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By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican Senator Todd Young on the subject of AI regulation. He’d endured a joke, repeated too many times by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, about the subject of his next film—“It’s another biopic: Schumer.”
The award was sitting on an end table next to Nolan, who was dressed in brown slacks, a gray vest, and a navy suit jacket—his Anglo-formality undimmed by decades spent living in Los Angeles. “It’s heavy, and glass, and good for self-defense,” he said of the award, while filling his teacup. I suggested that it may not be the last trophy he receives this winter. Despite an R-rating and a three-hour runtime, Oppenheimer made nearly $1 billion at the box office, and it’s now the odds-on favorite to win Nolan his first Best Picture and Best Director statuettes at the Oscars.
“Don’t jinx me,” he said.
I had come to ask Nolan about technology—both its promise and its perils—as a theme across his filmography. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation, in which we discuss the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of Interstellar, how Inception anticipated the social-media age, and why he hasn’t yet made a film about artificial intelligence.
Ross Andersen: It’s a low science to infer someone’s worldview from their art. But we now have 12 feature films from you, and thinking about them as a whole, it seems to me that one of the reasons you might have been drawn to Robert Oppenheimer’s story is that, like him, you feel quite conflicted about technology.
Christopher Nolan: I think it’s more that the conflict that a lot of us feel about technology is inherently dramatic. I’ve always been a fan of science fiction, which I think is often better referred to as speculative fiction, where you’re looking at particular trends—technological, but also sociological, economic—and where they might go, and exaggerating the present-day moment. There’s a lot of drama to be derived from that, and I’ve certainly enjoyed playing in that field.
I don’t think of The Dark Knight trilogy, for example, as science fiction per se. But it is speculative fiction. The whole thing with Gotham City was to exaggerate a contemporary American city in all sorts of ways that would bring out some of the more dramatic elements. What my brother’s screenplay for that film brought out very strongly was the idea that surveillance could be pursued through cellphones, and that was way ahead of its time. At the time, the idea that you could image an entire city through cellphones was very improbable and exotic. I remember saying to him, “Are people really going to believe that?” Now I think people sort of view that as our reality.
Andersen: I recently watched The Prestige, and it seemed to me that Nikola Tesla, as you portray him in that film, is a kind of a proto-Oppenheimer.
Nolan: Oh yeah, very much so. I don’t know if you know this, but Tesla was, somewhat controversially, credited with coming up with the concept of mutually assured destruction. When he died—by then having succumbed to a form of madness—government officials descended on the hotel room where he was staying and went through his papers. Please fact-check all of this, by the way. It’s been a long time since I looked at the material. As a filmmaker, you sort of glibly give all of these facts, because in Hollywood, it’s all a sales pitch. [Editor’s note: This article has been fact-checked.] It was rumored that he had scribbled down a design for a sort of death ray, and while I don’t think there was any hard science behind it, the concept was that this weapon would be so powerful that if both sides had it, it would end war.
That’s very similar to the conclusions that Oppenheimer came to. When people are that smart, they can find a way to make anything make sense. It seemed to me that he had a notion that until the bomb is used, people won’t really understand it. That’s a pretty extreme rationalization, and Oppenheimer’s story is full of those mental gymnastics. He was a very ethical person, but he also had a brilliantly abstracted philosophical way of looking at everything he was involved with, and that can lead you to pretty strange places.
[Read: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The Atlantic]
Andersen: Inception is also about a risky technology that emerges from military research. But instead of a bomb, it’s a dream-sharing technology that compels the main characters to turn inward into mazes of their own creation, so much so that even though they have small children, they have trouble pulling themselves out of those worlds. As our digital worlds evolve and become more transfixing over time, have you seen some resonances with that material?
Nolan: When the film came out, in 2010, the smartphone was exploding in popularity, and some of its inward-looking structure was actually based on the branching mechanisms of the iPod. I’d been using iPods to listen to music, and on the menu screens, you have these branching networks that allow you to go deeper into different catalogs. This was a time when people were first looking at the potential of carrying a whole world in your pocket, the kind of stuff that William Gibson had written about years earlier as pure science fiction. Those sorts of things were starting to become part of people’s everyday lives, and so people started to look at reality differently. They started to think about realities within realities. This was all unwitting, by the way: There’s a tendency to speak about your past work as though everything was planned and intentional. You try to analyze in hindsight what was going on in your head, and what synchronized with the world. But at the time, and as I continue to work, I try to be instinctive and unselfconscious, and open to the things that move me in the world.
Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy on the set of Oppenheimer (Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)Andersen: In The Prestige and Inception, the consequences of misusing technology are largely confined to the personal sphere. But in your Batman films, and more recently in Tenet and certainly Oppenheimer, the consequences of technological misuse extend to millions of people, if not all of humanity. What drew you toward these larger stories of planetary or even cosmic scale, as your career has progressed?
Nolan: I’m not sure it’s so much of a progression. Each story has its own reasons for a technology to be contained in a particular scale. Inception is about recursion, so the scale is internal. It’s infinities within infinities. I think Oppenheimer is an interesting case, because what I’ve done there is to take for granted the large scale, the global implications. This is someone whose activities and actions changed the world forever, with the highest stakes possible, and because we all go into the film knowing that, I felt that I could look at the story entirely from his point of view, to try and make it as personal as possible. I was hoping that the effect at the end—when the global implications seep in and you start to see gaps and cracks in his thinking, and his sense of guilt and stress—would be more powerful for not having been discussed or presented earlier in the film. So I think Oppenheimer is a combination of the two things: It’s very personal, but the real-world stakes of the story are sort of undeniable.
Andersen: Interstellar seems like an outlier in your work, with respect to technology. The film’s hero, Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), is an engineer who can’t stop reminding us that he’s an engineer. He aches with nostalgia for the Apollo missions. He thinks that humans have turned away from the stars—and the film seems to agree with him. In the end, it’s really science and technology and the exploratory spirit (along with love) that deliver humanity from extinction. Is it right to think of Interstellar as a defense or even celebration of technological ambition, and if so, how does that sit alongside something like Oppenheimer?
Nolan: It very much is that. I don’t want to speak for my brother, who worked on the script for years, but I know that one of the things that fed into it was this experience we had while scouting locations for The Dark Knight in Hong Kong. We both went to see a documentary about the Apollo missions voiced by Tom Hanks. There’s a part about the ridiculous idea that the moon landings were faked, and I think we were both—and Jonah in particular—very struck by how sad it was that the filmmakers felt the need to address such an absurd conspiracy theory, and how that diminished the achievements of everyone involved. This fed very directly into the character of Cooper and his idea that society had started to devalue the spirit of exploration. Now, is that consistent with the other ways in which our work—and my work—has addressed technology? Not necessarily, but at the same time, these films are not didactic. They aren’t intended to convey specific messages about society. They’re just trying to tell great stories.
[Read: I want to watch Tenet again. Unfortunately.]
Andersen: Interstellar also gives us one of Hollywood’s most sublime scientific spectacles with the black hole, Gargantua. In Oppenheimer, we get another one, but now, instead of a morally neutral object, it’s the Trinity atomic-bomb test. How did that difference play into the creative choices you made while shooting?
Nolan: When I was writing the script for Oppenheimer, my initial creative impulse was that the Trinity test needed to be portrayed with as much realism as possible, to put you into the heads of the scientists who were engaged in creating and testing it. If you look at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, there is a very beautifully rendered nuclear explosion that’s done with computer graphics. Paul Franklin and his team did an excellent job, and an enormous amount of research and detail went into it. But the technology of computer graphics is inherently a bit distancing and safe, which worked for that film because Batman has saved the day and the explosion is no longer threatening people. I knew this would need to be different, and I knew that the imagery would have to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time, and I felt very strongly that only real things that are photographed could achieve that. As a filmmaker, you choose the methodology that’s going to give you the appropriate resonance, and the resonance we needed for Trinity was massive threat and hypnotic beauty at the same time.
Andersen: Given your obvious interests in technology and personal identity and the nature of consciousness, it’s curious to me that we don’t yet have a film from you that takes AI as its central subject.
Nolan: Well, my brother has done four seasons of Westworld and five seasons of Person of Interest, which are amazing, prescient explorations of artificial intelligence and the security state and data security. That, and look, I’m a huge fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in its elemental, Kubrickian simplicity kind of says everything there is to say about artificial intelligence.
Andersen: There’s another scene in Interstellar that is one of the most emotionally gutting sequences in any of your films. As a consequence of gravity’s distortions of time, Cooper has missed decades of his kids’ lives, and he watches all of these video messages that they sent during that period, in sequence, while just shaking and sobbing. It’s a really visceral experience, especially for parents. How did you conceive of the idea for that scene?
Nolan: The wonderful truth is that it was in my brother’s script, and one of the things that made me want to do the film. As a parent, it seemed like such a powerful story moment. It was always the north star of the film, this beautiful sequence—and some of the actual words in the script, the specifics of what was said in the messages, never changed. We filmed McConaughey’s reaction first, in close-up. You never do that in a scene. You start with a wide shot and then warm up. But he hadn’t seen the video messages—we’d filmed them all in advance, so that everything would be there in the moment—and he wanted to give us his first reaction. We shot it twice close-up, and I think I used the second one, because the first one was too raw. Then we shot the monitors, and the wider shots, and put it together.
The last piece of the puzzle was a beautiful piece of music by Hans Zimmer that hadn’t really found a place in the film. I think he literally referred to it as “organ doodle.” My editor, Lee Smith, and I tried playing it just while we were in the room playing a cut, and we both felt that it was devastating. The other thing we did, which I don’t think I’ve done in any of my other films, is to treat the music as a diegetic sound: When the messages stop, the music stops. It almost breaks the fourth wall, and it’s not the sort of thing that I like to do, but it felt perfect and apt for that moment.
Andersen: I’ve heard you express in interviews about Oppenheimer, and in the script of the film itself, this idea that the Manhattan Project was the most important thing that ever happened—and I think I hear a bit of a corrective in that claim. Do you think that, generally speaking, in our popular historical consciousness, science and technology get short shrift?
Nolan: I haven’t really thought about it in those terms. To be completely blunt, I was trying to express why I wanted to make the film and why I think the film is dramatic. But I think the argument that Oppenheimer is the most important man who ever lived because he changed the world forever is pretty hard to refute. The only real argument against it is the “key man of history” argument, which is to say, if not Oppeneimer, it would have been Teller who brought the Manhattan Project to its fruition, but that’s parallel-universe stuff. In our universe, it was Oppenheimer who brought the project to its fruition. He changed the world, and it can never be changed back.
Andersen: I’ve followed your career long enough to know that you keep your projects under wraps until you’re good and ready.
Nolan: Then you’re wasting your last question.
Andersen: Well, it’s a meta-question about where you might go from here. You’ve just done this epic film. It’s three hours long. It contemplates the fate of humanity, and the possibility that we might extinguish ourselves. It seems to me that you can only go smaller from here—although I’m happy to be corrected—and I wonder if that will be a challenge for you?
Nolan: You want every new project to be a challenge, and I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what really gives scale to a film. You can look at it in terms of budget. You can look at it in terms of shooting locations. You can look at it in terms of story. I don’t tend to think in those terms. I don’t think about, “Oh, I’ve done a big one; now I’ll do a small one.” In my kind of work, Oppenheimer was pretty lean; in terms of budget, it was a lot smaller than some of my other films. I try not to be reactive in my choices. To me, it’s really about finding the story that I want to be engaged with in the years it takes to make a film.
Andersen: Has one gripped you?
Nolan: I’m not going to answer that.
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My Brooklyn apartment is designed for sterility. The windows have screens to keep out bugs; I chose my indoor plants specifically because they don’t attract pests. While commuting to other, similarly aseptic indoor spaces—co-working offices, movie theaters, friends’ apartments—I’ll skirt around pigeons, avert my eyes from a gnarly rat, shudder at the odd scuttling cockroach. But once I’m back inside, the only living beings present (I hope, and at least as far as I know) are the ones I’ve chosen to interact with: namely, my partner and the low-maintenance snake plant on the windowsill.
My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease. But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world. As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.”
The feedback loop bears telling resemblance to another vicious cycle of modern life. Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation. Although our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another may feel like disparate phenomena, they are both parallel and related. A life without nature, it seems, is a lonely life—and vice versa.
The Western world has been trending toward both biophobia and loneliness for decades. David Orr, an environmental-studies researcher and advocate for climate action, wrote in a 1993 essay that “more than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control.” This discomfort might manifest as a dislike of camping, or annoyance at the scratchy touch of grass at the park. It might also show up as disgust in the presence of insects, which a 2021 paper from Japanese scholars found is partially driven by urbanization. Ousting nature from our proximity—with concrete, walls, window screens, and lifestyles that allow us to remain at home—also increases the likelihood that the experiences we do have with other lifeforms will be negative, Orr writes. You’re much less likely to love birds if the only ones around are the pigeons you perceive as dirty.
[Read: A growing fear of nature could hasten its destruction]
The rise of loneliness is even better documented. Americans are spending more time inside at home and alone than they did a few decades ago. In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam cites data showing that, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, Americans went from entertaining friends at home about 15 times a year to just eight. No wonder, then, that nearly a fifth of U.S. adults reported feeling lonely much of the previous day in an April Gallup poll. Loneliness has become a public-health buzzword; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls it an “epidemic” that affects both mental and physical health. At least in the United States, COVID-19 has made things worse by expanding our preferred radius of personal space, and when that space is infringed upon, more of the reactions are now violent.
That loneliness and biophobia are rising in tandem may be more than a coincidence. Orr wrote in his 1993 essay that appreciation of nature will flourish mostly in “places in which the bonds between people, and those between people and the natural world create a pattern of connectedness, responsibility, and mutual need.” The literature suggests that he’s right. Our sense of community certainly affects how comfortable or desirable we perceive time in nature to be, Viniece Jennings, a senior fellow in the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at Harvard who studies these relationships, told me. In one 2017 study across four European cities, having a greater sense of community trust was linked to more time spent in communal green spaces. A 2022 study showed that, during COVID-related shutdowns, Asians in Australia were more likely to walk outside if they lived in close-knit neighborhoods with high interpersonal trust.
Relationships between racial and ethnic groups can have an especially strong influence on time spent in nature. In the 2022 study from Australia, Asians were less likely to go walking than white people, which the study authors attributed to anti-Asian racism. Surveys consistently show that minority groups in the U.S., especially Black and Hispanic Americans, are less likely to participate in outdoor recreation, commonly citing racism, fear of racist encounters, or lack of easy access as key factors. Inclusive messaging in places like urban parks, by contrast, may motivate diverse populations to spend time outdoors.
On the flip side, being in nature or even just remembering times you spent there can increase feelings of belonging, says Katherine White, a behavioral scientist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2021 paper on the subject. The authors of one 2022 paper found that “people who strongly identify with nature, who enjoy being in nature, and who had more frequent garden visits were more likely to have a stronger sense of social cohesion.” In a 2018 study from Hong Kong, preschool children who were more engaged with nature had better relationships with their peers and demonstrated more kindness and helpfulness. A 2014 experiment in France showed that people who had just spent time walking in a park were more likely to pick up and return a glove dropped by a stranger than people who were just about to enter the park. The results are consistent, White told me: “Being in nature makes you more likely to help other people,” even at personal cost.
[Read: How we learned to be lonely]
Time spent in natural spaces might contribute to a greater sense of belonging in part because it usually requires you to be in public space. Unlike homes and offices, natural spaces provide a setting for unpredictable social interactions—such as running into a new neighbor at the dog park or starting a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on your walking path—which “can be a great space for forming connections and building social networks,” Jennings said. In a study in Montreal, Canada, researchers found that time in public parks and natural spaces allowed immigrant families to converse with neighbors, make new friends, and feel better integrated in their new communities, all for free. Similarly, there’s some reason to suspect that strong human relationships can help extinguish any disgust we feel toward the natural world. We learn fear through one another, Daniel Blumstein, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. The more safe and enjoyable experiences we accumulate in groups, the better our tolerance for new and unfamiliar things.
It would be a stretch to say that just getting people to touch more grass will solve all societal ills, or that better social cohesion will guarantee that humankind unites to save the planet. Our relationships with the Earth and one another fluctuate throughout our lives, and are influenced by a number of variables difficult to capture in any one study. But this two-way phenomenon is a sign that, if you’ve been meaning to go outside more or connect with your neighbors, you might as well work on both. “Natural ecosystems rely on different people” and vice versa, Jennings said. “You don’t have to go on long hikes every day to understand that.”
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www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 11 › oppression-palestine-israel-hamas › 675907
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After the Hamas attack on Israel October 7, an old, bad argument resurfaced. In the streets of New York, London, and Paris, and on American college campuses, protesters who consider themselves leftists took the position that oppressed people—Palestinians in this case, but oppressed people more generally—can do no wrong. Any act of “resistance” is justified, however cruel, however barbaric, however much these protesters would rage against it if it were committed by someone else.
I remember the same argument from the days of the Algerian struggle for independence from France, when the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched terrorist attacks against European civilians. The movie The Battle of Algiers shows a bomb being planted in a café where teenagers met to drink and dance. This really happened, and figures as eminent as Jean-Paul Sartre defended such attacks. Killing a European, any European, the famous writer announced, was an act of liberation: “There remains a dead man”—the victim—“and a free man”—the killer.
By this same logic, the murder of young and old Israelis has been justified, even celebrated, by people who, again, consider themselves leftists. For them, the Hamas murderers are not ordinary mortals, responsible for what they do; they are agents of resistance, doing what must be done in the name of liberation.
[Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false]
Framed this way, the issue is simple: Oppressed people have a right to resist; the Palestinians have a right to struggle against the Israeli occupation. But rights come with obligations. What are the obligations of the oppressed and, most immediately, of those who act in their name? This may not seem like an urgent question, given the horrors of the war now unfolding. But it is a question for all time; it is about the moral and political health of all those who fight for liberation—and of everyone who wants to support them.
The Hamas terrorists claim to be acting on behalf of the Palestinian people. At the same time, Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip—a strange situation: a terrorist organization that also rules a territory. The anomaly explains why Hamas terror leads to actual conventional wars, whereas Irish Republican Army or FLN violence against civilians never did. Hamas’s government is substantial, the real thing, with a civil service and a system of social provision that includes welfare and schooling. It has, therefore, the same obligations that any government has to look after its citizens or, as in Hamas’s case, its subjects. It must secure their rights and protect their lives.
But much evidence suggests that the government of Gaza does not meet these basic obligations. Despite the large funds that Hamas has accumulated, chiefly for its military wing, some 80 percent of Gazans live in poverty. Hamas rejects the very idea of civil rights and liberties; it imposes a harsh religious discipline (though short of the Iranian version), and it does not seem overly concerned with Gazans’ general well-being. Instead of protecting the lives of its people, it exposes them to attack by embedding its military communication and storage centers in the civilian population and firing its missiles from schoolyards and hospital parking lots. It spends much of its money on the manufacture of rockets and the construction of an elaborate network of tunnels for military use. Knowing the wars it plans, it doesn’t build shelters for its people.
Insofar as anyone genuinely cares about Gazans’ well-being, it is the foreign governments that send money (Qatar pays the salaries of the civil service) and the United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations working on the ground. One might also mention the state of Israel, which, until October 8, supplied half of Gaza’s electricity. (Cutting off the electricity was, I believe, morally wrong and politically stupid, but those who call it so should acknowledge the years of electric service, even while rockets were fired at Israel.)
What would Gaza look like if Hamas was a normal government? That’s hard to say, because normality is hard to come by in the Middle East today. But when Israel withdrew from the Strip (taking Jewish settlers with it) in 2005, there was excited talk of a Palestinian Hong Kong, with a seaport, an international airport, water-desalination plants, and much else—all of this funded with investment from abroad, chiefly from Western Europe and the Persian Gulf states. Hamas was not interested in anything like that, and all these projects faded with the first major barrage of rockets aimed at Israel in 2006. The definitive end came a year later when Hamas, having won a narrow election victory (the last election in Gaza) seized total power and murdered its opponents. What it wanted was not a prosperous Gaza but a base for a long-term war against Israel—and, later on, against Egypt’s control of the Sinai. Hamas’s rise to power, coupled with the group’s Islamist ideology, is what led to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, designed (not very successfully) to prevent Hamas from bringing weapons into the Strip.
In light of all this, to cast Hamas solely as an agent of resistance is to overlook a lot. It is a government that has failed its people. It is also a movement for Palestinian national liberation with a significant, but probably minority, following in Gaza and considerable influence throughout the Arab world. It is, finally, a movement that has chosen terror as its means of struggle—not as a last resort but as a matter of policy from its beginning. What are the obligations of a movement like that? I should say right now: Its first obligation is to reject terrorism.
Let’s pause here and look at a classic argument first worked out in a different liberation struggle—the class war of Europe’s and America’s workers. Lenin famously distinguished between “revolutionary” and “trade union” consciousness among the workers, the first directed toward the distant achievement of a communist society, the second aimed right now at higher wages, better working conditions, and the end of the factory foreman’s tyranny. Lenin favored the first and worried that any advance along trade-union lines would make revolution more difficult. Most workers, it turned out, favored the second approach. Revolutionary consciousness ended in dictatorship and terror or in defeat and sectarian isolation; trade-union consciousness led to the successes of social democracy.
That old distinction holds for national liberation too. In the case of Palestine and Israel, revolutionary consciousness aims at a radical triumph: Greater Palestine or Greater Israel “from the river to the sea.” That aim is often expressed in messianic language—the religious version of revolution. By contrast, trade-union consciousness is represented by those who work for a division of the land—two states, sovereign or federated or confederated. That may seem utopian right now, but it isn’t messianic. One can imagine it as a human contrivance, worked out by Palestinians and Jews who are committed concretely to the well-being of their people. We should judge Hamas, I would argue, by the standard of trade unionism because that kind of politics is genuinely responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people it aims to liberate.
Hamas has never been interested in the kinds of political work that follow from a “trade union” commitment. Begin with the obvious: Hamas should be making Gaza into a model of what a liberated Palestine would look like (perhaps, sadly, that’s what it has done). And then it should be organizing on the West Bank to achieve a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It should be working with Israeli opponents of the occupation and with other Palestinian groups for that version of liberation—which is achievable short of war and revolution. Two states (with whatever qualifications on their sovereignty) would be the most beneficial outcome for both Palestinians and Israelis. So Hamas should be building a mass movement with that end in view, a movement that would stand behind or, better yet, replace its revolutionary vanguard. It should be educating people for civil disobedience and planning marches, demonstrations, and general strikes. It should be working to strengthen Palestinian civil society and create the institutions of a future state.
Of course, Israel will make this work difficult; the current Israeli government will make it extremely difficult, because it includes religious messianists and ultranationalist settlers. Settler thugs regularly attack Palestinians living on the West Bank. Against the thugs, self-defense is required—force against force. But the goal of Palestinian “trade unionists,” a state of their own alongside Israel, requires a mass movement. Fatah, Hamas’s rival, produced something like that in the First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993; it wasn’t entirely nonviolent, but in some ways it resembled the nationalist version of a union strike. It played a large role in making the Oslo Accords possible. Hamas can’t claim any similar achievement; indeed, rockets from Gaza helped undermine Oslo.
There are people on the ground in the West Bank committed to nonviolent resistance and to constructive work of exactly the sort I’ve just described, but Hamas does not look at them as allies. Nor does it regard Palestinians in and around the Palestinian Authority who support the idea of two states as allies. It is committed to a revolutionary, totalizing politics. It insists not only on the replacement of the state of Israel by a Palestinian state but also—equally important to Hamas—on the end of any Jewish presence on what it regards as Arab land.
Hamas is not doing anything in a “trade union” way to build a liberation movement with more limited goals—a movement that might actually succeed. That kind of political work requires an organization less Bolshevik-like, less repressive, less rigidly ideological, more inclusive than Hamas has ever been. Hamas is a vanguard that isn’t looking for an organized rear guard. It is an elite of ready-to-be-martyrs who plan to liberate Palestine and eliminate Israel—not by themselves but only with those allies who won’t challenge their supremacy. They seek the help of the Arab street, excited by Hamas’s violence but not capable of replacing Hamas’s rule—and the help of movements and states that share Hamas’s zealotry and will never question its authoritarianism. The resort to terror follows. It is the natural expression of this kind of politics.
The most succinct argument against terror as a strategy for liberation comes from the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Although he wrote the essay “Their Morals and Ours”—one of the earliest versions of the bad argument that I began with—Trotsky also wrote critically about terrorism, arguing, accurately, that terrorists “want to make the people happy without the participation of the people.” The terrorists, Trotsky continues, mean to “substitute themselves for the masses.” Some on the left view that ambition as heroic and admire terrorists for that reason. But the politics of substitution is an authoritarian politics, not a leftist politics, precisely because it does not look for popular participation. Its end cannot be a democratic state: Algeria, long dominated by authoritarian FLN leaders, is a useful example of how things are likely to turn out. So is Gaza itself.
[Michael Ignatieff: Why Israel should obey Geneva even when its enemies do not]
Terrorism is a betrayal of the oppressed men and women whom its protagonists claim to defend—and plan to rule. Because they substitute themselves for the people, they will, if victorious in their struggle, simply replace the oppressors they defeat. But this is only part of the story. What about the people the terrorists kill? Terrorism is the random killing of innocent men, women, and children for a political purpose. But its worst and most common form is not random in a general way but random within a group: the killing of Black people in the United States by police or by white men with guns, or of Europeans in Algeria, Muslims in India, or, as in the recent attacks, Jews in Israel. This kind of directed terror needs to be called out—as American activists did with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Remember the counter-slogan, “All Lives Matter,” that many people—including me—took to be a denial of the specific politics, the racial hatred, that drives the killing.
For similar reasons, we should give the attack of October 7 its right name: It was a pogrom, a massacre undertaken for the purpose of murdering Jews. People who refuse the term, saying instead that all killing of civilians is wrong, are right in the general way that “All Lives Matter” is right, but they are avoiding the crucial moral and political point.
Still, precisely because all lives do matter, we must also draw universal moral lines. What about you and me, random individuals, who are sitting in a café or attending a music festival and are suddenly blown up or machine-gunned by attackers who are deliberately trying to kill us? I can’t understand anyone on the left or the right who, when thinking of themselves in the café or at the festival, would say that such violence is all right. Surely we are all innocent: ordinary folk, going about daily business, thinking of politics only occasionally, worrying about money, looking after kids—or just being kids.
But aren’t men, women, and children just like these also the victims of war? Yes, and terrorism—the deliberate killing of innocent people—is often enough a military strategy, as it was, I believe, in the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But that is not always true: Many armies and many soldiers aim only at military targets and do what they can to avoid or minimize civilian injury and death. That is especially difficult when the enemy deliberately exposes its civilian population to the risks of combat.
Civilian casualties are obviously much easier to avoid in the course of a political struggle. Those who resist oppression can focus and therefore have to focus narrowly on the oppressors. No good society, no liberated state, can be produced by denying life and liberty to the ordinary folk I have described. No good society without them. No good society without you and me! That is the fundamental principle of a decent politics. Terrorism is a deliberate, overt denial of that principle, and so the defenders of terrorism are the betrayers first of the oppressed and then of the rest of us. Like the terrorists, they may think that they are advancing the cause of liberation, but they have forgotten their obligations to you and me.
This story seems to be about:
On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.
The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world.
Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on Beijing and calling for Washington to impose sanctions against those who throttled Hong Kong’s freedoms.
[Read: The fracturing of Hong Kong’s democracy movement]
But in the summer of 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese officials put the final touches on a national-security law that effectively criminalized dissent and reengineered the very character of a once freewheeling city. Those found guilty under its provisions could be sentenced to prison for life.
This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s upcoming book, Among the Braves.Now Hong Kong’s political groups and civil-society organizations were preparing to disband. Shops were pulling protest art off their walls. People were selling apartments and saying goodbyes. Many of Wong’s closest allies had booked tickets to foreign countries where they intended to seek asylum. But Wong didn’t have that option: His passport had been confiscated by the police.
If his renown was a vulnerability, Wong reasoned, it might also be his path out. The U.S. government maintained a few offices in the St. John’s Building, and Wong had set up a routine meeting with two American diplomats.
“I don’t want to leave,” Wong told them as the meeting ended. “I want to go to the U.S. consulate.”
His gambit drew on a famous precedent and a vexed history. The United States had cast its lot, at least verbally, with the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and the administration of then-President Donald Trump styled itself as tough on China. But how much was it willing to venture for the democratic opponents of the Chinese Communist regime?
Back in 1989, the United States seemed to have weighed this problem and come down on the side of principle.
Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist with an extracurricular interest in political philosophy and political systems. His belief in democracy was as public as it was forthright, making him a figure of global stature in the years preceding the Tiananmen Square protests. A sketch of his face, round and sanguine, graced the cover of the May 1988 issue of The Atlantic: In it, he wore a slight smile and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. Fang was China’s Andrei Sakharov, the journalist Orville Schell wrote, a “man of not only keen intelligence and conviction but fearlessness.”
The day after the massacre—June 5, 1989—gunfire still rang out in the streets of Beijing as Fang, his wife, their son, and the academic Perry Link, who was a longtime friend, scrambled into the U.S. embassy compound. McKinney Russell, a diplomat and polyglot who was the head of the press and cultural section, and Ray Burghardt, the acting deputy chief of mission, met them inside.
Before he sat down with Fang, Burghardt had consulted his ambassador, James Lilley, a former CIA operative. Lilley was alarmed at the prospect of the Fangs seeking refuge there, fearing that they might get stuck in limbo. Burghardt walked away with the impression that he should talk the Fangs out of it. He told Fang that American protection could discredit him and the Chinese democracy movement: The Communist Party would dismiss Fang as a pawn of the United States, his presence at the embassy proof that the American “black hand” was behind the protests. The argument seemed persuasive. Fang and his family left, and the procedure-abiding diplomats reported the incident back to Washington.
[Read: Seeking sanctuary in the old empire]
Several hours later, Washington, on instruction from President George H. W. Bush, responded to the diplomats’ cable. Over a secure line, the administration delivered an unambiguous message: Go to the Fangs immediately. Tell them that if they wish to seek asylum, they would be “welcomed by the president of the United States.”
Russell and Burghardt raced to the Jianguo Hotel. They snuck into the back entrance, received the family—suitcases already packed—and climbed into an unmarked American van, which raced back to the U.S. embassy. There, the senior Fangs would live for the next year, until the United States negotiated their safe release to Britain. (Their son had gone back to his university studies in Beijing after a month, smuggled out of the embassy in another covert operation.)
Washington understood why the diplomats initially handled the Fangs in the way they did. On top of the political sensitivity, the request was technically out of line, as asylum can normally be granted only in-country, not at a consulate on foreign soil. But the administration’s ultimate concern, Burghardt told us, was that “regardless of what we said or how we recounted what had happened, the story would always be that we kicked them out and they got arrested.” And so the United States broke the rules to protect the Fangs. “It is a sort of fascinating example of the tension that always exists in American foreign policy, between the realist, strategic approach and the need to continue to uphold and to demonstrate our values,” Burghardt told us.
Fang and his family eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as a physics professor at the University of Arizona until he died in 2012 at age 76. That same year, in April, Washington made another life-altering exception. Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had championed disability and land rights, made a perilous escape from house arrest. He was given protection at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped negotiate his release to New York City, what she called “an example of American values in practice.”
American values clearly aligned with those of the movement in Hong Kong—such, certainly, was the message Wong and his fellow activists heard loud and clear from Washington in 2019 and 2020. American politicians across party lines praised Hong Kongers for standing up to China in defense of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and, most of all, democracy. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but Hong Kong remained a cause célèbre inside the Beltway, where stalwarts of both parties had deep connections to the city.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a decades-long supporter of human rights in China, lauded the protesters, as did Jim McGovern, one of the most liberal members of Congress. But any politician would have been hard-pressed, in 2019, to outdo Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of Trump’s closest legislative allies, in performative support. Cruz, the Texas Republican, traveled to Hong Kong in mid-October, wearing all black—in solidarity, he said. A few days later, Hawley, of Missouri, planted himself among teens in athletic gear and yellow helmets to tweet details of a nighttime standoff between protesters and police. Both men invoked Berlin and cast Hong Kong as the new center of a global struggle between democracy and communism.
No such sense of mission animated the president, however. Trump had billed his administration as one that took risks and was tough on China. But his position on Hong Kong was muddled, erratic, and guided primarily by his fixation on Chinese President Xi Jinping and his desire to secure a trade deal. The entire U.S.-Chinese relationship, for Trump, came down to dealmaking.
[Read: The final blow to Hong Kong]
The Hong Kong democracy movement did not understand Washington in these terms. They saw a president who claimed to be tough on China, together with bipartisan concern for the fate of their city. Why wouldn’t the United States take a stand for one of the movement’s representatives?
Wong enlisted Jeffrey Ngo, a gregarious candidate for a Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University and a former member of Wong’s prodemocracy group, to help him execute a plan. Wong and Ngo had worked together since 2016 to win support for Hong Kong from American lawmakers, meeting with dozens of staffers and officials in the administration. Now they would appeal to those contacts for help.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a meeting over a secure phone line with his closest advisers on May 23, 2020. Details of China’s national-security law were still not public, but Pompeo was preparing to respond to its implementation by announcing that America no longer considered Hong Kong sufficiently autonomous to warrant separate treatment under U.S. law. He wanted policy suggestions on what should follow.
The advisers threw out a long list of punishments: enacting sanctions against top officials, scrapping training programs with the Hong Kong police, stopping the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Miles Yu, Pompeo’s China-policy adviser, suggested that Washington create a special immigration pathway for Hong Kong residents. Britain had done this. Canada and Australia were also working on such schemes. And admitting Hong Kongers wasn’t just charitable. The United States could offer special visas to Hong Kong residents with university degrees or with specialized skills; the country stood to benefit from fleeing Hong Kong talent.
The policy recommendations reached Trump, whose National Security Council had also prepared three lists of options in response to China’s strangling of Hong Kong. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and Ivan Kanapathy—the NSC’s director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and deputy senior director for Asian affairs—described theirs as a “Goldilocks” menu: One option included a list of “hot” measures (a maximalist approach); the second, “cold” ones; and the last, in-between.
The “hot” list comprised actions that had nothing to do with Hong Kong but that China hawks had long sought the opportunity to take, such as closing the Chinese consulate in Houston, where Washington claimed that spies were aiding in espionage and the theft of scientific research. Trump picked the “hot” menu. He even liked Yu’s immigration idea.
“President Trump said, ‘Why don’t we just open up? Why don’t we just let a huge portion of people from Hong Kong move to the U.S.?’ And I loved it,” Pottinger told us. “You know, my view was just, transplant the whole damn city and make a new Hong Kong in America. [Trump] was like, ‘They’re going to be industrious; they’ll be great. They’ll make great Americans.’”
[Read: What happened to Hong Kong?]
But Stephen Miller, Trump’s far-right political adviser, stopped the immigration scheme from going further. He was “very persuasive,” Yu told us.
The White House and the State Department moved forward on most of the other measures. As one senior official said: “So now we’re going to be thinking about Taiwan. We need to be thinking about the next steps and saying, Look, if you’re going to kill the golden goose, we’re not going to put the goose on fucking life support. We’re going to let you kill the goose. And then we’re also going to make sure that you regret it.”
Pompeo announced on May 27, 2020, that Hong Kong no longer had a high degree of autonomy. In the Rose Garden, Trump promised to eliminate “policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment.” Then the president went off script and vowed to cut America’s ties with the World Health Organization. The WHO announcement completely overshadowed the Hong Kong news.
Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed.
On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen.
For years, Ngo had worked behind the scenes for Wong, writing op-eds in his name and even editing his tweets. Now he wrote an email above Wong’s signature to the secretary of state. “I want nothing more than to continue to fight for democracy and freedoms in my home,” it read. “But there is legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention … I request U.S. protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of applying for asylum.”
The email landed in the inbox of Mary Kissel, Pompeo’s senior adviser, just after noon on July 1 in Washington. Kissel knew Wong and Ngo personally and had lived in Hong Kong as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She got the message where it needed to go.
Within the next 48 hours, Pompeo summoned his half dozen or so top officials to discuss Wong’s request. They immediately ruled out sheltering him at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. Plans were already under way to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, and when the announcement came, Beijing would likely retaliate. If Wong was hiding in the U.S. consulate, Beijing could close it down. Or Beijing could demand Wong’s release in exchange for American prisoners—it could snatch Americans off the streets in Hong Kong and hold them in arbitrary detention for this purpose.
The officials considered covertly extracting Wong from Hong Kong instead. But Hong Kong’s geography was unforgiving—the city shared a land border solely with mainland China, which meant that the only escape would be by boat across the Taiwan Strait or south toward the Philippines. Wong would risk encountering the Chinese Coast Guard in those waters, and American involvement could make for an international incident. Options dwindled. Soon the officials came to believe that none remained.
Pompeo and his advisers decided that the United States could neither let Wong into the consulate nor extract him from Hong Kong. “You’ve got national interest and personal interest, and in some ways you try to find a balance between the two,” one senior official involved in the process told us. “In the end, you know, on the seventh floor of the State Department, national interest won out.”
[Read: Hong Kong’s elite turned on democracy]
The decision was hardly unanimous in Washington. A National Security Council memo to the State Department opined that Wong should be protected, but deferred to State as the deciding authority with, as Pottinger later told us, a “fuller picture” of the facts. Pottinger’s deputy, Kanapathy, told us that fear of what Beijing would do in response was the “absolute wrong” reason to refuse to help Wong: “If you can’t do what I think a lot of people would say is the right thing [because] you’re afraid they’re going to do the wrong thing, then you’ve already lost.”
The State Department’s decision was, strangely, kept close. No one informed Wong or Ngo that the die was cast. In August, Ngo appealed to Pelosi and Senator Marco Rubio, both of whom had worked with Wong since he was a teen. They made calls to State on Wong’s behalf, pushing the request at the “highest levels,” according to one Hill staffer. At one point, a fellow Hong Kong activist named Nathan Law, who had slipped away to London just before the national-security law passed, met with Pompeo in private, raising Wong’s plight directly and emotionally. Nothing changed.
The issue “dragged,” one State Department official involved told us, “and it lingered, and then the inevitable happened.” Wong was arrested in September 2020 and then remanded in custody in late November. Last year, he pled guilty to charges of subversion under the national-security law.
The democracy movement in Hong Kong made little secret of the hope it placed in Washington. Some protesters flew American flags in the street, or made public appeals, whether to Trump’s gigantic ego or to Pelosi’s support for Chinese democracy activists dating back to Tiananmen. Many believed that America had the ability to alter Beijing’s course of action. They were wrong. What the United States could have offered was a haven, but it didn’t.
Washington made no special provision for Hong Kongers who wanted to emigrate to the United States. Cruz, notwithstanding his show of solidarity, killed a bill in December 2020 that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. In a self-aggrandizing memoir, Pompeo wrote that he wished he had done more to punish China over Hong Kong, but he made no reference to Joshua Wong.
The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.
This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s new book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, And Exile In The Battle For Hong Kong And The Future Of Global Democracy.