It’s not difficult to see evidence of intelligent design in nature. Blue sky, fluffy clouds, warm sun, flowers, birdsong, bees going about their business, the wonderful and complex mechanics of evolution: I’m sitting outside in the garden just now, happily drinking all of this in. (Albeit – I have to confess – on opium-derived painkillers.) Surely none of this could have come about by chance? There must, surely, be a benevolent God of some kind.

But then we come on to human and political affairs. Imperfection all around, wars, my broken ankle, other horrors scarcely imaginable, disease, stupidity, selfishness, Trump, even ‘God’s chosen people’ (some of them) turning into monsters, people everywhere with none of the cravings for ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ that are often attributed to them by liberals, but who just want to be fed and led; and the most dreadful – I nearly wrote ‘un-Christian’: see my previous post – immorality governing them.

I suppose that what reconciles this with a wise and benevolent God is the idea of free thought. After all, it wouldn’t really be much credit to us, would it, or to God, if we had no other choice than to be good. That at any rate was what I was taught in ‘RE’ (Religious Education) at school, and in church. I can see that. But still….

All this reminds me of a poem I discovered while I was doing research on the ‘Boer War’ (1899-1902), in a little book issued to (British) soldiers to boost their morale. I can’t remember it completely now, or even Google it (it will be in my notes back in Hull); so I’ve made some of it up. But it finishes like this (roughly):

And when I see how nobly natures form

Under the war’s red rain; I [wonder]

That He who made [the flowers and the birds],

Perchance made battles too.

That must have gee’d the Tommies up. Almost as much as Vitai Lampada. (Look it up.)

Anyway: so much for my cod theology. It’s not really my subject.

What gets my goat about many public Christians, and Christian churches and denominations, is how un-Christian they appear – to me. This may have something to do with the sort of Christian environment I was brought up in, by my Methodist parents at a little Wesleyan Methodist church, where everyone was friendly and – more to the point – tolerant and non-judgmental. We had a minister who gave good cerebral sermons, and hymns I delighted in singing (many of them written by John Wesley’s brother Charles). The sermons of course were always prefaced with little biblical texts (‘For my brother Esau was an hairy man, but I am a smooth man’, if you recall Alan Bennett’s faux sermon in Beyond the Fringe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPCm6pRCSmQ; starting at about 1.1.38); but it was only a few years later that I realised that the preacher invariably chose these texts only from a certain part of the Bible: namely, the four Gospels.  For me these were the only bits that mattered; and which consequently have informed my own view of ‘true’ Christianity, through to the present day.

But of course the Bible consists of much more than this. That’s the problem. The first third of it, the Old Testament, which I understood it was Jesus’s mission to replace, is often too horrible to be a reputable moral guide, as well as being unreliable and even ludicrous in its history; so that I’m surprised that the Jews still stick with it. (I’m assuming that the Torah is basically the OT. Is that right?)

Then – after the Gospels – we have the ‘Epistles’ (letters) of the awful St Paul: Lenin to Marx’s Christ, and distorting the original message in much the same way; with the whole thing capped off by ‘The Book of Revelations’, which would not look out of place in a collection of supernatural horror stories. Why these very different elements could have been brought together in a single volume which Christians are supposed to swear by – often quite literally – beats me. We surely should only need the middle bit. Which is what was preached to me in my little Wesleyan chapel; and is what I still take to comprise the essence of the religion.

Well, I do know – roughly – how it happened. The present-day Bible was compiled towards the end of the fourth century CE by a number of church elders, all male, who brought together some – but not all – of the old ‘books’ which were thought to be most crucial to the (relatively) new religion. Their process of selection omitted some accounts, like a ‘Gospel of St Thomas’, and possibly a gospel written by Mary, Jesus’s mother; for what reasons I don’t know. (Contemporary misogyny may have been one of them.)  The four Gospels that we have seem pretty kosher; but that too must be questionable, in view of the relative illiteracy of their supposed authors, and possible editorial interventions afterwards. For me that would account for what I regard as the un-Christian bits that remain.

This of course is a critical historian’s way of approaching the texts which are our main source of information about early Christianity. I imagine that it must be the approach of reputable theologians to it too. (I don’t know. I’ve not read their stuff.) So why do certain self-styled ‘Christians’ stray so far from the essential message of the Gospels; which nowhere – so far as I can remember – mention, for example, homosexuality or same-sex marriage or abortion, or many of the other concerns and doctrines that have been added to ‘Christianity’ by popes, Evangelicals and leaders simply wishing to keep their followers in line; and certainly don’t sanction the hostility towards other belief systems, whether religious or secular, that these modern cultish ‘Christians’ display.

Of course, in all these cases what has happened is that the secular world has simply swallowed the Gospels and spewed them out in forms that suit the prevailing ethoses (ethoi?) of the dominant classes of the day; much as Lenin and Stalin and Mao did with Marxism, and now the veritable anti-Christs Donald Trump and JD Vance (a Catholic convert) are doing with the ‘gentle Jesus’ I was brought up with as a boy.

There’s a bloke on the internet who is very good at revealing the detritus that has built up around the original form of Christianity: see https://medium.com/@tanner_79717. This could well reconcile me with the religion I long ago abandoned; – if it weren’t for the ‘faith’ thing, which I’ve written about before (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/03/11/christianity-weaponised/).

Whenever Trump mentions one of America’s states, it’s always a ‘great’ State:  ‘Senator X from the great State of Minnesota’, for example. Why? Are Minnesotans flattered by this? What is it in particular that makes Minnesota great? Its northerliness? All the ex-Swedes living there? The common loon (its ‘State bird’)? And what is this thing about ‘greatness’ in general – as in ‘Make America Great Again’? What renders a country – or a state – ‘great’?  Its size? Military power? Conquests? Material prosperity? Social progress? Education? Art? (Probably not those last three, if it’s the US you have in mind.)

And is any of this what the inhabitants of any country really want or need? Quite frankly I could list a couple of dozen other things I’d want from my country before ‘greatness’. And a glance at any of those international ‘happiness indexes’ that are published from time to time – here’s one of them: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world – suggests that ‘greatness’ in the conventional sense is not what makes the ‘happiest’ countries happier. Finland?

Of course it matters to Trump and Putin, and presumably to the people around them. Also – on another level – to some supporters of the most successful football teams. (Not West Ham, of course. We’re more interested in how our team plays – the ‘art’, if you like.) Living as I did (just) during the tail-end of the British Empire, I remember feeling no pride in my country’s supposed ‘greatness’ then. If in order to qualify as ‘great’ you need to boss other countries around, then count me out. Leave that to Trump and Putin.

Incidentally, as I’m sure you know: the title ‘Great Britain’ – ‘Storbritannien’ in Swedish – was not originally intended to imply ‘greatness’ in the Trumpian or Putinesque sense. Only that Britain was a group of nations: England, Scotland, Wales and (Northern) Ireland; as distinct from Little Britain, or just England. Many people – including whoever made the current radio ad for Weetabix – have got this wrong. ‘You may wonder why Britain is not as great as she used to be. It’s because she is not eating enough…’ yes, you’ve guessed it. ‘So we need to eat more of it – bix by bix.’ (Weetabix, incidentally, was invented by a moderately ‘great’ Australian.)

On the question of the US’s recent ‘deep’ bombing of Iran, I’m torn between, firstly, my old 1960s CND views – nuclear weapons were one of the two main targets of my political activism then (the other was South African apartheid) – and secondly, my more recent hostility to American-backed Zionism; the latter of which didn’t really impinge on me until the Palestinians became such sorry victims of it in recent years. (Of course they had been victims before then, but not such public ones.) That Iran should be deprived of the ability to build an H- (or is it an A-?) bomb conformed to that 1960s principle, or prejudice; but then my more recent opposition to Trump, and to American bullying, clearly runs across that, and in the case of the present Middle East war makes it difficult for me to decide whose side I’m on. Stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Or stop the awful Donald in his tracks? Can you have both?

Currently doubts are being expressed as to whether the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities really were as effective as Trump claimed; or as necessary, in view of Trump’s ditching of an earlier – peaceful – nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term.. ‘Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.’ That was how he put it at the time. Claims on the other side that the Iranians had already moved much of their nuclear ‘stuff’ to deeper sites elsewhere, so that their plans had been put back for only a couple of months – consequently making Trump’s ‘success’ far from the absolute one that he was boasting – were dismissed by him in his characteristic way as ‘fake news’, by ‘low IQ’ commentators, designed to minimise his personal achievement, and hence his hopes of winning a Nobel peace prize.  (The fact of Obama’s having got one has clearly stung his inflated amour propre.)

However, if these doubts turn out to be justified, then it will make it easier for us to choose sides. Support for Trump (and for Netanyahu) depends on Iran’s nuclear ambitions really having been ‘obliterated’ by the US’s  ‘bunker-busting’ bombs; in which case we old CND marchers can give them our support. We’ll have to hold our noses to do it, in view of the awfulness of both men; but the security of the world against the threat of nuclear Armageddon must take priority. If on the other hand the action turns out to be a relative failure, not achieving its stated objective, and possibly making things even worse in the Middle East, as Bush’s and Blair’s grand adventure in Iraq turned out to, then we can confidently stick to our anti-American (or rather anti-Trump) guns.

This is one of those occasions when we need to see how things turn out before we can judge. Personally I’ll feel pretty devastated if Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ actually works in this crucial and complex area of international diplomacy. But that’s preferable to the entire Middle East’s being devastated, rather more literally.

So far as I’m aware, The Russia Report has still not been published in full. It comprised the findings of an inquiry by a British Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee , set up in November 2017, into allegations of Russian involvement in British politics, including alleged Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The Report was completed in March 2019, and sent – substantially redacted – to the then prime minister Boris Johnson in October that year; but only published – even more heavily redacted – in July 2020. Critics of the government claimed that the delays and redactions were part of a cover-up by the government.

This looks likely. The report is supposed to have provided ‘substantial evidence that Russian interference in British politics is commonplace’. The details are kept hidden, but even without them some have surfaced into the public view; most notoriously the Alexander Litvinenko and Salisbury poisonings on British soil. And the huge Russian and possibly Kremlin-linked donations to the Conservative party are pretty well known about; together with the astonishing elevation of one of the donors, Evgeny Lebedev, to the British House of Lords by (again) Boris, in 2020. (Lebedev’s dad was a KGB officer.) We know that one of Putin’s targets, in his crusade to ‘Make Russia Great Again’, is the European Union.  Without descending into ‘conspiracy theory’ territory, there’s surely enough here to justify the suspicion that British politics has been manipulated (at least in part) by those clever chess-playing Ruskies. And to require The Russia Report’s being published now, six years later, in full.

Suspicions of Russia are not of course a novel theme in British political history. They featured in the years before the original Crimean War (1853-56), and may have contributed to that conflict. The best account of these is still John H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Harvard UP, 1950), which I read as an undergraduate. That – if I remember the book rightly – mainly places them in the ‘mad conspiracy theory’ category. Today’s Russophobes might be on rather firmer ground.

… at last; as a straightforward overnight ankle operation turned into a fortnight of other late-discovered maladies. But I seem to be OK now; back at my (Swedish) home with help from Kajsa and from the amazing social services that ‘Stockholm Stad’ provides for poor old crocks like me. I got none of the impression of crisis that one meets in the NHS these days; a hospital fully staffed with doctors and nurses with time to discuss the travails of the NHS with me, and in one case – an Iranian nurse – to introduce me to mediaeval Persian poetry. The food was not to my taste, with the result that I’ve lost weight; but Kajsa reckons that’s not such a bad thing.

I’ve had plenty of time, just lying there, to think of new ideas for blog posts, but I’ll have to wait for that. Tomorrow we go in to have my plaster taken off, and the foot – reinforced now with bits of steel – to be X-rayed.

I’ve not yet made up my mind about yesterday’s bombing raids on Iran. I’ll probably address that first, after my hospital visit.

PS. Awfully difficult to summon a nurse when you need one. Try shouting ‘sjuksköterska’ from a sickbed.

Obviously I’m ‘against’ Trump as a European, an ‘intellectual’, a liberal and a socialist. But it’s my identity as a historian that raises my hackles against him most.

Trump obviously values history (as he understands it) as a means of inculcating patriotism. I on the other hand – patriotic as believe I am, in my own way – hold strongly that this is to prostitute the discipline for what are usually misleading and could be nefarious ends. This piece by David Reynolds in today’s Guardian puts the case against Trump qua historian well: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/14/trump-obsessed-us-history-but-learned-wrong-lessons.

But is there any point in labouring this? Americans never seem to listen to us historians; as nor do most of us Brits. It’s ‘people’, more generally, who are at fault.

Anyway, I hope he enjoyed his little boy’s parade yesterday.

There’s a bit of a debate going on in Sweden just now – although not as widespread or rancid as in Britain or the USA – about immigration; with the usual suspects – the rising right-wing  Sverigedemokraterna party – leading the charge against it, but also a sizeable movement vocally defending immigration, using the slogan ‘without immigrants Sweden would collapse.’

Stuck here right now in a Stockholm hospital bed I can see the force of that argument. Nearly all the medical and nursing staff looking after me come originally from abroad. I have nurses, doctors and physios from Kenya, Eritrea, the Gambia (she was pleasantly surprised that I knew where that is), Uganda, Sudan, Botswana, Vietnam, Armenia, Greece and the Kurdish part of Turkey. There may be a few Finns and Danes too; but they melt in more. It’s a wonderfully cosmopolitan community, reminding me of my college days. How dull it would be if I was only being doctored and nursed by Swedes!

Still in hospital, I’m afraid. Had the op last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?), but the damage to my ankle was greater than they had anticipated, so they had to work on it for several hours. Apparently it all turned out OK, but it has left me with some impressive scars and stitches, and unable to walk for at least six weeks. And having to take 40 pills and two injections a day. They’ll let me back home next week; and with help (at home) from Stockholm’s social services, which should ease the burden a bit on Kajsa. 

So far Sweden is comparing pretty well with the UK in this (public health) area; but relying in much the same way on foreign labour – in my case nurses from Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Armenia; a Kurdish doctor; cleaners from the Phillipines…: all terrific, and – as Kajsa points out – linking me up again with the Empire!  The hospital food is very poor – another similarity with Britain – but K is allowed to bring me in some tastier dishes from our local Thai and Indian takeaways. (Why have I never seen a Swedish takeaway, anywhere in the world?)

I have ideas for a couple of proper blog posts; but will need to work on my fitness first. The op (and the food, and possibly the pills) have rather taken it out of me. But a physiotherapist is coming along tomorrow, to teach me to walk – or, rather, hop – again.

I remember years ago – it must have been in the ’70s – Margaret Thatcher’s appointing a businessman to her cabinet, after making him a Lord, in the belief that men (only men) who had succeeded in the ‘real world’ of business were what the country needed at the top. His first name was David; I can’t for the moment remember his surname or lordly title.

‘Most of my ministers’, Thatcher is quoted as saying at the time, ‘come to me with problems; but David brings me solutions’ (or words to that effect). What those ‘solutions’ were I fear we’ll never know, for David Whatshisname soon vanished from my political ken, and I suspect from most other people’s too.

The belief however that his kind, if given hold of the reins, were just what the world of politics needed to make it more efficient, has been a widespread view on the political Right for many years. It’s easy to see why: if you’re the CEO of a company you don’t need to bother much with democracy, which almost by definition is likely to put obstacles in your way. That’s why business people are constantly railing against politicians. And – I guess – why ex-businessmen like David (and perhaps Elon, just the other day) who have been enticed into the web, quickly get out.

America’s current experiment of turning itself into a totally and now blatantly business-led nation – with a real estate speculator President obsessed with money and ‘deals’, and most of his cabinet’s having enriched themselves in ‘the market’ – could be seen as the apotheosis, or culmination, of Thatcher’s (and Lord David’s) philosophy. And perhaps of the US itself, in this its (very) late capitalist phase.

(PS: Searching around later I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/dec/11/lord-young-of-graffham-obituaruy. But that doesn’t impress me much.)