Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
It’s time that the nations of the world (or at least the influential western nations) accept the reality that all the lands that constituted 1920-1948 Mandatory Palestine should be formally recognised as a single nation-state; ideally called Palestine Israel or Israel-Palestine, but more realistically called Israel.
In other words, the never-viable notion of a two-nation-state division of ‘Israel’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eretz_Israel) should be dropped as a viable solution in favour of the promotion of a liberal bicultural (or multicultural) nation-state. The role model for change could be South Africa.
Jewish and Non-Jewish intellectuals (such as Hans Kohn, Shlomo Sand and Yanis Varoufakis) – on the political left – have been arguing for this ‘one-state-solution’ for over 100 years. It’s just that their voices have always been deamplified by those on the political centre and the political right. (On the centre, we think of people like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, and their predecessors. On the right, we may consider former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a leader in the 1940s of the openly fascist Lehi, yet a moderate by today’s Israeli political standards.)
Shlomo Sand outlines the history of the arguments for a single ‘binational’ state in his 2024 book Israel-Palestine: Federation or Apartheid? His vision, which is not quite what I favour, emphasises binationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/binationalism), and looks towards these successful liberal examples of bi- or multi- nationalism: Canada, Belgium, Switzerland.
The better framing of this approach, I believe, is biculturalism; though even that is not problem-free, because it is an exclusive concept. What I think would work best for Palestine Israel is also the same as what would work best for Aotearoa New Zealand: multiculturalism with a bicultural (treaty) emphasis. (Ireland could have become something similar, as in Irish rugby; but it went down a failed two-state path, and experienced two substantial civil wars last century.) The ideal is for Palestine Israel to become a liberal democracy in which all people born within its borders become citizens with equal citizenship rights; a nation state which commits to both the domestic and international norms of liberal democracy.
(In a bicultural nation-state, the principal divider is religion; normally people’s religious loyalties are discrete, meaning that being, say, a Muslim or Jew or Christian is mutually exclusive. The word ‘national’ is increasingly used in the 21st century as it was in the 19th century; to refer to a ‘people’ or a ‘race’ rather than to relate to a territory defined by its borders and its sovereign institutions. Ethnicity – the better word is ‘ancestry – is not a discrete concept such as ‘religion’; individual people have multiple ancestries, and should not be required to identify as one over another.)
How can this be achieved?
First, we should note that the status quo in Eretz Israel is at least as unacceptable as Apartheid South Africa was to our world of mostly ‘internationally-civilised’ nation-states. (An internationally civilised state is one that accepts agreed norms in the ways that it relates to other nation states, meaning that it does not indulge in offensive hard-power geopolitics – such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’; and it practises cultural equality. Terrorism is understood as criminality. Such a state does not have to be a ‘democracy’ in the Westminster or American sense; but it should meet open liberal standards in the ways it treats its resident denizens – non-citizens – and it should subscribe to international treaties on matters such as climate sustainability and nuclear energy and election authenticity.)
Second, this desired outcome will not come about by force. The community of liberal nations should simply recognise Eretz Israel as a nation state, based ideally on the prior borders of Mandatory Palestine.
While there should be no demands, such a new nation-state would be risking discriminatory sanctions if it abuses liberal norms; in particular if it implements laws (including civil-marriage laws) that discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, or ancestry. Again, the obvious model is Apartheid South Africa, and the ways that South Africa was excluded from international sport so long as it implemented laws which discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. (Palestinians and many Israelis have Levantine ethnicity. Many Israelis have European, African or Asian co-ethnicity; that non-indigeneity should never be held against them. Nor should the indigeneity of the Palestinians.)
In recognising Eretz Israel as Israel-Palestine (or even just under the name ‘Israel’), a Levantine nation state, Israel’s nuclear status should be addressed and normalised. (Likewise, India and Pakistan should be pressured to join the ‘nuclear club’. One of the most problematic regional asymmetries at present is the advanced nuclear-status of Israel versus the embryonic nuclear status of Iran; Israel at present hides behind its non-membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to make it seem that Iran is a bigger nuclear threat to the world than Israel is.)
Recognition of Eretz Israel as a sovereign nation state, under any name, should come with overt expectations of democracy, amnesty, truth, reconciliation, and press freedom. There should be no formal or informal mechanism of ‘settling scores’, no matter how reprehensible anyone’s past or present behaviour has been. Truth trumps vengeance cloaked as ‘accountability’.
Lebanon was an initially successful, but now largely failed, version of a similar attempt at creating a tolerant multicultural nation state in the Levant. Lebanon’s main problem was its belligerent southern neighbour. Israel-Palestine would not have Israel as a neighbour.
Abandon the naïve two-state solution.
There is no way a Palestinian nation-state can be viable. At the very best it could become like a mini-Pakistan or mini-Bangladesh; and even that would take decades. (And the last Israeli prime minister to formalise a two-state future – Yitzhak Rabin – was assassinated in 1995, having achieved a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.) The two-state-solution agenda seems to be more about deescalating sufficiently for the Palestine issue to disappear from its media prominence; and not at all about ending a forever war which began in 1948.
The present forever war – now in its hottest phase – followed a brutal war for Israeli-Jewish independence and non-Jewish expulsion waged by fascist and non-fascist ‘non-state actors’ from 1939 to 1948 against the British ‘protectors’. That, in turn, followed a prior Palestinian insurrection against the British and the settlers from 1936-1939 (though overshadowed in the international media by the Spanish Civil War), which in its turn followed the 1929 Palestine riots. That’s 96 years of escalating forever violence.
In Summary
Recognise a new expanded state, with or without a new name, but with certain (unenforceable, but well-publicised) expectations. This expectation should be a multi-cultural Levantine sovereign state, embracing adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths (as well as people of other religions, or no religion, as citizens; people born in Israel or Palestine, and documented immigrants): Levantine Jews, Levantine Muslims, Levantine Christians, plus others. All Israelis. And all Palestinians.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
It’s time that the nations of the world (or at least the influential western nations) accept the reality that all the lands that constituted 1920-1948 Mandatory Palestine should be formally recognised as a single nation-state; ideally called Palestine Israel or Israel-Palestine, but more realistically called Israel.
In other words, the never-viable notion of a two-nation-state division of ‘Israel’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eretz_Israel) should be dropped as a viable solution in favour of the promotion of a liberal bicultural (or multicultural) nation-state. The role model for change could be South Africa.
Jewish and Non-Jewish intellectuals (such as Hans Kohn, Shlomo Sand and Yanis Varoufakis) – on the political left – have been arguing for this ‘one-state-solution’ for over 100 years. It’s just that their voices have always been deamplified by those on the political centre and the political right. (On the centre, we think of people like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, and their predecessors. On the right, we may consider former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a leader in the 1940s of the openly fascist Lehi, yet a moderate by today’s Israeli political standards.)
Shlomo Sand outlines the history of the arguments for a single ‘binational’ state in his 2024 book Israel-Palestine: Federation or Apartheid? His vision, which is not quite what I favour, emphasises binationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/binationalism), and looks towards these successful liberal examples of bi- or multi- nationalism: Canada, Belgium, Switzerland.
The better framing of this approach, I believe, is biculturalism; though even that is not problem-free, because it is an exclusive concept. What I think would work best for Palestine Israel is also the same as what would work best for Aotearoa New Zealand: multiculturalism with a bicultural (treaty) emphasis. (Ireland could have become something similar, as in Irish rugby; but it went down a failed two-state path, and experienced two substantial civil wars last century.) The ideal is for Palestine Israel to become a liberal democracy in which all people born within its borders become citizens with equal citizenship rights; a nation state which commits to both the domestic and international norms of liberal democracy.
(In a bicultural nation-state, the principal divider is religion; normally people’s religious loyalties are discrete, meaning that being, say, a Muslim or Jew or Christian is mutually exclusive. The word ‘national’ is increasingly used in the 21st century as it was in the 19th century; to refer to a ‘people’ or a ‘race’ rather than to relate to a territory defined by its borders and its sovereign institutions. Ethnicity – the better word is ‘ancestry – is not a discrete concept such as ‘religion’; individual people have multiple ancestries, and should not be required to identify as one over another.)
How can this be achieved?
First, we should note that the status quo in Eretz Israel is at least as unacceptable as Apartheid South Africa was to our world of mostly ‘internationally-civilised’ nation-states. (An internationally civilised state is one that accepts agreed norms in the ways that it relates to other nation states, meaning that it does not indulge in offensive hard-power geopolitics – such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’; and it practises cultural equality. Terrorism is understood as criminality. Such a state does not have to be a ‘democracy’ in the Westminster or American sense; but it should meet open liberal standards in the ways it treats its resident denizens – non-citizens – and it should subscribe to international treaties on matters such as climate sustainability and nuclear energy and election authenticity.)
Second, this desired outcome will not come about by force. The community of liberal nations should simply recognise Eretz Israel as a nation state, based ideally on the prior borders of Mandatory Palestine.
While there should be no demands, such a new nation-state would be risking discriminatory sanctions if it abuses liberal norms; in particular if it implements laws (including civil-marriage laws) that discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, or ancestry. Again, the obvious model is Apartheid South Africa, and the ways that South Africa was excluded from international sport so long as it implemented laws which discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. (Palestinians and many Israelis have Levantine ethnicity. Many Israelis have European, African or Asian co-ethnicity; that non-indigeneity should never be held against them. Nor should the indigeneity of the Palestinians.)
In recognising Eretz Israel as Israel-Palestine (or even just under the name ‘Israel’), a Levantine nation state, Israel’s nuclear status should be addressed and normalised. (Likewise, India and Pakistan should be pressured to join the ‘nuclear club’. One of the most problematic regional asymmetries at present is the advanced nuclear-status of Israel versus the embryonic nuclear status of Iran; Israel at present hides behind its non-membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to make it seem that Iran is a bigger nuclear threat to the world than Israel is.)
Recognition of Eretz Israel as a sovereign nation state, under any name, should come with overt expectations of democracy, amnesty, truth, reconciliation, and press freedom. There should be no formal or informal mechanism of ‘settling scores’, no matter how reprehensible anyone’s past or present behaviour has been. Truth trumps vengeance cloaked as ‘accountability’.
Lebanon was an initially successful, but now largely failed, version of a similar attempt at creating a tolerant multicultural nation state in the Levant. Lebanon’s main problem was its belligerent southern neighbour. Israel-Palestine would not have Israel as a neighbour.
Abandon the naïve two-state solution.
There is no way a Palestinian nation-state can be viable. At the very best it could become like a mini-Pakistan or mini-Bangladesh; and even that would take decades. (And the last Israeli prime minister to formalise a two-state future – Yitzhak Rabin – was assassinated in 1995, having achieved a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.) The two-state-solution agenda seems to be more about deescalating sufficiently for the Palestine issue to disappear from its media prominence; and not at all about ending a forever war which began in 1948.
The present forever war – now in its hottest phase – followed a brutal war for Israeli-Jewish independence and non-Jewish expulsion waged by fascist and non-fascist ‘non-state actors’ from 1939 to 1948 against the British ‘protectors’. That, in turn, followed a prior Palestinian insurrection against the British and the settlers from 1936-1939 (though overshadowed in the international media by the Spanish Civil War), which in its turn followed the 1929 Palestine riots. That’s 96 years of escalating forever violence.
In Summary
Recognise a new expanded state, with or without a new name, but with certain (unenforceable, but well-publicised) expectations. This expectation should be a multi-cultural Levantine sovereign state, embracing adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths (as well as people of other religions, or no religion, as citizens; people born in Israel or Palestine, and documented immigrants): Levantine Jews, Levantine Muslims, Levantine Christians, plus others. All Israelis. And all Palestinians.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The central narrative of New Zealand’s Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is ‘There is only so much money to go around’. (For example, her interview on RNZ on 20 May, Willis on her second Budget, price of butter. The interview also covers, in the usual subservient way our media addresses these issues, Willis’s diversionary narrative to scapegoat supermarkets.)
A false zero-sum narrative
This zero-sum narrative about money is virtually uncontested, certainly in the mainstream media. Yet it’s not only sub-standard economics, it is also sub-standard theology. It is appropriate to debate whether God-made-Man or Man-made-God; there should be no such contest about Money-made-Man versus Man-made-Money.
Money is not (or should not be) God. The one fundamental truth about money, is that it is a human creation; Man made money. Money is a social technology, not a fundamental poverty-imposing constraint. In modern capitalism, central banks supervise the money supply, and can create money at will. The creation of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 1934 was a critical component of the post-Depression recovery and expansion from 1935 to 1940.
In modern capitalism, central banks act as lenders of last resort and governments as borrowers (and insurers) of last resort. This process of central bank lending and government borrowing is the engine of global capitalism, just as the sun’s energy is the engine that makes ongoing life on Earth possible.
Japan versus Germany
It is instructive to compare the economic fortunes of Japan and Germany this century.
Japan developed the new macroeconomics during its ‘horrible decade’, the 1990s. Its economy has thrived since 2000. The basis of its success, in a country with a financially conservative middle class and low inequality, is to borrow from its large pool of savers, rather than to overtax them. Japan has a stable public debt, sitting at around 240% of GDP since before 2015. And it has a stable fiscal deficit of around 4% each year. It has had interest rates around zero for more than a decade; currently 0.5%. Inflation peaked at 4% in 2023 (in the context of a falling Yen), up from 1% in early 2022. Japan’s current unemployment rate is 2.5%, having peaked at 3% in 2020.
Germany has taken the mercantilist line, which – in essence – posits money as God. It has imposed fiscal austerity on itself since 2010, and on the European Union which it then dominated. And it’s now in a state of socio-economic crisis, with a similar economic growth profile to New Zealand. In its last election (in February), using MMP, only 45% of voters voted for the two major parties. In the more recent opinion polls that support has fallen to around 40%. In the former ‘Communist’ East Germany, support for the two major parties combined is under 25%.
Germany, like most countries in the west, has stubbornly refused to learn from Japan. Fiscal counternarratives are effectively suppressed.
Debt ceiling?
New Zealand, when Grant Robertson was Minister of Finance, decided to impose a de facto ‘debt ceiling’ of 50% of GDP. Nicola Willis – inspired by Ruth Richardson’s (now entrenched) 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ – is entrenching this 50% debt ceiling. Thankfully for our great-grandparents, Michael Joseph Savage (and his Finance Minister, Walter Nash) did not operate similar ‘debt ceiling’ policies.
A policy to cut-back on government spending also has the effect of cutting back government revenue. That’s very basic Keynesian macroeconomics. If we buy less, we produce less, we earn less, and we pay less tax than we otherwise would. The combination of reduced government spending and reduced government revenue is anti-growth; pushed to its limits it represents a capitalist death spiral. The western world found a way out of such a spiral in the 1930s; before World War Two (WW2), but too late to prevent that war and the megadeath which came with it.
A true zero-sum identity
In a world in which the private sector – businesses and households – collectively chooses to run financial surpluses (choosing saving at debt repayment over borrowing), then governments must run deficits. When the world is divided into two sectors – private and public – the successful achievement of a surplus by one of those two sectors must be accompanied by a deficit in the other of those two sectors. In essence, governments can only – and have only – run surpluses or ‘balanced Budgets’ when businesses are running financial deficits. For the global economy as a whole, by definition there can be neither a financial surplus nor a deficit; financial balances add to zero, as an accounting identity.
Business sector deficits were substantially the norm in the twentieth century, but not since about 1990. Government balanced budgets were possible – though not normal – for much of the previous century. Japan met its new challenge in the 1990s, at a time when Japanese businesses were forced by their creditors to run substantial financial surpluses; substantial government deficits were a mathematically necessary part of the solution.
Inequality and increased private risk
The twenty-first century is characterised by high – and often-growing – levels of inequality in the western capitalist world. It is also characterised as a period of growing private risk, including the risk that even rich people (eg the ‘ten-percenters’) will struggle to afford life-saving medications for cancer and other ills. This twenty-first century private risk-profile means that the household component of the private sector is trying to run bigger surpluses. This is a kind of insurance situation; people feel they need ever bigger amounts of contingency savings to cover personal or familial ‘rainy days’. Japanese people led the way in this respect, in the 1990s.
This drive for ever bigger private surpluses – which includes things like debt repayments and retirement savings – means that, for capitalism to survive, governments must run bigger deficits; indeed ‘structural deficits’, in the way that Japan does.
Government spending on big guns.
In one sense the capitalist world – belatedly – is saving itself in this way through fiscal expansion; though only by trying to destroy itself in another way. Hitlernomics – a form of Keynesian economics – maintained de facto or de jure debt ceilings for civilian-oriented public spending, while allowing for virtual unlimited military spending on ‘big guns’. Germany explicitly moved in this direction in March 2025, by using a voted-out ‘lame duck’ parliament to authorise the removal of the de jure debt limit on military spending (and limited ‘infrastructure’ spending).
Urgent need for contestable democratic counter-narratives
We urgently need a democratic counter-narrative, which promotes public debt at least as a stabilising force (and in some cases to take priority over private debt). And a complementary counter-narrative promoting public-equity over pay-equity as an efficient means to correct destabilising inequality, given that excessive inequality is also a deathknell of capitalism. Capitalism depends on selling wage-goods to wage-workers.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Donald Trump is a mercantilist, as noted in Trump’s tariffs: Short-term damage or long-term ruin? ‘The Bottom Line’, Al Jazeera, 11 April 2025 (or here on YouTube). But the United States, in today’s world, is not a mercantilist country. Or at least not a successful mercantilist country, though it is inhabited by many mercantilists.
In that television interview, Georgetown University professor of Public Policy, Michael Strain said: “I don’t think [Trump’s tariffs are] smart politics, but I think the president [thinks they are]. I think that President Trump is a true mercantilist. The president believes that if the United States are running a trade deficit that means we are losing economic value to the rest of the world.”
Mercantilism, in its most literal form, is the belief that international trade is ‘economic warfare’, and that winning is achieved by a country exporting more than it imports. Obviously, the total amount of exports in this world is exactly equal to the total amount of imports. Every internationally traded good is both an export and an import. So, mercantilism is a belief-system which sees the world in zero-sum terms, as winners and losers, as warfare by financial means.
My chart and article yesterday (International Trade over time: gifts with strings, Evening Report, 8 May 2025) shows the accumulated ‘excess benefits’ of unbalanced global trade over the last forty years. The countries on the top-left-side of the chart are deficit/debtor countries; and the countries on the bottom-right-side are surplus/creditor countries. (The countries are selected on the basis of available ‘current account’ data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook Database, April 2025, and as representatives of deficit and surplus countries. China, if on the chart, would belong close to Malaysia. The chart is made from my own calculations to adjust for inflation.)
The chart necessarily – because deficits must be financed elsewhere by surpluses – has a seesaw shape. Some countries are up, some countries are down; and some countries occupy the central pivot, neither up nor down. So long as some countries have consumed substantial amounts of stuff (imports) which they have not yet paid for (the deficit countries), some other countries (the surplus countries) have supplied stuff (exports) that they have not yet accepted payment for (and are unlikely to accept payment for in the imaginable future). Imports are paid for by exports.
It’s not a true seesaw, which is typically either grounded or horizontally balanced. We may think of it as a seesaw pivoting above a chasm. What is true is that if the downside goes further down – that is, if the surplus countries’ accumulated surpluses get bigger – then the upside (accumulated deficits) must go further up. The seesaw is a ‘system’, and the only alternative to the seesaw shape is system collapse, analogous to the whole seesaw breaking off its pivot and falling into the chasm.
Imports are paid for by exports. But many contracted payments are deferred, indeed to the point where the payments will never actually take place. Instead of receiving payment in the form of imports, the mercantilist surplus countries have gleefully accepted ‘promises’; effectively ‘IOUs’ (‘I owe you’). (These ‘financial promises’ or ‘financial assets’ are essentially bonds [ie credit], or titles [ie equity]; promises themselves can be bought and sold, and can appreciate or depreciate in market trading [including depreciating to zero]. Promises typically earn, for their owners, additional promises in the form of interest and dividends. Interest and dividends may be realised – that is, spent – on imports, or may be ‘compounded’ – another word for ‘accumulated’ – hence the concept of compound interest.) Technically, inflation exists when the particular promise that we call money depreciates in market value.
In a mercantilist world, all countries want to occupy the low ‘ground’ (ie a point below the seesaw pivot); they want to import less than they export, and to accumulate promises. In a stable world economy, so long as some countries insist on occupying the low ground, then some others must occupy the high ground.
The most obvious deficit countries in the chart – countries with an accumulation of enjoyed (or invested in new structures) but unpaid-for imports – are the United States, Australia, Greece, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. (Another important deficit country is Türkiye, for which the data is not good enough, but would almost certainly have an accumulated ‘current account’ deficit of over $US100,000 per Turkish person.) These are the world’s ‘spendthrifts’.
The most obvious surplus countries in the chart are Taiwan, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Indeed, the European Union – more than anywhere else, including China – is a mercantilist enterprise. (Further, the European Union is starting to look quite shabby, especially the countries just mentioned.) This is what Donald Trump means by the European Union ‘screwing’ the United States. (Refer EU was born to ‘screw’ US, Trump says, France24, 26 Feb 2025.)
Surplus/creditor nations (like Germany) do not want to settle; they want to compound, they want deficit/debtor nations (like Aotearoa New Zealand) to extend their liabilities. The mercantilist countries are content – indeed, more than content – for other countries to enjoy the fruits of their labour and their capital.
Just as the deficit countries are the world’s ‘spendthrifts’, the surplus countries are the world’s ‘misers’. The global economy maintains a successful equilibrium so long as the willing spendthrifts balance out the insistent misers.
US President Donald Trump raised a fist in defiance after an assassination attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Saturday, July 13, 2024 (USEDST).
Donald Trump threatens to disturb that global equilibrium by saying – in effect – that he wants the United States to join the ‘miser club’; he says he wants his country to stop being screwed by the misers. The thing is, though, he probably doesn’t actually mean it. His natural proclivity is to spend, and to gamble. He’s a hedonist, not a puritan nor a thriftwad; his nature is neither parsimonious nor austere.
(I would rather Donald Trump than Friedrich Merz was United States’ president; and prefer the pragmatism of the United States and Australian Treasurers over the austere Nicola Willis or the United Kingdom’s brutally austere Rachel Reeves. In 2027, I am optimistic that, in office, NZ Labour’s Barbara Edmonds will be able to break away from the austere image of female Finance Ministers with whom we have become familiar – remember Ruthenasia; public austerity is an election-losing strategy, a generator of societal inequality and low morale.)
Nevertheless, Trump may be unintentionally breaking the world economy, on account of his – or his advisers’ (eg Peter Navarro) – weak understanding of it. If the surplus/creditor nations sought to spend their credits (except for spending in very small increments) they would: either bankrupt the debtor countries, creating systemic collapse; or, due to depreciating prices of assets being dumped onto financial markets, have to accept many fewer imports than they felt they were due. Financial promises work according to the use-it or lose-it rule.
The Great Depression
Parsimony, austerity, and mercantilism in the 1920s got us into the Great Depression of 1930 to 1934. (These were the core years of the Depression; the timing varies for different countries.) The Great Depression was a global event that occurred as a ‘race to the bottom’; almost all countries wanted to be below the pivot of the seesaw and none at the top. The United Kingdom – under Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill – in particular was a deficit country that tried to push its side of the seesaw down through a process of internal devaluation (deflation) at a time when France, United States (under the curmudgeonly Coolidge), and Germany had anchored their side of the seesaw down. (At that time, Germany had been – thanks to post World War One reparations – forced onto the same downside of the seesaw. Churchill’s most specific action was the returning of the British pound to an unworkable restored Gold Standard at an overvalued exchange rate.)
(In the pre WW1 global environment, one of the most important balancing deficit/debtor countries was Russia. Russia seceded from the global capitalist system in 1917, largely as a result of the war. The loss of Russia’s pre-war presence – as a counterweight – was an aggravating factor in the Great Interwar Crisis.)
Deep Mercantilism
Donald Trump, while an overt mercantilist, is shallow in his convictions. He loves ‘money’, but he also loves what money can buy.
Deep mercantilists love money, and other financial assets (‘virtual gold’) including cryptocurrencies, in miserly ways; they believe in making money, not spending it. (Stereotypical new wave misers are young men, mining and trading in Bitcoin from bedrooms in the parents’ homes.) Through hoarding, they act to impede the global circulation of money, not to enable it.
Finance, as an academic discipline, is quintessentially mercantilist. It equates the accumulation and appreciation of financial assets – promises – with the creation of wealth; and that the wealthiest country in the world is the one with the fullest Treasury. And so many people – especially journalists – buy into that vision of wealth as a pile of treasure, as an accumulation of credits.
Modern mercantilists only regard mined gold as wealth, not gold still in the ground; and only promises that are tradeable, or at least potentially tradeable. Financial institutions regard your mortgage as their wealth; and they understand public debt to be private wealth; they buy and sell mortgages, along with other assets such as government debt.
And they believe in the magic of compound interest. They believe that unspent money – unsettled promises – grow exponentially and indefinitely. The seesaw chart, showing unpaid-for imports accumulated over 40 years, belies this. If the surplus nations all tried to spend their gold and their paper (and other virtual) riches – by becoming deficit countries, by shifting the seesaw into the alternate position – then they would find both that their ability to import from the present deficit/debtor countries would amount to less than the unpaid-for amounts shown in the chart – and they would find that many of their claims (ie promises) would be unrealisable.
As already noted, trade credits – promises – are accumulated on a ‘use-it or lose-it’ basis; this amounts to a negative form of compound interest. The surplus countries have not sufficiently used their credits; without realising it, their hoarded credits have already lost much of their initial purchasing capacity. While individual countries – especially small ones like Finland – may successfully shift from one side of the seesaw to the other, it is too late for the seesaw to swing without the surplus group of countries incurring heavy losses. The present deficit countries are simply not tooled up to produce masses of goods and services for export.
Private pension funds represent the epitome of deep mercantilism.
Deep mercantilism is not just about countries and international trade. A major feature of the next Great Depression will be the collapse of these funds, as far too many ‘first world’ people in their fifties and sixties seek to withdraw and spend their retirement savings. Thus, the next Great Depression will be one of stagflation – not 1930s’-style deflation – as there will be a rush of ‘Generation Jones’ people (born in the later 1950s and early 1960s) to spend their savings and finding that the global cupboard of goods and services is becoming bare.
Non-Mercantilism
Human wealth is actually the ‘factors of production’: people (simplistically construed as ‘labour’) and nature (simplistically construed as ‘land’) and structures [and inventories; and including intangible structures such as ‘knowledge’] (construed by economists true to their discipline as ‘capital’) and the enjoyable goods and services which flow to humans from these ‘factors’.
The next global Great Depression can be forestalled if the deficit countries (like United States and Aotearoa New Zealand) – the less-mercantilist countries, or at least the ‘unsuccessful’ would-be mercantilist countries – continue as net spenders, given that the substantial likelihood is that the prevalent mercantilist countries (like Germany and Sweden and Netherlands and China) are likely to at least try to persevere as accumulators of financial assets through the process of selling more goods than they buy.
Or the next Great Depression can be forestalled by most countries slowly moving, in concert, into a position of balance. Imagine each end of the seesaw neither up nor down, a horizontal seesaw on its pivot. Here countries like France, Italy, Indonesia and Philippines serve as examples.
Collapse and its prevention
Under prevailing mercantilist ideology, the best place for a country to be is on the downside of the seesaw. The biggest danger – the danger of system breakage – is that of the deficit countries trying to get their side of the seesaw down while the surplus countries are also trying to keep their side down. Any option of voluntary balance – of some countries trying to do what the majority are trying not to do – may forestall a global economic collapse; including a voluntary continuation of the present situation, with one group of countries happy to stay up while another group of countries want to stay down.
The irony is that the real winners are the alleged losers. For good reason, the seesaw chart shows these real-winner countries at the top rather than at the bottom. The real winners like to import, to enjoy their stuff; they do not pursue the mercantilist illusions of treasure hoards and compound interest.
Children understand that when one side of the seesaw is down, the other should be up. And that being up is fun. Will the adults learn what children already know?
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
On Anzac Day we remembered World War One and World War Two, or at least the peripheral little bits of those imperial wars that New Zealand was involved in. There was and is little context given to how New Zealand got involved with such far-away wars which need never have become world wars. There were the usual cliches about ‘our’ young men, invading the Ottoman Empire, somehow fighting for freedom and democracy; and, through making ‘supreme sacrifices’, establishing the invaders’ national identities. There was very little context about what these anti-German and anti-Japanese wars were really about, and on why we thought anybody could possibly benefit from Aotearoa New Zealand contributing in its own small way to their escalation.
The Great World War 1914-1945
If we step back, we can see that there was really only one very big war; best dubbed as The Great World War 1914-1945 (the GWW, which itself morphed into another in 1945, The Cold War 1945-1990).
The Great World War is really the 1914 to 1945 Russo-German War, embedded in a wider state of conflict that might be called The Great Imperial War.
The subsequent Cold War, essentially the ‘great hegemonic war’, reframed world war; from 1945 it was between the United States imperium and the Communist powers of Russia and China; it was a ‘proxy war’ rather than a passive-aggressive ‘cold war’. The years 1991 to 2021 may prove to have been an intermission, just as 1919 to 1939 was an intermission in the Great World War; and noting that, in the GWW, Russia and Germany became ‘Communist’ and ‘Nazi’ during that intermission. The most important early ‘hot’ conflict in the Cold War was the Korean War, a deadly proxy conflict – at its core between the ‘Anti-Communist’ United States and ‘Communist’ China – ending as a ‘score-draw’; an armistice in 1953 which took the hostile parties back to an almost identical position as to where they started in 1950. For the second phase of the Great Hegemonic War, the ‘Communist’ factor was waned; the prevailing ideology in the west in 2025 is a distorted form of self-congratulatory ‘democratic imperialism’, not unlike the prevailing ideology in the west in 1914.
By looking at 1914 to 1945 in this way, as a single albeit complex conflict, we can more easily see that the essence of the struggle was a conflict between the waxing German and Russian Empires; and that the central prizes of that conflict were the Russian imperial territories of Ukraine and the Caucasus, and the waning Ottoman Empire: food, oil and sea-access in the strategic pivot of central Eurasia.
All (except one) of the world’s ‘great’ empires of the early twentieth century became involved: the waxing empires of Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States of America; and the waning empires of United Kingdom, France, Ottoman Türkiye, Austria-Hungary and Netherlands. And the would-be empire of Italy. (The exception was the empire of Portugal, a neutral party; in 1898 the United States had acquired Spain’s remnant empire.)
The Result of the Great World War
Wikipedia has page entries for every war ever fought in reality or mythology. And the Wikipedia format likes to give a binary result, as if a war was a series of football matches with a grand finale. Winners and losers. It’s not like that in reality: most wars formally end in an armistice; albeit an armistice in which one party – one nation or coalition of nations – has an advantage and is largely able to dictate terms.
The core war within the Great World War was the Russo-German War, which ended in 1945 with a victory to Russia; then Rusia was the imperium of the ‘Communist’ Soviet Union. The victor of the wider Great Imperial War was the United States; Imperator Americanus inherited a beaten-up world, much as Emperor Augustus inherited the Roman Empire in 27 BCE after about two decades of strife between warring would-be overlords.
The Great World War began in 1914, essentially as the Third Balkan War. The reasons this local war expanded from a part of the world politically and geographically distant from the British Empire – the empire of which New Zealand understood itself to be an integral part – related to a contested set of quasi-scientific socio-economic and supremacist utopias (which will only be addressed here in passing), and to a basic reality that an expansionist western ‘civilisation’ was confronting diminished returns.
Possibly the most important and least understood year of the whole GWW was 1918. The context here is that Russia – Germany’s new great foe, the Russian Empire – had been defeated late in 1917, following both a successful democratic revolution (the February Revolution) and a German-facilitated ‘Communist’ ‘Bolshevik’ coup d’etat (the October Revolution). The formality of Russian defeat – the Brest-Litovsk Treaty – was signed by Leon Trotsky in March 1918. The problem for Germany was that there was still an unresolved western front, there was a British naval blockade of Germany, and that the United States had been persuaded in 1917 to enter the war as an Entente power. Nevertheless, in March 1918, the Germans were winning on the western front having already settled the more-important eastern front; but Germany had no thought-through exit strategy. They were in no position to occupy Belgium, let alone France.
After the trench warfare stalemate that had characterised the western front for more than three years, it was Germany that broke through in the winter of 1917/18; indeed, Germany advanced to just-about big-gun-firing distance from Paris. The western powers were in a state of panic, as Germany redeployed soldiers from the eastern front to the west.
The United States had entered the war in France, but their soldiers were green and initially of little help against battle-hardened Germans. But the American soldiers, without realising the significance, had brought with them a secret weapon, influenza. (The deadly strain of influenza in 1918 – popularly known as the Spanish Flu – was almost certainly a hybrid of the Kansas strain and an Asian strain already in France.) The tide of the war only turned against Germany in August 1918, mainly due to economic limitations but also due in some part to soldiers getting very sick. The sickness had a bigger military impact on Germany, given that Germany’s soldiers (including one A. Hitler) were more hardened fighters than the Americans.
Germany went from winners to losers only in the last three months, from August to November 1918; it was like a basketball game in which defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory (or vice versa, from a western viewpoint!). But they were never losers in the absolute sense that they later were, in 1945. On 11 November 1918, Germany settled for an armistice in which they were on the back foot. It was not an absolute defeat, and should never have been seen as such. Nevertheless, that sensible armistice came to be treated by the Entente Powers (especially France, the United Kingdom and the United States) as an absolute victory; Germany, victor over Russia, was subsequently treated with great and unnecessary humiliation, creating the seeds for a resumption of the Great World War. Part of that humiliation was the stripping of the territories in the incipient Soviet Union that had been won by Germany (especially the loss of Ukraine); another important part was the imposition of a ‘Polish Corridor’, through Eastern Germany to the Baltic Sea at the then-German city of Danzig, physically dividing Germany.
A third humiliation was a set of reparations that were imposed using similar mercantilist logic to that which is upsetting the world economic order today; Germany was supposed to pay France in particular huge amounts of gold, but the only way Germany could acquire that gold was for Germany to run a trade surplus and for the Entente Powers to run trade deficits. But the ‘victorious’ powers wanted to run trade surpluses, not trade deficits; they wanted Germany to increase its debt to the west while claiming that they wanted Germany to pay off its debt to the west.
(Today, the United States wants its Treasury to accumulate treasure in the same way that it and France sought to do in the 1920s, not realising that the countries they want to extract ‘modern treasure’ from – China and the European Union – can only get that treasure if they run trade surpluses. The great ‘modern treasure’ mine is actually in Washington, not in Eurasia.)
One result of all this mercantilism imposed upon the 1920s’ world order by the liberal Entente powers was the Great Depression; that was probably the number-one catalyst towards the resumption of the Great World War in 1939 and the Russo-German War in 1941. This ‘liberal mercantilism’ was the first of the pseudo-scientific utopias to fail. Other aggravating factors were the intensification of the contradictions of the other two ‘scientific utopias’: the unachievable ‘Communist’ experiment in Russia, and the exacerbation of the supremacist eugenics which was widely subscribed to throughout Europe and which reached their apotheosis in Hitler’s Germany.
A defeated Russia played no part in the formal hostilities of the GWW in 1918. Likewise, when the Great World War resumed in 1939, Russia appeared to be on the sideline; though that’s another story. The true nature of the resumed GWW – known as World War Two in the west – became apparent in June 1941. The war continued for nearly four terrible years, with Soviet Russia prevailing over Nazi Germany in 1945, with some help from the western powers. Russia will celebrate Victory Day in a few days on 9 May; the end of the Russo-German War, though the Great World War continued until 15 August of that year. As regards the result of the Russo-German War, the western Entente powers were kingmakers rather than kings.
Overall, freedom and democracy were casualties of the GWW, not outcomes. By 1950, there were many more unfree people in the world, and few (India notwithstanding) who were more free than they had been in 1913. Indians’ post-GWW freedoms came at a huge cost in damaged and lost lives. And they were freedoms from Britain, not freedoms fought for by Britain.
Ukraine
Chief among the territories won-and-lost by Germany was Ukraine. Considered in its entirety, Ukraine was the number-one prize and the number-one battleground of the Great World War.
The territory of Ukraine had been occupied by Germany for five years: 1918, and 1941 to 1944. In 1918, Germany lost Ukraine because of events on the western front; in 1945 the Soviet Union recovered Ukraine on the battlefield. Soviet Russia was helped by three imperial nations throughout the active phases of the GWW; by the British, the French, and the Americans. Otherwise, Germany – the Prussian Empire – would have almost certainly prevailed in its quest for Ukraine, and the oilfields around the Caspian Sea (and possibly the so-called ‘Middle East’, though that may have been permanently lost to Germany in 1918).
With Ukraine once again being centre-stage in geopolitics – the contested ground between conflicting quasi-academic narratives – the world may be set for a resumption of both the Cold War (especially in its mercantilist Sino-American guise) and the Russo-German war. Together, these have the makings of ‘World War Three’; especially if we add in the Levantine conflict, the present supremacist conflict in the ‘Middle East’.
In the geopolitics of early 2025, the ‘elephant in the room’ is Friedrich Merz, who will (eventually!) become Chancellor of Germany on 6 May. Merz is a military hawk, who has already shown all the signs that he would like to take the Ukraine War to Russia (ref. Berlin Briefing, DW, 24 April 2015), and elite public opinion in Germany seems to be staunchly ‘pro-Ukraine’. In the event of a new global Great Depression – or the Geoeconomic Chaos Crisis that seems to be starting – could Merz become the new Führer, a ‘willing’ militarist leader of the Fourth Reich? At age 69 he’s a young man compared to Donald Trump, and he looks to be fighting fit. Germany has many of the same issues today that it had in 1910 and in 1930; a people seeking to re-flex their nationalist muscles while severely constrained, within their German and EU boundaries, in terms of natural resources. Will Merz try to shore up (and militarize) the flagging European Union, much as Trump has been trying (unsuccessfully to be sure) to unite the whole of the Americas under his triumphalist banner? (Q. How do you get to run a small superpower? A. Get yourself a large superpower, and wait.) The battle for Ukraine may have a while to run yet; possibly as a European ‘civil’ war, a new Russo-German War.
Anzac Day
My sense is that if there’s one thing that Aotearoa’s post-2023 leadership are even more attracted to than fiscal austerity, then that’s a good geopolitical scrap. We start to see war as glorious rather than ugly. We bring out all the false clichés and narratives, we extoll the likes of Winston Churchill, we self-suppress the inconvenient truth that war is a nasty, nasty, nasty business; indeed, we self-suppress this truth even when we see war’s brutality – or could see it if we choose to watch Freeview Channel 20 – unfolding every day.
Now that the 80th anniversary of the Great World War has nearly passed, Anzac Day risks becoming a day of martial geo-nationalism, and not a day of remembrance.
Anzac Day has already become a day of highly selective remembrance; probably it always was. I visited Würzburg (the German firebombed city that suffered more than any other on a per capita basis) in 1974, and I visited West and East Berlin (via Checkpoint Charlie) that same year. I visited Arras in 1975, near to where my father’s first cousin died in November 1918. I visited Derry and Belfast in 1976, cities in a then-active civil war zone. I visited the magnificently-sited Khartoum in 1978, now the capital-centre of the world’s most complicit and under-narrated tragedy. I visited Cassino in 1984, the 40th anniversary of the battles that pointlessly took so many lives, including Kiwi lives such as that of my mother’s first cousin. I visited Dandong and Seoul in 2008, gaining a first-hand insight into the Korean War, including a walk on the American-destroyed bridge and an oversight of the North Korean city of Sinuiju. (And I visited Port Arthur – Lüshun – key site and sight of the Russia-Japan War of 1905, with its natural harbour and its extant Russian train station.)
And in 2014, on the day after Anzac Day, I visited Nagasaki, site of the first plutonium bomb ever dropped over a city; and, that same month, I visited Ginza and Asakusa in Tokyo, rebuilt sites of the worst example every of a conventional fire holocaust; 100,000 mostly civilian deaths in one March night eighty years ago. (I was also lucky to get to walk through unbombed streets to the northwest of Ueno Park, getting a sense of what the neighbourhoods of Asakusa were once like.)
Lest we forget. Mostly, we have forgotten. (Including the worst of The Holocaust. Who commemorates Treblinka today? Or Minsk? Only Poland and Russia and Belarus.)
Our amnesia extends to one place New Zealanders fought in. This week Al Jazeera has done a series of news vignettes and a longer documentary, to remember the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This anniversary has not been prominent in New Zealand’s Anzac Day media-scape. (RNZ did run a Reuters-syndicated website-only story on 30 April: Vietnamese celebrate 50 years since end of Vietnam War. And, to its credit, TV3 News ran an overseas-sourced story yesterday, not a story about New Zealand’s largely-forgotten participation.) By-and-large, the still-living anti-Vietnam-War generation is now silent, apparently forgetful.
When martial narratives are not sufficiently contested, then wars – big wars – happen, almost by accident. That’s how the Great World War began in the first place.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Operation Gomorrah may have been the most cynical event of World War Two (WW2). Not only did the name fully convey the intent of the war crimes about to be committed, it, also represented the single biggest 24-hour murder toll for the European war that I have come across.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
On the night of 27 July 1943, the RAF murdered 35,000, mostly working-class civilian residents living in the most densely populated part of Hamburg; a planned firebombing which started a sequence of events – a holocaust if not The Holocaust – that ended in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. (Note The bombing of Hamburg foreshadowed the horrors of Hiroshima, National Geographic, 23 July 2021.) A holocaust is a “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war” (Oxford Dictionary). [In The Holocaust, 31,000 Jews were shot dead in Kyiv in a single day in 1941; the worst single day of The Holocaust, I understand.]
Hamburg was, literally, a dry run for what came later; the aim was to maximise the number of barbecued civilians by, among other things, choosing perfect weather conditions for an experiment in incendiary murder. (Yes, I am literally using inflammatory language.) While the total death toll of the week-long operation has been estimated to be over 40,000, the toll arising from the night of 27/28 July 1943 represents about 85% of the total.
The Gomorrah chapter of Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory, 2018, gives a documented account of the moral duplicity surrounding Churchill’s bombing campaign. For a full story of the Allies’ firestorm holocaust, see Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, 2022, by James M Scott. (John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, is a survivor of the Tokyo episode, the raid that killed more people – over 100,000 – than any other in a single arsonous assault.)
Sodom and Gomorrah
These twin ‘cities of the plain’, which, if they ever existed, are now either under the Dead Sea or east of there, in modern Jordan. The key chapter in the bible (Genesis, ch.19) mainly emphasises Sodom, though Gomorrah was reputedly as ‘sinful’. The biblical story is ghastly, in its misogyny as well as its extollation of extermination of ‘others’.
Genesis (ch.19) tells us, when Lot (Abraham’s nephew) found himself, in Sodom, hosting two Angels/men, ‘the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”‘ The secret to understanding this is the biblical meaning of the word ‘know’; in this case the events took place in Sodom, and the guests had the appearance of ‘men’.
Lot replies: ‘”I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men …”.’ While the men of Sodom did not take up the offer – they favoured Lot himself – the angel-men saved Lot and his family. Then ‘When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.”‘ …
‘When they had brought [the four of] them outside, [the angel-men] said, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.” … Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.’ …
After the three survivors settled in a cave: ‘the firstborn [daughter] said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father.” … ‘Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father.’ (Thus, the East Bank [of the River Jordan] was repopulated!!)
Hamburg came to be equated with biblical Sodom, as deserving victims for a particularly barbaric form of mass murder. Neither Churchill, nor his bomber commander Arthur Harris, could know that only 35,000 Hamburgers would die as a result of that night’s operation. There is reason to believe that Churchill and his savants were looking for many more than hundreds of thousands of Germans to be ‘de-housed’ over the incendiary bombing campaign. (Dehousing was the euphemism used by Churchill’s men; compare with ‘resettlement’ for the trip that the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto made to Treblinka.)
Hamburg and the Gomorrah holocaust
Why Hamburg? Basically, because it was there. Though it was/is a large industrial and mercantile port city, the terror target was workers, not the works which employed them. The National Geographic article notes, with gallows-humour irony: “After noticing that Brits whose homes were struck by bombs were less likely to show up to work, analysts determined that destroying Germany’s largest cities and towns would likely cripple Germany’s war efforts.” Hamburg was close to England, and could be reached without flying over occupied land. And Hamburg was defended by a radar system of sorts, though not as sophisticated as British radar. The first British bombing raid on Hamburg was very much a technology test-run; refer The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War – and Still Baffles Weathermen, Irena Fischer-Hwang, 28 November 2018, Smithsonian Magazine. The second British raid on Hamburg was the real thing, a particularly dry run to really get the Gomorrah holocaust underway.
Hitchens (p.178) says: “Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July I940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating exterminating [my emphasis] attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland would help to bring Hitler down’. Arthur Harris, later the chief of RAF Bomber Command, realised the significance of these extraordinary words … he kept a copy of this letter.”
Hitchens (p.181) citing Bishop Bell speaking in February 1944 in the House of Lords: “Hamburg has a population of between one and two million people. It contains targets of immense military and industrial importance. It also happens to be the most democratic town in Germany where the Anti-Nazi opposition was strongest. … Practically all the buildings, cultural, military, residential, industrial, religious – including the famous University Library with its 800,000 volumes, of which three-quarters have perished – were razed to the ground.” While dead and dazed people may have low morale, and therefore have an arguable incentive to wage a civil war against their own government, they – especially the dead – are uniquely unable to overthrow a ruthlessly militarised government.
We might note Hamburg’s anthropological links to England. At a time of high racial – indeed racist – sensibilities, Anglo-Saxon supremacy was a very real thing. The area of Germany around Hamburg is the ‘Hawaiki’ of the Anglo-Saxon people; Lower Saxony is the ancestral motherland of the English. The class-consciousness and revengeful bloodlust of the English political class outweighed their ethnic consciousness. This was not true for the German Nazis, for whom the English were racial equals; Hitler and his crew really did not want to kill English people. Nazi Germany wanted the United Kingdom to become a neutral country, as Ireland was, and as the United States was before December 1941. Nazi Germany’s policy was to enslave, resettle, and murder Slavs and Jews and Gypsies; not to kill or dehouse Englishmen and their families.
The ‘elephant in the room’ was Josef Stalin.
Hitchens (p.191): “There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure to open a second front.”
Hitchens (p.198): “Overy [in The Bombing War 2014] recounts how on 28 March 1945 Winston Churchill, clearly growing sick of the violence he had unleashed as victory approached and the excuses for it grew thinner, referred (in a memorandum) to Harris’s bombing tactics using these exact words. He urged, none too soon, that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no attention, and right up until 24th April 1945, his bombers continued to drop incendiaries and high explosives on German cities, turning many thousands of civilians into corpses.” [Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, and VE Day was 8 May.]
Point of Interest: Churchill contested three elections, all after VE Day, all using Great Britain’s ‘first-past-the-post’ plurality system. He won just one of those three, though even then – in 1951 – his party got fewer votes than a Labour Party seeking re-election at a time of great difficulty for left-wing parties worldwide. Churchill’s Conservative Party got way-fewer votes than Labour in 1945 and 1950. The pressure on Prime Minister Clement Attlee to call the UK snap election of 1951 (one-third of the way through the term of his elected Labour government) can be understood as a successful example of political cunning on the part of the British establishment; literally a King’s coup.
A Scale of ‘Evil’?
While I generally hesitate to use the word ‘evil’, it may still be useful to grade very powerful people on a zero-to-ten scale of malevolence. On zero we might have the pacifist version of Jesus. On ten would be some very powerful person who actively sought nuclear ‘Armageddon’ (which would destroy life, not just humanity). After recently reading some quite difficult literature about World War Two, this is where I would place five powerful leaders:
9: Josef Stalin
8: Adolf Hitler
7: Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill
6: Harry Truman
I need to read more about Truman; though, his legacy seems to have been airbrushed much as Churchill’s has been, and I might decide to upgrade him to a 7.
I would also note that these leaders had their close and powerful henchmen, whose ‘evilness’ can also be rated on such a scale, for example:
9.5: Lavrenty Beria
9: Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler
Overall regimes can be better or worse than their leaders. I would rate both Stalin’s ‘Communists’ and Hitler’s ‘Nazis’ as both 8.5. Thus, Stalin’s regime was not quite as bad as its two most notorious figures. And Hitler’s regime was even worse than Hitler; that’s certainly not being kind to Hitler! (Stalin’s atrocities, the equal of Hitlers, were mostly committed in peacetime; the vast majority of Hitler’s were committed in wartime.)
‘Favourites’ as intimate (though not necessarily sexual) friends of powerful leaders
Churchill’s regime was not as bad as Churchill. Though Churchill had two favourites, both active members of his regime – especially his ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ – who were worse than him (possibly worse in one case, and definitely worse in the other). The ‘possibly worse’ one was Brendan Bracken, Minister for Information. Bracken, the prototype for ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, was Churchill’s Goebbels. Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ was a conflation of the Ministry of Information and Orwell’s wartime employer, the BBC. (Born in Ireland, Bracken was sometimes rumoured to have been Churchill’s ‘love child’, though that supposition is most likely untrue.) Surprisingly little has been written about BB.
The ‘definitely worse’ favourite was German born (Baden Baden) and educated (Darmstadt and Berlin) scientist, Frederick A Lindemann; who was granted the title Lord Cherwell in 1941. He built his career in Britain at Oxford University, becoming Professor of Physics there in 1919. He also became a bit of a wartime ‘test pilot’, managing to establish his loyalty to the United Kingdom. His close friendship with Churchill lasted decades, beginning in 1921.
Frederick Lindemann, aka Lord Cherwell
In my assessment, Lindemann is the closest individual yet to a ten-out-of-ten on the above-suggested scale of malevolence. Let’s say that, if World War Three comes and someone like Lindemann has as much access to the levers of power as Lindemann actually had, then the world would be a goner. (In Lindemann’s defence, it has been noted that he was fond of children and animals. Likewise, another man; one with a famous moustache.)
Frederick Lindemann exerted a beguiling influence over Churchill. When Churchill was not in power, in the 1930s, Lindemann ran a private think-tank for Churchill. In the 1930s he allegedly undermined the scientific development of radar, which proved critical to the defence of Britain from Luftwaffe attacks; indeed, Lindemann seems to have shown a lack of interest in military defence; his thing was the elimination or dehumanisation of ‘others’. Lindemann “was one of the first to urge the importance of atom bomb research” (Where to Read about Professor Lindemann, The Churchill Project, 6 May 2015); indeed “Following his 1945 return to the Clarendon Laboratory, Lindemann created the [United Kingdom] Atomic Energy Authority”, Wikipedia.)
I will illustrate the Lindemann problem with quotes from these three sources; some may argue that I have made a biased selection, but so be it:
Mukerjee: “Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindeman was responsible for the government’s scientific decisions.”
Mukerjee: “Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.”
Gladwell: “I think that’s the crucial fact about Lindemann. One time he’s asked for his definition of morality and he answers, ‘I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.’ … The man who defined a moral action as ‘One that brings advantage to my friends,’ was best friends with Winston Churchill.”
Gladwell: “Lindemann becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind.”
Mukerjee: “On most matters Lindemann’s and Churchill’s opinions converged; and when they did not, the scientist worked ceaselessly to change his friend’s mind.”
Mukerjee: “The mission of the S branch [Churchill’s nearest equivalent to DOGE] was to provide rationales for whichever course the prime minister, as interpreted by the Prof, wished to follow.”
Mukerjee: “Department heads ‘began to realize that, like it or not, the Prof was the man whom Churchill trusted most, and that all their refutations, aspersions, innuendos or attempts at exposure would not shift Churchill from his undeviating loyalty to the Prof by one hair’s breadth,’ wrote [economist] Harrod. So it was that the Prof would pronounce judgment on the best use of shipping space, the profligacy of the army, the inadequacy of British supplies, the optimal size of the mustard gas stockpile, the necessity of bombing German houses – and, when the time came, the pointlessness of sending famine relief to Bengal.”
Gladwell: “An argument took place at the highest reaches of British government. The question was what was the best use of the royal air force against the Germans? … One school of thought says, ‘Let’s use our bombers to support military activities, protecting ships against German U-boats, destroying German factories.’ The other school of thought argues that bombing ought to serve a bigger, strategic purpose. In other words, ‘Let’s use bombing to break the will of the German people, let’s make their lives so miserable that they give up.’”
Wikipedia: On dehousing, Lindemann says “bombing must be directed to working class houses. Middle class houses have too much space round them, so are bound to waste bombs”.
Gladwell on Lindemann’s dishonesty: “Lindemann’s memo to Churchill. It’s very matter of fact; it’s all about what the data says except for one thing. That’s not what the data says. The Birmingham-Hull study reached the exact opposite conclusion [about working-class morale] that Lindemann did.”
Gladwell: “Other experts [eg Henry Tizard] in the government, critics of strategic bombing, point out immediately that Lindemann’s numbers are ridiculous, five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.” [Hitchens (p.205) claims that the numbers of civilian casualties were only ten percent of what Lindemann had promised. If you multiply by ten the number of civilians – mostly workers, their families, slaves, and refugees – killed in the totality of the Gomorrah holocaust, you get a number bigger than deaths in The Holocaust; this would be a measure of Lindemann’s intent.]
Gladwell: “One of Lindemann’s friends said, ‘He would not shrink from using an argument which he knew to be wrong if, by so doing, he could tie up one of his professional opponents.’ Lindemann wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German cities.”
Gladwell: “Most historians agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. 160,000 US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many of Europe’s most beautiful cities were destroyed and German morale didn’t crack; the Germans fought to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he said that the war could have been won six months or even a year earlier, if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.” [Note that the whole Gomorrah holocaust killed more Japanese civilians than German civilians; as noted in Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, the Hamburg dry run led more-or-less directly to the fire-bombings of almost every urban centre in Japan.]
Mukerjee: “‘Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me,’ muttered a furious Churchill in 1941, after a member of the House of Commons had raised questions about the Prof’s influence.” [Gladwell: that “row occurred in 1942 and it occurred over strategic bombing”.]
Mukerjee: “Cherwell believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world. ‘Those who succeed in getting what everyone wants must be the ablest,’ he asserted. The Prof regarded the masses as ‘very stupid,’ considered Australians to be inferior to Britons, advocated ‘harshness’ toward homosexuals, and thought criminals should be treated cruelly because ‘the amount of pleasure derived by other people from the knowledge that a malefactor is being punished far exceeds in sum total the amount of pain inflicted on a malefactor by his punishment.’” [Enjoyment arising from the punishment of the wretched outweighs the suffering of those wretched!]
Mukerjee: “Eugenic ideas also feature in a lecture that Lord Cherwell (then known as Professor Lindemann) had delivered more than once, probably in the early 1930s. He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes.”
Mukerjee: “New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. … ‘Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?’ Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with ‘the mental make-up of the worker bee.’ This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: ‘Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap.’ The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, ‘led by supermen and served by helots.’”
Mukerjee: “At least no one would demand votes on behalf of an ape. … To consolidate the rule of supermen – to perpetuate the British Empire – one need only remove the ability of slaves to see themselves as slaves.”
Gladwell: “How can you have a real debate against Churchill’s best friend? Friendship comes first.”
Gladwell: “The US starts sending over so many ships that, by late 1943 when the famine in Bengal is at its height, there’s actually a surplus of boats on the allied side. In fact, in 1943, the British actually start shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just not to India. … British ships full of grain are sailing right past India on the way to the Middle East to be stored for some future, hypothetical need. They might even stop and refuel in Mumbai, but nothing leaves the ship. … Why is Lindemann [as Paymaster General] refusing to help? It doesn’t even make illogical sense. Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries like Canada and the United States offered to send food to India, the British say, ‘We don’t want it.’ They turn down help. Lindemann seems completely unmoved by India’s plight.”
Gladwell: “Black people, according to a friend, filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable to control. But I’m not sure that we’re seeing Lindemann here; I think we’re seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with an issue about India. He’s obsessed with India. In the years leading up to the war, Gandhi is building his independence movement within India and Churchill hates Gandhi. Churchill is furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw materials from India, meaning that the master is running up a debt with its supposed subject. … Why was Lindemann so adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was adamant that England could not help India and Lindemann was a loyal friend.”
CP Snow (1960), cited by Gladwell: “The Lindemann-Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of court politics that we’re likely to see.” [hmmm!]
Gladwell: “The best guess of how many died in the Bengal famine of 1943 is three million people. Three million. After the war, the British government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the investigation was forbidden to consider, and I’m quoting, ‘Her Majesty’s government’s decision in regard to shipping of imports.’ In other words, they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine without investigating the cause of the famine.”
Hitchens (p.197): “Gas attacks were contemplated by Winston Churchill. … Overy writes ‘The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated – deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted. This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945’.”
It also paved the way for the potentially devastating anthrax attacks on Germany which would have taken place in 1944 had the American-led D-day offensive been unsuccessful; contamination from such attacks would have rendered parts of Germany uninhabitable for a human lifetime. (See my Invoking Munich, ‘Appeasement’, and the ‘Lessons of History’ 13 March 2025, which mentions both the Bengal famine and the anthrax program as well as the Hamburg holocaust.) The anthrax program bears the hallmark of Lindemann; the abandoned anthrax operation was dubbed Operation Vegetarian, in part a likely reference to Lindemann’s famed dietary obsessions.
Hitchens (pp.200-201): “It is surprising that Sir Max Hasting’s Bomber Command (first published in 1979) has not begun to change opinions. … Sir Max deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt [south of Frankfurt] on 11 September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way, a military target). Hastings: ‘The first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity’.” (Lindemann went to school in Darmstadt. Victims most likely included his former classmates, teachers and their families.)
Hitchens (p.206), on the battle between Frederick Lindemann and Henry Tizard (the scientist who stood up to Lindeman, and paid a price): “Why is the only considerable account of this battle trapped inside [a] small, obscure volume that the reader must retrieve from deep in a few impenetrable scholarly libraries? Why is it not taught in schools? Why has nobody written a play about it? I suspect it is because this story, if well known, would undermine the shallow, nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill as the infallible Great Leader, a cult to which, surely, an adult country no longer needs to cling.”
Hitchens (p.205): “Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. He was supported by Patrick Blackett, a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day. He would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and be ennobled as Lord Blackett. Blackett independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high. ‘Both were slightly out. But they were nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was. Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact ten times too high, as the postwar bombing survey revealed.” [The actual destruction of German cities was only one-tenth of what Lindemann had hoped and argued would be the case. Given the actual hundreds of thousands of barbecued German civilians, Lindemann had been arguing for millions.]
CP Snow (1960), cited by Hitchens (p.205): “It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing. … Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.” [Strikingly, although the post-war years have generally been regarded as ‘more benevolent’, the Gomorrah holocaust continues to ‘fly under the radar’. Indeed, so much so that Churchill’s speeches have been nominated as part of New Zealand’s schools’ draft English curriculum! (And that matter of Churchill was not raised by the New Zealand media; they were more interested in the ‘controversial’ possibility that Shakespeare might be compulsory.)]
Winston Churchill was not a nice man. His ‘favourite’ – Frederick Lindemann – was rather less nice.
Lessons
War itself is the problem, and the first casualty of war is truth. Drumbeating for war is cheap, and sabres are easily rattled. We stumble into wars without having any realistic idea how they might end; casual war becomes forever war. Wars involve multiple nasty people from the outset, and other similarly nasty people come to the fore during war, sometimes completely behind the scenes.
War changes much but solves little. World War Two was the first war in which civilians were targeted on an industrial scale. It ended, in Europe at least, in a Pyrrhic manner, with Josef Stalin’s USSR as the annihilist of Nazi Germany.
War in the modern age of globalisation means this and more. In a twenty-first century World War, while targeted civilians will be high on the murder list, the biggest death-counts are likely to be of untargeted civilians – residents of semi-belligerent and non-belligerent countries – and of completely guiltless non-human life forms.
If the Americans hadn’t successfully prosecuted D-Day (Operation Overlord) in 1944, I believe that Winston Churchill would have used the RAF to unleash his anthrax bombs. The Scottish island of Gruinard is only now becoming habitable, after eighty years of anthrax contamination. Imagine parts of Germany becoming uninhabitable – for nearly a century – had Operation Vegetarian been executed.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Fiji’s Minister for Defence and Veteran Affairs is facing a backlash after announcing that he was undertaking a multi-country, six-week “official travel overseas” to visit Fijian peacekeepers in the Middle East.
Pio Tikoduadua’s supporters say he should “disregard critics” for his commitment to Fijian peacekeepers, which “highlights a profound dedication to duty and leadership”.
However, those who oppose the 42-day trip say it is “a waste of time”, and that there are other pressing priorities, such as health and infrastructure upgrades, where taxpayers money should be directed.
Tikoduadua has had to defend his travel, saying that the travel cost was “tightly managed”.
He said that, while he accepts that public officials must always be answerable to the people they serve, “I will not remain silent when cheap shots are taken at the dignity of our troops, or when assumptions are passed off as fact.”
“Let me speak plainly: I am not travelling abroad for a vacation,” he said in a statement.
“I am going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our men and women in uniform — Fijians who serve in some of the harshest, most dangerous corners of the world, far away from home and family, under the blue flag of the United Nations and the red, white and blue of our own.
‘I know what that means’ Tikoduadua, a former soldier and peacekeeper, said, “I know what that means [to wear the Fiji Military Forces uniform].”
“I marched under the same sun, carried the same weight, and endured the same silence of being away from home during moments that mattered most.
“This trip spans multiple countries because our troops are spread across multiple missions — UNDOF in the Golan Heights, UNTSO in Jerusalem and Tiberias, and the MFO in Sinai. I will not pick and choose which deployments are ‘worth the airfare’. They all are.”
He added the trip was not about photo opportunities, but about fulfilling his duty of care — to hear peacekeepers’ concerns directly.
“To suggest that a Zoom call can replace that responsibility is not just naïve — it is offensive.”
However, the opposition Labour Party has called it “unbelievably absurd”.
“Six weeks is a long, long time for a highly paid minister to be away from his duties at home,” the party said in a statement.
Standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ “To make it worse, [Tikoduadua] adds that he is . . . ‘not going on a vacation but to stand shoulder to shoulder with our men and women in uniform’.
“Minister, it’s going to cost the taxpayer thousands to send you on this junket as we see it.”
Tikoduadua confirmed that he is set to receive standard overseas per diem as set by government policy, “just like any public servant representing the country abroad”.
“That allowance covers meals, local transport, and incidentals-not luxury. There is no ‘bonus’, no inflated figure, and certainly no special payout on top of my salary.
As a cabinet minister, the Defence Minister is entitled to business class travel and travel insurance for official meetings. He is also entitled to overseas travelling allowance — UNDP subsistence allowance plus 50 percent, according to the Parliamentary Remunerations Act 2014.
Tikoduadua said that he had heard those who had raised concerns in good faith.
“To those who prefer outrage over facts, and politics over patriotism — I suggest you speak to the families of the soldiers I will be visiting,” he said.
“Ask them if their sons and daughters are worth the minister’s time and presence. Then tell me whether staying behind would have been the right thing to do.”
Responding to criticism on his official Facebook page, Tikoduadua said: “I do not travel to take advantage of taxpayers. I travel because my job demands it.”
His travel ends on May 25.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
‘Rational Expectations’ is a problematic theory in economics. Here I want to focus more away from economics; and more on the meanings of ‘rationality’ in decision-making, than on the problematic ambiguity of the word ‘expect’ (and its derivatives such as ‘expectations’). ‘Expectation’ here means what we believe ‘will’ happen, not ‘should’ happen; a rational expectation is a prediction, an unbiased average of possibilities, formed through a (usually implicit) calculation of possible benefits and costs – utilities and disutilities, to be technical – and their associated probabilities.
A rational decision is one that uses all freely available information in unbiased ways – plus some researched information, bearing in mind the cost of information gathering – to reach an optimal conclusion, or to decide on a course of action that can be ‘expected’ to lead to an optimal outcome to the decision-maker.
All living beings are rational to a point, in that they contain an automatic intelligence (AutoI) which exhibits programmed rationality. For most beings, AutoI is fully pre-programmed, so is not ‘intelligence’ as we would normally understand it; for others, that programming is subject to continuous reprogramming through a process of ‘learning’, true intelligence. In addition, beings of at least one species – humans – have a ‘manual override‘ intelligence (ManualI), which is our consciousness or awareness.
AutoI is an imperfect, though subversive, process of quasi-rational decision-making. Brains make calculations about optimal behaviour all the time; calculations of which we are not aware. (Richard Dawkins – eg in The Selfish Gene – would argue that these calculations serve the interest of the genotype rather than the individual phenotype.) For humans at least, full rationality means the capacity to use ManualI to override the amoral limitations of AutoI.
Rational decision-making, through learning, may be called ‘intelligence’. Though intelligence has another meaning: ‘information’, as in the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ (CIA). It is perfectly possible to use unintelligent (stupid?) processes to gather and interpret intelligence!
Even when rational processes are used, many good decisions will, with hindsight, have inferior outcomes; or many good forecasts will prove partly or fully incorrect. It’s mostly bad luck, but also partly because intelligence is rarely completely unbiased, and partly because the cost of gaining extra information can be too high.
Expected Value, aka Expected Outcome
There is a simple rationality formula – familiar to students of statistics and of finance – which can yield a number called an ‘expected value’. In this expectations’ formula, a high positive number represents a good decision and a higher positive number represents a better decision. A negative number represents a bad (ie adverse) expected outcome, although sometimes all available expected outcomes are ‘bad’, meaning that the better course of action is the ‘lesser evil’. A positive number indicates an expected benefit, though not a necessary benefit. Negative possible outcomes represent ‘downside risk’, whereas positive possible outcomes represent ‘upside risk’.
(It is important to note that, in many contexts, a negative number does not denote something bad. A negative number may indicate ‘left’, as in the left-side of a Bell Curve; or ‘south’ or ‘west’ as in latitude and longitude. In accounting, a ‘deficit’ by no means indicates something bad, though President Trump and many others are confused on that point [see Could US tariffs cause lasting damage to the global economy?Al Jazeera 7 April 2025, where he says “to me a deficit is a loss”]; and we note that the substitution of the term ‘third world’ for ‘global south’ suggests an inferiority of southern latitudes. In double-entry bookkeeping, items must add to zero; one side of any balance sheet has negative values by necessity. A deficit, in some contexts, represents a ‘shortfall’ which is probably ‘bad’; but also a ‘longfall’ – or ‘surplus’ – is often bad, just think of the games of lawn bowls and pétanque.)
A simple example of rational decision-making is to decide between doing either something or nothing; for example, when contemplating asking someone out on a date. The expected outcome of doing nothing – not asking – has a value of zero. But, if you ask the person for the date, and you evaluate the chance of a ‘yes’ as 0.2, the utility of a ‘yes’ as +10, and the disutility of a ‘no’ as -1, then the expected value calculates to 1.2; so, the rational decision is to ask (the calculation is 10×0.2–1×0.8). This example is interesting, because the more probable outcome is a ‘no’, and a ‘no’ would make you less happy than if you had not asked the question; nevertheless, the rational decision here is to ‘take the risk’. (‘Risk averse’ persons might have rated the consequence of ‘rejection’ as a -4 rather than a -1; they would calculate an expected value of -1.2, so would choose to not ask for the date.)
Political Decision-Making when Catastrophic Outcomes are Possible
A rational calculation allocates values and probabilities to each identified possible outcome. A favourable outcome is represented by a positive number, a neutral outcome has a zero value, and an adverse outcome has a negative value.
A basic favourable outcome may be designated a value of one; an outcome twice-as-good has a value of two. An outcome an ‘order-of-magnitude’ better has a utility or happiness value of ten. The same applies to adverse outcomes; the equivalent disutility scores are minus-one, minus-two, and minus-ten.
An aeroplane crash might incur a score of minus fifty to society and minus ten million to an individual. The probability of dying in such a crash, for an individual, getting on a plane is probably about one in 100 million. If it was less than one-in-a-million, hardly anybody would get on a plane. (The chance of winning NZ Lotto first division is about one-in four-million.)
We should be thinking like this when we think about war. What kind of risk would we be willing to take? A problem is that the people who provoke wars do not themselves expect to be fatal victims.
A catastrophic outcome could range from minus 100 (say a small war) to minus infinity. An outcome which meant the total eradication of all life on Earth would come close to minus infinity. However, because of the mathematics of infinity (∞), any outcome of minus infinity with a non-zero probability yields an expectation of minus infinity. So for the following example, I will use minus one billion (-1b) as the disutility score for such a total catastrophe. A catastrophe that leads ‘only’ to human extinction might have a value of minus ten million (-10m). A holocaust the size of the 1943 RAF firebombing of Hamburg might have a catastrophe-value of minus one thousand (-1,000). A catastrophe the size of the 1932-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern Europe (which included 14,000 murders including the Holocaust, and much additional non-fatal suffering) might have an overall catastrophe-value of minus a hundred thousand (-100,000).
(Could we imagine an outcome of plus infinity: +∞? Maybe not, though certain evangelical Christians – extreme dispensationalists – pray for Armageddon; “dispensationalism views the progression of history in stages that begin in the Garden of Eden and ends in the paradise of the New Heavens and New Earth“. Thus, what might be minus infinity to most of us could be plus infinity for a few. There is an analogy of ‘wrap-around-mathematics’ in geospace; a longitude of +180° is the same as a longitude of -180°. And, in another example, some people believe that there is little difference between extreme-far-right politics and extreme-far-left politics. On this topic of extremes, the mainstream media should avoid the mindless repetition of hyperbole – as in a comment recently heard that President Trump’s tariffs may amount to an “economic nuclear winter“.)
My Example – the Ukraine War
In an example with some relevance to today, we might consider the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’. I could assign a modestly favourable outcome of +1 with a 50% probability, a very favourable outcome +10 with a 10% probability, and a catastrophic -1,000,000 with a 1% probability. (All other possibilities I will treat here as neutral, although my sense is that they are mostly adverse.) I calculate an expected value of minus 9,998.5; practically, minus 10,000; this is an average of all the identified possibilities, a catastrophic risk rather than a prediction of a major catastrophe.
This decision to persevere with the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ is only rational if the only alternative decision – to abandon the NATO- backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ – comes up with an even lower expected value. (These two alternative decisions would be characterised by New Zealand’s former Ambassador to the United Kingdom – Phil Goff – as ‘standing up for Good in the face of Evil’ versus ‘appeasement of Putin’.) It seems to me that catastrophe becomes much less probable, in my example, with the ‘appeasement’ option than with the ‘defence’ option. (In the case that Goff was commenting on, his implication was that the 1938 ‘appeasement’ of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain led to either an increase in the probability of catastrophic war, or an increase in the size of catastrophe that might ensue.)
Morality Fallacy
One view of morality is the identification of some Other as Evil, and that any subsequent calling out of that (Evil) Other must therefore be Good. Further, in this view of morality, the claim is that, if and when hostilities break out between Good and Evil, then Good must fight to the ‘bitter end’ at ‘any cost’. (When we see Evil fighting to the bitter end – as per the examples of Germany and Japan in World War Two – we tend to think that’s stupid; but Good fighting to the bitter end is seen as righteous.)
Of course, this kind of morality is quite wrong. The idea that one must never surrender to Evil is a moral fallacy, based on the false (binary) idea that one side (generally ‘our side’) of a dispute or conflict has the entire ‘moral-high-ground’ and the other side has the entire ‘moral-low-ground’. Further, a victory to ‘Evil’ is surely less catastrophic than annihilation; a victory to Evil may be a lesser evil. Choosing annihilation can never be a Good choice.
Most conflict is nothing like Good versus Evil, though many participants on both (or all) sides believe that their side is Good. Most extended conflict is Bad versus Bad, Bad versus Stupid, or Stupid versus Stupid; although there are differing degrees of Bad and Stupid. Further, in the rare case when a conflict can objectively be described as Good versus Evil, it can never be good to disregard cost.
Morality in Practice
True morality requires a broadening of the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘self-interest’.
The important issues are benefits and costs to whom (or to what), and the matter of present benefits/costs versus future benefits/costs. In a sense, morality is a matter of ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Is it beneficial if something favourable happens ‘here’ but not ‘there’? ‘Now’, but not ‘then’? To ‘me’ or ‘us’, but not to ‘you’ or to ‘them’.
Human ManualI is very good at inclusive morality; AutoI is not.
It is natural, and not wrong, to prioritise one’s own group; and to prioritise the present over the future. The issue is the extent that we ‘discount’ benefits to those that are not ‘us’, and future benefits vis-à-vis present benefits. And costs, which we may regard as negative benefits. A very high level of discounting is near complete indifference towards others, or towards to future. An even higher level of discounting is to see harm to others as being beneficial to us; anti-altruism, being cruel to be cruel.
Then there is the ‘straw man’ morality much emphasised by classical liberals. ‘Libertarians’ claim that certain people with a collectivist mindset believe in an extreme form of altruism, where benefits to others take priority over benefits to self; such an ethos may be called a ‘culture of sacrifice’, benefitting by not-benefitting. While this does happen occasionally, what is more common is for people to emphasise public over private benefits; this is the sound moral principle that libertarians really disapprove of.
Thus, an important part of our ‘rational calculus’ is the private versus public balance; the extent to which we might recognise, and account for, ‘public benefits’ in addition to ‘private benefits’.
So, when we complete our matrix of probabilities and beneficial values, what weight do we give to the benefits that will be enjoyed by people other than ourselves, to other people in both their private and public capacities. Should we care if another group experiences genocide? Do we gloat? Should we empathise, or – more accurately – sympathise, and incorporate others into a more broadly-defined ‘community of self’?
If we have a war against a neighbouring country, should we care about how it affects other more distant countries through ‘collateral damage’? Should we care about a possible catastrophe if it can be postponed until the end of the life-expectancy of our generation? Should we care about the prosperity of life forms other than our own? Should we care about the well-being of our environments? Should we care more about our ‘natural resources’ – such as ‘land’ – than we care about other people who might be competing for the use of those same resources? If we have knowledge that will allow us to make improvements to the lives of others so that they catch up to our own living standards, should we make that knowledge public and useful? Should we account for the well-being of people who live under the rule of rulers who we have cast as ‘Evil’ (such as the burghers of Hamburg in 1943)?
One important morality concept is that of ‘reciprocation’. If we accept that others have the right to think of us in ways that compare with how we think of them, then we must value their lives much as we value our own lives. If I live in Auckland, should I value the life of a person who lives in New Delhi nearly as much as I value the life of someone who lives in Wellington? I should if I expect persons in Mumbai to value my life nearly as much as they value the lives of people in New Delhi.
Reciprocal morality can easily fail when someone belongs to a group which has apparent power over another group. We may cease to care whether the other group suffers our wrath, if we perceive that the ‘lesser’ group has no power to inflict their wrath onto our group. We may feel that we have immunity, and impunity. They should care about us, but we need not care about them.
It is through our ManualI – our manual override, our consciousness, our awareness – that we have the opportunity to make rational valuations which incorporate morality. Our AutoI, while rational in its own terms, is also amoral. We can behave in amoral self-interested ways – even immoral ways – without being aware of it. Our automatic benefit-cost analyses drive much of our behaviour, without our awareness; we cannot easily question what drives our Auto-Intelligence.
Our AutoI systems may – in evolutionary terms – select for degrees of ignorance, stupidity, blindness as ways of succeeding, of coping. AutoI protects us from having to face-up to the downsides of our actions and our beliefs; especially downsides experienced more by others than by ourselves. And they tell us that we are Good, and that some others are Bad.
Pavlovian Narratives
We come to believe in other people’s narratives through habit or conditioning. AutoI itself has a cost-cutting capacity that allows speedy decision-making; it adopts reasoning shortcuts, in the context that shortcuts save costs. We build careers – indeed our careers as experts in something – by largely accepting other people’s narratives as truths that should not be questioned and that should be passed on. We enjoy belonging to ‘belief communities’; and we are ‘pain-minimisers’ at least as much as we are ‘pleasure-maximisers’; it may be ‘painful’ to be excluded from a community. We too-easily appease unsound public-policy decisions without even knowing that we are appeasing. We turn-off the bad news rather than confronting it.
Our beliefs are subject to Pavlovian conditioning. And one of the most painful experiences any human being can suffer is to have beliefs cancelled as ‘stupid’. So we unknowingly – through AutoI – program our auto-intelligences to protect our beliefs from adverse exposure; and, if such protection fails, to denounce those who challenge our belief-narratives.
One form of cost-cutting-rationality is ‘follow-the-leader’. It’s a form of ‘conclusion free-riding’. We choose to believe things if we perceive that many others believe those things. An important form of ‘follow-the-leader’ is to simply take our cues from authority figures, saving ourselves the trouble of ‘manual’ self-reasoning.
With AI – Artificial Intelligence – we delegate even more of our decision-making away from our moral centres, our consciousnesses, our manual overrides. We allow automatic and artificial intelligence to perform ever more of our mental labour. It’s more a matter of people becoming robot-like than being replaced by robots.
Pavlovian rationalisation is heavily compromised by unconscious bias. Beliefs that arise from uncritical ‘follow-the-leader’ strategies are unsound. They lead us to make suboptimal decisions.
Why War?
Many people, including people in positions of influence, make decisions that are sub-rational, in the sense that they allow auto-biases to prevail over reflective ‘manual’ decision-making. There are biases in received information, and further biases in the way we interpret/process information.
Unhelpful, biased and simplistic narratives lead us into wars. And, because wars end in the future, we forever discount the problem of finishing wars.
When we go to war, how much do we think about third parties? In the old days when an attacker might lay-siege to a castle, it was very much ‘us’ versus ‘you’. But today is the time of nuclear weapons, other potential weapons of mass destruction, of civilian-targeting, and drone warfare. Proper consideration of third-parties – including non-human parties – becomes paramount. A Keir Starmer might feel cross towards a Vladimir Putin; but should that be allowed to have a significant adverse impact on the people of, say, Sri Lanka; let alone the people of Lancashire or Kazan?
Proper reflective and conscious consideration of the costs and benefits of our actions which impact on others should be undertaken. Smaller losses are better than bigger losses, and the world doesn’t end if the other guy believes he has ‘won’. Such considerations, which minimise bias, do allow for a degree of weighting in favour of the protagonists’ communities. But our group should never be indifferent to the wellbeing of other groups – including but not only the antagonist group(s) – and should forever understand that if we expect our opponents to not commit crimes, then we should not commit crimes either.
War escalates conflicts rather than resolves them. And it exacerbates other public ‘bads’ such as disease, famine, and climate change. War comes about because of lazy unchecked narratives, and unreasoned loyalty to those narratives.
Further Issues about Rational Expectations:
Poor People
It is widely believed by middle-class people that people in the precariat (lower-working-class) and the underclass should not gamble; as in buying lottery tickets and playing the ‘pokies’. But ‘lower-class people’ generally exhibit quite rational behaviour. In this case, rare but big wins make a real difference to people’s lives, whereas regular small losses make little difference to people already in poverty or in poverty-traps.
The expected return on gambling is usually negative, though the actual value of a big-win cannot simply be measured in dollar-terms. $100,000 means a much greater benefit to a poor person than to a rich person. Further, the expected value of non-gambling for someone stuck in a poverty-trap is also negative. It is rational to choose the least-negative option when all options are adverse.
Policy Credibility
Here I have commented about the rationality of decision-making, and how rational decisions are made in a reflective, conscious, moral, and humane way. However, there is also an issue around the meaning of ‘expectations’. While the more technically correct meaning of expectation is a person’s belief in what will happen, the word ‘expectation’ is also used to express a person’s belief in what should happen.
(An expectation can be either what someone will do, or should do. Consider: ‘Russia will keep fighting’ and ‘Russia should stop fighting’. To ‘keep fighting’ and to ‘stop fighting’ are both valid expectations; though only the first is a rational expectation from the viewpoint of, say, Keir Starmer; the second is an ‘exhortation’.)
The phrase ‘rational expectations’ is used most widely in the macroeconomics of interest rates and inflation. The job of Reserve Banks (‘central banks’) in the post-1989 world is to condition people (in a Pavlovian sense) into believing that an engineered increase in interest rates will lead to a fall in the inflation rate. This is called ‘credibility’. The idea is that if enough people believe a proposition to be true, then it will become true, and hence the conditioned belief becomes a rational belief. If people come to believe that the rate of inflation this year will be less than it was last year – however they came to that belief – then it should dowse their price-raising ardour; it becomes a contrived ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.
War
The same reasoning may be applied to warfare. If, by one side (especially ‘our’ side) talking-tough (and waving an incendiary stick), people on both sides believe that the other side will dowse its asset-razing ardour (due to fear or ‘loss of morale’), then the belief that a war is more-likely-to-end may in itself lead to a cessation of hostilities. While unconvincing, because humans are averse to humiliation, it’s an appeal to ‘our’ AutoI (automatic intelligence) over our less credulous ManualI (manual override, our reflective intelligence). It’s the ‘credible’ ‘tough-man’ (or iron-lady) narrative. In this sense, Winston Churchill was a credible wartime leader.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
While World War Two (WW2) always was a set of intersecting conflicts – with Japan fighting a war of imperialism in East Asia and the Western Pacific – the war in Europe has been cast as the ultimate battle of ‘Good’ versus ‘Evil’. Hence the narrative of the Good War. Further, it has been personalised, with Adolf Hitler becoming the personalisation of Evil and Winston Churchill the personalisation of Good.
It always was nonsense. Wars are fought over territories and hegemony, between various peoples (nationalities), empires, religions, ideologies etc.; in the vast majority of cases between Bad and Bad, albeit various shades of bad (although the Hitler’s Nazis and Joseph Stalin’s Communists were close to having been equally Bad). The Bad versus Good narrative remains compelling to the human mind, however. Once you can find a compelling Evil – without or within, over there or over here – then our brains want to tell us that whoever opposes that ‘bad’ must be ‘good’. (In the old days, the ‘good’ said: ‘God was on our side’. Typically, their opponents thought something similar.)
Winston Churchill was neither a Good leader nor a competent leader. He didn’t start WW2, though there is an argument that the United Kingdom did. Nevertheless, Churchill, as a charismatic rhetorician and narcissist, had some sway over political discourse in Britain for half a century. (His important career began in 1904, when he became a party-hopping backbencher. He resigned from his second stint as Prime Minister in 1955; he was an MP for 61 years, and PM for 9 years.) That’s why there are so many more cited quotations from him than from any other British back-bench MP in the late 1930s.
Churchill, as a war-leader, was an ultra-imperialist who fought imperialist wars under the cover of World Wars One and Two. He was responsible for numerous atrocities, including appeasements of Stalin that were more problematic than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938. In his speeches in 1938 and 1939, Churchill may have been alluding to Eastern Europe, but he was thinking about Italy and its threat to British ‘assets’ in and around the Mediterranean Sea.
WW2: Germany versus Soviet Russia, with the United Kingdom as stoker and as kingmaker
World War Two was round two of the Germany versus Russia conflict; this time as ‘Nazi’ Germany against ‘Communist’ Russia, the Third Reich versus the Soviet Union. The centrality of the Germany versus Russia conflict – indeed a conflict between them for the territories of Ukraine and the oilfields to the southeast of Ukraine – becomes more apparent when WW1 and WW2 are seen as one. World War One clearly started as a conflict between Germany and Russia; albeit triggered as a conflict between proxies, Austria and Serbia. And World War Two ended with the defeat of Germany by Soviet Russia; and after the entry of Russia into the Pacific War (which henceforth became the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the United States of America).
Technically, WW2 became a world war (rather than a regional war) when the United Kingdom and France (and their empires) ‘declared war’ on Germany on 1 Sep 1939. The trigger issue was the possibility of Germany invading Poland. But what mischief was the United Kingdom upto with distant Poland? Why did a British ghost-war go horribly wrong? And why did open warfare between the two principal belligerents in Europe – Berlin and Moscow – not commence until June 1941?
My reading of British and French ‘diplomacy’ between March and August 1939 is that these notional allies, United Kingdom in particular, wanted there to be a major regional showdown between Berlin and Moscow; both powers would be substantially weakened as a result, thereby enhancing British and French control of the Mediterranean and the ‘Middle East’.
The British and the French ‘tried’ to do a deal with Stalin, in March 1939, with respect to protecting Poland from German aggression. (On 15 March 1939, Germany annexed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia.) They revealed their military weakness (especially Britain’s), or at least the paucity of the military contribution they were willing to make towards the security of Poland.
Britain and France subsequently went on to sign a treaty guarantee with Poland; a guarantee that both would declare war against Germany if Poland was attacked by Germany. Stalin already knew that the United Kingdom would not back-up such a declaration with any action to defend Poland.
The reason for the guarantee appears to have been to deter Poland from negotiating a peace deal with Germany. Further, Britain was maintaining diplomatic communication with Germany until August 1939. The inference would appear to be that Britain was trying to start a ‘nothing-war’ between itself and Germany, while stoking a ‘something war’ between Germany and Soviet Russia. Britain had no intention of doing anything in Poland, and was expecting that France would provide a substantial defensive barrier between Germany and Great Britain; this was all in the context that Britain and France would be helping their own security by nudging Germany into ‘pushing’ East (as was always Germany’s apparent plan) rather than ‘West’.
However, Britain and France were nonplussed by the non-aggression pact – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – signed between Moscow and Berlin in the last week of August 1939. Further, there was a secret sub-pact. Moscow and Berlin would carve up Poland, and which effectively – and subsequently – meant the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, activating that secret deal. Despite having nineteenth-century precedents for a pragmatic backing out from a signed-up deal, the United Kingdom and France – at least notionally – honoured their guarantee and declared war on Germany.
For France, this meant further shoring-up of its border with Germany, and – virtue signalling –making a small and brief incursion into Germany (the Saar Offensive). For Britain it meant further rearmament, but really to build up its navy to shore up its imperial interests, and building up its Air Force to defend itself from possible German attack. And it sent an army into France, as a show of support for France, more to be seen to be doing something than to actually be doing anything.
But the clear sense is that Britain still expected Germany to negotiate peace with Britain while consolidating its annexations of the Czech lands and Poland. The ‘phoney war’ proceeded, though it was far from phoney to the people of Poland and other Eastern European countries. The United Kingdom was launched into war proper in May 1940, with the lightning conquest of France by Germany, a conquest made possible by Germany’s temporary truce with the Soviet Union. (Though that was preceded, by a month, by Germany’s invasion of Norway; a matter for Britain’s navy rather than army.)
Adolf Hitler abandoned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in June 1941, embarking Nazi Germany on a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union, his main plan all along. He had secured his western border in 1940; though his plans were somewhat scuppered by a need to attend to the military failings of Mussolini’s Italian forces in the Eastern Mediterranean, hence the war in Greece which involved New Zealand.
The Bloodlands and their toll of political murder: 1932-1945
The atrocities of the Nazis took place during a world war; those of Stalin were mostly during peace-time. Timothy Snyder, in his 2010 book Bloodlands, “conservatively” estimates that fourteen million civilians and prisoners-of-war were politically murdered in a set of contiguous territories – between Germany and Russia-proper – by either the Moscow-based Soviet Communist regime or the Berlin-based National Socialist regime. This includes ‘The Holocaust’, or at least most of it.
As real estate, Snyder defines the Bloodlands as the pre-WW2 territories of Ukraine and Belarus (within the Soviet Union), Poland, the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), and the part of Russia close to Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The murders included in his tally were inflicted by deliberate starvation, guns, and gas. The cases of starvation were not due to famine in the conventional sense of that term. In the Ukrainian ‘famine’ of 1932/33, the food grown on Ukrainian farms – among the most productive lands in Europe – was confiscated and exported to Russian cities and to other countries in return for foreign currency. In the Siege of Leningrad – 1941 to 1944 – the German military prevented food from entering the city.
The worst-affected areas of the Bloodlands are today in western Ukraine and western Belarus. This land was in Eastern Poland before World War Two, and therefore in the Soviet-annexed territories of pre-war Poland. These lands were annexed or occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, Germany in 1941, and the Soviet Union again in 1944. Each annexation saw its own round of political mass murder.
The murders of citizens of Poland and the Soviet Union took place on a vastly larger scale than any comparable atrocities committed on West Europeans; including the Holocaust, for which the vast majority of victims were Jews resident in Eastern Europe (not Germany; not the West). Snyder summarises the Bloodlands murder toll as:
3.3 million deliberately starved mostly in Ukraine in the 1932/33 Holodomor
0.7 million murdered in the Great Terror of 1937/38
0.2 million murdered in occupied Poland in 1939-1941 (disproportionately highly educated people; many killed by the notorious Einsatzgruppen, Nazi loyalists with PhD degrees)
4.2 million Soviet citizens starved by German occupiers in 1941-1944
5.4 million Jews (mostly Polish or Soviet citizens) shot or gassed by Germans in 1941-1944
0.7 million citizens (mostly Belarussians or Poles) shot by Germans in reprisals in 1941-1944
To what extent would have these (or equivalent numbers of) deaths have happened anyway, regardless of how the war actually started in Poland? Stalin’s victims, mostly already dead, represented about 40 percent of these fourteen million. The majority of Stalin’s victims were killed in the Ukrainian Holodomor which peaked in 1932 and 1933; or in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, which targeted the ‘kulak’ class of peasants and former peasants, ethnic Poles, and Russia’s political class (including many Bolshevik allies of the paranoid Stalin; communists who had come to be seen as potential threats to him).
Before September 1939, Hitler’s attempts at political murder were puny at best, when compared to Stalin’s ‘peace-time’ terror campaigns. Stalin murdered Soviet citizens. So, to a large extent did Hitler; Hitler killed comparatively few Germans, before or during the war.
Those who died in the Bloodlands after August 1939 might have experienced different fates had the war not been started then and there. Certainly, in 1940, a group of Hitler’s scientists – led by a leading agronomist – devised the ‘Hunger Plan’, which, if implemented in full, would have led to the murder of thirty of forty million Soviet citizens, to be replaced by German Aryan settlers. (While Hitler used ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ Jews as convenient scapegoats, Nazi racism should be understood as pro-Aryan rather than specifically anti-Jewish.) This was probably a racist and supremacist Nazi fantasy, unlikely to be able to be realised in full, and which was not prevented by the declaration of war by the United Kingdom against Germany in 1939.
It’s hard to see that the eventual victory of the Soviet Union over Germany in 1945 made the world a better, freer or more democratic place than it otherwise would have been; with fewer deaths and sufferings after 1939 than there actually were. Would a German victory over the Soviet Union have led to a less inhumane outcome for many millions of people, in the Bloodlands and elsewhere? We’ll never know, but it’s possible. It seems unlikely that the extremes of German National Socialism could have lasted for as long as the extremes of Soviet and Maoist Communism. And we know that most oppressive regimes do come to an end eventually; just as Hitler thought the Third Reich was forever (or for 1,000 years), so did Stalin and his successors believe of the Soviet Union.
World War Two morphed into the Cold War
Mostly, the Cold War – between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their proxies and alleged proxies – was ‘fought’ between the First World and the Second World; but its many victims were mostly in the ‘Third World’, now called the ‘Global South’. The way the Pacific War morphed into the Cold War is glaringly obvious, with the nuclear attack on Japan by the United States representing the end of the one war and the beginning of the next. (And note The bombing of Hamburg foreshadowed the horrors of Hiroshima.)
The Cold War began in Europe too, when the ‘victorious’ western ‘powers’, most particularly the United States, ‘suggested’ that the Russian ‘liberators’ of Eastern Europe were planning to overrun Western Europe as well (and turn the conquered into ‘communists’). The result was a tensely divided Europe until 1990, unnecessarily so; many European lives were blighted by politico-military suppression for 45 years. Further, that east-west divide has reappeared; just look at the results of the recent general election in Germany.
Finally, the costs ain’t over yet
Just as the World War came in two episodes, so too is the Cold War now in its second episode. (In the case of the World War, the second episode was explicitly ideological; communism versus fascism. In the Cold War, it was the first episode that was explicitly ideological; communism versus liberal capitalism.) Further, with signs that the United States might be withdrawing early, the second Cold War (CW2?) is looking like becoming, at its core, the Fourth Reich (aka the European Union) versus Russia (the new Russian Empire?), and with the territories of contention once again being Ukraine and the Black Sea.
The World War could have ended in 1918 or 1919 after the Great War (later known as World War One) – understood then to be the ‘War to End All Wars’ – if the ‘great powers’ had learned the appropriate lessons. Sadly, the ‘powers-that-were’ and the ‘powers-that-would-be’ learned, if anything, the wrong lessons. World War Two was not a Good War; it was grubbier and crueller than probably all its predecessors, and all sides – including the Anglo-side – contributed to that grubbiness and cruelty.
Imperialism was very much the problem, not the solution. The ‘rules-based-world-order’, devised in 1919 by the then-victorious powers – shonky new-nation national-borders and all – proved to be just another variation of great-power imperialism. We live in a world today of powers (some more ‘super’ than others), their proxies, and nations in the Global South saddled with borders which ensure forever conflicts.
We live in a world in which the Global West sees itself as morally and culturally superior, even though manifestly it isn’t. And we live in a world in which the Global East – in its various ethnic and cultural shades – rejects the supremacist assumptions and liberal presumptions of the West. And we live in a world in which those powers gamble with global war, just as the British gambled in 1939. And we live in a world in which the militaries contribute vastly to very real climate change, partly from military emissions of greenhouse gasses, partly because the immediate (eg 2020s) security concerns of the world outweigh concerns about the climate future (eg 2040s) concerns, and partly because we behave as if the goals to prevent or adapt to global warming are unwinnable.
There is a lot happening in the world at the moment, including tensions within Europe that would lead few people to be confident that – in 2050 – the present political architecture of Europe would still exist. Germany coveted Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Germany occupied Ukraine in 1918 and in the middle years of World War Two. Will the second quarter of the twenty-first century once again see German control of Ukraine? I wouldn’t bet against it. I see a stronger belligerence today in Germany towards having influence in Ukraine than I see in any other western country.
The biggest threat to peace is war; not Russia, not China, not Germany, not the United States of America, not Iran, not the hapless United Kingdom. Wars are a problem, not a solution.
The worst things happen during wars, or as a result of wars. There is one important exception. As we have seen, the Soviet Union – a Marxian ‘scientific utopia’ – destroyed many of its own people in the 1930s, in ‘peacetime’, and while the liberal world was looking the other way. Something similar, maybe worse, happened in China in the 1960s.
The lessons to learn are: avoid war, and the drum-beating that precedes it. And avoid technocratic utopian groupthink; avoid ideologies masquerading as science. The Nazi Hunger Plan was devised by an agronomist, Herbert Backe. War leads to such ideologies; and such ideologies lead to war.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The above chart traces the vote-share of Germany’s establishment political parties: the right-wing CDU/CSU and the now-centre-right SPD (essentially the Christian Democrats, just like National in New Zealand) and the Social Democrats (just like Labour). And it compares Germany with England to show a similar process there.
An increasingly stale political centre has consolidated power in both Germany and the United Kingdom, despite record low vote-shares for these establishment parties. In Germany, the ‘major party’ combined vote has fallen to 45% (nearly as low as that in last year’s election in France, for the Centre and the traditional Right). In the United Kingdom, the establishment (Labour, Conservative) vote has fallen to 60%; though, given a much lower turnout in the United Kingdom than Germany, 60% there represents a similar level of support to that of the equivalent parties in Germany.
With these outcomes being at-best borderline-democratic (JD Vance had a point about the shutting-out of alternative voices), neither country is scheduled to have another election until 2029. And the ‘left’ establishment parties – in office in both countries in March 2025 – are as right-wing as their centre-right predecessor governments of Merkel and Sunak.
We note that, for Germany, elections before 1991 are for West Germany only. And, for the United Kingdom, my aim has been to focus on England, where Celtic nationalist parties have not played a role; thus until 1979, the British data is for the United Kingdom, whereas from 1983 the data is for England only. We also note that Germany shows few signs of promoting the literally colourful characters who play such an important part in contemporary British politics.
The waxing and waning of the postwar German mainstream
Postwar German politics began in 1949, with its new MMP voting system; proportional voting featuring two disqualification mechanisms, a five percent party-vote threshold, and the failure to gain a local electorate using the simple-plurality (FPP) criterion. (In Germany, in the 1950s, the latter disqualification rule was tightened; three electorate seats were required, rather than one.)
The rise in the two-party vote from 1949 to 1972 represented the consolidation of the major-party system, essentially in line with the post-war German economic miracle. From 1949 to 1969, the government was CDU-led. The SPD led the government from 1969 to 1982 (though with fewer votes than the CDU/CSU). All subsequent governments have been CDU-led, except for the relatively short-lived administrations of Gerhard Schröder (c.2000) and Olaf Scholz.
The fall in establishment-party vote-share reflects the rise of the Green Party in Germany, which itself reflects the waning of the economic miracle.
The 1990s’ political stability reflects the reunification era, the political dominance of Helmut Kohl; and the fact that, due to reunification, German politics suspended its characteristic debt-phobia.
The 2000s and 2010s represents the Angela Merkel era. The 2009 result reflects the Global Financial Crisis. The 2005 vote reflects the early Eurozone period, in which investment within the European Union was diverted into the development of the southern EU countries (and to Ireland). In particular, the 2000s saw the rise of The Left Party, which was shunned by the Establishment parties; this was the beginning of the German ‘firewall’, which meant that ‘grand coalitions’ were favoured over the inclusion of ‘outsider’ parties into government. In that time, the Green Party became a centrist party; inside rather than outside ‘the tent’.
In 2014 the debt-phobic way Germany ‘resolved’ the Euro crisis was popular in Germany, though ‘austerity’ ushered in the deflationary bias that has characterised subsequent fiscal policy in the European Union. (The adverse effect of deflationary fiscal policy was the use of a zero-interest-rate monetary policy by the European Central Bank; so the adverse consequences of the austerity policies played out more slowly than they might have.)
Since the initial ‘triumph’ of austerity in 2014, we have seen a substantial and ongoing decline in the vote for the establishment parties. However, these parties managed to consolidate power despite haemorrhaging votes. The new 2025 Government will be a substantially right-wing government made up of German-National (CDU 28.5%) and German-Labour (SPD 16.4%); this represents easily the worst vote ever for the ‘left’ SPD and easily the second-worst vote ever for the ‘winning’ CDU/CSU.
And, in the United Kingdom, the vote for Labour in 2024 was easily the worst vote of any ‘winning’ party in any election since 1945 (and possible since the time of Walpole in the 1720s).
Democracy anyone?
Postscript UK
In the UK, the highest percentage vote for a political party in the postwar era was 48.8% for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, seeking a third term in office (in a very-early election which Attlee was tricked into calling). Labour was defeated, despite its record-high poll! Winston Churchill’s Conservatives got 48.0% of the vote; but, crucially, more seats. Attlee’s government was the least stale government in the United Kingdom’s post-war history; Attlee, in the UK, had a popularity and significance comparable to that of Michael Joseph Savage in New Zealand.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa has survived a vote of no confidence after weeks of political turmoil.
In a vote today, she defeated the motion by 34 votes in favour and 15 against.
The motion was prompted by a split in the ruling FAST Party, which saw Fiame leading a minority government.
But in a shock move today, FAST members voted alongside Fiame’s faction to register a resounding defeat against Opposition Leader Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi’s motion.
The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Papalii Lio Masipua, had granted the opposition’s formal request for a vote of no confidence against Fiame on Friday.
Tuilaepa, who is also the head of the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), confirmed that the Speaker approved the motion in writing and allowed five members from the opposition bench to speak on it.
According to Samoa’s constitutional requirements, the MP who commands the majority of MPs should be elected as Prime Minister or continue as Prime Minister.
‘Another desperate attempt’ However, the Samoan government stated Tuilaepa’s move was “another desperate attempt to stir political drama” ahead of the no-confidence vote.
Political upheaval hit Samoa just three days into 2025 when the chair of the ruling FAST party and Samoa’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries La’auli Leuatea Schmidt confirmed he was facing criminal charges.
FAST Party chair Laauli Leuatea Schmidt (left to right), Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, and Opposition Leader Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi. Image: RNZ Pacific/123RF/Samoa Government/FAST Party
On January 10, Mata’afa removed La’auli’s ministerial portfolio and subsequently removed three of her Cabinet ministers.
But La’auli remained chair of the FAST Party, and went on to announce the removal of the prime minister and five Cabinet ministers from the ruling party.
This decision was reportedly challenged by the removed members.
Fiame then removed 13 of her associate ministers.
Laauli acknowledged the challenge of holding a vote of no confidence, but refrained from disclosing the party’s position, stating they would wait until Tuesday.
First female prime minister Fiame is Samoa’s first female prime minister. She had heritage — her father, Fiame Mata’afa Faumuina Mulinu’u, was the country’s first prime minister.
The caretaker HRPP government locked the doors to Parliament in an attempt to stop the then prime minister-elect from being sworn into office following her FAST Party’s one-seat election win.
Two governments claimed a mandate to rule, and the United Nations urged the party leaders to find a solution through discussion.
The Court of Appeal ruled that the country had a new government after it judged the impromptu swearing-in by the newcomer FAST party on May 24 was legitimate under the doctrine of necessity.
It took until July for the incumbent, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, to concede.
Fiame went to school and university in Wellington, New Zealand, but her studies were interrupted in 1977 when she returned to Samoa to help with court cases around the succession of her father’s titles following his death in 1975.
In 1985, she was elected as MP for Lotofaga, the same seat held by her father and then her mother after his death.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Jotham Napat has been elected as the new prime minister of Vanuatu.
Napat was elected unopposed in Port Vila today, receiving 50 votes with two void votes.
He is the country’s fifth prime minister in four years and will lead a coalition government made up of five political parties — Leaders Party, Vanua’aku Party, Graon Mo Jastis Party, Reunification Movement for Change, and the Iauko Group.
Napat is president of the Leaders Party, which secured the most seats in the House after the snap election last month.
The former prime minister Charlot Salwai nominated Napat for the top job.
The nomination was seconded by Ralph Regenvanu, president of the Graon Mo Jastis Pati, before the MP for Tanna and president of the Leaders Party accepted the nomination.
The MP for Port Vila and leader of the Union of Moderate Parties, Ishmael Kalsakau, congratulated Napat on his nomination and said there would be no other nomination for prime minister.
Who is Jotham Napat? Napat, 52, is an MP for Tanna Constituency and is the president of the Leaders Party which emerged from the January 16 snap election with nine seats making it the largest party in Parliament.
He was born on Tanna in August 1972.
He heads a five party coalition government with more micro parties likely to affiliate to his administration in the coming days and weeks.
More than 30 MPs were seated on the government side of the House for today’s Parliament sitting.
Napat was first elected to the house in 2016.
He was re-elected in 2020 and again in the snap elections of 2022 and 2025.
Before entering Parliament he chaired the National Disaster Committee in the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Pam.
New government facing many challenges The incoming government will have a long list of urgent priorities to attend to, including the 2025 Budget and the ongoing rebuild of the central business district in the capital Port Vila after a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in December.
That quake claimed 14 lives, injured more than 200 people, and displaced thousands.
One voter who spoke to RNZ Pacific during last month’s election said they wanted leaders with good ideas for Vanuatu’s future.
“And not just the vision to run the government and the nation but also who has leadership qualities and is transparent.
“People who can work with communities and who don’t just think about themselves.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The LIVE Recording of A View from Afar podcast will begin today, Monday at 12:45pm October 14, 2024 (NZST) which is Sunday evening, 7:45pm (USEST).
In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning I will analyse how the state of Israel has gone rogue, attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
At this juncture it is clear this is an intentional attack. Over the past week Israel Defense Force troops have repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers who were authorised and deployed to the region by the United Nations Security Council.
Also last week; the Government of Israel issued a statement notifying the United Nations Secretary General that he was now banned from Israel and was persona non grata.
Within a day of that statement, IDF troops had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in Southern Lebanon. Since then, the IDF has continued operations that threaten the UN’s presence.
And Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now issued a directive to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw from the area north of its borders in Southern Lebanon.
Also, despite the United States Biden Administration cautioning Israel on its attacks on UN personnel, overnight New Zealand time, the United States has deployed 100 US troops on the ground in Israel to operate missile defence systems.
It would appear the Biden Administration has allowed Israel’s Government to draw it further into a war justified on defence but is factually a conflict that is clearly disproportional to Israel’s threat.
Atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Gaza continue; and, IDF hostilities continue in the occupied West Bank; missile attacks against civilian areas in Lebanon; and missiles have been fired into Syria over the weekend.
Today, Paul and Selwyn will consider:
* Why Israel has begun to attack United Nations peacekeepers in the region?
* Why has the United Nations deepened its involvement in Israel’s so-called defence?
* What of Hezbollah, Hamas; are their attacks on Israel a defence or an attacking offensive?
* What of Iran, what is its position and will it engage in a full-scale war with Israel and what are the consequences should it do so?
Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
A View from Afar – In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning analyse how the state of Israel has gone rogue, attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. At this juncture it is clear this is an intentional attack.
Over the past week Israel Defense Force troops have repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers who were authorised and deployed to the region by the United Nations Security Council.
Also last week; the Government of Israel issued a statement notifying the United Nations Secretary General that he was now banned from Israel and was persona non grata. Within a day of that statement, IDF troops had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in Southern Lebanon.
Since then, the IDF has continued operations that threaten the UN’s presence. And Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now issued a directive to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw from the area north of its borders in Southern Lebanon.
Also, despite the United States Biden Administration cautioning Israel on its attacks on UN personnel, overnight New Zealand time, the United States has deployed 100 US troops on the ground in Israel to operate missile defence systems.
Paul and Selwyn consider:
Why Israel has begun to attack United Nations peacekeepers in the region?
Why has the United States deepened its involvement in Israel’s so-called defence?
What of Hezbollah, Hamas; are their attacks on Israel a defence or an attacking offensive?
What of Iran, what is its position and will it engage in a full-scale war with Israel and what are the consequences should it do so?
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
Podcast: A View From Afar with Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning.
In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst, Paul G. Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning discuss: The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies.
Paul and Selwyn reveal Israel’s long-form planning that led to it sabotaging hand-held communication devices that Hezbollah used to communicate with.
This episode’s questions include:
Who was behind the manufacturing of the booby-trapped devices?
How long has Israel been planning last week’s attack – an attack that saw thousands injured and many killed in Lebanon after Israel remotely pulled the virtual-pin and exploded the devices indiscriminantly?
And why now? Presumably the devices were also programmed to be tracked. So why did Israel decide to abandon tracking Hezbollah and to attack?
Was it to cause chaos among its enemies in a preemptive move immediately prior to its widespread bombing and targeting of communities in Lebanon?
And what of international law? Has Israel gone so far beyond the Rubicon with Gaza that it senses international law no longer applies to Israel?
And, finally, has the United Nations abandoned its right to protect principles, its peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities in favour of aid, development and an overly bureaucratic institution?
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
