Hicham el-Gherrouj is not a household name in Australia, but he should be. A retired athlete, he is considered by sporting commentators to be one of the greatest middle distance runners in the works. His career is an example of resilience and the overcoming of obstacles.

First of all, I say middle distance, but to me, anything beyond 100 metres is long distance. I could run 200 metres when I was young, but only with great exertion, huffing and puffing, and going red in the face from physical exhaustion.

Gherrouj, born in 1974 in Morocco, displayed remarkable courage and persistence in taking on what I consider long distance running – 1500 metres, Gherrouj’s speciality, would take me half a day. The Olympic marathon, where competitors run approximately 42.1 kilometres (26 miles and 385 yards in the imperial measurement) is not a run, that is deportation to me.

In the 1996 Atlanta summer Olympics, Gherrouj experienced a dramatic incident, one which would impact him greatly. Running alongside his fellow athletes in the 1500 metre race, he was accidentally tripped by Algeria’s Noureddine Morceli, with only 400 metres left to go.

Morcelli had been a staunch rival of Gherrouj’s, and was a multiple world record holder in middle distance running.

Gherrouj, collapsing, nevertheless got up and finished the race. He quickly retreated from the main athletic arena, and broke down in tears. His career as an athlete appeared to be over.

Gherrouj, while in the depths of inconsolable despair, was handed a mobile phone. It was the Moroccan King, Hassan II, on the phone. The king expressed his admiration for Gherrouj, and said that the latter was the pride of the Moroccan nation.

That call lifted Gherrouj’s spirits. He never looked back. He went on to defeat all his competitors, establishing world records, winning gold medals, and retiring as a sporting champion of his nation in 2006. From Moroccan sands to Olympic glory, Gherrouj’s example is still an inspiration to athletes today.

It is important to remember and understand the experiences of high profile athletes, and how they are handled in the media.

Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian-American gymnast, was a superstar of the Romanian gymnastics team in the 1970s and 80s. A showcase for the Eastern bloc’s athletes and sporting programmes, her score of a perfect 10 at the 1976 Montreal Olympics was a coup for Ceausescu’s administration in Romania.

Born in 1961, Comaneci showed exceptional talent from a young age, and won numerous European gymnastic competitions before going on to compete for her country at the international level.

Awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour medal, Comaneci’s star was cemented as one of the greats for Romanian sport. In 1989, she, along with several others, did the unthinkable. She defected to the West, and was welcomed in the United States. This journey to asylum seeking freedom was undertaken in the days when imperialist nations welcomed high profile defections, especially from Communist nations, for their propaganda value.

Comaneci was not the only one to defect in November 1989. Her trainers, Bela and Mary Karolyi, also defected. A body blow to the Ceausescu’s government’s credibility, Comaneci’s defection was widely publicised in the West as an example of the indomitable human yearning for freedom from tyrannical regimes.

The Karolyis were soon recruited into the American gymnastics team, and through their training methods, were responsible for the US team’s first ever gold medal in all-round gymnastics by one of their star students, Mary Lou Retton, The latter won the gold medal for her nation at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

In recent years, the training methods of gymnastics coaches has come under renewed scrutiny, especially with regard to the treatment of underage girls. Stories of physical and verbal abuse, diet policing to the point of starvation, and aberrant use of medical treatment have all been alleged. Whether there is any truth to these allegations, I do nor know, and cannot comment.

There were no such questions raised in 1984, when the US team were happily accepting the gold medal in women gymnastics by Retton. Her success was hailed in the media, and Retton’s image became a marketable commodity.

What I do see is the vitriolic campaign of hatred directed at a particular underage girl, at least since 2022, Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. A sporting prodigy in the world of figure ice skating, her ascent has been marred by a vicious and sustained media attack on her person as a ‘Russian cheat.’

Valieva, an Olympic and world champion, was fifteen in 2022. Yet her tender years did not stop a relentless and hurtful effort of humiliation on the part of the corporate media. It is difficult enough for adults to handle the scrutiny and excessive pressure of media attention. A fifteen year old girl, talented and resilient as Valieva is, would be incapable of handling the pointedly accusatory campaign of vilification directed against her as a purported ‘cheat.’

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) found that Valieva did not actually cheat. The prohibited substance found in her system, a particular heart medication, was the result of accidental contact, not wilful cheating. Yet, after her success in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the accusations against her flowed, and the tsunami of hostile press coverage followed.

The medication in question, trimetazadine, is for people with heart problems, not young athletes. Such a medication would cause heart palpitations in a young, healthy person, hardly a motivating factor for a figure skating champion who requires nerves of steel in the heat of competition.

Politics intersecting with sport can be an ugly business. Geopolitical hostility to Moscow has resulted in targeting an innocent person, Kamila Valieva. How about we respect athletes for their achievements, and not use them as pawns in geopolitical conflicts.

Sometimes, it is the seeming footnotes in modern history that turn out to contain the most important lessons.

Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, but that was not the end of his government. His successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, relocated the German government to Flensburg, in the north of the country near the Danish border. Lasting about three weeks, his administration controlled only isolated patches of territory, what with the Soviets and American forces rapidly closing in on the Third Reich.

Winston Churchill, British PM, had a plan – to recognise the Flensburg administration. Why? So that all the millions of demobilised German soldiers of the Wehrmacht could be reconstructed into a new fighting force. His objective? To launch an attack on the Soviet Union. Two distinct yet related plans were drawn up for that purpose; codenamed Operation Unthinkable.

Churchill, while opposed to Nazi tyranny, maintained that the real threat was Soviet Bolshevism. The Wehrmacht, its soldiers overwhelmed by successive defeats, could be reconstituted as a fighting machine, footsoldiers in a new Cold War. But there was a problem; the German army was guilty of horrendous war crimes, and its senior officers were being arrested and charged for multiple offences.

Eisenhower, the Supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, vehemently rejected Churchill’s proposal. The Flensburg government, already reduced to rump status, could barely be considered a credible authority given that it was basically a continuation of the criminal Nazi regime. Collapsing in a heap by the end of May 1945, it was officially dissolved in June by the victorious powers.

Rehabilitating former Wehrmacht officers, while officially rejected, was revived in a way by the 1950s. West Germany, occupied by the western powers, could be turned into a military bastion against the Communist East. That objective, demanded by the exigencies of the Cold War, dovetailed nicely with a domestic West German project initiated by former Nazi military officers – the rehabilitation of the ‘clean Wehrmacht.’

Rearming West Germany was going to be difficult, given the memories of the monstrous crimes of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Nazi military. Former Wehrmacht officers, as well as civilian personnel in the West German bureaucracy, began the myth of the ‘good Wehrmacht’, German soldiers reluctantly carrying out the orders of the Fuehrer and his inner circle.

German officers were noble, motivated by patriotism and love of homeland – the SS and Gestapo were made the alibis of a nation. In 1950, invited by then West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a meeting of former Wehrmacht officers issued the Himmelrod memorandum. A forty page document, this statement exonerated the German military of its crimes, laid the blame for the genocide of the European Jews at Hitler’s door, and elaborated the intent of the German military to rearm.

In this objective, they found a surprising ally in US President Dwight Eisenhower. The latter made clear his respect and admiration for the German officer corps, unsullied by the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. By placing a strong distinction between the German military hierarchy and the Nazi party echelons, Eisenhower assisted in cultivating a collective amnesia regarding the German military’s criminal conduct and massacres, especially in the war against the Soviet Union.

The Himmelrod memorandum was so named after the 12th century monastery where the attendees met. If the honour and reputation of the German military was restored, and the stains of the Holocaust and mass slaughter of ethnic minorities removed, then the US and Britain could supply the West German military with all the armaments they needed. A new bulwark against the Soviet bloc was born.

One of the thousands of Wehrmacht officers rehabilitated and put in charge of West Germany’s rearmament programme was General Hans Speidel (1897 – 1984). Chief of staff of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Speidel had a long and fruitful career carrying out the Nazi military’s mission in occupied Europe.

While conspiring with the coup plotters in the July 1944 scheme to assassinate Hitler, he was unaware of the actual bombing of Hitler’s headquarters. Using his connections with the anti-Hitler officers as anti-Nazi credentials, Speidel surrendered to Allied troops at the conclusion of the war.

One of the post-war architects of West Germany’s rearmament, Speidel along with his former Wehrmacht colleagues, waged an incessant propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the honour of the German army. Here was a German officer, ready and willing to be used as a weapon against the Soviets in the Cold War.

In May 1955, the West German state was officially declared as having the authority of a sovereign state – the Federal Republic of Germany. Its armed forces were now known as the Bundeswehr.

Speidel’s efforts in rearming Germany, and aligning with NATO, were handsomely rewarded. In 1957, barely twelve years after the end of the Second World War, Speidel was appointed commander in chief of NATO Allied forces in Central Europe. Speidel was one of numerous officers who managed the integration of the Bundeswehr, the reconstituted armed forces of West Germany, into the NATO command structure.

Why is all this relevant today?

Current German chancellor Friedrich Merz announced, earlier this year, that Germany will embark on a massive rearmament programme, with thousands of new troops to be recruited for a confrontation with Russia. European nations, such as Germany, will increase their proportion of GDP on military spending to five percent of the national budget. Merz pledged that Germany will have the strongest conventional forces in Europe.

In a way, Churchill’s original proposal for the Flensburg government as a militarised sledgehammer against Russia is coming to fruition.

Hulk Hogan, arguably the world’s most famous professional wrestler and showman simp for American imperial power, died earlier this month. A fixture on our TV screens, his larger-than-life persona encapsulated the decaying rot at the heart of American political and social culture. He was MAGA before there was such a term.

There is no doubt that Hogan (his real name was Terry Gene Bollea) was an expert at self-promotion. His talent for turning his individual persona into a marketing brand is exemplary – if you are interested in egomaniacal hyper-competitive individualism. He had support in that area – his willingness to be used as a flag bearing American propaganda tool certainly helped him acquire publicity and media exposure.

For instance, Hogan fought the ‘Iron Sheikh’ in the ring, back in the 1980s. The villain, played by a former bodyguard to the deposed Shah of Iran, represented everything about Iran and the wider Middle East. You see, sheikhs, Arabs, Iranians, all mangled together in one simplistic easy-to-hate stereotype.

Hogan, the fake-tanned, steroid-muscled all American hero, was there to avenge the loss of Iran, avenge the Americans taken hostage in Lebanon, inflicting a heavy defeat on the oil-wealthy Arab sheikhs (never matter than Iranians are Persians and not Arabs) – Hogan’s tree-trunk sized arms did all the talking.

The Iron Sheikh had a signature move very cleverly named the ‘camel clutch.’ See, isn’t that hilarious – Middle Eastern people and camels, do you get it? That move, though proving to be a winner for the Sheikh against lesser opponents, was not enough to stop our hero. Escaping from that vice-like grip, Hogan triumphantly smashed the Iron Sheikh, claiming victory. Let’s not focus on the fact that WWE wrestling is all rehearsed beforehand and scripted.

The crowd chanted ‘USA! USA!’ repeatedly, the villainous Iranian/Arab sheikh was vanquished, and everything was right with the world again.

I never hated Hulk Hogan, even though I was familiar with what he stood for. Hating him would have conferred a certain type of legitimation. Hating him would have meant paying attention to him. Ignoring him was a way of demonstrating that he was beneath contempt.

Over the years, and after his appearance in the Rocky III movie, we got to know the fraudulent and cowardly personality beneath the hype. His racist rants, his scabbing behaviour informing on his wrestling friends when the latter tried to form a union, accusations of domestic violence against him – the carefully staged-managed persona was starting to wear thin.

Carl Beijer, writing in Jacobin magazine, elaborates on the self-absorbed careerist who successfully hid the dark side of his character from the public. A pop culture icon, he did not elevate wrestling from a backwater sport to a national level for love of the game. He did it for his first and only true love – himself.

Later in life, he claimed to have found Jesus, supporting evangelical Christians, and graduated to his last public act – the shouting, shirt-tearing endorsement of the MAGA cult at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Bizarrely, he actually struggled to rip off his shirt. The MAGA cesspit was his true home, reinforcing and celebrating his hyper-competitive individualism as a virtue.

Let me tell you about an incredibly strong, successful athletic weightlifter – Yurik Vardanyan (1956 – 2018). An athlete of small stature, his career as a weightlifter is extraordinary. Competing for his native Soviet Armenia as part of the USSR’s Olympic weightlifting team, he broke records and won gold medals. If anyone wants evidence of his remarkable strength, just take a look at his training regimen. He was able, with a single bound from a standing position, jump over the gymnast vaulting horse multiple times unassisted.

He was the first weightlifter in his category (82.5 kilos) to achieve a cumulative 400 kilogram lift. Awarded the Order of Lenin in 1985, he remained loyal to his nation throughout the difficult times of the Soviet dissolution and accompanying humanitarian chaos of the early 1990s.

He never sought glory or riches for himself, at the expense of his fellow citizens. Passing away in 2018, his funeral was an occasion for sadness, and also respect for his outstanding accomplishments in sport. There was no fanfare, no marketing or branding, no self-promotion during his career. Just a genuine and talented sportsperson dedicated to his chosen sport and his country.

His life is the lesson from which we should be learning.

The two nations mentioned in the title above are separated by geography, culture, language differences and history. One is part of the Arab and Islamic world, the other is part of Latin America. So why combine the two? Because both cases are instructive in the way we in Australia (and in the wider Anglophone community) approach and understand these two distinct nations. Our view of the Global South – and both Kuwait and Panama are part of that informal collective – is informed by the way the Anglo-American imperium treats the Global South community.

In the early 1990s, as American forces built up their military presence in Saudi Arabia for an attack on Iraq, the putative rationale offered by the corporate controlled media was that Iraq had illegally invaded and occupied Kuwait. True enough on the surface, but hardly a convincing reason for the massive military buildup.

Kuwait had actually been part of Iraq for centuries, carved out as a supposedly independent emirate by the British colonial empire in the 1920s. Resistance to the enforced separation of Kuwait from Iraq continued well into the 1930s. The histories of Iraq and Kuwait are inextricably entwined.

The imposition of a British-backed petromonarchy in Kuwait, personified by the Al-Sabah family, continues until today. That is important to note, because during the brief Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait, the major Anglo-American media outlets provided favourable and routine coverage of the ‘resistance’ – those Kuwaitis who supported the Al-Sabah royal family.

We were offered the viewpoint of Kuwaiti royalist supporters, shedding tears (and fake news stories – remember the ‘Iraqis are killing babies in hospital incubators story?) about the terrible privations of Kuwaitis groaning under the weight of foreign occupation.

The Palestinians of Kuwait, who largely occupied a role as a class of workers and servants for Kuwaitis, were expelled en masse for their support of the Iraqi military. Supporting a foreign military is a wrong move to be sure. However, after decades of mistreatment by the Kuwaiti royal authorities, the Palestinians could be forgiven for their all-too-human resentful miscalculation.

After the Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait in 1991, that nation basically fell off the radar of the Anglophone media complex. That is interesting, because in recent times, Kuwaiti voices have risen again.

No, not the obsequious and cowardly Kuwaitis begging at the feet of the Al-Sabah royal family and its American supporters, but Kuwaitis like Osamah Al-Abdulrahim, the secretary general of the Kuwaiti Progressive Movement. He gave his evaluation of the current global political and economic situation, which was published in Peoples Dispatch magazine.

He spoke about the decline of imperial hegemony, and the rise of a multilateral order. Why did we not hear the voices of Kuwaitis like him in our corporation-dominated media landscape? His perspective does not align with the massive US propaganda drive – reinforced by a compliant Australian media – to go to war in 1990-91 on false premises.

In the period 1989-91, there was another war that the US waged on false pretences – the regime change operation in Panama. Conducted ostensibly to oust the narco-trafficking regime of Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega, the misleadingly named Operation Just Cause was fought to implement a strict capitalist neoliberal regime on Panama.

I wrote about the underlying hypocrisies of the US propaganda drive that accompanied that particular war. Noriega himself was a product of American intelligence activities in that nation, spying on leftist students and activists in his younger days. He actively supported the drug trafficking trade, all done under the watchful eye and connivance of the CIA.

The US military invasion of Panama, we were informed, was done to restore democracy and economic fairness in that nation. Well, that is interesting, because there is a huge movement for democratic change and economic fairness going on right now in Panama.

At least since the beginning of this year, thousands of Panamanian workers, peasants, urban and rural poor are waging an economic and political struggle against the ultrarightist and US-backed government of President Jose Mulino.

Mulino, in his younger days, agitated among the Panamanian oligarchs to support a US invasion of his country in 1989. He has violently suppressed trade unions and labour organisers. His economic policies reward the ultrawealthy at the expense of the working class. His administration works to serve the mining-financial oligarchy, nothing more.

This upsurge of political struggle in Panama has been met with virtual silence in the corporate controlled media. Yes, we have all heard about Trump’s proposal to re-annex the Panama Canal. His proposal has been rebuffed with scorn and derision inside Panama. Other than that, we have heard nothing about what the Panamanian workers and peasants are demanding.

If the media only act as an ideological adjunct of US regime change operations, then they cease to act as journalists and become propagandists. Stenographers for regime change are a dime a dozen. It is time for the media to behave like journalists – as insurgents against the doctrines and abuses of the rich and powerful.

The sport of baseball has always been a bit of a mystery to me, with its detailed statistics and multiple leagues of players. The sporting accomplishments of prominent baseballers are definitely worthy of admiration. There is something unique about hitting a home run, and doing it consistently.

Another athletic endeavour requiring skill and stamina with statistical complexities is cricket. Wildly popular in Australia – similarly to other former British colonies – cricket is regarded as a national sport, the cricketing team players as role models for the younger generation (let’s not talk about the cricketers who cheated).

Let’s unpack this subject.

No, I do not want to subscribe to a baseball news feed. There are enough newsletters, substack articles, email subscriptions and multiple online news sources to read. I do not think that anyone gets up in the morning and says ‘I’d like to read another email newsletter on my day off!’

There are numerous statistics in baseball, metrics that measure the success or otherwise of individual players. For instance; Runs batted in (RBI) – is a crucial metric. A batter’s success, runs scored, is measured by counting the plays that allow making a run. This is not just an individual batter knocking the ball out of the park, though that is counted. Let’s say that a batter hits the ball, allowing a player at a forward base to complete to home – that run is credited to the batter.

There are similar statistics in softball and cricket.

Scoring runs is not the only story in American baseball. Overcoming racial discrimination is also an important part of understanding baseball in the US. Making it into the major leagues, becoming an All-Star, is a culturally significant event in the sporting world.

Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues baseball, overcame rigid racial barriers and cultural stereotypes imposed his career. The only other player who arguably faced as much discrimination and ethnic hatred as Robinson was a contemporary of his; Hank Greenberg (1911 – 1986).

Greenberg was Jewish, and Jews were regarded as the ultimate outsiders. Vilified as Christ-killers, Jews were considered an internal threat to the mainstream Anglophone American community. While Jewish people eventually came to be regarded as white in the capitalist racial pyramid, they still faced racial barriers in the wider society.

Nicknamed the ‘Hebrew Hammer’, Greenberg was a strong, competitive, 6 feet 4 inches tall athlete, who won an athletics scholarship to attend college. While he excelled in a number of sports, he shone most brightly in baseball. Playing in the Major Leagues mainly for the Detroit Tigers, he served in the US Army Air Corps in World War 2.

A prodigiously talented batter, he rivalled Babe Ruth in his batting averages.

His courage at the batting plate was matched by his bravery in confronting antisemitic hatred. He is described in The Conversation as the best baseball player you have never heard of. Initially, Greenberg resented being described as the best Jewish baseballer. He wanted to be know as simply a great baseballer. In time, he realised how important it was that his ethnic background was accepted by the wider community. He was one of the few players to support Jackie Robinson publicly.

He was never a religiously devout person, but he embraced and defended his cultural identity as a Jew in a time when antisemitism was rife.

Afghanistan’s cricketing success

Cricket, another sport which requires batters to score runs for their team against a fielding opposition, has a massive worldwide following in the former colonial possessions of the British empire. Afghanistan is one such nation.

The Afghan cricket team has performed exceptionally well; they defeated the Australians in 2024. We like to think that our cricketers are endowed with remarkable superhuman prowess – losing at the hands of nonwhite nations is too horrid an outcome to contemplate. I always cheer for the underdog, in this case, Afghanistan.

Let’s leave aside the defeat of the Australian cricketing superpower to the Afghans, and concentrate on a more important issue.

The Afghani cricketers, who emerged from the refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s, are from the majority Pashtun ethnic group. Fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the ‘80s, they absorbed a love of cricket while in exile. The Afghan national team, triumphant on the international stage, is made up exclusively of Pashtuns.

The other ethnicities that make up the Afghan population – Hazaras, Tajiks – are dominating the soccer team. While the cricket is regarded as a national sport, the Taliban regime has largely excluded ethnic minorities from the cricket, and thus exacerbated the ethnic and religious schisms dividing the nation.

While Pashtun refugees mostly fled to Pakistan, where cricket is encouraged, the non-Pashtun refugees fled to Iran and Central Asian states, where soccer is the national sport. From 2001, returning refugees brought their socially inherited particularities with them. This sporting schism is reflected in the makeup of post-2021 Afghanistan, after the Taliban regained state power.

We all know that the Taliban enforces a rigid gender apartheid in sporting and cultural activities. Women are banned from playing cricket. They also enforce an ethnic schism, a kind of Pashtun supremacism at the expense of ethnic minorities. The Afghan soccer team, while ethnically mixed, is not promoted as heavily and consistently as the cricket team.

The spiritually uplifting success of the Afghan cricket team, however, notable, is overshadowed by the ongoing gender and ethnic segregation that divided the Afghan homeland. Let’s work towards a world where sport is not only an avenue of upward social mobility, but a genuinely inclusive level playing field.

What is happening to reading in the age of AI? This is the subject of a June article in The Atlantic by Joshua Rothman. He examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on reading and writing skills. In particular, he looks at the changes currently occurring to reading. You may think reading is a mundane activity, relatively unchanged since the invention of the printing press. However, you would be profoundly mistaken.

To be sure, the traditional printed book is definitely not going obsolete. People still enjoy the published copy. However, we all recognise that in this era of digitisation, books are increasingly available online.

The rise of fully digitised books is an alternative to buying the printed copy, especially if the book has long been out of print, Audiobooks are a booming sector, and internet users like myself regard their mobile devices as portable libraries. The classics of literature are hardly going out of style; Penguin Publishers, for instance, still maintains a strong and diverse collection of printed classics.

Nevertheless, there has been a decline in the sales of printed books. This is understandable, given the availability of information via digital media. Hey, I read books online, if they are available. Rather than shelling out thirty or forty dollars for a paperback, I would much prefer reading the book for free online – or buy a cheap secondhand copy.

There is no need to panic regarding the cultural shift to digital media. No, books are not going to disappear any time soon.

There is undoubtedly a shift taking place in reading and writing. We had the Gutenberg era – where the published book or magazine media dominated our consumption of information. We are moving into the Zuckerberg era, where digitisation and social media are the dominant forms of information distribution.

The literary classics – what we classify as the great works of our cultural canon – are freely available and accessible online. Does this make them part and parcel of the digital world? No, they are not. Why is that? The way we read them, digitised on the internet, is not what makes them classics. The way these books were conceived, constructed, published and distributed were part of the nondigital world.

What makes a book a classic? Its universal themes, the longevity of the topics it addresses, its relevance for contemporary times, and its ability to withstand the test of time. One such publication that is considered a classic today is Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt, a German born American philosopher and scholar, covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The latter had been living in Argentina since the conclusion of the Second World War. Kidnapped by Mossad agents, Eichmann was taken to Jerusalem where he was put on trial for his role in the genocide of European Jews.

Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and executed by hanging in 1962. Arendt’s serialised reporting and analysis of the Eichmann trial was compiled into book form and published in 1963.

What is especially unique about this book? Arendt, examining Eichmann’s defence in court, concluded that for crimes such as the Holocaust to occur, it is necessary that bureaucratic officials such as Eichmann obey orders and follow through without question. Arendt devised the concept of the banality of evil; Eichmann, at least according to his own account of his wartime activities, was a functionary in a gigantic killing machine. All he did was implement the instructions given to him from on high.

The execution of evil, according to Arendt’s book, does not require a colour, or an identity. The functionaries, the faceless nonentities staffing the machine, were all that were needed to carry out the Holocaust.

Now, you and I know, and Arendt knew, that Eichmann was being dishonest about his past, to say the least. He was a very committed and fanatical Nazi, dedicated to the ideology of white supremacy and antisemitism. The glue that held the entire Nazi hierarchy together, and underpinned their actions, was racial supremacy. Eichmann understood full well that Nazi-occupied Europe was to be made Judenrein – Jew free.

Arendt’s observations were uniquely her own; she took copious notes, covered every aspect of the trial, and studiously observed the reactions of the foreign media. The book conveys something of the sense of occasion – if that description can be applied to a trial. Its historic and political significance were apparent to all who participated in, and observed, the trial.

AI, for all its convenience and speed in producing text, does not have intentionality. It cannot know what is going on in the minds of human observers and participants. If you ask AI about the Eichmann trial, you will receive a good answer in record time. It will cover all the important points of that event. However, AI is nothing but a stochastic parrot, fed with reams of data and text, with which it churns out answers according to a probabilistic algorithm.

AI’s large language models (LLM)s can string together linguistic constructions with astronomical speed, saving you time and money. In a matter of seconds, you will have essay-length answers to your questions. But always remember that AI is only as good as what we feed it; it relies on plagiarism, with thousands of AI workers busy in the background creating text to feed the synthetic intelligence machine.

The outcome of relying on AI will be the triumph of the mediocre; the monotonous output of AI slop. The algorithm decides what strings of words to combine, without deciding the credibility or legitimacy of the ideas contained in them.

Please use AI if you want to, but do not make major decisions or life changes based on its output. As I have written previously, in times of cascading crises and multiple emergencies, everyone turns to the classics for guidance.

Are you a logical, rational thinker? Then you are primarily left-brained. Are you a creative, artistic type? Then you are right-brained. That is the story we tell ourselves. It has a commonsense appeal; we like to categorise people into distinct groupings. The brain has hemispheres, and particular human behaviours are controlled by specific locations in the brain, right?

The left-brained/right-brained dichotomy is false – we all use both hemispheres of the brain. It is true that functional lateralisation is apparent in the brain; the left hemisphere is where language is largely controlled. Damage to Broca’s area, for instance, located in the front left temporal lobe, impairs a person’s ability to understand and process language.

No, your personality and abilities do not depend on which hemisphere of the brain you use.

There has been extensive research on split-brain patients; the latter have had their corpus callosum severed. The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerves which connects the two hemispheres. Interruption to this interhemispheric transmission of information impacts a patient’s perception, motor skills, spatial reasoning and language processing. No, still this does not mean we all fit neatly into left/right brained personality or temperament types.

From the 1960s onwards, psychologist and neuroscientist Roger Sperry (1913 – 1994), and his protege, the psychologist Michael Gazzaniga (1939 – ) undertook pioneering experiments on split-brain patients. Numerous epileptic patients, who were experiencing multiple uncontrollable and violent seizures, underwent an invasive brain operation – cutting the corpus callosum.

This procedure, which is rarely if ever used today, effectively separated the hemispheres of the brain. Did this procedure have any impact on a patient’s mental abilities?

Sperry and Gazzaniga designed and conducted a series of clever experiments; each hemisphere was exposed to images or tactile stimuli. Would the patient understand what they were seeing or doing? The brain’s wiring, as it stands, means that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and vice versa.

A patient was asked to stare at a dot – and then an image, say of a circle, was flashed to their right eye only. Language processing is located in the left hemisphere. The patient could articulate the image they saw.

However, if a circle was flashed to their left eye only, that information was sent to the isolated right hemisphere. The patient could not verbally identify what they witnessed. However, using their left hand, they successfully pointed to a picture of a circle.

That is just one example of an entire range of experiments conducted by Sperry and Gazzaniga. Does this mean that consciousness can be localised? Can the sense of self be divided? Is the mind entirely dependent on the successful functioning of neurons and synaptic activity in the brain?

Here is where pop psychology took hold.

The notion of the brain as a computer, and a corresponding computational theory of mind, ascended into widespread popularity after the Second World War. Brain lateralisation was a hot topic; identifying which areas of the brain controlled which functions gave us an image of the brain as a compact Swiss army-knife. Each component, equally important, fit smoothly into a single compartment.

Added to that was the rise of computerisation. Conceiving of the brain/mind duality as a hardware/software analogy gained public popularity.

It is heartening to see a major IT company, Atlassian, respond to this myth of left/right brain dominance with a debunking. Certainly, the right hemisphere is largely responsible for processing spatial and visual cues, which are important in producing art. But consider the following; physics, mathematics, cosmology and so on, are creative endeavours, each in their own way.

Solving mathematical problems, or resolving questions in physics and astronomy, requires not just logical deductions and pure rationality, but also thinking creatively. Einstein was a giant of twentieth century physics, and he also approached scientific questions with remarkable creativity.

Ironically, over the last 25 years, new neuroscience research has emphasised the importance of neuroplasticity. The brain is not a Swiss Army knife with specific components. The hemispheres of the brain work together. The brain is not a computer, but an entire network of interlocking and interdependent computers.

Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain to evolve and respond to life experiences. While the left hemisphere is heavily involved in language processing, the right hemisphere is responsible for understanding intonation and pitch. Have we all forgotten that one of the most important stages of human communication and experience is nonverbal communication. Language would not be possible without the ability to express and process nonverbal cues.

So what if this neuromyth of being left/right brained persists? What is the harm? When self help books, corporate bonding courses, and social media pop quizzes are all telling you that you are right-brained and therefore artistic, does that encourage you to pursue maths or the sciences? What happens when a 13 year old is told that s/he is left-brained and mathematically inclined – would they pursue art, painting or creative writing?

What happens when a person – whether a child, an adolescent or an adult – makes life decisions that will impact them over decades on the basis of a neuromyth? For generations, we have advised schoolgirls that they are ‘bad at math’. Are we doing them a favour by stating to them that their aptitude for maths is determined by the brain hemisphere they use?

While the current article is not the place to bring up issues regarding current politics, one observation will suffice here. Muslim majority nations are leading the world in women graduating in STEM subjects. Women working as scientists have been comprehensively interviewed over the years from Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and other Muslim majority nations. So when it comes to mathematics, engineering and subjects requiring logical and analytical thinking, women’s brains are outpacing the men’s.

We all have our talents, skills and abilities. No, we cannot be good at everything. But please, dispense with this myth that we are the products of left/right brain predominance.