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In the summer of 2011, riots erupted all over London and television screens and newspapers were filled with pictures of blazing buildings and looted shops. People swiftly noted that among those not present in the capital was the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who was with his family in a camper van in the Canadian Rockies on a holiday from which he showed great reluctance to return.

As London burned, the excuses for Johnson’s absence by City Hall became more and more embarrassing: he was said to be against “rewarding” the rioters by flying back to London precipitously; he claimed that he must stay in Canada because his then wife was unable to drive the Winnebago camper van.

When he did come back to London – sometime after the prime minister, David Cameron, and the home secretary, Theresa May, had rushed back from their own holidays – he went straight to Clapham in south London, which had suffered particularly badly in the riots. He was greeted at first by jeering residents, but he seized a broom and held it aloft as a symbol of his determination to lead the clean-up of the debris left by the riots. Hand clapping replaced the booing, though some distraught shopkeepers later said that there was no evidence that Johnson had actually used his broom. Politically, this did not matter: the gesture was enough and Johnson was re-elected mayor the following year, his political career, and wider ambition to be prime minister, undamaged.

Given his track record, nobody should have been too surprised that the prime minister was on the millionaires’ island of Mustique in the Caribbean when China first told the WHO on 31 December that an unusual type of pneumonia had been identified in Wuhan. The pandemic was well underway in February when he took a 12-day “working holiday” and missed five emergency Cobra meetings about coronavirus before succumbing to the virus himself in March. Most politicians would have been damaged by these voluntary and involuntary disappearances in such a mega crisis, but, instead, he may return to Downing Street in the next few days, his popularity enhanced by accidentally achieving the martyr status of “wounded in action” in the war against coronavirus.

More is at work here than sympathy for a sick man: Johnson plugs into the traditional English sympathy for the lovable rogue with an engaging personality who has faults but very human ones to which everybody can relate; quintessentially English, he is never downhearted and is difficult to hate. This fondness for jocular Falstaffian figures has a long history and it is, indeed, not for nothing that Shakespeare’s Falstaff was his most popular creation.

Yet it is important to keep in mind, as Johnson enjoys physical and political rejuvenation, that his jolly but self-confident amateurism is all too genuine and, unlike 2011, his mistakes cause real misery and loss of life. Note, for instance, that the death rate for Covid-19 in the Republic of Ireland is two-thirds of that in Northern Ireland and the explanation for this is that on 12 March, Britain – including Northern Ireland – abandoned contact tracing and restricted testing, which it is now desperately trying to resume, while the Irish government followed WHO guidelines and expanded testing and contact tracing. In other words, if 18,738 people have died from coronavirus in the UK, then as many as 6,000 may have died unnecessarily because of mistakes by Johnson and the government that he has created in his own image.

Once a bungler, always a bungler – and the bungles are not going to stop simply because the man most responsible for them has personal experience of coronavirus. Johnson’s failings might not matter so much if Britain was only trying to cope with the consequences of Brexit. He might even have been the right man for the job because, going by his agile retreat over the Withdrawal Agreement last October, he is skilful in announcing famous but non-existent victories and masking concessions with sub-Churchillian bombast and defiance.

The ineptitude of the Brexiteers is more dangerous than Brexit itself: Johnson and his lieutenants gained power by exaggerating or inventing danger, such as the supposed threat to British independence from the EU. And it is this very skill in inflating threats and boosting opportunities conveniently just over the horizon, that makes a Brexiteer government peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with an all too real and terrible crisis. Suddenly the slogans are no longer enough – upbeat words stubbornly refuse to turn into deeds and serve only to hide and drift an uncertain strategy.

The government’s defence gambit is to say that all along it has been only “following the science”, though it is obvious from the beginning that scientists radically disagree about what should be done. It was the chief medical officer Chris Whitty and the chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance who backed “mitigation”, or herd immunity, for a critical period – contrary to the best practice in South Korea, China, Taiwan and Singapore. Paradoxically, the very same Brexiteers who had once repeatedly denounced experts who criticised their favourite project now demand that the words of their medical experts who advise them should be treated as divinely inspired utterances that must be obeyed.

Political leaders do not have to judge the validity of scientific arguments themselves, but they do need to appoint people who can correctly do so. History is full of examples of distinguished scientists who got things very wrong: Professor Lindemann, Winston Churchill’s friend and scientific adviser, argued in the 1930s for the development of aerial mines hanging from parachutes as a way of defending Britain from future German air attack, while others suggested that radar might be the better option.

A pandemic is by its nature an international event since the coronavirus knows no national frontiers. It is therefore unlucky that Britain should be ruled by people who are fanatical believers in the nation state and sceptical about cooperation with the rest of Europe. Regardless of whether it was ministers or civil servants who were to blame for failing to participate in joint procurement with the EU of essential medical equipment, this was clearly something to which the government had given little priority.

Austerity has hollowed out the British state at home and Brexit has weakened it abroad. Worse, those in charge of promoting those projects are in power with no chance of replacing them, however poorly they perform. Strong local government institutions are essential to carrying out the new mantra of tracking, tracing and testing, but these have been cut back to the point that it is doubtful if they can carry out such a vast undertaking.

Presiding over this catastrophe will be Boris Johnson, exuding optimism and praising the “fantastic” and “amazing” work of almost everybody, regardless of achievement. He will speak of the spirit of 1940, but so far his performance is closer to that of those bonhomous but disastrous British generals in the First World War. About one such general, Siegfried Sassoon wrote a bitter poem with striking current relevance: “‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack / As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack / But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Boris Johnson, Britain, Coronavirus 
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“Where does incompetence end and crime begin?” asked an appalled German chancellor in the First World War on learning that his chief military commander planned to renew his bloody but futile attacks on the western front.

President Trump is showing a similar disastrous inability during the coronavirus pandemic to shift away from his well-tried tactics of claiming non-existent successes and blaming everybody for his blunders except for himself. It is his first true crisis in his three years in the White House and, like that German general, he is visibly incapable of changing the way he deals with it.

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the last three years about the ineptitude and isolationism of the Trump presidency, and how far it will erode American hegemony. The pandemic has posed the question more starkly than ever before, but it has also provided something of an answer. Crudely put, the US will not remain the one single superpower if the rest of the world sees evidence day after day that the country is run by a crackpot who cannot cope with a global calamity.

More is at stake here than the future of the Trump presidency. Over the past decade, Trumpian nationalist populist leaders have taken power all around the world, and they too are being tested and found wanting. Without exception, they have shown themselves to be better at winning (or fixing) elections than they are at combating the virus. Some admit the gravity of the outbreak, but use it to enhance their power and silence their critics. Others reject social distancing and restrictive measures as unnecessary, or denounce them as a hoax cooked up by the media. What comes across in all these cases is that Trumpian regimes, for all their self-serving talk of threats, do not know what to do when there is a real threat to their nation.

In India, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, locked down his country with just four hours’ notice, forcing millions of jobless migrant labourers with little money or food to trek hundreds of miles to their home villages.

In Brazil, the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took an opposite tack, downplaying the crisis and defying his own health ministry’s appeal for social distancing by going into the street to buy doughnuts and mingle with his supporters: one film shows him wiping his nose with his wrist before shaking hands with an elderly woman.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reluctant to do anything to stall the Turkish economy and is jailing journalists who say he is not doing enough for victims of the virus. In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orban, used the pandemic as an excuse to pass a law suspending elections and enabling him to rule indefinitely by decree. The dire state of underfunded Hungarian hospitals is ignored.

What might be loosely called the Trump playbook – though much of it predates Trump, and has been used by populist nationalist demagogues through history – falls short when it comes to dealing effectively with a real rather than a concocted crisis. However, comforting though it would be to suppose that this would discredit leaders who pretend to be national saviours, this does not necessarily follow. In places such as Hungary, Turkey and India, the media is largely under the control of the ruling party, and news of its mismanagement of the crisis will be suppressed regardless of the toll.

Yet the pandemic is exposing the weaknesses of regimes from Washington to Delhi and Sao Paulo to Budapest. Autocracy has its disadvantages since, at the core of these governments, is a supreme leader with devoted followers who believe that he can do no wrong. Trump may have drawn back from his claim that he enjoys monarchical powers and can do without Congress, but the boast shows his authoritarian inclinations.

Crises expose the poor judgement of such dictatorial regimes, where leaders surround themselves with cheerleaders and courtiers who tell them what they want to hear. A diplomat in Baghdad once told me that among the senior lieutenants of Saddam Hussein, the only safe course was “to be 10 per cent tougher than the boss”. Trump may not shoot advisers who contradict him, like Saddam did, but he does sack them and shows equal intolerance towards dissenting views as the Iraqi dictator.

The Trumpian generation of leaders suffers from a further disadvantage: they come from deeply polarised countries, and are both the symptom and cause of those divisions. Minorities are persecuted: Muslims in India; Kurds in Turkey; Latin American immigrants in the US. The new authoritarians are happy to rule countries that are split down the middle, but they are finding that successfully fighting a pandemic requires a higher degree of national cohesion than they can deliver.

The pandemic will rock many of these regimes, but censorship and aggressive government PR may limit its political impact. The devastating Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 only gained its name because Spain was one of the few countries that did not censor accounts of its ravages.

The coronavirus may ebb, or news of it be suppressed, but it will be impossible to hide the deep economic depression likely to follow in its wake. It was the Great Crash of 1929 that led to the rise of Hitler and the advance of communism, fuelling ever-increasing political violence in the 1930s. A post-pandemic Great Depression mark II may have a similarly explosive political effect, turning the 2020s into the same sort of troubled time in our century as the 1930s were in the last. Rival nation-states will once again confront each other and international organisations such as the UN and the EU, as with the League of Nations of old, will retreat into irrelevance. Enhanced international cooperation and integration, which once appeared to be where the world was heading, are turning out to be a mirage.

As Trump presides over the break-up of the international order and the ebb-tide of US hegemony, it is difficult to think of any historic figure that precisely resembles him. But one contender should surely be Kaiser Wilhelm II, the swaggering, opinionated German emperor with catastrophically poor judgement, who led his country to defeat in the First World War. As with Trump, he warned – somewhat prematurely – of the rise of China and “the yellow peril”. And, again like Trump, he forecast that the great crisis that he could not cope with would soon be over, promising his soldiers in 1914 that they “would be home before the leaves fall”.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Coronavirus, Donald Trump, Nationalism 
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I was walking in the early evening down an empty street in Canterbury, wondering how residents were coping with fear and isolation stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. People living there must have been in their houses judging by the cars parked outside, but there were few lights in the windows suggesting that they were in their kitchens out the back.

The silence was complete aside from the twitter of birds, eerie but magical, reminding me of streets in Beirut or Baghdad during a lull in the fighting. But then Lebanese and Iraqis have all had too much experience of crises when it was too risky to set foot outside one’s own home. For people in Canterbury it is a new and worrying experience.

I had my worst experience of loneliness when I was six years old in 1956 and I caught polio in an epidemic in Cork. An ambulance took me to a ward in St Finbarr’s hospital in Cork city which only doctors, nurses and clergy were allowed to enter. I had grown up within a tight family group and felt frightened and bewildered. One day I saw my parents waving their hands frantically and with manically cheerful smiles on the other side of an oval window in a door leading into the ward.

I discovered early on that reading was the easiest way to escape from an unappealing world. As a child, I would become wholly absorbed in historical adventure stories by the once vastly popular G A Henty and, rather more contemporary ones set in or around the two world wars by Captain WE Johns, featuring the war heroes Biggles and Gimlet.

As a foreign reporter my luggage used to be weighed down with books to fend off potential tedium. A hazard for journalists specialising in the Middle East was once a call from a Libyan diplomatic mission saying that one had been granted an exclusive interview with the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

This sounded too good to be true and so it was, but was difficult to turn down, even though one was aware that the Libyans had probably made the same promise of exclusivity to a dozen journalists and there was a better than even chance that none of us would see the mercurial Gaddafi. Since the only way to find this out for sure was to go to Tripoli and wait, I travelled with a full helping of Jane Austen. I would lie on my bed in the hotel in Tripoli reading Pride and Prejudice, Emma or Mansfield Park, disappearing into the country house world of the early 19th century English gentry.

More fraught situations required a less genteel reading list: wars require boring periods of waiting for something to happen and I discovered that an effective antidote to tedium or self-pity was books about even nastier conflicts, like the battles of Verdun or Stalingrad, showing that, however bad things might be for oneself, they had been a great deal worse for others.

In the coronavirus pandemic, as has happened in past wars, politicians make irritating efforts to evoke wartime spirit and camaraderie. The media highlights upbeat items designed to demonstrate national solidarity and raise morale.

The tone is unnecessarily patronising since most people are capable of dealing with a solitary or uncertain existence so long as it does not go on too long and they and their family are together and not under direct threat. The worst affected in most crises are people who were not doing too well pre-crisis: an adviser in a Citizens Advice Bureau told me that she was most worried about what would happen to her mentally ill clients who not only could not operate online, but are frightened of telephones.

Curiously, the pandemic has re-established the use of the telephone as the best way of keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. I have always found emails to be a chilly and not very satisfactory way of making contact with people. In the present lockdown, many others have reached the same conclusion. Telecommunication companies in the US say that they had expected a big increase to be in the use of the internet, but found instead that the number of phone calls has increased much faster and are twice what they used to be.

My experience of coping with isolation and loneliness has to do mostly with armed conflict in places like Belfast, Grozny, Baghdad, Beirut and Benghazi. At first glance, this would seem to fit in neatly with what happens to people facing lockdown and possible infection today. Certainly there are points in common, but the analogy is not as helpful as it might seem.

The Covid-19 pandemic is really not like a war despite innumerable comparisons: the number of fatalities caused by the virus worldwide totals around 100,000 compared to an estimated 20 million deaths in the First World War and 56 million in the 1939-45 conflict.

In one respect, however, the pandemic is very similar to a war: they are reported the same way by the media. War reporting tends to mislead, not so much because of “the fog of war” or propaganda, but because it dwells so exclusively on melodrama; reports of epidemics are equally sensationalist and catastrophist.

“If it bleeds, it leads” is a well-established principle of the news business and always will be. Political leaders, for their part, revel in threat inflation as it puts them centre stage and enables them to extend their authority without opposition. The cruellest current example of this epidemic-fuelled authoritarianism is in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a lockdown with only four hours’ notice, forcing millions of unemployed migrant labourers to take to the roads in a desperate bid to reach their home villages. In South Africa shanty towns, police beat people for not staying in their houses full time even when their house consists of a few pieces of plywood and corrugated iron.

As with war reporting, objective and substantiated information is difficult to come by despite, or even because of, the tidal wave of news. How far, for instance, does the death rate in each country exceed the normal death rate for this time of year? The vulnerable health service workers in every country are being rightly lauded for their selfless courage, but does the significantly lower death rate in Veneto compared to Lombardy reflect the fact that fewer patients are hospitalised in the former region and the hospitals themselves may be a prime source of fatal infections?

There is a politics of pandemics, just as there is a politics of war in which conspiracy theories abound. In the small but vicious polio epidemic in Cork, where I caught the disease, as in Wuhan today, local people were convinced that the authorities were lying about the number of fatalities and were secretly burying the dead in mass graves.

A pandemic, like a war, requires decision making in circumstances in which crucial information is scant or unreliable. The cooperation of many countries and individuals is needed to stop a war or an epidemic disease, which explains why it takes so long to end them.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: American Media, Coronavirus, Disease 
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Government leaders everywhere are calling for their people to wage war against the coronavirus outbreak, recalling past victories in an effort to boost public morale. In Britain, politicians cite the Second World War as a suitable example of determined and successful resistance to a terrifying enemy.

Yet the faltering response of the British authorities to the Covid-19 pandemic so far is much closer to the failures of 1914 than anything that happened in 1940. The parallels are striking between the crisis today and the one that exploded on the world just over a hundred years ago. Then as now there was poor leadership – inadequately prepared and hampered by an initially mistaken strategy – sending frontline forces over the top to suffer massive losses. The difference is that then the casualties were in the British army and today they are in the NHS.

“Lions led by donkeys,” was the phrase used to condemn the waste of lives by incompetent First World War generals and their political masters. The same words could be used again today: once the shortages were of machine guns and artillery shells while now they are of ventilators, surgical masks and testing kits. The common feature is that in both cases the shortage will kill or disable a proportion of those who do not receive essential equipment.

The analogy could go on: the best trained troops of the British Expeditionary Force were all but wiped out in the first months of fighting and were replaced by enthusiastic but ill-trained volunteers. How will all those volunteering for service in Covid-19 hospitals fare when they begin to fill up?

Overdramatic? A pandemic is not the same as war? Governments around the world are already talking of potentially millions of dead unless the virus is brought under control. It is disrupting life and destroying economies on a scale not seen since 1945.

An excuse for the stumbling performance of most governments is that this crisis is unprecedented. Although China, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore put their experience with the Sars epidemic to good use. Again the best comparison is with 1914 which was the first great international military conflict since the Napoleonic Wars a hundred years earlier. Come the Second World War people had plenty of grim experience of what such an earth-shaking conflict would be like.

But this does not quite explain why British political and scientific leadership has been visibly worse than almost all other developed countries. From the beginning, the authorities underestimated the gravity of the crisis: only five-and-a-half weeks ago, on 21 February, a meeting of government scientific advisers concluded that Covid-19 posed only a “moderate risk” to Britain. This was well after the epidemic had swept through China, where there were already 75,465 cases and 2,236 deaths, and was spreading to South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Italy and France.

Scientific panjandrums who have since become television celebrities, such as the pandemic modeller Neil Ferguson, were at the meeting. But there appeared little objections raised to the conclusion directly afterwards. A quarter of a million people were allowed to attend the Cheltenham Festival on 10 to 13 March, only ten days before Boris Johnson said that everybody should stay at home and not gather in large numbers to avoid the spread of the deadly virus. These were miscalculations of First World War dimensions and are already exacting a heavy toll in human lives.

The government appears to think in slogans and not in joined up policies. “Get Brexit Done” has been replaced by “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. There is an amateur air about all that is done: giant drive-through testing facilities were opened at Chessington World of Adventures and Ikea at Wembley, but nobody from the NHS was let in without a email giving them an appointment, something almost impossible to obtain.

A counterpart to the British tradition of amateurism is an exaggerated respect for supposed experts. In times of trouble, everybody looks for saviours with magical powers: a hundred years ago this was to be Kitchener and today we hope that the chief scientific officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, both articulate confident professionals, know a feasible way out of the crisis.

Yet it was Whitty and Vallance who presided over the initial disastrous flirtation with “herd immunity” – let most people get the illness aside from the most vulnerable – that was only abandoned on 16 March. Since then ministers have tried to distance themselves from a strategy that is condemned by almost everybody, even President Trump, who, with shameless hypocrisy, has described it as “catastrophic”.

Critics unkindly point out that this political distancing will not work since Dr David Halpern, a senior Downing Street official, gave an interview five days before the government’s U-turn, confirming that official policy was to protect the most vulnerable so by the time they emerged from their cocooning, “herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population.”

The government is racking up an impressive record of poor judgement and inability to translate words into action. Why did it adopt a policy so different from the rest of Europe and Asia and contrary to that advised by the World Health Organisation (WHO). One explanation is probably that a Brexiteer cabinet, whose members had spent three years lauding the virtues of British separatism and exceptionalism, found nothing strange about going their own way. Another is that the British have always had difficulty in taking on board that they can learn anything from the experience of other nations and must wait until it happens to them.

There are other dangers on the horizon that might be averted if the experience of past world crises is taken into account. It is important not to overreact to chaos by putting some outside figure as head of medical procurement like Churchill’s appointment of his friend and ally Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of The Daily Express, as minister of aircraft production in 1940, in the mistaken belief that he would “energise” the aircraft industry.

But according to General Sir Alan Brooke, the supremely competent British chief of staff, he disrupted the carefully planned output of different types of aircraft. Brooke was particularly enraged when Beaverbrook used armour needed for tanks to make his own entirely useless armoured car, called the Beaverette, to be supplied to the Home Guard. His other stunt was to organise a campaign whereby kitchen utensils – along with ornamental railings – were collected as scrap that were supposed to be melted down to be turned into aircraft: “we will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes, Blenheims and Wellingtons.” By most accounts, municipal dumps were full of useless and unused scrap by the end of the war.

 
• Category: History • Tags: Britain, Coronavirus, World War II 
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The US may be reaching its “Chernobyl moment” as it fails to lead in combating the coronavirus epidemic. As with the nuclear accident in the Soviet Union in 1986, a cataclysm is exposing systemic failings that have already weakened US hegemony in the world. Whatever the outcome of the pandemic, nobody is today looking to Washington for a solution to the crisis.

The fall in US influence was visible this week at virtual meetings of world leaders where the main US diplomatic effort was devoted to an abortive attempt to persuade the others to sign a statement referring to the “Wuhan virus”, as part of a campaign to blame China for the coronavirus epidemic. Demonising others as a diversion from one’s own shortcomings is a central feature of President Trump’s political tactics. Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton took up the same theme, saying that “China unleashed this plague on the world, and China has to be held accountable”.

US failure goes far beyond Trump’s toxic political style: American supremacy in the world since the Second World War has been rooted in its unique capacity to get things done internationally by persuasion or by the threat or use of force. But the inability of Washington to respond adequately to Covid-19 shows that this is no longer the case and crystallises a perception that American competence is vanishing. The change in attitude is important because superpowers, such as the British Empire, the Soviet Union in the recent past or the US today, depend on a degree of bluff. They cannot afford to put their all-powerful image to the test too often because they cannot be seen to fail: an exaggerated picture of British strength was shattered by the Suez Crisis in 1956, as was that of the Soviet Union by the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The coronavirus crisis is the equivalent of Suez and Afghanistan for Trump’s America. Indeed, these crises seem minor compared to the Covid-19 pandemic, which will have far greater impact because everybody on the planet is a potential victim and feels threatened. Faced with such a mega-crisis, the failure of the Trump administration to lead responsibly is proving extraordinarily destructive to the US position in the world.

The decline of the US is usually seen as the counterpart to the rise of China – and China has, at least for the moment, successfully got a grip on its own epidemic. It is the Chinese who are sending ventilators and medical teams to Italy and face masks to Africa. Italians note that the other EU states all ignored Italy’s desperate appeal for medical equipment and only China responded. A Chinese charity sent 300,000 face masks to Belgium in a container on which was written the slogan “Unity Makes Strength” in French, Flemish and Chinese.

Such exercises in “soft power” may have limited influence once the crisis is over, though this is likely to be a long time coming. But, while it does so, the message is going out that China can provide essential equipment and expertise at a critical moment and the US cannot. These changes in perception are not going to disappear overnight.

Prophecies that the US is in a state of decline have been two a penny almost as long as the US emerged from the Second World War as the greatest superpower. Yet the much-heralded downfall of the American empire has kept being postponed or has seen others decline even faster, notably the Soviet Union. Critics of “US decline-ism” explain that, while the US may no longer dominate the world economy to the degree it once did, it still has 800 bases around the world and a military budget of $748bn.

Yet the inability of the US military to use its technical prowess to win wars in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq has shown how little it has got in return for its vast expenditure.

Trump has not started any wars despite his bellicose rhetoric, but he has used the power of the US Treasury rather than the Pentagon. By imposing tight economic sanctions on Iran and threatening other countries with economic warfare, he has demonstrated the degree to which the US controls the world financial system.

But these arguments about the rise or decline of the US as an economic and military power miss a more important point that should be obvious. The very real decline of the US as a global power, as exemplified by the coronavirus pandemic crisis, has less to do with guns and money than many suppose, and much more to do with Trump himself as both the symptom and cause of American decline.

Put simply, the US is no longer a country that the rest of the world wants to emulate or, if they do, the emulators tend to be authoritarian nativist demagogues or despots. Their admiration is warmly welcomed: witness Trump’s embrace of the Hindu nationalist Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his cultivation of the younger generation of tyrants such as Kim Jung-un in North Korea and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

Democratic and despotic rulers will, at least at first, be strengthened by the pandemic, since in times of acute crisis people want to see their governments as saviours who know what they are doing.

But demagogues like Trump and his equivalents around the world are seldom much good at handling real crises, because they have risen to power by exploiting ethnic and sectarian hatreds, scapegoating their opponents and boosting their own mythical achievements.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Coronavirus, Donald Trump 
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“I have delivered food parcels to four families this morning,” says Paula Spencer, who runs the community centre in Thanington, a deprived district on the outskirts of Canterbury. Two of the families had called for help because they had symptoms of the coronavirus, and two simply needed food to eat.

There are no signs of panic buying in Thanington, which has a population of about 2,700 and a Morrisons supermarket not far away. However, Nick Eden Green, a Lib Dem councillor for this part of Canterbury, says that the restraint is not due to people being unworried by shortages but because many “do not have the money for a bulk buy and, even if they did, they do not own cars in which to take away mass purchases”.

I spoke to Spencer by phone on Thursday afternoon and she was already sounding fairly desperate. She said that the problem is that food banks in Canterbury, on which many in Thanington have come to rely, are dependent on volunteers who tend to be older people or pensioners – because of their high vulnerability to the coronavirus, and in compliance with government advice, many of them have gone home.

This is not to say that panic buying is not going on. I visited the biggest local Sainsbury’s on Tuesday when most of the shelves were still well-stocked, aside from toilet roll, kitchen paper, tinned or packet soup, and coffee beans. But a friend who went there this morning reported “no bread, no vegetables, no fresh fruit, no pizzas – and very little beer.”.

Normal life is crumbling fast in Canterbury, considerably faster than the efforts by government, local authorities and volunteers to prop it up. A few hours after I had talked to Spencer, she sent me an anguished email: “I’ve had a stream of people in here since I spoke to you saying their employers are laying them off as of today. The lady who just left has three young children and works in the kitchen of a school which has said that she has to take four weeks unpaid leave as of today and if she becomes ill she won’t be paid sick leave. What are these people going to do? I’m feeling so powerless and inadequate and there’s no guidance from anywhere.”

It is going to get a great deal worse than this as the coronavirus advances into east Kent. A patient at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford has tested positive. “The three main hospitals in the area couldn’t cope before the crisis, and they certainly won’t be able to cope now,” a friend told me.

Those worst hit are going to be the many who have been victims of creeping destitution during a decade of austerity. Canterbury is a city where many jobs are in pubs, restaurants, hotels, or are part of the gig economy. “It makes much more sense from the point of view of the owners of these places to fire their workers now and re-hire them after the crisis than take out government loans that they will have to pay back,” say Alex Lister, a community organiser. He was speaking before the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced measures to help workers impacted by the spread of coronavirus.

It is easy enough to work oneself into a state of apocalyptic gloom about the future of the country and the world as the pandemic spreads, but there are also strong forces working to make sure that society goes on functioning and prevent its disintegration. Edd Withers is the founder and organiser of the online Canterbury Residents Group, which has 37,000 members on Facebook and is the highly influential platform where most people in the Canterbury area get their local news and communicate their opinions. He says that “the government keeps talking about ‘social distancing’ while what we should be advocating is ‘physical distancing and social solidarity’.”

To this end, Withers is intending to use the group’s Facebook page to bring thousands of people who want to volunteer their help in contact with those sectors that are most in need. Doing so is not easy: Lister, who used to work for a charity facing this issue, says that “coordinating volunteers is always a huge effort”. He believes the best approach is to utilise the policies and experience of charities that have already been down this road.

A crucial weakness in combating the virus is that a great deal will be demanded of municipal and state organisations that have been systematically degraded by the years of government-imposed austerity. All of these, from Canterbury Council to the NHS, have been run down and starved of money. Operational capacity cannot be resurrected overnight.

Organisations that will now be in the front line are crumbling further under the impact of the pandemic. A small example of this is the Citizens Advice Bureau in Canterbury, never more necessary than today, which will, understandably, no longer see people face to face, although it promises to return phone calls. The Thanington Neighbourhood Resource Centre, to give the community centre its official name, drew most of its income from renting out space for clubs and meetings: as this revenue dries up, it may have to cut its staff or close at a moment of maximum demand.

None of these local efforts, be they voluntary or municipal, will be able to carry the vastly increased burden coming their way without drawing on the resources of the central government. However, government decision-making lags behind events, clarity of direction is lacking, and the government seems to be trying to operate slow-moving, traditional and over-burdened methods of administration, such as applying for and receiving loans, that will not work in a crisis as calamitous and destructive as this one.

The closure of schools is a measure that has so many exceptions that it is unclear how many schools will, in fact, be able to close. One parent in Canterbury worked out that 68 per cent of the children attending his daughter’s nursery school were still eligible to do so because one or more of their parents were “key workers”. A high degree of confusion is inevitable when changes disrupting the lives of millions of people have to be implemented almost overnight, but there is a sense that decisions are being taken that have not been thought through.

Putting the country on a wartime footing is necessary – but, if this is to be more than bombast, it must mean giving clear orders and ensuring that they are obeyed. Anything less implies that the government has still not got to grips with the gravity of the catastrophe coming our way.

 
• Category: Culture/Society • Tags: Britain, Coronavirus, Health care 
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The fear caused by the coronavirus outbreak is greater than that provoked by a serious war because everybody is in the front line and everybody knows that they are a potential casualty. The best parallel is the terror felt by people facing occupation by a hostile foreign army; even if, in the present case, the invader comes in the form of a minuscule virus.

The political consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic are already vast because its advance, and the desperate measures taken to combat it, entirely dominate the news agenda and will go on doing so for the foreseeable future, although it is in the nature of this unprecedented event that nothing can be foreseen.

History has not come to a full stop because of the virus, however: crucial events go on happening, even if they are being ignored by people wholly absorbed by the struggle for survival in the face of a new disease. Many of these unrecognised but very real crises are taking place in the Middle East, the arena where great powers traditionally stage confrontations fought out by their local proxies.

Top of the list of critical new conflicts that have been overshadowed by the pandemic is the battle for the throne of Saudi Arabia: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), whose dwindling band of admirers describe him as “mercurial”, this month launched a sort of palace coup by arresting his uncle, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, and his cousin, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, whom he displaced as crown prince in 2017.

The new purge of close relatives by MbS may be motivated by his wish to eliminate any potential rivals for the crown who might step forward upon the death of King Salman, his 84-year-old father. This need to settle the royal succession has become more urgent in the past few weeks because the US presidential election in November might see the crown prince lose an essential ally: Donald Trump, a man who has become increasingly discredited by his shambolic response to Covid-19, and who faces Joe Biden’s emergence as the likely Democratic candidate for the presidency.

Trump has been a vital prop for MbS, standing by him despite his role in starting an unwinnable war in Yemen in 2015 and his alleged responsibility for the gruesome murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. MbS has denied personal involvement in the killing, but told PBS last year: “It happened under my watch. I get all the responsibility, because it happened under my watch.”

The record of misjudgements by MbS after he established himself as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia five years ago makes Inspector Clouseau seem like a strategist of Napoleonic stature by comparison. Every one of his initiatives at home and abroad has stalled or failed, from the endless and calamitous war in Yemen to the escalating confrontation with Iran that culminated in Tehran’s drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities last September.

The latest gamble by MbS is to break with Russia and flood the market with Saudi crude oil just as world demand is collapsing because of the pandemic’s economic impact. In living memory in the Middle East, only Saddam Hussein displayed a similar combination of hubris and erratic performance that inspired disastrous ventures such as the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 and of Kuwait in 1990.

I once asked a Russian diplomat knowledgeable about the workings of the Iraqi ruler’s inner circle why none of his senior lieutenants, some of whom were intelligent and well informed, had warned him against taking such idiotic decisions. “Because the only safe thing to do in those circles was to be 10 per cent tougher than the boss,” explained the diplomat. MbS reportedly shows similar impatience towards anybody critical of the latest cunning plan.

When it comes to the oil price war, the likelihood is that the Kremlin will have thought this through and Riyadh will not. Russian financial reserves are high and its reliance on imports less than during the last price conflict five years ago between the two biggest oil exporters. Inevitably, all the oil states in the Middle East are going to be destabilised, Iraq being a prime example because of its complete reliance on oil revenues. Iran, suffering from the worst outbreak of Covid-19 in the region, was already staggering under the impact of US sanctions.

In time, the Russians may overplay their hand in the region – as all foreign players appear to do when over-encouraged by temporary successes. For the moment, however, they are doing nicely: in Syria, the Russian-backed offensive of President Assad’s forces has squeezed the rebel enclave in Idlib without Turkey, despite all the belligerent threats of President Erdogan, being able to do much about it.

These developments might have provoked a stronger international reaction two months ago, but they are now treated as irrelevant sideshows by countries bracing themselves for the onset of the pandemic. It is easy to forget that only 10 weeks ago, the US and Iran were teetering on the edge of all-out war after the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was assassinated at Baghdad airport in a US drone strike. After ritualistic Iranian retaliation against two US bases, both sides de-escalated their rhetoric and their actions. Rather than drastically changing course, however, the Iranians were probably re-evaluating their strategy of pinprick guerrilla attacks by proxies on the US and its allies: this week, the US accused an Iranian-backed paramilitary group of firing rockets at an American base north of Baghdad, killing two Americans and one Briton. Iran has evidently decided that it can once again take the risk of harassing US forces.

Covid-19 is already changing political calculations in the Middle East and the rest of the world: a second term for President Trump looks much less likely than it did in February. The election of Biden, an archetypal member of the Washington establishment, might not change things much for the better, but it would restore a degree of normality.

Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere has always been less innovative in practice than his supporters and critics have claimed. Often, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was surprisingly similar to that of Barack Obama. The biggest difference was Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal with Iran, but even there Trump relied on the “maximum pressure” of economic sanctions to compel the Iranians to negotiate. For all Trump’s bombast and jingoism, he has never actually started a war.

 
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On 30 March last year, a man suffering from severe mental illness walked out of his flat in north London and stabbed a woman in the back with a knife, inflicting injuries that left her paralysed for life. She was a complete stranger to him, as were the four other people whom he met by chance in the street over the next three days and stabbed in the back.

Jason Kakaire, 30, had a long history of psychotic illness. He had once been in sheltered accommodation, but that had closed because of a lack of money. At the time of the attacks, he was living in a seventh-floor flat in a run-down tower block in Edmonton, where he was visited once a month by a mental health team that gave him his medication.

He later told psychiatrists that he suffered from hallucinations and heard voices in his head that told him to kill himself. In the days before he began stabbing strangers, these voices became more threatening, telling him that they were going to kill him. He said that he felt that “he needed to go out and kill people to prevent himself from being killed”.

Kakaire was going to stand trial for attempted murder, but admitted this week to 10 charges of wounding with intent and possessing a knife. He will be sentenced in May.

The case has become something of a cause celebre, because it shows up the failure of the NHS – and of health services around the world – to stop disasters like this. “No question it could have been prevented,” says Marjorie Wallace, the chief executive of mental health charity Sane, who has come to know the Kakaire family well.

She asks why somebody as sick as Kakaire, pursued by demons in his head, should have been assessed as low risk to himself and others. Described as a polite, lonely individual, he was too frightened by his voices to leave the building to go to an outpatient appointment. When his mother reported that he was thinking about suicide, she was told to seal up the windows in his flat so he could not jump out.

Fifty years ago, the severity of Kakaire’s psychosis would probably have meant that he would have been given a bed in a mental hospital, but these beds no longer exist. Despite repeated government claims that it is prioritising mental health, the number of beds available for people with acute mental illness fell by 30 per cent between 2009 and 2018, from 26,448 to 18,082. The number of mental health nurses dropped by 6,000, the number of specialist doctors by 600, over the same period.

Tragically, the provision of help to those with serious mental illness has been squeezed from both right and left over the last half century. Hospital care was supposed to have been replaced by “care in the community”, which makes an appealing but deceptive slogan, but has turned out to mean, as one former government minister put it: “Couldn’t-care-less in the community.”

A great attraction of this approach from the point of view of governments and health authorities is that it saves a great deal of money. If you compare the financial cost of treating a mentally ill person through an occasional visit by a care team with giving them a hospital bed, the care team is an estimated 44 times cheaper than the hospital, says Wallace. She stresses that the vast majority of mentally ill people are non-violent, but says that research by Sane showed that more than half of the 120 homicides committed annually by mentally ill people in the UK happened because of multiple failures by care services. The most common of these is simply not listening to repeated warnings from mentally ill people or their families about what they might do.

The running down of hospitals and other institutions caring for the mentally ill is one of the cruellest and most regressive developments of our era. Government has justified it, in the UK as elsewhere, by claiming from the 1950s onwards that “de-institutionalisation” was in the interests of patients. In reality, it was often exchanging one institution (a psychiatric hospital) for another (prison).

One reason why mentally ill people are so often being left to sink or swim on their own is that people of goodwill seldom have much understanding of the causes and treatment of mental illness. There is what some call the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” attitude, fostered by the film of the same name, which saw mental hospitals as essentially places of incarceration. It stood to reason, in this view, that patients would be better off free, and relied instead on some form of benign but unspecified communal care.

A more serious argument was that advances in medicine since the 1950s enabled doctors to control, though not cure, many aspects of mental illness. Moreover, these new medications did not require the patient to be in hospital because most of them (though not the most effective ones) could be administered by slow-acting injection.

The problem is that there are many gradations of mental illness, but this perception has been blurred by a well-intentioned but counterproductive effort to stop the mentally ill being marginalised. Rachel Jenkins, professor emeritus at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, says that “in order to avoid stigma over the last 20 years, people have been calling mental illness ‘mental health issues’, thus creating endless confusions.”

Jenkins says that we are really talking about three distinct categories of mental illness: acute psychosis, which may require hospitalisation; non-psychotic mental disorders such as depression and anxiety; and people with lesser mental problems, which includes a large proportion of the population. People who are psychotic need to be treated very differently from the others.

People with serious psychosis frequently cannot look after themselves, and may be a risk to themselves and others. Looking after them and trying to improve their condition requires great resources, but these have been steadily stripped away since the mid-20th century. As a result, “care in the community” usually ends up meaning care by one’s family, so its degree depends on that family’s resources and income.

By trying to avoid frightening words like “madness” and “insanity”, people who had the laudable intention of destigmatising mental illness have ended up diluting the traditional – and quite correct – belief that acute psychosis is a shattering experience. The pretense that a psychotic person can take rational decisions in their own interests may appear to be a humane approach – but it sends out the message that a person who would once have been considered in desperate need of help can be left to their own devices – or, as happened to Kakaire, to their own voices.

 
• Category: Science • Tags: Mental Health, Mental Illness 
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On 9 to 10 November 1938 the German government encouraged its supporters to burn down synagogues and smash up Jewish homes, shops, businesses, schools. At least 91 Jews – and probably many more – were killed by Nazi supporters egged on by Joseph Goebbels, the minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, in what became known as Kristallnacht – “the Night of Broken Glass”. It was a decisive staging post on the road to mass genocide.

On 23 February 2020 in Delhi, Hindu nationalist mobs roamed the streets burning and looting mosques together with Muslim homes, shops and businesses. They killed or burned alive Muslims who could not escape and the victims were largely unprotected by the police. At least 37 people, almost all Muslims, were killed and many others beaten half to death: a two-year-old baby was stripped by a gang to see if he was circumcised – as Muslims usually are, but Hindus are not. Some Muslim women pretended to be Hindus in order to escape.

Government complicity was not as direct as in Germany 82 years earlier, but activists of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, were reported as being in the forefront of the attacks on Muslims. A video was published showing Muslim men, covered in blood from beatings, being forced to lie on the ground by police officers and compelled to sing patriotic songs. Modi said nothing for several days and then made a vague appeal for “peace and brotherhood”.

The government’s real attitude towards the violence was shown when it instantly transferred a judge critical of its actions during the riots. Judge Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court was hearing petitions about the violence when he said that the court could not allow “another 1984” to happen, referring to the killing of 3,000 Sikhs by mobs in Delhi in that year after the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. He said the government should provide shelter for those who had been forced to flee and questioned if the police were properly recording victims’ complaints.

The government says that Judge Muralidhar’s transfer had already been announced and claims that its speedy implementation of the move had nothing to do with his remarks.

Accusations of fascist behaviour by present day political leaders and their governments, similar to that of fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, should not be made lightly. Such comparisons have been frequently levelled in recent years against nationalist, authoritarian populists from the US and the Philippines to Poland to Brazil. Often the allegation is believed by the accuser and, at other times, it is simply a term of abuse. Yet Modi and the BJP appear closer than other right-wing regimes to traditional fascism in their extreme nationalism and readiness to use violence. At the centre of their agenda is their brand of Hindu nationalism and a relentless bid to marginalise or evict India’s 200 million Muslims.

The rest of the world has been slow to grasp the gravity of what is happening in India because the Modi government has played down its project to shift India away from its previous status as a pluralistic secular state. The sheer number of people negatively affected by this change is gigantic: if the Muslim minority in India was a separate country then it would be eighth largest state in the world by population.

The violence in Delhi this week stems from the fear and hatred generated by the government-directed pincer movement against Muslims in India. One pincer is in the shape of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), under which non-Muslim migrants can swiftly gain Indian citizenship but Muslims cannot. Even more threatening is the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is likely to deprive many Indian Muslims of their citizenship. It was the non-violent protests and demonstrations opposing these measures that provoked the Hindu nationalist mobs into staging what was close to a pogrom earlier this week.

Just how far Modi and the BJP will go in their anti-Muslim campaign is already in evidence in Jammu and Kashmir, the one Indian state with a Muslim majority. It was summarily stripped of its autonomy last August and has been locked down ever since. Mass detentions and torture are the norm according to the few witnesses able to report what they have seen.

For 150 days after the government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, the internet was cut off and it has only been restored to a very limited degree since January. The security forces detain who they want and distraught family members complain that they cannot find their relatives or that they are too poor to visit them in prisons that may be 800 miles away.

The isolation of Kashmir has largely worked from the government point of view in sealing it off from the outside world. But would it make much difference if events there were better known? The burnings and killings in Delhi this week are well publicised, but regarded with a certain tolerance internationally: Modi can trade off India’s reputation as a ramshackle democracy and a feeling that “communal violence” is traditional in India, like hurricanes in Florida or earthquakes in Japan, and nobody is really to blame.

There has been an encouraging, though fiercely repressed, wave of opposition in India to the degradation of its non-sectarian traditions. The danger here – and the mobs in Delhi may be a sign of this – is that Modi and his government will respond to these protests by playing the Hindu nationalist card even more strongly.

Dealing with foreign criticism, the government may say that, regardless of its domestic political programme, it is supercharging economic growth and this excuses its other failings. Authoritarian regimes, with control over most of their own media, often make such claims and, when economic statistics show the opposite, they simply fake a new set of figures. A recent study of the Indian economy noted that, while overall economic growth had supposedly risen strongly, the growth in investment, profits, tax revenues, imports, exports, industrial output and credit had all weakened in recent years.

In one respect, Modi is in a stronger position than Germany after Kristallnacht. President Roosevelt responded with a statement denouncing antisemitism and violence in Germany and promptly withdrew the US ambassador. President Trump, on a two-day visit to India at a time that Muslims were being hunted down and killed a few miles from where he was sitting, said he was satisfied that Modi was working “really hard” to establish religious freedom.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: India, Muslims, Narendra Modi 
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I was in Kabul in 2010 when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks first released a vast archive of classified US government documents, revealing what Washington really knew about what was happening in the world. I was particularly interested in one of these disclosures, which came in the shape of a video that the Pentagon had refused to release despite a Freedom of Information Act request.

When WikiLeaks did release the video, it was obvious why the US generals had wanted to keep it secret. Three years earlier, I had been in Baghdad when a US helicopter machine-gunned and fired rockets at a group of civilians on the ground who its pilots claimed were armed insurgents, killing or wounding many of them.

Journalists in Iraq were disbelieving about the US military’s claims because the dead included two reporters from the Reuters news agency. Nor was it likely that insurgents would have been walking in the open with their weapons when a US Apache helicopter was overhead.

We could not prove anything until WikiLeaks made public the film from the Apache. Viewing it still has the power to shock: the pilots are cock-a-hoop as they hunt their prey, including people in a vehicle who stop to help the wounded, saying, “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” and, “Ha, ha, I hit them.” Anybody interested in why the US failed in Iraq should have a look.

The WikiLeaks revelations in 2010 and in 2016 are the present-day equivalent of the release by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, unmasking the true history of the US engagement in the Vietnam War. They are, in fact, of even greater significance because they are more wide-ranging and provide an entry point into the world as the US government really sees it.

The disclosures were probably the greatest journalistic scoop in history, and newspapers such as The New York Times recognised this by the vast space they gave to the revelations. Corroboration of their importance has been grimly confirmed by the rage of the US security establishment and its overseas allies, and the furious determination with which they have pursued Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks.

Daniel Ellsberg is rightly treated as a hero who revealed the truth about Vietnam, but Assange, whose actions were very similar to Ellsberg’s, is held in Belmarsh high-security prison. He faces a hearing in London this week to decide whether he will be extradited from the UK to the US on spying charges. If extradited, he stands a good chance of being sentenced to 175 years in the US prison system under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Ever since Assange orchestrated the release of documents through WikiLeaks, he has been the target of repeated official attempts to discredit him or, at the very least, to muddy the waters in a case that should be all about freedom of speech.

The initial bid to demonise Assange came immediately after the first release of documents, claiming that it would cost the lives of people who were named. The US government still argues that lives were put at risk by WikiLeaks, although it has never produced evidence for this.

On the contrary, the US counter-intelligence official who was in charge of the Pentagon’s investigation into the impact of the WikiLeaks disclosures admitted in evidence in 2013 that there was not a single instance of an individual being killed by enemy forces as a result of what WikiLeaks had done.

Brigadier General Robert Carr, head of the Pentagon’s Information Review Task Force, told the sentencing hearing for Chelsea Manning that his initial claim that an individual named by WikiLeaks had been killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan was incorrect. “The name of the individual was not in the disclosures,” he admitted.

On the day the WikiLeaks revelations were made public, I had a pre-arranged meeting in Kabul with a US official who asked what the coding on the top of the leaked papers was. When I read this out, he was dismissive about the extent to which the deep secrets of the US state were being revealed.

I learned later the reason for his relaxed attitude. The database Manning had accessed was called SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router), which is a US military internet system. After 9/11, it was used to make sure that confidential information available to one part of the US government was available to others. The number of people with the right security clearance who could theoretically access SIPRNet was about 3 million, although the number with the correct password, while still substantial, would have been much fewer.

The US government is not so naive as to put real secrets on a system whose purpose was to be open to so many people, including a low-ranking sergeant such as Chelsea Manning. Sensitive materials from defence attaches and the like were sent through alternative, more secure channels. Had the US security services really been using a system as insecure as SIPRNet to send the names of those whose lives would be in danger if their identity were disclosed, they soon would have run short of recruits.

The false accusation that lives had been lost, or could have been lost, because of WikiLeaks damaged Assange. More damaging by far are the allegations that he has faced of the rape and sexual molestation of two women in Sweden in 2010. He denies the allegations, but they have condemned him to permanent status as a pariah in the eyes of many. The Swedish prosecutor discontinued the rape investigation last year because of time elapsed, but this makes no difference for those who feel that anything Assange has said or done is permanently tainted and that the WikiLeaks disclosures are only a tangential issue. Likewise, much of the media views Assange’s character and alleged behaviour as the only story worth covering. Although information about SIPRNet and General Carr’s evidence was published long ago, few journalists seem to be aware of this.

But it is not because of anything that may have happened in Sweden that Assange is threatened with extradition to the US to face prosecution under the Espionage Act. The charges all relate to the release of government secrets, the sort of thing that all journalists should aspire to do, and many have done in Britain and the US without being subject to official sanctions.

Compare the British government’s eagerness to detain Assange with its lack of interest in pursuing whoever leaked the secret cables of the British ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, to the Mail on Sunday last year. His negative comments about Donald Trump provoked an angry reaction from the president that forced Darroch to resign.

Assange has made disclosures about the activities of the US government that are more significant than the revelations in the Pentagon Papers. That is why he has been pursued to this day, and his punishment is so much more severe than anything inflicted on Daniel Ellsberg.

 
Patrick Cockburn
About Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.


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