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I am delighted to announce that Philip Corrigan’s and my book The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, first published by Basil Blackwell in 1985, has just been republished in the Historical Materialism series by Brill. The e-book version was made available on October 27. A hardback edition will follow on November 5.

As with other volumes in this series, whose aim is to “publish important theoretical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange on the left,” a much more affordable paperback edition will be issued in the fall of 2027 from Haymarket Books.

This volume is a reprint of the Blackwell 1991 edition (which contained a new preface, postscript, and bibliographic supplement), plus Philip’s “State Formation (entry for a dictionary)” and nine further essays on state formation and cultural revolution written by me and/or Philip. All but one of these date from 1987-1994 and variously extend or clarify our arguments in The Great Arch. I have also provided a new introduction. This edition of The Great Arch is dedicated to Philip’s memory.

I am reproducing the Table of Contents and Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition below. The entire post–peer review manuscript is available (with permission of the publisher) here.

In the United Kingdom November 5 is Guy Fawkes Night. When we were kids we used to collect wood for the bonfire for weeks beforehand—it was my favorite day of the year. Guy Fawkes was popularly reputed to be the only man ever to enter the English parliament with honest intentions. It seems an appropriate anniversary on which to reissue the hard copy of our book.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution

And Further Essays on State Formation

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition

Part 1 The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer

Foreword by G. E. Aylmer

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   ‘A Remarkably Centralized Country’: State Formation in Medieval England

2   ‘This Realm of England Is an Empire’: The Revolution of the 1530s

3   An Elect Nation: The Elizabethan Consolidation

4   Mortall God Enthroned: One Bourgeois Revolution (Of Many)

5   From Theatre to Machine: ‘Old Corruption’

6   ‘The Working Class Question’: ‘Society’ and society

7   Epilogue: ‘There Is, Above All, an Agency’

Afterthoughts

Bibliography

Additions to 1991 edition

Preface to 1991 edition

Postscript

Bibliographical Supplement

Part 2   Organising the Subject: Further Essays on State Formation

1   State Formation (entry for a dictionary) Philip Corrigan

2   From ‘The Body Politic’ to ‘The National Interest’: English State Formation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (An Argument Concerning ‘Politically Organized Subjection’) Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer

3   Introduction to ‘The Making of the Boy’ Paul Corrigan

4   The Making of the Boy: Meditations on What Grammar School Did with, to, and for My Body Philip Corrigan

5   Untying the Knots: TheTexts of the State (From the Battle of the Books to the Books of the Battle). Remarks for Ludwig and Michel Philip Corrigan

6   British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920 Derek Sayer

7   A Notable Administration: English State Formation and the Rise of Capitalism Derek Sayer

8   Bread and Knowledge Politics: E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) Philip Corrigan

9   Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on Hegemony Derek Sayer

10   Undoing the Overdone State Philip Corrigan

11   Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia: Reflections Inspired by Tables of Kings Derek Sayer

References for Part 2: Organizing the Subject

Index

Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition

Derek Sayer

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times…

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights

When most intent on making of herself

A prime enchanter to assist the work

Which then was going forwards in her name.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude

The Great Arch has had a checkered history.  It was first handsomely published by Basil Blackwell, at an affordable price and with J. M. W. Turner’s splendid Burning of the Houses of Parliament on the cover, in simultaneous hardback and paperback editions in 1985.  Aside from a brace of deplorables who tried to strangle the book at birth,[2] the initial response was everything we could have hoped for. The Great Arch was widely, and for the most part very favorably, reviewed in history, sociology, anthropology, and political science journals internationally.[3] It was commended by scholars as diverse as the anthropologist Eric Wolf (‘The processes of English state formation are not usually on the docket of anthropological research priorities, but this book carries several important messages for anthropologists’), the Anglo-Saxon historian James Campbell (who chided his colleagues for leaving ‘the largest issues and the most arresting questions… to foreigners and to sociologists’), and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (who saw The Great Arch as a ‘quite exemplary’ attempt to theorize ‘the genesis of the state’ and devoted an entire lecture to it in his 1990-1991 course on the state at the Collège de France)’.[4] Three months after Bourdieu’s lecture, participants in a major international conference on state formation and popular culture in modern Mexico at the University of California at San Diego were encouraged to engage with the theoretical frameworks offered in two influential recent publications.  One was James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak.  The other was The Great Arch.[5] Ironically, it was around this time that the first edition of The Great Arch went out of print.

When we reminded Blackwell of an undertaking to reprint given by our editor Sean Magee, who had by then left the firm, we were offered the option of a paperback ‘reprint with revisions’ in the Ideas series in 1991.  For the cover we replaced Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament with a photograph of the Soviet avant-garde artist Liubov Popova’s set for The Earth in Turmoil (1923), which seemed to us to be equally apt. We left the main text of the 1985 edition unchanged but added a postscript in which we discussed reviewers’ criticisms of the first edition, some of which we took on board, as well as updating the bibliography with an extensive supplement.  Blackwell did little to publicize this 1991 reprint and we discovered much later that it had a miniscule print-run, so that most readers had no opportunity to see the new material. The Great Arch was not reprinted again and has never been published in an electronic format.  Philip and I only recovered publication rights years later.  Dismayed at the prices being asked for secondhand copies, I made the text available on academia.edu, where it garnered thousands of views. The Great Arch remains the most frequently cited work either of us has written, and citations have increased rather than decreased over the years.[6] So when Steve Edwards wrote me a month or so after Philip’s death on 24 April 2021, inquiring about the possibility of reissuing The Great Arch, I was delighted.  The Historical Materialism series, with its aim to ‘publish important theoretical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange on the left’, was an ideal venue that promised to give our book a new lease of life (and a venue of which I am sure Philip would have approved).

But the passage of time since The Great Arch was published makes introducing the present edition difficult.  Though Philip and I worked closely together for nearly two decades, we ceased to collaborate after 1992, when Philip retired from formal academic life following a series of breakdowns.[7] I was then on research leave in Prague, embarking on a new project whose starting-point was a suspicion that the Czech capital’s remarkable range of modern experiences – Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire up to 1918, an independent bourgeois-democratic republic from 1918-1938, a Nazi-occupied protectorate from 1939-1945, a people’s democracy from 1945-1948, and a communist state from 1948-1989 – might make Prague a better vantage point from which to observe the diverse modalities of twentieth-century modernity than London, Paris, or New York.  This was the start of an intellectual journey that would detain me for the next thirty years and radically shake up my ideas on just about everything in the process.   It led to a trilogy of books with Princeton University Press in which I endeavored to treat twentieth-century Prague as Walter Benjamin had nineteenth-century Paris, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the era.[8] Living on different continents, Philip and I meantime drifted apart.  At the time of his death, we had not spoken or corresponded in twenty years.  Though there are many connections between my post-1990 work and my earlier writings, the gulf between where I stood then and where I stand now is immense.

Since I have not kept up with the scholarly literature on Marxist theory, state formation, or English history in any systematic way during the last thirty years, it would be laughable for me to try to situate the book or evaluate its arguments in relation to current academic debates in these fields, as might normally be expected in such a reissue.  What I have attempted is more modest: a reprint of The Great Arch (including the new materials added in the 1991 edition), supplemented by a selection of essays by Philip and/or myself that variously amplify, qualify, or in some cases go beyond its arguments.  Most of these texts date from the period in which we were still working together and planned to go on doing so.

In the 1991 edition of The Great Arch, we announced that ‘Over the next few years we will be working on a larger project: Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution.  Volume 1 will be a second edition of The Great Arch, extensively revised and enlarged by some 100 pages.  Volume 2, Organizing the Subject, will address the cultural and moral logics, practices, productions and uses without which we cannot make sense of ‘the state’ as both totalizing and individualizing, the collective misrepresentation of an illusory community which claims all of us (albeit differently) yet belongs to none of us’.[9] That project (which we already envisaged some version of when we were writing The Great Arch) [10] was never realized.  But Part 2 of this book, which I have followed our 1991 plan in titling ‘Organizing the Subject’, gives an indication, as a preliminary sketch for a painting might, of some of what Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution might have contained.

Part 1 of the present edition is a straightforward reprint of the 1985 text of The Great Arch, together with the material added in the 1991 reprint.  The text itself is unaltered except for correction of a handful of errors.  There is no need to say any more here by way of introduction, since that is done in the introduction to the book itself.  The essays in Part 2 are presented chronologically. In all but one case the texts are also exactly as they were originally published except for correction of typographical or minor factual errors. To avoid undue duplication and (we hope) make for greater ease of reading, however, in both Part 1 and Part 2 we have shifted all in–text references to the notes.  While we have left the original bibliography and the 1991 bibliographical supplement to The Great Arch as they stood, we have provided a single consolidated bibliography for Part 2 rather than separate references for each essay.  We have replaced the original index to The Great Arch with a composite index for the present book.

Part 2 begins with Philip’s brief article ‘State Formation’, which he originally wrote as an entry for a dictionary in 1986 and updated for Everyday Forms of State Formation, the book Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent edited from the papers at the 1991 conference on state formation and popular culture in Mexico mentioned above.  In my view, this is the clearest and most concise summary of the paradigm shift we were attempting to inaugurate with The Great Arch that either of us ever managed.  We wrote ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’ for the second Mellon Symposium on Historical Anthropology, which Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas Dirks organized at California Institute of Technology in May 1987.  The symposium theme was ‘Culture and Colonialism: Deployments of Power and Resistance’.[11] Though there is undoubted overlap between this essay and The Great Arch, the arguments in ‘Body Politic’ are organized thematically rather than chronologically, and we extend our discussions of routines and rituals of rule and regulated representation and address the intrinsically gendered character of English state formation and state forms more comprehensively than in the book.  As it turned out, ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’ would be our last jointly authored text on state formation (or anything else).  I first published it in the Journal of Historical Sociology in January 2022, as a tribute to Philip’s memory.

My own articles ‘A Notable Administration’, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre’, and ‘Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia’ also extend or complement specific areas of argument in The Great Arch.  Conceived as an intervention in historical sociological debates over ‘the rise of the West’, ‘A Notable Administration’ was our fullest statement of the case for seeing the ‘peculiarities’ of English state formation as an important part of why England became Marx and Weber’s ‘classic ground’ of capitalism in the first place, despite the course of English history strikingly deviating from Marxist and Weberian expectations.  ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre’ is a case study of one of the bloodiest episodes in Britain’s imperial history, which, I argued, needs to be understood not as an aberration but in terms of the moral conceptions that legitimated General Dyer’s punitive action.  Gruesomely exemplifying our wider thesis on moral relations, this essay goes some way (albeit not far enough) toward redressing what Philip and I both later recognized as a major failing of The Great Arch, our inadequate attention to the constitutive role of centuries of empire in English/British state (and subject) formation.  It speaks volumes that despite my public school education and my A grade History A Level, I first learned of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre from Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982). [12] I return to this lacuna in ‘Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia’, which is the only text in which I have ever explicitly revisited The Great Arch in light of my subsequent work on Czech history.  This started out as a presentation for an invited panel on the state at the 2003 American Anthropology Association meetings in Chicago[13] and went through several iterations before I finally published a first version of it in 2016.   I have made some further changes here.

‘Everyday Forms of State Formation’ began life as a verbal response to the papers delivered at the 1991 UCSD conference on Mexican state formation, on which I had been asked to comment.  Resisting attempts by some participants to counterpose The Great Arch and Weapons of the Weak as ‘history from above’ vs. ‘history from below’, I used Václav Havel’s famous parable of the Prague greengrocer, who obediently hangs the slogan ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ in the window of his store, to upset the dichotomy.[14] Havel’s analysis, I argued, rested ‘less on the greengrocer’s being fooled than on his, and everyone else’s, knowing complicity.  It is cynicism, not ideological conformity, that makes this system work’.  This was ‘the exact opposite of ‘mystification’ or ‘false consciousness’.  This power works through the way it forcibly organizes, and divides, subjectivities, and thereby produces and reproduces quite material forms of sociality’.  I was trying simultaneously to draw attention to the irreducible agency of the subject – people are not mere animals, machines, or ‘hands’ – and to the fact that this agency is always confined, limited, and more or less crippled by the social forms through which subjects are permitted/forced, enabled/constrained to act.   Such agency, I went on, comes ‘at the cost of a corrosive derangement of ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves’.   This social schizophrenia, as we called it in ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’, is a central motif in Philip’s essays ‘Untying the Knots: TheTexts [sic] of the State’, which focuses on schooling as a state form, and ‘Undoing the Overdone State’, which like my ‘Everyday Forms’ paper questions conventional uses of Gramscian notions of hegemony. The ‘identifications on offer within repertoires of state forms’, Philip argues in the latter, ‘are violently contradictory. The much desired and much worked for ‘Individual’ is a situation of tormented and twisted loyalties, performances, positions, and regulated persona’.

In a rather different – autoethnographic – vein, Philip’s 1988 essay ‘The Making of the Boy’ blew me away when I first read it and reads equally powerfully today.  Here, Philip documents the ‘bodily terror’, as well as the psychological brutality, of the education he received at a South London grammar school in the 1950s, recalling ‘the random violence of the cuff against the ear, the slap around the face, the book thrown hard into the face, the twisting of the arm, the enforced placing of a growing, gangly body into a desk far too small, the slipper/plimsoll applied to the bum, multiply; and there, at the end of the chamber of horrors, the cane’.  ‘All I am trying to say’, he concluded (in a Coda annotated: ‘for Derek Sayer who shares ‘it” – which I did),[15] ‘is that bodies matter… They/we are the subjects who are taught, disciplined, measured, evaluated, examined, passed (or not), assessed, graded, hurt, harmed, twisted, re-worked, applauded, praised, encouraged, enforced, coerced, condensed… To have around volumes of educational theory (however radical) that never mentions bodies, and their differentiation, seems to me now, slightly stupid… bodies may be what (who) is being schooled because by now – I hope – we cannot so easily separate minds, psyches, emotions off from bodies’.  I am grateful to Paul Corrigan for his introduction to this most angry and insightful of his brother’s writings, which Paul wrote for this volume.

‘Intellectuals… seem to lack that starting point from which their scriptures come: where are our bodies? This is the simple question I wish to register’, Philip wrote elsewhere, adding ‘but it is noticeable how amongst male intellectuals this is the most remarkable yet unremarked absence: a silence, which is, of course, thunderously, necessarily there’.[16] The body was largely absent from The Great Arch, too, except as a perennial object of whipping, branding, mutilation, and sundry theatrical modes of execution at the hands of The Law.  It is here, I think, that Organizing the Subject would have made its greatest advances. The Great Arch was already unorthodox in the range of theoretical resources on which it drew; our Marxism, inflected (infected?) by the culturalist heresies of Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, was abundantly leavened with Weber and Durkheim as well as with Elias and Foucault.  During his time at the Ontario Institute of Education (OISE) in Toronto from 1993-98, Philip deepened his intellectual engagement not only with poststructuralist theory, to which he became more receptive while continuing to adamantly reject the reduction of everything to an idealist conception of discourse, but also – and above all – with feminist scholarship.  My own dalliance with Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida came later.[17] In his 1988 article ‘Social Forms/Human Capacities: Further Remarks on Authority and Difference’, Philip characterized social forms as ‘a cartography, a dictionary, a repertoire, whose central social organization entails a social grammar organized around a Figure in Dominance: that of the white, heterosexual, male ‘possessed’ of the dominant features of the division of labour’.[18] I suspect that had Philip and I gone on to write Organizing the Subject, we might have ended up placing less emphasis than The Great Arch on capitalism as Marx’s ‘general illumination’ and paying more attention to other features of that enduringly dominant figure.  For me, this would require cracking the Marxist mold.  For Philip, I can’t say.

The last of Philip’s texts I have chosen to reproduce here is ‘Bread and Knowledge Politics’ (1993).  ‘On the news of Edward Thompson’s death Philip Corrigan scrapped the article he was working on for left history and sent us this immediate tribute’, the editors of left history explain.  I have included this piece less for what it says about state formation than what it says about where we came from.  I first met Philip in my first year as a graduate student at Durham University, back in the heady days between the miners’ strikes of 1972 (best remembered for Arthur Scargill’s flying pickets and the Battle of Saltley Gate) and 1974 (which brought down Edward Heath’s government after he called an election on the issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’).  I was twenty-one.  Eight years older, Philip was in his final year as an undergraduate in the same department.  He entered the Durham PhD program that fall.  ‘Perhaps because I came ‘late’ to university life… and certainly because the earlier years were spent working as a librarian (together with my own writing of poetry, stories, and – voluminously – letters)’, Philip once explained, ‘I have never been properly ‘disciplined’’.[19] The years spent in the stacks left their stamp on his footnotes and bibliographies, which (as readers of this book will discover) were no less voluminous.  Lovingly compiled with the purest of intentions, they overwhelmed – much like the man himself.  A voracious and catholic reader, Philip was a firm believer in liberating knowledge from the disciplinary walls that fence it in and making it accessible to the multitudes outside the ivory towers.[20] Sometimes he put me in mind of Haňt’a, the hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, suffocating under the weight of the books he has saved from being pulped.[21]

Bliss it might have been in that dawn to be alive, but the world has changed mightily in the half-century since Philip and I embarked on our collaboration.  Gerald Aylmer asked in his foreword how far it is possible to be persuaded of the historical case put forward in The Great Arch without accepting the political conclusions drawn from it.  I remain generally persuaded of the historical case, though I might now demur on many points of detail.  The political conclusions are another matter.  The miners’ strike with which we began The Great Arch, that of 1984-85, ended very differently than those of the seventies, in a bitter defeat for the labor movement that put the seal on more than just the destruction of Britain’s mining communities.  In retrospect, it was a turning point in the long march of capitalist triumph that began with Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang in 1986, swept all before it as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and has led us to the brink of the abyss into which the world is staring today.

We ended The Great Arch with an injunction to imagine.  If I allow myself to imagine the future today, what I see is not Marx’s ‘resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’, but a burning and drowning planet ravaged by famine, pestilence, and wars, in which pitiful authoritarian remnants of ‘the West’ cower behind Trumpian walls built to keep out never-ending hordes of refugees.  Such a nightmare scenario could, perhaps, be averted, though I am not hopeful.  We are at another historical turning-point: one in which, this time around, the very existence of sustainable human life on earth is in jeopardy.  It may be that humanity’s long-term future, if it is to have one, can only be secured within some kind of socialist framework.  Our present capitalist path is a certain road to ruin.  But the immediate task of the day, it seems to me, must be to defend whatever is left of bourgeois democracy, Enlightenment thought and values, civil and human rights, and the rule of law, against the onslaughts of a new global fascism – without losing sight of the enduringly raced, classed, and gendered features of all these social forms, just in case we survive.  Nothing in The Great Arch leads me to think otherwise.

Calgary, April 2026

References

Bourdieu, Pierre 2014, On the State: Lectures at the College de France, 1989-1992, trans. David Fernbach, London: Polity.

Campbell, James 1989, ‘Stubbs and the English State’, Stenton Lecture, University of Reading, 1989.

Corrigan, Philip 1975, ‘On the Politics of Bibliography’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 5, 1.

Corrigan, Philip 1990, ‘The Body of Intellectuals/The Intellectuals’ Body’, in Social Forms/Human Capacities: Essays in Authority and Difference, London: Routledge.

Elkins, Caroline 2002, Legacy of Violence: A History of Empire, New York: Knopf.

Gilbert, Joseph M. and Daniel Nugent (eds) 1994, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.

Havel, Václav 1987, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in his Living in Truth, Boston and London: Faber and Faber.

Hrabal, Bohumil 1990, Too Loud a Solitude, trans. Michael Henry Heim, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Sayer, Derek 1989, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sayer, Derek 2002, ‘Gerald Aylmer and DGOS: In Memoriam’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 1, 60-62

Sayer, Derek 2004a, Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press.

Sayer, Derek 2004b, ‘Incognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the Subject’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21, 5.

Sayer, Derek 2013, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sayer, Derek 2022a, ‘Prefatory Note: On ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 107-8.

Sayer, Derek 2022b, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wolf, Eric 1987, review of The Great Arch in American Ethnologist, 14, 2.

Notes

[1] Translated in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, New York: Da Capo, 1997, pp. 622-3.

[2] Mark Kishlansky ridiculed our endeavors in the Times Higher Education Supplement as ‘A-level history’ (12 September 1986), while J. G. A. Pocock penned a nasty little limerick that began: ‘There was a professor from OISE’ and ended ‘His reading of history/While laudably herstory/Was less for the men than the boys’ (Albion, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1986, pp. 294-96). The cadences of white, entitled masculine privilege to which we had drawn attention were evidently alive and well in Johns Hopkins University as well as the University of Chicago, where Professor Kishlansky plied his pugnacious trade before moving on to Harvard in 1991.

[3] Publication details of all reviews of The Great Arch known to us at the time, including those quoted here, are given in the Bibliographical Supplement to the 1991 edition of The Great Arch (see below, p. 000).

[4] Wolf 1987; Campbell 1989; Bourdieu 2014, pp. 374-5

[5] See Joseph and Nugent (eds) 1994, p. 4.  ‘The volume’s purposefully ironic title’, wrote the editors, ‘juxtaposes ‘everyday forms’ from James Scott’s penetrating analysis of peasant resistance in rural Southeast Asia and ‘state formation’ from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s study of the formation of the bourgeois state in England as a cultural revolution’.

[6] The Great Arch had 7,546 views on academia.edu as of 12 April 2026.  On the same date, Google Scholar recorded 2726 lifetime citations (plus 317 of the partial Spanish translation).  Though the book was published in 1985, it continues to be widely cited, averaging over 60 citations per year since 2020.

[7] Our writings together and with Harvie Ramsay up to 1985 are listed in the bibliography to The Great Arch, below, pp. 000-000.  I would also mention our foundation with Gerald Aylmer of the Discussion Group on the State (DGOS), which met annually at St Peter’s College, Oxford, from 1982-2001 (see Sayer 2002, 60-62), and the Journal of Historical Sociology, which was published quarterly from 1988-2022.

[8] Sayer 1989; 2013; 2022b

[9] See below, p. 00

[10] A work called Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution: Organizing the Subject is listed under both our names in the bibliography as forthcoming (with Macmillan) in 1986. See below, p. 000

[11] For more details on the background to this essay, see Sayer 2022a, pp. 107-8

[12] The massacre remains disturbingly peripheral to both British historiography and popular conceptions of empire, but Jallianwala Bagh has more recently been given its appropriate place as a paradigm of the ‘legalized lawlessness’ fundamental to ‘liberal imperialism’ in Elkins’s superb Legacy of Violence: A History of Empire (Elkins 2022, pp. 129-44).

[13] The other panelists were Saskia Sassen, Jane Schneider, and James C. Scott.

[14] See Havel 1987.

[15] The cane was the fetish (I use the term advisedly) that ruled over us at King’s School, Rochester, the minor English public school I attended as a scholarship boy from 1959-1968, too; I have explored its lasting imprint on my psyche in Sayer 2004a.

[16] Corrigan 1990, p. 186.  This is one of three incandescent essays Philip wrote while at OISE in 1986-88 (the others being ‘Social Forms/Human Capacities’ and ‘Masculinity as Right’) that I would have liked to include here had I more space.  They are all reproduced in Social Forms/Human Capacities, which is still in print in paperback and electronic forms.

[17] See the long theoretical essay with which I concluded Going Down for Air, a modified version of which was published as Sayer 2004b, and more generally my Undisciplined: Essays in History and Theory, forthcoming in the Historical Materialism series.

[18] Corrigan 1990, p. 199

[19] Corrigan 1990, p. xi.

[20] ‘Footnotes should be provided in double or treble profusion in a socialist periodical’, Philip once wrote, ‘which should aim before all else to establish the class configurations of the recorded knowledge which we have. Socialist periodicals should give much space to facts, to review essays, to bibliographical listing, since they must be keys, leads, linkages and powers encouraging any reader to follow up their interest in this or that facet’ (Corrigan 1975).

[21] Hrabal 1990.

[In the published version these are footnotes, not endnotes.]

By on

Earlier this summer I gave a wide-ranging interview with the Czech literary magazine HOST on my books on the history of Prague. Here is the published Czech text. The original English version from which the Czech text was edited follows (below).

Derek Sayer

H > Články > Praha, hlavní město 20. století

Aktuální číslo

07/26

PRAHA, HLAVNÍ MĚSTO 20. STOLETÍ

V létě v Praze proběhl velký kongres zahraničních bohemistů. K rozhovorům, které jsme přinesli v předstihu, přidáváme nyní ten závěrečný, a sice s britsko-kanadským sociologem Derekem Sayerem, známým svými interdisciplinárními přesahy a trilogií o české kultuře.

V posledních několika desetiletích jste se věnoval české kulturní historii, dokončil jste svou pražskou trilogii a nabídl nový pohled na modernitu. Existuje v Praze nějaká budova, dílo nebo památka, která pro vás tuto modernitu vystihuje?

Nenapadá mě sice konkrétní místo, které by představovalo modernitu v koncentrované podobě, ale Veletržní palác se tomu velmi blíží. Byl obdivován La Corbusierem a svého času platil za jeden z nejrozsáhlejších funkcionalistických objektů v Evropě. Nejen Teigem byl právem oslavován jako ikona progresivního modernismu. Jenže stavba zároveň vznikla jako ústřední bod „veletržního“ města, jinými slovy, byla navržena, aby prezentovala český průmysl. Otevření paláce neprovázela avantgardní výstava, ale uvedení vysoce nacionalistické Slovanské epopeje Alfonse Muchy, cyklu, který většina moderních umělců a kritiků té doby považovala za zpátečnický a reakcionářský.

Působil jste na univerzitách v Anglii i Kanadě a sám sebe popisujete jako Angličana místem narození a Kanaďana volbou, můžete k tomu říct víc?

Narodil jsem se v Londýně a v Británii jsem žil do svých pětatřiceti. V roce 1986 jsem se přestěhoval do Kanady, abych nastoupil na Univerzitu v Albertě, kde jsem dvacet let učil a zastával jednu z prvních Canada Research Chairs (prestižní výzkumný titul v rámci národního programu). Do Británie jsem se z rodinných důvodů vrátil v roce 2006, ale po odchodu z Lancaster University v roce 2016 jsem do Kanady odjel na důchod. Mám dvojí občanství.

Národnost není něco, co si vyberete, vybral jsem si tedy emigraci. Část mě zůstane Britem, ale poté, co jsem polovinu dospělého života prožil v Kanadě, je jiná část mě zase Kanaďanem. Stýská se mi po rozlehlých pláních, širé prérijní obloze a jasném slunečním svitu při dvaceti stupních pod nulou. Nebo po úžasně různorodé kuchyni, kterou si užívám v Calgary — mimochodem ve městě, kde se třetina obyvatel narodila v zahraničí a přes čtyřicet procent patří k etnickým menšinám. Toto by bezpochyby pobouřilo mnoho Čechů, tedy alespoň ty, kteří volili Zemana a Babiše a jsou k přistěhovalcům nepřátelští. Já se ale cítím nejvíc doma právě v místě plném mně podobných vykořeněných kosmopolitů.

Jak do toho zapadá Česko?

To je vlastně náhoda. Nemám formální vzdělání ve slavistice nebo bohemistice, bakalářský i doktorský titul jsem získal v sociologii. Má první žena, Alena, byla Češka, možná bych měl říct Moravanka, pocházela z Ostravy. Seznámili jsme se jako bakalářští studenti na Essex University v roce 1970. Československo opustila ke konci roku 1967, tedy ještě před pražským jarem, aby strávila rok v zahraničí jako au pair před tím, než začne studovat anglistiku na Univerzitě Karlově. Získat výjezdní víza tehdy ještě nebylo snadné, ale její otec měl i jako nekomunista dobré kontakty na ministerstvu zahraničí, navázal je při svém pobytu v Sachsenhausenu během války. Byl jedním z dvanácti set českých studentů zatčených 17. listopadu 1939 při „dni studenstva“. Týden před tím, než se Alena měla vracet domů, ale začala okupace a ona zůstala v Británii. Vrátila se až po revoluci.

To znamenalo, že ještě než jsem poprvé vkročil na českou půdu, udržoval jsem s Českem téměř dvacet let v moha ohledech intimní, jakkoli zprostředkované pouto. Podivná situace, když se nad tím zamyslíte, ale v rodinách emigrantů a uprchlíků po celém světě naprosto běžná.

Kdy jste se poprvé do Česka či Československa podíval?

Na jaře roku 1990, v období mezi revolucí a volbami. Většinu času jsme trávili s rodinou v Ostravě, ale povedlo se nám na pár dní zavítat do Prahy. Právě tehdy, na Smetanově nábřeží, mě napadlo využít zkušeností z novodobé historie pro konceptualizaci Prahy jako vyhlídky na modernitu a vytvořit tak alternativu k místům tradičně západním, jako je Paříž, Londýn, New York. V Praze jsem následně žil od prosince 1991 do léta 1993 a snažil jsem se co nejlépe naučit česky, zatímco jsem pracoval na prvním díle mé pražské trilogie, The Coasts of Bohemia.

Zmínil jste, že myšlenka uchopit Prahu jako nový úhel pohledu na modernitu vás napadla na Smetanově nábřeží. Byla to náhoda, nebo inspirace tím místem?

Když jsem se na jaře roku 1990 procházel po Smetanově nábřeží v Praze, napadlo mě, že by mohlo být plodné přistoupit k evropské historii vyprávěné ze západního pohledu kopernikánsky. Místo, kde mě to napadlo, nebylo bez významu: v průběhu 20. století bylo nábřeží postupně pojmenováno po císaři Františkovi I., prvním prezidentovi Československa Tomášovi Masarykovi, nacistickém říšském protektorovi Reinhardu Heydrichovi. A protože komunisté považovali vzpomínku na Masaryka za nepřijatelnou, nakonec i po českém „národním skladateli“ devatenáctého století, Bedřichu Smetanovi.

Tehdy jsem samozřejmě neznal tolik souvislostí. Muselo tedy jít víc o tušení než o cokoli jiného. Spíš než na jednom konkrétním nábřeží bylo pravděpodobně založené na té neskutečné architektonické koláži, kterou Praha nabízí — je v ní všechno od středověku a baroka až po nejrůznější podoby moderny, často promíchané.

Jedno místo na Smetanově nábřeží je pro mě však obzvlášť dojemné, socha Františka I. Když jsem ji poprvé viděl a také po celou dobu, co jsem v Praze žil, byl podstavec prázdný, protože socha byla po vyhlášení nezávislosti v roce 1919 přesunuta do lapidária Národního muzea. Vzhledem k honosnému rámování památníku působilo toto prázdné místo až surrealisticky. František byl na svoje právoplatné místo nakonec v tichosti vrácen v roce 2003.

Otisklo se vaše někdejší pozorování přímo i do knihy The Coasts of Bohemia, na které jste další rok začal pracovat?

Ano, celá ta procházka po Smetanově nábřeží. A pak ta socha: pro mě ztělesňuje ústřední téma mé práce o Praze, dialektiku paměti a zapomínání a její projevy ve veřejném prostoru — názvy ulic, sochy, památníky, pamětní desky, nástěnné malby a fresky, fasádu i vnitřní výzdobu budov. Z různých důvodů mi připadá dojemné také Smetanovo muzeum spojené se Zdeňkem Nejedlým, který se zasadil o jeho založení v roce 1926. Souvislosti mezi diskurzy národního obrození a KSČ po roce 1945 jsou důležitými tématy mých knih, ačkoli se jedná o něco, co Češi obecně neslyší rádi.

Vzpomínáte si na nějaký konkrétní okamžik také z pobytu v Ostravě, když jste poprvé přijel do Československa?

Z mé první cesty mi v paměti nejvíc utkvěla událost v tehdejším Divadle Zdeňka Nejedlého, kterou jsem později popsal ve své knize [Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, 2004]:

Nabucco, Verdiho první velký hit, má premiéru v La Scale 9. března 1842. Třetí dějství. Poprvé zaznívá velký vlastenecký sbor „Va, pensiero“. Publikum vybuchne a požaduje přídavek za přídavkem. Po skončení představení propuknou nepokoje. Rakouské úřady od té chvíle zakazují operním domům hrát přídavky.

Před svou smrtí zanechává Giuseppe Verdi přísné pokyny vyžadující, aby na jeho pohřbu nehrála žádná hudba. Staré novinové fotografie ukazují Piazza del Duomo až po okraj zaplněné lidmi, čtvrt milionu, půl milionu, milion lidí, kdo ví? Když se smuteční průvod pomalu prodírá obrovským davem, někdo začne zpívat, přidá se další a další, slova napsaná před šedesáti lety na jiném místě pro jinou dobu, slova, která přesto všichni znají nazpaměť:

Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,

va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

ove olezzano tepide e molli

l’aure dolci del suolo natal!

Překlopí se století.

Staré severomoravské město založené na uhlí a oceli, počátek roku 1990, to nejisté období mezi sametovou revolucí a prvními svobodnými volbami po dvaačtyřiceti letech. Jednoho volného večera jsem se rozhodl zajít do místního operního domu, kde zrovna hráli Nabucca. Před začátkem představení vystoupí zpoza opony na jeviště nějaký muž. Očekávám, že se dozvím, že jeden z hlavních představitelů je indisponován. Namísto toho však jménem svých kolegů umělců vášnivě vyzývá publikum, aby hlasovalo pro Občanské fórum. Napětí je hmatatelné, svírá hrdlo a štípe jako kyselý déšť, který visí ve vzduchu nad Ostravou.

„Va, pensiero“ zazní do absolutního ticha — jev, který jsem nezažil při žádném operním vystoupení jinde na světě. Žádné pokašlávání, popotahování nebo šuškání. Nevzpomínám si ani, že bych kdy předtím nebo potom slyšel žádat diváky o přídavek sboru. Až když dozní ozvěna posledního tónu, ani o vteřinu dřív, divadlo vybuchne. Lidé vyskočí na nohy a volají po přídavku. Té noci zaznělo „Va, pensiero ještě třikrát“, než mohla opera pokračovat. Později jsem se doslechl, že k témuž došlo v Národním divadle v Praze po sovětské invazi v roce 1968, což vedlo k zákazu Nabucca na českých jevištích na následujících dvacet let.

Vaše knihy se soustředí na individuální příběhy. Zaujalo mě, že téměř čtvrtina té poslední, Pohlednice z Absurdistánu, je vyprávěna skrz život Mileny Jesenské. Té je sice věnována stále větší pozornost, ale zároveň se málokomu podařilo přenést její dílo do širších souvislostí. Čím myslíte, že to je?

Milena Jesenská byla nepochybně významnou osobností své doby, což se po její smrti z různých důvodů opomíjelo. Odborná edice její žurnalistické práce vyšla až v roce 2016. Kvůli svým politickým názorům zůstávala po většinu komunistického období persona non grata — z KSČ vystoupila po moskevských procesech a ve svých článcích otevřeně odsoudila stalinismus. Jako žena Jaromíra Krejcara byla prominentní osobností meziválečné avantgardy, k níž byla KSČ nepřátelská od roku 1948 do počátku 60. let (jak popisuji v Pohlednicích) a znovu potom od roku 1969 do konce 80. let. Navíc byla spřátelená s Židy (za což jí Yad Vashem udělil vzácné ocenění „Spravedlivá mezi národy“), přičemž poválečná KSČ příliš neskrývala antisemitismus.

Na Západě, a zvláště pak v anglofonním světě, se její odkaz potýká s jiným problémem. Jesenská je známá především — dle mého názoru nepřesně — jako „múza“ Franze Kafky. Zčásti je to tím, že první text, který o ní na Západě vyšel, byla kniha Milena, Kafkas Freundin od Margarete Buber Neumann. Většina západní literatury o Kafkovi nepracuje s českými zdroji, Milena proto bývá nahlížena výhradně německou optikou, která ji obvykle exotizuje. Hlavní anglicky psanou výjimkou je Kafka, Love and Courage od Mary Hockaday. Kniha z roku 1997 se navzdory svému názvu zaměřuje na Milenin život jako celek, nikoli pouze na její vztah k Frankovi, jak Milena Kafkovi říkala. Pokud vím, jediným anglickým překladem Jesenské článků je kniha Kathleen Hayese The Journalism of Milena Jesenská, vydaná v roce 2003.

Může mít na její omezené zobrazování vliv také gender? Byla historie psána příliš „mužsky“?

Udělejme si myšlenkový experiment. Řekněme, že by Milena byla talentovaným novinářem, třeba jako Egon Erwin Kisch. Představme si, že by takový muž vedl vášnivou milostnou korespondenci s mezinárodně proslulou modernistickou spisovatelkou a poté psal nejen informativní články o avantgardě, architektonické a módní scéně, ale i ty nejpronikavější novinářské texty své doby o aktuální politice — od Stalinových gulagů přes anšlus po nacistickou okupaci Čech a Moravy. A navíc by se během okupace stal členem odboje, pomáhal Židům uprchnout ze země, byl zatčen a nakonec zemřel v koncentračním táboře. — Byla by jako takový muž známější? Ta otázka si odpovídá sama. Ve skutečnosti je těžké najít mužský protějšek.

Čím život a dílo Mileny Jesenské zaujaly vás?

Hlavním důvodem mého zájmu o Milenu Jesenskou je právě pozoruhodný život, jaký vedla. Je to ale také dáno mou metodikou. Rozhodl jsem se psát historii jako mozaiku poskládanou z fragmentů, čerpal jsem z životů jednotlivců spíše než z velkolepých abstrakcí. Pozornost, kterou jsem věnoval Jesenské, mi otevřela dveře do mnoha různých, vzájemně se prolínajících světů, které dohromady tvoří ústřední téma nejen zmíněné knihy, ale celé mé trilogie. Patří sem žurnalistika, avantgarda, modernistická architektura, komunismus, válka, uprchlíci, okupace, holokaust, tábory. Milena Jesenská mě také přivedla k dalším lidem, jejichž životy se staly leitmotivy knihy, zejména ke Kafkovi, Adolfu Hoffmeisterovi nebo k druhému manželovi Jesenské, architektu Jaromíru Krejcarovi, a pozoruhodné i tragické postavě její dcery Jany, zvané Honza Krejcarová/Černá, kterou Bohumil Hrabal nazval „perlou na dně propasti“. Skrz Janu jsem se potom seznámil s Vladimírem Boudníkem, Egonem Bondym, Mikulášem Medkem a dalšími „pražskými beatníky“, kteří se v 50. letech scházeli s Hrabalem v Libni. Bondy mě později spojil s Ivanem Martinem Jirousem, skupinou Plastic People of the Universe a pražským undergroundem po roce 1968 a tak dále. Pohlednice jsou plné takových souvislostí.

Jednou z výhod pokusu psát historii z „hadrů a odpadu“, jimiž pohrdá většina konvenčních akademických narativů, je to, že se člověk může s čistým svědomím dívat jinam, než kam ukazuje převážně maskulinní mainstream. V mém případě se zdroje rozpínají od Domácí kuchařky Magdalény Dobromily Rettigové až po erotiku Toyen. Jde o různé přístupy k tomu, co Walter Benjamin nazýval snovými světy dané doby.

Takže přece jen máme především „mužské“ dějiny?

Myslím, že ano. Jedním z důvodů „maskulinismu“ tolika historiků je dle mého názoru nejen jejich (záměrný či nevědomý) sexismus, ale také zaujatost zdrojů, ze kterých čerpají. Po většinu období, kterým se zabývá moje trilogie, tj. přibližně od 80. let 18. století do 90. let 20. století, byli muži nejmocnějšími osobnostmi ve většině oblastí života, včetně politiky a umění, jejichž vztah byl jedním z mých hlavních zájmů. A o jejich činech potom psali většinou opět muži.

Zejména v Pohlednicích jsem vynaložil záměrné úsilí nepsat dějiny „mužsky“. Kromě Jesenské a její dcery figurují v knize další ženy, od jejichž životů se příběh odvíjí: spisovatelky Lenka Reinerová, Marie Majerová a Zdena Salivarová, tanečnice Mira Holzbachová, političky Marie Švermová a Milada Horáková, herečky Lída Baarová, Marie Burešová a Vlasta Chramostová, gymnastka Věra Čáslavská, režisérka Věra Chytilová a zpěvačka a disidentka Marta Kubišová — abychom jmenovali jen některé. Nemluvě o hrdinkách odboje z operace Anthropoid Marii Moravcové, Marii Kovárníkové, Ludmile Soukupové a Anně Malinové. Nebo Ince Bernáškové, dceři umělce Vojtěcha Preissiga, která po zatčení svého otce a zbytku skupiny po dobu deseti měsíců sama vydávala čísla odbojového časopisu „V boj!“. První česká žena popravená nacisty 26. srpna 1942.

Pokud jde o začlenění příběhů těchto žen do dějin, mluvíte o vědomé snaze čelit předsudkům. Musel jste se při zpracovávání české historie vyrovnat i s jinými — ať už osobními, nebo obecnými, řekněme západními — předsudky?

Předsudky nejsou to správné slovo, evokují spíše osobní rozměr než společensky zakořeněné perspektivy. Mluvil bych raději o konceptuálních geografiích, myšlenkových rámcích, uvnitř kterých jsme podmíněni vnímat svět pod určitým úhlem a do kterých zasazujeme psaní dějin.

Svou první knihu o Česku, Coasts of Bohemia, jsem zahájil úvodem s názvem „Orientace“. Chtěl jsem zde naznačit, že navzdory geografické poloze Prahy v centru evropského kontinentu a jejímu historickému umístění na rozhraní konfliktů, které formovaly moderní evropskou historii, Praha zaujímá v anglicky psaných historických narativech okrajovou pozici a zůstává neviditelná — jedině snad s výjimkou jednotlivých let 1620, 1938—1939 nebo 1968, kdy byly události v Praze uznány jako určující pro širší západní příběh.

Čím to bylo?

V té době bylo Česko ve Velké Británii pomyslně odsunuto do ghetta tzv. „regionálních studií“, kde působila jen hrstka obskurních odborníků a existovala pouze jedna vedoucí akademická pozice zaměřená na česká studia. Tu zastával Robert Pynsent, který mimo jiné považoval Karla Čapka za „spisovatele maloměšťáckých buržoustů“ a napsal do London Times protest proti udělení Nobelovy ceny Jaroslavu Seifertovi, protože byl „průměrným básníkem“. Tehdy i dnes je v anglicky mluvícím světě bohemistika či samostatná čeština vyučována pouze hrstkou univerzit. Zůstává vysoce specializovaným, menšinovým oborem, a to dává těm, kteří v oblasti pracují, neobvyklou autoritu jako jakýmsi strážcům brány.

Z historického i koncepčního hlediska byl obor formován dědictvím studené války. Výmluvná je i skutečnost, že hlavní mezinárodní odbornou asociací, k níž patří anglicky mluvící čeští vědci — kromě sdružení, která se zaměřují konkrétně na Česko a často i Slovensko — je Asociace pro slovanská, východoevropská a euroasijská studia (ASEEES). Ta byla založena v roce 1948 jako „přední mezinárodní organizace věnující se rozvoji poznání o Střední Asii, Kavkazu, Rusku a východní Evropě v regionálních a globálních souvislostech“. ASEEES udělila v roce 2013 mé knize Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století čestné uznání, za což jsem náležitě vděčný. Ale stále si kladu otázku, zda je to vhodný referenční rámec pro studium země, jejíž historie byla po tisíciletí historií zemí Svaté říše římské a která, navzdory panslavismu 19. století a meziválečným komunistickým sympatizantům, měla před rokem 1945 jen malý kulturní kontakt s Ruskem.

Máte doktorát v oboru sociologie, ovlivňuje to váš postoj k takovým společensky zakořeněným názorům?

V rámci studia jsem se zaměřoval zejména na historickou sociologii a Praha pro mě začala mít intelektuální význam především v souvislosti s ústředními tématy klasických sociologických teoretiků, jako byli Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim a Georg Simmel, ale i pozdějších autorů, jako Walter Benjamin. Témata, která bych mohl shrnout otázkou: Co je moderního na modernitě?

Domníval jsem se, že Praha nabízí k prozkoumání této otázky lepší výchozí bod než jakékoli západní město, a to díky šíři a rozmanitosti svých historických zkušeností v moderní éře. Například Londýn či New York nezažily ani fašismus, jak tomu bylo v Praze během šesti let německé okupace, ani komunismus. Paříž sice byla během druhé světové války také okupována nacisty, nikdy však nezažila komunistickou vládu. Berlín, který se mi jeví jako nejbližší Praze coby domnělému „hlavnímu městu dvacátého století“, zažil komunismus i fašismus, stejně jako liberální demokracii. Nenabízí ale nic srovnatelného s českým národním obrozením v 19. století jako procesem boje proti imperialismu. Berlín také nezažil etnické konflikty, které hrály tak významnou roli v životě Prahy od poloviny 19. století až do odsunů v poválečných letech 1945—1946, ani celou škálu forem komunistické vlády. Pražská kulturní a umělecká tvorba byla touto jedinečnou škálou moderních zkušeností formována a vyjadřuje je.

Jak vám tedy tato zkušenost pomáhá osvětlit modernu jako takovou?

Uvedu příklad. Václav Havel napsal Moc bezmocných jako úvahu o normalizaci. Má však také univerzální platnost, a to jako analýza toho, jak v moderním světě funguje moc díky aktivní spoluúčasti subjektů, jako je zmíněný pražský zelinář. Kanadský premiér Mark Carney ji citoval ve svém projevu v Davosu a pro mě je Havlova analýza stejně důležitá jako například myšlenky Michela Foucaulta. Hledáte dnes ve světě pražské zelináře? Podívejte se, jak se americké univerzity, včetně Kolumbijské a Harvardovy, poníženě přizpůsobují Trumpově administrativě.

Skutečnost, že jsem Prahu v tomto velmi specifickém smyslu označil za „hlavní město 20. století“, většinová akademická veřejnost přijala s pozitivním ohlasem, včetně mnohých odborníků v Česku — například renomovaná historička umění Lenka Bydžovská. Výjimkou bylo několik anglicky mluvících bohemistů, kteří můj názor zesměšňovali. Podle mého to poukazuje právě na limity jejich konceptuálních geografií.

V Pohlednicích se často opakuje výraz kafkárna, dal by se podle vás považovat za univerzální?

Ano, dokonce mám za to, že tento pojem by měl být považován za univerzální. Existuje snad přesnější popis modernity tak, jak jsem ji zachytil ve své pražské trilogii — zejména v Pohlednicích —, kde každý pokus o nastolení údajně racionálního řádu skončí jako kafkárna? Oproti tomu cynické chování Havlova pražského zelináře lze vnímat jako zcela racionální, byť nemorální a nedůstojný vzor toho, jak se jednotlivci mohou protloukat ve světě, který je kafkárnou. Je to svět, v němž se za život v pravdě platí vysoká cena a v němž bude takový postoj většina zcela logicky pokládat za šílenství.

V poslední době se na Substacku (česky v Britských listech) často věnujete globálním událostem. Které narativy považujete za nejproblematičtější?

Jak kanadský premiér Mark Carney zdůraznil ve svém projevu v Davosu, poválečný „řád založený na pravidlech“ umírá nebo již zemřel a je rychle nahrazován scénářem ve stylu Divokého západu. Podle tohoto scénáře několik velmocí bojuje o nadvládu — nebo si mezi sebou rozděluje svět —, aniž by je omezovalo mezinárodní právo či multilaterální instituce jako OSN. Poslední roky začínají stále více připomínat 30. léta 20. století: s nástupem neofašistických „populistických“ hnutí v celé Evropě, Velké Británii a Severní Americe, rostoucím autoritářstvím, omezováním občanských svobod a xenofobií i ze strany „centristických“ vlád a uchylováním se k ozbrojeným konfliktům (zejména, ale nejen na Blízkém východě) k řešení politických sporů.

V této souvislosti působí progresivní narativy o „konci dějin“ — v jakékoli variantě —, které jsem kritizoval v Pohlednicích, naivně. Můj důraz na složitost, nejednoznačnost, iracionalitu a „šedou zónu“, ve které se hranice mezi správným a špatným stírají, nabízí přesnější pohled na současnou politiku. Například zmíněný Carney: navzdory svému projevu v Davosu podpořil izraelsko-americký útok na Írán, ačkoli útok byl zjevným porušením mezinárodního práva a Charty OSN. Stejně tak učinili Ursula von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron a Merz, kteří dříve hlasitě odsoudili ta samá porušení mezinárodního práva, když na Ukrajinu vtrhl Vladimir Putin.

Jakou roli hraje Česko, nebo konkrétně Praha, ve vašem současném životě v Calgary? Na co se při plánované návštěvě nejvíc těšíte?

Neřekl bych, že Česko je součástí mého současného života v Calgary, až na to, že některá česká jídla patří k základům naší domácí kuchyně. Vařím fakt skvělý segedínský guláš.

V průběhu let jsem Česko navštěvoval často, ale už jsem tam nějakou dobu nebyl. Dálkové lety nejsou v mém věku zrovna snadné, a navíc jsou dost drahé při financování z důchodu.

Kdy jste Prahu navštívil naposledy?

V srpnu 2021, při první cestě mimo Kanadu po covidových omezeních. Bylo to poněkud tísnivé, tolik podniků zavřelo, obchody a restaurace měly stažené rolety, ulice byly prázdné. Ale v jistém smyslu mi to také připomnělo, jaká Praha bývala, když jsem tu žil a teprve se začala otevírat světu. „Zpátky do Evropy“ bylo tak trochu dvojsečné.

Kam se v Praze rád vracíte?

Kdysi jsem miloval Staré Město, ale dnes se cítím lépe v Holešovicích, Karlíně, Smíchově nebo Troji, kde jsem žil v letech 1991—1993. Nebo se vydávám ještě dál, třeba do Bohnic, kde mám přátele. Cestovní ruch sice přináší peníze, ale také velké problémy, stejně jako v Barceloně nebo Amsterdamu.

Těším se na obhlídnutí nových budov, jako je komplex od Zahy Hadid za Masarykovým nádražím nebo bytový dům Fragment v Karlíně „podpíraný“ Lilit od Davida Černého. Láká mě procházet knihkupectví a galerie, objevovat nové restaurace a vrátit se do těch starých osvědčených, znovu si pochutnat na chlebíčcích ve Zlatém kříži, vařeném hovězím krku s křenovou omáčkou v Lokálu a smaženém vepřovém řízku s bramborovým salátem v Café Savoy. A to vše zapít dobrým českým pivem.

17/09/2026

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rozhovor

Kristýna Pavlík Vaněčková

Derek Sayer (nar. 1950) je britskokanadský sociolog známý svým interdisciplinárním přesahem, emeritní profesor Univerzity v Albertě. Mimo Kanadu se proslavil zejména jako autor úspěšné trilogie o české kulturní historii, ve které upozorňuje na mozaikovitost příběhů a narušuje tak zavedené historické narativy — The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998), Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013), Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022). Za své knihy obdržel řadu cen, mimo jiné je jako jediný autor díla v cizím jazyce laureátem Ceny F. X. Šaldy (2014).

source: https://www.h7o.cz/clanky/14608-praha-hlavni-mesto-20-stoleti

English version 

You’ve spent the last few decades writing your Prague trilogy and focusing on offering a different view on “modernity”. Is there any building, work or monument in Prague that represents modernity in a condensed form? 

I can’t think of any single location that represents “condensed” modernity, but Veletržní palác [the Trade Fair Palace] goes a long way toward fitting that bill. Built in 1926-8, critically admired by Le Corbusier, and one of the largest functionalist buildings in Europe at that time, it has been hailed by Karel Teige and others as an icon of progressive modernism. But the building started life as the centerpiece of a “trade fair city” designed to showcase Czech industry. The palace opened not with some avant-garde exhibition but the first showing of Alfons Mucha’s highly nationalistic Slovanská epopej [Slav Epic], a cycle that was seen as backward and reactionary by most modern artists and critics at the time. During WW2 the Veletržní compound became the assembly-point for deportation of Jews to Terezín and other concentration camps from nearby Bubny station. Subsequently the building housed various state offices (including Tuzex and Strojimport) before it burned down in 1974. Subsequently it was reconstructed “like a phoenix” and now houses the National Gallery collections of 19th and 20th-century art and is a big tourist attraction. I’ve written about Veletržní palác at length in Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century.

You describe yourself as English by birth and Canadian by choice. How does Czechia fit into that?

I was born in London and lived in Britain until I was 35. I moved to Canada in 1986 to take up a position at the University of Alberta, where I taught for twenty years and held one of the first Canada Research Chairs. I returned to Britain for family reasons in 2006, but moved back to Canada in 2016 after I retired from Lancaster University. I have dual citizenship.

Nationality is not something you choose, whereas I chose to emigrate. Part of me will always remain British—but having lived half my adult life in Canada, another part of me is Canadian too, whether it’s missing the wide open spaces and big prairie skies and bright sunshine at 20 degrees below or the astonishing variety of cuisines I enjoy in Calgary, a city where a third of the population is foreign-born and over 40 percent belong to ethnic minorities. No doubt this would appal many Czechs, at least those that voted for Zeman and Babiš and are hostile to immigrants, but I feel most at home in a place full of rootless cosmopolitans like me.

My connection with your country was serendipitous. I was not formally trained in Slavics or Czech studies—my BA and PhD were in sociology. My first wife, Alena, was Czech, or maybe I should say Moravian, from Ostrava. We met as undergraduate students at Essex University in 1970. She had left Czechoslovakia at the end of 1967—i.e., before the Prague Spring—to spend a year abroad as an au pair prior to starting a degree in English at Univerzita Karlova [Charles University]. Getting an exit visa was still not easy then, but her father, who was not a communist, had good contacts in the foreign ministry that he made in Sachsenhausen [concentration camp] during the war. He was one of the 1200 Czech students arrested on November 17, 1939, the “day of the students.” A week before Alena was due to return home the Russians invaded and she stayed in the UK. She didn’t return until after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989.

What this meant was that I had what was in many ways an intimate but completely vicarious relationship with Czechia for nearly 20 years before I ever set foot on Czech soil—a bizarre state of affairs, if you think about it, but one that is common in families of émigrés and refugees the world over. My first trip to Czechia was in March-April 1990, after the revolution but before the elections. We spent most of our time with family in Ostrava, but managed a few days in Prague. It was then, on the Smetana Embankment, that I got the idea of using Prague’s variety of modern historical experiences as a different vantage point on “modernity” than the conventional western ones—Paris, London, New York, etc.

I subsequently lived in Prague from December 1991 through June or July 1993, doing my best to learn the language while researching The Coasts of Bohemia, the first book in my Prague trilogy.

I believe that not entering Czech studies through the usual academic routes, and not being part of those “area studies” networks, has given me a significantly different orientation to that of most Anglophone scholars working in the field. Whether for good or ill, I leave to readers to judge.

You mentioned you got the idea of using Prague as a different vantage point on “modernity” on the Smetana Embankment. Was this accidental or inspired by the place?

I commented on the Smetana Embankment in the introduction to Coasts of Bohemia:

Walking along the Smetana Embankment in Prague in the spring of 1990, it occurred to me that a Copernican turn on this history [i.e., European history as narrated from the West] might be fruitful. The location is not irrelevant: suffice it to say, for the moment, that in the course of the twentieth century the Embankment has been successively named after Emperor Francis I of Austria, Czechoslovakia’s first president Tomáš Masaryk, Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and (the communists finding the memory of Masaryk unacceptable) the nineteenth-century Czech “national composer” Bedřich Smetana. (p. 13)

Of course I didn’t know this level of detail at the time; I learned it later. So it must have been a hunch, as much as anything else, likely based on the incredible architectural collage that Prague presents—everything from medieval and baroque to many varieties of modern, all as often as not jumbled together—rather than anything specific to the Smetana Embankment. But one location on that embankment is especially poignant for me: the statue of [Austrian Emperor] Francis I. When I first saw it and throughout the time I lived in Prague the plinth was empty because the statue had been removed to the lapidarium of the National Museum in 1919 following independence. The vacancy looked surreal, given the ornate housing of the monument. Francis was eventually quietly restored to his rightful place in 2003. For me this history epitomises the dialectic of memory and forgetting, as materialized in public spaces (streetnames, statues, memorials, plaques, murals and frescoes, the architecture and internal decor of buildings) that have been central concerns of my work on Prague. I also find the Smetana Museum poignant for different reasons—the association with Zdeněk Nejedlý, who was instrumental in founding the museum in 1926. The connections between the discourses of the národní obrození [national revival] and the KSČ [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] after 1945 have been important themes of my books, though this is not something that Czechs generally like to be reminded of. This might take us to Letohrádek Hvězda [Star Castle], the onetime Jirásek and Aleš Museum, which I have also written about at length in The Coasts of Bohemia.

Getting back to your first encounter with Czechoslovakia, it was not dominantly set in Prague. Do you recall any inspirative moment from your stay in Ostrava?

What probably sticks in my mind most from that first trip was an incident in what was then the Divadlo Zdenka Nejedlého [Zdeněk Nejedlý Theater] that I made use of in a later book:

Nabucco, or to give it its full title Nabuccodonzor, Verdi’s first big hit, premieres at La Scala on March 9, 1842. Act III. The great patriotic chorus Va, pensiero is heard for the first time. The audience erupts, demanding encore after encore. After the performance ends there is a riot. Henceforth, the Austrian authorities decree, no encores will be allowed in opera houses.

Before his death Giuseppe Verdi leaves strict instructions that no music is to be played at his funeral. Old newspaper photographs show the Piazza del Duomo packed to the walls with people, a quarter million, a half million, a million people, who will ever know? As the cortège slowly feels its way through the immense crowd somebody starts to sing, and then another, and another, and another, the words written sixty years before in another place for another time, words that they nevertheless all know by heart:

Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,

va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

ove olezzano tepide e molli

l’aure dolci del suolo natal!

A century turns.

An old coal and steel town in Northern Moravia, early in 1990, that uncertain time between the Velvet Revolution and the first free elections in forty-two years. At a loose end one evening I decide to take myself to the local opera house, where Nabuccohappens to be playing. Before the performance begins a man steps through the curtain to the front of the stage. I expect to learn that one of the principals is indisposed. Instead he makes a passionate plea on behalf of his fellow-artists for the audience to vote for Civic Forum, the opposition coalition formed in November 1989 around Václav Havel. The tension is palpable, catching in the throat, acrid as the acid rain that hangs in the Ostrava air.

Va, pensiero is heard in absolute silence — something I have never experienced at an operatic performance anywhere in the world. No coughing, no shuffling, no whispering. Nor, I think, have I ever before or since heard a demand for a chorus to be encored.

When the last echo of the last note dies, but not before, the theater explodes. People are on their feet, yelling for it to be played again. Va, pensiero was encored three times that night before the opera could go on. I was later told that the same thing had happened at the National Theater in Prague after the Soviet invasion of 1968, leading to Nabucco being banned from Czech stages for the next twenty years.

Your books pay close attention to individual destinies. I found it interesting that nearly a quarter of your last book, Postcards from Absurdistan, is narrated through the life of Milena Jesenská. Although she is receiving increasing attention, few have managed to place her work in a broader context. Why do you think this is?

Milena Jesenská was clearly a significant figure of her time, and one who was for various reasons neglected after her death. It took until 2016 before a proper scholarly edition of her journalism was published, Torst’s monumental Křižovatky. She remained persona non grata for much of the communist period due to her politics—a one-time KSČ member who left the party over the Moscow trials and denounced Stalinism in print. She was also a friend to Jews (awarded the rare honor of “righteous among the gentiles” by Yad Vashem) while the postwar KSČ was pretty openly antisemitic, and as Jaromír Krejcar’s wife she was a prominent associate of the interwar Prague avant-garde, to which the KSČ was hostile from 1948 until the early 60s (as I trace in Postcards) and again from 1969 to the late 1980s. Neither of these things favored her posthumous rehabilitation. Her daughter Jana Černá’s (née Krejcarová) memoir of her mother Adresát Milena Jesenská was scheduled to come out in 1969 but never reached the bookstores, a casualty of the 68 invasion and normalization. It was first published by Concordia in Prague in 1991, that is to say, ten year’s after Jana’s death. Jaroslava Vondráčková’s reminiscence Kolem Mileny Jesenské came out the same year. Alena Wagnerová’s Milena Jesenská, which I think was the first Czech biography, came out only in 1994.

In the West, and in particular the Anglophone world, the problem is a different one. Jesenská is known primarily (and in my view inaccurately, even during the brief time of their relationship) as Franz Kafka’s “muse.” This is partly because the first text published on her in the West was Margarete Buber-Neumann’s Milena, Kafka’s Freundin. More generally, a majority of western scholarship on Kafka does not avail itself of Czech-language sources: Milena is visible only through Germanic lenses (which typically exoticize her). The main exception in English, published in 1997, is Mary Hockaday’s Kafka, Love and Courage, which despite the title focuses on Milena’s life as a whole and not just in relation to Frank (as Milena called Kafka). So far as I know the only English translation of Jesenská’s articles—a relatively small selection, but including several of her most important 1937-9 articles for Přítomnost—was Kathleen Hayes’s The Journalism of Milena Jesenská, published in 2003. 

Could her gender also have an impact on the representation? Has history been written too “masculinely”?

Let’s try a thought experiment. If Milena had been a talented male journalist (like, say, Egon Erwin Kisch), who at one time (let us imagine) had a hot romantic correspondence with an internationally famous modernist female writer, then went on to write not only informative pieces on the avant-garde, architectural, and fashion scenes and some of the most incisive journalism of its time on the politics of the day—from Stalin’s gulag through the Anschluss to the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia—and who during the occupation became a resistance member who aided Jews to escape the country, was arrested, and finally died in a concentration camp, would she be better known? The question answers itself. In fact, it is hard to find a male counterpart.

The main reason for my interest in Milena Jesenská is this remarkable life she led. But it is also a result of my method. I set out to write history as a collage woven out of fragments, drawn from the lives of individuals, rather than in grand abstractions. Focusing on Jesenská gave me entry to many different overlapping worlds central to the book and, indeed, the trilogy—journalism; the avant-garde; modernist architecture; communism; war, refugees, occupation; the Holocaust; the camps, etc. etc. She also connected me with other people whose lives became leitmotifs of the book, notably Kafka, Adolf Hoffmeister, her second husband the architect Jaromír Krejcar, and her remarkable, if tragic, daughter Jana (”Honza”) Krejcarová/Černá, whom Bohumil Hrabal called “a pearl at the bottom of a chasm.” Jana in turn connected me to Vladimír Boudník, Egon Bondy, Mikuláš Medek and the other “Prague beatniks” who hung out with Hrabal in Libeň in the 1950s. Bondy connected later on to Ivan Martin Jirous, the Plastic People of the Universe, and the post-1968 Prague underground, and so on. Postcards is full of such filiations.

One of the reasons for so many historians’ “masculinism,” I think, lies in the biases in their sources as much as any (deliberate or unconscious) sexism on their parts. For much of the period dealt with in my trilogy, c. 1780s–1990s, the most powerful figures in most walks of life—including politics and the arts, whose relation has been one of my key concerns—have been men, and it is their actions that have been written about, mostly by other men. One of the benefits of trying to write history from the “rags and refuse” that is scorned by most conventional academic historical narratives is that one can with a clean conscience look elsewhere, ranging, in my case, from Magdaléna Dobromila Rettigová’s Home Cookery (Coasts, pp. 79-80) to Toyen’s erotica (Prague, pp. 214-16, 262-4) as different ways of accessing what Walter Benjamin called the dreamworlds of the age.

I have made a deliberate effort, especially in Postcards, not to be “masculinist.” Apart from Jesenská and her daughter, figures around whose lives the narrative is woven include the writers Lenka Reinerová, Marie Majerová, and Zdena Salivarová, the dancer Mira Holzbachová, the politicians Marie Švermová and Milada Horáková, the actresses Lída Baarová, Marie Burešová, and Vlasta Chromostová, the gymnast Věra Čáslavská, the film director Věra Chytilová, and the pop singer and prominent dissident Marta Kubišová (to name but a few)—not to mention the resistance heroines of Operation Anthropoid Marie Moravcová, Marie Kovárníková, Ludmila Soukupová, and Anna Malinová—or Inka Bernášková, daughter of the artist Vojtěch Preissig, who single-handedly produced issues of the resistance newspaper V boj! for ten months after her father and the rest of the group were arrested. She was the first Czech woman to be guillotined by the Nazis, on 26 August 1942.

You speak about the deliberate effort to face the bias you made through including many important women in your books. Were there any other biases or stereotypes – personal or generally Western – you faced while working on Czech history?

I’m not sure biases is the right word—it suggests personal prejudice rather than socially embedded viewpoints—so I would rather speak of conceptual geographies: frameworks of thought within which we are conditioned to see the world and frame the writing of histories.

I began Coasts of Bohemia with an introduction I titled “Bearings,” in which I suggested that despite Prague’s geographic location at the center of the European continent and its historical location on the faultlines of the conflicts that have shaped modern history from the religious wars of the 17th century, through the national revivals of the 19th century, to the struggles between communism, fascism, and democracy in the 20th century, it has occupied a marginal position in Anglophone historical narratives, remaining invisible except when (as in 1620, 1938-9, or 1968) events there were acknowledged as impinging on the wider western story.

Bohemia was relegated to an “area studies” ghetto staffed by a small number of esoteric Czech specialists: in the UK, at that time, there was just one Chair in Czech Studies, which was held by Robert Pynsent (who among other things considered Karel Čapek a “petty-bourgeois writer” and wrote to the London Times objecting to the award of the Nobel Prize to Jaroslav Seifert because he was a “mediocre poet”). Then and now, only a handful of universities in the English-speaking world offered degrees in Czech studies or a training in Czech language. It remains a specialized, minority field. This gives those who work in the area unusual authority as gatekeepers.

Historically and conceptually, this field has been shaped by the legacy of the Cold War. It says much, I think, that the major international professional association to which Anglophone Czech scholars belong, other than those that are focused specifically on Česko (and often Slovensko), is the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which was founded in 1948 as “the leading international organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Eastern Europe in regional and global contexts.” ASEEES gave Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century an honorable mention in their awards for 2013, for which I am duly grateful, but I still question whether this is an appropriate frame of reference in which to study a land whose history has been that of the lands of the Holy Roman Empire for a millennium and which—nineteenth-century pan-Slavism and interwar communist fellow-travelers notwithstanding—had little cultural involvement with Russia before 1945.

Similarly, Steven A. Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939, was justly hailed as a major work of historical revisionism, challenging western-centric canons and demanding a rethink of how we conceive modern art, when it was published in 1999. But it still treats Bohemia as part of a homogenous “region” stretching “from the Baltic to the Balkans,” ignoring the fact that Czech artists during the period it covers were part of networks that included Paris (where many of them, from Mucha and Kupka to Štyrský and Toyen spent years), Munich, Berlin, and—for the interwar avant-garde—Moscow, while they had relatively little to do with artists elsewhere in Mansbach’s “Eastern Europe.” Inspection of Prague’s exhibition history or artists’ periodicals makes this international orientation very clear.

You are a Doctor of Sociology, does that influence your position on such socially embedded viewpoints?

I was trained with a particular focus on historical sociology, and for me Prague first became intellectually significant in relation to the central concerns of classical sociological theorists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel as well as later writers like Walter Benjamin—concerns I might summarize in the question “what is ‘modern’ in ‘modernity?”

I believed Prague offered a superior vantage-point from which to investigate this question than any western city because of the range and variety of its historical experiences during the modern era. For instance, London and New York have experienced neither fascism, as Prague did during six years of German occupation, nor communism. Though Paris was also occupied by the Nazis during WW2 it has never experienced communist rule. Berlin (which for me comes closest to Prague as a putative “capital of the twentieth century”) has experienced communism and fascism as well as liberal democracy, but offers nothing comparable to the 19th-century Czech national revival as a process of anti-imperial struggle. Nor did Berlin experience the ethnic conflicts that played so large a part in Prague’s life from the mid-19th century until the odsun of 1945-6, or the full gamut of forms of communist rule, from the show trials of the 1950s to Dubček’s attempted “reform communism” of 1968 and the “normalization” that followed. Prague’s cultural and artistic products have been shaped by and articulate this singular range of modern experiences.

To take just one example of how this experience for me illuminates “modernity” more generally, Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” was produced as a meditation on normalization. But as an analysis of how power works in the modern world through the active complicity of subjects—like the Prague greengrocer—it has universal relevance. Canadian PM Mark Carney cited it in his recent speech on Davos. For me, Havel’s analysis is as important as, say, Michel Foucault. If you want to find Prague greengrocers around the world today, look at how US universities—including Columbia and Harvard—are abjectly accommodating to the Trump administration.

My treating Prague as a “capital of the 20th century” in this very specific sense was widely welcomed, including by Czech scholars like the distinguished art historian Lenka Bydžovská. The exceptions were several (though by no means all) Anglophone Czech studies scholars, who ridiculed the claim. For me, this shows the limitations of their conceptual geographies.

In Postcards, the term kafkárna reoccurs often, could it be considered universal as well?

There is no single equivalent for the term kafkárna in English, which is why I retained the Czech throughout having explained what it meant. I quoted the following definition, from Naše řeč:

This word that is difficult to interpret, let alone translate, denotes an absurd feeling of hopelessness, disarray, and dislocation that is typical of Franz Kafka’s work … Most commonly, the word is used to describe a nonsensical, logically inexplicable, chaotic, ridiculous, or hopeless situation, state and feeling to which one gradually resigns oneself, although one does not identify with it and it escapes one’s conscious understanding … The word may also describe a place that is peculiar, strange, out of the ordinary in a negative sense, a place governed by absurd laws. (Postcards, p. 25)

Yes, I do think the term should be universalized—what more accurate description can you find of the modernity I mapped in my Prague trilogy (and especially Postcards), in which every attempt to impose what is claimed to be a rational order eventually collapses into a kafkárna? Conversely, the cynical behavior of Havel’s Prague greengrocer may be seen as a thoroughly rational, if immoral and undignified, template for how individuals can get by in a world that is a kafkárna. This is a world in which living in truth comes at a very high price, and will quite logically be regarded by most people as crazy.

Recently, you’ve been on your substack focusing more on global events (in Czech accessible in Bristké listy). Which narratives do you see as the most problematic, and could Central European experience be helpful in this regard?

As Canadian PM Mark Carney pointed out in his speech at Davos, the post-WW2 “rules-based order” is dying or dead, and is rapidly being replaced by a Wild West scenario in which a few great powers struggle for pre-eminence (or carve up the world between them), unrestrained by international law or multilateral institutions like the UN. The last few years are beginning to look increasingly like the 1930s, with the rise of neofascist so-called “populist” movements across Europe, the UK, and North America, increasing authoritarianism, crackdown on civil liberties, and xenopobia even on the part of “centrist” governments, and resorts to armed conflict—notably but not only in the Middle East—to resolve political disputes.

In this context the progressive “end of history” narratives—in whatever variant—I criticized in Postcards look pretty naive. My emphasis on complexities, ambiguities, irrationalities, the “grey zone” where rights and wrongs shade into one another, offers a more accurate handle on present-day politics. Thus, for instance, despite his Davos speech, Carney supported the Israeli-US attack on Iran even though the attack was manifestly in breach of international law and the UN Charter. So did Ursula von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron, and Merz, all of whom had noisily denounced exactly the same breaches of international law when it was Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.

Is Central European experience relevant in this context? I would say yes, obviously—providing it is read in all its complexity, rather than as simplified in Cold War and post-Cold War western narratives. And that is what I tried to do in my Prague trilogy.

How present is Česko, or specifically Prague, in your current life in Calgary? What are you looking forward to during your planned visit?

I wouldn’t say Česko is part of my current life in Calgary except that some Czech dishes are staples of our home cooking. I cook a kickass segedínský guláš.

I have visited Česko often over the years but haven’t been back for a while. Long-haul flights are not so easy at my age, and they are also expensive on a pension (I retired from teaching in 2016).

The last time I was in Prague was in August 2021, our first trip out of Canada after the Covid lockdowns. It was eerie—so many businesses closed down and shops and restautants shuttered, the streets empty—but also in some ways a reminder of what the city used to be like when I was living there and it was just beginning to open up. “Zpátky do Evropy” was a mixed blessing. I used to love the Old Town but nowadays I’m more at ease in Holešovice or Karlín or Smíchov or Troja, where I lived in 1991-3. Or venturing further out, like Bohnice, where I have friends, or Sapa, which I wrote about in my little 2017 guidebook-cum-potted history Prague, Crossroads of Europe. Tourism may bring in the dollars, but it has also brought major problems, just like in Barcelona or Amsterdam.

What am I looking forward to during my visit? Seeing new buildings, like the Zaha Hadid development behind Masarykovo nádraží or the Fragment apartment block “held up by” David Černý’s Lilit in Karlín, surfing the bookstores and art galleries, and discovering new restaurants and revisiting old favorites—reacquainting myself with chlebíčky at Zlatý kříž, vařený hovězí krk s křenovou omáčkou at Lokál, and smažený vepřový řízek s bramborovým salátem at Café Savoy, all washed down with good Czech beer.

By on

This is a complete list of reviews of my books The Coasts of Bohemia (1998), Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2013), and Postcards from Absurdistan (2022), including of translations, that are known to me. If anyone knows of any others I’d be glad of the information. Some of the links no longer work (or are paywalled) but the references are, I hope, accurate.

The Coasts of Bohemia 

1. Kirkus Reviews (February 15, 1998)

2. Foreign Affairs (Robert Levgold, Sept/Oct 1998)

3. Choice (Nov 1998)

4. New York Review of Books (R. J. W. Evans, “The Magic of Bohemia,” October 21, 1999)

5. Times Literary Supplement (Steven Beller, “The Shadow on the Pavement,” review essay, 1 January 1999, lead review)

6. New Republic (Tony Judt, “Freedom and Freedonia,” review essay, September 1998, reprinted in his When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 85-104)

7. Vancouver Sun (Stan Persky)

8. Nationalities Papers (Daniel Miller, Vol.27(2), pp. 343-345, 01/01/1999)

9. Slavic Review (Robert Pynsent, Volume 58, Issue 1, Spring 1999, pp. 203 – 204)

10. Habsburg H-net (Hugh Agnew, October 1999)

11. University of Toronto Quarterly (Andrew Rossos, Vol. 69, #1, winter 1999-2000)

12. Austrian History Yearbook (Volume 31, January 2000, pp. 180 – 181, T. Mills Kelly)

13. Canadian Journal of History (Vol. 35, #1,  Apr 2000, 124-126, Mikuláš Teich).

14. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (Neue Folge, Bd. 48, H. 3, 2000, pp. 469-470, Claire Nolte)

15. Central European History (Vol. 33, No. 4, 2000, pp. 562-564, Ivan T. Berendt)

16. East European Quarterly (R. William Weisberger, 2001)

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century

1.  Publishers Weekly (28 January 2013)

2.  Financial Times (Tony Barber, “Artistic capital, revived,” 3 May 2013)

—reposted on Czech Embassy London Facebook page 4 May 2013  

—reposted on Journalisted, 3 May 2013

—reposted on EuroNewsCloud.com, 3 May 2013

—reposted on Media Dragon, 5 May 2013

3.  Times Higher Education (Marta Filipová, “Dark pieces in a Modernist puzzle,” 30 May 2013)

—reposted on Aboutmyprague, 28 May 2013

4.  ForeWord Reviews (Karen Ackland, 31 May 2013)

5.  Australian (Nicolas Rothwell, “At the crossroads in Prague,” 15 June 2013)

—reposted on Tugendhat Villa page of World Warisan: News of UNESCO World Heritage Sites 14 June 2013. 

6.  Library Journal  (Kelsey Berry Philpott, 15 June 2013)

7.  Booklist  (Brendan Driscoll, 18 June 2013)

8.  Northern Review of Books (Jim Burns, June 2013)

9.  Reference & Research Book News (June 2013)

10.   Leonardo (Jan Baetens, 1 July 2013)

—excerpted at Quantitative Risk Management 15 July 2013  

11.  Architectural Review (Andrew Mead, “Bohemian rhapsody,” 12 July 2013, pp. 103-4)

—reposted on American Planning Association Daily Planning News 13 August 2013

12.  deReactor.org: platform voor literair kritiek (Jan Baetens/Arnoud van Andrichem, 19 July 2013)

13.  Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (Michael Lowy, Vol. 21, issue 1, 2013, pp. 117-20, posted online 30 September 2013)

14.  New Eastern Europe  (Zlata Kopřívová, “The surrealist spirit of Prague,” issue 4, 2013, pp. 188-91)

15.  Choice  (P. W. Knoll, 13 October 2013 vol. 51 no. 02)

16.  Quarterly Review (Stoddard Martin, “La Bohême.  Stoddard Martin visits Prague by proxy,” posted 1 November 2013)

17.  Čechoaustralan (Miloš Ondrášek, “Na křížovatce,” Autumn/Winter 2013, p. 5)

18.  The Enlightened Economist: Economics and Business Books (Diane Coyle, “Lifting the iron curtain of the mind,” December 19, 2013)

19.  Diplomat & International Canada (George Fetherling, “Nitty-gritty Cities,” 5 January 2014)

20.  Times Literary Supplement (Marci Shore, “Surreal love in Prague,” 8 January 2014 [10 January print edition], lead review)

—The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna reposts TLS review in the “Read, Listen and Watch” section of their website (9 January 2014)

—Inagist reports TLS review, with links to full text (9 January 2014)

—3 Quarks Daily (9 January 2014) has excerpt from TLS review and link under title “Surreal Love in Prague”

—American Conservative Magazine (11 January 2014) lists the TLS review in its “Of Note” section

—Silobreaker reposts American Conservative Magazine post with link to full TLS text (11 January 2014)

21.   Gorse (Esther Galfalvi, 5 March 2014)

22.  American Historical Review (Claire Nolte, Vol. 119, Issue 2, April 2014, pp. 635-6)

23.  Austrian History Yearbook (Chad Bryant, No. 45, 2014, pp. 272-3, published on-line 20 April 2014)

24.  Critique d’art (Jérôme Duwa, «Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History») 

25.  Austrian Studies Newsmagazine (Andrea Orzoff, “A Resolutely Non-linear History,” Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 16, 19)

26.  Slavic Review (Thomas Ort, Vol. 73, No. 2, 2014, 378-381)

27.  European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire (Andrea Talabér, Volume 21, 2014 – Issue 6, pp. 933-5, published online 1 April 2014)

28.  Social History (39:2, 2014, pp. 292-293, Claire Morelon)

29.  Lidové noviny (“Když Praha byla metropolí Evropy,” Pavel Kolář, weekend supplement Orientace, 28(X), 29 November 2014)

30.  Umění/Art (Vol. lxii, No. 5, 2014, pp. 576-8, Lenka Bydžovska)

            —English translation in CEE New Perspectives blog, 11 January 2016

31.  Canadian Slavonic Papers (Volume 56 • Nos. 3-4 • Sept.-Dec. / septembre-décembre 2014, 363-5, Veronika Ambros)

32.  Habsburg (H-net) (Jakub Beneš, March 2015)

33.   Canadian-American Slavic Studies (Alfred Thomas, Volume 50, Issue 1, pages 104-107, 2016) 

34.  Journal of Modern History (Mark Cornwall, Vol. 88, No. 3, September 2016)

35.  Central Europe (Peter Bugge, Vol. 13, issue 1-2, April 2016)

36.  Kunstform (Pavel Kolar, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2016)

37.  Contemporary European History (James M. Robertson, 25: 1, February 2016, 177-89.  Review essay of Prague and 3 other books)

38.  Yomiuri Shimbun (28 December 2018). 

39.  Tosho-shimbun (the reviewer’s paper), (email from Kenichi Abe, translator of the Japanese edition, 21 January 2019).

40.  Asahi-Shimbun, (“The City of Kafka and Čapek,” 6 November 2018.  Saturday book side page)  

41.  All-Reviews, 2019/03/06.  Shigeru Kashima  

42.  Repre 35, 2019.  Haraka Kawakami  

43.  Mainichi Shimbun, 27 January 2019.  Shigeru Kashima.  Review.  (Same as All-Reviews one?  Listed on Hakusuisha page).

44. Magazin OKO, Meziřádky Zdenko Pavelky, 25.5.2021.  (Zdenko Pavelka.  Saturday Radio Vltava broadcast, review in weekend magazine)  

45.  Deník N, 3 June 2021.  (Jan Lukavec, “Surrealistická setkávání v modernistické metropoli. Vyšla další monografie magické Prahy”)

46.  ArtReview, (“Vynikající kniha nejen o Praze a českém surrealismu,” Radan Wagner, 12 June 2021)  

47.  Právo, 1 July 2021, Café section, p. 18.  (Petr Zídek, “Kniha o českém surrealismu aneb monografie světové Prahy”)

48. iLiterature.cz (Elizaveta Getta, “Město surrealistických snů,” 1 August 2021)

49.  Historická Sociologie, (Lucy Brown), Vol 14 No 1 (2022), 173–174 

50.   Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1), pp. 223-233 (Veronika Košnartová.  „Hadrář“ Prahy dvacátého století? Kulturní dějiny jako postmoderní freska/A “Ragman” of Prague of the Twentieth Century? Cultural History as a Postmodern Fresco)

Other press mentions:

1.   Art Daily (March 15, 2013)

—reposted on European Graduate School Facebook page 15 March 2013

—reposted on Simon Fraser University Institute for the Humanities Facebook page,  15 March 2013

—reposted on Nick Socrates Contemporary Art 16 March 2013

—reposted on Delirium Clemens: Ruthner’s Global Austria: Central European Cultural Analysis 18 March 2013

—reposted on gg.art.com, Art News, 21 March 2013

—reposted on Realtime News: India as it Happens 26 March 2013

—reposted on regator  (March 2013)

—reposted on Trinity College Dublin MA in European Studies Facebook page, 30 March 2013 

2. 
Modernism/Modernity, vol. 20, #2, April 2013, pp. 423-425  

3.  Chronicle of Higher Education (12 April 2013, “The Chronicle Review,” p. B18)

4.  Belfast Telegraph (Michael Conaghan, “7 books you should own,” 4 May 2013, main paper, pp. 28-29) 

5.  Financial Times  (Summer Books Guide, 28 June 2013)

—reposted on Campaign for the Michigan Reader blog 29 July 2013, Campaign for the California Reader, Campaign for the Ohio Reader, and Campaign for the Texas Reader

6.  Dublin Review of Books (Issue 38, 1 July 2013)

7.  Financial Times Books of the Year (posted on-line November 29, 2013; in FT Weekend, Arts + Life section, Nov. 30 print ed.)

—reposted on http://www.mahbubani.net/Book Review/Books of the Year – FT.pdf, 30 November 2013.

—reposted under headline “BOOKS OF THE YEAR: History and Politics, on Business Day Live (South Africa), Life and Books section, 12 December 2013

—reposted on http://static.pulso.cl/20131219/1870948.pdf, 19 December 2013

8.  Česká televize, Kultura section of website, reports FT listing under headline “Financial Times doporučuje: Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století”

—reprinted on IHNED.cz, 3 December 2013 with comment: “Kniha o českém surrealismu patří podle Financial Times mezi nejlepší letošní publikace.  České výtvarné umění, design, architekturu, literaturu a hudbu v období 1918 až 1945 zpracoval profesor historie kultury Derek Sayer ve své knize Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Za ni si vysloužil ocenění prestižního deníku Financial Times”

—latter reprinted on surrealist.sk, wn.com and právě dnes on 3 December 2013 

9.   Aktuálně.cz reports FT listing under headline “Financial Times doporučují dějiny pražských surrealistů” (4 December 2013)

10.  iDnes, Kultura, Literatura section, 24 December 2013, “Dějiny surrealistické Prahy jsou jednou z knih roku Financial Times”

11.  Portál české literatury/Czech Literature Portal, 24 December 2013  

12.  Czech Literature Portal (5 January 2014).  Separate entry from preceding: “FT praises Sayer’s book on Prague avant-garde” 

13.  Award of F. X. Šalda prize, including honorable mention for Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, was reported on the following Czech sites:

            — artalk.cz, 12 June 2014

            — Blesk [daily newspaper], 17 June 2014 

            — Týden.cz [weekly magazine], 17 June 2014

14.  Fear of a Square Planet #12.  Virtual Memories Show, May 8, 2017, Gil Roth.  Podcast 

15.  iLiteratura.cz, 19 June 2021  

16.  “Book of the Week” on alian.info, weekly #156

Postcards from Absurdistan

1.  Library Journal starred review (David Keymer , Sep 01, 2022)

2.  Foreword Reviews (Meg Nola, Nov/Dec 2022)

3.  Publishers Weekly

4.  Dublin Review of Books (Alena Dvořáková, “Bohemian Encounters,” Feb 2023)

5.  Common Knowledge (R.J.W. Evans, Vol. 30, #3, Sept 2024)

6.  CEU Review of Books (Felic Jeschke, Nov 2024, “The Last Postcard from Prague”)

7.  Transitions (Michael Stein, 4 Nov 2024)

8.  Journal of Modern History (Rudolf Kučera, Vol. 97, #2, June 2025)

9.  Česká literatura/Czech Literature (Vol 73, issue 5, pp. 650–653, 2025.  Františka Schormová,  “Prague, postcards, palimpsests: Derek Sayer’s Czech histories”)

10.  iLiteratura.cz (Jan Lukavec, 16 May 2026, “Sayer, Derek: Pohlednice z Absurdistánu: Dějiny vyprávěné klíčovou dírkou”)

By on

We warned you: the wholesale destruction of Gaza was not an exception, it was a blueprint to crush anyone who opposes the plutocratic imperialism embodied by US/Israel and their global allies.
Act now: defend int[ernational] law from lawlessness, before the rupture becomes irreversible.

Francesca Albanese, post on X, March 1, 2026

A bloodstained backpack left after the Israeli-US missile strike on Minab elementary girls’ school, Iran, February 28, 2026. BDS.

On February 28, Mark Carney issued a statement on what he delicately termed the “Iran-related hostilities throughout the Middle East.” He did not call them the “Israel-initiated hostilities” or the “US-initiated hostilities,” despite the fact that the hostilities originated in a so-called “preemptive strike” on Iran by Israel and the US earlier that day. 

“Canada,” the PM’s statement proclaimed, “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security” (my emphasis). This was a clear endorsement not only of the (purported) political objectives of the US military action, but of the action itself. 

Preemptive massacres 

So what, exactly, is Canada supporting? Equally to the point, what is it opposing?

During the first round of strikes, Israeli and US missiles assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law. Khamenei’s wife died from her injuries on March 2. The IDF boasted of taking out 40 top Iranian commanders “in the first minute” of the attack, including armed forces chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi.

So successful were these targeted assassinations that on March 3 Donald Trump told reporters that “Most of the people we had in mind [to succeed Khameini] are dead … And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

Military and political leaders were not the only casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the first day of the war left 555 dead across Iran. Bombings have continued every day since, with the capital Tehran being especially hard hit. By March 5 the death toll had reached 1,230—more than the number of people killed in the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, which appalled the world and precipitated Israel’s Gaza “war.”

Thousands of kilometers away off the coast of Sri Lanka “an American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.”  I quote US secretary of war—he’s no longer called secretary of defense—Pete Hegseth. Eighty-seven bodies were recovered. 

The war has meantime spread to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet-bombing and has ordered more than half-a-million people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Most horrifically, a missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran killed at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12. 

Israel disowns the Minab massacre, stating that it has not “found any connection to our operations.” The Pentagon is “investigating,” but Pete Hegseth has assured the world that “we of course never target civilian targets” and US secretary of state Marco Rubio protests “The United States would not deliberately target a school.”

Neither Carney nor foreign minister Anita Anand have yet uttered a word of regret about the Minab slaughter. In fact, they haven’t mentioned it at all. But while remaining silent on what—at the least—is a tragic instance of collateral damage, they rushed to condemn the “strikes carried out by Iran on civilian infrastructure across the Middle East.” 

According to Anand, it is Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the the Israeli-US aggression that Canada supports, that “represent an unacceptable escalation and a blatant attempt to further destabilize the region.” The first European leader to publicly react to the war, EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, also denounced Iran’s “reckless and indiscriminate strikes” as “a blatant violation of … sovereignty and a clear breach of international law,” without mentioning, still less condemning, the Israeli-US actions that provoked them.

This is self-evidently absurd. Asked by NBC News why Iran was attacking US bases in neighboring Gulf states, the Iranian foreign minister gave the only appropriate response: “Um, because you’re bombing us from those bases? What do you want me to say?” 

Value-based realism?

Carney’s backing for the Israeli-US strikes on Iran came as a nasty shock to many in Canada and abroad in light of his widely-acclaimed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos little more than a month earlier. 

Carney began his Davos speech by acknowledging “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics—where the large, main power—is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But, he argued, 

the other countries, particularly intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.

The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.

Invoking former Czech president Václav Havel’s parable of the Prague greengrocer who places a sign in his window every morning reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it but “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along,” Carney urged: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

Middle powers like Canada should adopt “value-based realism” in foreign policy. He presented this approach as

both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

Carney’s value-based realism seems to have crumbled in the face of its first test. 

Odious as the ayatollahs’ regime may be when judged from the standpoint of human rights as proclaimed—though not always honored—by the West, the Israeli-US attack has unquestionably violated Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is manifestly not consistent with the UN Charter or international law. 

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states categorically that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” However evil a regime may be, force may only be used in pursuit of regime change if the UN Security Council has authorized it.

While Article 51 permits the use of force in self defence, this has been understood to mean “in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack.” Preemptive defensive action is admissible only when the risk of attack is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” (the so-called Caroline Test). 

This was not the case here. Notwithstanding White House press secretary’s Karoline Leavitt’s assertion that “The president had a feeling … based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States,” administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings on March 1 that “U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.” Do Trump’s feelings now override international law?

A war of choice

Whether the US action was undertaken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as Carney says, must also be seriously doubted. It is more likely a pretext for war, just like George W. Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction during the lead-up to the 2003 Gulf War. The difference in this case is that the US has not even gone through the motions of seeking UN support for the attack.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities when it bombed them back in June 2025. This may just be typical Trumpian bluster, but on March 3 Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said his inspectors had not uncovered any evidence of “a systematic and structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.” 

Before the attack, negotiations on the nuclear issue were well underway between Iran and the US, and seemed headed for a favorable outcome. The Omani foreign minister, who was mediating the talks, told CBS News “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan on February 27 that he was confident “a peace deal is within our reach.” 

Iran, he explained, was prepared to agree to a deal in which it “will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb”; its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be “down blended to the lowest level possible … and converted into fuel”; and there would be “full and comprehensive verification by the IAEA.”

Asked whether he feared that “Israel is planning to take a first strike, even though the U.S. and Iran are agreeing to talk,” Albusaidi replied “I hope that is not the case.” 

This fear likely explains why the Omani minister went public in the first place. As Triti Parsi points out, he wanted to make clear to the world that although “what has actually been achieved in the negotiations is quite unprecedented … everything indicates that Trump won’t take yes for an answer. That he will start a war of choice very soon.” 

Marco Rubio later let the cat out of the bag when he told the press that the “imminent armed attack” that led the US to launch its so-called “preemptive defensive strike” was in fact Israel’s strike on Iran. The logic is straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: 

The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action [against Iran], we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

Stung by the suggestion that he could possibly be Bibi Netanyahu’s puppet, Donald Trump subsequently denied that the US was “pushed into war” by Israel (“I think they [Iran] were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”). But this only confirms that this indeed was a war of choice.

The fault line in our foreign policy

Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack has copped a lot of flak in Canada and beyond. Lloyd Axworthy—no “radical left lunatic,” but a well-respected former foreign minister in Jean Chrétien’s government—called out the glaring hypocrisy:

Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.

We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans—whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat—doing the bombing. 

Axworthy is only echoing Carney’s own admission in Davos “that international law [was] applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” 

“The double standard is obvious,” Axworthy goes on: “when Russia uses force without lawful grounds [as in the invasion of Ukraine], it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.”

More importantly, in the context of this article, Axworthy questions whether supporting the US in this illegal war is remotely in Canada’s national interest—precisely because of the new world disorder (or as Sandra Kendzior dubs it, the “no world order”) described by Carney, within which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu … ” 

“We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together,” Carney continued. This means, among other things, “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals” (my emphasis). 

Not only, then, is Canada’s support for the Israeli-US war on Iran unprincipled. It is also, on Carney’s own premises, unpragmatic. “For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security,” Axworthy concludes, “that is not realism; it is recklessness.”

If Canada condones the US attack on Iran, then what will we say if Trump decides to make good on his repeated threats to absorb Greenland (“I think we’re going to have it”) and make Canada “a cherished and beautiful 51st state”? Who will be there for us? 

Putting the signs back up

Mark Carney is far from stupid, and though he may be a novice in politics his experience of moving in the top circles of international governance is unrivalled among Canadians. He knows that—as he later admitted to a Toronto Star reporter—”the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada” and that the attack is “prima facie inconsistent with international law.” 

He must also be well aware that his endorsement of the US action will dismay many of his supporters—not just among the progressive left, but more centrist Canadian opinion—not least because what allowed him to overturn the enormous lead Pierre Poiliévre had in opinion polls and win the federal election was his perceived willingness to stand up to American bullying. His slogan “Elbows Up!” was a stroke of genius, summoning up the shades of Gordie Howe and Terry Fox to come to the aid of the nation in its hour of need. 

The first Canadian opinion poll since the Israeli-US strike on Iran, from Angus Reid, does not bode well for Carney: 35% supported the attack, 48% opposed it, and 17% were unsure. Most worrying for the Liberal government was the finding that just 17% of past Liberal voters—in other words, those who elected Carney—supported his position.

Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack also manifestly does nothing for our standing with the middle powers with whom he sought to cooperate in “building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored … something bigger, better, stronger, more just …” So what gives?

Carney didn’t have to endorse Trump’s attack on Iran. So the inevitable question arises: why did he?

For Spain read spine

Carney is not the only one to find himself impaled on the horns of this dilemma. The US-Israel attack on Iran led to uncertainty as to how to respond across western capitals. 

Though Norway’s PM Gahr Støre complained that “The attacks this morning and the spreading of the conflict to Iran’s neighbouring countries is not in line with international law,” Spain was the only EU member to condemn the US-Israeli attack outright. 

Prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused the US permission to use jointly-operated bases for launching strikes on Iran, leading Trump to threaten “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” Sanchez was unbowed, stating thathis country “will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world—and that is also contrary to our values ​​and interests—simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.” 

On March 4 Karoline Leavitt assured reporters “I think [Spain] heard the president’s message yesterday loud and clear. It is my understanding over the past several hours they’ve agreed to cooperate with the US military.” 

Whether this is a sign of American insecurity or just another regular White House Lie™ I can’t say, but José Manuel Albares soon set the record straight:

The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota. Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal … She may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all.

Take note Mr Carney. This might be what “value-based realism” looks like. As Václav Havel knew better than most, when the going gets tough living in truth takes cojones.

The devil or the deep blue sea?

Other EU leaders were more circumspect. In the immediate aftermath most denounced the Iranian regime and several welcomed the death of Khamenei. Needless to say, there was widespread condemnation of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. But it is noteworthy that while nobody followed Sánchez in rejecting the Israeli-US action, nobody followed Carney in voicing support for it either. For that he had to wait for Australia and New Zealand. 

Even Germany, whose Middle Eastern policy seems to comprise atoning for its part in the Holocaust by facilitating genocide in Palestine, prefers not to jump too visibly on Trump’s bandwagon. Pressed on the legality of the Israeli-US operation, Chancellor Friedrich Merz diplomatically evaded the question: “Categorizing the events under international law will have relatively little effect. This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their objectives.” He again dodged the issue when questioned after meeting with Trump on March 4.

Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement on March 1 condemning “the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran against countries in the region” in which they promised “to work together with the US and allies in the region … potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source.” Again, they stopped short of expressing support for the Israeli-US attack itself, on which the statement was silent.

The next day France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot began to distance France from Israel and the US. Asked by a journalist whether “France today believes this war is justified, because you haven’t condemned it,” he responded: “we weren’t informed and didn’t take part in the military operations launched by the United States and Israel … only by facing the Security Council could such operations have had the legitimacy of international law.”

Addressing the nation on the Middle Eastern situation on French TV on March 3, President Emmanuel Macron flatly stated that the Israeli-US attacks were “outside of international law” and France “cannot approve of them.” Italy’s foreign minister Guido Crosetto likewise told his parliament on March 5 that the US-Israeli attack was “in violation of the international law” and confirmed that Italy had no prior knowledge of it.

Caught between not wanting to provoke the wrath—and economic or other retaliation—from “Daddy” (as NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte called Trump), and being dragged into an illegal war that could easily spiral out of control, the Europeans are squirming.

And that “special relationship”?

Perhaps the most entertaining contortions have come from UK prime minister Keir Starmer. Keir cannot have been happy with Trump and Netanyahu putting him on the spot less than a week after his hammering in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Green Party, whose leader Zack Polanski is a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Walking a tightrope between appeasing Trump and fending off his domestic critics to both the right and the left, Starmer predictably ended up satisfying neither. Speaking in the House of Commons on March 2, he made clear that “The United Kingdom was not involved in the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran” and “That decision was deliberate.” 

Indeed, Starmer denied US requests to use British military bases for its initial attack on Iran. Furious, Trump complained that “we are not happy with the UK” and “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” “He should be giving us, without question or hesitation, things like bases,” he told the New York Post on March 5. 

However, Starmer continued, “it is now clear that Iran’s outrageous response has become a threat to our partners, to our interests, and to our allies.” For this reason, he was now prepared to modify Britain’s stance to allow the US to use British bases “to destroy the [Iranian] missiles at source, in their storage depots or at their launchers.” 

“To be clear,” he emphasized, “the use of British bases is strictly limited to agreed defensive purposes. The UK has not joined US offensive operations.” 

A lawyer by trade—once upon a time a civil rights lawyer, as well as the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions—Starmer was certainly, as Trump suggested, “worried about the legality.” He told MPs that government would publish its legal advice (it did), explaining

We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable thought-through plan. That is the principle that I applied to the decisions that I made over the weekend. 

Unlike Macron, nowhere in his speech—or, as far as I am aware, anywhere else—did Starmer comment on the legality of the Israeli-US attack on Iran itself. 

On March 5 German foreign minister Johann Wadephul told reporters in Berlin that “Germany is not participating in this war. And that will remain the case,” and on March 6 Macron was reported as assuring a social media user that “France is not part of this war. We are not in the fight and we are not going to get involved in this war.” 

By contrast, Britain’s deputy PM David Lammy caused consternation when he told BBC Breakfast viewers the same morning that “there was a “legal basis” for the Royal Air Force to participate in strikes on Iranian missile sites” (as distinct from the UK merely allowing the US to use British bases to launch them). Mark Carney, too, has refused to“categorically rule out participation. We will stand by our allies when it makes sense.”

Britain and France have meantime moved ships, planes, and troops into the Middle East, ostensibly for the purposes of aiding the US in its “defensive” strikes on missile facilities or protecting their citizens and allies. It is not hard to see how things might go south.

Why?

Whatever else this circus might be, it is certainly not middle powers banding together to fight power with value-based realism. The abandonment of principles (while paying lip-service to international law) is undeniable. 

But as Lloyd Axworthy observed in relation to Canada, this is hardly good pragmatics either. What do Canada, Australia, the UK, or the EU countries have to gain from getting drawn into an Israeli-US war which if previous experience (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) is anything to go by will only create further chaos in the Middle East and floods of new refugees?

So we must ask, once again, why are they doing this? No doubt there are a multiplicity of reasons, including fear of US tariffs and sanctions, strength of Zionist lobby groups, and (for some) the prospect of money to be made out of armaments, oil, or postwar reconstruction of bombsites into rivieras. 

We also cannot ignore the deep racism underlying Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump’s framing of these wars as “a battle of civilization against barbarism.” If there is one thing that unites the US, Canada, Australia, and the Europeans, it is whiteness. Europeans found it easier to stand up to Trump when he took a fancy to Greenland.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Marco Rubio laid out an unashamedly imperialist agenda for “a new Western century”:

We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir … And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.

But if we ask how any of this was possible—how the western world got to where it is now—I believe the answer lies under the rubble in Gaza. 

For more than two years, during much of which Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, was in the White House, the West participated in, endorsed, or at best turned a blind eye to overt war crimes in Gaza. While the UN, ICJ, ICC, and every major human rights organization on the planet warned of genocide, the Western democracies supplied Israel with arms, gave it diplomatic protection at the UN, and punished dissenters at home, while from the BBC to the New York Times an obliging media became a mouthpiece for Israeli hasbara. The US and other governments recklessly shredded international law and sabotaged its key institutions—the UN and its agencies, ICJ, and ICC—in the process.

This is a deeply corrupting process for everyone involved. If you don’t believe me, read Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless.”

Asked in February 2025 why he thought the Democratic Party was powerless to resist Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, the writer Ta-Nahisi Coates replied: “I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” His point applies more generally.

By on

Note. A lightly edited version of this was article published in Canadian Dimension on January 22, 2026.

Donald J. Trump via Truth Social

I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, opening his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026 

Before dawn on January 3, the US launched “a large-scale strike against Venezuela” during which its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped and flown out of the country. They were subsequently arraigned in a New York court on drug and weapons charges. Though there were no American deaths, at least 100 people were killed in the assault, including Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cubans.

Four days later, in Minneapolis, MN, a masked ICE agent, Jonathan E. Ross, fatally shot a 37-year-old American woman, Renée Nicole Good, three times in the face at point-blank range.  Video analysis by the New York Times of “bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” Contrary to the claims put out by the Department of Homeland Security within two hours, this was a brutal murder—not self-defense.

What has any of this to do with Gaza? The short answer is: everything. For it was above all in Gaza that the New World Order of which these are symptoms was forged.

The Donroe Doctrine

Later on January 3, Trump told journalists that “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” 

With a nod to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which he has modestly renamed the “Donroe Doctrine”), Trump warned that “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force,” vice-president J. D. Vance posted on X, “but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.“

By “steal our stuff” he meant Venezuela’s nationalization of foreign oil companies in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.

When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 aiming to depose president Gamal Abdel Nasser following his nationalization of the Suez Canal, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower pressured them to accept a United Nations ceasefire and voted for UN resolutions publicly condemning the invasion and approving the creation of a UN peacekeeping force. That was under the old post–WW2 “rules-based” order.

Today, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller,; 

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Move fast and break things

As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Trump made his determination not to have American hands tied by involvement in multilateral organizations, treaties, or agreements very clear from the get-go. On his first day in office, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement. 

Two weeks later he pulled the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, prohibited any future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including what he called the “anti-American” UNESCO (from which he would withdraw the US in July 2025). 

Following that review, which was led by secretary of state Marco Rubio, on January 7 this year Trump withdrew from a further “35 non-United Nations organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities.” 

One of these was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which all other countries in the world belong. This frees up the US from any future international obligations regarding action on carbon emissions and global warming. Trump has long made it clear to the world that he proposes to “Drill, baby, drill!”

More recently (and very ominously), in the words of former UK prime minister Gordon Brown Trump has made “the momentous decision to constitute an alternative” to the United Nations, a so-called “‘board of peace’, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.” 

That the UN opened the road for this when it cravenly endorsed Trump’s “Gaza Peace Plan” on November 17 is indicative of just how moribund the old order has become.

Triumph of the will

The invasion of Venezuela is not a one-off. Despite running on an anti-war platform, the use of force (or threat thereof) has been a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.

He has threatened to annex Greenland, “take back” the Panama Canal, and employ economic force to compel Canada to become “a cherished and beautiful 51st state.” 

Notwithstanding his petulant lobbying for a “Noble Peace Prize” (like Obama) and his specious claim to have “ended eight wars,” in 2025 Trump bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and the US has killed at least 112 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Asked whether “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” J. D. Vance responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” 

On December 16 Trump declared “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela … Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” As of January 13, the US Navy had seized five tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump responded “We’re gonna keep it.”

Trump has now extended the blockade to Cuba, warning “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY [from Venezuela] GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He has also threatened to take military action in his quarrels with Mexico and Colombia. Nothing like showing them who’s boss.

Asked in a lengthy interview for the New York Times in January 2026 whether there was any limit on his powers, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”

A global protection racket

In a sharp reversal of the free trade consensus that has governed the world economy since World War II, Trump has imposed tariffs ranging from 10–41 percent on imports from all US trading partners, and certain goods (e.g. steel, aluminum, critical minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber) face higher levies. As I write, the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs is being litigated before the US Supreme Court.

On February 1, 2025 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, supposedly because neither country was doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl (and in Mexico’s case immigrants) across the US border. On March 24 he imposed 25% tariffs on all goods from countries that import Venezuelan oil—a tactic he extended on January 12, 2026 to “any country doing business with” Iran.

On July 30, 2025, Trump put tariffs on various goods from Brazil “due to Brazil’s actions regarding the prosecution of former President Bolsonaro, the regulation of online platforms, and other issues.” In August he imposed a whopping 50 percent tariff on India, which included a 25 percent punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil. In October he made a $20 billion line of credit to Argentina contingent upon his rightwing ally Javier Milei’s party winning the upcoming parliamentary elections. 

On January 17 he threatened a 10 percent tariff, rising to 25 percent, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, which would “be due and payable until … a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”—despite having signed recent trade agreements with the UK and EU. Following pushback from European powers he backed down, announcing that talkswith NATO chief Mark Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal.”

When French president Emmanuel Macron declined to join his Board of Peace, Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne.

It is clear is that irrespective of prior agreements or treaties, Trump will not hesitate to use economic means to achieve political ends. He’s running a global protection racket.

Strongarming the courts

Not only has Trump flouted international law. He has gone out of his way to discredit international legal institutions, including the world’s two highest courts. 

Accusing South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice” (ICJ) the Trump administration instituted a series of measures intended to discredit South Africa’s moral authority to bring the case, pressurize South Africa to drop it, and discourage other countries from joining it. 

In February 2025, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for indicting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan was the first victim. The US sanctioned four more judges on June 5, adding two more judges (one of them was Canadian justice Kimberly Prost) and two assistant prosecutors on August 20. Rubio sanctioned two more judges in December, and the administration is now leaning onthe court to amend its guiding documents to exempt US citizens from its jurisdiction. 

Such sanctions include an asset freeze, a prohibition on Americans doing business with sanctioned individuals, and a ban on their entering the United States. Unable to access the world banking system, victims—who also include UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—cannot even use credit cards or book a flight or a hotel online. 

“The purpose is clear,” Prost told the Irish Times: 

Effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution.

Securing the home front

Trump has moved just as fast on the domestic front, in ways that test the legal limits of his executive power. His actions have resulted in at least 583 challenges in the courts. While lower courts have overturned many of his orders, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court—which previously gave him immunity for “actions relating to the core powers of his office”—has so far generally proved more compliant.

The administration took an axe to the federal government and its programs, with the loss of 317,000 jobs by the end of 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was created by executive order on Trump’s first day outside the normal machinery of government, was responsible for much of the early carnage. The now-defunct DOGE has been widely criticized as “illegal and unconstitutional.” 

The 26 executive orders Trump signed on his first day—more than any previous US president—included a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government, attempts to limit birthright citizenship, and the declaration of a “national energy emergency” that has led to a bonfire of environmental regulations. 

From removing over 8,000 government web pages related to DEI initiatives, “gender identity, public health research, environmental policy, and various social programs,” to excluding transgender soldiers from the military and athletes from women’s sports, waging a “war on science” and whitewashing how history is presented in the nation’s museums, Trump has used his executive powers to advance MAGA’s culture wars.

He also found time on his first day to unconditionally pardon almost all 1,600 rioters convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and commute the sentences imposed on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members for seditious conspiracy. While this was within his powers as president, it shows scant respect for the courts. House Democrats are now asking how many of the rioters have joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly looks like Trump’s Gestapo.

The same contempt for the rule of law is shown by the fact that nearly a month after Congress set a deadline of December 19 for the release of all files relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump’s Department of Justice has made public only 12,285 out of over 2 million relevant documents, and many of these have been heavily redacted.

I am your retribution

Not content with stacking the governing bodies of public institutions from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center—to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with loyalists, Trump has good on his promise to his MAGA supporters that “I am your justice … I am your retribution.” 

The president has purged the US military, the justice department, immigration judges, and at least 17 inspectors general (the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government departments).  The list of those whose security clearances been revoked in retaliation for past actions deemed hostile to Trump is growing very long indeed. 

Weaponizing the justice department, Trump has opened criminal investigations or prosecutions against among others Letitia James, Jack Smith, James Comey, John Bolton, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, John Brennan, and Jerome Powell, all of whom he has crossed swords with in the past. The administration’s response to pushback against the murder of Renée Good from elected city and state officials has been to issue subpoenas against governor Tim Walz and mayor Jacob Frey. 

Trump has sanctioned big law firms (e.g., WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, Covington & Burling) because they represented clients of which he disapproved. Rather than face being shut out of business with federal agencies, excluded from federal buildings (including courtrooms), and losing security clearances, several firms have caved to Trump’s demands and promised millions in pro bono work to causes he supports.

Silencing speech

The administration has dismantled Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia and defunded PBS and NPR on grounds that the former has “a “leftist bias” and fails to project “pro-American” values and the latter do not offer “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Trump removed Associated Press from the White House press pool and stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional power to decide which journalists have access to the president. In October, reporters from all but one news organization—including even the regime-friendly Fox News—turned in their Pentagon access badges rather than agree to new rules from secretary of defence (now styled “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth restricting what they were allowed to report. 

Trump has personally sued among others ABC News (obtaining $15 million in an out-of-court settlement), the Daily Beast, CBS News (a $16 million settlement), the Des Moines Register, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is suing the BBCfor defamation for no less than $10 billion, a sum that would bankrupt the UK’s public broadcaster (whose entire income in 2025 was £5.9 billion, or $US 7.88). 

CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Trump. The next month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel commented on the assassination of rightwing darling Charlie Kirk, leading Trump to muse: “They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” This is hardly a climate conducive to free speech.

Kneecapping the universities

A recent report by PEN America documents how 

From executive orders and memos, to investigations, the withholding of funds for research and financial aid, and efforts to detain, deport, or deny visas to international students and academics, the federal administration has weaponized every imaginable lever to bring the higher education sector to its knees. 

The report instances 90+ Title VI investigations, $3.7 billion in cuts from federal research dollars from previously awarded grants, and NIH and NSF funding cuts with an estimated annual cost of $10-15 billion in decreased US economic output. 

The federal government has proposed suspending 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a research partnership program because they engage in DEI hiring, fined UCLA $1.2 billion, and required that it not enroll “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” Since January 2025 the State Department has revoked over 8,000 student visas, targeting in particular those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. 

Faced with these pressures many schools, including New York’s Columbia University, have traded academic freedom for federal dollars and accepted unprecedented political oversight of their hiring practices and the content of their research and teaching. 

Others have resisted—up to a point. Though Harvard is suing the administration, it has suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The cruelty is the point

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act allocated a mindblowing $75 billion over four years (in addition to $10 billion already appropriated for 2025) to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. The law provided $45 billion to increase ICE detention capacity and $46.6 billion for the construction of border barriers and surveillance systems. 

Advertising “You do not need an undergraduate degree,” a generous pay and benefits package, and a $50,000 signing bonus, ICE recruited 12,000 additional agents during 2025, expanding its workforce by 120 percent. Mobilizing “Uncle Sam” imagery, the ads are crafted to attract MAGA supporters, if not outright white nationalists. 

DHS boasts that in 2025 “nearly 3 million illegal aliens … left the U.S. … including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations.” The conditions in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and other ICE detention centers are grim. A record 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025.  The cruelty is the point—to strike fear.

An unknown number of those deported have not been given due process and in some cases have been sent to third countries with which they have no connection. In what is perhaps the most notorious case of denial of legal rights, the administration defied court orders and summarily deported 238 Venezuelan men to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for torture and “life-threatening prison conditions.” 

ICE has conducted large-scale raids across the US aiming at 3,000 arrests per day. Though DHS claims its targets are “criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers,” ICE’s goons have rounded up people from factories, farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, churches, schools, and even immigration courts. In Minnesota Trump’s Gestapo are going from house to house, breaking down doors and arresting people. Seventy-five percent of those held by ICE in December had no criminal convictions. This is a reign of terror.

Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in the latter case to support ICE. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to dispatch troops to end the protests in Minnesota. “If I feel it’s important to invoke the Insurrection Act,” he told the New York Times, “I have the right to do pretty much what I want to do.” L’état, c’est moi.

Signs in the window

What has any of this to do with Gaza?

Invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the Czech greengrocer who places a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it, but to signal his conformity—and thereby helps reproduce the system that oppresses him—Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech showed rare honesty from a western political leader.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” he begins. But

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful … So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

Then came Gaza. When the gaps became chasms.

When George H. W. Bush went to war with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he sought and got authorization from the UN Security Council. When his son, George W. Bush, wanted to fight Saddam again in 2003, he and UK PM Tony Blair—the same Blair that is now on Trump’s “Board of Peace”—used fake intelligence to get support for going to war from the US Congress and UK parliament. The UN was unpersuaded by their claims, but they went through the motions of playing by the rules before going ahead with a “coalition of the willing” anyway. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2024, western powers, including the US, EU, UK, and Canada, responded with ever-escalating rounds of sanctions. 

But with Gaza, it is different. As I have documented in more than 25 articles over the last two years, not only have western governments, with the support of mainstream political parties and mass media across the political spectrum, armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for the genocide. They have thrown international law out of the window and perhaps fatally undermined the institutions that support it—the UN and its agencies, the ICJ, and the ICC. And they have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties at home, persecuting Israel’s critics under the specious banner of “combatting antisemitism.”

This was not Donald Trump’s doing. The responsibility lies squarely with Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Kamala Harris; with Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper; with Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and—it must be said—Mark Carney; with Emmanuel Macron, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. They dealt the final blows to the old order. Trump is just picking up where they left off.

Gaza’s revenge

Asked by Democracy Now on December 26, 2025, to comment on “what’s happening in Gaza,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy replied: 

What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous—I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Trump’s triumph might be seen as Gaza’s revenge. Revenge for the West’s complicity in the worst crimes of the century. Revenge for its repeated trampling on international law. Revenge, above all, on the American Democrats who demanded everyone’s vote despite Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break with his legacy—and told protestors against genocide to shut up because “I’m speaking!” 

She is not speaking any more. Donald Trump is Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The imperial chickens are coming home to roost.

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The first three months of Donald Trump’s “Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan”

Canadian Dimension/ January 8, 2026 

Trucks carrying humanitarian aid wait to cross into Gaza from Egypt through Rafah. Photo by Eskinder Debebe/UN.

On September 29, 2025, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, Donald Trump announced his 20-point Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan to the world. Over the next few days the US president put heavy pressure on Hamas to sign up to his deal, threatening that Israel “would have my full backing to finish the job” of destroying the group if they didn’t.

Though neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian organization had been involved in drawing up Trump’s 20 points, Hamas signed an agreement with Israel at noon on October 9 to implement the first phase of the plan, which came into effect the next day.

This agreement—which, let us be absolutely clear, is all that Israel and Hamas have signed up to so far—committed both sides to a ceasefire in Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

In the 72 hours following the IDF withdrawal, all Israeli hostages in Gaza (or their remains) were to be exchanged for “250 life sentence prisoners [in Israeli jails] plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”

“Full aid” would also “be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip… at a minimum in consistence with the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid.” The latter stipulated the entry of at least 600 trucks, including 50 fuel trucks, per day.

Though this aspect of the October 9 agreement received less media attention than the release of the Israeli hostages, it was critical for the Palestinians. The world’s top authority on food supply, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), had declared the “irrefutable” existence of famine in Gaza more than a month earlier.

The Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit

The ceasefire officially began on October 10. Hamas released its last 20 living hostages, and Israel began to release Palestinian prisoners on October 13.

At the Sharm el-Sheikh “Peace Summit” in Egypt that same day, Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over.” His audience included over 30 world leaders, among them Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Giorgia Meloni, as well as leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim states and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

The “president of peace” (as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio baptized his boss) was praised on all sides. Elbows up as ever, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered “congratulations to President Trump for his essential leadership” in delivering this “historic peace plan… opening a new chapter for Israelis, Palestinians, and the world.”

Their enthusiasm is comprehensible—though totally unfounded. For months, Western leaders outside the US had been facing mounting public opposition over their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as growing concerns over their own potential liability for complicity in what was increasingly widely being recognized as a genocide. Tensions between the US and its allies peaked when (to Israel’s fury) Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and several other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York.

Trump’s Gaza plan provided them with an off-ramp. As I wrote at the time, “One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.”

The end of the war?

The reality, however, is less rosy—as everybody present in Sharm el-Sheikh must have known.

To begin with, the October 9 agreement did not commit either Israel or Hamas to accepting the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. Hamas had always been ready to engage in prisoner exchanges—that was, after all, the reason they took hostages on October 7—Israel rather less so. Other issues have proved more intractable.

Several members of the Israeli government stridently opposed the ceasefire, and Netanyahu himself likely only entered into it under pressure from Donald Trump (who was openly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize). Challenged by the opposition to endorse Trump’s plan, Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a Knesset vote on the issue.

In the ensuing days and weeks, Israeli leaders made it clear that they remained opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state now or ever and had no intention of pulling the IDF out of Gaza anytime soon. Fifty-three percent of the strip, including almost all of its arable land, lies in the area the IDF now controls behind the yellow line.

For its part, on October 24 Hamas communicated that while it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’” as the Trump plan envisaged, it was not prepared to disarm without serious negotiations on establishing a Palestinian state.

Like much of what comes out of the US president’s mouth, Trump’s statement in a December 29 interview with PBS Newshour that “Hamas pledged, they swore that they were going to disarm” is quite simply false.

Very far from the Gaza “war” being over, the thorniest issues—Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories, disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, and the realization of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state—have yet to be resolved. So does the fate of Gaza’s surviving civilian population of over a million people, trapped in appalling conditions between the yellow line and the sea.

Two earlier ceasefires had enabled exchanges of hostages, in November 2023 and January 2025. Israel multiply breached and finally unilaterally ended both. There was—and is—no good reason to think the outcome will be any different this time around.

UN Security Council Resolution 2803

Notwithstanding these serious obstacles to a real peace, in a landmark resolution of November 17, which passed by a vote of 13-0 (with Russia and China abstaining), the UN Security Council welcomed Trump’s plan and endorsed its key provisions.

Resolution 2803 “authorized” a “Board of Peace”—whose composition is not specified in the resolution, but which will be chaired by Donald Trump himself—to:

  • Set up “a transitional governance administration, including … a Palestinian technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip”
  • Establish “a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF)… with forces contributed by participating States”
  • Create a “newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force,” which will work with the ISF to ensure “the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including… the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

“As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip… save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” the text goes on. The “standards, milestones, and timeframes” will be “agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [the US, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar], and the United States.”

Astonishingly, there is no provision for any Palestinian input into this most important of issues—for both sides. If the Palestinians give up their arms with no internationally backed guarantee of eventual statehood, they are defenceless in the face of an army that has repeatedly proved its ruthlessness. But so long as Hamas is not disarmed, Israelis fear a repetition of the dreadful events of October 7, 2023, which triggered the present so-called “war” and have been invoked to justifyevery Israeli action since.

The deal of the century?

These transitional arrangements, says the resolution, will remain in place “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

Both the PA and Hamas denounced Trump’s 2020 plan (which he modestly called “the deal of the century”) at the time, with Hamas describing it as an attempt “to liquidate the Palestinian national project.” Among other things, the plan would have allowed Israel to annex much of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, leaving behind a demilitarized Palestinian “state” made up of a series of Bantustans.

Only “after the PA reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced,” Resolution 2803 continues, “the conditions may”— note it says “may,” not “will”—be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.”

The postponement of establishing even a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood to the indefinite future—while effectively giving Israel and the US a veto over the process—is particularly ironic, coming so soon after Canada, the UK, and all the rest purportedly “recognized” the state of Palestine.

Unsurprisingly, Hamas and the other factions in Gaza rejected Resolution 2803. In their view, Trump’s plan is no more than a “form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the [Israeli] occupation against our people.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump during the introduction of the Gaza ceasefire proposal, September 29, 2025. Photo courtesy the White House/Wikimedia Commons.

The legal background

It is difficult to overstate just how major a departure Resolution 2803 is from the UN’s previous policies on the Palestinian question—and from the body of law established by the world’s two highest international courts.

After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Security Council Resolution 242 called for:

Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict [and]… Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area…


Israel ignored Resolution 242, as it has ignored literally hundreds of UN resolutions since—usually with the support of the United States, which has frequently employed its veto to shield Israel from sanctions or other UN action. The US has vetoed no less than six United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions in the course of the current “war” alone.

Responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities,” and “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The justices went on to stress that “all states,” as well as international organizations (including the UN), were “under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance” in maintaining the occupation.

Recalling the ICJ ruling as well as earlier resolutions, on December 3, 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requiring Israel to “comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vote was 157 in favour, eight against, and seven abstentions. Though both the US and Israel opposed the motion, the overwhelming majority of Western democracies, including Canada and the UK, backed it.

On November 21, 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998 as “an independent, permanent court of last resort… to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression,” issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Though not recognized by the US or Israel, this is the same court that convicted Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic for their part in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and—with US approval—indicted Vladimir Putin in 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s response to the ICC indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant has been to impose sanctions on both the court and several of its individual officials and judges.

The UN betrays Palestine—and itself

The Security Council’s acceptance of the Trump “peace plan” is a watershed moment for the postwar international order. It marks the definitive abandonment of attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute within this framework of international law, and their replacement by obeisance to the imperatives of great power realpolitik.

Though Russia and China both criticized the Trump plan, they conspicuously did not veto Resolution 2803. Russia has no more interest in upholding international law than Israel or the US, given its invasion of Ukraine, while China would welcome a free hand in Taiwan, which it has always insisted is an integral part of its national territory (and therefore not governed by international law regarding relations between states).

In a blistering response to Security Council Resolution 2803 Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, got to the heart of the matter.

“Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence,” she wrote:

the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.


Instead, “the resolution risks entrenching external control over Gaza’s governance, borders, security, and reconstruction” and “betrays the people it claims to protect.”

Specifically:

A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal. It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenceless population, US and Israeli interests, plain and simple.

Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.


In abnegating its legal responsibilities and outsourcing Gaza’s future to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” she charges, the UN has betrayed not only the Palestinian people but its own founding principles as embodied in Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter.

You cease, I fire

Nearly three months have passed since the Gaza “ceasefire” came into effect. Israel has repeatedly stalled progress on moving to phase two of Trump’s “peace plan” until all the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages have been returned—no small task, given the difficulty of recovering them in Gaza’s devastation. By December 4 the remains of all but one hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, had been recovered. Israel is still stalling.

Though both sides have accused the other of multiple violations of the ceasefire, the monstrous asymmetry of casualties suggests the fault lies overwhelmingly with Israel.

Since October 10, at least 416 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,110 wounded in Israeli attacks. Over the same period, just three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza. According to Palestinian sources, two of them died when their vehicle ran over unexploded ordinance, and not, as Israel claimed, in a Hamas ambush.

While there hasn’t been a single reported incident of Hamas firing rockets into Israel, the Gazan authorities claim that between October 10 and December 28 “Israel shot at civilians 298 times, raided residential areas beyond the ‘yellow line’ 54 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 455 times, [and] demolished people’s properties on 162 occasions.”

In total, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 969 times from October 10 to December 28. To describe Trump’s ceasefire as “fragile,” “precarious,” or “tested,” as mainstream Western media habitually do, is to stretch the meaning of words beyond all credibility. On the Israeli side, at least, this has been a ceasefire in name only.

Restriction of aid

Let me finally turn to the only other provision in Trump’s Gaza Plan aside from the exchange of prisoners that was actually agreed in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on October 9, the resumption of “full aid” into Gaza.

Israel has failed to open the Rafah crossing into Egypt, as is explicitly mandated in the Trump plan, and has severely restricted and on occasion completely stopped traffic at other crossing points throughout the ceasefire. While the number of humanitarian aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza since the ceasefire is disputed, it is clearly far fewer than the agreed minimum of 600 per day.

Per the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, “Due to Israeli restrictions, as of December 16, only 57 percent of the 556 aid missions planned by the UN and its partners were carried out, including the delivery of vital aid and equipment, medical evacuations, and infrastructure repairs.”

According to Oxfam, posting on December 22:

Since the current ceasefire began on October 10th, Israeli authorities continue to arbitrarily reject scores of shipments of life-saving assistance into Gaza. Almost $50 million worth of food, water, tents, and medical supplies is still being held up at border crossings and warehouses. Oxfam alone has $2.5 million worth of aid sitting in Jordan, including 4,000 food parcels.


Expressing “serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic,” on December 30 the foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling upon Israel to fully open all the crossings and “lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use… includ[ing] urgently needed medical and shelter equipment.”

Hobbling of INGOs

The statement further demanded that international NGOs “are able to operate in Gaza in a sustained and predictable way,” and that “the UN and its partners can continue their vital work.” It emphasized that “this includes United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], which provides essential services, such as health care and education, to millions of Palestinian refugees.”

This last point matters because Israel banned UNWRA—the single most important agency for coordinating aid efforts in Gaza—from operating in Israel from January 2025, on the basis of accusations (for which it provided no evidence) that some of its employees participated in the Hamas October 7 attack. That ban remains in place.

Tightening the screw further, on December 29 the Knesset passed a law cutting off electricity and water supplies to facilities owned by or operating on behalf of UNRWA in the occupied Palestinian territories, and banned provision of telecommunications, banking, and other financial services to the agency.

Under rules introduced in March 2025, Israel required aid organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to submit lists of their Palestinian staff by December 31 for vetting by intelligence services. Fearful that this would put their employees in danger of targeting by the IDF, many refused. Their fears are well founded. In 2024 alone, 125 UNRWA aid workers were killed in Gaza, the highest death toll in UN history.

Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has insisted on implementing this so-called “security” measure. As a result, 37 INGOs have now lost their accreditation and will have to cease operating by March 1. These include Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Vision International, ActionAid, International Rescue Committee, CARE, Medico International, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

These restrictions on aid entering Gaza are too numerous and systematic to be an accident. The guns may have temporarily quieted, but Israel is continuing its ethnic cleansing and genocide by other means.

As winter bites, the old, the infirm, and above all the children will continue to die. In these circumstances the survivors may be that much more willing to abandon their homeland for “voluntary” exile. In another press conference with Netanyahu on December 29, Donald Trump suggested that more than half the population would like to take advantage of such an offer (“To me it’s common sense”).

Coincidentally or otherwise, on January 2 Israel became the first country in the world to recognizethe breakaway state of Somaliland, an enclave strategically situated on the coast of the Gulf of Aden. The government of Somaliland has denied agreeing to host Israeli bases or accept displaced Gazans, but suspicions remain.

What comes next?

Three months on, the prospects for Donald Trump’s “comprehensive peace plan” are looking decidedly shaky. Having got all its hostages back, and secure in its military occupation of 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, Israel may decline to move on to phase two and find some excuse to resume the conflict as in the previous ceasefires.

Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm in the absence of guarantees of eventual statehood that Israel will never give—what more, after all, do Palestinians have to lose by keeping their weapons? Meantime the states that were mooted as contributors of troops to Trump’s proposed international stabilization force, including Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia, are reportedly getting cold feet about being dragged into the quagmire.

But in a sense none of this matters. The Trump plan has done its job. Gaza is out of the headlines, the allies are back on board, and the US is calling the shots—with the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council, which has accepted the inevitable.

The “rules-based order” established at the end of World War II is over. The world is entering “a new era of great power competition; a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength”—to quote US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking after the US invasion of Venezuela—an era in which right gives way to might.

Resolution 8302 is the embodiment of that capitulation. Gaza is the future. And not just for Palestinians.

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Album of the Year—hors de concours

Rosalía Lux

First Top 10—Likely Not Jazz

Big Thief Double Infinity

Wednesday Bleeds

Blood Orange Essex Honey

Patterson Hood Exploding Trees and Airplane Dreams

Mdou Moctar Tears of Injustice

Jason Isbell Foxes in the Snow

Flory Sounds Like

Wet Leg Moisturizer

Dave Stewart Dave Does Dylan

Valerie June Owls, Omens and Oracles

Second Top 10—But Is It Jazz?

Ambrose Akinmusire Honey from a Winter’s Stone

Tarune Balani Kadahin Milandaasin

Yazz Ahmed A Paradise in the Hold

Amina Claudine Myers Solace of the Mind

Theon Cross Affirmations: Live at the Blue Note New York

Linda May Han Oh Strange Heavens

Nate Mercereau Josh Johnson Carlos Nino Openness Trio

Charles Lloyd Figure in Blue

Fieldwork Thereupon

Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner Play

Some notable EPS

Kronos Quartet and Hard Rain Collective Hard Rain

Lisa O’Neill The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right

Makaya McCraven Techno Logic/Hidden Out/The People’s Mixtape/Pop-Up Shop (4 EPs, available together as Off the Record from Bandcamp)

and a reissue

Thelonious Monk Bremen 1965

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Volvox Globator, who previously published the Czech translation of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, has now brought out a Czech translation of the third volume in my “Prague trilogy,” Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History. I am most grateful to Jindřich Veselý for undertaking this translation, which cannot have been the easiest of assignments given the length and character of the book.

This is the Czech publisher’s blurb. English translation follows.

Kniha Pohlednice z Absurdistánu, napsaná britsko-kanadským bohemistou Derekem Sayerem, představuje jedinečný vhled do českých dějin dvacátého století. Ve své předchozí knize autor nazval Prahu hlavním městem 20. století (Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století, Surrealistická historie Volvox Globator, 2021) a tento pohled zůstává výchozím bodem i pro tuto knihu.

Derek Sayer se podrobně zabývá kulturním a společenským děním, odhaluje absurdity, které 20. století provázely, a zároveň poukazuje na křehkost demokratického systému. Podtitul knihy Praha na konci dějin odkazuje ke slavnému dílu, které napsal Francis Fukuyama v devadesátých letech dvacátého století, ale zároveň v sobě nese nadhled, který je Dereku Sayerovi vlastní. 

V knize se prolínají dějinné, politické události spolu s osobními dějinami českých osobností, které si v nehostinných podmínkách velké části dvacátého století vydobývaly vlastní svobodu. Velká pozornost je věnována vývoji umění, které bylo nuceno, ať už jakýmkoli způsobem, na danou politickou situaci reagovat. Kniha nese veškeré parametry vědecké práce, autor však není spoutaný akademickým jazykem, naopak, jedná se o velice čtivý text, který je doprovázen více než sedmdesáti dobovými fotografiemi.

Z angličtiny přeložil Jindřich Veselý.

Postcards from Absurdistan, written by British-Canadian Czech scholar Derek Sayer, offers a unique insight into Czech history in the 20th century. In his previous book, the author called Prague the capital of the 20th century (Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století, Surrealistická historie, Volvox Globator, 2021), and this remains the vantage point for this book as well.

Derek Sayer takes a detailed look at cultural and social events, revealing the absurdities that accompanied the 20th century, while also pointing out the fragility of the democratic system. The subtitle of the book, “Prague at the End of History,” refers to the famous work written by Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s, but at the same time carries Derek Sayer’s characteristic perspective

The book intertwines historical and political events with the personal histories of Czech personalities who fought for their freedom in the inhospitable conditions of much of the 20th century. Much attention is paid to the development of art, which was forced, in one way or another, to respond to the political situation. The book has all the parameters of a scientific work, but the author is not bound by academic language; on the contrary, it is a very readable text accompanied by more than seventy period photographs.

Translated from English by Jindřich Veselý.

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I was delighted to belatedly discover that my potted history/guidebook Prague: Crossroads of Europe, published by Reaktion Books (London) in their Cityscopes series in 2018, was published in Chinese translation in October 2021 by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. Here are the Chinese publication details and blurb—English translation follows, courtesy of DeepL.

《布拉格：欧洲的十字路口》

作者：德里克•塞耶

出版社：上海文艺出版社

出版时间：2021年10月

ISBN：9787532178353

定价：108.00元

内容简介

身为加拿大皇家学会院士的德里克•塞耶，在本书中既细数布拉格风云变幻的昨日，也详述布拉格精彩纷呈的今天。被誉为“欧洲美首都”的布拉格，拥有伏尔塔瓦河畔令人惊叹的自然风光，其壮观的建筑群亦多彩多姿，从罗马式圆形大厅到哥特式塔楼，从文艺复兴时期的宫殿到巴洛克式大教堂，从新艺术风格的咖啡馆到立体主义风格的公寓楼……可谓包罗万象。位于欧洲十字路口的布拉格是各方思潮、各国文化交汇碰撞之地，距今已有千年。塞耶通过回顾欧洲史的错综过往，呈现给读者一幅布拉格波澜壮阔的历史画卷。寻幽入微，言有尽而意无穷。

作者简介

德里克•塞耶，波西米亚历史专家、原英国兰卡斯特大学文化历史系教授，出版有《波西米亚海岸：一个捷克人的历史》《资本主义与现代性：马克思主义和韦伯思想概论》《二十世纪之都布拉格：一段超现实的历史》《自找麻烦：超现实主义和社会科学》等多部著作。当选为加拿大皇家学会院士的塞耶现居“牛仔城”卡尔加里，同时是阿尔伯塔大学社会理论与文化研究系的荣誉退休教授。

译者简介

金天，口笔译硕士。先后获伦敦国王学院及诺丁汉大学一等荣誉学位、伦敦圣三一学院对外英语教学证书。峰会口译员；曾任剑桥国际之友（Friends International Cambridge）领队，为当地语言学校开设有多场英语学术讲座。共计有英汉互译作品约七十万字。译有《孟买：欲望丛林》《巴黎：光影流动的盛宴》等。

目 录

003 序

昔日布拉格

003 我见一城俊伟

011 普舍美斯王朝

027 查理四世的黄金时代

041 反对一切！

055 金杯毒酒

077 白山之后

099 为了祖国，为了艺术

119 我们说斯拉夫语

145 十字路口

161 阴云笼罩

175 来自东方的共产主义

191 重回欧洲

今日布拉格

197 布拉格咖啡馆

211 啤酒实乃琼浆玉液！

221 立体主义者的塑造梦

231 当之无愧现代风

241 旧貌新颜查理镇

253 小河内

263 跳舞的房子

275 附录

315 译后记

319 大事年表

325 索引

Translation

Prague: Crossroads of Europe
Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication Date: October 2021
ISBN: 9787532178353
Price: ¥108.00

Synopsis
As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Derek Sayer chronicles Prague’s turbulent past while detailing its vibrant present. Dubbed “Europe’s most beautiful capital,” Prague boasts breathtaking natural scenery along the Vltava River and a kaleidoscope of architectural wonders—from Romanesque rotundas to Gothic towers, Renaissance palaces to Baroque cathedrals, Art Nouveau cafés to Cubist apartment buildings. Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Prague has been a crucible where diverse ideologies and cultures have collided for over a millennium. By revisiting Europe’s intricate historical tapestry, Sayer unfolds a sweeping panorama of Prague’s past for readers. His exploration delves into the minutiae, leaving the narrative rich with meaning beyond its words.

Author Biography
Derek Sayer, an expert on Bohemian history and former professor of cultural history at Lancaster University, UK, is the author of numerous works including The Bohemian Coast: A Czech History, Capitalism and Modernity: An Introduction to Marxist and Weberian Thought, Prague: A Surreal History of the Twentieth Century, and Trouble in the Making: Surrealism and the Social Sciences. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Sayer currently resides in Calgary, known as “Cowboy City,” and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.

Translator Profile
Jin Tian holds a Master’s degree in Interpreting and Translation. She earned First-Class Honours degrees from King’s College London and the University of Nottingham, along with a Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA) from Trinity College London. She has served as a conference interpreter and previously led groups for Friends International Cambridge, delivering numerous academic English lectures for local language schools. Total English-Chinese translation output exceeds 700,000 words. Translations include Mumbai: Jungle of Desire and Paris: Feast of Light and Shadow.

Table of Contents
003 Preface
Prague of Yore
003 I Beheld a Magnificent City
011 The Přemyslid Dynasty
027 The Golden Age of Charles IV
041 Against Everything!
055 The Golden Cup of Poison
077 After White Mountain
099 For the Fatherland, For Art
119 We Speak Slavic
145 The Crossroads
161 Dark Clouds Gather
175 Communism from the East
191 Return to Europe
Prague Today
197 Prague Cafés
211 Beer Is the Nectar of the Gods!
221 The Cubists’ Dream of Form
231 Undeniably Modern Style
241 Charles Town: Old Faces, New Looks
253 Malá Strana
263 The Dancing House
275 Appendix
315 Translator’s Afterword
319 Chronology
325 Index

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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I have added a new section to this website called MY TEXTS. You can navigate there from the main menu. This is why.

For at least a decade now, like many other academics, I have used Academia.edu as a repository for my writings and a place where others can easily and freely assess them, consistently with terms of copyright. While I have never used the (monetized) “premium” features of the site, I always thought the basic idea of such an open repository an inspired one that I was very happy to support.

I found the site especially useful for posting complete texts of books that were out-of-print to which I had regained the rights, including Marx’s Method, The Violence of Abstraction, and my 1985 book with Philip Corrigan The Great Arch, which has so far had 7,535 views. I also find the site useful for posting drafts, articles published in out-of-the-way places, and occasional unpublished materials.

Reluctant as I am to remove texts from this facility, I am deeply disturbed by and feel duty-bound to resist Academia.edu’s recent unilateral change in terms and conditions. The relevant clause reads:

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.

I had a disconcerting example of this when the company proudly informed me that it had “made a podcast” from one of my articles without my knowledge, involvement or permission.

Like many others, I am contemplating discontinuing my Academia.edu account or at least drastically cutting the amount of material I leave on the site for its corporate management to plunder “in any manner” as they see fit.

Until I find an alternative repository that provides the services Academia.edu used to offer without asserting effective ownership over member content and personal information, I am making my work freely available—consistently with publishers’ rights—on my personal website at coastsofbohemia.com.

Most of what was formerly available for download at Academia.edu can now be downloaded from My Texts. I will be adding new materials as time goes on.