Vinoth Ramachandra

I have been experiencing a sense of déjà vu. In early 2003 I remember helping draft a collective letter with some American friends, urging President George Bush Jr. not to mislead the world about Iraq and launch an invasion of that country.

For, contrary to what was being told by the American administration and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the time, the International Atomic Energy Agency had not uncovered any evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. Blair even claimed that Saddam Hussein was two weeks away from perfecting a nuclear missile that could reach London.

None of those consummate liars- Bush, Blair, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell – have been held accountable for the tragedies that ensued. The secularist regime of Saddam Hussein, which had no involvement with al-Qaeda, was toppled; but it gave birth to a terrorist outfit (ISIS) that was far more brutal than al-Qaeda. And hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, not to mention tens of thousands of NATO soldiers were killed or maimed for life.

And the mainstream Western news media, including the New York Times and the BBC, went along with such lies.

I have chronicled the story in the opening chapters of my book Subverting Global Myths (SPCK and IVP-US, 2008).

The resemblances to what is unfolding in Iran today are uncanny. We have learned nothing from the past. (Blair is even today castigating Kier Starmer for not sending British troops to support the Americans!)

On 26 February this year the Omani negotiator announced that talks between the US and Iran on uranium enrichment had made “significant progress”. Both the Americans and Iranians agreed. This was bad news for Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby in the US which have long been wanting to drag the US into a joint war on Iran, which is the only obstacle to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

So we have a pseudo-Christian nationalist regime in the US collaborating with a pseudo-Jewish nationalist regime in Israel to launch a senseless war on an Islamist nationalist regime in Iran. A plague on all religious nationalisms!

Further disinformation being propagated by the right-wing media in Western countries include:

(a) Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, thus threatening the global economy. Not quite. Iran seems to be striking at American shipping only. What is freezing the movement of ships is the reluctance of maritime insurance companies.

(b) Iran is bombing its peaceful neighbours in the Gulf. It’s more complicated than that. Iran is targeting American assets in the Gulf and those petro-monarchies that have allowed their territory to be used by the Americans to launch missiles into Iran. And there are some ugly tit-for-tat reprisals on civilian targets.

There are two principal reasons for all the wars that have ravaged the Middle East over the past one hundred years. The first is the aims of imperial British and American governments to control the oil reserves of the region. This was what led to the creation of Kuwait by the British and also the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 by the CIA, ushering in the despotic rule of the Shah until 1979.

The second is the uncontrolled migration of East European Jews to Palestine, following the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the end of Ottoman rule, culminating in the creation of the state of Israel and the killing or eviction of nearly one million Arabs (what Palestinian remember as the naqba, their equivalent to the Nazi Shoah). Centuries of peaceful coexistence among Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East suddenly came to an end.

The world desperately needs regime change- in the US and Israel, no less than in Iran.

January has been an eventful month. It has seen more blatant examples of the hypocrisy I discussed in my last post. For instance: a bogus story about drug-trafficking to justify an illegal invasion, and silent support for the latter by EU leaders who condemn Putin for similar actions; supporting peaceful protestors in Teheran while murdering them in Minneapolis; a “Board of Peace” stacked with war criminals and despots; ad nauseam.

An interesting question re Minneapolis: would the cold-blooded murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have elicited the same widespread moral outrage in the US if they had been non-white citizens (or non-citizens possessing proper legal documents)?

Given that the wannabe emperor has no clothes, I don’t understand why people are rushing to make deals with a man full of bluster who changes his mind from day to day. Nothing he says can be trusted, no deal will last.

America’s bigger problem, however, is not Trump. It is the Republican party who put him where he is today and continues to grovel before him rather than fulfil their moral and Constitutional obligations. Republicans have always clamoured for “minimal government”, meaning by that a government that plays nanny to big business interests while turning its back on the rest of America. The bitter irony is that it has created the most tyrannical government in American history. And it has turned the US, like Israel, into a “rogue” state (eviscerating international law and showing contempt for all international institutions).

Politics in the US, both Democrat and Republican, has always been corrupted by wealth: whether AIPAC (the Israeli lobby), the oil companies, the weapons industry, or Big Pharma. But Trump has taken corruption to a staggering level which must be the envy of tinpot rulers in the rest of the world. He and his family are running a lucrative business racket that may well put all other Mafias out of business.

The medieval theologian John of Salisbury (1115-1180) argued an interesting case for regicide. Where a ruler exercised arbitrary power, not under the rule of law, government was absent. His removal, even by violence, was therefore justified- not as an overthrow of government but as a restoration of government. But such an action has to be undertaken by those immediately below him and not by the rank and file, leave alone by a mob.

It is unlikely that this will happen in the US, however attractive and legitimate it may be. For Trump has surrounded himself with acolytes in his cabinet, the DOJ and FBI. The military has forgotten that their oath is not to the president but to the Constitution. And Republicans in the senate, as I said, have long lost their moral backbone.

Underneath all this, however, is America’s biggest problem. It is what Jesus called Mammon– an Aramaic word meaning money/wealth. Jesus personifies it as a rival power in people’s lives to the true God whom he addressed as Father, “Abba”. He spoke more about the idolatry of mammon than he did about any other moral issue, which puts him at odds with much of the American church.

The “god” of American civil religion is actually mammon. It is what silences the voices of university administrators, theological colleges, church pastors and even judges. It is what lies behind the propping up of Trump by the CEOs of the AI giants who are driven by greed for bigger profits and world dominance. It is what makes being poor in the US more psychologically damaging than in my own country, because a person’s value is defined by his or her bank balance.

The world’s billionaires have continued their stratospheric rise since the 2008 financial crisis and during Covid. They pay minimal tax on incomes and hardly any on their wealth. As the Global Inequality Report 2022 has shown, the richest 0.1% of the world’s population now own some 100 trillion dollars in financial and real estate assets, or more than 19% of the world’s wealth (equivalent to one year of global GDP).

Thomas Piketty, the eminent French economist, has pointed out that the 80-90% tax rates applied to the highest incomes under Franklin Roosevelt and for half a century (81% on average from 1930 to 1980) coincided with the period of maximum prosperity, innovation and growth in the United States. Since the Reagan-era cuts in taxes, wealth inequality in the US has grown to catastrophic levels.

Piketty calls for this mid-century economic legacy, which also led to the post-war prosperity of Europe,  be applied by all governments “to a progressive wealth tax, with rates of 80-90% on billionaires, and putting the top 10% of wealth on the tax rolls. Above all, a substantial part of the revenue from the richest should be paid directly to the poorest countries, in proportion to their population and their exposure to climate change.”

“In the global battle between democracy and oligarchy, one can only hope that Europeans will emerge from their lethargy and play their full role. Europe invented the welfare state and the social-democratic revolution of the twentieth century, and it stands to lose the most from Trumpist capitalism.” (Equality is a Struggle, 2025)

I was dismayed and angered by the life-imprisonment earlier this month of the Hong Kong democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai. Perhaps more dismaying was the British government’s silence on the matter. The Chinese government has also accelerated its crackdown on “underground” Church leaders in China, a news item under-reported by most Western media since it doesn’t count as antisemitism, homophobia or Islamophobia.

At the same time the British prime minister Kier Starmer is planning to visit China soon. While concerns about Chinese spying will, no doubt, be raised, the fate of Hong Kong and that of religious and ethnic minorities will not. So much for internationalism.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting held in Colombo in November 2013,  Britain’s prime minister David Cameron- much to the delight of many of us- lambasted the Sri Lankan regime for its continuing abuses of power and violation of human rights. Two weeks later, Cameron was again flying, this time to Beijing to kowtow before the Chinese Community Party leadership offering them a “dialogue of respect”, and wooing their rich elites with visa exemptions to invest in Britain. China’s human rights record was, and is, far worse than that of Sri Lanka.

In the face of betrayal by the Trump regime, China seems to be emerging as European governments’ best friend, along with the repressive petro-monarchies in the Gulf and India’s BJP. The idolatry of economic growth has always trumped human rights concerns. International law has been shredded by the US and Israel for decades. The work of all those who risk their lives for the restoration of the rule of law and public accountability in the no-Western world is severely undermined by the hypocrisy and double standards practiced by those governments that pay lip-service to human rights.

What do the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have in common, apart from being ex-British colonies? They are all immigrant societies. The tens of thousands of Britons who still migrate to these countries every year to better their prospects are never called “economic migrants”, That pejorative term is reserved for coloured people from other former colonies. So much for colour-blindness and liberal “British values”.

These examples of moral hypocrisy in politics are not, of course, confined to the West. In Sri Lanka, where I live, the government claims to be socialist yet, like those who came before, panders to the rich business elites. It votes in support of Palestine at the UN General Assembly, but signs an agreement with Israel to replace Palestinian workers in Israel with Sri Lankans. This is to support the Israeli regime’s policy of apartheid.

Furthermore, Israeli military reservists vacation in Sri Lanka and have caused problems for local, mostly Muslim communities on the east coast, by engaging in commerce (sometimes of a dubious nature). When local conflict erupts, the Israeli government calls it “antisemitism” and Western embassies who follow the Israeli narrative caution their nationals about visiting Sri Lanka. That affects our economy. Is the government waiting for another jihadist attack like the Easter bombing of 2019 before it acts?

Previously on this Blog I have expressed my puzzlement over the term “antisemitism”. Semitic is a linguistic term which according to the Oxford dictionary denotes a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian. By extension, it relates to peoples who speak Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Arabic. But it is used in the English-speaking world exclusively as an equivalent to “Jewish”, and “anti-Semitic” is never used to describe hostility towards Arabs. And when “antisemitic” is further conflated with “anti-Israel” it insults the many Jews, both within and outside Israel, who are fierce critics of the Israeli apartheid state and thus sows further confusion.

How many Jews in Israel have a semitic background? Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth was perhaps the most articulate and winsome spokesperson for Judaism in today’s world. “Judaism is not an ethnicity and Jews are not an ethnic group,” wrote Sacks, “Go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and you will see Jews of every colour and culture under the sun, the Beta Israel from Ethiopia, the Bene Israel from India, Bukharan Jews from central Asia, Iraqi, Berber, Egyptian, Kurdish and Libyan Jews, the Temamim from Yemen, alongside American Jews from Russia, South African Jews from Lithuania, and British Jews from German-speaking Poland. Their food, music, dress, customs, and conventions are all different.”  (Future Tense, 2009)

Will 2026 bring us more balanced news reporting and a new breed of moral leaders?

Here is a stirring challenge by this year’s Reith lecturer to all young people:

Our planet is heating up. As temperatures of land and oceans increase, normal weather events increase in frequency, unpredictability and intensity.

A few days ago, for the first time in recorded history, three cyclonic storms converged simultaneously in the Indian ocean to leave a trail of devastation from Indonesia to Sri Lanka. Rivers and reservoirs overflowed their banks, trees were uprooted, houses demolished, hundreds of people perished, and thousands more left homeless and impoverished. Ten percent of Sri Lanka’s annual rainfall fell in just twenty four hours. The search for the missing and the dead continues.

The year 2025 began with the deadly Los Angeles wildfires. This was followed by record-breaking fires ravaging parts of the Amazon and Congo. Indeed, during this year alone a land area the size of the Indian subcontinent has been burned in wildfires.

Is this devastation attributable to climate change?

A new report, a collaboration between scientists across continents using satellite imagery and advanced modelling, shows that human-induced climate change did exacerbate the world’s wildfires. More than 100 million people were affected by these fires, and US$215 billion worth of homes and infrastructure were at risk.

The report analysed the Los Angeles fires and concluded that they were twice as likely and burned an area 25 times bigger than they would have in a world without global warming. Unusually wet weather in Los Angeles in the preceding 30 months contributed to strong vegetation growth and laid the foundations for wildfires during an unusually hot and dry January.

Not only are fires on this scale caused or worsened by greenhouse emissions, but they then contribute huge amounts of the same to the atmosphere. Fires emitted more than 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024–25, about 10% above the average since 2003. Emissions were more than triple the global average in South American dry forests and wetlands, and double the average in Canadian forests. The excess emissions alone exceeded the national fossil fuel CO₂ emissions of more than 200 individual countries in 2024.

The wars in Ukraine, Gaza and central Africa also pour tonnes of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere.

The greatest tragedy is that nearly three decades after the first UN climate conference (in Rio) global emissions are still rising.  It’s clear that if this continues, more severe heatwaves and droughts will make landscape fires more frequent and intense for half the world and incessant rainfall and floods for the other half.

Only last month COP30 in Brazil saw rich governments and the oil lobby wrangling with climate scientists and indigenous peoples over a proposed global agreement to roll back dependence on fossil fuels.

The richest 1% of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity. And precious little of the aid promised at every COP summit by rich governments to help vulnerable nations mitigate the effects of global warming has materialised. It is a moral scandal that is not raised in the EU, let alone the US.

According to one estimate, the cost of flying and accommodating 100,000 delegates at Cop28 in Dubai was probably higher than the total amount promised at that same COP to compensate poorer countries for climate-related losses.

The planet is awash with wealth, private and corporate, at the same time as it is burning. The levels are mind-blowing. Tesla shareholders recently gifted their loathsome boss a staggering $500 billion. For what?

It is moral fibre and political will that are in short supply. The celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has long called for a one-time global tax on the wealth (not just income) of billionaires. He estimates that in his country of France, the combined wealth of the largest 500 fortunes has grown by 1 trillion euros since 2010, so all it would take is a one-time tax of 10% on this trillion euro increase to bring in 100 billion euros-equal to all the budget cuts the French government is planning for the next three years.

It would be more than sufficient to help build climate resilience in the most vulnerable countries of the world.

At the same time, the governments of poorer countries must also shoulder responsibility for the relatively heavy loss of life and infrastructure when natural disasters happen. Ensuring that safety codes are followed in building construction, effective forest management and urban drainage, re-settling poor communities in areas not prone to landslides or flooding, and investing in better weather-forecasting systems and emergency relief teams should be higher on their list of priorities than pouring meagre tax revenue into military equipment and propping up unproductive national industries.

Nineteenth-century industrial England laid the cultural foundations of modern capitalism. What the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation” turned people into “human resources” for factory production and land into a commodity with rental value.

Furthermore, a new mindset which Max Weber famously called the “iron cage” of modernity separated moral questions from political and economic ones, imprisoning the latter within modes of rational-bureaucratic and legal reasoning. Within this technocratic framework, morality and religious beliefs are understood as private and personal, while political life and economic life are seen as public, “neutral” and amoral. This “iron cage” is the dominant framework within which politics is imagined and economics conducted today, wherever we may happen to live.

Democracy, advancing hand-in-hand with the doctrine of national self-determination, was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. But, like capitalism, it has been an achievement fraught with ambiguity. The warnings of an earlier generation of Western liberal thinkers have not lost their force. While it may be true that once a democratic nation has attained a certain level of economic development it will not revert to autocracy, illiberal forms of democracy always loom on the horizon. Just witness the authoritarianism in the USA today and the popularity of far-right groups in Western Europe and the USA today. Political parties increasingly play to familiar themes of scapegoating new immigrants and demonizing minorities, especially when the economy stagnates.

The most perceptive political thinkers of the nineteenth century (Mill, Constant, Tocqueville, Gladstone) argued passionately for the extension of political and civic liberties but agonised over the spectre of mass conformity, the downgrading of public tastes and the “tyranny of the majority” that popular government would bring. They devised safeguards against this danger, arguing for electoral and constitutional restraints, including entrenched rights that limited the scope of democratic decision-making while making the most of democracy’s potential for good.

There were, of course, numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in their political positions, not least when it came to dealing with European colonial rule. John Stuart Mill, often called the father of modern liberalism, famously argued that the “barbarous” people of India had to be educated into political liberty by first being subject to British rule. Not surprisingly, he followed his father into the Board of the British East India Company.

Threats to liberal democracy emerge from the “top” no less than from the “masses”. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the greatest threat to America’s fledgling democracy lay in the greed of the mercantile class. Gross economic inequalities destroy social solidarity, and subvert democratic participation. We know that those who have more resources are able to manipulate public policy in their favour at the expense of those with fewer.

I have commented in earlier posts of how the super-rich, especially the big banks and hi-tech giants, have turned the US into an oligarchy rather than a democracy and capitalism itself has collapsed into the reign of oligopolies even while trumpeting the rhetoric of “free markets”.

Tocqueville warned that where material inequalities widened, liberty would be jeopardized. The rise of what he called a “mercantile aristocracy” and the decline of a religious sensibility would alike spell the erosion of popular sovereignty: “Habits are formed in the heart of a free country which may someday prove fatal to its liberties.”

In an essay written 30 years ago, the African-American novelist Toni Morrison wrote about fascism in a way that reverberates with us today:

“[Fascism] is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones- so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers- so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers- so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking- so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).”

Democracy does not arise in a vacuum. It requires disciplined citizens if it is to thrive: citizens nurtured in a culture that prizes not only the love of freedom but voluntary self-restraint. Contemporary studies by the sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates seem to indicate that where people are too preoccupied with the cult of self-gratification and private consumption, not only do the bonds of citizenship decay but so does commitment to any social project.

In his biography of the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, Lord Skidelsky notes that Keynes was acutely aware of how much the economy depended on the moral capital that religious beliefs conferred. He quotes him as saying, “I begin to see that our generation… owed a great deal to our fathers’ religion. And the young… who are brought up without it will never get much out of life. They’re trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of  both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits.”

(I have extracted Morrison’s words from a collection of her speeches and essays entitled The Source of Self-Regard, 2019)

Earlier this month I spent two weeks traveling by train and on foot in Central Europe. I was fortunate to experience marvellous weather.

It confirmed my long-held belief that one of the best reasons for being a Christian is to compare Soviet-era art, architecture, music and literature- when Atheism was the officially sanctioned religion and Christians forced underground- with what preceded it. As Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) once remarked, “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, the saints that the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”

Prague exceeded my expectations. The only downside was being charged to enter almost every building, including churches. Given that over 8 million tourists visit Prague every year (more than four times what Sri Lanka receives) this must be the wealthiest capital per capita!

I mentally composed this post sitting in St Martin’s Cathedral in Bratislava, where many kings of Hungary were crowned. I have ceased to photograph places I visit as I can find better quality photos, if needed, on the Internet. I have often watched bemused as a gaggle of tourists rush into, say, a cathedral and start snapping away with their phones, not even pausing to savour in silence the beauty and history of the place. Click, click, and they are off again to the next stop on their tour. At the risk of sounding technophobic, the camera-phone is not merely addictive, it has reinforced the superficiality of our engagement with the world around us.

While I was away, an American physicist from CalTech who has started his own global Christian organization descended on Colombo. Predictably, what was advertised as a weekend of “apologetics” for us was another typical crash-course in biblical fundamentalism (“creationism”, “god-of-the gaps”, “inerrancy”, etc). Scientists and engineers, with a few outstanding exceptions, tend to be philosophically and theologically illiterate. And, albeit well-intentioned, no attempt was made to listen to the perceptions and objections, religious or otherwise, of local folk.

Further, when will Americans learn that the neediest so-called “mission field” lies in their own backyard? Their society and politics are in disarray; and the credibility of American Christianity is at rock bottom. If thoughtful young people are not attracted to the white, conservative American church, or are leaving it in droves, its not because of atheism or science (which, after all, was birthed in a culture imbued with a Christian worldview), but because of the racism, patriarchy, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and hypocrisy they see; as well as the blind support for fascists like Trump and Netanyahu.

In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist orator and former slave, argued that large swathes of American Christianity had so thoroughly conformed itself to the racist and slave-owning culture that it no longer represented the Gospel of Jesus. In 1845, as he concluded his autobiography, Douglas wrote the following devastating words:

“Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference- so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other… Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels… The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families… The dealer gives his blood-stained gold  to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America… They love the heathen on the other side of the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible put into his hand, and missionaries to instruct him; while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.” (Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845, Appendix)

How much of this applies to “Christian nationalism” today I leave the reader to decide.

As for the self-styled “progressive” white churches, these tend to leap on the latest bandwagon of the cultural left, with nothing distinctively Christian to say in the public sphere. That has always been the failing of theological liberalism.

My last Blog post was pertinent to political events over the past two weeks in the US and UK. The darkest expressions of political extremism in the US have found their way across the Atlantic as shown in the recent far-right rally in London supported openly by Elon Musk and others in MAGA. A hypocritical far-right rhetoric about free speech, initially fuelled by understandable resentment at left-liberal “cancel culture”, is inflamed by social media silos and AI chatbots.

Add to this toxic maelstrom the government-sponsored normalization of scorn for climate science and evidence-based medicine, and you are staring down a moral and political abyss.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the World Wide Web, bluntly stated a few years ago that his early hopes for the Web had proved too optimistic. “I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That’s why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces that use it for their own agendas.”

In recent decades, many countries have seen the rise of authoritarian regimes- one cannot call them proper governments- which persecute political dissidents, religious minorities, human rights activists and anybody who dares stand up to them. At the same time, the giant hi-tech companies resist any legal regulation of their social media and AI platforms in the name of internet freedom even as their proprietary algorithms exclude, exploit and divide.

This feeds into the polarisation between a libertarian “right to free expression” which sees any attempt at restriction a violation of a basic human right; and a more “woke” or “politically correct” demand for legislation that prohibits or penalises offensive speech of various types. Yet since what is “offensive” lies in the eye of the beholder, is applied inconsistently and often hypocritically, and my not taking offence at another’s speech may simply be due to incomprehension or a servile desire to please, neither libertarian nor politically correct views of freedom of expression do proper justice to what is involved in human communication.

The arguments for free speech are well known. The pursuit of truth in every area of human learning, the development of governments that are responsive to the people and respect every shade of public opinion, and opening our lives to those who are different from us, requires that ideas and viewpoints, however disturbing, should not be suppressed.

However, even the most famous proponents of rights to freedom of expression have argued for certain limitations on this right. For example, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) famously argued that if the expression of content is a matter of communication, it needs to meet further requirements. Every communication has a context.

In a well-known illustration of an acceptable reason for limiting freedom of expression he points to the harm some speech acts can inflict. He wrote: “An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.” [ On Liberty]

Deliberate lies do nothing to advance the search for truth, and the good government argument offers no case for porn. None of the arguments supports the spreading of fake news, conspiracy theories or sheer malice of Internet trolls tweeting online abuse or sending obscene posts to targeted people.

Further, as the late Sir Bernard Williams, observed, “We cannot take for granted Mill’s optimistic conclusion that maximal freedom of speech must assist the emergence of truth in what has come to be called ‘a marketplace of ideas’… Critics of the marketplace approach to First Amendment doctrine have pointed out that in institutions that are expressly dedicated to finding out the truth, such as universities, research institutes, and courts of law, speech is not at all unregulated. People cannot come in from outside, speak when they feel like it, make endless, irrelevant, or insulting interventions, and so on; they cannot invoke a right to do so, and no-one thinks that things could go better in the direction of truth if they could.” [Truth and Truthfulness, pp.212-7]

In her thought-provoking monograph A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication, Dame Onora O’Neill laments the change of terminology (in the canonical human rights documents of the mid-twentieth century) from a focus on freedom of speech to a focus on freedom of expression and opinion. “It is a change that treats the expressive use of speech as primary, and its communicative uses as secondary, thereby stressing the rights of originators but paying less attention to the needs or the rights of recipients. Communication, however, requires more than rights that protect expression: it also requires originators to reach recipients who must be able to understand and assess what is communicated. Everyday communication works only if it actually links speakers to hearers, writers to readers, performers to audiences.”

She points out that claims that specific types of digital communication would cause online harms, or harm democracy, are too simplistic. It can be hard, and may be impossible, to prove harm to public goods, unlike in the case of individual harm. “That is why it is sensible to take an indirect approach to online harms by penalising activities that turn out to harm rather than presupposing that harmful communication can be identified in advance.”

O’Neill argues that we also need to be paying attention to other ethical and epistemic norms that apply to speech acts, and thereby for communication. Examples include truthfulness, respect for evidence, for consistency, as well as norms of civility and comprehensibility. When we simply “express” an opinion it can be an exercise in self-indulgence. It is not a social act. There is no requirement that it should intelligible to and assessible by others. Communication, however, involves two or more agents.

Hence, relying on human or civic “rights” alone seems insufficient to protect and promote the Web as a common space where authentic human communication flourishes.

I have ignored the question of “hate speech” as I dealt with this in posts following the notorious Danish/French Cartoon affair of 2014. But O’Neil poses the intriguing question re Mill’s corn-dealer example: “Would Mill [today] have thought that expressing this opinion on Twitter/X was acceptable? Or would he have concluded that the size of the potential audience made it more like voicing an opinion outside the house of the corn dealer?”

Last month, on 9^th April, we remembered the execution by the Nazi regime of one of the most remarkable pastor-theologians of the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Few at that time would have predicted his continuing influence on theology all over the world. Dying in his mid-thirties, his collected writings fill sixteen large volumes in German, and the grand book on ethics that he expected to be his most important work was left in fragments — 13 manuscripts and 115 handwritten notes.

Bonhoeffer was deeply influenced by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, whose return to the “strange world of the Bible” inspired his younger German counterpart’s early lectures. Barth’s theology marked a complete break with the adjustments to modern culture and the Prussian political order that Bonhoeffer had learned from his mentors in Berlin. It provided the basis for the Confessing Church, which maintained a courageous resistance to Hitler’s decree that all institutions in Germany had to align themselves with Nazi policies.

Bonhoeffer was not present at the Barmen Synod which launched the movement in 1934, but he quickly became one of its younger leaders, and he spent most of the rest of the decade as director of a Confessing Church seminary. It is to this period that we owe two of his most widely read works, Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship. However, by 1938 most Confessing Church pastors had capitulated to Nazi intimidation and took some form of loyalty oath to Hitler.

With Hitler’s tyranny and the likelihood of another war, Bonhoeffer struggled with ideas of Christian pacifism and nonviolent resistance. He returned to his teaching career in the safety of Union Theological Seminary in New York. However, he returned to Germany in August 1939, determined to face the impending war at home in order to be part of Germany’s reconstruction afterwards.

In a farewell letter to his friend, the American public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he wrote:

“I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of my time with my people… Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying their civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security.”

Bonhoeffer became part of a conspiracy against Hitler at the highest levels of the German government, using his role as a civilian agent in military intelligence as a cover for ecumenical contacts that allowed the conspirators to make tentative overtures toward a peace settlement with the British government. It is clear from his actions as well as his writings that for Bonhoeffer faithful discipleship to Christ entailed taking responsibility in a concrete situation, with a willingness to risk even guilt in the course of it.

In one of the many letters and papers he wrote from his prison cell after his arrest in 1944, he said: “Now I want to assure you that I haven’t for a moment regretted coming back in 1939… I knew quite well what I was doing, and I acted with a clear conscience. I’ve no wish to cross out of my life anything that has happened since, either to me personally or as regards events in general. And I regard my being kept here as being involved in Germany’s fate, as I was resolved to be. I don’t look back on the past and accept the present reproachfully… All we can do is live in assurance and faith – you out there with the soldiers and I in my cell.”

Bonhoeffer began work on his unfinished Ethics in 1940.  In  the early pages he contrasts Christ who loves humanity and is despised for it, with the tyrant who despises humanity and is idolized by the people, nonetheless.

Bonhoeffer was clearly disgusted with the masses of people who could not see through Hitler’s deception. But he struggles with the temptation to view the German people with the same contempt that Hitler has for them. “Only because God has become human is it possible to know and not despise real human beings.” Responsible action must be undertaken on behalf of these real human beings whom God loves. He thus develops a profound theological humanism that defends the dignity and integrity of human life as a witness to the incarnation.

Looking to the future he observes: “During these years the Church has fought for self-preservation as though it were an end in itself, and has thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to mankind and the world at large. So our traditional language must perforce become powerless and remain silent, and our Christianity today will be confined to praying and doing justice for our fellow men.”

Bonhoeffer’s life and work are so relevant as we face the tide of demagogue-inspired racism and nationalism in the United States and Europe.

So much academic theology today is divorced from life. Scholars write articles and books only for each other to read. They are not enfleshed in public action, and hence lose credibility.

In conclusion, I appeal to all those Americans who are still captive to nineteenth-century views of “mission” understood as “proclaiming Christ abroad” to broaden their outlook. We appreciate your desire to preach the gospel and serve others. But we do not need you. Your own country does- especially at this time when God-ordained institutions are being dismantled, human rights trampled upon, and the American Church ridiculed for its complicity (active or silent) with such evils. Do what Bonhoeffer did and return home to fight the corruption and growing tyranny there.

Donald Trump’s economic calculations have met with stupefaction and withering scorn on the part of journalists and economists worldwide. However, among the criticisms of his “liberation” rhetoric I have not yet come across any reference to the role AI plays in the new global economy and in his ambitions.

Remember that Trump is hand-in-glove with, and perhaps even a puppet of, the hi-tech billionaires who got him to where he is today. China is their biggest obstacle to the global domination they crave.

We also need to remember who contributes to the global AI empire of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Palantir, OpenAI and their lesser-known rivals. The answer: All of us.

The language of “cloud computing”, “virtual reality” and “cyberspace” has blinded us into thinking that the web and AI systems are floating in an ethereal, other-worldly sphere that is divorced from physical bodies and their natural environments.

However, AI relies on manufacturing, transportation, and physical human work; on data centres, undersea cables and satellites. And the computing industry cannot function without the minerals and resources that go into our smart phones, laptops and supercomputers. Much of this is extracted in poor countries and involve processes that leave local communities and their natural habitats devastated. AI demands vast quantities of energy and minerals.

In her ground-breaking Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford extended the metaphor of “extraction” to the way data-sets are collected in order to train AI systems. She highlights the basic belief that underlies the computer industry: everything out there is for us to take. The Commons is privatized and turned into company capital.

Every click of the mouse, every App we choose to open, every photograph we upload to Meta or Instagram, sends information about our ourselves to tech companies that pass them on to thousands of invisible advertisers. Neither the people depicted in the photographs nor their families have any say about how these images are used and likely have no idea that that they are part of the testing programs of the hi-tech AI companies, most of them American.

Every time we respond to a Captcha on a website we are helping improve Google’s image-recognition models. Everything I have written on this Blog, as well as all my books and articles, are scraped off the internet without my knowledge or permission and used by the tech billionaires to consolidate their profits and global power.

And then there is the psychologically damaging labour of those men and women in countries such as India and the Philippines who have to check all that is posted on Meta or Instagram for violent and abusive content.

Hence Kate Crawford’s pungent conclusion: “Contemporary forms of artificial intelligence are neither artificial nor intelligent.  We can- and should- speak instead of the hard physical labour of mine workers, the repetitive factory labour on the assembly line, the cybernetic labour in the cognitive sweatshops of outsourced programmers, the poorly paid crowdsourced labour of Mechanical Turk workers, and the unpaid immaterial work of everyday users. These are places where we can see how planetary computation depends on the exploitation of human labour, all along all the supply chain of extraction.”(p.69)

Add to all this the huge number of engineers and AI programmers, not to mention doctors and other professionals, in the US who were trained in the universities of the “developing” world often at local taxpayers’ expense. As I have often commented on this Blog, taking into account the “brain drain”, capital flight into offshore tax havens (which include many American and British protectorates), debt repayments at high rates of interest, tariffs on agricultural exports, and the re-location of profits by Western multinational companies, the net financial flows in the world are not from the rich nations to the poor but from the poor to the rich.

And did any of this factor into Trump’s “reciprocal tariff calculations”? So much for “liberation”!

There is, of course, a cunning in Trump’s madness. He approaches global politics as a business deal (something at which he was never any good). In targeting countries like Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam etc, with high tariffs, he wants to wean them away from dependence on Chinese investment. He expects them to come grovelling before him, seeking concessions. What will he demand of them in turn? Exploitation by American companies of their mineral resources (as in the case of his overtures to Ukraine and Greenland) or perhaps military sales and bases.

This is nothing less than blackmail. The Chinese openly called it so.

There is a bitter humour in the fact that the Republican party which preaches limited government and libertarian economics has ushered in the most authoritarian government in the history of the USA. And mercantilism and oligopolies have replaced capitalism.

Adam Smith must be turning in his grave.

A largely ignorant and gullible American public have given the reins of power to an arrogant, mentally challenged criminal and his mega-rich cronies. And the rest of the world has to come to terms with that harsh fact.

Every schoolboy quickly learns that the only ways to deal with a bully are either to find a bigger bully to beat him up; or else, to band together to stand up to him without fear of intimidation. Bullies thrive on fear.

What is the likelihood of world governments coming together to stand up to Trump and his corporate cronies? Miniscule. It is an equally sad fact that most governments are out of sync with their publics. The Arab peoples may be outraged at the plight of their Palestinian brethren, but their corrupt, fickle regimes can easily be bought over by American money and Israeli threats to support ethnic cleansing. Liberal democracies pay lip-service to human rights and international law, while worshipping at the foot of economic growth which trumps (!) all moral considerations, including limiting climate change. Sanctions are what they fear more than the judgment of history, let alone divine judgment!

The UK government may have an absolute majority in parliament, but its two-faced Prime Minister is massively unpopular and is leaning over backwards to appease Trump and to attract American AI giants – hence the UK’s refusal to support EU regulations on AI.

(An aside on AI: What governments don’t yet understand is that the handful of AI Giants -Google, OpenAI, Palantir- own and control the Frontier Models on which others depend. So, British and other governments that are putting public funds into their own startups in an attempt to be competitive are actually transferring more public money into these private giants. And the aim of these giants is not so much bigger and bigger profits, but power– absolute domination.)

That leaves us looking to China, a terrible prospect given the brutality of its own regime.

Or else, ordinary citizens must come together to kick Trump’s ass rather than kiss it as their governments and corporations may do. Google Maps’ shameful capitulation to change the name Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America should be challenged by users. (Why on earth did Google give in to what was not a legal order?) Americans need a new civil disobedience campaign, with another Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King giving the lead. And the rest of us, in our own countries, should be encouraging the boycott of American goods, however difficult that might be for some local retailers and given the dominance of American companies over the Internet. Perhaps we can begin with Tesla, Amazon, Apple, TruthSocial and Coca-Cola.

Nothing reveals the hypocrisy of most Western media and governments than the “Blame Hamas” game they have indulged since October 2023. We are shown the faces and names of Israeli hostages, but never those of Palestinian prisoners who have been tortured and imprisoned for decades. The former are human, the latter are presumably not.

The ceasefire deal is on the brink of collapse. And when it does, once again the Western media will blame it on Hamas and completely ignore the way that Trump sabotaged his boast of brokering the ceasefire by his own plans to kick all the Gazans out of Gaza and Israel’s refusal to allow food and aid to reach those returning to whatever remains of their homes. Trump’s imperialist ambitions dovetail with those of the war criminals now ruling Israel.

Uri Avnery was a former member of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), a war hero and later a courageous peace activist. The veteran British journalist Robert Fisk hailed him as “one of my few Middle East heroes”. Fisk interviewed Uri Avnery when the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre in Beirut took place, and asked him how survivors of the Holocaust and their children could look on as 1,700 Palestinians in refugee camps were massacred. He replied:

“I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

What we are facing, on this and other fronts, is an all-out war unleashed by the rich against the poor.

“Woe to you who add house to house, field to field, until there room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! (Isaiah 5: 8, The Bible)