“Why did they kill the children? Even the most savage beast in the jungle isn’t that brutal.”

 Go on, guess the country, guess the year.

It’s not Palestine and it’s not 2025.

(Five book recommendations and a musing — well, it’s been raining out there!)

I read The Kite Runner a few years ago, and could easily have gone on believing the Taliban were the most evil people in the world. I could have let revulsion spread out from there, and start believing, as our politicians clearly want us to, that Islamic men are the most evil people in the world.

It would sit naturally in mind this last week, as I read My Dear Kabul, and discovered the beginning of the current hell that Afghan women are going through was being made far, far worse by the ease with which their own men fell in with the Taliban’s ways, and added to their troubles.

I’ve heard so many feminists tell me Islamic fundamentalism is the worst and most pernicious form of misogyny. Occasionally they focus enough to say ‘Islamicist’, sometimes they’ll broaden out to ‘religious’ – with the latter, they’re not so far wrong, but the idea leads to a terrible misdirection. They forget, then, to ask why all the countries they point the finger at are in the grip of fundamentalist males.

Serendipity books

I try to let chance lead me to books I hadn’t planned to read – we often miss the most useful books simply because we don’t know they exist. Someone helped me out a month or so back, as I walked along the main road past the industrial estate at Hampden Park, heading for a train to go take a lucky dip at Eastbourne library. A truck drove past me with a huge yellow hoarding on the side saying ‘remember Amritsar 1984’. Well, call me poorly educated, tell me I have a brain like a sieve – fine. I admit it. It ‘rang a bell’, as they say – something about the Golden Temple? A massacre?

When I got to the library I asked the desk assistant if she had anything on Amritsar, or on contemporary Sikh history. It took a while because (sigh, you can call me illiterate too, if you must) neither of us were sure how to spell Amritsar or Sikh for her search but after a bit she gave me a reference number and I went off to the far-distant shelves, remembering as I went that scene in The Jewel in the Crown when the old woman said “remember Jalianwala” and her grand daughter said “who’s Gillian Waller?”

I reached the shelf with my reference number on it but there was nothing modern enough to say anything about 1984. A title caught my eye though – The Patient Assassin. I took it home, and started reading the story of Udham Singh who, as a young man, had the misfortune to be one of the many people who were in Jalianawala Bagh in 1919 when the British troops opened fire.

It’s quite disconcerting for a Brit, reading a story set in India in the days of the Raj, that’s written from an Indian point of view. It’s true even if you’re a socialist, even if you’ve improved on school history in your adult reading. You still tend to assume the violence and oppression were aberrations but — well, here are a few snips to give you a flavour of it…

…but the one that really stuck in my mind was the description of the Golden Temple. Bearing in mind it was the central sacred site of the Sikhs, its design shows both Hindu and Muslim features, suggesting designs built of mutual understanding and respect. It left me wondering how we UK school kids were persuaded that all the violence in India came from the incurable loathing different Indian religions had for each other. Then, I came across this, about Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of Punjab in Udham Singh’s time …

… and I matched it with what I’ve learned recently about how hard Israeli propagandists have worked to persuade the world that all the violence in Palestine comes from the incurable hatred Muslims feel for Jews.

Udham Singh was an assassin. Whether he was a traitor or a hero depends on where you stand politically, but he wasn’t an assassin because of religion or ethnicity or culture, he was an assassin because of all the things his life threw at him, because he grew up in poverty, and then was orphaned, and then had to try and make his own way as a brown-skinned man in India under the British Raj, and then had the terrible misfortune to be in Jalianwala Bagh when General Dyer gave the order to fire into the trapped crowd.

I did find out about the massacre of 1984. I remembered, once I read about it but it just hadn’t stood out enough from all the other horrors that television news spins past you day by day, week by week, year by year…

One person’s rage might kill quite a few people. Singh killed one, and injured several others. All those white, male shooters and serial killers average a dozen or so deaths each, soldiers, in whoever’s army, probably kill far more. Let’s think about the extensive massacres though, the ones perpetrated by numerous people who have been persuaded over years of their lives to kill and maim, and goad each other on to terrorise at the direction of profit-hungry businessmen and power-hungry politicians. More often than not, those who give the orders manage to paint the unfolding horror as symptoms of an incurable religious or cultural divide, and walk away all cool and calm, with no fingers pointing at them.

The quote at the start of this article comes from The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende, which opens on the night of one of the first orgies of Nazi violence in Austria – but the quote isn’t about that, it’s about a village in El Salvador, in 1981, and refers to farmers’ families killed by one or other of the factions that the US whips up to maintain debilitating conflicts in South America. The gun-slinging gangs had been ordered simply to sow terror.

The characters in the book, fleeing the violence of El Salvador, that serves US needs so well, ran straight into the nightmare of Trump round one when they crossed the border into the US.

Something caught my eye in a passing news story online the other day, that went…

“Vast numbers of families have been killed or ended up in displacement camps, and yet the perpetrators and their allies seem to have the run of the UK political scene. The representatives of one such country are due to attend a swanky political conference in London in 2025, even as the slaughter goes on…

Campaigners, though, sensed a unique opportunity. The timing of the assault, on the eve of the London conference, would surely persuade the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, to […] use his leverage to tell his counterpart to cancel the outrageous attack on a displacement camp…“

If Lammy ‘used his leverage’ I never heard about it. That story was about Sudan, by the way, not Israel. If you want to see how the US- and UK- dominated arms industry keeps pumping weapons into Africa, along with all the ingredients of the hate-campaigns that make people want to use them, the book for you is The Monstrous Anger of the Guns.

Zionists are fond of using the example of Sudan in their whataboutery. They say there are plenty of other examples of genocide, and that we only care about Palestinians, and therefore we’re all antisemitic. They forget, I suppose, that the Labour Party conference, in our lefty, Corbyn-led years had fringe events about victims of violence in all those conflict-riven countries where world statesmen and industries maintain divisions to suit themselves, and they forget that, for example, FiLiA, the biggest feminist conference in Europe, generally has speakers from 50+ countries, and covers as many of the issues affecting women across the world as it can. An ever-growing proportion of our population is becoming very well-educated about what causes violence and cruelty. Anti-war campaigners are not ‘obsessed with Israel’, nor are they fooled by the insinuations against brown people in general and Muslims in particular.

The Zionist whataboutery is supposed to exonerate Jews I guess but, on the whole, people have more sense than to blame Jews for what’s happening in Israel. Israel is killing, maiming, starving and imprisoning Palestinians on behalf of the USA, which is run by billionaire businessmen. The violence they provoke is powered by racism and territorialism. It’s what settler-colonialists and global-scale power-mongers always do, and in Israel our RAF is helping them do it on behalf of the UK government. They do it because very, very rich very, very powerful people pay politicians to keep politics flowing that way, and so they keep on getting away with it.

So who are the most evil people in the world?

The ones who get a grip on too much money and too much power? Or the ones befuddled enough to drink in the ideas the rich and powerful spread, and carry out their deadly orders?

Of course, if you hear people say “the most evil people in the world” lately, they’re probably talking about the IDF, or Israeli settlers — but like tormentors everywhere, they do it because someone’s letting them get away with it. And the other day, Jonathan Cook published this…

…and let’s keep in mind the banality of evil. Maybe “who are the most evil people in the world” is not a useful question. How about…

Why do we let evil people have so much power?

Because we didn’t know they were evil until we saw what power did to them? Hmm… Such conversations generally end up with the notion that we need to stay forever alert to the dangers of hero-worship, and of celebrity scapegoating. Here in the UK, we have a ton of evidence that Keir Starmer’s government is too authoritarian, too top-down, not accountable enough. That’s not a conspiracy theory, the truth is plain to see — and pretty much all the MPs and staffers who make up Starmer’s government, people who were quite mediocre before, have magically become evil, genocide facilitators.

But who can we vote for, people then ask. Maybe that’s also the wrong question.

I’m thinking about the new party currently called ‘Your Party’, wondering if it can be saved. Are 800 000 people sitting around saying Corbyn or Sultana or anyone else is uniquely wonderful, or sitting around saying they’re doing it wrong, or that the SWP or whoever have taken it over, so it’s no good?

Rather, we need to say okay, it’s our party, let’s decide where it’s going. Similarly, we need to put our own ideas and skills into it, not just assume the people ‘at the top’ are magic, are going to be the leaders because they said so, and have everything worked out for us.

And that applies to every country, every workplace, everywhere people have an opportunity to work together. Top-down organisation creates evil, and it’s maintained by all the people who are in the habit of raising heroes on pedestals when things go well, then knocking them down when things go wrong.

How do we do it right?

I don’t know, but I think I picked up some clues at the community assemblies my town has started having in the last few years. Let’s take matters into our own hands, place our trust in the people around us, start local and figure out how to sideline the murderous people at the top of our governments and businesses, and gently curb the heroes that risk being the next lot of murderous people at the top, whilst we get the hang of that mysterious thing, ‘grassroots democracy’.

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