On Democracies and Death Cults

Many people in the West today are not comfortable talking in terms like good or evil. In our increasingly secular societies, many people seem to think that such words are part of the past—too reductive an idea for our far more subtle and understanding times. We are even used to the notion that criminals in our society who do terrible things must ha

None has had to fight against an opposition whose leadership (as intercepted messages from the leader of Hamas in Gaza have made clear) sees the loss of their own civilians as desirable because of the advantages it can bring them in the war for international public opinion. Because in this era war is not just waged on the battlefield, but in the ef

I also wondered why the citizens of Israel seemed so unique among victims. Why they seemed to be the only people on earth who, when savagely attacked, either didn’t gain the world’s sympathy or gained it only for a matter of hours—if that.

Himmler and his SS were among the most evil people in human history, yet even they had sought to cover over their crimes. Here, in 2023, in the form of Hamas, were people who were boasting of their crimes, were proud of their crimes, and indeed wanted to broadcast their crimes for all the world to see.1

But as the historian Andrew Roberts has also remembered, toward the end of his life George often reflected on the fact that in his view, “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.”

It was an extraordinary claim to make, in some ways. But as George used to explain, while Hamas, al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others had so far not managed to be as genocidal as the Nazis, there was no doubt that they would be if they could. Still, there was something about their actions and their motivations that made them distinct. George would b