history

A Devouring Minotaur – Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant

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Some notes after reading Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha (London: Reaktion Books, 2026).

Book cover, duotone red, for "Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant" by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha. Hoxha in a coat and trilby, mid-wave with one hand raised, against a background of the letter Z repeated in a fence-like pattern.

“After Nixon’s visit to China, a group of disappointed radical Marxists from Washington state hung a banner in downtown Seattle reading: ‘Defend Albania, Marxism’s last hope’.”[1]

Despite its diminutive scale and its poverty, Albania in the latter decades of the Cold War retained a wider importance to cognoscenti on the Far Left worldwide because of its unflinching and unembarrassed Stalinism. This was the product of the unflinching and unembarrassed tyrant who ruled the Balkan country for forty of its forty-seven years of Communist rule, Enver Hoxha, most of it as a minotaur defending his maze. With perfect timing, Hoxha died exactly one month after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the USSR in early 1985 – granting the world just the tiniest sliver of overlap between the last holdout of Communism’s murderous but potent heyday in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the man who would inadvertently dismantle the structures that allowed the system to remain rigid despite its increasingly obvious contradictions.

Hoxha thought he and his régime were of global importance every bit as much as his more enthusiastic overseas admirers. In my latter primary school years, those immediately after Hoxha’s death, Radio Tirana, at some financial cost to this small and impoverished country, dominated the shortwaves with its portentous, somewhat sinister, interval signal introducing programmes in twenty languages, aiming to export Albania’s vision of revolution. I doubt programming in other languages was any less tedious than that in English, which was soporifically dry and always delivered in a halting, heavily accented monotone, bemoaning the machinations of “American imperialists” and “Soviet socialist imperialists”.

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Life Punishes the Late—Adapt or Die

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A close-up photograph focusing on the eyes, eyebrows, and ears of an older man with light-colorued, receding hair. The man's expression appears serious, with deep-set blue eyes and furrowed brows. Part of a red background, possibly an American flag, is visible on the left side, suggesting a political or patriotic context. The man is Donald Trump.

This article was originally posted on Slugger O’Toole…

A large, cracked globe depicting a world map, resting on a pile of rubble and broken stones, symbolizing the breakdown of the old world order. The globe, shown in shades of blue with visible continents and grid lines, has multiple deep fissures running across its surface. In the background, shattered ruins of buildings are visible, set against a dramatic blood-red sky with hints of gray and purple, evoking urgency and turmoil.

This will be the first of many shattering weeks in 2025. Even the cleverest members of the establishment that is being routed have started to acknowledge publicly that the old order is dead. This isn’t a matter of a change in the personnel in charge, or even of long-standing diplomatic alliances, but of suddenly finding that the assumptions that most of us shared about how the world functions and how it should function are no longer correct. To think through what we might be about to experience, it might be useful to briefly explore the last time a world-historical shift of similar speed and scale took place.

On 7 October 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorchbachëv visited East Berlin to help the incompetent geriatrics who ran the misnamed German Democratic Republic celebrate the 40th anniversary of their state. Although he was the leader of what was supposed to be their closest ally, East German security forces blocked streets to prevent their citizens from greeting the world’s most senior Communist—only vetted members of front organisations on planned demonstrationswere allowed near his cavalcade. Extra barricades were erected at Checkpoint Charlie, and day-trippers from West Berlin, normally welcomed for the hard Deutschmarks they spent in eastern shops and cafés, were turned away.

Nonetheless, a few East Berliners managed to find their way to vantage points overlooking the route, shouting “Gorbi help us!” in front of the world’s cameras. In private, away from the media, Gorbachëv warned Erich Honecker and his colleagues in the SED ruling party, bitter opponents of his economic and political liberalisation, that the USSR would not intervene to preserve their rule if their own people turned against them.

In October, power in the country still seemed to rest with its fearsome secret services, especially the widely-despised Stasi, far more competent than the SED’s gerontocracy. Many wondered if the Stasi would start shooting at the weekly Monday night demonstrations in the second city of Leipzig which grew into the tens of thousands after Gorbachëv’s visit. In the weeks that followed, events moved with such speed they were almost impossible to process at the time. By December, with the Berlin Wall open and the SED negotiating with the opposition, people wondered if the crowds that stormed Stasi regional headquarters across the country to prevent them shredding evidence of their crimes would lynch the occupants (they didn’t). A montage of West German TV evening news reports from the last three months of 1989 captures the blistering and often bewildering pace of events.

The situation was frequently misread as it developed, especially by the many in West Germany who, while despising the brutality of the SED and its secret police, saw at least some features of the Communist economic and cultural order as being superior to Western capitalism.

Very rarely has a video clip profoundly influenced me; an exception is a panel discussion on West German TV the night after the Wall fell on 9 November, which discussed the extraordinary events of the previous 24 hours. The right-wing journalist Gerhard Löwenthal, long a figure of ridicule on the Left for his televised rants about ‘Linksextremiste’, confidently predicted that reunification would soon follow. In Left-leaning West Berlin, his fellow panellists talked down to him and rolled their eyes; there had been no evidence over weeks of demonstrations, they told him, that East Germans wanted reunification rather than reform.

By February, the only question was how quickly the two Germanies would reunify. It was estimated that around 90% of East Germans favoured reunification. During the campaign for East Germany’s first and only free elections, centre-right parties led by Helmut Kohl’s CDU offered rapid reunification, the centre-left SPD offered reunification at more measured pace, and a slow reunification was proposed, ironically, by both the newly renamed former ruling party and the human rights activists who were the first to raise their heads above the parapet in early 1989 as a potential opposition. Commentators on both sides of the border expected the SPD to top the poll—surely, with democracy secure, East Germans would want to take the time to preserve the redeeming features of state socialism, it was reckoned, especially in this heavily working-class region. They were badly wrong. Kohl’s allies swept to victory, and by the first anniversary of Gorbachëv’s visit, the German Democratic Republic had ceased to exist.

2025—The End of an Era

February 2025 lies at the beginning of a period of destruction of existing structures, but more than that, the destruction of previously reliable political and even psychological assumptions about the way the world works. Trump is ripping up Europe’s post-1990 security architecture, as he promised in his successful election campaign. He is also ripping up the American domestic settlement on identity and race, also as he promised in his successful election campaign.

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View from Yerevan in The Tablet

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It’s good to be in print in this week’s The Tablet (11 August 2022 edition) with a “View from Yerevan” – a piece about beautiful town planning, the revival and the absence of churches, losing a war, refugees from far away, and having one of the world’s most difficult geopolitical positions. It’s easy enough to … Read more

Proclaiming Forgiveness: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th December 2021 (The Second Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – Luke 3:1-6; Malachi 3:1-4

“He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

It seems that in this pandemic, we’re always waiting. This time last year, we were waiting for the vaccines to arrive, having just heard news that seemed too good to be true about their effectiveness. This year, we’re waiting to see if they’ll still work as well against the Omicron variant. Waiting can sometimes be a nerve-grinding, exhausting, process, most of all when we wait poised between utter despair and relief. Let us be honest – the Second Sunday of Advent in 2021 involves just this kind of joy-sapping, emotionally fraught, waiting.

A painting by Domenico Veneziano of St John the Baptist surrounded by bare mountains and scattered woodland. He is naked.
St John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Domenico Veneziano (1445). Now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Waiting is, however, part of the human condition. It is also a major theme of the season of Advent, where we wait for Christ to come into the world at Christmas. Even Jesus had to wait for the appropriate time to start his public ministry, which meant waiting for John the Baptist; and John himself presumably had to wait for the right moment to begin preaching, in a time and a place that was full of shifting political and religious tensions.

It is of note that Luke locates John the Baptist at a definite historical moment. His preaching didn’t happen at a random moment in history, but at a particular time and a particular place, and I quote from this morning’s Gospel:

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”

From the time when he is writing, Luke is probably looking back around sixty years to the ministry of John the Baptist. That is a long time, but well within the living memory of older people; prominent public figures of the time will still mean something to most people. John the Baptist’s ministry is presented as a historical reality, in the not too distant past. It is as if a modern writer were writing about, say the Cuban Missile Crisis or miniskirts, by saying:

“In the eighth year of the reign of Elizabeth the Second, when Macmillan was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Kennedy President of the United States, and Khrushchev and Mao Chairmen of the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and China, during the archiepiscopates of Geoffrey Fisher and Michael Ramsey.”

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Crumbling Empires and Eternal Bliss: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 21st November 2021 (Christ the King)

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Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.

Readings – Revelation 1:4b-8; Mark 10:17–31

 “My Kingdom is not from of this world.” 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Some of you know, and some of you don’t, that I am a very keen radio ham, and a particular enthusiast for Morse code, which is still in use by hobbyists around the world on a daily basis. My love affair with radio started when I was an eight year old boy, on discovering that the radio cassette player my parents had given me as a Christmas present had a switch marked “Short Wave”. At first, tuning the dial on this strange waveband was unpropitious, as the adults had all assured me would be the case, revealing only strange bleeps and noises and a few stations in languages I didn’t even recognise.

Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.
Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv’s Paton Bridge, 11 August 2017, © Gerry Lynch.

Within a few hours, however, I had discovered programmes in immaculate English from Sweden, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and things developed from there over the following weeks and months. To a child always fascinated by maps and already at that tender age becoming interested in politics, that cassette player became like a magic carpet to distant lands, so much more remote in those pre-Internet days of the 1980s.

One of the most ubiquitous stations, and certainly the most bizarre, was Radio Tirana, which dominated large parts of the Short Wave spectrum with its creepy and unforgettable theme tune, introducing broadcasts that promoted Albania’s official state ideology in every language from Armenian to Zulu. It seemed to despise equally both what it described as American Imperialists and Soviet Socialist Imperialists, but its real ire was reserved for the oul’ enemy – the imperialists of Yugoslavia.

The undoubted king of the dial, however, was Radio Moscow, which in English alone had not only a North American service, and a World Service aimed mainly at audiences in Africa and South Asia, but for an hour at 8 o’clock every evening the wonderful Britain and Ireland Service. It was presented by gentlemen who were very well-spoken indeed, sounding like they had been educated at Marlborough and Cambridge – because they probably had been. They presented the failures of the Soviet Union as being the inevitable flaws of a system that was still merely Socialist, and that these would ultimately disappear as a perfect political system, a genuine Communism, inevitably emerged.

I discovered all this at Christmas 1985. Within a few years, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even the mighty Soviet Union all vanished from our maps. Empires rise and fall. They always have done and always will do, and they are always profoundly flawed entities.

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Ecclesiastical History Rocks: 1960s Pentecostalism and Nigerian Anglicans

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I spotted this interesting article and follow up letter in the Church Times when exploring its coverage of the 1968 Lambeth Conference. The article notes that the number of Anglicans in “the western part of Nigeria” was declining in favour of Pentecostals. Nigerian Anglicanism had gone through phases of shedding both sects and adherents towards Independency since at least the 1920s. But this was possibly the first report in the press of a new phenomenon which would have significant impacts on Anglicanism across the world.

There was a major Third Wave of new Pentecostal Churches emergent in Africa from the mid-1970s; in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, Jesse Zink locates this surge as beginning a little earlier, with an evangelical revival during the civil war of 1967-70. It would be incubated and then enormously multiplied in student groups meeting in the margins of the expanding Nigerian university system of the 1970s. Matthews Ojo understands these African movements as originating in the 1960s Pentecostalist revivals in North America and Britain; but Nigerian Independency long had links with the Anglo-Saxon north, and the influence wasn’t always unidirectional either.

Also of note here is some indirect evidence of Muslim-to-Christian conversion in Nigeria, which is far from unknown but somehow seems to escape everyone’s notice.

Anglicans facing competition from the burgeoning Pentecostal scene in Africa was one of a complex cluster of reasons why the issue of homosexuality became so toxic within world Anglicanism from the mid-1990s onwards.

From the Church Times, 9 August 1968

Fewer Anglicans in W. Nigeria

The number of Anglicans in the western part of Nigeria, West Africa, is declining, to the benefit of other denominations.

This is revealed in the report published giving the results of a research project into the “Role of Religion in Yoruba Society,” conducted by the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife, Nigeria.

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A Soldier Shot on the Afghan Frontier, 1889

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In Rochester Cathedral, a cross executed in memory of Lt Archie Harris of the Royal Engineers “[s]hot while in pursuit of a Pathan robber on the Afghan frontier”, 11 October 1889. History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. “A scrimmage in a Border Station-A canter down some dark defileTwo thousand pounds of educationDrops to a … Read more

Afghanistan Exposes the West’s Crisis as it did the Soviets’

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This post originally appeared on Slugger O’Toole

The Soviet Empire was undone by three things – firstly, overstretching itself, especially through the acquisition of a series of Global South satrapies from Nicaragua through Ethiopia to Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s; secondly, misrepresenting realities to itself so as to fit Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; thirdly, because its leaders no longer believed in that political religion even as they presided over a system that permitted no alternative.

Mohammad Najibullah’s government hung on in Kabul for three years after Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989; Ashraf Ghani’s kleptostate didn’t even survive until America’s withdrawal date. US and other Western experts were more wrong about Afghan society than the famously self-deluding late Soviet Union; in terms of plain logistics, the US executed a shockingly less competent withdrawal than a USSR on the brink of collapse; and in the shape of Ghani and before him Karzai, it backed rulers so monumentally corrupt that they seem to have been less palatable to devout Afghan Muslims than actual godless Communists.

In the dying days of 1979, Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, fought an initially successful internal battle against Soviet intervention in the country after the Communist coup, convinced that invading Afghanistan would end up in failure; it was feuding between Afghan Communist factions once in power that dragged the USSR in, and fear of losing face in the propaganda game of the late Cold War that kept it there for a while. But it only took the Soviets seven years to realise they weren’t actually being welcomed as defenders of material progress and women’s rights against religious obscurantism, and they were gone in nine. America took twenty.

Soviet APCs depart Afghanistan as part of the first phase of troop withdrawal in 1986.
Soviet APCs depart Afghanistan as part of the first phase of troop withdrawal in 1986. © RIA Novosti archive/ Yuriy Somov. Used under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Yet all the while, the people directing the war in DC knew it was going badly and simply lied, as the Washington Post exposed in 2019 when it got access to the US government’s own report on its failures in Afghanistan. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations all lied, knowingly, not just to the public but much of the time to themselves; they couldn’t have sustained this war for 20 years otherwise. Countless experts colluded in the lies, spending time and money to create analyses to fit a consciously deceitful official narrative, nodding along because dissenting voices find their careers limited while nodding dogs get to bill four-figure daily rates.

Governments lying to themselves with the encouragement of experts well-paid to silence truth-tellers is a pattern of behaviour familiar from the story of toxic mortgage bonds and the 2008 financial crisis; something similar will probably turn out to surround the pandemic’s origins and how influential Western medics helped Beijing cover them up. This is not just an American problem. Lying is just as embedded, for example, in the UK, where the political class and punditocracy spent yesterday arguing about the ways in which Britain could have saved Kabul from the Taliban when the same people know British combat troops left Afghanistan in 2014.

Truth is now entirely subject to political ideology in the West, but being liberal democracies rather than a single-ideology state, various nexuses of deceit sell different sets of lies to their own groups of followers. The progressive/left take is that jihadism only exists because of colonialism and White supremacy with British Labour MP Richard Burgon even demanding reparations be paid to the Taliban. The soi disant sensible centre-left-to-mainstream-right were the actual architects of the Afghan disaster, with neocons and hawkish liberals like Blair inventing for themselves an Islamic world crying out to be bombed from the air so they could be free. And, of course, the post-Trump GOP is so far down the rabbit-hole of QAnon-lizardmen-paedo-pizza conspiracy that it doesn’t worry that its lies sound like they come from the secure wing of the local asylum.

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The Strange Death of Catholic Ireland

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This piece was published in the print edition of Prospect magazine in July 2015. In the referendum held in Ireland on 22nd May, voters chose overwhelmingly—by 62 per cent to 38 per cent—to endorse a proposal to amend the country’s constitution in order that “marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons … Read more