FOR THE TLS, I’VE reviewed the journalist Seth Harp’s frustrating, excellent, and excellently frustrating The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces:

His method is seductive. The Fort Bragg Cartel has the slick sheen of the True Crime thriller—propulsive, sinister, twisty. But this is surface, disguise. Really it is an inter…

Read more

FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I’ve reviewed Garrett Graff’s new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. It’s a very handsome and fine-looking book, but its contents—and the form of oral history itself—forbid the kind of clear analysis and condemnation this subject demands:

As soon as the defeat of…

Read more

I HAD THE PLEASURE of being interviewed by the good comrades at Jacobin about Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful: Israel’s Extermination of Gaza. In the interview, we talk about the dire situation in Gaza now, and the complete collapse of the public legitimacy of the institutions of international law:

In Blowing Up Everything Is Beautiful: Israel’s Exte…

Read more

THE TEAM AT POLITICSJOE were kind enough to invite me on their show to discuss my book Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful, the ou…

Read more

FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC, I’ve written about the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, Israel’s new cutout for controlling the distributio…

Read more

FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I’ve reviewed the veteran climate campaigner Mark Lynas’ new book Six Minutes to Wi…

Read more

WHEN THE TIME CAME, too many good people gave up too easily. In the doldrums of the Cold War, when the wind seemed to be going out of the revolutionary left, a large number of people who really should’ve known better turned their backs on the movement. They went over to the right, or to human rights, or environmentalism. Everywhere there was a softening…

Read more

The Dreadnought returns! Make sure you’re subscribed:

Subscribe now

THREE DAYS REMAIN UNTIL the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas (mediated by the US with late urgency before the Trump administration is installed), and the IDF is using these hours to get in a few last-minute bombing sprees. And while Palestinians might celebrate their impending relief and res…

Read more

WITH ONE SIDE OF its face, the United States smiles. With the other, it bites. Rarely has duplicity and hypocrisy been so grotesquely exposed than in the contortions the current American administration will go through to protect and defend its client and customer. The Nuremberg principle was always fragile, despite its mythic status in Western political…

Read more

FOR MORE THAN A year now, the Royal Air Force has been flying reconnaissance missions over the ruins of Gaza - 645 missions to be exact, far more even than the United States or Israel itself. While the MOD swears up and down that its purpose in running these flights is to look for hostages, it prompts a serious question worth pursuing: does the British …

Read more

READERS OF THE DREADNOUGHT may notice the minor, and probably quite annoying, habit of mine of bringing up two publications - and two people - who can serve as useful journalistic models: the Woman’s Dreadnought, run by Sylvia Pankhurst (after which this newsletter is named), and IF Stone’s Weekly.

Separated in time by almost a half-century, they nevert…

Read more

IF THERE IS ONE institution which failed most catastrophically one gruesome year ago, it is Unit 2800: the IDF’s secretive intelligence corps. Months before October 7, detailed assessments of Hamas planning were circulating the arteries of the spy system; no one paid any notice.

But back in the 1950s, one of the unit’s early officers was Sa…

Read more

AFTER A WEEK OF having it all their own way, Britain’s fascists were stopped in their tracks. The better part of the population proved that the old formula is best: not to hide in fright or flee but to confront the fascists where they stand in a demonstration of unity. But there’s a risk of missing the point completely:

A lot of breath will be wasted by …

Read more

IT IS VOTING DAY. In the coming hours the British public will decide how rough the Conservatives’ punishment will be. Humiliation is necessary; not only so that the party’s leaders might be made to feel a pinch of shame, but also for the small satisfaction we are capable of taking. Yet a complete and total obliteration would not be enough to make up for…

Read more

FOURTEEN YEARS OF TORY rule: what has it wrought? Three elections, two bouts of serious economic strife, one major constitutional crisis, and five prime ministers – including the 49-day premiership of Liz Truss who infamously failed to outlast a festering lettuce locked in a cupboard somewhere in the offices of the Daily Star. Their reign has left the c…

Read more

ANNIE JACOBSEN’S NEW BOOK Nuclear War: A Scenario - something between a non-fiction polemic and a trashy airport novel - invites us to imagine the intimate details of a world ravaged by atomic apocalypse. The deeper she travels into the nuclear security state, the more its operations take on both the hues of death and the colours of comedy. Stanley Kubr…

Read more

THREE SEPARATE TIMES NOW, the International Court of Justice has refused to order an immediate end to Israeli aggression in Gaza. The invasion of Rafah obliged South Africa to return to The Hague once more and ask again, this time with a pang of desperation in their voices: Rafah, they said, was the “endgame”, “the last step,” and the “last chance for t…

Read more

AS WELL AS A BRUTE, an idiot, a Jew-hater, and a man capable of nurturing profound cruelty in his own soul as well as those of his sons, Saddam Hussein was occasionally right. He was right often enough to be noticeable, and as Steve Coll makes clear in his new book The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003, he w…

Read more

ONE OF THE FEW elegances of the law is its ability to cut both ways. It protects the potential victim from harm and debasement as well as protecting the likely perpetrator from making themselves unhuman. Murder is a double coarsening, and the Israeli determination to avoid the binds of law, to instead operate consistently beyond its limits, makes the ar…

Read more

SINCE ISRAEL WAS MADE to sit in the dock at the International Court of Justice, there has been much fraught discussion on the meaning of intent. But really, intent matters little outside the courtroom; judge the morality of an action by its effect, and by this criteria it becomes much easier to see the scale of …

Read more