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Articles by Herbert Bushman
Double Effect and Human Rights in War
When, in June, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their conduct in Gaza, the Conservative government objected that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Israeli citizens. Last week, the new Labour incumbents of No. 10 abandoned that challenge. But lack of jurisdiction is only the weakest ground for objection.
What I Learnt Interviewing Jihadists
My guest, Suha Hassen, is originally from Iraq and now lives in the United States, where she is currently a doctoral candidate at George Mason University's School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Suha's work is crucial in promoting global safety by countering extremist narratives. In this conversation, Suha discusses the shifting dynamics within Islam, including how Hamas, traditionally Sunni, is moving towards Shiaism.
Podcast #246: How Gender Activists Took Over a Scottish Rape-Crisis Centre
Introduction Jonathan Kay:Welcome to the Quillette podcast. Iâm your host, Jonathan Kay. Todayâs guest is Joan Smith, whom our Quillette readers will know from her detailed and scathing articles about the state of gender politics in Scotland, including her most recent offering, which appeared on August 4th, under the title, Gaslighting Scottish Rape Victims in the Name of Trans Inclusion.
Two Wars, a Wedding, and a Funeral
The article that follows forms part of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialised Quillette history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This is the eleventh instalment, and the sixth dedicated to the Huns. To read previous instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, click here.
The Debate Over Lab-Grown Meat
On 1 May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced that the sale of cultured meat grown from animal stem cells in a laboratory has now been banned in his state. “While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption,” he explained, “Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef.” John Fetterman, the junior senator for Pennsylvania and a Democrat, endorsed the move the following day.
Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full’
NOTE: The following essay discusses A Man in Full—the new Netflix series and the Tom Wolfe novel on which it is based. There are spoilers throughout. I. The new six-part Netflix miniseries A Man In Full is a binge-worthy piece of entertainment that bears little relation to the 1998 Tom Wolfe novel of the same name on which it is based. The show is written and created by David E.
Showdown in Champagne
The article that follows forms part of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized Quillette history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This is the tenth instalment, and the fifth dedicated to the Huns. To read previous instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, click here.
No, There Are No "Trans" Animals
Pity the poor clownfish—a brightly coloured creature, once made famous by the 2003 animated film Finding Nemo, which has now been reduced to a prop in the ongoing debate about sex and gender identity. That’s because, unlike mammals (including humans), clownfish are what scientists call “sequential hermaphrodites” of the protandrous variety. What this means is that while every clownfish starts out as male, some switch sexes if a female is needed by the school.
The Delta Variant
Measuring social change by particular expressions of popular culture is an imperfect science. A hit novel, song, or TV show may tell us something about the values of the underlying society that generated it. Alternatively, it may simply be a single illustration selected to support a pre-existing hypothesis, easily countered by illustrations that demonstrate the opposite. Sometimes a fad is just a fad.
El NYT distorsiona la historia del conflicto israelí-palestino
Este artículo de Benny Morris se publicó originalmente en inglés en Quillette.com el 27 de febrero de 2024. Como vimos en el salvaje asalto de Hamas al sur de Israel el 7 de octubre, los palestinos ciertamente han sido protagonistas activos en su batalla de más de un siglo contra el sionismo e Israel. Pero el New York Times lo presentaría de otra manera.
The Prophet of October 7?
A review of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz; 464 pages; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 2024). Most observers deemed the Hamas attack on October 7 to be a shocking and brutal orgy of torture, murder, rape, and abduction. But not a Somali-American writer named Najma Sharif, who tweeted, “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” That tweet was liked by over 100,000 people, including a Washington Post journalist.
Under Attila’s Gaze
The article that follows forms part of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized Quillette history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This instalment is the fourth dedicated to the Huns. To read previous instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, click here. Priscus of Panium was an Eastern Roman government official based in Constantinople, and was in his thirties when he undertook his famous journey to the lands of the Huns.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh: “Jew Hatred Never Died, It Just Mutated”
Pamela Paresky: So you are Israel's Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism. Tell me a little bit about that role and also tell me what you did before you came into that role. Michal Cotler-Wunsh: So in many, many ways everything that I did before coming into this role prepared me to hit the ground running when appointed to this role.
Funhouse-Mirror Fusionism
After the end of the Second World War, the American Old Right underwent a transformation from being a loosely connected band of libertarians, nativists, and isolationists towards a more cohesive ideological conservative movement aimed at confronting the threat of collectivism and atheism posed by the Soviet Union abroad and the left at home.
Johann Blumenbach: The First Race Scientist
The concept of race, we are often told, is a social construct with no basis in biological reality. Some have argued that it was invented by white Europeans for the express purpose of constructing a racial hierarchy in order to justify slavery. According to cultural critic Kenan Malik, “Racism gave birth to race. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black.
Attila Invictus
The article that follows forms part of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized Quillette history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This instalment is the third dedicated to the Huns. For previous instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, click here. We left off last time in the mid-430s C.E., with Theodosius II, the long-serving Roman Emperor in the East, praying for the demise of the Hunnic warlord Rugila.
A Gathering of the Huns
What follows is the seventh instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This instalment is the second dedicated to the Huns. The first five instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, may be found here. Though the Huns were formidable at the time they first burst into Roman consciousness by driving the Goths south across the Danube, they were not yet a unified nation.
Western Europe’s Forgotten Nightmare Original
A common strategy for marketing history books is to promise readers that the author will completely upend their understanding of the modern world. Thus do we get titles such as How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (Arthur Herman), and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the Worldby Mark Kurlansky (an author who’d already written another book offering similarly earth-shattering claims about the history of salt).
Sir Roger Deakins-An Englishman in LA
The sleek Leica gallery in Los Angeles is currently hosting a quintessentially English exhibition—39 arresting stills captured by Sir Roger Deakins, one of the most esteemed cinematographers of our time. Spanning five decades, the monochrome photographs are taken from Deakins’s 2021 book Byways—a title inspired by the time he spent as a young man during the early ’70s “wandering the byways” of north Devon in the southwest of England.
From out of the Steppes, a ‘Whirlwind of Nations’
What follows is the latest instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. The first five instalments of this series traced the history of the Goths. In this sixth instalment, the author begins a new arc dedicated to the Huns. “Filimer, King of the Goths…found among his people certain witches…He expelled them from the midst of his people and compelled them to wander in exile far from his army.
How Superhero Franchises Are Killing Original Cinema
This has been a tumultuous year for the American film industry. Numerous high-budget films have bombed at the box office, actors have gone on strike, and streaming services continue to threaten Hollywood’s traditional business model. Amid this upheaval, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) became an unlikely blockbuster. Oppenheimer is very different from most popular films of the past fifteen years: it’s not a superhero movie or a sequel to a film series that peaked in the 1980s.
The Greatest American Western Novel of All
When Cormac McCarthy died in June of this year, much was written about his 1985 western novel Blood Meridian, which many literary highbrows over the years (Harold Bloom, Saul Bellow, George Steiner, etc.) have claimed is not just a great western but one of the great masterpieces in all of American literature.
The Long Road to Aquitaine
What follows is the fifth instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. We left off last time with the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 C.E. and its immediate aftermath. Having plundered the birthplace of the Roman Empire, the Gothic king, Alaric I, took his followers south to attempt a crossing to Sicily, but was thwarted by the Goths’ (seemingly congenital) inability to properly operate boats.
The Deadly Logic of Decolonization
When the Khmer Rouge embarked on their genocidal campaign against the Cambodian people in 1975, they aspired to mold Cambodia into a self-sufficient, socialist, agrarian society, emancipated from all foreign influence.
A Roman Trauma
What follows is the fourth instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. In our last instalment, we left off with the Western Roman Empire’s crumbling Rhine defenses under assault from west German tribes, whose members were now pouring across the border.
King of the Goths
What follows is the third instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. When we left off at the end of the second instalment, we saw the Goths victorious at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 C.E., having killed the Roman Emperor Valens (r. 364-378) and destroyed his army. The Balkans were exposed, and general war followed.
The Communication Revolution
The first printed work to emerge from Johann Gutenberg’s press in Mainz, Germany was the Ars Minor: a Latin grammar guide intended for schoolmasters and students. The success of the Ars Minor—and of a sideline in printed papal indulgences—convinced Gutenberg to risk embarking on the ambitious project of producing a Bible in 1455. The Gutenberg Bible did not make its printer’s fortune; he was declared bankrupt later that year. But it was a formidable advertisement for the potential of printing.
‘Augie March’ Turns 70
Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of numerous books, including Reading Blake’s Songs, Writer’s Block, Revision and Romantic Authorship, The Life of Kingsley Amis, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915–1964,and The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965–2005. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing.
Strange New Sci Fi
Classic Star Trek is not Shakespeare. It has always been the sort of show in which aliens could steal Spock’s brain, or Dr Crusher could fall in love with a Scottish space ghost. It sometimes screwed up—sometimes the plot dragged, the ending didn’t make sense, or the wacky science went too far and broke its own rules—but still, it was always primarily about trying to tell a good story. Strange New Worlds is different. There’s less emphasis on story, more on being the right kind of show.
Huns to the North. Romans to the South
What follows is the second instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. I left off our story last time with the defeat of the Gothic leader Canabaudes by the Roman Emperor Aurelian in 271 C.E. That successful campaign led to a period of peace on the Empire’s Danube frontier.
Our Lost Classical Learning
Ancient Athens was perhaps the first state in history in which substantial numbers of citizens were literate, and ideas were able to circulate freely. Literacy eroded the gulf between rulers and ruled and made possible the creation of a radically new kind of human society. For perhaps the first time, every free man could criticise and question officials and this was often portrayed as desirable and valuable.
But is it a Bernini? A Tale of Contested Identity in the Art World
The permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto contains a bronze sculpture entitled The Crucified Christ (Corpus) and attributed to the seventeenth-century Roman artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The piece was donated to the art gallery by the late Murray Frum in 2006. What isn't well known is that the bronze was lost to history for centuries, and even after decades on the art market, the campaign to attribute the work to Bernini only began about twenty years ago.
Rise of the Goths
What follows is the first instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized narrative adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast, which began airing in 2021. In telling the story of the Early Middle Ages—once called The Dark Ages, a term that has now fallen from favor among most historians—I’ve decided to begin with the last hundred years or so of the Western Roman Empire, with a focus on the groups that the Romans described as barbarians.
Not a Genocide
The movement to describe Canada’s system of Indian Residential Schools as a “genocide” has been gaining momentum since the late twentieth century. That momentum became stronger in 2021, when it was claimed that the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children who’d attended these schools had been found using ground-penetrating radar. While none of those claimed graves have yet been found, the social panic that followed the initial announcements has not fully abated.
The Ideological Refusal to Acknowledge Evolved Sex Differences
Much remains to be learned about the nature and origins of various sex differences, but more is known than most people realize. Much of the current confusion is generated by activists who suppress, attack, and distort information on sex differences in order to reinforce their preferred ideological narratives.
Captain Cook and the Colonial Paradox
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Don't Blame Police Racism for America's Violence Epidemic
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My Misspent Years of Conspiracism
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The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
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