Deep, collective fear about state of our world has kept me awake

It intensified as I trudged towards my Thursday bedtime.

It was a feeling I hadn’t felt since my late teens, freaking out that the Falklands War was going to conscript me and my raggedy student pals.

Lying in the dark, I had a lurch of deep, collective fear. The fear said: these wars might be coming to my doorstep.

We could all be in big trouble. I’m angry at my fear (if that makes sense). There’s nothing that raises my hackles more than a phalanx of establishment figures – politicians, generals, pundits, arms manufacturers – urging us to be “war-ready”, or get into a “pre-war” state.

This requires the construction of a “demonic” national enemy, where leadership and people are fused into one monstrous and threatening mass. When we know, from our mildest observations of human social nature, that this cannot be so.

READ MORE: Labour slammed for continuing Israeli arms sales secrecy

I also presume that a military-industrial complex stands ready to benefit from such a drumbeat. And that it’s not just the arms dealers beating out the rhythm.

Characters like the Corbynite-turned-Starmerist journalist Paul Mason have been pushing for a “belligerent left”. This is a policy position where British and European rearmament deters Russian and Chinese advance – but also provides high-skill, high-paying jobs for happy, unionised workers.

That’s a twisted but familiar old story, one which Elvis Costello’s song Shipbuilding brilliantly depicts.

So it’s usually not difficult for me to maintain some critical distance from war-mongerers and war-mongering. But my stumble into deep fearfulness came from a cascade of scenarios, themselves arising from a clatter of sabre-rattling commentary.

The prospect of an isolationist Trump/Vance administration, allowing Russian adventuring into post-communist states; those actions triggering some kind of reaction and mobilisation among Nato powers; and then, the shattered everyday life of a war-torn Ukraine coming to me and my own. (Assuming, that is, some deployment of “tactical battlefield nukes” hadn’t already thrown the entire table over.)

J D Vance has been named as Donald Trump's running mate in the US presidential election

Result: eyes wide open, staring into the night.

It’s the drama of conventional militarist wisdom that seizes your scare-able brain. If “Putin” (again, that useless personification of a vast, complex society) wins in Ukraine, then it “sends a message” to other dictators/oligarchs that “might is right”. So, bye-bye Taiwan.

If Russia is victorious in Ukraine, then 27% of the world’s grain production is under its control. A “stranglehold” leading to a “price war”! So we must win!

How do you dissolve the sweeping certitudes that these leaderships and nations are the only “players”, the real agents, in these crises? Of course mass and sustained public protest is one way, as recently evidenced by the millions taking to the streets, opposing the Israeli army and state’s murderous behaviour in Gaza.

In a world of omniveillance, with networked cameras and screens in every hand, it’s been impossible to suppress the bearing of witness to carnage and cruelty. Watch enough of that, and your feet take themselves to the streets.

But it’s also possible to get behind monolithic personifications like “Putin’s Russia” and “Xi Jinping’s China”, and begin to perceive the swirl and motion of the social humans behind them.

READ MORE: UN court says Israel's presence in Palestine occupied territories 'unlawful'

Last week, I suggested that a regular scanning of the op-ed pages of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper could keep your mind open – particularly to the domestic forces amassed against Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. This week, I’ve discovered a similar publication that also displays the suppressed energies and resistances of Russian society: The Moscow Times (MT).

Launched in Moscow in 1992, and evicted from there in 2022, MT is now based in Amsterdam. It’s majority owned by a Russian airline-services tycoon. Yet it has been deemed both a “foreign agent” and an “undesirable organisation” by the Russian authorities.

Does the paper justify that? Scanning it yesterday, its reporting on the failures and setbacks of the Russian military in Ukraine (which has already been outlawed in 2022) certainly would. If you want to read about the status of the 600 explicitly political prisoners in Russian jails, it’s laid out here.

“The goal is to exercise control, for which it is unnecessary to deprive people of freedom. Scaring them is enough for that”, writes Leonid Gosman. “The number of people frightened into silence by repression is tens of thousands of times greater than the number of people in prison.”

But The Moscow Times does a very good job of reporting on the fearless. There are pieces on how tattooing conveys protest messages. Another piece on how the use of VPNs (virtual private networks, which mask the location of an internet user) is so ubiquitous that Russian state services are now blocking them from Apple’s app store.

The Levada Centre, described by MT as Russia’s last independent pollster, recently reported 58% of the population seeking peace talks, with 52% seeing the use of nuclear weapons as “unacceptable”.

Yet we also need to know that the wages of the Russian working class are rising (due to labour shortages and military spending) and that most Russians have been personally insulated from the war.

Two photo-video series on “Generation P” (young adults born in the Putin era) and “Mothers and Daughters” are full of subtleties.

The youth mostly distance themselves from their regime, burrowing deeply into their practices and occupations, assuming things will be better “in a decade”.

As for the spectre of China, we had a visit from a Taiwan visionary to these shores this week. She indicated different ways of being with the superpower than just cutlass-waving. The former minister of digital affairs for Taiwan, Audrey Tang, is a quietly charismatic force. She’s touring the world at the moment, promoting her book Plurality: The Future Of Collaborative Technology And Democracy.

READ MORE: Suella Braverman to defect from Tories to Reform UK, reports suggest

Tang inspires because she (and her fellow geeks) transformed Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in the mid-2010s. They were objecting to the government opening up procurement rules to Chinese suppliers.

But what the movement became was a parallel societal structure. They expressed their objection by better practice, not louder voices.

Taiwan’s army of nerds and coders built alternatives to government services (turning the web address from .gov to .g0v). This compelled the Taiwanese government to reverse its procurement policy – and then open its doors to the participatory energy and skills of Tang’s digital-civic forces.

This was “not protest, but demonstration”, Tang asserted (gently but pointedly) at the Conduit Club in London earlier this week. By which she meant that Taiwan was deepening its democratic structures by inviting citizens to prototype policies, using digital consultation tools. The Taiwanese state then stood ready to listen, learn and utilise the results.

There's a ready-made geopolitical story around this (and one that experts say will be hammered out by the next Trump administration). Which is that Taiwan’s democratic innovations are exactly what an authoritarian China would want to squash. This will make the area an inevitable flashpoint.

Yet there’s a different perspective to be had. As Tang explicitly admitted at the Conduit Club, the many non-Western religious and spiritual traditions in his country are deeply shaping of his compatriots’ behaviour.

This shows up particularly when you consider the miraculous-seeming effectiveness of their digital democracy.

Taiwan’s citizens are already deeply enculturated to interact with digital tools in a beneficial, constructive, pro-social way (meaning they don’t flame out furiously in tribal online wars).

Is there a framing on this where China could learn (and is learning) from Taiwan – especially given the civilisation-deep communitarianism they share? Might the Chinese find new forms of legitimation by studying and adopting Taiwan’s methods and structures – what Tang wittily calls their “nerd immunity”?

Compare this frame to the ruddy-faced bloviations about the military “pivot to China” being emitted by Trump/Vance (and for that matter, Biden). Here’s a way to think about China and Taiwan that is different from the old iron logic, driving towards a mutually assured escalation to war.

Who knows? It might even get me some sleep at night.