SOME very good journalism this week, as well as some of the other sort. Charles Glass has been reporting from the Lebanon for 50 years now. In that time, he has watched the country tear itself apart in a civil war, and then be repeatedly invaded by Syria and Israel. He has survived all those wars, and even a spell as a hostage of Hezbollah in 1987; he escaped after two months.
He has a long Diary piece in the London Review of Books. Parts are war- correspondent reminiscence, such as a massacre in a refugee camp in the summer of 1976: “A population that had lived there since 1949, the year after their expulsion from Palestine by the Israelis, had ceased to exist. Their dismembered and crushed bodies covered the camp’s streets and alleys. Blood surged down the gutters. Looters from nearby Christian quarters drove over the corpses in their haste to steal furniture, refrigerators, clothing, anything they could carry. A bulldozer scraped bodies from the ground and dumped them in pits. The air was filthy from the smoke of burning shacks, cars and flesh. When Doyle and I walked out of the ruins, we saw a Maronite priest on a balcony blessing looters on their way home.”
Now, he teaches undergraduates at the American University of Beirut: “My students call me ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’, though I am neither. In Lebanon, many things are not called by their right name. Outright thieves are called ‘bankers’, gangsters designate themselves ‘political leaders’ and Israel’s continuous bombardment of South Lebanon between November 2024 and March 2026 went by the name of ‘ceasefire’. For the first time in my life, I am not covering a war. Like every other civilian in Lebanon, I am just living it.
“Wherever we are in Beirut, we hear explosions that kill our neighbours and endure the relentless hum of the Israeli drones that watch us. I hear and sometimes see this war, but I’m not covering it. What good would it do? You, dear reader, don’t give a damn. Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah’s aspiring martyrs.
“Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life?”
I used to admire him only for his courage and his prose style. I now admire him as well for his capacity not to be bitter at the remorseless horror of the world.
Over at UnHerd, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams was also clear about the existence of evil. Interviewed by Freddie Sayers, he was pushed on what he had meant by calling American political culture “demonic” (Quotes, 24 April): “The example Lord Williams gave was Pete Hegseth invoking the will of God in the Iran military campaign. I ask him: by using the word ‘demonic’ is he not guilty of demonising his political opponents? He might have said that Hegseth was misguided, perhaps not very intelligent, or making a grave mistake. But to call him demonic is to suggest something different, which is that he is animated by a malign spirit.
“‘Animated by a malign spirit,’ Lord Williams confirms, ‘which is not necessarily Pete Hegseth. I’m rather old fashioned in believing in the Devil. I actually do believe that there are malign forces in the universe and that people who may not have consciously malign or diabolical designs can be manipulated and exploited by those destructive forces.’
“Does he believe, then, that the Devil is at work in the Trump administration?
“‘The Devil is at work in you and me. The Devil is at work in every institution. Sometimes it comes to the fore more clearly. And at the moment, I worry that something is being normalised, licensed and allowed into the room which ought to be regarded (to put it with Anglican politeness) with considerable suspicion.’”
I do wish that he had spoken with as much clarity and urgency when he was in office. Of course, the great right-wing noise machine would have deafened us all for a while if he had; but if an archbishop cannot talk intelligently about how evil works in the world, who can? It’s not as if the subject is going to go away.
