman had been killed on the orders of DINA agent Pedro Espinoza was destroyed by SIM. In 1987, the U.S. State Department hesitated to accept Meneses’s testimony. Embassy officials also knowingly withheld information and failed to call in the FBI to investigate the cases.
Photographs of victims of Pinochet’s regime.
National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation
Such wilful negligence had legal implications. In 1991, the cases of Horman and Teruggi were among the first to be made public by the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. Nine years later, the Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in the Chilean courts, but the judicial investigation was based on the interpretation of declassified documents, rather than hard evidence. By 2003, the court’s attention had shifted to the presumed U.S. involvement and Davis was charged with Horman’s murder, on the premise that the latter “knew too much”, based upon Gonzalez’s initial statement, later retracted.
Despite the U.S. coverup for the Chilean military, Dinges’s examination of court records do not reveal evidence of direct U.S. involvement. In his discussions with Judge Mario Carroza – well known for his role in investigating crimes related to Operation Condor – Dinges notes that the Chilean courts required ‘an assumption deemed to be reasonably based on other established evidence.’ According to Carroza, the charges against Davis were so weak, ’It would have been easier to convict Henry Kissinger.’
Dinges also recalls research by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archives, and investigative author Pascale Bonnefroy, who conducted extensive research into Chile’s terror under the dictatorship. Neither unearthed evidence regarding US involvement in Horman and Teruggi’s executions. Reflecting Dinges’s own research, Bonnefroy stated that assumptions were being made upon association and liaison, rather than documented evidence.
This is perhaps an unsatisfactory conclusion to such detailed investigation into this snippet of U.S.-Chilean history. Even as Dinges lays bare the logic guiding his research, readers cannot help but grapple with the question of whether there is more to the story. While Dinges writes with both logic and humanity, it is in the acknowledgements that Dinges pays tribute to the questioning of the unknown, particularly to the Horman family, who remained committed to uncovering the truth. Dinges’s research narrows the search, but the heart will keep searching.
Most people whose Irish childhood was spent between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s wistfully remember the comics then available. They were mostly published by the DC Thomson company based in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Beano and The Dandy were read by boys and girls, and girls’ comics like Bunty and the School Friend (this for older girls) had wide appeal. For older Boys there were masculine comics like Hotspur, Tiger and Eagle, choc-a-bloc with soccer and World War II action stories. Brothers and sisters took an occasional peek at each other’s favourites out of curiosity.
Nowadays I sometimes buy The Beano weekly or the Dandy Annual and give them to a woman I know who passes them on to her nieces and nephews. I notice that Lord Snooty and his Pals are still around; Desperate Dan still enjoys monster cow pies with an oxtail protruding through the side; the Bash Street Kids are up to their madcap antics, but they don’t get whacked nowadays by angry teacher because caning has been outlawed. Minny the Minx, tomboy forever, still enjoys smashing things with her home-made catapult, but is not smacked with her parent’s slipper. Multicultural Britain is deftly integrated into The Beano with Asian girls from Hindu and Muslim homes. Afro-Caribbean ethnicity is also given a place. There is no discussion as such about religious beliefs, but festive events like Christmas and Diwali are featured.
Cultural Self-Confidence and Irish Comics
Some efforts were made from the 1950s onwards to produce Irish comics that promoted the cultural norms and references of a state that broke from the values of the British Empire after 1922. These entrepreneurial efforts had limited success. Economies of scale was one limiting factor. The Irish population was either stagnant or only slowly increasing. The Irish comics had no income from advertising.
In the 1950s there was a monthly Irish comic called The Leprechaun. In the 1960s and 1970s a comic titled Our Boys appeared, and one called An Gael Ōg which was for young readers learning Irish. These latter titles were produced by the Christian Brothers. Since the 1970s the educational Folens company has published Christmas annuals with titles like Súgra, Siamsa and Spraoi for parents to place beneath Christmas trees. Some Celtic themes, some aspects of contemporary life and some Irish language fun are included in the titles. These only appear once a year. Irish children still go to shops and newsagents to buy The Beano, Spiderman and a few American publications.
Perhaps there’s a market for an Irish-produced monthly childrens’ comic? We have many illustrators of stimulating children’s books in Irish and English who could surely be attracted to such an enterprise. The movie animation industry in Ireland has contributed to films that were nominated for Bafta and Oscar awards. I hope some of this artistic talent can be garnered for the launch of a comic or two that Irish children and their parents would gladly read.
Continental Comics
Since the early twentieth century Italian children’s comics called fumetti (smoke puffs – the bubbles with cartoon dialogue) have appeared. During the turbulent 1930s and ‘40s chauvinism and fascism were extolled unfortunately, but contemporary Italy has happy-go-lucky children’s comics that appeal to nonpolitical tastes. In France and francophone Belgium since the early twentieth century there has been a plentiful supply of bandes dessinées comics. Astérix comic stories have portrayed ancient France to the delight of children and adults around the world for many decades.
Incidentally, comics with lots of bubble dialogue are published by language teaching companies for people learning French and other foreign languages. The TEFL teaching English as a foreign language industry in Ireland could follow suit.
A Zambian Comic
While living in Zambia I occasionally read a comic called Orbit – the magazine for young Zambians, which was subsidised by the Ministry of Education. The magazine could be read by children from aged twelve upwards and promoted science, technology, nature study and fun within an African context. See this link for sample pages: Discovering “Orbit” – Zambia’s unique science and comic magazine – downthetubes.net.
I recall posting copies of the comic to youthful Irish relatives and hope they absorbed positive impressions of African life.
Indeed, at the Carnsore anti-nuclear rally in 1980 I sold specially imported copies of Orbit along with modern African novels and collections of proverbs.
Perhaps, if kids today were to read more comics they might be less attracted to the dark world of the internet, and their imaginations might roam more freely. Finally, a comprehensive history of Irish comics might assist our understanding of the cultural formation of the children of yesteryear.
Our research on toads and carabids
considered predator and prey.
Japanese toads and bombardier beetles
were ‘introduced’, let’s say.
The relationships were explosive –
but complied with current laws.
We intend to show you footage.
Please, hold your applause.
Our methodology? Each beetle placed
in tongue’s reach of a toad.
Each swallowed.
Chemical explosions soon showed
toads bulging, swelling,
changing shape –
till finally, through emesis,
they let their prey escape.
Our results? All beetles were ejected –
and survived. No toads died.
We timed explosions, measured vomit,
observed from every side.
We’ve now described how toxic creatures
can avoid digestion.
Ah yes sir, at the back there,
do you have a question?
Reference Sugiura, S., Sato, T. 2018 Successful escape of bombardier beetles from predator digestive systems. Biol.Lett. 14: 20170647. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2017.0647
Feature Image: Japanese Common Toad by Yasunori Koide.
Corruption is worse than prostitution; the latter might endanger the morals of an individual. The former invariably endangers the entire country. Karl Krauss
Leonardo Sciascia or Shaza was an Italian or rather Sicilian political journalist, an elected radical member of the Italian parliament and the most prominent anti-mafia and indeed anti-corruption critic of his time. He was also a voice of moderation in a sea of extremism in the 1970s and 1980s.
All this features in his famous detective novels which are really anti-detective novels or works of political observation. Along with his masterful analysis of the assassination by the Red Brigade of the Christian Democrat conciliator and former Prime Minister Aldo Moron – a book not unlike the equally masterful News of a Kidnapping (1997) by Garcia Marquez concerning Colombia in the era of Escobar – his oeuvre offers a sustained critique of Italian and Sicilian political and cultural life.
This reflects the complex interstices of corruption and collusion between extreme-right-wing Catholicism, organised crime and the shadowy self-protection syndicates of big business, politics, as well as a malevolent state bureaucracy deeply embedded in all of the aforementioned. His books also demonstrate the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and the nefarious rumour mill.
You could cut and paste these, change the names, and apply them to Ireland, the U.K. or U.S. or any country where extreme neo-liberalism or Christian evangelism holds sway.
Sciascia was a specialist on the mafia, and he demonstrated how they kill and destroy. First, they isolate and disempower and then they denigrate. Often, demonising or scapegoating their prey. And those who seek to investigate them – such as the anti-corruption Sicilian Judge Giovanni Falcone – who act on principle are destroyed. This is exquisitely detailed in Equal Danger (1971), his best book.
Illustrious Corpses
In Sciascia’s fiction, it is the detective, not the murderer, who is isolated and suspected, suffering the same fate as whistleblowers around the world today. It is a post-truth doppelganger of good and evil. Thus, those who oppose corruption in the words of the film adaptation of his book become Illustrious Corpses [1976].
In fact, his current heir, as the anti-corruption conscience of Italian letters, Robert Saviona was placed under police protection after his exposure of the Neapolitan mafia in Gomorrah (2016), and his fabulous text Zero Zero Zero (2013), which was made into a T.V. series that highlights how the practices and modes of organisation of the drugs trade are mirrored in corporate organisation, and vice versa. The same brutality. The same hierarchical structure. The same partnerships.
Mr Saviona was recently prosecuted by Meloni for calling her a bastard over her immigration views. A cautionary tale perhaps for the revival of the hate crimes bill in Ireland, and our anti-immigrant stance? Who would dare call Jim O’Callaghan a bastard? I doubt he would sanction a prosecution, but who knows as the centre-right moves even further to the right, just as Starmer has the taken the so-called Labour Party.
In Ireland, anti-mafia or anti-corruption activists face an uphill not impossible struggle in our present universe. Witness the case of Jonathan Sugerman.
In a world of statist and corporate authoritarianism, what Eisenhower historically called (in interview with the late great Walter Cronkite at the end of his Presidency) the military industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity. Meanwhile, on X, Elon Musk perversely uses freedom of speech to undermine the civic space.
Indeed, Habermas‘ ideal of communicative action is poisoned by misinformation undermining the democratic rights and entitlements of all by pandering to far right-wing extremists and racists and WOK simpletons.
The film Illustrious Corpses. (1976) begins with the murder of Investigating Judge Vargas in Palermo, amidst a climate of demonstrations, strikes and political tension between the Left under a Christian Democratic government. The detective Rogas is assigned to investigate the case and no sooner has he started then two more judges are murdered.
He is encouraged ‘not to forage after gossip,’ but to trail the ‘crazy lunatic who for no reason whatsoever is going about murdering judges.’ He focuses mistakenly on a suspect leftist wrongfully convicted by the judges. Whereupon he is advised by the President of the Supreme Court, played in sinister fashion by Max van Sydow, that the court is incapable of error.
At a party he is advised there will be a coalition of the Communists and the Christian Democrats, and that the murder of the judges as well as Rogas’s investigations were causing tensions, and justify the prosecution of the far-left groups. Rogas also discovers that his suspect, Cres, is present at the party. Rogas meets with the Secretary-General of the Communist Party in a museum. Both are killed. And the murder is blamed on the innocent detective.
The film ends with the dictum: ‘The people must never know the truth?’
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in March 1992. Two assassinated judges.
Equal Danger
It is this kind of disrespect for the truth that has led us collectively, in my view, into the present quagmire. The gatekeepers of the system must be above reproach, and the exposure of corruption may lead – as it did to the Italian judge Falcone – assassination by the mafia, although in more ‘civilised’ countries this may consist of a fabricated charge, or some form of propaganda-by-omission where a critic of government policy is no-platformed in the media.
The salient message of the book Equal Danger is that the system breaks down when one of the canonical features of the Rule of Law is eradicated. This includes when the gatekeepers are no longer independent, as Lord Bingham suggested in his canonical text on The Rule of Law.
At the core of the ideal of the Rule of Law, the legendary Law Lord and jurist Bingham, suggests is the idea ‘that ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them reasonably, in good faith, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, and without exceeding the limits of such powers.’ Sadly those conditions have been undermined in many jurisdictions.
Ironically in the end, Sciascia attacked crusading judges for putting civil rights at stake in an article, while on his deathbed, that irredeemably punctured his reputation: attacking Falcone as a celebrity judge which was ludicrous and frankly in bad taste.
First Edition.
Anomie
Another Sciascia theme, particularly evident in his most famous text, The Day of the Owl (1961)’ is the Sicilian trait of anomie or indifference, implying that pursuit of principle, justice and the truth are all a waste of time.
In controlled societies, such as Italy or Ireland, Sciascia’s books demonstrate the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and the nefarious rumour mill, along with the collective trivialisation that amounts to a resigned admission that the victims of crime had it coming to them in some obscure way. This betrays a latent desire for yourself not to go the same way. What C.S. Jung referred to as the shadow.
The Day of the Owl also brilliantly shows that to succeed in a mafiosi culture you must pay the protection money or pizzo; just as in Mario Puzo’ s vastly underrated The Godfather (1969) you must kiss Don Corleone’s ass. An understanding of patronage and feudalism remains crucial in our time.
That book also canvasses another theme of distraction central to our age: the playbook of the false sex allegation. The virtuous are undermined by the crime passional, the allegation of sexual impropriety, including child abuse. Those who carry out the task appear sanctimonious and mask political persecution, often framing their victims. A favourable appointment follows. Robespierre would approve.
In the context of false allegations Roy Cohn, Trumps lawyer, was barely twenty-four years old when he played perhaps the central role in the Rosenberg’s’ espionage trial, relentlessly and vindictively lobbying the judge for their execution. Both were found guilty of passing information to the Soviet Union and electrocuted at Singh Sing in 1953.
It was quite clear that this was utterly malicious in that he knew Ethel Rosenberg was innocent but used forged documents, perjured evidence and the art of persuasion – in that he believed her indictment would force Julian Rosenberg to reveal his espionage sources.
Well whistleblowers and anyone accused of sedition, espionage or treason also come from the fascist playbook. That is now Trumps agenda for even academics and students.
And people forget. Memories fade. The shadow play moves on. Thus, Sciascia a proper Sicilian communist has much to say about the rule of law and not just in Italy. His work is crucially relevant to our time.
Roberto Calvi
Roberto Calvi
Close to my Chambers is Blackfriars Bridge where Roberto Calvi the former head of the Vatican bank was found dangling. Sciascia’s acidic response was: ‘Why was a good mystery preferred to finding out the truth?’
But the truth depends on memory, pattern recognition and a sense of history, and as Milan Kundera – as good an exposer of corruption as Sciascia in his way – remarked, the first way of liquidating a people is to destroy memory, or the lessons of history.
Thus, in contemporary Italy the mayor of Montefalco banned cricket in a village played by immigrants near Joycean Trieste, forgetting that AC Milan was founded as a cricket club. And lest we forget that in the jaw-droppingly beautiful village of Sant Angelo in Ischia Italy gave refuge to one of the great artists and enemy of Pinochet, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, though the film Il Postino (1994) fictionally suggests it was nearby Procida!
Thus, as I enthused about the country on a train from Perugia, after viewing the Fra Angelica painting Resurrection, an Italian lawyer said yes but what about the government? He reminded me not just about Berlusconi, but Andreotti so closely connected with the corruption I have referred to – Il Divo (2008) to reference Sorentino’s film about him. Surviving into his nineties, he was the reptile like crystallisation of the world’s corruption. A man who sent people to their death via his associations with the mafia, but a pious Catholic. Sound familiar?
Now let us pave a path for a new resurrection to create a better world based on the Rule of Law and moderation, whether secular or Christian. Let us wonder if the good man Jesus would stand for what has been done and is being done in his name.
The message of our sceptical and brilliant communist Sicilian friend is most relevant to this age. Keep to the truth and let the heaven’s fall.
Title Image: Paolo Borsellino with Leonardo Sciascia (Creative Commons).
The common denominator between charities and private service providers is that they all live off public money on the basis of serving “victims” of one stripe or another, the raw material of these particular “industries”. But a victim helped and eventually “cured” is no use to this business model. To make it viable you need more “victims” coming onstream at a steady rate. But fixing the victims or the circumstances creating them is not part of the business model, since to actually fix the problems is to put yourself out of business. Raise awareness by all means, but please, don’t go fixing things. Broken is best. It’s broke, we’re fixed. It’s fixed, we’re broke.
Private Concerns
While it might be said, and often is, that privatisation is a “good”, promising efficiency and so on, there are of course problems. But then, there are problems with everything, life being what it is, so it wouldn’t be unusual for privatisation to also have problems.
“In fact, it would be downright unnatural if privatisation didn’t have problems.”
“Yes minister, but that isn’t the question. The question is: is privatisation better than public ownership?”
The problem with the privatisation of services is the profit motive. It stands to reason that a private company entrusted with a service, any service, is going to rig the system to maximise profits. This means cutting and cutting and cutting, while valiantly keeping up appearances. This explains the awful food served in private prisons and direct provision, for instance, primped to appear as normal as possible for as cheap as possible while carefully managing not to descend to clear and present pig swill; while the company directors, healthy on profits, hang out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark’s teeth and the latest in designer shades.
More Bodies
I once worked in RTE and there was some kind of to-do between workers and management. Inevitably us writers got involved, because there’s none so militant as a writer, it’s almost a lifestyle thing, but management swiftly solved that small problem with a genius move: they hired more writers, lots of writers, flooding the writer’s pool with more writers than anyone could ever use, smothering the original small militant group of writers with grateful newbies. This tactic crossed my mind recently when our manifestly unpopular government kept our borders open to the entire third world and their grandmothers despite cries of dissent and distress from towns and villages far and wide.
What do you do with disgruntled voters?
“Get more voters! Grateful ones!”
The problem with this short-term solution to a long-term problem is that some newbie from Mumbai or Kabul is not really going to give a damn about Fine Gael versus Fianna Fail versus the Shinners. When you dangle power like that to the hungry world don’t expect gratitude translated into neat generous voting patterns. You put power up for grabs like that and not only have you given your country away, you’ve given yourself away too, opening enticing opportunities for the thoroughly ruthless.
Win-Win
In 2017 a private prison company in Torrance County, New Mexico, threatened to sue the county on account of disappointing returns and close the damn prison, costing the county two hundred jobs. The private company demanded two hundred extra prisoners pronto, “Or we’ll see y’all in court!”
Don’t you just love the symmetry of those numbers? Two hundred prisoners: Two hundred jobs. As Paul Simon once wrote, “When times are mysterious, serious numbers will always be heard.”
I lost track of the story after that. It was all pending. Maybe Obama sorted it out before turning out the lights, took some prisoners from elsewhere and sent them down there to Torrance to keep the private company in business and the country out of the courthouse.
Or maybe that’s where the blind-eye to illegal immigration comes in. Just let a few hundred thousand South Americans steal over the border and impress upon your police force the urgent need for many arrests in a hurry to ward off a potential corporate suing tsunami. Keep the system oiled with more bodies.
Business Plans
What does a charity need most of all besides funding? It needs someone or something to be charitable towards. What’s say, a homeless charity without homeless people? Well, jobless would be one word that might spring to mind, maybe even homeless. Homeless charities and the people who work in them need homeless people. Arguably, they need homeless people far more than homeless people need them.
Like privatisation of services, there is profit in charitable causes, which may go some way towards explaining the existence of over 30,000 NGOs in Ireland, nearly a thousand of which came into existence since 2020, according to Benefacts legacy. It’s boom time in charitable work and it’s not difficult to imagine the CEOs of charitable NGOs also hanging out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark’s teeth and the latest in designer shades.
So it may be that mass immigration is little more than a few bad management plans gone awry. A result of unpopular political parties seeking grateful voters who’ll work for peanuts and act as infantry should the Russians invade, (you can never have too much cannon fodder), and poverty industry entrepreneurs spreading their nets wider to catch more “victims” to expand their businesses, based as they are on a kind of economic cannibalism. Because in the end, charity, like politics, war and orgies, all comes down to body counts. The more the merrier.
Feature Image: U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Marina and I wait for a bus, and when it comes, we squeeze our way into it, blending in with a crowd that pushes and carries us like a wave into the sea. I say “squeeze”. This is literally what it feels like – something very familiar to me and, at the same time, almost forgotten, because this happened every morning in my childhood when I rode trolleybus number…Oh my, I wish I could remember the number of that trolley bus I used to ride every morning to my kindergarten, with my father holding my hand while the crowd carried us along. I both remember it and don’t remember it because, although it happened every morning back then, it never happened once my childhood was over. I told Marina what it used to be like, who is so squeezed from all sides. There’s no need for her feet to touch the floor – the crowd holds her so well. And while I am squeezed between a plump young man in uniform, Marina is squeezed between me, on one side, and, on the other, the crowd of people that keeps growing every second. Still more people enter the bus, until finally, the door closes—a miracle—and the closing door pushes everyone even further in.
An old woman behind the plump young man in uniform, to whom I will refer as “soldier” for short, says, in a chastising tone that older women in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries often use: “Muzhchina, you swerve me. Stop swerving me!”
It sounds funny to me because I never heard the Russian verb she uses, “kolyshete,” used this way means “push” and, as far as I know, it is not a transitive verb, that is, it is not usually followed by an object, which, in this case, is “menia” (me). The old lady’s complaint is just her way of saying a simple thing: “Sir, you are pushing me”. It sounds funny but I tell myself I should be careful saying “funny” about anyone’s speech here, after all, what do I know about funny, I, who had left the Soviet Union so long ago and whose ancestors lived in Ukraine when none of the people alive here had even been born. Whether funny or not, I tell myself to remember the old woman’s use of “kolyshete”– not so much because I want to use it myself but because I like colorful expressions, and hearing it from the old lady on this crowded bus seems like a find I should treasure.
Muzhchina, i.e., the soldier she addresses, says, “Lady, it is not I swerving you! People, she says I’m swerving her! But it is not I who is swerving her! It is my bulletproof jacket! I would never swerve anyone alive!”
He pauses, unzips a mini sack with a little carry-on pharmacy he carries on top of his bulletproof jacket, takes out a small set of medical wound dressings, and pushes it into my closed hand: “A gift for you, Indiana Jones!”
I say, “Indiana Jones… Is that because of my hat?”
“The lady is from America,” Marina says. I am getting used to this explanation of my presence in Ukraine, because even though I don’t feel like a foreigner here, it helps making my Russian-only speech, which might have been perceived as unpatriotic otherwise, (or for that matter the strangeness of my Indiana Jones hat) seem fine.
“True, the lady is from America,” I say about myself, “but the hat is actually from Australia, where no one thought of it as an Indiana Jones hat.”
I take off my hat to show its underside to the soldier. “See, what it says here? I point at a tag: Designed in Australia.”
He doesn’t react to my mention of Australia but nods when I say “America,” and at the end confirms: “Indiana Jones, yes.”
Again, he unzips his portable pharmacy and takes out a little present for me. This time it’s a small rolled-up package of gauze. “No, no,” I say with more conviction than before, “You need it much more than I do! Please keep it!”
“Indiana Jones,” says the soldier in all seriousness. “This is for you. Do not reject it. I imbibed a little more than necessary last night, but it doesn’t change the fact that this humble medical gift is all I can offer you. In honor of Indiana Jones movies, which I loved so much in the days of yore.”
He pushes the small package of gauze into my hand, and I must accept it, if only out of politeness.
“Well, thank you,” I say. “Not that I ever thought of myself as a replica of Indiana Jones…”
The old woman who complained about the soldier swerving her is now immersed in light – her toothless smile lights up her face, and every wrinkle on her face seems to exude light. I say ‘quite a sight’ to myself, considering that we are squeezed in the back of the bus like chopped-up herring in a tin can.
I say, “Really, I don’t want it.”
I give the small rolled-up package back to the soldier: “Not because I dare to refuse the honor of the gift, but because you need it much more than I do. In fact,” I say, “One day, your life may depend on having it. Which is why it would be wrong of me to accept it.”
“No, Indiana Jones, it is my gift for you. I would have given you a gun, but this is all I can give you right now.”
Marina says it’s time for us to get off, and I’m getting ready to make my uneasy way towards the door. Luckily, most people standing between us and the door get off at the same stop, and right before Marina and I leave, I try to push the gauze and the wound dressing into the soldier’s hand again. Still, he’s adamant: he closes his hand into a fist so no gifts can be returned, and that is that. The door shuts behind us, and the bus is gone, and along with it, the plump soldier with the little pharmacy sack on his chest and the old woman with wrinkles that exude light.
I say, “Wasn’t it funny, being called Indiana Jones because of my hat?”
Marina says that the soldier was sincere. She uses the word “iskrenniy”: he earnestly wanted to give me these things, and he meant well, so I shouldn’t hold this Indiana Jones thing against him.
“I know he meant well,” I say. “I just thought these medical supplies should have stayed in his little pharmacy bag. He needs them more than I do.”
“Well,” she walks ahead, showing me the way to go. “He did say that he had imbibed more than usual the night before. Although I still think it was very touching…the way he was so happy to see his Indiana Jones on this crowded bus.”
We walk some more toward Drobitsky Yar, the Holocaust Memorial just outside of Kharkiv, the goal of our trip, when Marina says, “Here’s a checkpoint. I hope you have your passport with you.”
I reassure her, “Don’t worry. I have two, which is more than enough for one checkpoint.”
____________________
FOOTNOTES
1Muzhchina – a male. “[…] you swerve me!” is a literal translation of “Мужчина, вы меня колышeте!” (romanized: Muzhchina, vy menya kolyshete”).
Vincent in Hiroshima “A work of art is a corner of creation viewed through a temperament.”—Emile Zola
I.
Daubigny’s Garden, a late
masterpiece of Vincent van Gogh,
painted in July 1890 (the same month he died),
now hangs in Hiroshima. Talk about
ghosts of the blast. Beauty clings
to Horror, and still clings, even when
it let’s go; just as we suspected:
Siamese twins.
II.
Glimmer at the edge of fog.
Sphinx at sunset, red paws.
Oval flocks of moons while drunk.
A bow of measure in a coffee spoon.
The way her delicate lips pucker
while thinking of yesterdays
you never entered.
III.
Back to Vincent in Hiroshima.
Back to the gravity of collage. How each day
slips into the groove of whirling
months. How the garden
swirls with flowers and a church
tower in his final summer. How
Vincent’s last words were:
“I wish it were all over now.”
How the true page is never printed. How
the puzzle we call history shrinks
as the world grows into one
piece of a larger puzzle.
Feature Image: Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Daubigny’s Garden’
We are regularly presented with press releases from government departments that express empathy for those struggling to make ends meet while facing exorbitant day-to-day living costs—not least among them the price of petrol, diesel, and home heating fuel. Yet, in the next breath, government bureaucracies issue statements justifying the ‘need’ to raise Carbon Taxes so that we can ‘do our bit’ for the environment and society. These contradictory messages serve only to exacerbate the hardship felt by those who, day in and day out, live under the weight of economic and political pressure.
We regularly hear about problems and disasters attributed to climate change. There are, we are told, endless challenges stemming from this phenomenon—and as responsible citizens, we must be willing to pay the price for its effects.
As of May 2025, nearly 50% of the price of petrol and diesel at the pump is made up of various taxes, with the Carbon Tax accounting for almost 10%. It is worth remembering that motorists are paying VAT not only on the fuel but also on the tax applied to the fuel. Those using natural gas to heat their homes are paying close to €130 a year in Carbon Tax, while those using home-heating oil are paying €63.50 per tonne of CO₂ emitted in the same tax. With all these sources of Carbon Tax, the State’s revenue from this ‘green initiative’ reached €1 billion for the first time in 2024.
Unravelling the Hysteria
The seemingly endless chorus of climate change consequences can leave one feeling helpless, subservient to an invisible, unquestionable force beyond comprehension.
But just as the old saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps understanding the burden of the consequences of this unchallengeable doctrine begins with asking the most basic questions.
Are the repeated justifications for never-ending increases in Carbon Tax truly the result of the general population’s failure to make sufficient sacrifices to combat climate change, or could they stem from other factors—politically inconvenient ones—that are more easily scapegoated as climate issues? Climate change has become a topic so shielded from scrutiny that questioning anything presented as its direct result is rare, for fear of being labeled a climate change denier.
Just as Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984, began to question the scapegoating ritual of the “Two Minutes Hate”, a daily exercise designed to convince citizens that society’s problems stemmed from disloyal citizens rather than a deeply flawed system, we, too, might benefit from stepping back. Perhaps some of our societal and economic struggles are rooted in deeper, overlooked issues that are being ignored or glossed over due to the incessant rhetoric of climate change effects, paradigm blindness and groupthink.
Take, for example, the recent introduction of water usage restrictions in areas of Ireland that experience some of the wettest spring months in Europe. Just recently, a hosepipe ban was announced for Mullingar in Co. Westmeath, Milford in Co. Donegal, and Kells-Oldcastle in Co. Meath, set to last for six weeks due to yet another climate change-attributable factor. The official stated reason?
“Climate change is leading to more frequent and intense weather events, such as flooding and dry spells. This impacts our water resources, which can mean we need to put restrictions in place.”
And who must pay the price for this catastrophe? Why, each and every one of us, of course—as good comrade citizens, all for the common good!
But is the need for the hosepipe ban—and the accompanying Carbon Taxes supposedly meant to remedy the ‘harms done by carbon’, truly the result of the general population’s ‘carbon greed’? Or is it, at least in part, a form of scapegoating used to avoid answering some rather politically awkward questions?
Let’s, without venturing down the well-worn road of climate change denial, consider an alternative to the familiar mantra that supposedly justifies yet another increase in Carbon Tax to solve yet another ‘climate problem’.
Since its foundation in 2013 as a state-owned water utility company, Uisce Éireann has promised to revitalise Ireland’s water infrastructure. Despite having a multi-billion euro budget, the utility has faced significant criticism for massive overspending and making unrealistic claims about fixing leaking pipes and upgrading infrastructure—largely due to its lack of transparency, particularly regarding how funds are allocated for operational costs and repairs.
Considering the lavish funding allocated to this company—€16.9 billion from 2025 to 2029, including €10.3 billion for infrastructure and €6.6 billion for operating costs, one might reasonably expect that leaking pipes and inefficiencies would no longer be an issue. Yet, even in the month of May, water shortages persist even in some of the wettest areas of Europe raising serious questions about where this investment is going.
Multi-million euro contracts are regularly awarded by Uisce Éireann as part of a massive overhaul of Ireland’s long-neglected water infrastructure. However, there is little to no scrutiny or transparency when it comes to assessing value for money or the efficiency of the work carried out. When water shortages do occur, it becomes all too easy to deflect the hard questions by reinforcing the idea in the public’s mind that the fault lies not with the state, but with the ever-looming spectre of climate change.
At the implementation of the Government’s Climate Action Plan in 2019, the people of Ireland were told:
“Climate disruption is already having diverse and wide ranging impacts on Ireland’s environment, society, economic and natural resources. The Climate Action Plan sets out an ambitious course of action over the coming years to address this issue”.
This same plan told the burden carriers
“For most areas of environmental damage, a key problem is that those inflicting the damage do not pay the cost of the damage they inflict. This is the rationale for charging a carbon price for carbon emissions which reflects the growing damage that they are inflicting. This serves to discourage emissions and to make carbon abatement more profitable.“
The Flaccid Fourth Estate
Ireland’s media, one would assume, should challenge the government on its climate policies should there ever be any possibility of it dodging responsibility. But alas, as history has proven time and time again—especially with the specific example of the Irish Banking Inquiry of 2011 into the causes and impact of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the housing market crash of 2008. it has been clearly shown that Ireland’s established media has repeatedly failed to question the sustainability of government policy, lacked investigative reporting, and played a role in normalizing risk to the general populace. The established media in Ireland, therefore, simply does not criticise government policy in any meaningful way.
Let’s take a step back and analyse the broader picture. If, by chance, the water shortages in Ireland are at least partly due to operational inefficiencies of a multi-billion-euro state company responsible for ensuring there are no shortages, perhaps many other problems regularly used to justify a crippling carbon tax are also, at least in part, the result of systemic issues within government operations and not solely the fault of climate change.
If this is the case, wouldn’t it make a lot more economic and political sense to reform the system rather than continue to tax the burdened?
Of course, one can argue that taxes are essential for the government to fund the functioning of the country, and that point is not being disputed here. However, when additional taxes are introduced in the name of improving society, while transparency, accountability, and efficiency in government spending and state operations continue to decline, and the number of exposed instances of public fund wastage continues to rise, this does little to benefit either society or the economy.
Is it not time to press the pause button on the ever-increasing rates of ‘green’ taxes on the people of Ireland and to begin a thorough investigation into how public money is spent on projects—from the Irish Water scandal, with millions wasted on the setup of this monolith, to the National Children’s Hospital cost overruns, making it the most expensive hospital in the world, to the bicycle shed in Dáil Éireann, and so on and so on?
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. ― George Orwell, 1984
The Covid pandemic brought a public health emergency, political and legal challenges, intense media coverage, social divisions, and intense debates among scientists. Yet, in public commentaries, attention fell almost exclusively on a single cause of suffering: the virus itself.
This framing of the crisis contributed to an atmosphere of extreme danger, a sense that disease and death lurked around every street corner. Public messaging, media reports and daily statistics reinforced the idea of omnipresent risk. News cycles focused relentlessly on case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities, making the threat feel immediate and inescapable.
Five years on, we can collate how the pandemic sparked a surge of research across many fields: medicine, public health, economics, education, and sociology all responded. This burst of academic activity was not, however, spread evenly. Bibliometric studies show that, at first, research focused mainly on clinical medicine, immunology, biology, genetics, and pharmacology; the social sciences, psychiatry, and economics received less attention (Funada et al., 2023). Within the social sciences, early research looked at wellbeing, the plight of healthcare workers, vaccines, and inequalities. Emotions were also studied, but far less often, ranking only as the twenty-fourth most common keyword in published papers (Hamdan & Alsuqaih, 2024).
Nevertheless, a closer look at emotion-related research reveals a problematic focus. Most of these studies examine mental health issues and depression, fatigue, sleep, fear, anxiety, coping strategies, resilience, and attitudes toward vaccines. They treat emotions as individual reactions to a threatening situation, mainly, the risk of illness or death. From this almost exclusive perspective, emotions are considered as disruptions to psychological balance, responses to a biological danger separate from society or culture. They are private experiences, signs of mental strain when facing mortality. Fear, grief, and anxiety are viewed as symptoms of danger and of risk, highlighting the personal impact of living through a threatening time.
Moving Beyond Reaction: Constructing the Emotional Field
This framing of emotions overlooks a crucial point: emotions are not simply automatic, hard-wired biological responses to external situations or threats. Rather, they are often actively produced and shaped within particular moral, cultural, and political frameworks. How people come to fear, endure, or worry is continually influenced by the signals and expectations set by public discourse, media narratives, institutional practices and prevailing social norms.
The news media do obviously more than report mere facts; they select, emphasize, and dramatize certain aspects of events, contributing and even constructing the emotional climate of crisis according to preconceived judgments. Hence, the emotional atmosphere of the pandemic, marked by vigilance, anxiety, and collective tension, was not just a consequence of the virus, but the result of ongoing processes that shaped how people understood and responded to the unfolding situation.
Several notable examples illustrate how governments and media employed rhetorical and psychological techniques to shape public emotions.
In the UK, the slogan “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” became one of the most widely disseminated and emotionally charged messages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Designed to evoke both communal duty and existential fear, it mobilised public sentiment around the act of staying at home, not simply as a health measure, but as a moral obligation to shield others, particularly frontline healthcare workers. Ubiquitous across television, newspapers, and social media, the slogan fostered an emotional climate of collective responsibility and latent anxiety about overwhelming the national health system.
Rhetorically, the slogan is striking: its simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence render it both memorable and persuasive. It appeals simultaneously to national solidarity, civic duty, and the highest ethical imperative, saving lives, thus activating a complex affective mix of fear, guilt, and altruism.
This emotional construct was neither accidental nor incidental. A report by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, dated 22 March 2020 and titled “Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures” (SPI-B, 2020), explicitly recommended the use of emotionally charged messaging. It advised that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,” and further emphasized the need to frame compliance as a duty to protect others. Public messaging was a deliberate instrument of affective governance.
In France, the famous “Nous sommes en guerre”, “we are at war” slogan, pronounced by French President Emmanuel Macron recruited the French citizens for “general mobilisation” against an “enemy […] invisible and elusive”. This phrase, repeated six times during a single televised address, anchored the pandemic within a wartime imaginary, framing the virus as an invisible enemy and the French population as combatants in a national struggle (Lemarié, A., & Pietralunga, C. 2020).
The affective environment in France was thus shaped around sacrifice and mobilisation. Staying at home became not merely a health directive, but an act of national resistance, evoking allusive memories of the World War II. This rhetorical strategy, deeply embedded in French republican traditions of unity and state authority, reactivated symbolic repertoires associated with past national emergencies.
Perhaps the most disquieting illustration of planned disciplinary and emotional control during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe was to be found in a leaked strategy document from Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior. Widely referred to (ironically yet revealingly) as the “panic paper”, this internal memorandum, drafted in March 2020, exposes the deliberate mobilisation of fear and terror as legitimate political tools. The paper explicitly recommends heightening the population’s sense of threat to ensure compliance with lockdown measures, even proposing emotionally manipulative narratives targeted at children.
The document’s authors do not hesitate to make emotionally manipulative claims, unanchored to any scientific or empirical evidence. One of the more disturbing passages reads: “Children will easily become infected, even with restrictions on leaving the house […] If they then infect their parents, and one of them dies in agony at home, they will feel guilty because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands after playing. It is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.” (Bundespapier, 2020)
Under the guise of public health strategy, the experts thus suggest that the state should conjure worst-case scenarios to shock citizens into obedience. This weaponisation of fear, particularly the psychological targeting of children, marks a disconcerting threshold where public communication slips into psychological coercion. It represents a calculated use of terror to engineer behaviour.
Surprisingly enough, this narrative was not limited to governments or the media. Even prominent intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading voices in the theory of deliberative democracy, perceived democracy as having ground to a halt. Under the threat to “the life and health of members of the species Homo sapiens across the globe,” Habermas declared in 2021, in strikingly dramatic terms, that humanity found itself in a truly existing Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in a metaphysical and biological war for the survival of the species. In such a situation, Habermas thought, the “legally mandated acts of solidarity” required by the authority of the state must override individual rights and liberties without exception (Habermas, 2021). In other words, the recourse to a temporary dictatorship is defended as a legitimate means of safeguarding democracy itself.
Such tactics reflect a biopolitical logic in which emotions are instrumentalised, manipulated, and weaponised in the name of security. As the American historian William Reddy’s notion of ‘emotional regimes’ reminds us, the state not only regulates action but prescribes feeling. What the “panic paper” reveals is an attempt to institutionalise anxiety and guilt as tools of governance, undermining democratic trust and ethical responsibility in the process.
Insights from the history and anthropology of emotions, particularly the work of Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, invite us to rethink this framing of emotions. Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ (2006) highlights how emotions are shaped, valued, and regulated within particular social groups, each with their own norms and expressive codes. From this standpoint, emotions during the pandemic cannot be reduced to individual reactions but must be understood as patterned and normative, reflecting the affective economies of distinct communities: communities of fear, of denial, of moral indignation, or of solidarity.
Similarly, Reddy’s theory of ‘emotives’ (2001) emphasises the performative and world-shaping nature of emotional expression. Emotions are not merely responses to a given reality; they participate in shaping that reality by enacting or challenging dominant scripts.
Shaping the emotional landscape of the pandemic through these theoretical lenses allows us to move beyond the medical paradigm and to interrogate the normative, political, and cultural scripts that governed which emotions were considered legitimate, intelligible, or deviant. It also opens the way to analyse how emotions were mobilised to sustain or contest public policies, shape collective identities, and articulate forms of belonging or exclusion.
Although traditional theories of public relations and propaganda from Bernays and Adorno to Ellul have long emphasized the central role of emotions in shaping public opinion, the American historian William Reddy offers a strikingly original lens through which to examine how speech, when instrumentalised, not only conveys but actively produces emotional states. The framework he developed in his book The Navigation of Feeling (2001) allows us to reconsider emotional expression not as a by-product of persuasion, but as a form of action in its own right.
The expressions and formulae he calls “emotives” work at the same time as expressions and speech-acts that do not merely reflect a feeling but also act upon the feelings expressed.
Let us consider one of the slogans widely used in the UK during Covid: “Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re helping by staying at home?” The formula obviously expresses sentiments of moral urgency, it purveys a sense of guilt, and it evokes a feeling of shared suffering. By mobilising emotional responses in its audience, the message not only seeks compliance but also helps produce an imagined community of responsibility, what Benedict Anderson might describe as a politically constructed sense of belonging forged through shared affect and narrative. “Not staying at home” not only becomes a morally shameful act, but it also transforms those who do not abide by the rules into antisocial or even dangerous outsiders.
As such, the formula is not simply descriptive (“you are harming people”), nor purely persuasive (“please help us”), but it performs a moral-emotional judgment that invites internalisation: “You are failing us, your community, unless you feel what we want you to feel.” In this sense, that emotives express and reshape emotional experience by realigning the narrative sense of oneself and the expected moral position of the community.
The same analysis applies to Macrons “war”. The expression declares a collective crisis state, it evokes gravity, calls out a clear and present danger and warns about an existential threat. Thus, it installs an emotional climate of wartime unity, emergency discipline, and patriotic mobilisation. Unlike the English moral community, French citizens are summoned in the guise of soldiers and patriots, enlisted in the defence of the state.
The German example seems politically the most unsettling. The consultants emphasise horrific imagery (death by suffocation) in order to induce “primal fears” and uncontrollable panic. They instrumentalise guilt in children to heighten family responsibility by evoking a nightmarish parricide that results from disobeying.
-Germany’s response corresponds in function (if not in scale) to Jacobin emotional regimes analysed by Reddy in the period of French Terror (September 1793–July 1794). Emotional authenticity is measured by conformity to the collective fear. In the context of post-Revolutionary France, not fearing enough becomes a sign of counter-revolutionary disloyalty. Similarly, in 2020 Germany, not appearing afraid (or questioning the panic narrative) could make one suspected of being reckless, not acting in solidarity, or worse, of being a right-wing-extremist-enemy of the state.
To push things even further, Germany’s federal domestic intelligence service – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – established, in 2021, a new ‘phenomenon area’ for verbal “delegitimisation of the state” as part of a broader affective disciplining. Much like the East German state’s attention to emotional attitudes and moral tone (Brauer, 2011), pandemic-era Germany began to police not only what people did or said, but how they felt, or more precisely, which emotions they were publicly permitted to express. The result, in Reddy’s terms, was the emergence of a strict emotional regime, wherein fear, trust, and compliance became not just encouraged but expected, while scepticism, defiance, and even calm detachment were marked as dangerous deviations from normative feeling.
As Reddy shows, emotives do not exist in isolation but operate within broader emotional styles that can transform into hegemonic “emotional regimes”. These regimes then constitute the officially sanctioned or dominant norms governing which emotions are deemed appropriate or required. An emotional regime may be conceptualised as the emotional dimension of a culture’s ideological structure.
This perspective helps explain how distinct emotional regimes were deliberately constructed within varying national and cultural settings. The aim was to cultivate specific emotional landscapes which, according to political figures, scientific experts and media outlets were perceived as the most effective means to encourage, persuade, or even compel populations towards the desired attitudes and behaviours. This was to be achieved, in large part, by aligning public sentiment with state goals and framing non-compliance as morally reprehensible.
By dictating appropriate feelings such as patriotism, calm obedience, compliance, solidarity, anxiety or even panic, while discouraging dissent, critique, lack of fear or apathy, the Covid responses installed what Reddy calls a “strict” emotional regime. In strict regimes – as was the case in most Western democracies – authorities heavily dictate emotional responses (e.g. demanding constant displays of patriotic fear or fervour), whereas a “looser” regimes (like Sweden) allowed more individual emotional freedom.
The construction of a strict emotional regime evidently leaves little room for individual “emotional navigation”. Emotional navigation, in Reddy’s theory, is the process through which individuals explore and reorient their feelings, often by attempting to name or express them using available emotional descriptions. Hence, within strict regimes, the mandated emotions and suppression of others are always at risk of creating a conflict with individuals’ authentic feelings. Pressure to conform reduces our autonomy to explore and articulate genuine emotional experiences.
Reddy’s work suggests that strict regimes inevitably inflict “psychological pains”. This psychological pain arises from the discrepancy between one’s internal emotional state and the external expectation of how one should feel or express emotions. The deliberate heightening of threat and weaponisation of fear, as seen in the aforementioned pandemic policies, lead to significant emotional suffering.
This approach mirrors what the German memo proposed (making individuals, even children, feel accountable for tragic outcomes) and what SPI-B had called “shame” by conflating compliance with virtue and non-compliance with deviance (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).
Indeed, psychologists reported a rise in what they dubbed “COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome,” where individuals became obsessively fearful (avoiding public spaces, constant symptom-checking, etc.), effectively locked into a state of chronic anxiety (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022). Professor of psychology Marcantonio Spada, who studied this phenomenon, warned that by “deliberately inflat[ing] the threat and perceived fear of Covid-19 (in combination with lockdowns)”, the government made it likely “that a significant proportion of the population would develop psychopathological responses and end up locked into their fear or develop related forms of anxiety such as health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviours” (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).
As a consequence, when people find an emotional regime oppressive or alienating, they seek “emotional refuges”, that is, social spaces or subcultures that permit the free expression of forbidden feelings. These refuges (such as the historic salons, Masonic lodges, cafés in Reddy’s research) let individuals “breathe” emotionally and share sentiments that the dominant discourse suppresses.
In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms played a crucial role as digital emotional refuges, allowing individuals to articulate forms of scepticism, frustration, irony, or grief that were often unwelcome or delegitimised in mainstream public discourse. Whether through Telegram groups, Facebook forums, YouTube comments, or encrypted chat channels, these online spaces became vital arenas not only for a delegitimized critique, but also for affective expression, especially for those who rejected the emotional scripts of fear, compliance, or trust in government authority.
Here, alternative emotional narratives could circulate: defiance against confinement, sarcasm toward official slogans, or empathy with marginalised voices such as vaccine sceptics, small business owners, or distressed adolescents. It was these spaces that functioned as emotional counter-publics: informal communities where dissonant emotions could be shared, validated, and amplified outside the normative emotional regime that attempted to monopolise the emotional field.
Yet even these emotional counter-publics did not remain untouched. As expressions of dissent or ambivalence became increasingly vilified and pathologised, many of these refuges were themselves subjected to forms of surveillance, content moderation, public denunciation and censorship. Social media platforms intensified their control of discourse through algorithmic filtering and deplatforming, while governments and media denounced certain emotional expressions, especially those critical of official policy, as irrational, dangerous, or politically subversive. In this way, the emotional regime extended its reach, constraining the very spaces where alternative affective orientations could emerge, intensifying emotional suffering and narrowing the horizon of legitimate emotional life.
Bibliography
All-Party Parliamentary Groups. 2022. « Concerns Heard about Government Use of Fear to Increase Adherence to Covid Restrictions ». APPG Pandemic Response and Recovery. Consulté 14 mai 2025 (https://appgpandemic.org/news/covid-restrictions-fear).
Brauer, Juliane. 2011. « Clashes of Emotions: Punk Music, Youth Subculture, and Authority in the GDR (1978-1983) ». Social Justice 38(4 (126)):53‑
Funada, S., Yoshioka, T., Luo, Y., Iwama, T., Mori, C., Yamada, N., Yoshida, H., Katanoda, K., & Furukawa, T. A. (2023). “Global trends in highly cited studies in COVID-19 research. JAMA Network Open, 6(9), e2332802.
Hamdan, W., & Alsuqaih, H. (2024). “Research Output, Key Topics, and Trends in Productivity, Visibility, and Collaboration in Social Sciences Research on COVID-19: A Scientometric Analysis and Visualization”. SAGE Open, 14(4), 21582440241286217.
‘I confess I do not believe in time.’ Vladimir Nabokov
On a hostel rooftop in Morocco, I met a Russian man who had not been home since the war broke out. I was there to catch the last of the sun and read my book in peace so when he first introduced himself I made no effort to be friendly. It soon became clear that he wasn’t motivated by any particular attraction to me, as I had immediately and arrogantly presumed, but because he had seen that I was reading Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Some mingled instinct of nostalgia and boredom had led him to overcome his aversion to intruding on strangers, he explained.
I invited him to sit and the conversation roamed freely. He described late spring in St Petersburg and the peculiar sense of dissolution that comes with moving through endless bars and the sun never setting. I told him about the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin and people in green hats strewn on the bridges at dawn. We spoke about the war and about La Rochefoucauld and about rap. We agreed that Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky; we disagreed about Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Soon it was dark so we got a six pack of Casablanca beers and sat by the pool. We shared a pack of Marlboro Golds and began to talk about heartbreak, naturally. He said that in Russian there are more specific words for sadness: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I gave him my pen so he could write them in the back of my book. When we finished all the beers he retrieved a half bottle of vodka from his room. We made light of our romantic humiliations. You can speak most openly with people you know you’ll never see again.
I didn’t think about him again until recently, in a bookshop in Dublin, when I came across a copy of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which had come up that night. He’d urged me to give it another go, insisting it was worth it, even going so far as to say it was his best work, which isn’t an opinion you hear much. Even Nabakov said it was a dismal flop, and he wasn’t known for his humility.
I should get it out of the way that I read Lolita at a formative age, close to Lolita’s age, in fact, and that I loved it completely without understanding it in the slightest. (I used to think this was a unique experience but over the years I’ve met many women like me.) Lolita is the book I’ve returned to most and my love for it has only deepened, though now I understand its awfulness. So, as a long time fan of Nabokov, I’m disposed to forgive his more unlikeable traits, which I admit are unlikeable in the extreme: his aristocratic disdain, his insistence on his own brilliance, his exhausting multilingual wordplay, his obsessive control over interpretation, his stylised indifference. Updike put it best: ‘I don’t like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ All Nabokov’s vices are displayed most opulently in Speak, Memory.
It’s less of an autobiography than a record of personality. He sets down a few of his passions, such as lepidopterology, but more importantly, he catalogs his many hatreds. They range from small gripes with Freud’s theories or disagreements with ignorant critics to the amazingly vague, such as music (‘an arbitrary succession of more or less annoying sounds’), or sleep (‘I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of genius…the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.’) Every time I’ve attempted to read Speak, Memory I’ve gone in with good intentions and every time I’ve been thoroughly defeated.
This time, however, the book seemed to speak directly into the conversation with the Russian man on the hostel rooftop in Morocco. I saw it as a story about exile and nostalgia, and I wondered if he had urged me to reread it because he understood that neither of us had been home for years, though his reasons were far graver and sadder than mine. The word nostalgia, as you may already know, comes from the Greek νόστος, ‘return home’, and ἄλγος, ‘ache’.
Speak, Memory tells the story of the author’s aristocratic childhood in Russia at the turn of the century, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that forced him to flee, and his attempts to build a new life in America. Early on, Nabokov makes it clear that his project is not political but sentimental, addressing a brief chapter to ‘the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.’ ‘My contempt for the emigre who hates the Reds because they stole his money and land is complete,’ he explains. ‘The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.’
Out of that childhood he creates something mythical and shadowless. He elevates to epic proportions something that is, in fact, very ordinary. He misses his beautiful mother and the garden where he used to play. He wishes he could go back. But he can’t admit it so straightforwardly so he invokes the Muse, like Homer. The Muse steps in and the past rushes back, intact. ‘I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’ The motivating impulse is against oblivion. Like with the butterflies he pins to a board, he wants to take the moment in all its impossible detail, to fix and immortalise it. The enemy is time, which pulls you away from everything you love. Memory is a tool for defeating time.
Nabokov’s exile isn’t just a matter of geography or politics; it’s a spiritual condition marked by the loss of a world that no longer exists. Speak, Memory doesn’t progress logically, it circles back on itself, drawing connections through motif and image rather than sequence. Its structure mimics the strange, folding logic of memory, where one detail can suddenly trigger a whole Proustian journey of the mind.
This associative structure is how diasporic cultures preserve history. It is encoded in fragments, in music, in idioms, in rituals that seem personal but are weighted with collective meaning. The longing for return, or for a wholeness that never fully existed, becomes formal rather than simply emotional. Nostalgia is a structural feature. It organizes the past via symbols. In such contexts, the ache of memory is not a flaw. It is how identity endures across distance.
In the back pages of my book, I still have the man’s careful, looping words in Cyrillic: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I’ve forgotten the precise differences between these shades of sadness, but the point remains: not all nostalgia is the same. There is the soft kind, the sentimental kind that sells postcards and heritage tours. But there is also a harder kind: nostalgia as mnemonic, as survival instinct.
