Holiday From History · Part One · The Myth of Order · Chapter 1

Uri Zehavi’s new book continues. It’s not the end of history. In fact, the story of Western blindness is only just beginning…- Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

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About the book. On October 7, 2023, Israel paid the bill for thirty years of Western complacency in a single morning. Holiday From History is the forensic account: how the post-Cold War West convinced itself history had ended, why the warnings did not break the spell, and what the collapse now reveals about the institutions meant to defend free nations.

Read the serial from the start: Holiday From History on Guerre & Shalom

Get the book: Paperback · Hardcover · Kindle

About the author. Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute and publisher of Israel Brief. He is the author of Rooted Truth, serialised here on Guerre & Shalom, Rooted in Judea, and Letters Across the Table.

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Chapter 1: Fukuyama’s Folly

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire cracked, and the West told itself a story. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Communism was finished. Peace was at hand.

Francis Fukuyama gave the mood its slogan: “the end of history.”1 He meant the end of mankind’s great ideological struggles. Liberal democracy and free markets had won. Everyone else, sooner or later, would converge. There might be quarrels, but no more civilizational clashes.

Elites embraced this as gospel. The Cold War was over, therefore war itself was over. They acted as if the hard work of defense, vigilance, and memory could be abandoned. It was a seductive delusion. I have read enough history to know what comes next when a comfortable class declares the game won. History had not ended. It had only paused, waiting for the West to look away.

Fukuyama’s thesis, first an essay in 1989 and then a 1992 book, argued that liberal democracy was the final stage of political development. Future wars, he suggested, would be peripheral, manageable. That claim leapt from seminar rooms to statecraft. In the 1990s, “End of History” became shorthand for the new normal. Leaders cashed in a “peace dividend.” Defense budgets shrank.

The cuts were real. Germany went from 2.6 percent of GDP on defense in 1990 to about 1.2 percent a decade later. Canada slid to barely 1 percent. Britain slashed its army by a quarter and retired ships early. A reunified Germany cut its forces from roughly 600,000 to under 350,000. The United States joined in. Active-duty troops fell by a third, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. Army divisions dropped from 18 to 10. Spending sank to 3 percent of GDP by 2000. Republicans and Democrats alike called this responsibility. In truth, it was a holiday.

The spirit went beyond budgets. Globalization was hailed as the new security architecture. Pundits mocked old geopolitics and cheered a “flat world” where markets trumped armies. NATO expanded, the EU deepened, and Russia was labeled a “strategic partner.” China entered the global trade system. Davos panels and State Department briefings sounded the same: history’s conflicts were over, institutions and commerce had secured peace. Even pop culture joined in with the “Golden Arches Theory” — no two countries with McDonald’s would fight each other.

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Reality disagreed. In 1994 Rwanda’s genocide killed 800,000 in three months. Across the same decade, jihadist networks bombed American targets at home and abroad — and each outrage was treated as an aberration. Policymakers still insisted the default setting was peace.

Into this atmosphere walked a heretic. If Fukuyama’s “End of History” was gospel, he argued the opposite. History was gathering. His name was Samuel P. Huntington.

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Oded’s exclusive piece may well be the best written and most influential of the near-800 pieces we have have published on this journal. It’s definitely the best sourced! Accepted that it isn’t an easy read, but it’s all the more rewarding for its dense, comprehensive analysis of the question of the age. It deserves to be read far and wide.

Precisely because of its non-clickbait nature (but its clear importance), I would urge readers to like, restack and share the article even before they’ve read it so as to ensure it goes viral. There is nothing in it one would “disagree” with --it’s not that kind of piece.

I particularly like Oded’s analysis of AI’s effect on the legal profession. With lawyers needing far leaner firms, and initially racking in sky-high profits, competition will naturally ensue. This, in turn, will lead to large cuts in fees and, finally, accessible justice for all. For as long as we can remember, the law has been out of reach, even for Middle Class professionals, making pretensions of the rule of law seem illusory. Yet with AI reducing the price of cognition, Ted the Electrician and Daniel the Writer will be able to take the powerful to court and win. Quite the prospect. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

Ashok Panikkar began our AI symposium:

AI Is Not Making Expertise Obsolete

Why the AI Jobs Panic Is Asking the Wrong Question

We made production cheap, then transport, then energy, then calculation. Now we are making a good deal of cognition cheap. Which jobs that destroys is a fair question. Who may collect the dividend is probably the better one.

By Oded J.K. Faran (Jacob’s Ledger)

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A familiar question about an unfamiliar input

Guerre and Shalom recently published an essay by Ashok Panikkar that asks what may be the most uncomfortable question about artificial intelligence: what happens to us when we remove the struggle through which people learn to think, judge and become competent?[1] His concern is wider than employment, but one part of it has stayed with me. The boring work that firms are increasingly tempted to hand to AI was often the work through which juniors became seniors.

I think that concern deserves to be taken seriously, and I will come back to it. But I want to approach the same change from another direction, through prices.

Every few generations something that used to be expensive becomes cheap, and the people living through it tend to describe the machine rather than the price change. The power loom, the tractor, the dynamo, the mainframe. The machine is what you can see. The price change is what rearranges the economy. Mechanized production made cloth and iron cheap. Railways and the motor car made movement cheap. Electricity made usable power cheap, and available in small portions wherever a wire could reach. Computers made arithmetic and storage so cheap that we stopped thinking of them as costs at all. (Nobody budgets for multiplication.)

Generative AI belongs in that sequence, with one obvious difference. What it cheapens is part of what we used to call educated thought: drafting, summarizing, translating, retrieving, classifying, writing serviceable code, producing a first-pass analysis of a document nobody wanted to read. For most of modern history you paid a trained person to do these things, by the hour, and the hours were long.

It is a remarkable change, and I understand why people reach for the word unprecedented. But the first question it raises is an old one. What happens when an important input becomes much cheaper? In general form, we know. The price of things made with it falls, and demand for them usually rises. Some of the people who supplied the input lose income, while some of those who combine it with other skills gain. Firms reorganize around the new costs, more slowly than anyone expects. And the gains go to whoever owns what and can bargain, which is the part nobody mentions at the product launch.

Asked that way, the debate over whether AI will “take our jobs” starts to look badly framed. A model passes a bar exam[2] or builds an app from a paragraph of instructions, and the inference follows by reflex: lawyers and programmers are finished. The demonstration is treated as the proof.

My own view is narrower than the optimists would like and less dramatic than the pessimists expect. AI is plainly technologically unfamiliar. Whether its economics are unprecedented is a question of evidence, and permanent mass unemployment is a hypothesis that someone has to demonstrate; it does not follow from watching a chatbot do something clever. I should admit at the outset that this argument did not survive the research intact. It came out narrower than it went in, and it is weakest exactly where Panikkar’s worry points: the bottom rung of professional careers.

A job, after all, is a collection of tasks held together by an employment contract, a desk and a good deal of habit. A junior legal translator renders text, checks terminology against the client’s earlier filings, rebuilds tables that did not survive conversion, flags errors in the source and calls the client when the original says something the client almost certainly did not mean. Technology has no obligation to automate that bundle in the proportions in which it was assembled. Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo built a whole framework on this: automation pushes workers out of some tasks, new tasks pull them back in elsewhere, and nothing guarantees that the second keeps pace with the first.[3]

Once you think in tasks, the slide from “AI can do part of this job“ to “this job will disappear“ turns out to have a lot of steps in it, most of which are usually skipped. Whether anyone actually uses the tool for those tasks, whether it replaces the worker or makes her faster, whether the firm hires fewer people or just different ones: each is a separate empirical question. Exposure measures get read as forecasts of job loss when they are closer to a map of places where something might happen. The International Labour Organization’s refined exposure index finds that about one worker in four globally is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, and only 3.3 percent of employment falls into its highest band.[4] Its own conclusion is that most jobs are more likely to be transformed than eliminated. Exposure is not substitution, substitution is not the death of an occupation, and the death of an occupation is not mass unemployment.

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The History

The lazy inductive-historical argument says that people panicked about the loom, the tractor and the computer, the panics were wrong, so this one is wrong too. While there’s some merit in it, on the whole, I do not find that persuasive. The worriers were often right about particular workers, towns and decades. Where they went wrong was in the leap from those losses to a permanent shortage of work for the economy as a whole.

The motor vehicle is the case I find most instructive. The internal combustion engine made motive power cheap. In 1920 American farms held about 25.2 million horses and mules; by 1959, according to the Census of Agriculture, fewer than 3 million remained.[5] The tractor replaced the horse, and also its lunch: the Census Bureau noted that land which had grown feed for work animals was freed for other uses.[6] Teamsters, harness makers and livery stable hands gave way to automobile workers, mechanics and truck drivers, and agriculture, which employed close to two in five American workers in 1900, employed fewer than one in five by 1940 (Figure 1).[7] Many people did not convert, and the movement off the farms was also a story of rural decline.

Figure 1. Agricultural and non-agricultural workers in the United States, 1820–1940. Agricultural employment rose in absolute numbers until 1910, then fell; its share fell throughout. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945, Series D 1–7.[7]

The horse and wagon probably supplies the best pessimistic analogy in the whole debate. Wassily Leontief made it in 1983: horse employment collapsed and stayed collapsed, because the horse had nothing else the new economy wanted.[8] We need to understand that the only serious question about AI is whether human workers are in the position of the teamster or of the horse. The teamster had hands, judgment and a driving license waiting to happen; the horse had only pulling power, and pulling power had become cheap. (A later rejoinder adds two differences that matter: people can own capital, and they can vote.[9]) For the last century, people have been teamsters. The pessimist’s claim is that a general enough cognitive technology might eventually leave them nothing else to offer. That claim is coherent, and it is about the future.

Timing is yet another factor less discussed. Paul David showed in 1990 that electric motors supplied less than 5 percent of the mechanical drive in American factories in 1899, and that it took roughly another two decades to pass half. For much of that time owners swapped the steam engine for a dynamo and changed nothing else, and productivity barely moved; the gains came in the 1920s, some four decades after the first central power stations, when factories were rebuilt around small motors on individual machines.[10] I suspect that today’s measurements of firms bolting a chatbot onto an unchanged workflow understate both the eventual gains and the eventual disruption.

Alas; we cannot have a serious tech-related economic discussion without mentioning the computer. As a result of the computer-adoption revolution, the automated teller machine cut the tellers needed in a typical urban branch from about 20 to 13 between 1988 and 2004, but made branches cheap enough that banks opened many more, and teller jobs did not disappear as ATMs spread.[11] A study of American job titles found that roughly 60 percent of employment in 2018 was in titles that did not exist in 1940, though it also carries a warning optimists tend to skip: new work comes mainly from innovations that complement an occupation and from rising demand for what it produces. Automation alone does not create it.[12]

Across more than a century in which output per worker multiplied many times over, the economy kept finding paid work for most adults who wanted it, while cheaper inputs destroyed particular trades and left many of the people in them worse off for the rest of their lives. Permanent economy-wide technological unemployment has not followed from new technology in the cases economists have studied most closely.

There are real reasons to think AI may behave differently from all of this, and I find only two of them hard to dismiss.

The most obvious is speed. Electrification needed power stations and rebuilt factories, and a tractor had to be built and sold one farm at a time. A model can appear on a million desks almost overnight, at a marginal cost that is small and falling. Stanford’s latest AI Index reports that generative AI reached about 53 percent adoption within three years of its mass release, faster than the personal computer or the internet at the same stage.[13] Capabilities are also improving quickly while retraining takes time, so a skill that complements this year’s models may be substituted by the models of the year the worker finishes acquiring it.

Breadth probably matters too, because the tractor displaced one kind of work, while language models touch programming, translation, clerical work, marketing and customer service at once; the International Monetary Fund has estimated that about 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies are exposed in some form.[14] And the capital flowing into the technology is highly concentrated. The AI Index puts private AI investment in the United States at about 286 billion dollars in 2025, roughly 83 percent of the global total.[13] If very few people own the thing that does the work, the assumption that productivity gains eventually reach wages has less to stand on.

The less serious objection is about “where people go“. We already have ample experience with that. Earlier automation pushed workers out of routine physical work toward language, judgment and social skill. AI has entered that territory too, starting, as it happens, with the tasks we used to give to beginners. One formal model of the limiting case has automation running ahead of capital accumulation, so that wages fall, and machines eventually reaching the upper bound of what humans can do, so that wages collapse.[15] If that happens, the labor market as we know it ends, and the horse becomes the right analogy after all. But it would take a technology that does not yet exist.

What would change my mind about the narrower claim, before any such technology arrives, is a sustained decline in the employment and earnings of experienced workers in exposed occupations, or clear evidence that displaced workers stay out of work instead of moving. So far we have witnessed neither.

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The evidence

One Stanford payroll study has become difficult to avoid in this debate, and its August 2026 revision, using payroll data to June, finds no widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI.[16] (Danish evidence points the same way: linking adoption surveys to administrative records, researchers there find precise null effects on earnings and hours in eleven exposed occupations two years after ChatGPT, ruling out effects larger than about 2 percent.[17])

But employment among Americans aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19 percent below where it would be had it kept pace with similar workers in less-exposed occupations, up from 15 percent a year earlier. In levels, employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in the two most exposed fifths of occupations fell about 11 percent between November 2022 and June 2026, while in the three least exposed fifths it grew about 10 percent. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. The adjustment runs through fewer hires rather than more firings, and it is concentrated where observed AI use tends to automate tasks; where AI mostly complements workers, employment is flat or rising. In the revised paper the authors also distinguish occupations built on codified knowledge, the kind written down in textbooks and procedures, where young workers’ employment has fallen, from those built on tacit knowledge acquired through practice and mentorship, where experienced workers’ employment has risen (Figure 2).[16]

Figure 2. Employment change for workers aged 22 to 25, November 2022 to June 2026, by AI exposure of occupation. The authors describe the pattern as descriptive, not causal; older workers show no comparable gap. Source: Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2026.[16]

I want to be careful with these numbers, because the authors insist on calling their results descriptive and refrain from assuming causality. The gaps shrink when education is accounted for, some differential trends predate generative AI, and the gaps are larger in the payroll sample than in national surveys.[16] Two economists writing for the Economic Innovation Group make a sharper point: a cohort of 22-to-25-year-olds is replenished almost entirely by hiring, so any fall in graduate hiring shrinks it fast, and graduate hiring had begun falling in 2022, when interest rates rose.[18] The Stanford authors reply that the divergence survives controls for interest-rate exposure, persists outside technology firms, and kept widening long after rates peaked. They still decline to call it proof, and so do I. A separate Harvard study, using résumé data on about 65 million workers at more than 280,000 firms, finds the same pattern inside firms that adopted AI: junior employment falling, senior employment not.[19]

The productivity evidence points the same way from the other side. In a large field study of customer-support agents, an AI assistant raised productivity by 15 percent on average, by about 30 percent for the less experienced and lower-skilled, and barely at all for the most experienced.[20] The tool seems to capture the habits of the best workers and hand them to beginners, which matters for training. Anthropic’s own usage data, which comes from an interested party and classifies conversations rather than jobs, shows business deployments tilting much more heavily toward delegated or automated workflows than individual use does.[21][22]

AI is plausibly part of the cause of the young workers’ shortfall, though nobody yet knows how large a part, or whether the pattern will spread up the age distribution.

The codified and tacit distinction is, I think, the most interesting thing in the data, because it says quite a lot about what expertise is. In an earlier essay on academic attitudes to AI, I argued that the technology is pulling apart things institutions had bundled for so long that nobody had to define them separately.[23] Professional expertise is the same kind of bundle. A senior lawyer, translator or analyst has been paid partly for information, partly for knowing where to look, and partly for turning both into a competent memo, translation or model. And partly for something harder to name: knowing which question the client should have asked, noticing that a figure does not tie out, recognizing that the confident paragraph in front of you is wrong, and signing the document.

Generative AI has driven down the marginal cost of the first three, in some cases spectacularly. Someone whose market value lay in spending six hours finding what can now be found in six seconds has lost scarcity, no doubt.

The tempting word for what remains is judgment, but it is often used to mean whatever the machine cannot do yet, which makes the argument circular. I would rather define it by what it costs. A decision calls for judgment in the economically relevant sense when the objective cannot be fully specified in advance, when relevant information lies outside the record (the client’s circumstances, the counterparty’s habits, the politics of the room), and when checking the result is expensive while errors are costly and fall on someone identifiable. Where a task can be specified in advance and checked cheaply afterwards, I see no reason to think it stays human. Where it cannot, the person who can specify and check complements the machine, and complements of a cheapened input tend to rise in value. Economists studying machine prediction made a version of this argument years ago.[24][25]

The best evidence for it is a little unsettling. In a field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants, those using GPT-4 on tasks inside what the researchers called AI’s jagged frontier completed 12.2 percent more tasks, worked 25.1 percent faster and produced significantly higher-quality work. On a task chosen to fall outside the frontier, those using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the right answer.[26] The machine helped, fluently, in the wrong direction.

We probably should not overstate the comfort in this. AI can codify tacit knowledge, which is what the customer-support researchers think happened with their agents, and the line between what is written down and what is learned by doing moves every year. David Autor goes further and argues that AI’s real opportunity is to let many more workers make some of the decisions now reserved for doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors.[27] If he is right, expertise becomes more widely held, which is good for society and less good for the rents of those who hold it now. Some experts will discover that what they took for their judgment was mostly their access. Expertise survives as an economic category, but the market is changing what it means by the word and which parts of it command a premium.

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What about the Juniors?

If judgment is the scarce complement to cheap cognition, Panikkar’s question becomes unavoidable: where does tomorrow’s judgment come from? In his words, “the boring grunt work was how juniors became seniors.”[1] It was where they made mistakes, learned what the textbooks left out and slowly acquired judgment. If AI does that work, how does anyone become an expert, and will we still need them?

I think this is the strongest objection to my argument, and the payroll data supports it to an extent. But it bundles two worries: Society may permanently need fewer experts. Or our way of producing experts may have depended on work that is now disappearing. I am fairly confident about the second and unconvinced by the first.

Consider how apprenticeship has been financed. A law firm hires a young associate and bills her document review, due diligence and first drafts to clients, who pay because the work needs doing. She learns from doing it, and from the partner who marks up her drafts. Accounting firms, consultancies, newsrooms and translation agencies run on versions of the same arrangement. The drudgery paid for the apprenticeship. Make it nearly free, and no client will pay for three associate hours on a review a model does in minutes. The training that used to ride along at no visible cost turns up on the firm’s books as a pure expense.

Gary Becker pointed out in the 1960s that, in a competitive labor market, firms have little reason to bear the cost of general training whose benefits a worker can take to another employer.[28] Professional judgment is about as portable as skills get. That gives each firm an incentive to train fewer juniors than the profession as a whole may need and to hope to hire experienced people later from someone else. If every firm reasons that way, the shortage appears a decade later as a scarcity of mid-career practitioners and a rising price for experience, long after the decisions that caused it. The junior-worker problem may be a training crisis before it is an unemployment theory.

Preserving drudgery for its own sake would be plainly silly. Deliberate training is the obvious precedented alternative. Under zero-flight-time rules, a pilot can earn a rating on a new airliner entirely in a full-motion simulator, but only with substantial prior flying experience, and the first real takeoffs and landings are flown under the supervision of a type-rating instructor.[29] Medicine keeps residents supervised for years.[30] In both cases the training is designed rather than incidental, and someone pays for it.

AI itself could help or hurt here. If the customer support assistant helped novices most, it is also a very patient tutor that could make apprenticeship shorter and cheaper. Used as a substitute, it removes the practice altogether. Panikkar’s point about friction applies: a junior who never drafts the first version never learns to see what is wrong with a draft, which is precisely the skill the consulting experiment found to be scarce. Which use wins will depend on what firms are paid for and what they are required to do.

My answer to Panikkar, then, may seem only partial. Economists are usually better at explaining the general mechanisms, the “how”, than at predicting the concrete “what” and “when”. Those emerge through market processes that cannot be known in advance. That is intellectually unsatisfying, certainly, especially when the obvious question is what people will actually do instead. But nevertheless, let me take a shot at satisfying those unhampered intellectual appetites

Let’s agree that the way we produce experts is changing, perhaps quite sharply. However, I am much less convinced that it is breaking. Junior work is unlikely simply to disappear. Its content will change. AI will become another tool in the junior’s toolbox, just as it will in the senior’s, and some of what we now regard as apprenticeship will migrate into tasks, occupations and perhaps entire professions for which we do not yet have names.

That is difficult to picture because we are much better at seeing the work a new technology makes unnecessary than the work it makes possible. A typist watching the first office computers arrive could see perfectly well which part of her job was under threat. She could hardly have been expected to describe the millions of jobs that would later depend on spreadsheets, databases, software, digital design, online commerce or network administration. Those jobs were not merely difficult to predict. Many of them were difficult even to describe before the technologies, firms and markets around them existed.

We face the same problem now. We can already see the first drafts, document reviews, translations and routine analyses that AI can perform. What we cannot see with anything like the same clarity is the work that will become worthwhile once those things are cheap. That ignorance is not evidence that the work will fail to appear. It is a limitation on our ability to specify in advance what a process of economic discovery will produce.

If technological history is any guide, juniors will still have to learn, make mistakes and acquire judgment. That is different from the lazy claim that past fears were wrong and therefore present fears must be wrong too. History cannot tell us what the new work will be, or guarantee that enough of it will appear. It tells us only that new forms of work have often been hardest to see before the technologies and markets that created them existed. Juniors may therefore learn different things, with different tools, while doing work we do not yet recognize as a profession. The career ladder may be changing. Some of its present rungs may disappear. Others have probably not been built yet.

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Who gets the AI dividend?

Suppose a lawyer with AI can now do work that used to take three people. The immediate temptation is to count the two missing lawyers, which tells us almost nothing about where the gain ends up.

At first the partner may simply keep it. Fees do not change, two associates are not hired, and profit rises. That gets harder once clients understand what has happened, and while other firms try to constantly compete with one another. Some will demand lower fees, and cheaper legal work may bring in people who could not previously afford it at all; the Legal Services Corporation found that low-income Americans got no legal help, or not enough, for 92 percent of the civil legal problems that substantially affected them, and about half of those who did not seek help cited cost.[31] A smaller practice may also suddenly be able to compete with a firm whose advantage used to depend on armies of juniors, to the extent that the rules on who may provide legal services let it. Where licensing protects incumbents, more of the dividend stays with them, so the distribution of AI’s gains in law will be decided at least as much by regulators and bar associations as by engineers. It is entirely possible that cheaper legal work ends up meaning more legal work, and more lawyers of a somewhat different kind, the way cheaper branches once meant more bank tellers.

The model providers look like the obvious winners, but so far the evidence is more reassuring than that. An earlier edition of Stanford’s AI Index estimated that the cost of querying a model performing at roughly the level of GPT-3.5 fell from about 20 dollars per million tokens in November 2022 to about 7 cents by October 2024 (Figure 3).[32] Prices falling that fast for a given capability look like competition, and the latest edition puts American consumer surplus from generative AI at roughly 172 billion dollars in 2026, a survey-based figure best read as an order of magnitude.[13] Frontier models are another matter, and nothing guarantees that today’s competition lasts.

Figure 3. Price of querying a model at GPT-3.5’s level (64.8) on the MMLU benchmark. A price for one capability level, not a general price of intelligence. Source: Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025, ch. 1 (Epoch AI and Artificial Analysis data).[32]

The part of the dividend that may be worrying is the one paid by people not yet in the room. Software shows it as clearly as law. Cheaper software can expand demand for software, so lower production costs do not by themselves imply fewer programmers in total. Yet the Stanford data shows employment of software developers aged 22 to 25 falling sharply.[13] Demand for what a profession produces can rise while the route into it narrows.

The gains from cheap cognition are likely to be widely spread and individually small: a cheaper contract, a free translation, faster software. The losses, in this first phase, look concentrated and visible: a particular cohort of graduates in particular occupations, who did what they were told, acquired the credentials and found the entrance narrowed. That combination has a poor political record. Research on the China trade shock found strong, though not definitive, evidence that American districts more exposed to Chinese import competition underwent an ideological realignment, growing more polarized in some respects and shifting rightward in others.[33] The AI version may be generational rather than regional, and a cohort of educated, articulate, online young people with worse prospects than their older siblings is not politically inert. That seems to me a more concrete threat to democratic stability than deepfakes, and whether it materializes depends on whether prices fall, whether entry opens, and whether anyone takes responsibility for training the next cohort of experts.

I set out to argue that the AI jobs panic was mistaken. I now am convinced it is mostly asking the wrong question. The evidence does not show AI producing mass unemployment. But something is plainly happening to work, and the first place it shows is, surprisingly, not the unemployment rate.

It shows first in the changing content of work, in who gets hired, in which tasks retain value, and in which forms of expertise become easier to acquire or less scarce. That is a material adjustment that cannot be dismissed, and for some workers it will be painful. But adjustment per se is not equal to obsolescence.

I believe the error is in looking at the work AI can already do and treating that visible subtraction as a forecast of the labor market that follows. We can name the drafts, reviews, translations and analyses becoming cheaper because those jobs already exist. We cannot name with equal confidence the work that becomes possible once cognition itself is cheaper. That asymmetry should make us cautious about predictions of permanent displacement. The typist could see the computer taking over typing long before anyone could describe the occupations that spreadsheets, databases, software and networks would eventually support.

I expect AI to follow the same broad logic, though not necessarily the same path or timetable. Juniors and seniors alike will use it as part of their work. Some old tasks will disappear. Others will become more valuable. Entire occupations may emerge around capabilities we currently regard as mere tools. None of this guarantees a painless transition. History offers no guarantee that every displaced worker will be made whole. It does give us good reason to distinguish between work we can already see disappearing and work whose economic value has not yet been discovered.

That is why we should not focus on whether AI will leave us with fewer jobs. The better question would be: what becomes scarce when cognition becomes cheap, who learns to supply it, and who ultimately receives the dividend?

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Sources

[1] Panikkar, Ashok. 2026. “The Most Dangerous Thing about AI.” Guerre and Shalom, 16 September 2026. https://danielclarkeserret.substack.com/p/the-most-dangerous-thing-about-ai

[2] OpenAI. 2023. “GPT-4 Technical Report.” https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/

[3] Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. 2019. “Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33 (2): 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.2.3

[4] International Labour Organization. 2025. “Generative AI and Jobs: A Refined Global Index of Occupational Exposure.” ILO Working Paper 140. https://www.ilo.org/publications/generative-ai-and-jobs-refined-global-index-occupational-exposure

[5] U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1962. U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1959, Vol. II, General Report, ch. 7, “Livestock and Livestock Products,” Tables 2, 3 and 18. https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/archive/files/1959-Livestock_and_Livestock_Products-TABLES-913-Table-02.pdf

[6] U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1956. U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1954, Vol. III, Agriculture 1954: A Graphic Summary, “Horses and Mules.” https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/archive/files/1954-Agriculture_1954_A_Graphic_Summary-MAPS_AND_CHARTS-1089-Table-32.pdf

[7] U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1949. Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945, ch. D, Series D 1–7. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1949/compendia/hist_stats_1789-1945/hist_stats_1789-1945-chD.pdf

[8] Leontief, Wassily. 1983. “Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income.” Population and Development Review 9 (3): 403–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/1973315

[9] Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2015. “Will Humans Go the Way of Horses?” Foreign Affairs 94 (4).

[10] David, Paul A. 1990. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80 (2): 355–61.

[11] Bessen, James. 2015. “Toil and Technology.” Finance & Development 52 (1). International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/bessen.htm

[12] Autor, David, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, and Bryan Seegmiller. 2024. “New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 139 (3): 1399–1465. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae008

[13] Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. 2026. AI Index Report 2026, “Economy.” https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/economy

[14] International Monetary Fund. 2024. “Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.” Staff Discussion Note SDN/2024/001.

[15] Korinek, Anton, and Donghyun Suh. 2024. “Scenarios for the Transition to AGI.” NBER Working Paper 32255. https://www.nber.org/papers/w32255

[16] Brynjolfsson, Erik, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen. 2026. “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, revised August 2026. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26/

[17] Humlum, Anders, and Emilie Vestergaard. 2025, revised March 2026. “Still Waters, Rapid Currents: Early Labor Market Transformation under Generative AI.” NBER Working Paper 33777. https://www.nber.org/papers/w33777

[18] Iscenko, Zanna, and Fabien Curto Millet. 2026. “Looking for the Ladder: Is AI Impacting Entry-Level Jobs?” Economic Innovation Group, American Worker Project, January 14, 2026. https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/TAWP-Iscenko-Millet.pdf

[19] Hosseini Maasoum, Seyed Mahdi, and Guy Lichtinger. 2025. “Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data.” SSRN Working Paper 5425555, last revised 6 June 2026. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5425555

[20] Brynjolfsson, Erik, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond. 2025. “Generative AI at Work.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 140 (2): 889–942. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae044

[21] Anthropic. 2025. “Anthropic Economic Index Report: Uneven Geographic and Enterprise AI Adoption.” September 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-geography

[22] Anthropic. 2026. “Anthropic Economic Index Report: Economic Primitives.” January 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-january-2026-report

[23] Faran, Oded J.K. 2026. “What Is Really Behind Academic AI Puritanism? On AI-Assisted Writing, Academic Credentials, and the Nature of Expertise.” Jacob’s Ledger, 9 August 2026.

Jacob's Ledger

What Is Really Behind Academic AI Puritanism?

[This piece is dedicated to Prof. Walter E. Block and Prof. Er’el Granot; my co-authors and personal friends…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Oded J.K Faran-Jacob's Ledger

[24] Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. 2018. Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

[25] Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence: The Ambiguous Labor Market Impact of Automating Prediction.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33 (2): 31–50. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.2.31

[26] Dell’Acqua, Fabrizio, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon, and Karim R. Lakhani. 2026. “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.” Organization Science 37 (2): 403–423. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.21838

[27] Autor, David. 2024. “Applying AI to Rebuild Middle Class Jobs.” NBER Working Paper 32140. https://www.nber.org/papers/w32140

[28] Becker, Gary S. 1964. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research; distributed by Columbia University Press.

[29] European Union Aviation Safety Agency. Easy Access Rules for Aircrew (Regulation (EU) No 1178/2011), provisions on zero-flight-time training. https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/document-library/easy-access-rules/online-publications/easy-access-rules-aircrew-regulation-eu-no

[30] Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Common Program Requirements (Residency), section on supervision. https://www.acgme.org/programs-and-institutions/programs/common-program-requirements/

[31] Legal Services Corporation. 2022. The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans. https://justicegap.lsc.gov/resource/executive-summary

[32] Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. 2025. AI Index Report 2025, ch. 1, “Research and Development.” https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai_ai-index-report-2025_chapter1_final.pdf

[33] Autor, David, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi. 2020. “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure.” American Economic Review 110 (10): 3139–83. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20170011

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Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

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Parts I to IV of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part V — The Dream After 2011

After 2011, the world saw the Kurds more clearly. The question was whether visibility could become protection and protection could become home.

Part V Introduction: The Dream After 2011 // Chapter 15: Rojava and the Syrian Earthquake

Chapter 16: ISIS and the Kurdish Moment

Chapter 17: A Moment of Dignity and the Punishment of Hope

2017 independence referendum, Kirkuk, Baghdad, Iran, Turkey, U.S. ambiguity and Kurdish miscalculation

The 2017 independence referendum was the moment when a morally legitimate Kurdish hope was asked to carry more strategic weight than the political machinery around it could bear.

This chapter argues a limited claim: the 2017 independence referendum was a genuine expression of Kurdish dignity and democratic desire, but dignity without enforceable protection became vulnerable to punishment.

This is plebiscitary anti-fungibility. The voter must not become only a number in a mandate. The flag must not replace the citizen. The map must not replace the villages, towns, disputed cities, minorities, families, workers, women, Pêşmerge, journalists, and young people exposed by the decision. A referendum can reveal the depth of a people’s longing, but it cannot by itself protect the people who carry that longing. Hope becomes responsible only when it refuses to make persons replaceable by the symbolic beauty of the vote.

It did not come from nowhere. It came after Anfal, after Helebje, after the safe haven, after the federal opening, after Article 140 had been delayed and hollowed out, after the Iraqi army collapsed before ISIS, after the Pêşmerge defended Erbil and Kirkuk, after Kurdish forces became indispensable to the anti-ISIS war, and after decades in which every Iraqi promise to the Kurds seemed either broken, postponed, or conditional.

For many Kurds, the referendum was not a reckless invention. It was the answer to a century of waiting.

It was also a one-day Kurdish attempt to experience political normalcy. For one day, Kurds were not asking to be admired as fighters, pitied as victims, managed as a minority, postponed as a problem, or used as a temporary ally. They were answering the state question in their own name. The vote said: we too are a people who wish to stand normally among other peoples, not forever as an exception inside someone else’s sovereignty.

The question placed before voters on 25 September 2017 was direct: did they want the Kurdistan Region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state? The answer was overwhelming. Results showed more than 92 percent voting “yes.” More than three million people participated. The emotional meaning was clear: after genocide, betrayal, federal ambiguity, Baghdad’s pressure, and the sacrifices of the anti-ISIS war, Kurds wanted the world to hear that their desire for statehood had not died.

But the world heard something different.

That was the tragedy of the normalcy claim. What Kurds experienced as a peaceful democratic answer, surrounding powers translated back into the old vocabulary of threat. A vote became destabilization. A people’s wish to stand normally among other peoples became a regional danger. The act Kurds understood as dignity was received by others as a breach in the cage.

Baghdad heard a challenge to Iraqi “sovereignty.” Iran heard a threat to its regional corridor, its influence in Iraq, and its own Kurdish question. Turkey heard the danger of a Kurdish state on its border, one that might inflame Kurdish aspirations inside Turkey and strengthen wider Kurdish nationalism.

The United States heard a distraction from the anti-ISIS campaign and a destabilizing rupture between two of its own partners: Baghdad and Erbil. Europe heard timing problems, legal concerns, and regional risk. The United Nations urged caution. Almost everyone told the Kurds to postpone.

They voted anyway.

To many Kurds, postponement did not sound like prudence; it sounded like the old language by which every Kurdish opening had been delayed until it disappeared.

This is why the referendum must be understood not only as a political event, but as a psychological event. Kurdish history had taught that postponement usually meant burial. Article 140 had been postponed. Self-rule had been postponed. Recognition had been postponed. Justice for Arabization had been postponed. The Kurdish leadership believed that if it waited for everyone else to approve the right moment, the right moment would never come.

That instinct was historically understandable.

It was also strategically not without serious risks.

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The referendum revealed the gap between Kurdish moral time and international diplomatic time. Kurdish moral time said: we have waited long enough. Diplomatic time said: not now, not like this, not with Kirkuk included, not while ISIS is still unfinished, not while Baghdad is recovering, not while Turkey and Iran are hostile, not without U.S. support, not without internal Kurdish unity, not without a clear plan for the morning after.

The Kurds had the stronger moral argument. Their opponents had the stronger coercive position.

This imbalance doomed the moment.

The inclusion of Kirkuk and other disputed territories made the referendum far more explosive. For Kurds, Kirkuk was not an optional add-on. It was the heart of the unresolved Kurdish question in Iraq: Arabization, oil, displacement, delayed Article 140, and the memory of lands taken by force. Kurdish forces had moved into Kirkuk in 2014 after Iraqi security forces collapsed during the ISIS offensive. From the Kurdish perspective, the Pêşmerge had protected Kirkuk when Baghdad failed. Why should the city be excluded from a vote on Kurdistan’s future?

But for Baghdad, Kirkuk was a red line. For Turkey, it was tied to Turkmen claims, energy routes, and fear of Kurdish statehood. For Iran, it was central to Iraqi balance and regional influence. For many Arabs and Turkmen inside Kirkuk, the referendum was seen as unilateral Kurdish annexation rather than democratic self-determination. The Kirkuk Provincial Council’s decision to participate was boycotted by many Arab and Turkmen members, showing how contested the process was even locally.

Kirkuk transformed the referendum from a vote of Kurdish self-expression into a territorial confrontation.

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In light of their incomprehensible decision-making processes, Guerre and Shalom has taken matters into our own hands. What we are about to say is neither ironic nor polemical. From now on, Guerre and Shalom will award an annual Global Peace Prize to someone who actually deserves it. This year is a little bit rushed due to events, but next year we will take down nominations from readers and invite the eventual winner to write an article in response.

So with no further ado, it is our honour to award this year’s G&S Global Prize for Peace to:

Hon. Irwin Cotler

Irwin is the mentor of my mentor, so hopefully he will receive our decision and be able to respond. In any event, below is our presentation speech.

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Guerre and Shalom has decided to award the Global Peace Prize to Hon. Irwin Cotler for his lifelong defence of human rights, his courage in confronting oppression and hatred and his unwavering belief that justice is the foundation of lasting peace.

For more than half a century, Irwin Cotler has demonstrated that the defence of human dignity requires not only legal knowledge, but moral courage. As a lawyer, scholar, parliamentarian and international human rights advocate, he has dedicated his life to protecting those whose freedoms have been denied by authoritarian governments, discriminatory systems, and campaigns of hatred.

Cotler’s commitment to human rights was forged through direct confrontation with injustice. During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, he stood in solidarity with those fighting racial oppression. He became part of the international legal effort to defend those who challenged the apartheid regime, including his work as counsel for Nelson Mandela, whose imprisonment had become a symbol of the global struggle against racial injustice.

In 1981, while visiting South Africa as a guest of the anti-apartheid movement, he delivered his historic address, “If Sharansky, Why Not Mandela?”, drawing attention to the persecution of both Soviet dissidents and South African opponents of apartheid. Following that speech, he was detained by the South African authorities and questioned by the apartheid government. Rather than retreat in the face of intimidation, he returned to Canada determined to continue the international campaign against apartheid and to support the struggle for freedom and equality.

That same conviction guided Cotler throughout his career. He became known internationally as “counsel for the oppressed,” representing prisoners of conscience and political prisoners whose governments sought to silence them. He advocated for Soviet Jewish refuseniks denied the right to emigrate, defended dissidents such as Natan Sharansky and worked on behalf of victims of persecution around the world.

In 2001, Cotler returned to Durban, South Africa for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism. At a conference intended to confront hatred and discrimination, he spoke out against the presence of antisemitism and against attempts to transform a forum against racism into one that targeted Jewish communities and the State of Israel. He insisted that the fight against racism must be universal and consistent: no community’s dignity can be defended by denying the dignity of another.

As Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003 to 2006, Cotler brought these principles into public service. He launched Canada’s first National Justice Initiative Against Racism and Hate, advanced legislation addressing the trafficking of women and children, initiated Canada’s first prosecution under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act for the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and worked to strengthen the independence and diversity of Canada’s justice system.

After leaving government, Cotler continued his global human rights work through the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, defending human rights defenders, prisoners of conscience, and victims of persecution. His work has reflected a consistent principle: that international law and human dignity must not depend on nationality, religion, political power or public opinion.

In recent years, Cotler has been a prominent voice in the rejection of allegations that Israel’s actions constitute genocide, while maintaining that the protection of civilians and respect for international humanitarian law are essential obligations in every conflict. His position reflects the central conviction that has guided his life: human rights must be defended consistently and without prejudice.

Irwin Cotler is honoured today because he has shown that peace is not achieved through silence or indifference. Peace requires the courage to confront injustice, the wisdom to defend universal principles and the determination to protect the rights of every human being.

For his lifelong commitment to justice, freedom and the defence of human dignity, the G&S Peace Prize is awarded to Hon. Irwin Cotler.

Irwin’s must-see recent speech at the “A Canary's Song: Antisemitism in Our Free and Democratic Society” Conference:

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The latest chapter of The Genocide of Truth, the book that tears down the foundations of The Great Genocide Blood Libel:

Today Navi Pillay, one of the devils that spread The Great Genocide Blood Libel, was awarded The Nobel “Eternal Islamist War” Prize. This tells you everything you need to know about our Palestinianised institutions, our contempt for Truth and the fall of our corrupted world.

This is why I was called to write The Genocide of Truth. This is why you need to sign up as paid today to read and spread the work that will bring the world back to sanity.

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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: The Deep Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

PART 1: The Tree of Knowledge

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority

PART 2: The Descent to Babylon

Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion // Chapter 11: Conversation // Chapters 12: Democratisation // Chapter 13: Sophistry // Chapter 14: Image

PART 3: The Rise of Byzantium

Chapter 15: Guilt // Chapter 16: Belief // Chapter 17: Christ // Chapter 18: Mission // Chapter 19: Doctrine // Chapter 20: Heresy // Chapter 21: Sin (below)

Chapter 21: Sin

The Pear Tree or The Tree of Knowledge?

The Historical Project to end Evil

What is it that causes human beings to engage in wrongdoing? This is a question that has perplexed philosophers, theologians and educationalists for centuries, being very much interrelated with the evergreen problem of evil. Its implications for modern-day malaises from schooling to anxiety relief to “genocide” activism are powerful and in need of immediate explication. Far from a matter of pure academic import, it is a topic that reaches to the very roots of the postlinguist religion and should be revived from the ancient vaults in which it is currently buried.

There are many explanations for the roots of human action. The perversity of our individual and collective behaviour has led many over the centuries to question the existence of a benevolent God. How is it that an all-powerful loving deity could permit the existence of evil on the planet which He is said to have created? It is not my intention to needlessly repeat the theodicies which have been well explained in my other work. Theologians, ancient and modern, have turned to the explanations of contrast, soul-making and, above all, free will to explain the coexistence of a monotheistic Creator with His fallen world.

Yet beyond the theodicies here and elsewhere mentioned, there is one classical response which requires further deliberation, that provided by the extinct world religion of Manichaeism. Unlike Christianity and Islam, which flourish numerically to this day, and Judaism, which survives lion-heartedly in diminished form, Manichaeism was the 7th world faith that is no more. In the classical world, it was a belief system of region-spanning popularity and amongst its celebrity adherents was a young Saint Augustine.

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Fully available for Paid Subscribers:

The Ancient Woke of Manichaeism

Manichaeism was a faith which spoke of the existence of two deities, one good and one evil. In the Roman world of the early Church, its followers identified the Creator “God of the Old Testament” as being the God of darkness in contrast with the “loving God” of the New. His supposed evilness was demonstrated not only by his anthropomorphic jealousy and regular interventions to smite the disobedient, but more fundamentally by His association with matter. As the creator of material things, He was intimately associated with the sinfulness of the flesh. With the spiritual being inherently superior to the material - and the former perpetually being in conflict with the latter - YHWH was the Satanic force keeping us in touch with wrongdoing.

As a Jew, the author is naturally uncomfortable with the literal demonization of the Hebrew Bible, but as a purported resolution to the problem of evil, one can see its attractions. It is easy to understand the cruelty and suffering of this life if it is implicit in the material substance of things, a substance which was created and maintained by an all-powerful divine force. The spiritual good God may try to aid us in our fight against the flesh, but we are confounded by the material reality in which we live.

Nonetheless, this creed faces some severe problems, and not merely the anger of long-defamed Jewish theology. From a classical Christian perspective, it reopens the Pandora's box of Byzantine era heresies. If the flesh is inherently evil, then the “good God Jesus” could not have been made of such a substance. He may have appeared to have been a human; he may have seemed to have died on the Cross; but in reality he was a non-human person of full divinity.

More practically for the modern era, Manichaeism, intentionally or otherwise, presupposes a world of limited accountability. If the physical human is so wracked by unavoidable sin, then he is helpless in its wake. There is nothing he can do; therefore no wrongdoing can be attributed to its author. Such a rationalist philosophy would either lead followers to chronic inaction underwritten by guilt or, more likely, a life pursuing power, pleasure and meaninglessness with gay abandon. Lack of enforced responsibility births necessary impunity. Who is fallen man to overcome the evil god of flesh?

Manichaeism is the classical equivalent of scientific or historical determinism. “I can’t help it” philosophised. I act as I do because of my genes, historical injustice and how I was beaten up as a child. I come from a victim group and was blighted with a disability. In brief, it’s not my fault Officer Krupke.

In truth, Manichaeism never died; it just morphed into modern mutations. Wokeness and the like are its contemporary bastard children. As a philosophy, it was an intellectually satisfying explanation of evil, but a morally warped basis for a just society. It was time for St Augustine to look elsewhere.

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Neoplatonism: “Education is the solution”

The second stop on Augustine’s train of intellectual discovery was Neoplatonism. Would the celebrated Athenian’s teachings be able to explain the perpetual wrongdoing of humankind?

We're all familiar with the Allegory of the Cave, with the unfortunate inhabitants chained against the subterranean wall, all the while seeing reflected shadows of the reality beyond. To those who need a refresher, this description from Neel Burton is appropriately evocative:

“Human beings have spent all their lives in an underground cave or den which has a mouth open towards the light. They have their legs and their necks chained so that they cannot move, and can see only in front of them, towards the back of the cave. Above and behind them a fire is blazing, and between them and the fire there is a raised way along which there is a low wall. Men pass along the wall carrying all sorts of statues, and the fire throws the shadows of these statues onto the back of the cave. All the prisoners ever see are the shadows, and so they suppose that the shadows are the objects themselves.”

The famed metaphor presents the cave-dwelling residents as being in a state of ignorance. Uneducated and unenlightened, they mistake the unreality of the reflected images as being the genuine, unmediated truth. Having (literally) turned their backs on veracity, which is to say the undefiled light of The Sun beyond, they stumble around in their ignorance.

According to Neoplatonist thought, it is this absence of education that directly leads to wrongdoing. The Transcendent One, the Sun of the Allegory, is pure goodness and unadulterated light. Once we have ascended from the cave and fully turned our faces to the purity of the Good, wrongdoing will be banished from our lives. In contrast, turning our backs to the Sun will lead us, by our own hand, to our own demise.

The Transcendent One can create no evil nor be held responsible for the existence of sin in the world, but Her absence can lead to meaning-deprived groping and a nihilism which seeks only for power and riches. Thus there is no divine-created evil in this world; only that which we create for ourselves by turning our back on the One.

On one level, Neoplatonism is intellectually satisfying as it conceives of a finely-graded ladder between complete materialism and complete spirituality. As we gradually ascend from the cave and become closer to the One, we desist in our ignorance and thereby our resultant wrongdoing. It makes it clear that there is a ladder between materialism and spirituality, whereby we must ascend to learn the highest truth (education) before descending to apply our learnings in the world (service). It also absolves the Higher Being of blame for human misery and places full accountability upon the citizen.

Put simply, where there is evil, we are to blame. If we do wrong, it is because we decided to remain in ignorance. If we - the uneducated - chose to do evil, it is us that must be held accountable. If our world is absent of inspiration and meaning, it is because, having ascended to the truth, we refused to return to serve our fellow countrymen. Neoplatonism is a vision of an educated citizenry, the enlightened teaching the ignorant and spiritual advancement leading to service in the material realm.

Neoplatonism continues to be one of the greatest forces in the modern world. Although not named as such, its presence is all around us; those who say that the answer to every problem is education. No matter the issue, they claim that there is nothing that the right schooling cannot correct. Yet, as with many such easy political formulas, it denies the complexity of reality.

We need not look far to see evidence to the contrary: educated men turned evil. Did not Robert Mugabe work as a school teacher? Did not Hitler and Stalin read widely and enjoy classical music? Isn't postlinguistic antisemitism rampant on American university campuses, more contagious among the educated than in the impoverished streets of Mississippi? In each and every here listed case, there are multiple factors at play, Yet it seems that education is no simplistic cure to evil —and in some campus-confined cases, it actually exacerbates it behind the sainted cloak of rational detachment.

So if pure education fails, where else can we turn?

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The Case of the Pear Orchard

Ultimately Augustine was to reject both Manichaeism and Neoplatonism and it is this intellectual journey that is clearly laid out in his famed Confessions. For the purposes of this chapter, we are going to focus on Augustine's story of the Pear Orchard, a tale which holds significant insight on the question of wrongdoing. Far from being an ancient story of little interest, it is an anecdote of far-reaching contemporary implication.

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9th October 2026: The Day Truth Died

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The Green Party were wrong to vote that “Australianism equals racism”. Yet in facilitating antisemitic violence from illegal Islamist settlers like Farhat, who were implanted by white Europeans in formerly Australian sovereign territory, the Australian judiciary are allowing impunity to run rampant in Sydney. In the past, Australia used to lock up its convicts, but apparently this policy only applies to 19th Century Englishmen. Sanctions may follow from the British government.

Join the fight against anti-Western Palestinianism today. Sign up as paid to Guerre and Shalom - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

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PREVIOUSLY ON THE AUSTRALIA SYMPOSIUM:

A natural experiment is underway in Australia to discover what is required for something to be considered antisemitic. Apparently, driving into a Jewish neighborhood, setting fire to a vehicle, and scrawling “Fuk Israel” across cars and buildings does not meet the standard.

According to Justice Desmond Fagan of the New South Wales Supreme Court, these gross acts of Jew hatred were not antisemitism and just a “crude political expression of contempt and dismissal of a foreign state.” It was just vigorous civic engagement.

Perhaps Mohommed Farhat—a man with a Hezbollah tattoo etched into his neck who caused over $100,000 in property damage—was simply confused about the venue for the local Model UN debate.

This ugly episode is the latest sign that Australia is culturally and politically in deep trouble. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s shameful record on antisemitism is something to behold. It is worth familiarizing yourself with it because the dynamics are not unique to Australia and may be playing out in your country.

In his ruling in State of New South Wales v Farhat, Fagan rejected an application for an Extended Supervision Order against a dangerous vandal and used the bench to deliver a masterclass in the disease rotting Western institutions: the aggressive, pedantic, and willful determination to define antisemitism out of existence.

If you ever wanted an autopsy of how an allegedly civilized judiciary dismantles its own immune system to accommodate Islamist intimidation, this judgment is your specimen.

Fagan, whose honorific of Justice I have removed from this story due to his unworthiness, is a disgrace among disgraces. His name is now forever tarnished.

Consider the facts. In late 2024, amid the global wave of attacks on Jewish communities after the October 7 pogrom, Mohommed Farhat went on a 41-minute arson and vandalism rampage. He did not spray-paint the French Consulate or torch a car outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He went to Woollahra—a heavily Jewish eastern suburb in Sydney—where he torched a car, wrote “Fuk Israel,” and sprayed slogans referencing foreign terror outfits.

To any life form with a functioning central nervous system, the semiotics were unambiguous. You do not travel to a Jewish enclave to deliver a scholarly critique of the Knesset’s coalition agreements. You go there to terrorize Jews.

Yet Fagan declared that the location “does not imbue the curse with an antisemitic character.” Why? Because, Fagan reasoned, the word was “Israel,” not “Jews.”

It is an intellectual trick of breathtaking dishonesty that reveals Fagan to be a man of extraordinarily low character, a blight on the New South Wales judiciary, and a stain upon the Australian Commonwealth. Clearly, this Australian government is unaware of the degree to which its international reputation has been battered.

Context affects what words mean. Sieg Heil translates from German as “Hail Victory.” There is no mention of Jews or anything Jewish. Yet if a gang of jackbooted thugs marches past the Great Synagogue on Elizabeth Street screaming “Hail Victory,” no sane person shrugs and calls it an enthusiastic tribute to German track and field.

Fagan’s kindergarten hermeneutics have handed psychotic jihadists and other lunatics a bulletproof legal defense: simply swap the noun. As long as you scream Zionist or Israel while smashing shop windows, setting things on fire and menacing children, the law will treat you not as a bigot, but as an impassioned, if somewhat unrefined, geopolitical commentator.

Having sanitized the crime, the judge then launched an unlettered sortie into amateur sociology and rabbinics. To justify his absurd conclusion that attacking Israel has nothing to do with Jews, Fagan turned to the Jewish Council of Australia.

Oh dear.

For those unfamiliar with the Australian landscape, the Jewish Council of Australia is an unrepresentative fringe group—an ideological astroturf outfit created post-October 7 whose membership would struggle to fill a minibus. It exists entirely to appear on state television and to provide cover for anti-Israel agitators by murmuring, “Not in our name.”

Fagan cited this tiny sliver of marginal dissent as proof that “many Jewish people criticize Israel.”

Meanwhile, the judge said that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ)—the peak, democratically elected representative body of the Australian Jewish community that has represented over 85 percent of the country’s synagogues, schools, and communal organizations for generations—was a “transparently pro-Israel lobbying organisation.”

Notice the ancient, poisonous taxonomy at work. The fringe, tokenized Jews who validate the judge’s progressive worldview are elevated as thoughtful, authentic moral authorities. The vast majority of Australian Jews, who maintain historical, religious, and familial connections to their ancestral homeland, are smeared as foreign agents and shills.

The good Jews testify; the bad Jews lobby.

It is an outrage that an Australian judge deployed this classic antisemitic trope from the bench—and did so without even giving the ECAJ the elementary procedural courtesy of answering the slur.

The real venom of Fagan’s judgment, however, was reserved for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

A shadow cabal did not conjure the IHRA definition out of thin air the way Fagan did his legal reasoning, if one can call it that. The IHRA definition was drafted over years by the world’s leading Holocaust scholars, sociologists, and legal experts, and has been formally adopted by more than 40 democratic nations—including Australia—and hundreds of universities, police forces, and municipal councils worldwide.

Far from outlawing criticism of Israel, the definition explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

What the IHRA definition does do—and why jihadis and the Far Left hate it with volcanic fury—is call out the obvious: that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, applying double standards not required of any other democratic nation, and holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel are contemporary manifestations of antisemitism.

Fagan would have none of it.

He dismissed the IHRA core text as “verbose and imprecise,” claimed it was “detached from reality,” and declared that it had no place in an Australian courtroom. Then, shedding any pretense of judicial temperance, he accused the IHRA of seeking to “graft onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel.”

Take a moment to savor that word: parasitic.

Of all the adjectives available, he miraculously landed on the foundational slur of 20th-century European fascism and Nazism.

Naturally, the Australian Greens, the local Stalinist party, popped the champagne. Greens MP Sue Higginson raced in front of the cameras to celebrate that Fagan had struck a blow against the IHRA standard. Of course they cheered. When the yardstick of antisemitism is destroyed, Jew haters are free to spew their bile without being held to account.

Make no mistake. This is not a dispute over statutory interpretation but an exercise in complete cultural cowardice. Western elites have decided that they will recognize antisemitism under exactly one condition: when it conforms to a black-and-white photograph from 1944.

If you do not show up in a Nazi SS uniform, sporting a swastika armband, shouting about skull shapes and shouting Juden, our progressive institutions throw up their hands in theatrical perplexity: “Gosh, it’s just so complex! Could it be an architectural grievance? Maybe it’s a zoning protest!”

This is happening in Britain and Australia:

Yet antisemitism has never been a static ideology. It mutates to match the host culture’s dominant moral vocabulary—and everyone, including Fagan, knows this.

• In the Middle Ages, when religion was the supreme authority, Jews were hated for their religion—Christ-killers, well-poisoners, desecrators of the Host.

• In the 19th and 20th centuries, when science and nationalism ruled, Jews were hated for their race—biological pollutants threatening national purity.

• In the 21st century, when human rights and anti-colonialism are the Western elite’s secular sacraments, Jews are hated for their nation-state—settler-colonialists, apartheid-mongers, genocidaires.

The hatred is identical; the pretext modernized.

By insisting that antisemitism can only mean “hostility to Jews as Jews”—divorced from the real-world vessel of modern Jewish identity, which is the State of Israel—judges such as Fagan are demanding that Jews surrender their reality to suit legal pedantry.

They are telling Australian Jews that their fear is illegitimate, their communal structures are suspect, and that their tormentors are simply misunderstood activists exercising their democratic rights with a spray can and an accelerant.

There is an adage from the Talmud (Pirkei Avot 1:18): “By three things is the world sustained: by justice, by truth, and by peace.” When justice becomes semantic gymnastics, and truth is sacrificed to placate political fashion, peace is the first thing that burns. And Fagan has given his judicial blessing to the mob and is letting it burn.

The Farhat ruling is a signal to every radical, every Islamist thug, and and every extremist in Australia that the judiciary has their back. As long as they keep the word “Jew” out of their mouth and substitute “Israel,” they can terrorize Jewish neighborhoods, firebomb vehicles, and intimidate a vulnerable minority with virtual impunity. Fagan claims he was protecting the right to legitimate political protest.

Not a single person believes this.

What Fagan has legitimized is the intimidation of Australia’s Jewish citizens. In doing so he has also destroyed the integrity of the New South Wales bench, and proved that contemporary Australia has not progressed much beyond its notoriously racist past.

If lighting fires in a Jewish street while cursing the Jewish state is not antisemitism, then the word is now meaningless—and that is precisely the point. Removing any meaningful definition of antisemitism licenses and normalizes it.

Australian Jews now know exactly where they stand—and that when it comes to their safety, some members of the judiciary have joined the government in the hunting party.

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From the man who helped save Western civilisation to a puffin and a bumblebee. Britain’s latest banknote makeover raises a rather uncomfortable question: why are we so determined to replace the people who made our history?

There was a time when Britain celebrated its achievements, honoured its heroes and understood that national identity was something worth preserving. Today, apparently, Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing are to be replaced on our banknotes by a hedgehog, a barn owl, a puffin and a bumblebee. No, this isn’t a rejected Monty Python sketch. It is the latest announcement from the Bank of England, which has decided that the next generation of British currency should celebrate wildlife rather than the extraordinary individuals who helped shape our civilisation.

Now, I happen to love animals. I have considerably more respect for the average hedgehog than I do for most of Westminster, and I suspect a bumblebee could make a better job of running the Treasury. But this isn’t about wildlife. It’s about symbolism, national identity and the extraordinary ease with which we seem prepared to dispense with the visible reminders of our own history.

Churchill wasn’t simply a politician. He became the defining voice of British resistance during one of civilisation’s darkest hours. Austen helped shape English literature, Turner transformed British art, and Turing helped lay the foundations of modern computing while contributing to Britain’s wartime codebreaking effort. These are people whose achievements resonate far beyond our shores, whose names belong not merely to Britain but to the history of human progress. And yet, when it comes to the symbols of our national currency, apparently a puffin will do just as well.

The Bank of England insists that this is about celebrating nature and improving banknote security. Nearly half a million people responded to its wildlife consultation, while an earlier exercise found nature to be the most popular proposed theme. Fair enough. The public was consulted, and the new notes will still carry the monarch’s portrait. But that doesn’t make the broader question disappear. Why must celebrating one aspect of Britain mean removing another? Why couldn’t our wildlife share the notes with the remarkable men and women who made this country what it is?

And this is where the matter becomes rather more significant than the redesign of a five-pound note. National identity isn’t maintained exclusively through grand speeches, military parades or flags fluttering above government buildings. It lives in the ordinary things: our traditions, monuments, institutions, literature, architecture and currency. These are the everyday reminders of who we are, where we came from and what previous generations achieved. Remove enough of those reminders, however innocently each decision may be presented, and something important begins to disappear from public consciousness.

Of course, replacing Churchill’s portrait doesn’t erase him from the history books, and there is no evidence that the Bank’s decision was deliberately intended to suppress British history. But that is precisely why the debate matters. Cultural inheritance can be weakened without a grand conspiracy or an explicit campaign against it. Sometimes it happens through a thousand seemingly harmless administrative decisions, each perfectly reasonable when examined in isolation, but collectively changing the symbols through which a nation recognises itself.

Britain has an extraordinary history. We gave the world advances in parliamentary government, engineering, science, medicine, literature, industry and technology. Our achievements deserve recognition, just as our failures deserve honest examination. A mature country should be capable of doing both without becoming embarrassed by its own existence. National pride need not mean pretending the past was perfect. It means understanding that a nation’s inheritance is worth remembering, discussing and passing on.

The irony, of course, is that the Bank of England has been celebrating notable historical figures on its notes since 1970. More than half a century of recognising the individuals who shaped the country is now giving way to what might best be described as a beautifully illustrated wildlife collection. The new notes won’t appear immediately; their design and production will take several years. But the direction has been settled.

And perhaps the most telling thing is how easily we have arrived at this point. We have become accustomed to treating our national symbols as interchangeable decorations rather than expressions of a shared inheritance. A country’s currency is more than a means of payment. It is something that passes through millions of hands, carries the authority of the state and quietly tells a story about the nation that issued it. For decades that story celebrated British achievement. Soon, it will celebrate British wildlife instead.

I have nothing against hedgehogs, owls, puffins or bumblebees. They are wonderful creatures and deserve our protection. But there is a rather obvious difference between celebrating the natural world and honouring those whose courage, imagination and genius helped build the modern one.

Perhaps the real question isn’t why Churchill is disappearing from our banknotes. Perhaps it’s why we have become so comfortable with the idea that the people who shaped Britain no longer need to feature on them.

A nation that ceases to celebrate its history should not be surprised when future generations struggle to understand what it stands for.

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* Source: Bank of England announcement, 8 October 2026. The Bank has not yet confirmed which animal will appear on each denomination.

From our International Law Correspondent:

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The Claim

An indigenous Australian activist known as Uncle Robbie recently tried to prosecute Britain’s King Charles. King Charles serves as Australia’s head of state, and Robbie says that Australia is perpetuating a continuing genocide against its indigenous people. As evidence, he claims that indigenous Australians currently die younger, suffer worse health problems, and are more likely to be imprisoned or unemployed than other groups.

On September 28th, the Court of Appeal of Australia’s state of Victoria dismissed the case. One might assume the court had decided that whatever injustices Australia’s First Nations currently suffer, there is no basis for attributing personal responsibility to King Charles. That would have been completely reasonable and made perfect sense. But they didn’t. Instead, the court refused to even examine the issue, explaining that there was no need. Under Australian law, when it comes to genocide against First Nations, impunity is almost complete.

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Domestic Law

Uncle Robbie invoked three separate legal bases for his challenge: Australian statutory law, common law, and laws of the First Nations. The court dismissed them all.

In 2002, Australia made genocide, along with war crimes and crimes against humanity, punishable by Federal statute. But that came with a catch: prosecutions could only proceed with the written consent of the Attorney-General. And this is no mere oversight: Parliament even considered removing that requirement in 2024–25, but decided not to.

The rationale for this requirement was to prevent Australian courts from being flooded with lawsuits that were either frivolous or invoked universal jurisdiction in ways that were politically problematic. But since atrocity crimes such as genocide are most often committed by the state, this also means that Australian law gives that same state a veto over prosecution of allegations against it. The Attorney General does not even have to provide a reason, and their decision cannot be appealed to any other political body or court. So under Australian statutory law, Uncle Robbie cannot prosecute a head of state such as King Charles, or any other government officials, unless the state itself allows it.

Under Australian common law, criminal prosecutions can be initiated even by private citizens and the Attorney General’s blessing is not needed. But here the court again found a catch. Even though Australia is a party to both the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute, the court said that Australia’s legislature had never explicitly made these crimes part of the common law. So prosecution on that basis wasn’t allowed.

With common and statutory law closed, Uncle Robbie also stated that genocide was a crime under ‘The laws of our land for over 65,000 years.’ In other words, the conduct of colonial settlers was forbidden by the laws of the First Nations themselves.

But the Court of Appeal ruled that Victorian courts did not have authority to prosecute violations of First Nations’ laws. And due to the very actions that Robbie alleged constituted genocide, First Nations have no parallel court system capable of conducting the kind of criminal prosecution he was seeking.

This leaves an appeal to Australia’s High Court as Robbie’s only remaining option, and it seems extremely unlikely.

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International Law

Uncle Robbie intends now to turn to international courts. “The International Criminal Court (ICC) will expose Australia for what it really is — a lying, racist, illegal occupation committing genocide,” he was quoted as saying.

Unfortunately for him, however, at the ICC he will also likely have trouble. There are only three ways the ICC can begin an investigation, and all seem either unlikely or completely closed.

The first is a UN Security Council referral. But that is highly implausible, if for no other reason than because Britain has a veto. Second, a state party can refer a situation to the prosecutor, but Australia is obviously unlikely to ask the ICC to investigate itself. Robbie is hoping that Turkey may do so, but there does not seem to be evidence that will occur. And Australian First Nations are not able to join the ICC and thereby become eligible to make referrals themselves since they are not recognized as a state.

The final method is that the ICC Prosecutor may begin an investigation on their own if they come to possess reliable evidence. This is what Uncle Robbie is evidently hoping, and he plans to send the evidence he has accumulated to the prosecutor. But the odds are very poor.

One reason is that the ICC cannot consider crimes before 2002. So Thorpe would have to show that the harms First Nations are facing are actually due to an ongoing genocide, not merely the lasting effects of genocidal acts committed prior.

A larger issue is gravity. The ICC was designed to prosecute only the most serious of all crimes, and its prosecutor is supposed to consider the scale, nature, manner and impact. With the court already struggling to devote resources to situations involving mass killing and widespread destruction, such as Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the Prosecutor would prioritize Thorpe’s allegations.

There’s one other possibility which seems apt, but Uncle Robbie appears not to have pursued: an ICC charge of aggression. The crime of aggression occurs when a political or military leader orders a use of force ‘in manifest violation of the UN Charter’, such as for an invasion to conquer territory. And this is essentially what Uncle Robbie claims: the British conquered the territory of Australia’s First Nations, and that territory was never ceded from the First Nations to the British via any treaty or agreement. So Australia remains occupied indigenous territory, and continuing occupation is an act of aggression.

But even if that’s true, Robbie faces an insurmountable hurdle. According to the ICC’s Rome Statute, the crime of aggression can only be committed against a state. The governments that negotiated how the ICC prosecutes aggression set it up so attacks against indigenous peoples don’t qualify.

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Tolerance of Impunity

We’ve heard so often about Gaza that impunity cannot be tolerated. Not only does impunity deny justice to victims, but it shatters faith in the law itself. And we’re told that future peace is impossible if courts do not first mete out retributive justice.

But when it comes to genocide against First Nations, both Australia’s domestic legal system and the international system seem to feel very comfortable with impunity. We don’t hear anything about how, unless those responsible for the harms inflicted on First Nations are held to legal account, the entire rules-based order is threatened. Nothing about how without justice for First Nations, future peace with them will always be impossible. And we’re never told that if genocide against indigenous peoples isn’t prosecuted, it will establish a culture of impunity that will inevitably lead to more atrocities in the future.

It might make you wonder, why not?

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Today the coalition building begins: not the pro-Israel coalition, but the anti-Palestinianist coalition. The coalition of those who are fed up with Palestinian flags in their streets and Palestinian indoctrination on their campuses. The coalition of those who want their countries back from far-left ideologues.

For too long the Jews have got their strategy all wrong. They’ve been waving blue and white on LinkedIn, speaking of the bravery of the IDF and writing angry polemics to make us all feel better. Such posts have their place and I’ve been proud to be part of that school. But we cannot deny the demographics. Jews represent a tiny proportion of the world’s population. Even when we add to the mix our most fervent allies - the Kurds, the Evangelical Christians, the Persians - we still collectively represent a small minority against a tide of Palestinianism.

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The important political fact we have forgotten is this: all successful coalitions are anti not pro. The hate marchers who swarm throughout our streets and burn our schools throughout France are no cohesive political bloc. They include Islamists, Marxists, anarchists and young people ”who have seen the pictures from Gaza”. Together they represent nothing but The Fight Against the Machine. Yet their strength comes from unity masking incoherence. In pursuit of a greater goal, they put aside their contradictory views on social morality.

We must learn from our enemies. Most people in the world are not pro-Israel, not because they hate the country but because it’s a foreign land. They have no obligation to love Israel anymore than I have an obligation to love Azerbaijan. Marching soldiers on Masada won’t move them. Tears from Matula will leave them cold. They have enough to worry about paying for their bills and supporting their children through education. Quite naturally, they don’t have the bandwidth nor the will to engage their minds in a foreign conflict.

Our New Book on October 7th and The Holiday from History. Support. Like. Spread.

Yet though Israel may bore them, Palestine enrages them. Not the foreign territory with foreign people, but the fact that Palestine is here: in our streets, in our councils, in our universities and in our immigration policy. How can Hackney reject the Union flag in favor of the Palestinian banner of war? How can professors who hate the West be allowed to teach in our universities? How can foreign policy be based upon an obsessive vision of Islamist rule instead of the British or French or Dutch interest? How can priority be given to Palestinian and Afghan immigrants, who will inevitably import their hate, over those from nations of peace? (Indeed why do we not control our borders at all?) And most of all, how can a foreign conflict from a foreign region be dominating our news day after day for 3 years while the long-residing populations of Europe are seeing their standards of living (and cultural pride) eroded by the day.

It is of course true that we must have Kurds and Persians and Evangelical Christians in our coalition, but seen as a common fight against Palestinianism, the coalition expands to the vast majority. Mr Singh and Mr Sharma and Mr Adebayo all agree with us. So do Ted the Electrician and Jim the Plumber. The disappointed Democrats are with us. The betrayed feminists are with us. The liberal democrats are with us too – those who see their civilisational debate descending into slogan. From non-Muslim ethnic minorities to the vast majority of indigenous Europeans, all want an end to Palestinianism. Not because they are pro-Israel, but because they are anti-Palestinianist. They want their country back, and in the case of our hard-working minority populations, they want the country they came to back.

Unlike the coalition of our adversaries, this is a coalition of genuine intellectual diversity. Susan the feminist and Mr Igbo from Nigeria see gay rights differently. Ex-democrats love abortion, while the Evangelical Christian does not. Mrs Aditya is still concerned about racism. Jane the weightlifter wants hymns back in schools. Yet all accept the ground rules: democratic debate and playing by the rules. They agree that immigration should be decided democratically. They oppose riots and hate marchers. They support solemn assembly for our war dead. They agree that the British and French and Dutch national interest comes first.

This Manifesto naturally generalizes. There are many Muslims who support our views. There are many Jews and Sikhs and Hindus and electricians who are useful idiots for terrorism. Yet in all cases we are speaking of minorities of otherwise reliably civilisational groups and democracy, for better or worse, is about demographic weight. That is why a Hindu heavy Leicester-constituency turned Conservative in 2024. That’s why Indian Harrow stayed firm against the Starmer wave. That’s why Kemi’s white working class constituency voted for a Nigerian Tory. That’s why Muslim constituency after Muslim constituency went to the despicable Gaza independents. Demography commands us and we are the majority.

From France to Britain, from the USA to Australia, all of us sit meekly while a small minority dictate the terms of our national life. Together we can defeat them democratically. Apart we are doomed.

This is why Guerre and Shalom: The World’s Intelligent Journal exists. It’s an intellectual salon for the fightback. The editor is pro-Israel, but his readers need just be anti-Palestinianist. The editor has a particular views on economics, but his contributors may disagree. That’s fine. It’s a democracy. That’s what we are trying to protect.

To this end, we do not just write articles about Israel. We write articles about civilizational struggles in France and attacks on morality in India. We stretch from America to Europe to Kurdistan and beyond. We include feminists and anti-feminists and talk about AI. We bore the reader to tears with philosophy of language. We do everything that a university should do and doesn’t and we show solidarity with the struggles of anti-Palestinianists everywhere. From the embattled streets of France we hear their voice. In the terrified suburbs of Germany, we call them in solidarity.

In doing so we not only fight the far-left, but the far-right. Where anti-Palestinianists feel they have nowhere to turn, they will vote for Vance and Le Pen and the despicable AFD. Yet when we listen, Ted the electrician will vote for sanity in a party that shuns antisemitism.

This is a project that will be unattractive to the right-wing Likud Jew, he and she who is weaned on the presumption that “they’re all against us”. They are NOT all against us. A small, but influential minority are against us and we must defeat them. And why? Not only for the good of the Jews - who have survived so much worse than this - but for the future of the West that gave our planet civilization in a world of darkness.

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Two days ago I got my monthly paycheck: €1399. That’s about €180 more than the minimum wage. My wife is studying for her degree. So we have just €1399 a month with average rents €900 a month. I earn approximately €950 a month from Substack paid subscriptions.

So your paid subs aren’t pocket money or a sideline or a nice to have. They are essential for my financial survival.

In my current position I am often too exhausted to write. So I have a choice. Give up on Substack and become trapped in eternal poverty. Or get so many subs than I can go part time and eventually carry on with this important work with full commitment. It isn’t a blog - it is a free publishing house in a world of unrestrained antisemitism and unconscionable Palestinianism. It is also my only path to professional dignity.

Help me escape from prison so that I can interpret dreams in Pharoah’s palace.

Please give generously.

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Holiday From History · Before Part One · Preface & Introduction

Uri Zehavi is our new Israel Correspondent, writing a weekly news brief on all things Israel and releasing a longer monthly piece on domestic Israeli affairs. We are sure that this news brief, linked to detailed information from the Mitzpe Institute, will become one of the go-to websites for Israel News.

Meanwhile Uri returns today with a timely book on how the West has taken holiday from history. Believing that peace is the natural condition of mankind and that the dark side of human nature has left us for warmer, idealistic shores, we have forgotten to defend ourselves and our values. We have wrongly believed in the “End of History”. Uri wakes us up from our slumber, starting with the day that changed the world: October 7th 2023. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

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About the book. On October 7, 2023, Israel paid the bill for thirty years of Western complacency in a single morning. Holiday From History is the forensic account: how the post-Cold War West convinced itself history had ended, why the warnings did not break the spell, and what the collapse now reveals about the institutions meant to defend free nations.

Get the book: Paperback · Hardcover · Kindle

About the author. Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute and publisher of Israel Brief. He is the author of Rooted Truth, serialised here on Guerre & Shalom, Rooted in Judea, and Letters Across the Table.

The Idol of Peace

Preface

You can carry the thesis of this book in a single sentence, before you read a word of the argument behind it. Peace is not the natural condition of mankind. It is an achievement, held only for as long as someone is willing to guard it, and a civilization that mistakes it for the default has already begun to lose it.

That sentence was close to unsayable in the rooms where Western policy got made for most of my life. The Cold War ended, the defense budgets came down, and a generation of foreign ministries and editorial boards built a worldview on the premise that great-power war was finished and the work left was administration. I name the architects and the doctrines in the chapters that follow, because the premise did not come from nowhere and the people who held it had addresses. The argument of this book is that they were wrong, that the evidence they were wrong sat in plain view the entire time, and that the bill for the error came due on a single morning in October 2023.

I write as a Jew, and the tradition I joined keeps two words for the thing those rooms forgot. One is tikkun olam — repair of the world — the phrase Western progressives borrowed and printed on the tote bag. The other is shmirah: guardianship, the watch. The tradition keeps them bolted together. We pray for peace and we hire a guard for the synagogue door. We set out to repair the world and we assume it still holds people who would rather break it, and us. A people that spent two thousand years as the standing case study in what happens when the watch goes unmanned does not get to treat safety as the weather. It turns out nobody else gets to either. They only thought they did.

So this book is for three readers, the three named on its dedication page. The Jew who felt the floor move in the autumn of 2023 and has been looking for the structure underneath the fear. The Christian who loves Israel and has begun to understand, correctly, that whatever is being tested on the Jews is being measured for everyone else in the room. And the citizen of no particular tribe in this fight who has watched a decade of headlines with a thickening suspicion that the people paid to explain the world have it backwards, and who wants the suspicion either confirmed or laid to rest on the evidence.

I am an exasperated realist. Some of the people I love most have settled on calling that pessimism, and they are wrong, with my affection. I remain, after all of it, hopeful — but hope is not a forecast, and it has never once stood a watch in place of a person willing to stand it. What follows is the account of a thirty-year holiday from that plain knowledge — how it began, what it cost, and what staying awake is going to ask of the rest of us now that it is over.

October 7, 2023

Introduction

At dawn the sky over the western Negev was clear. It was Simchat Torah, the morning that closes the long harvest festival, when the yearly reading of the Torah ends and begins again in the same breath. On the kibbutzim strung along the Gaza fence, families were sleeping in. In a field outside Re’im, a few thousand young people were coming down off a night of dancing. The first sirens sounded at six twenty-nine.

What came through the fence in the next hours has been documented to the minute, and this book documents it in its place. For these opening pages one figure is enough. By the time the army retook the last of the communities nearly two days later, roughly twelve hundred people were dead, the majority of them civilians, hundreds murdered inside their own homes, and the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust had been carried out inside the one country built precisely so that it could never happen again.

I am not going to walk you through the killing here. You have seen the footage, or you have made a decision not to, and either way the morning itself is not the subject of this book. The subject is the thirty years that made the morning possible — the long, comfortable, expensively maintained assumption, held in capitals that were not Jerusalem, that history had quieted to a hum and the serious work left was logistics. October 7 was the invoice. It was itemized in Hebrew, but the charges had been accruing in Washington, Brussels, and London for more than a generation, and the people who let them accrue are, for the most part, still in the room.

That is why a book about Israel turns, in the end, into a book about everyone standing behind it. The bill arrived here first because Israel sits on the seam, where the comfortable world is stitched to the one that never agreed the fighting was over. The Jews are the people history keeps wiring as the smoke detector, and then resenting when the alarm goes off. Whatever is coming for everyone tends to reach a Jewish address a few years early. It reached this one on a Saturday morning, and the smoke had a return label.

So I wrote it for you, and I mean you in particular, in one of three chairs. If you are a Jew who felt the floor go that autumn and has been hunting for the architecture under the fear, it is here. If you are a Christian who loves this country and has begun to see that the people stress-testing the Jews are taking notes for a wider audience, it is here. And if you belong to no side in this and have spent a decade watching the explainers explain while suspecting they have the story upside down, you are the reader I most wanted, and I built the book to survive being handed to you by a friend who finally ran out of road trying to say all of this across a dinner table.

The holiday is over. It ended on a clear morning, the way it always ends for the people who kept the watch and could never get anyone else to believe the watch was still required. Here is what it was, what it cost, and why the bill is now everyone’s.

Next: Chapter 1, Fukuyama’s Folly

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On the French riots:

On “Genocide”:

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The U.S. has recently dealt with two cases of popular hysteria not against but for a murderer. After Luigi Mangione shot 50-year-old Brian Thompson, father of two, in the back for the crime of being CEO of an insurance company, he gathered a large fan-following, especially amongst young people, and raised more than $1.5 million from 42,000 donors. This support is mostly political because some people think medical insurance providers make money from people’s suffering. Some of the support is based on Mangione’s good looks.

Sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three small children in 2023, is more understandable because she suffered from mental illness and, immediately after the murders, she made a serious attempt to kill herself, which paralysed her below the waist, probably for life. Also, her husband is a dubious character who started dating a year after his children’s murders and remarried three years later. However, this sympathy has swelled into a campaign, mostly by women, for her to be found not guilty on the grounds that postpartum psychosis is a widespread condition. This campaign raised $1.2 million for her defense, and, worse, it has led to vicious online attacks on the juror who held out against an insanity defense.

In India, a similar case occurred recently. Although support for the murderers is much less active, several famous influencers have defended the murderers, and many younger people on social media have agreed with this defense.

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26-year-old Ketan Agarwal and 20-year-old Siya Goyal, scions of two prosperous business families in western India, were engaged for four months in 2026. Siya failed Class 12 and, according to her mother, wasn't interested in higher studies and was happy with the engagement. The couple went out on their own during the engagement, and the families say they were in love, which photographs seem to confirm.

Siya seemed happy. She visited Ketan’s family on her own, and baked cakes for them. She danced with him at various venues and videos show her at night-clubs, dancing and drinking beer. She was not, therefore, a traditional girl who was deprived of agency.

Family-arranged engagements followed by dating and falling in love constitute a common pattern in India. However, such engagements are also often broken off if one partner changes her or his mind.

Meanwhile, it turns out, Siya had also been secretly dating another man, 22-year-old Chetan Chaudhury, for a year. While her fiancé’s family were builders with a net worth of about 600 crore rupees ($62 million USD), her own family was somewhat less prosperous and intended to spend up to 5.5 crore rupees (about $600,000) on the wedding. Her boyfriend, Chetan, however, worked in his family’s grocery business and was lower-middle-class.

Her fiancé Ketan was besotted with the pretty Siya and lent her 1 crore rupees (about $100,000) for wedding shopping, which she gave to her boyfriend Chetan, who used some of it to buy an expensive ring for another girlfriend of his.

On June 18, 2026, Siya insisted on Ketan accompanying her up a steep hill to visit the Lohagad Fort in Pune. There, Siya and Chetan (who arrived on his own) pushed Ketan off a cliff to his death. Later, during interrogation, Siya said she did not like the fact that Ketan was bald and wore a wig (he had told her and her family about this from the start), whereas Chetan had a full head of hair. She had felt that since preparations were in full swing, calling off the wedding would have upset everyone.

Ketan was an only son, and his sister’s suspicions and persistence resulted in the police investigating what appeared to be an accident. During the investigation, Siya and Chetan confessed, and it emerged that on June 14, Siya had taken Ketan up the same hill and tried to push him off, but he had saved himself by grabbing a bush. Siya told Ketan that she had seen a snake and pushed him out of its way.

Also, the couple and their families had planned a pre-wedding trip to Bali, Indonesia, and a photo-shoot there, in early June. At Chetan’s behest, Siya stole and destroyed Ketan’s passport, so the trip had to be cancelled.

Surprisingly, several influencers sprang to Siya’s defense. According to popular pulp-fiction writer Chetan Bhagat, Siya ‘couldn’t say no to marriage.’ (Times of India, June 30, 2026). He added that adults ‘fall in love and date,’ and do not have family-arranged marriages. Both Siya and Ketan’s families belong to a traditional business community, so Bhagat launches a full-scale attack on ‘business families’ as ‘hollow, regressive and shallow,’ claims they are devoid of innovation, and says that they spend their time ‘obsessing over vanity’ by arranging extravagant weddings for their children.

Talk-show host Barkha Dutt and journalist Shobhaa De presented a similar analysis in a video, blaming society’s obsession with marriage for the murder. These two women argued that Siya killed her fiancé because she could not refuse to marry.

What these commentators forget is that first, there have been many cases of men killing girlfriends, therefore marriage is not the cause of murder and, second, that thousands of young people from backgrounds very much like Siya’s say no to marriage every day in India and tell their parents that they are in love with someone else or that they do not want to marry at all. So why couldn’t Siya?

Since Siya failed her high-school exam, her parents tried to marry her into a family that would enable her to continue to live in the style to which she was accustomed. What would they have done if she had told them she did not want to marry Ketan? Would they have murdered her? It seems highly unlikely. They would have been upset because they had already spent a lot of money on the engagement, the wedding venue and so on, but after some fighting, scolding, and weeping, they would have accepted her decision.

Siya was not an old-fashioned rural girl. She dressed as she pleased, went out when she wanted, and drank alcohol. She proclaimed her love for Ketan on social media. She went on extended dates with both Ketan and her boyfriend Chetan.

Siya couldn’t be bothered to talk to her parents because she thought it easier to pass off murder as an accident. There was also a strong financial motive as she would have had to repay the huge loan that she had taken from her fiancé if she had broken off the engagement. Yhe and Chetan would have succeeded in passing off the murder as an accident had it not been for the alertness of the Pune police.

Contra Bhagat, some adults do date and fall in love, but many do not. Many adults, even in the West, welcome help from family and friends.

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Also from Ruth:

The fourth-century Kamasutra says that the gandharva vivaha (what is now, in India, called a ‘love marriage’) is the best type of marriage. But a family-arranged marriage is the second-best kind. Plenty of adults have happy family-arranged marriages; some of the happiest marriages I have known have been family-arranged ones. Some so-called ‘love marriages’ (most of which are actually self-arranged marriages) succeed and are happy while others are miserable or end in divorce. Exactly the same is true of family-arranged marriages.

A good life and a good marriage are based on dharma (in the sense of basic values and the law of being human). Dharma does not include killing people just to avoid unpleasantness. Dharma requires telling the truth. In a famous ancient Indian story (Goethe loved the fourth-century Sanskrit play by Kalidasa, based on this story), Shakuntala married King Dushyanta in her father’s absence without his permission, but her father accepted the marriage when he returned.

Many young people today introduce their lovers to their parents, and most parents sooner or later accept and even pay for the weddings. In some instances, mostly rural, parents try to violently separate the lovers and forcibly marry them to other people. Hindu-Muslim marriages often result in violence. But this is far from being the norm. As I document in my book Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, several Indian parents from the ‘80s onward, have accepted and participated in their children’s same-sex weddings.

Commentators who sympathize with Siya want to have it both ways. They agree that murder is wrong but they still want to blame Siya’s parents. It is fashionable to celebrate some communities and castigate others, and it is always fashionable to denigrate the rich. Bhagat seems unaware that most young people in India want, even demand, the most expensive wedding their parents can afford.

Bhagat berates those young people who join their parental businesses and sell ‘steel pipes and rubber wires’ as their fathers and uncles did. Why? Who does he think should sell pipes and wires? Is it all right with him if lawyers’ children become lawyers and doctors’ children become doctors? Or would he like to prohibit children from ever following their parents’ professions or running their parents’ businesses?

Commentators, with boring Puritanism, also tell us that no one should have an expensive wedding. They do not realize that their life-styles and supposedly non-tacky weddings might seem wildly extravagant to their plumbers or to owners of small shops where they buy pipes and wires.

A free society is one in which people can have any kind of wedding they like and marry someone they choose either on their own or with their parents’ and friends’ help.

A free society is one where they can start their own businesses or inherit those of their parents’.

A free society consists of free individuals who have the courage to tell their parents the truth about themselves and do not sneak around in order to cheat on their fiancées as Siya did.

When all is said and done, the truth remains simple: There are no excuses for Siya and Chetan murdering Ketan – none.

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A shorter version of this article appeared in The Hindustan Times on July 13, 2026.

For more on this topic, see this article from Mallory Mosner:

Dear Zack Polanski and The Green Party of England and Wales,

Zionism is not a modern phenomenon. It’s a deep continuation, not only of the two temple periods, but also of the long and wrongly-forgotten exile. It is the essence of being Jewish. It is the right of a tiny people for self-determination.

Here is the thesis of serialising author Eli Kavon: We should stop considering exile as the Dark Ages for it was practise for Statehood. Diaspora life, along with the entire Jewish historical experience, forms one exciting, continuous story of Jewish memory that culminates in the return to The Land of Israel.

And throughout this narrative, we have a difficult balancing act and one that continues to this day: the righteousness of Jacob v the street smarts of Esau. Mr Polanski succeeds in having neither virtue.

Yours sincerely,

- Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor of Guerre and Shalom)

Also from The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House:

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Jacob’s Voice, Esau’s Hands: A Zionist Polemic

by Eli Kavon

Introduction: The Birth of a Nation

PART 1] Foundations: The Claim of Continuity

Chapter 1: Jacob’s Journey: Evolution of a Patriarch. // Chapter 2: Triumph of the Jewish Polemic // Chapter 3: Reflections on Yerushalmi’s Zakhor

PART 2] Ancient Israel and Judah: The Ethics of Power

If there is continuity between Jewish memory and Jewish history, then that continuity must hold up under the pressure of the record itself. The chapters that follow turn from the patriarchs and the modern Zionist thinkers who claimed their inheritance to the ancient Israelites and Jews who actually lived it: kings, governors, and rabbis who had to decide, in real time and often at the cost of their lives, when to speak with the voice of Jacob and when to act with the hands of Esau.

Chapter 4: The Northern Kingdom Revisited: Beyond Sectarianism

The origins of the Kingdom of Israel in the north—the Northern Kingdom—remain a mystery. There is no reason to dismiss the biblical account of the northern tribes of a unified Davidic state breaking away from Jerusalem in a rebellion supported, initially, by the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh. But the picture of the Northern Kingdom seems more complex than simple rebellion and, later, deviation from the Covenant by building cultic centers outside of Jerusalem.

The Hebrew Bible’s depiction of the northerners as a state of renegade idol worshippers lacks nuance and complexity. We cannot be certain what type of sacrifice was carried on in Bethel and Dan. We can condemn the Kingdom of Israel founded by Jeroboam I as deviants from the Covenant and forgers of syncretistic Baal worship. At the same time, we can look beyond this value judgment and try to recover the history of northerners who took their religious life and their devotion to the God of Israel seriously. We must search beyond the “prison of the text.”

What was the nature of the rift between the prophets of the God of Israel—specifically Elijah—and the rulers in Samaria? According to historian H. Tadmor:

The close economic and military ties between Israel and the Syro-Phoenician states, in particular Tyre, led to increased cultural and religious influences from these areas upon Israel...A Temple to Baal in which Tyrian priests officiated, was erected in Samaria. Presumably, extensive sections of the higher classes such as state officials and courtiers, followed the royal lead.

The sudden prosperity of merchants and court circles in the newly erected capital must have brought into sharp focus the growing polarization between them and the conservative rural population. Although Biblical sources provide no details, the story of Naboth of Jezreel is an illustration of the internal struggle that placed the prophet in the role of opponent to the court.

What Tadmor describes adheres to the Hebrew Bible’s account of Baal worship in Samaria. But what of the temples in Bethel and Dan?

American archaeologist, Edward F. Campbell Jr., writing in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, attempts to explain the origin of the cultic centers in the North in the early years following secession from Jerusalem. His description departs from the prophetic condemnations of these centers of sacrifice representing solely idol worship:

From a more neutral point of view, Jeroboam probably intended to employ earlier iconography of Yahweh drawn from that of El. El as designation for the god of Israel was doubtless current in the north—hence the validity of using the name Isra-El for the northern political entity.

Jeroboam’s move, then, was not idolatrous or even newly syncretistic, but probably invoked ancient Israelite traditions, including a legitimate enlistment of priests from among the people. Frank Cross has proposed that Bethel and Dan served as a compromise agenda. Jeroboam, he surmises, reestablished the Bethel sanctuary as the locus of Aaronite priestly family hegemony, and Dan (Judges 18:30) for priests of the Moses line—the two families whom David had placed in Jerusalem (II Samuel 8:15). In short, Jeroboam’s moves were calculated, but (from a non-Jerusalem perspective) legitimate. Only from the perspective of [the Hebrew Bible’s authors] were they idolatrous.

Campbell goes beyond the caricature of the northerners as flagrant idol worshippers and provides a more nuanced description of temples in Bethel and Dan that took worship of God seriously. J. Alberto Soggin, Italian scholar of the Hebrew Bible, argues that at the cultic centers at Bethel and Dan “we do not have a syncretistic or idolatrous cult, but that the worship was offered to the self same YHWH.” The images of the bulls that were erected outside the temples might have been peculiar to the Canaanite Baal as a fertility god. But, Soggin argues, “it is in fact more reasonable to suppose that just as the ark in the Jerusalem temple was the throne of the invisible YHWH, so the bull at Bethel and Dan was the pedestal for the equally invisible YHWH.”

To simply dismiss the religion of the Northern Kingdom as sectarian and heretical is to render a theological value judgment rather than an historical analysis. While Jewish tradition remembers Bethel and Dan as the epitome of evil in the eyes of God—a judgment which has its place—it is the task of the historian to take us back thousands of years and attempt to render a picture as it was at the time.

The Northerners were not simply Baal worshippers. The sacrifices at Bethel and Dan involved a priesthood and a serious mode of worship. This is not all to dismiss Elijah, Elisha, Amos and Hosea, all prophets who had legitimate warnings about the behavior and actions of the Kingdom of Israel, its priests and its rulers. Yet historians and archaeologists liberate us from the confines of a text that has no interest in reproducing history as it was. Rather, it is a theological history in which the North always deviates from the Covenantal paradigm and is in a state of perpetual sin. But sectarianism and heresy is in the eyes of the beholder, usually the victor in history. And the victors of the South wrote the theological history of the Northern Kingdom.

Israeli Politics and the Idealization of the Northern Kingdom

While it is refreshing to bring new perspectives on the Northern Kingdom that liberate us from the confines of the biblical text, a disturbing trend in scholarship has gone too far in its positive representation of Jeroboam, Ahab and the Kingdom of Israel. This trend, represented by Israel Finkelstein, professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, presents the Northern Kingdom as a sort of multicultural and pluralistic paradise that stands in contrast with an impoverished Kingdom of Judah that invented the stories of the evil North long after the Assyrian Exile of 721 BCE.

In The Bible Unearthed (2001) and David and Solomon (2006), Finkelstein and American archaeologist co-author Neil Asher Silberman have an agenda in degrading Jerusalem at the expense of Samaria. This follows logically from Finkelstein’s belief, based on his archeological digs, that the Hebrew Bible’s accounts of Kings David and Solomon were written in stages and over many centuries, representing a glorified version of these leaders that reflected the politics of the court of later kings of Judah, especially Josiah. For Finklestein and Silberman, David was not the king of a great empire but a local hilltop chieftain whose “kingdom” could not have sustained a large population or scribal literacy three thousand years ago. Therefore, Finkelstein and Silberman look to the Northern Kingdom as the dominant force and partner in Israelite society in contrast to a struggling Judah.

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The Latest Chapter of The Genocide of Truth. Support this work financially to end The Great Genocide Blood Libel:

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“But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Imagine starting a fire and then standing by and filming with your mobile phone while a firefighter is engulfed in flames. That is one of the scenes emerging from France’s latest wave of unrest. Elsewhere, rioters have doused a teacher in petrol, looted businesses, and set vehicles and schools on fire. The fact that many of the rioters are looting while waving Algerian and Palestinian flags is just a symptom of a much larger, unspoken failure.

The ostensible grievance is the condition of French education. The proposed remedy, apparently, is fewer teachers and more ashes.

France is once again supplying footage of burning vehicles, smashed businesses, and streets full of tear gas1. Allianz counted 5,517 protests and riots in France in 2024, more than three times the U.S. rate per capita. At some point, recurring riots stop being a series of unfortunate incidents and start looking like a national operating system.

The latest unrest in France offers an occasion to examine a country whose political habits are precisely those American progressives keep urging us to adopt: expensive barriers to hiring, immigration without a serious demand for assimilation, and a government expected to pay for nearly everything.

Why no jobs for young people?

France’s unemployment rate for ages 15 to 24 is a staggering 21.6%, versus only 9.1% in the U.S. That is a lot of young people with afternoons free for “improving” education with a cigarette lighter and a crowbar.

When I studied and worked in Europe, I was struck by how many young people I met who had literally never worked a day in their lives. Working with Alcatel and other local companies, I learned part of the reason: if you hire somebody in France, you’re practically married to them. Except in marriage, a spouse occasionally leaves voluntarily.

So employers make sure they desperately need someone before taking the plunge. When a bad hire can become a lengthy legal ordeal, “let’s give the kid a chance” loses much of its appeal.

France’s astronomical minimum wage makes it all the worse. It stands at over 62% of the median wage, versus roughly 25% for the federal minimum in the U.S. This is really basic Econ 101: if a rookie’s work is worth less than €12.31 an hour plus onerous mandatory benefits, the rookie doesn’t get hired.2

Faced with those labor costs, businesses do what any rational enterprise would do: they automate. I spotted fast-food kiosks in France years before I saw them in the U.S.3 Minimum wage laws should be renamed “kiosk proliferation laws.” They have certainly accomplished that in France and California (see article here).

Youth employment matters for more than just its contribution to GDP. A job gives a young person a sense of belonging, responsibility, purpose, and, crucially, something to do. If they’re working, they’re not rioting.

Assimilation: apparently an unreasonable request

A country needs more than a labor market. It needs enough agreement about its basic rules to keep disagreements from becoming street battles. That is no longer a given in France.

Over 34% of France’s under-18 population is of first-, second-, or third-generation immigrant origin. Two thirds of the immigration comes from the Third World, and 44% arrives from Muslim-majority countries (compared to only 4% in the U.S.).

Many of these newcomers do not share commonly held French values and feel no affinity for French society. Fewer than a quarter of foreign-born residents “feel French.”

Of the major Muslim-majority countries sending immigrants to France, only one (Senegal) is a democracy. A large percentage of these immigrants flatly reject laïcité, the strict tradition of secular government that France has cherished for more than a century. A country that hosts millions who feel no affinity for its traditions or its people is ripe for civil unrest.

The polling is not subtle. A 2025 survey found that 38% of French Muslims approve of some or all Islamist positions, twice the share that held comparable views in 1998. Among Muslims aged 15 to 24, 57% say Sharia rules outrank French law, and 32% express sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not a story of steady convergence. The younger generation is more hardline than its parents.

The gap also shows up in practices that have nothing to do with headscarves and everything to do with whether two populations can share a street. In the 2021 French national perinatal survey, about 0.9% of women giving birth had undergone female genital mutilation, a practice France has criminalized but which remains common in several of the countries supplying its immigrants. A culture that cuts little girls does not slot neatly into a culture that jails people for doing it.

Elite commentary still treats this as a manners problem. It is not. Cultures that already agree on law, sex, authority, and the place of religion assimilate. Cultures that treat those questions as settled by revelation do not, at least not on any timetable a democracy can survive. As I’ve noted in another article, classical Islamic jurists were often clearer on this than modern European ministries: permanent settlement in a non-Muslim polity was widely regarded as a bad idea, if not forbidden outright. French policy could do worse than take the hint.

Big government: big problems, small incomes

France’s third problem is a government expected to provide for and handle practically everything. French government spending as a percent of GDP is a whopping 57% (versus only 37% in the U.S.).

All that government has bought abysmal growth and stagnant incomes. In the 1980s, France’s per capita GDP was roughly 93% of America’s. Today it is only 72%, and the median American has about 50% more disposable income than the median Frenchman, after taxes, cash benefits, and differences in purchasing power.

When the government is the largest allocator of resources, people focus their productive energy on persuading it to allocate in their favor. The wealthy and connected do their persuading with lobbyists (or bribes). Everyone else does it in the street. Hence the French pattern: farmers, rail workers, and students always seem to be protesting something.

In a freer economy, people get ahead by focusing their productive energy on providing goods and services that others want. When the state allocates less, there is less to gain by setting buses on fire.

Want to be like France? You know how to vote

Three policies are driving France’s slow-motion collapse:

1. Punitive minimum wage laws that price the young out of work.

2. Unchecked immigration that ignores cultural compatibility and assimilation.

3. An overgrown, suffocating state that crushes economic dynamism.

Curiously, these happen to be the crown jewels of the American progressive left. Roughly 90% of all Democrats support doubling the minimum wage. More than 70% of “strong liberals” support removing ALL immigration restrictions. And 79% of Democrats want bigger government, a share that has climbed steeply for 30 years.

In short, the progressive left would love nothing more than for the U.S. to become France. So if you’ve been pining for double the youth unemployment, a third less take-home income, and a whiff of smoke and tear gas in the streets, you know how to vote.

2

Assume the average youth’s productivity is €8.60/hour (70% of the minimum wage). That leads to the excess labor supply shown below.

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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: The Deep Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

PART 1: The Tree of Knowledge

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority

PART 2: The Descent to Babylon

Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion // Chapter 11: Conversation // Chapters 12: Democratisation // Chapter 13: Sophistry // Chapter 14: Image

PART 3: The Rise of Byzantium

Chapter 15: Guilt // Chapter 16: Belief // Chapter 17: Christ // Chapter 18: Mission // Chapter 19: Doctrine // Chapter 20: Heresy

Chapter 20: Heresy

Living with Contradiction

The Great Genocide Blood Libel is founded upon doctrine and doctrine is founded upon religion. Yet religion is not founded upon the Bible, neither the Hebrew nor the New. For Biblia means books (a library) and the books are from very different schools with very different views. It is the glory of the Bible that it is a collection of opinions - a recorded debate - rather than a synthesized, monolithic viewpoint. In its unharmonised diversity, it is the civilisational counterpoint to postlingualism.

“Genocide” is a fruit of this postlinguistic doctrine: it precedes the evidence, survives irrespective of evidence and its contradiction is heresy. Its statement is a Nicene Creed, “truthful” only by repetition and enforced by an emperor of recognized authority. Refutation is tantamount to sedition and an attack upon the unity of the human rights empire.

While modern democratic “christianities” (plural) are content to tolerate one another, to listen to contradiction in competing christologies, the Emperor Constantine, elevated upon high in his Cambridge-based temple will only accept the diffusion of the accepted view: that there are oppressors and oppressed, and that the Zionist Project, infected by antichrists who refuse doctrine, is destined for the hellfire. This is the Greco-Roman legacy: Universities. Indoctrination on the Jewish “devil”.

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And the “proof” of this Johannine demonology? The statement of agreement enshrined in orthodoxy: That the Jews are committing genocide, not because they are, but because they don’t accept the new dispensation. That “human rights” are divine and embodied in the flesh; that they existed prior to the formation of the cosmos and are incarnated physically in the Global South. That they were pronounced, not only by the Hebrew Prophets, but directly from the Burning Bush —from the voice of “I Am” himself.

Many were the Jews that pioneered human rights. Out of the embers of Auschwitz they spoke of genocide and the need for never again. They built up international institutions and preached the oneness of humanity. Yet the followers of this loyal Jewish sect, committed to The Law - international law - created a judicial creep that amounted to perfected impossibility.

As it was written in the Gospel of Matthew, so it was repreached in our generation:

You have heard it is said from the Hebrew Scriptures that slavery is an abomination. Well I say that the slavery of your neighbor’s great-grandfather must be subject to reparation and overt repentance.

You have heard it said in times of old that one must love their neighbour. Well I say that love transcends neighbours, for all your enemiesshould be loved unconditionally — unless they have different views.

You have listened to preachers who have railed against genocide. Well I say that war, even in defence, amounts to genocide.

Matthew was the Jew who loved the law and extended it to the reach of the saints. All members of the community - Jew and gentile - were to follow Mosaic injunction and beyond the letter. His was the text of a man who loved the Law only to see its precise legal provisions turned against his people.

“Hypocrites!” they cried, as they created a new religion, a post-Mosaic confection not of his imagining.

“Legalists”, they bellowed, as precise lawyered injunction was metaphorised into doctrinal slogan.

The Word came out from Jerusalem and was turned mercilessly against its creators; law became slogan in the name of love. And this is no ancient story for it was reproduced in our own days and in our own generation. The words of Isaiah, engraved with irony upon the walls of New York, were used as a stick to destroy the prophet’s own flock.

The New Testament is perhaps the model of our malaise and yet, I confess, it may contain our salvation. For though Constantine and his Byzantine descendants may have transfigured intellectual diversity into orthodoxy, they maintained the Bible as a biblia, a library of books.

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It is with this in mind that we are honoured to welcome Scarlett Lu (17), youth ambassador of the Liberal Democratic NGO Section 1 and our youngest contributor to date. Below is an abridged version of her shortlisted submission to the John Locke Global Prize Essay Competition (the most prestigious writing competition in the world for high school students), the results of which are announced today. We wish Scarlett good luck!

Please support our young inheritors of the liberal democratic tradition by liking, spreading and promoting this wonderful essay. Canada and the free world need far more Scarletts. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor of Guerre and Shalom and Senior Fellow of Section 1).

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“A Twenty-First-Century Crisis: The Public’s Complicity in Autocratizing Democracies” by Scarlett Lu

Introduction

To assign the characterization of “in crisis” to the system of democracy is quite arbitrary. It is possible, of course, for democracy to die an unequivocal death. The coups d’état of the Cold War saw violent overthrows of democracy. When the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace and General Augusto Pinochet took over as an authoritarian dictator, the question “Is democracy in crisis?” would have seemed redundant to raise.

But in the twenty-first century, liberal democracies around the world are vulnerable to slow, nearly imperceptible deaths. Since the conclusion of the Cold War, “most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves… Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019). Elected governments and opposition parties alike manipulate human social psychology to advantage their own interests. Citizens’ responsibilities to a free and fair constitutional democracy are trivialized, transforming people from accountability agents to useful pawns (Biro, 2025).

Democracy is in crisis because democracies globally are not functioning as they should: with power vested in the people and with government merely a servant. Wunsch’s 2025 scholarly book on democratic backsliding contends that as political elites deliberately weaken judicial independence and undermine electoral competition, “citizens play a central role in supporting, or at least tolerating, such elected leaders… Their inability to fulfil their role as the ‘ultimate arbiter of the democratic game’ has been central to autocratizing elites’ ability to maintain—or, in the case of the United States, renew—their grip on power” (Wunsch, 2025). While citizens are not exclusively to blame, they are failing to hold their elected officials accountable and openly criticize government actions (Panagi, 2023). In 2026, our modern democracy crisis is defined by the escalating weaponization of fear and citizens’ failure to commit to democratic ideals in the face of tribulations.

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Weaponizing Fear

The current erosion of civic duty occurs chiefly through fear and its weaponization against political opposition. Fear is indisputably the most efficient “democracy-proofing” agent. It replaces rational, open discourse via free expression with paranoia and apathy for democratic commitments. Political adversaries are turned into existential enemies, targeted for a simple end goal: political domination—achieved through any means necessary. It destroys opposing forces and eliminates diverse opinions, laying the groundwork for an emerging tyranny (Biro, 2025; Ignatieff, 2022).

At its most extreme, fear is utilized as a totalitarian tool for supreme power. Following the American Civil War, newly freed African Americans were granted the franchise and rapidly gained political power to the alarm of white supremacists and many Southern Democrats. Anticipating the subversion of their authority, Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan, which would go on to reign terror on Black communities. Before the 1868 presidential election, the Ku Klux Klan hunted down over 200 African Americans in St. Landry Parish, embarking on a murderous rampage to eradicate any support for the local Republican Party. Not a single Republican vote was cast (DeLatte, 1976).

Fear continues to be employed as a tool to eliminate opposition in the 21st century. In recent years, threats against public officials have been on a “meteoric rise” for both national politicians and local officials, according to Seamus Hughes of the George Washington University Program on Extremism. Jurecic (2022) writes that “the number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016…with more than 9,625 threats reported in 2021.” Fjelde (2026) explains that “violence in conjunction with elections can be used to influence voting, intimidate voters, attack the opposition, and target other actors working to safeguard electoral integrity. In the long run, violence can also affect citizens’ perceptions of democracy and their willingness to participate in it.” Globally, over 25 percent of elections are marked by violent behaviours or attacks that manipulate electoral results. Instilling fear into the political opposition runs counter to the bedrock of democratic engagement and cooperation through compromise and negotiation. Violence against the free press has maintained its prominence as well: from 2011 to 2021, over 550 journalists were murdered globally. Jurado and Morales (2026) identify that among Mexican journalists, “targeted outlets reduced media activity in the year following a journalist killing.” Intimidation and the rising weaponization of fear evidently play a grave role in the ongoing collapse of democracy.

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Capitulation to Authority

Furthermore, citizens’ capitulation to high-ranking authorities and political officials is wholly eroding democracy around the world. The habituation of citizens to authoritarian government comes down to human nature: lying down and obeying rather than standing up for freedom may be a psychological instinct. In Stanley Milgram’s 1961 obedience-to-authority experiments, the Yale University psychologist found that 65% of participants were willing to administer a fatal 450-volt electric shock to an innocent stranger when an authority figure ordered them to do so. Individuals in an agentic state perceive themselves as passive agents simply carrying out another actor’s wishes; those in an autonomous state believe they control their own actions and therefore bear full moral responsibility for them (Lewis, 2024).

Today, the nature of human obedience has devastating consequences for the survival of democracy. Stanley Milgram proposes that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. However, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear…relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority” (Branden, 1975).

A textbook example of such gradual destruction is observed across Latin America, where the American continent overall is witnessing a persistent downturn of democratic principles, according to the Global Campus of Human Rights (Benítez-Mongelós, 2025). El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has systematically dismantled the nation’s checks and balances, co-opting the Supreme Court by replacing all previous magistrates with loyalist judges, who abolished presidential term limits, enabling Bukele to run for indefinite re-election. Citizens under such regimes undergo a gradual process of acclimatization to increasingly undemocratic standards; yet there is seldom ever a single moment when a government has unmistakably crossed over from democratic to authoritarian. Instead, the boundaries of what the public deems acceptable under a constitutional democracy are pushed further and further (López, 2026).

The argument that democracy’s collapse is primarily attributed to citizens comes down to how citizens “have omitted to withdraw support from authoritarian-leaning leaders even once they have shown their undemocratic colours, thereby effectively enabling them to pursue the gradual dismantling of the democratic system” (Wunsch, 2025). As a result, the number of “Not Free” countries has steadily increased over the last two decades, rising from 24% in 2005 to 30% in 2025 (Gorokhovskaia et al., 2026). This lack of intervention by citizens may not always be accidental, although it can end up that way. Guterman (2025) explains that backsliding is “a symptom of a deeper problem.” The dismantling of Thailand’s democracy had begun with deep ideological division, resulting from Parliament’s inability to appease conservative voters. Extreme polarization and ineffective incumbent administrations embolden incoming politicians to override democratic checks and balances, free from fear of heavy criticism from the majority of voters.

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Counterargument and Conclusion

Granted, it is arguable that democracy is always and has always been at major risk of collapsing. The 200-Year Theory, proposed by 18th-century historian Lord Tytler, estimates that democracies last only around 200 years before breaking down into authoritarianism (Owens, 2022). President Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech made clear that the United States in the 1970s was losing trust in government and public institutions; voter turnout was staggeringly low, with two-thirds of eligible voters failing to cast their ballots (Hastings, 2023).

It is not that global democracy is experiencing an unprecedented crisis; it is that global democracy is experiencing a crisis—as it often does—and still, individuals are turning their backs on the constitutional principles guarding their liberty in light of the tumultuous political environments suffocating them. When looking back at the first great democracy, historians often do not agree upon a single answer as to why Ancient Athens eventually collapsed into an autocracy. But perhaps it is unanimously agreed upon that it was citizens who, at the end of the day, failed their democracy. By looking away from political corruption and “turning to the perceived stability of an emperor,” or an autocrat, democracy in the modern day faces a remarkably similar crisis (Daley, 2018). Citizens in every nation worldwide are imbued with a single moral responsibility: to revitalize democracy and prove the Great Experiment a success—or make the same mistake again.

References

Barber, A. (2023, March 9). Crisis of confidence speech: Revisiting jimmy carter’s address. Close Up Foundation. https://www.closeup.org/revisiting-jimmy-carters-crisis-of-confidence-speech/

Biro, P. (2025). Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror?: Morning Keynote - Peter Biro [Review of Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror?: Morning Keynote - Peter Biro]. In Massey College.

Branden, B. (1975, October 1). Milgram, “Obedience to Authority.” Libertarianism.org. Libertarianism.Org. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/milgram-obedience-authority

Daley, J. (2018, November 6). Lessons in the decline of democracy from the ruined roman republic. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lessons-decline-democracy-from-ruined-roman-republic-180970711/

DeLatte, C. E. (1976). The St. Landry Riot: A Forgotten Incident of Reconstruction Violence. Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 17(1), 41–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4231556

Fjelde, H. (2026). How political violence threatens to weaken democracy. Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. https://kaw.wallenberg.org/en/research/how-political-violence-threatens-weaken-democracy

Freedom House. (2026, March). Freedom in the world 2026: The growing shadow of autocracy. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/FIW2026_final_digital%20%281%29.pdf

Guterman, D. (2025, March 4). The democratic dismantling of democracies: How leaders undermine the systems that elect them. The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Ash Center. https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/the-democratic-dismantling-of-democracies-how-leaders-undermine-the-systems-that-elect-them/

Ignatieff, M. (2022, October). The Politics of Enemies. Journal of Democracy. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-politics-of-enemies/

Jay, R. (2020, January 7). How democracies die. American Academy in Berlin. https://www.americanacademy.de/how-democracies-die/

Jurecic, Q. (2023). Taking the pelosi attack seriously. Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/taking-pelosi-attack-seriously

Lewis, T. T. (2024). Milgram experiment. EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com

NORC at the University of Chicago. (n.d.). Democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence in Latin America [Panel brief]. https://www.norc.org/content/dam/norc-org/pdfs/Democratic%20Backsliding%20Panel%20-%20Brief%20-%20English.pdf‌

Owens, C. (2022, July 26). Connections: Is the ‘Tytler Cycle’ inevitable? The Berkshire Edge. https://theberkshireedge.com/connections-is-the-tytler-cycle-inevitable/

Panagi, K. (2023, November 12). Democracy and participation: The cornerstones of a just society. YourCommonwealth. YourCommonwealth. https://yourcommonwealth.org/peace-democracy/democracy-and-participation-the-cornerstones-of-a-just-society/

Washington, G. (1890). Letter to Catharine Macaulay Graham, 9 January 1790. In W. C. Ford (Ed.), The writings of George Washington (Vol. 11, pp. 451–454). G. P. Putnam’s Sons. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ford-the-writings-of-george-washington-vol-xi-1785-179

Wunsch, N. (2025). Democratic commitment: Why citizens tolerate democratic backsliding. Oxford University Press.

Yousif, N. (2024, October 29). Paul Pelosi attacker gets life in prison without parole. BBC. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje09qx348do

Flores López, A. (2026). Looking at populism and democratic backsliding in the latin american context: The case of el salvador. In M. Lackowska, L. A. Nguyen Long, W. Aksztejn, & I. Tosics (Eds.), Cities Against Democratic Backsliding (pp. 162–183). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529250633.ch010

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In May 1169 a few hundred Cambro-Norman knights waded ashore at Bannow Bay in County Wexford. They had been hired by Diarmait Mac Murchada, a deposed King of Leinster who wanted his throne back and had crossed to Henry II to find the men who would take it for him. Within three years the King of England was at Waterford, receiving the submission of Irish kings. The Irish date their subjugation from that beach. The founding story of the modern Irish state is the story of its undoing.¹

Five centuries earlier, Arab armies broke the Byzantine field army at the Yarmouk in 636. Jerusalem surrendered within two years. Egypt fell by 642, Carthage in 698, and by the early eighth century the conquest had reached the Atlantic. The Jews and Christians of the Levant became protected minorities under Muslim rule, and over centuries Arabic displaced Aramaic and Greek. That was a conquest too. Nobody in Dublin calls it one.

What Dublin does call a conquest is Israel. Ireland recognised the State of Palestine in May 2024² and joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.³ In September 2026 its Taoiseach told reporters in New York that Israel was “literally uprooting Palestinians from their homeland.”⁴ Officially, Ireland still supports two states. But the words it has chosen, plantation, settlers, uprooting, homeland, are borrowed from the Irish past. They do not come with a border attached.

The Irish see their own history in Palestine. They should look more closely. What they will find there is their own principle, pointing the other way.

What does Irish independence assert? That a conquest does not become legitimate by lasting. That seven and a half centuries of foreign rule, of confiscation, of settlement, of laws written in another country, did not extinguish the claim of a people to govern themselves in their own land. Time did not sanctify the conquest. It only delayed the answer.

The Irish held this principle hard. Ulster had been planted since 1609, its settlers’ descendants had lived there for three centuries, and still the Irish state refused to concede that their presence conferred title. From 1937 the Constitution claimed the whole island as the national territory. The claim stood for more than sixty years and was withdrawn only by referendum in 1998 as the price of peace.⁵ Three hundred years of settlement, in the Irish view, were not enough to make a plantation a homeland.

That is a serious principle. It is also the Zionist one.

The Jewish tie to the land precedes the Arab conquest by well over a thousand years. Jewish sovereignty was ended by Rome, not by consent, and the land then passed from Byzantine to Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British hands. Jewish presence never wholly ceased; Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias held Jewish communities through all of it. For nineteen centuries the dispersed remembered the land in prayer, three times a day, and ended every Passover with the same wish: next year in Jerusalem.

The Irish understand a diaspora that does not forget. Ireland grants citizenship to the grandchildren of emigrants, born in Boston or Birmingham, who may never have set foot on the island.⁶ Israel’s Law of Return rests on the same idea: that a people scattered by history keeps its claim on the place it came from. Ireland has a law of return. It calls it the Foreign Births Register.

Nor are the Jews of Israel newcomers. More than seven million of them live in the country, and most were born there.⁷ On most estimates around half descend from Jews driven out of, or pressed to leave, Arab and Muslim countries after 1948: Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Aden, Fez. They were not planted from a European metropole. They were expelled from one part of the Arab conquest into the land where it began.

So the Irish must choose. If a conquest ratified by time is not final, then the Jewish return is not colonisation. It is what Ireland did. If a conquest ratified by time is final, then the Arab states are secure, and so was the Act of Union. Then 1922 was an illegitimate secession from a settled realm, and the Irish state rests on nothing.

There is no third seat at this table. The Irishman who calls Israel a plantation has to explain why reversing Henry II was liberation and reversing Rome was theft. He has to explain why three centuries of Ulster settlement conferred no title, while thirteen centuries of Arab conquest confer an unanswerable one. He has to explain why the grandchild in Boston has a homeland and the grandchild in Baghdad does not.

Consider the two grandchildren. The first is born in Boston. Her grandfather left County Mayo in the 1950s with one suitcase and never went back. At twenty-five she posts his birth certificate to Dublin, waits, and becomes an Irish citizen. If she moves to Galway, nobody calls her a settler. She has come home.

The second has a grandfather born in Baghdad, in a community that had lived beside the Tigris since the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years before the Arab armies arrived. In 1950 Iraq let its Jews leave on condition that they surrender their citizenship. In 1951 it froze the property of those who had registered to go.⁸ Within two years some 120,000 had been flown out with what they could carry. His granddaughter is born in Ramat Gan. In the language now fashionable in Dublin, she is a settler.

One grandchild has a homeland. The other, it seems, has only a plantation.

The Irishman cannot explain it. The principle that made Ireland free does not stop at the Mediterranean. It was never a principle about the Irish. It was a principle about conquest, and conquest is the same wherever it lands.

Ireland cannot keep both its principle and its rhetoric. One of them will have to go. It would be a pity if it were the principle. It built the country.

Notes

1. The substantive dispossession came later: the Tudor reconquest, the Plantation of Ulster from 1609 and the Cromwellian land settlement of the 1650s. “Eight hundred years” is nationalist shorthand, but the chain begins at Bannow.

2. Joint announcement with Norway and Spain, 22 May 2024; recognition took effect on 28 May 2024.

3. Government decision of December 2024; declaration of intervention filed with the Court in January 2025.

4. Micheál Martin, remarks to reporters at the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, reported in the Irish Examiner, 25 September 2026.

5. Bunreacht na hÉireann, Articles 2 and 3; amended by the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1998, in force from December 1999.

6. Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, s. 27, as amended; registration through the Foreign Births Register.

7. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, population estimates; the figure should be updated to the date of publication.

8. Iraqi Law No. 1 of 1950 (the Denaturalisation Law) and Law No. 5 of 1951. Some 120,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1951–52.

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The Latest Chapter of The Genocide of Truth where I get to root of the doctrine of Progressive Palestinianism. Please read and support:

“Andy Burnham’s Speech - Utopia” by Tyrell Bowman

I do not dislike Andy Burnham. In fact, watching him at Labour conference, it was easy to understand why the hall repeatedly rose to its feet. He is passionate, energetic and capable of communicating an idea with something resembling genuine human emotion, which in modern British politics is becoming something of a collector’s item.

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His speech was first-class political showmanship. He understood exactly what the Labour faithful wanted to hear and gave it to them in generous portions: kindness, security, public services, social justice, council housing, apprenticeships, mental-health support, cheaper transport, greater public control of utilities and, most significantly, a new National Care Service standing alongside the NHS.

It is an enormously attractive sales pitch because most of us want the same things. We want elderly people cared for properly. We want children with special educational needs to receive support. We want young people to have opportunities, families to have decent homes and people suffering mental-health problems to get help before their lives unravel.

Burnham’s vision is therefore difficult to attack on the grounds of intention, because the intentions are largely admirable. The problem is not what he wants to achieve. The problem is how on earth Britain pays for it.

At the heart of the speech was an old and very powerful socialist promise: the State will look after you. From childhood to old age, it will educate you, train you, house you, treat you, support you when you lose your job, protect you when things go wrong and care for you when you can no longer care for yourself.

There is something wonderfully reassuring about that. Frankly, some mornings I rather fancy handing Whitehall my electricity bill, mortgage, car keys and dog and telling them to give me a ring when everything has been sorted out.

But somewhere along the way Britain has developed an increasingly unhealthy relationship with government. Whenever something goes wrong, our first question is no longer necessarily, “What can I do about this?” It is increasingly, “What is the Government going to do about it?”

Lost your job? Government programme. Struggling with rent? Government support. Energy too expensive? Government subsidy. Child struggling at school? Government intervention. Need retraining, counselling, transport, housing or care? Increasingly, the answer is another state scheme, another department and another budget.

The welfare state was created as a safety net, and a civilised country absolutely needs one. But there is a difference between a safety net and a hammock, and there is an even greater difference between helping citizens when they fall and creating a nation of adult children permanently waiting for Mum and Dad Government to sort everything out.

That is the uncomfortable part of Burnham’s Utopia. The benevolent State gradually becomes the benevolent parent, while the citizen becomes the dependent child. Responsibility moves upwards until almost every difficulty in ordinary life eventually arrives at somebody’s desk in Whitehall.

The trouble is that government is not Mum and Dad. Mum and Dad normally have to earn the money before they spend it, whereas government has the additional convenience of taxing somebody else, borrowing the rest and leaving the invoice for people who have not yet been born.

Britain is now approaching £3 trillion of public debt. Government borrowing remains enormous, the cost of servicing that debt has risen substantially, taxation is already historically high and economic growth remains painfully modest. Against that backdrop Burnham is proposing another great expansion of the responsibilities of the State.

Social care undoubtedly needs reform. SEND provision desperately needs improvement. The NHS remains under extraordinary pressure despite vast amounts of additional money being poured into it. Councils are already watching adult social care and special educational needs consume an extraordinary proportion of their budgets, while residents simultaneously wonder why council tax keeps climbing and the pothole outside their house is developing its own postcode.

Burnham believes greater spending now can save money later. Better care could reduce pressure on hospitals, better youth services might prevent long-term unemployment, better mental-health support could return people to work and more council housing could reduce the enormous housing-benefit bill.

There is logic in all of this, and some of it may well work. But government has been promising that spending more today will save considerably more tomorrow for decades, and tomorrow has developed an unfortunate habit of never quite arriving.

This is where the entire proposition collides with the economy. You cannot redistribute wealth until somebody has created it, and Britain currently seems increasingly uncomfortable with the people and businesses who actually do that creating.

Entrepreneurs, investors and successful companies are not an infinitely renewable natural resource growing underneath the Treasury. They can move, invest elsewhere, employ people elsewhere and decide that Britain has become simply too expensive, too complicated or too hostile to bother with.

Burnham’s compassionate state therefore depends upon the very thing parts of the Left have historically regarded with suspicion: successful capitalism. The National Care Service needs profitable companies. The NHS needs profitable companies. Council housing, SEND provision, mental-health services and apprenticeships all ultimately require a productive economy generating wages, profits and taxation.

Without wealth creation there is nothing meaningful to redistribute. You cannot tax a nation into prosperity any more than you can improve your household finances by repeatedly transferring money from your current account to your savings account while your salary disappears.

This is also why the dismissal of the Thatcher era is too simplistic. Thatcher was far from perfect and some of the economic changes of the 1980s inflicted terrible damage on particular communities, but she emerged from an era when Britain had already endured inflation, industrial conflict, economic stagnation and an IMF bailout.

The central lesson of that period was not that government was evil. It was that government could not indefinitely promise more than the productive economy underneath it was capable of supporting.

That lesson is becoming relevant again.

I am not suggesting Britain in 2026 is simply 1976 with smartphones and Deliveroo. The economy, labour market and financial system are very different, but some of the ingredients should nevertheless make us uncomfortable: high public debt, enormous spending commitments, weak productivity, high taxation, expensive borrowing, creaking public services and growing frustration among the population.

Then add artificial intelligence, which could transform millions of jobs over the next decade, and the problem becomes even more complicated. Burnham is proposing a larger protective state just as the employment patterns and tax base required to finance it may themselves be undergoing profound disruption.

This is why I think Britain is approaching a fiscal precipice. That does not mean collapse tomorrow morning, but it does mean that without substantially stronger economic growth the numbers become progressively harder to reconcile.

Eventually something has to give. Taxes rise further, borrowing increases, services are rationed, promises are broken or financial markets decide that lending Britain money requires an increasingly painful price.

None of this makes Burnham a villain. In many respects it makes his speech more interesting, because he is articulating something millions of people genuinely want: a kinder country in which people feel protected from the worst consequences of illness, unemployment, old age and misfortune.

I want that too. Most reasonable people do.

But kindness has to be paid for, compassion requires resources and security cannot be created by political declaration. Before the State can distribute wealth, somebody somewhere has to get out of bed, build something, invent something, invest in something, sell something, employ somebody and make a profit.

That is the missing half of Burnham’s Utopia.

We have become accustomed to believing that government can solve almost every problem placed before it. It cannot, and pretending otherwise risks creating an increasingly infantilised society in which responsibility is endlessly transferred upwards until government itself eventually buckles beneath the weight.

A mature country needs a strong safety net, excellent public services and genuine compassion for those who cannot help themselves. It also needs independent adults, strong families, functioning communities, profitable businesses and citizens who understand that government cannot permanently protect everybody from every consequence of life.

Burnham’s vision is seductive because it promises security, reassurance and kindness. The road he described at Labour conference is lined with very good intentions indeed.

The question is whether the road actually leads to Utopia, or whether Britain reaches the end of it and discovers that somebody forgot to fill the petrol tank.

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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: The Deep Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

PART 1: The Tree of Knowledge

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority

PART 2: The Descent to Babylon

Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion // Chapter 11: Conversation // Chapters 12: Democratisation // Chapter 13: Sophistry // Chapter 14: Image

PART 3: The Rise of Byzantium

Chapter 15: Guilt // Chapter 16: Belief // Chapter 17: Christ // Chapter 18: Mission // Chapter 19: Doctrine (see below)

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Chapter 19: Doctrine

A Genealogy of Post-Linguistics

“There are two different kinds of people in the world….”

“There are two different kinds of people in the world….”

How many times have we heard this phrase? The insistent idea that the complex mass of humanity can be neatly divided into two categories. But those who resist the clarion call with passionate refusal are soon dragged into its irresistible orbit. For though we rail against simplicity; though we anger at dividing the world into us and them; we soon succumb to its temptation:

“There are two different kinds of people in the world, those who use phrases of the type ‘There are two different kinds of people in the world….’ and those who avoid such distinctions”. Oh dear…

Dichotomous thinking is at the heart of language and from its grip there is no escape. In every encounter with the world, we are forced to make distinctions. From the most mundane to the most complex of ideas we divide the world into x and not-x.

At the most humdrum of levels, we classify whether everyday objects make the categorical grade. Is this a table or is it not a table? If it has 4 legs, is of a certain height, is of a certain shape and has a particular function, it’s a table. In most cases, the appropriate definition is clear. But as with the law, there are hard cases. Is it a table or a workbench or a movable breakfast bar? Here we either concede that it’s a table, choose an alternative, pre-existing category or in extremis, invent an entirely new denotation. Our world is mediated through either-or categories into which we unceremoniously shoehorn all that we encounter.

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The Law and the Facts

But the linguistic magnetism towards division is most starkly brought to life in more abstract domains. Their Lordships in the appellate courts are tasked with defining the limits of the law; does this or that action fall within the ambit of the legislative clause?

Let us examine a classic example: Theft. In most cases, whether an act should be categorized as such is clear. The only question before the jury is “Did they do it?”. But upon appeal, controversy may remain. Even where the facts may be agreed upon, the law may not. Theft is defined as “Dishonestly (appropriating) property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it”3. In a challenging factual matrix, every non-function word in this sentence may be susceptible to legal challenge:

Do the facts amount to appropriation?

What is dishonesty?

Did it belong to another?

Did the thing taken amount to property?

Was there an intention to permanently deprive?

Dishonesty, property, appropriation, permanently deprive, intention and another: all these are linguistic concepts about which we are called to decide: are the facts to be categorised as x or not-x? Property as with tables is daily subject to dichotomous decision making.

In Somerset v Stewart, Lord Mansfield was asked to decide upon the matter of property. Could an escaped slave be considered as property or belonging to another? According to our modern philosophy, and indeed according to the philosophy that has existed since time immemorial on the British island, the answers to these questions are clear: no person may be considered property nor as belonging to another. But in the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade such questions were controversial and the appellate court was called to rule definitively.

Today, where such questions are settled, others emerge to take their place; the matter of forced consent being of particular interest. But note this: even though language, by its nature, necessitates distinctions, language is separate from the underlying reality.

Where the Supreme Court is called to decide upon the definition of appropriation, the case’s factual matrix has already been determined by the jury. Assuming that the 12 men and women have correctly determined the true sequence of events, they have, through so doing, determined a reality beyond the realm of legal definitions.

First the lower courts decide the facts. Then the appellate court categorises the facts in relation to legal concepts. This is precisely the ordering that the “genocide” discussion inverts. Instead of determining the actual facts - the length and nature of a people’s presence upon a land; the stated intentions of the parties, evidenced in speech, document and deed; the comparative treatment of civilians and combatants; the proportion of a population killed against the proportion protected; the presence or absence of a systematic policy of extermination - the facts become subservient to the first-declared ideological verdict.

This is an aberration of the international law, for only once appropriate facts are established does the second, legal and definitional question arise: do these facts amount to genocide, as that term has been defined since Nuremberg and the Convention that followed it?

What this process would engender is not solely justice, but the application of the prima-facie principle. It will be quickly seen that Gaza is so far from the Nazi paradigm case that it should be thrown out of court before the process begins.

Yet the post-linguistic reverse of natural justice allows absurdity to have its day in court. Having appointed themselves judge, jury and appellate court in a single motion, they first assign the category — coloniser, oppressor, perpetrator of genocide — and only then, if at all, seek facts to fit it. Jews become the accused not because a factual matrix demands it, but perversely because the category was required as the demonic outcome.

This, as we shall observe, is the necessary consequence of idealism colliding with reality. The word is applied first; the world is expected to comply. But it doesn’t. Nature punishes hubris.

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Reality and Defining Reality

Tornados exist in the realm of reality. They really do. The a posteriori decision to define the phenomenon as a tornado as opposed to a hurricane is a human construct within a particular community. But the thing being described by Great Plain Americans as a tornado is a real thing.

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CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM SYMPOSIUM:

Theory 1 (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - Nomadism:

Theory 2 (Alan Mairson) - Narrative Darwinism:

Theory 3 & Chapter 16 of The Genocide of Truth (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - The Concept of The Chosen People:

Theory 4 & Chapter 17 of The Genocide of Truth (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - The Perfection of Christ:

Theory 5 (Peter L Biro) - The Virtuous Hatred:

Theory 6 (Nachum Kaplan) - A Mental Disorder. See below.

“Antisemitism is a mental disorder” by Nachum Kaplan

Antisemitism is a psychiatric disorder and not just a hateful ideology. This hypothesis solves the big problem of no one ever advancing anything close to a coherent, unified or general theory of antisemitism.

Given its many manifestations, it is hard to push all the variants of antisemitism into a single satisfying explanation. It is hard to develop one theory that explains antisemitism’s religious, racial, economic, conspiratorial and other features. It is also hard to make sense of the way antisemitism comes from the Far Right and the Far Left, the Christian and Muslim worlds, atheist autocracies and all those mad conspiracy theories.

If antisemitism is a disorder, however, there is no need for the elusive unifying theory. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and body dysmorphia do not have, or require, a single unifying ideological theory either. They are syndromes defined by recurring constellations of cognition, emotion and behavior that may arise through different developmental, psychological and biological pathways.

Perhaps antisemitism should be thought about in the same way.

I am a career journalist and commentator who made a midlife career change into psychotherapy. While I do not diagnose psychiatric disorders in my work, I treat people suffering from many of them, so I am far from ignorant about the human psyche.

The idea of antisemitism as a disorder was first advanced seriously at a symposium in San Francisco in 1944, a landmark gathering of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists held under the auspices of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation and the Emergency Committee on Psychology and Social Problems. Its participants were attempting to understand something that ordinary theories of political disagreement seemed spectacularly incapable of explaining: how a supposedly civilized society could become consumed by a fantastical hatred of a tiny minority.

The symposium laid the groundwork for the 1946 volume Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, edited by Ernst Simmel, a Jewish German psychoanalyst who had fled Nazi Germany. Influenced by Freud, Simmel and his contemporaries treated antisemitism not just as racism or political doctrine but as a psychological phenomenon involving projection, displacement, regression and the construction of the Jew as a symbolic object onto which intolerable fears and conflicts could be deposited.

That distinction matters. The antisemite is rarely responding simply to Jews as actual people, but to “the Jew” as a psychological construction.

The Jew becomes simultaneously capitalist and communist, rootless cosmopolitan and tribal nationalist, sexually degenerate and sexually repressive, pathetically weak and terrifyingly powerful, genetically inferior and mysteriously capable of controlling governments, banks, universities, Hollywood and the press. Ordinary hostility requires its object to possess reasonably stable characteristics. There is no such restraint on antisemitism.

Contradiction is not a bug in antisemitism. It may be one of its defining psychological features.

Simmel saw antisemitism as a mass neurotic reaction in which inner conflicts, fears and unconscious drives could be displaced onto Jews as symbolic scapegoats. The psychoanalytic vocabulary is dated, but the psychological mechanism is not. Modern psychology still studies displacement, motivated reasoning, scapegoating, paranoia, identity threat, projection and conspiratorial cognition, even if it uses slightly different terminology.

Newer research is surprisingly congenial to the old intuition.

A 2022 meta-analysis covering 127 independent samples and hundreds of correlations found that conspiracy belief is associated with paranoid ideation, schizotypy, narcissism and lower cognitive ability, among other variables.

Other research has found that conspiracy thinking is associated with both vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, although probably for different reasons. Vulnerable narcissism tends to come with greater suspiciousness and sensitivity to threat, making conspiratorial explanations psychologically attractive. Grandiose narcissism, by contrast, appears to connect more strongly with the desire to feel exceptional—to believe that one sees what ordinary people cannot.

Across the wider literature, conspiracy belief also commonly travels with distrust, paranoia, unusual beliefs and other socially destructive personality traits.

This does not mean everyone who believes a conspiracy theory is mentally ill. That would be an absurd overreach. It means that conspiracism’s psychological architecture overlaps conspicuously with phenomena that psychiatry already recognizes.

That matters enormously for antisemitism because conspiratorial thinking is not peripheral to it. It is one of its oldest and most durable forms. Jews poison wells, murder Christian children for ritual purposes, control international finance, started communism, control capitalism, engineer wars, manipulate governments, control the media, import immigrants, orchestrate revolutions, start pandemics and, of course, secretly control America.

The details change but the cognitive architecture barely does.

Contemporary research even gives us reason to distinguish ordinary prejudice from this more elaborate conspiratorial structure. A study of belief in Jewish conspiracy theories in Malaysia, for example, found associations with authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, racism and anti-Israel attitudes, while also demonstrating that culturally specific ideological forces matter.

The important point is not that one psychological variable explains antisemitism. Quite the opposite. Antisemitism appears capable of recruiting several psychological vulnerabilities simultaneously.

In his 1990 book Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, psychiatrist Theodore Rubin picked up Simmel’s theme of antisemitism as a “symbol sickness,” arguing that it could express deep psychological conflicts involving envy, projection, low self-esteem and other disturbances. Rubin interpreted Hitler’s hatred partly through paranoia and grandiosity while also examining Jewish self-hatred.

The underlying question they were trying to answer has not changed: At what point does antisemitism become pathology?

Virulent antisemitism belongs in that conversation.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5) and the bible of psychiatric and psychological disorders, explicitly warns against confusing social deviance with mental disorder. A political, religious or sexual belief is not pathological simply because society finds it offensive. A mental disorder requires clinically significant disturbance reflecting some dysfunction in psychological, biological or developmental processes.

That is an important safeguard. Psychiatry has an ugly history whenever political disagreement becomes medical diagnosis.

Yet notice what the DSM does not say. It does not say beliefs can never reveal pathology, only that deviance alone is insufficient. The relevant question is whether the belief arises from or expresses dysfunction in cognition, emotional regulation or behavior.

That is where extreme antisemitism becomes interesting.

It is easy to dismiss antisemitism as just another hateful ideology, which is what political leaders do when they “condemn antisemitism and all forms of racism and bigotry blah blah blah.” Yet when a person becomes fixated on an entire group—spinning elaborate conspiracies about Jewish world domination, attributing wildly disparate social problems to Jews, treating contradictory evidence as further confirmation of Jewish cunning, or fantasizing about harming or eliminating Jews—the phenomenon has traveled some distance beyond ordinary dislike or regular racism.

The clinical resemblance becomes difficult to ignore.

Consider delusional thinking. Delusions are characterized by unusually fixed beliefs maintained with extraordinary conviction despite persuasive counter-evidence. Clinical psychiatry properly distinguishes delusions from beliefs widely shared inside a culture or subculture, which prevents us from simply diagnosing every bizarre political movement as psychotic.

That qualification makes the antisemitism question more interesting, not less.

Research comparing paranoia and conspiracy thinking finds significant similarities: both involve hostile attribution, heightened perception of malevolent agency and unusual pattern detection. Yet there is an important distinction. Paranoid beliefs usually concern harm directed personally at the believer, whereas conspiracy beliefs are more often socially shared and concern threats directed against a group.

So antisemitism can be understood as occupying an uncomfortable psychological borderland: it is a delusion-like cognition capable of becoming socially normalized.

A false belief does not become cognitively healthy because 10 million people repeat it.

History supplies plenty of examples of societies collectively normalizing ideas that, at an individual level, would sound deranged. The existence of cultural reinforcement explains how such beliefs spread; it does not necessarily tell us anything reassuring about the cognitive processes involved.

Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint made essentially this argument in the debate over extreme racism. The American Psychiatric Association has never classified racism itself as a mental disorder, in part because prejudice can be culturally learned and socially normative. Poussaint nevertheless argued that extreme racist beliefs can become symptoms of psychiatric pathology and proposed a possible delusional-disorder subtype he called “Prejudice Type”: a delusion in which a group sharing a defining characteristic is assigned extraordinary and threatening significance.

Poussaint was not arguing that every racist requires psychiatric treatment. He was arguing that the word prejudice can cease to describe the phenomenon adequately.

This clearly applies to antisemitism.

The psychologist Gordon Allport long ago developed his famous continuum of prejudice: antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and extermination. People begin by talking about the hated group, proceed to separating themselves from it, discriminate against it, attack it and, at the extreme, seek its elimination.

Poussaint specifically argued that the exterminatory end of this continuum—where fantasies about an entire race become sufficiently elaborate to justify mass murder—can reasonably be understood as delusional.

Yet there is another dimension that Allport’s behavioral progression does not fully capture, which is the hated group’s transformation into an existential threat.

Modern social psychology has explored this, too. Stephen Reicher and colleagues have described how collective hatred develops through social identification, exclusion of an outgroup, representation of that group as threatening, idealization of the ingroup and ultimately the redefinition of violence against the outgroup as virtuous self-defense. People committing atrocities do not necessarily believe themselves evil. Quite often they have constructed a psychological universe in which evil consists of failing to destroy the enemy.

Antisemitism has repeatedly demonstrated precisely this ability. The Jew is not merely disliked. He becomes explanatory and responsible for the world’s ills. The strange genius of antisemitism is its capacity to convert Jews from a tiny minority population into an all-purpose causation theory.

This is where conspiracy psychology becomes useful. Conspiracy theories provide something emotionally valuable in that they transform complexity into agency. Randomness becomes intention, failure becomes sabotage and humiliation becomes victimization. Historical processes involving millions of people become the work of hidden actors pulling strings.

Research on narcissism helps explain the psychological attraction. Studies have repeatedly found associations between narcissistic traits and conspiracy beliefs, with proposed mechanisms including paranoia, gullibility, need for dominance, need for control, need for uniqueness, and the desire to protect an inflated self-concept from threatening information.

Collective narcissism adds another layer: the conviction that one’s group is exceptional but insufficiently recognized can create fertile ground for theories explaining that lack of recognition as the work of malicious outsiders.

Thus the antisemite acquires an extraordinary psychological bargain. Nothing need ever be his fault or genuinely complicated. Defeat need not mean failure. Poverty need not require examining bad institutions. Political disappointment need not involve mistaken choices. Social alienation need not demand introspection. Jews’ existence provides an omnipotent external agent capable of explaining whatever requires explanation.

This is why antisemitism so often resembles paranoia while also satisfying narcissistic needs. The believer simultaneously becomes the victim of an unimaginably powerful conspiracy and one of the enlightened few clever enough to perceive it.

He is persecuted and special.

What an extraordinarily useful belief.

Obsession provides another psychiatric analogy. In Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and urges toward repetitive behavior. Antisemitic rumination is plainly not OCD: the thoughts are generally ego-syntonic rather than unwanted, and hatred is not a diagnostic compulsion. Yet the repetitive cognitive pattern is nonetheless striking. The antisemite returns again and again to the same explanatory object, interpreting unrelated events through it and seeking information that reinforces it.

The internet has industrialized this process. A person can now spend 10 hours a day inside a self-reinforcing epistemic system in which every war, billionaire, professor, movie studio, bank, politician and newspaper eventually leads back to Jews. Evidence against the theory becomes evidence of the conspiracy’s sophistication. Absence of evidence proves how thoroughly the evidence has been concealed.

The belief becomes effectively unfalsifiable. Psychologically, that is important because healthy cognition requires some mechanism by which beliefs can lose.

There are also parallels with personality pathology, though again parallels are not diagnoses. Antisemitic conspiracy thinking may involve grandiosity, suspiciousness, lack of empathy, externalization of blame and aggressive entitlement. Research on conspiracy belief broadly finds associations with narcissism, paranoia, schizotypal traits and so-called Dark Triad characteristics, although effect sizes vary and none of these relationships means most conspiracists possess a personality disorder.

This qualification is essential because psychiatric labels have been abused for ideological purposes before. The Soviet Union, and Russia today, notoriously pathologized political dissent, locking dissidents in mental asylums by defining disagreement with the state as evidence of mental abnormality.

Psychiatry becomes totalitarian the moment disagreeing with me becomes diagnostic evidence.

That is not the argument here.

Ordinary disagreement about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, Israel or Israeli policy is obviously not psychiatric pathology. Nor does moral repugnance establish mental illness. A belief can be wicked without being clinically disordered.

The narrower contention is that extreme antisemitism displays a cluster of cognitive features already familiar to psychopathology: paranoid attribution, grandiose explanatory systems, pathological externalization, unfalsifiable conspiratorial reasoning, obsessive rumination and a collapse in reality-testing about the intentions and power of a target group.

There is also a serious objection to medicalizing antisemitism as doing so can appear to excuse evil as involuntary. However, explanation and exculpation are not synonyms.

Psychiatry routinely distinguishes between the causes of behavior and responsibility for behavior. A person may possess psychopathology and remain entirely capable of understanding that an action is wrong. Legal insanity is an exceptionally narrow doctrine precisely because mental disorder alone does not abolish moral agency.

Understanding why a mind becomes receptive to hatred does not require forgiving what that person does with it.

Indeed, treating antisemitism purely as ideology may allow us to underestimate its emotional utility. Facts alone frequently fail because the belief is not being held merely as a factual.

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Bibliography:

• Simmel, E. (Ed.). (1946). Anti-Semitism: A disease of the mind: A psychiatrist explores the psychodynamics of a symbol sickness. International Universities Press.

• Allport, G. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley

• Rubin, T. I. (1990). Anti-Semitism: A disease of the mind. Continuum Publishing.

• Sullaway, M., & Dunbar, E. (1996). Clinical manifestations of prejudice in psychotherapy: Assessment and treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3.

• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (DSM-5)

• Poussaint, A. F. (2002). Yes: It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders. Western Journal of Medicine, 176(1):4 .

• Poussaint, A. F. (2015). Is extreme racism a mental illness? MDedge Psychiatry, July 16, 2015.

• Stasielowicz, L (2022). “Who Believes in Conspiracy Theories? A Meta-Analysis on Personality Correlates.” Journal of Research in Personality.

• Swami, V (2012). “Social Psychological Origins of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory in Malaysia.” Frontiers in Psychology 3.

• Reicher, S.D., S. Alexander Haslam, and Rakshi R. (2008) “Making a Virtue of Evil: A Five-Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 3.