Damascus

In 2002 I spent a few days in Damascus – the latest capital which the crazy Israelis have decided to bomb (the others being Beirut, Tehran and Sana'a). 
I went to check whether I would be happy spending some years there on an EU funded project but decided it was not my thing on the basis of being pissed off by the obvious antipathy to women displayed by Arab men – particularly on the plane out. But I do remember being bowled over by the quality of the glassware I found in the small workshops in the city – and by the amazing mosque. 

 https://alastaircampbell.org/2025/07/429-question-time-gaza-genocide-and-global-hypocrisy/

This post puts it very appropriately – indicating that a 

new country is bombing a 5000 year old country.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the only Arabist known to me who 

From 1982 to 2019, lived in an ancient tower house off the "Market of the Cows" in the old city of San'a, Yemen. As a consequence of the civil war in Yemen, he had to leave this home and temporarily relocate to Malaysia.[4] He is the author of the travel books Yemen: Travels in Dictionaryland (1997) and Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (2000). Further, he is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan medieval scholar Ibn Battuta. Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting Ibn Battuta's journeys as published in his Muqaddimah (The Prologue): Travels with a Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010).

The Natives are Restless… again

For more than 60 years it has been evident that something was profoundly wrong with British society – a series of reports, official and unofficial, have plotted public alienation, starting perhaps with the Labour Government of 1964 which commissioned a series of Royal Commissions covering most aspects of society – not least industrial relations, the civil service, local and regional government and social services. All aspects were put under a microscope and found wanting. 

So we should not be surprised that yesterday’s papers were full of an official 

report which claimed that social tensions in the country were ready to explode
The report in question was The State of Us commissioned by British Future (2025) 

which starts -

Communal life in Britain is under threat. Some of these threats are driven by long term 

trends that have undermined connection within our communities over many decades: 

the degradation of community infrastructure and institutions, weaker family units, growing 

inequality, declining trust in institutions and chronic neglect from policy makers. 
But there is another set of threats that are more recent and are turning the chronic crisis 

of social disconnection into an acute threat of social division: the mismanagement of 

immigration, cost of living pressures and social media driven extremism. 

These forces are converging into something altogether more dangerous - leaving the UK 

sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division.

The report comes with a very comprehensive Literature review consisting of four
parts.

• The introductory section defines community strength and 

cohesion and looks at how these conditions can be measured. 

• The second part examines barriers to community strength and 

cohesion. 

• Part Three look at the delivery of community development and 

cohesion programmes on the ground. It examines the approaches used by different 

organisations and the evidence on the impact of different programmes. 
The strategic role of local authorities is also examined, as well as learning from outside the UK.

• Part Four draws together evidence on the economic and social case for investing in community development and cohesion and draws some final conclusions.

The review itemises such official reports as 

The Seebohm Report (on social services 1968)
Race Relations Act (to avoid indirect discrimination and establish 
Commission for Racial Equality 1976).
A Community of Communities and Citizens (the Parrekh report on racial equality 2000) 
The Cantle Report (on “community cohesion” 2001)
Our Shared Future (Commission on Integration and Cohesion 2007)
Casey review of Opportunity and Integration (2016)
Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience (The Khan Review 2024)

Let alone the unofficial reports such as 
Born to Fail (NCB 1971) 
Shattered Britain (More in Common July 2025)
Perhaps the real problem is that such reports are dealing with a variety of 

very different issues – whether poverty, racial inequality and discrimination, 

“community cohesion” (whatever that means) and lack of democracy. 

Little wonder that the efforts were so unfocussed. And that action consisted of 

little more than terminology, words and reification.

The Latest Thinking on reforming Government systems

Most suggestions for reform come from Think Tanks and are incremental in spirit. The rare exceptions are those from NESTA such as Radical Visions of Future Government NESTA (2019) a visionary rethink of how government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented by Deloitte reports. Let me first give a taste of the more conventional crap - Mission-driven Government The Future Governance Forum paper sent to the UK PAR Select Committee (2025)

Mission-driven government is new and compelling – but it cannot gain traction, nor function properly, within the confines of old, unchanged systems. Barriers include:

● The concept of mission-driven government, as well as the missions themselves, being poorly framed and/or misconstrued

● A siloed approach within government, where officials and political advisers work first and foremost to ‘my Secretary of State’

● Rigid boundaries between central and local government, other parts of the state, other sectors of society and the economy, and between state and citizen

● Public finance allocations and processes working against ambitious cross-departmental working

● A risk-averse culture, where civil servants self-censor for fear of failure or political exposure

● Hollowed-out capacity at the centre of the state. The UK has lacked a purposeful centre of government for some time. Some necessary structures, skills and culture have lost effectiveness and those that are still in place are the products of a previous age and not fit for the current moment.

● Missions being seen as another word for ‘priorities’, leading to departments ‘mission-washing’ in order to gain prominence or secure funding for projects and initiatives.

Overcoming these barriers and moving to a mission-driven model will be difficult – and will not happen just by willing it into being. It requires sustained commitment from both political leaders (including the Prime Minister, Chancellor, Cabinet and senior advisers) and senior officials (Permanent Secretaries and Directors Generals). Without strong, visible leadership, missions are unlikely to take hold – tarnishing both the concept itself and wider efforts to modernise government.

Government must:

1. Lead with purpose. The centre should articulate an overarching vision that sits above its five missions, as well as clear, outcomes-focused ‘theories of change’ for each mission. If missions announced in early 2023 no longer reflect the current context, they should be repurposed. Missions should be backed by strong, personal commitment from both the Prime Minister and Chancellor, with a small Missions Leadership Group – consisting of the ‘quad’ of the PM, Chancellor, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Deputy PM – providing political leadership of missions. A more sophisticated and expansive set of strategic capabilities should be brought into No.10, enabling the Prime Minister to effectively drive forward the missions agenda.

2. Govern in partnership, orchestrating the collective efforts and resources of a wide array of actors – state and non-state – around shared missions. To enable this kind of partnership approach, Whitehall must ‘open up’ culturally and become a better partner – embedding external engagement into every stage of the policy cycle, professionalising relationship management and building a new culture of collaboration. Missions should be seen as a shared national endeavour involving every community and citizen, building the legitimacy needed to endure over the long-term.

3. Work collaboratively across government. Missions should sit above departmental silos and be collectively owned. A new model of shared accountability is needed to capture where an intervention by one department creates benefits or savings elsewhere. Governance should be focused on how well this system is learning, not just top-down targets.

4. Ensure the money follows the missions. Public finance should be aligned with mission goals at every stage – from how departmental budgets are set to how policy is appraised. That means embedding missions within the Treasury’s mandate and processes, including the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), Green Book guidance and procurement rules. A dedicated ‘preventative’ category of spending should be created, recognising the long-term value of early investment and reform. At the local level, place-based public service budgets should be introduced, enabling greater collaboration and preventative investment. The upcoming CSR in June 2025 represents a critical test of whether this new approach to public finance will be realised.

5. Rebuild state capacity in critical functions: Mission-driven government will only succeed if the state has the tools and capabilities to deliver it. That requires building up the civil service’s dynamic capabilities in mission-aligned areas – equipping the workforce to adapt to evolving needs and events, while investing in the tools, technology and infrastructure it relies on. This means both bringing in new expertise into government – through recruitment reforms and a high-profile ‘Missions Secondment Programme' – and building up capabilities among the existing workforce through investment in learning and development and a renewed focus on talent pipelines. Reducing reliance on external consultancies for core functions will also be a critical step here. Local government capacity must also be rebuilt, including by using digital and technology to modernise how councils work and deliver services.

6. Encourage a culture of test, learn and grow. The centre should be prescriptive about ends, but flexible about means, and provide the necessary political cover for officials to experiment and take risks. Whitehall’s deeply-ingrained aversion to uncertainty and risk should be swapped for a culture that tolerates experimentation and adaptability. Structural change is also needed for officials to work in this way – with significant focus needed on building greater flexibility into Whitehall processes, as well as updating the competency, reward and performance frameworks that govern organisational behaviour.

Dan Honig’s presentation about his book can be found here Mission-driven government – he seems a rather bumptious character.

The Radical How Anthony Greenway and Tom Loosemore (Nesta 2024) is a rather 

disappointing exception to my comment which started the post

There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing assumptions. We’ve been arguing in favour of it for years now, and the more it gets used, the more we see success and timely delivery.

We think taking a new approach makes it possible to shift government from an organisation of programmes and projects, to one of missions and services. It gives the next administration an opportunity to deliver better outcomes, reduce risk, save money, and rebuild public trust.

Making the Radical How a reality.

• Make outcomes matter most; Ministers should see delivering outcomes as a path to accelerating their own ambitions

• Let outcomes define accountability Hold senior officials accountable for delivering promises, not paperwork

• Demand politicians set direction through missions; Empower civil servants to determine how to make them happen

• Add more teams to get more done; Because multidisciplinary teams are the best unit of delivery, not individual generalists

• Open up ; Mandate that teams work in the open, sharing their successes, failures and knowledge in public

• Fund teams, not programmes; Invest public money incrementally, with oversight proportionate to financial risk

• Reinvent procurement; Buy or rent services that support teams, not simply to whom outcomes are outsourced

• Train civil servants for the internet era; Find, develop and keep the best, most skilled people; reward and incentivise them competitively

• Invest in digital infrastructure; Open data, common platforms, clear design; the basic foundations for everything

• Lead with courage; Accepting and committing to reform is the hardest, but essential first step

Recommended Reading

• State of the State Deloitte/Reform (2025) A typical thinktank report, regurgitating the 

conventional wisdom

Who is Government? The untold story of public service Michael Lewis 
(2025) Marvellous account of government work which the author discusses 
here with Aaron Bastani

• Failed State – why nothing works and how to fix it Sam Freedman (2024) A disappointing 

book from someone who advised Michael Grove in the UK Department of 

Education

• The Return of the State and why it is essential for our health, wealth and happiness 

Graeme Garrard (2022) a Canadian political writer working at a UK university. 

Historical and a bit abstract

• The Return of the State – restructuring Britain for the Common Good ed Patrick Allen 

et al (2021) A collection of British essays on how progressives might 

reform the state 

• The Idea of the Labour Left; A du Cros (2021) a useful overview of some key thinkers

• The Richer, The Poorer – how Britain enriched the few and failed the poor – a 200 year 

history Stewart Lansley (2021) Fantastic read

Successful Failure Matt Andrews (2021) the US (Harvard) guru who advises many governments on their reforms

• Radical Visions of Future Government NESTA (2019) a visionary rethink of how 

government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented 

by Deloitte reports

Making Sense of the Nazi period

In a few days will see the centenary of Mein Kampf’s publication by Adolf Hitler who managed to publish it on July 18^th 1925 after he’d spent 9 months in a Munich prison. I owe this to John Kampfer’s post which told us he’d been rereading the book (in both German and English) to save us the trouble of doing so. In fact an English historian, Neil Gregor, offered in 2005 a guide to How to Read Hitler

Immediately after the war, three Germans (2 historians and a philosopher) tried 

to explain what had happened  
The German Question W Roepke (1946) – one of the historians 
The Question of German Guilt Karl Jaspers (1948) – the philosopher whom wikipedia 
explains thus 
The German Catastrophe – reflections and recollections Friedrich Meinecke (1950)
Since then, material about the Nazi period has become a veritable industry, 

starting perhaps with Karl Bracher whose The German Dictatorship – the origins, 

structure and effects of National Socialism came out in 1971. But Richard Evans 

(with Ian Kershaw) are the 2 Brits who have devoted their lives to explaining 

Hitler’s rise. In Hitler’s Shadow (1989) identifies some of the protagonists

Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is it time to forgive the Germans? Now that most of those who carried out the crimes of Nazism are dead, should the younger West Germans who constitute the majority of the Federal Republic’s population today learn to be proud of their country rather than being ashamed of it? Have the memories of Germany’s twentieth-century misdeeds been distorted by the legacy of wartime propaganda? Has the moment arrived when we should take a broader and more balanced view, and accept that the evil of Nazism, terrible though it was, did not significantly differ from other evils which have plagued our troubled time, from the Gulag Archipelago to the killing fields of Cambodia?

Over the past few years, these questions have aroused an impassioned debate both within West Germany and outside, as a substantial number of West German historians have argued in various ways that the answer to all of them should be “yes.” This book is an attempt to lay out the fundamental issues in this sometimes angry and convoluted discussion, and to reach as balanced an assessment of them as possible. It is not a polemical book. Polemics, though they can have a useful function in bringing a problem to public attention, tend to obscure the central issues in a controversy, and the aim of winning debating points too easily leads to a lack of fairness and discrimination in the weapons used. Nor is it an account of personalities, though a certain amount of background detail has been provided on some of the principal antagonists in the debate. The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues in the light of what we know about the historical events upon which they touch. To help the reader unfamiliar with this controversy, it also attempts to give an account of the political context in which the debate has arisen, and to point to some of the implications for German and European politics as the twentieth century draws to a close.

A few years later Daniel Goldenhagen put up a different picture in Hitler’s 

Willing Executioners – ordinary germans and the holocaust (1996)

How the Nazis came to power, how they suppressed the left, how they revived the 

economy, how the state was structured and functioned, how they made and waged war 

are all more or less ordinary, "normal" events, easily enough understood. 

But it was probably Ron Rosenbaum who offered the most satisfactory angle 

with Explaining Hitler – the search for the origins of his evil (1998)

It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question “Why?” The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about the explainers—about the eyes of the beholders—and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

Explaining Hitler, in other words, is not my got-it-all-nailed-down instruction manual. It’s not a biography; it’s more a dissection, well, an examination of biographies—an essay in intellectual history. I do not have the hubris to declare discovery of a Unified Field Theory of Hitler. No “Theory of Everything” Evil. That doesn’t mean there won’t—or can’t—ever be one, or that it’s not worth the attempt to further clarify what we mean by Hitler, by evil, by origin. Indeed, as I’ve tried to point out in the book, the attempts often tell us more about ourselves, our own self-images, and our cultural predispositions than some indisputable truth about Hitler. “Cultural selfportraits in the negative” was the phrase I used: Hitler is everything we (hope)

Rosenbaum was interviewed about the book

Walter Langer was a US psychologist who, during the war, published 

A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler which was eventually published by the 

Office of Strategic Studies in 1999. He also published The Mind of Adolf Hitler 

– drawing on interviews with someone claiming to be Hitler’s psychologist

But a question which needs asking is - WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM ALL THESE 

PUBLICATIONS? In what sense have they advanced our understanding??

Other Recommended Texts
Germans into Nazis Peter Fritzsche 1998 
The Third Reich in Power Richard Evans 2005
Hitler – a biography Ian Kershaw 2008
Hitler – a biography Longereich 2019

Takeover – Hitler’s Rise to Power Timothy Ryback 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3HhfPoavwc&t=2367s

The Nazi Mind

After my effort to make sense of the Trump mind, it seems appropriate to follow up with a just published book by the British historian Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind – 12 warnings from history (2025). Its a long book based on several hundred interviews (both victims and perpetrators)

In this book, for the first time in my work, I explore how psychology as a discipline can help us understand the mentalities of the Nazis, and aspects of neuropsychology and behavioural and social psychology have all offered me valuable insights. Before talking to academic psychologists and studying relevant scientific papers, I had not been aware of the immense advances that have been made in these areas in recent years. In particular, the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology has been of considerable value. We sometimes forget that our brains evolved while our ancient predecessors were hunting on the savannah, and insufficient time in evolutionary terms has passed since then to allow much change.

His chapters are headed

1. Spreading Conspiracy Theories

2. Using Them and Us

3. Leading as a Hero

4. Corrupting Youth

5. Conniving with the Elite

6. Attacking Human Rights

7. Exploiting Faith

8. Valuing Enemies

9. Eliminating Resistance

10. Escalating Racism

11. Killing at a Distance

12. Stoking Fear

Anthony Scaramucci has linked up with Alastair Campbell to run a Rest in Politics 

US and has just interviewed the very articulate Rees about his book - 

12 warning signs that democracy is dying. 
Another interview on the book was with an American I’ve never heard of, Matt 

Lewis but its a great interview.

At one time, to attribute human motives to Hitler was lese-majeste – but the past 

few decades have seen a significant change – with his personal attributes being 

celebrated 

• Hitler - abridged version Ian Kershaw (2008 – 550pp)

• The Charisma of Hitler – leading millions into the abyss Laurence Rees (2012) only 250pp

• and even a novel - Look Who’s Back Tibur Vermes (2014 180 pp)

• Hitler – only the world was enough Brendan Simms (2019 1250pp) 

• Hitler – a Biography Longerich (2019 1380pp) 

Out of the Darkness – the Germans 1942-2022 Frank Trentmann (2023) is an important book which just happens to begin its account on the year of my birth for the reasons the author explains here

And why did I start in the middle of the Second World War? There's a big moral turmoil 

that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942, 1943, the time period we now call the 

Holocaust. A growing number of Germans started asking themselves troubling questions 

about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. 

So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads 

of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost. 

Its a big book - 1077 pages - and presented in videos here and here

Laurence Rees is also a documentarist and this is one of a series he’s produced The Nazis – a view from history

On Not Resisting the Temptation to write about Trump

I had been wanting to write something about anarchism – or Lawrence Ree’s most recent book “The Nazi Mind” or even a post about “contextual analysis” of which Rory Stewart is such a good exponent. 

Instead, I have been seduced by this post about Fascism in America from a site 

called The Rational League to speculate about the state of Donald Trump’s mind 

– and that of his MAGA followers.

You can’t negotiate with someone who sees compromise as surrender. You can’t persuade a person out of beliefs that serve as emotional armor against uncertainty and fear. And you certainly can’t build a functioning democracy when 30–40% of the population interprets equality as an attack, and compassion as weakness. This is the psychological blind spot at the heart of MAGA, and it explains why even policies that make life objectively worse for their own communities are still embraced if they reaffirm authoritarian values or hierarchical dominance. The MAGA movement thrives because it supplies this audience with what they crave: certainty, submission, identity, and an enemy. And once they have that, they will defend it, even to the detriment of their health, their economy, their fellow citizens, and democracy itself. That is why no policy rebuttal, no moral appeal, and no set of facts will shake them. These are not flaws in their thinking; they are features of it.

The history of authoritarianism teaches us that these minds will not course-correct. They require a society designed to check them, constrain them, and strip their ideology of legitimacy. If we fail to do that, their psychological needs will continue to override our collective needs. They will vote against healthcare, education, the environment, and equality, not because they are evil, but because fear and order are more important to them than fairness or truth. And once again, as before, they will drag civilization backwards. Not in a fiery revolution, but with the silent obedience of billions, marching to the steafdy beat of “order,” “tradition,” and “the way things ought to be.” The warning is simple: if you do not stop authoritarianism when it is soft and delusional, you will face it later when it is brutal and unapologetic.

Europe, of course, has seen this before – there was a flood of books in the early 

1950s trying to make sense of German behaviour in the 1930s, books like The 

Authoritarian Personality ed Adorno et al (1950) with a later edition – see the link 

- in 2019 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. 

At Glasgow University in the early 1960s (when I studied Politics and Economics) 

I had a Romanian tutor (in political sociology) Zevedei Barbu who held me spellbound 

as he introduced me to Weber and Michels, drawing on his own experience (which 

I didn’t know about at the time) of Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology 

and patterns of life which he published in 1956. He was, after all, a psychologist 

by training. Bob Altemeyer was another psychologist (Canadian this time) who 

published 50 years later The Authoritarians (2006) which I found very confusing 

since it focuses more on the details of his psychological experiments and fails to 

mention Adorno let alone Barbu. 

But he’s published 2 further books on the theme Authoritarian Nightmare – 
Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2019) and a short (60 page) 

addition in the light of 3 important books Updating Authoritarian Nightmare (2021). 

The post with which I start quotes extensively from the first of these books and led 

me to another interesting book on the subject The Politics of Antagonism – security 

narratives and the remaking of political identity (2024) by a writer on war and 

international relations - Georg  Loefflemann 

This book demonstrates how populist security narratives served as the driving force 

behind the mobilization of Republican voters and the legitimation of an ‘America First’ 

policy agenda under the Trump presidency. Going beyond existing research on both 

populism and security narratives, the author links insights from political psychology on 

collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political 

communication on narrative and framing to explore the political and societal impact of a 

populist security imaginary. Drawing on a comprehensive range of sources including key 

interviews, campaign and policy speeches, presidential addresses, and posts on social 

media, it shows how progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, 

and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively became an internal Other, 

delegitimated as ‘enemies of the people’. Developing an innovative conceptual‑analytical 

framework of nationalist populism that expands on established concepts of political 

identity and ontological security, the book will appeal to students of critical security studies, 

critical constructivist approaches in International Relations, and US politics 

A final article worth reading is Collective Narcissism and Weakening of American democracy Oliver Keenan and AG de Zavala 2021