UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’ | Slavery | The Guardian

UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’

(This vote against the resolution by the United States, Israel and Argentina confirm what a lot of us have always known. These three countries, along with the countries that abstained are all evil nations.)

"Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’

Eromo Egbejule

UN adopts Ghana's resolution to class slave trade as crime against humanity – video

The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”

Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU.

The UK said it recognised the gravity of the issues addressed in the resolution and the untold harm and misery the transatlantic slave trade had inflicted on millions of people over many decades.

But James Kariuki, the UK chargé d’affaires to the UN, said Britain continued to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text and was “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities”.

“No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another,” he said.

As the resolution went ahead in New York, the British MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy presented a petition to the House of Commons, pushing for a state apology by the UK for its key role in slavery and colonialism of Africans.

“So many of the intersecting global challenges we now face are rooted in the legacies of enslavement and empire: from geopolitical instability to racism, inequality, underdevelopment and climate breakdown,” the petition read. “To truly confront these issues, we must acknowledge where they come from.”

For four centuries, seven European nations including the UK enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. The scale of the chattel slavery was such that 18th and 19th-century abolitionists coined the term “crime against humanity” to describe it. Historians have also linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

“When it’s framed as a trade, it distorts the reality,” said Jasmine Mickens, a postgraduate student of history and government at Harvard University. “It was not a consensual joint business enterprise.”

Speaking at the UN headquarters in New York, John Dramani Mahama lamented the erasure of Black history and censorship of teaching the ‘truth of slavery, segregation and racism’ in US schools. Photograph: Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Ghana, which has been at the forefront of an effort across Africa and the Caribbean for reparatory justice, pushed for the terminology to be updated to reflect the lingering impact of chattel slavery.

Experts involved in drafting the resolution say it is an attempt to get “political recognition at the highest level” for one of the darkest eras in history.

“The main point is not to introduce a hierarchy of crimes,” said Kyeretwie Osei, the head of programmes of the economic, social and cultural council at the AU. “It is rather an attempt to properly situate that particular chapter in history … how it was so world-breaking in its impact that it essentially created the platform for every atrocity and crime against humanity that then followed.”

“[This] was the chattelisation of human beings which essentially reduces them to property that can be sold or inherited [and] the status of enslavement could be passed on through birth,” he added.

The UN first acknowledged that slavery was a crime in a 2001 conference against racism, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

Panashe Chigumadzi, a historian and rapporteur for the AU’s committee of experts on reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, who drafted the framework, said that conference had had many limitations, including its framing of slavery as a “retroactive moral judgment rather than a continuous legal reality”.

“The AU framework … establishes that the inception of the trafficking in enslaved Africans during the so-called ‘age of discovery’ constituted the definitive break in world history, which inaugurated the break from localised feudal regimes to the modern world racial capitalist system,” she said. “This structurally transformed the fates of all peoples across the world through racialised regimes of labour, capital, property, territory and sovereignty that continue to determine relations of life and the land on which it is lived.”

While the resolution is not legally binding, it is now expected to pave the way for more progress in a fight that scholars and some politicians say has been hampered by the rise of rightwing movements in the west.

In recent years, the AU has been working to ensure the codifying of chattel slavery as a crime that requires not just apologies, but reparatory justice.

“Right now, the focus is on this particular moment [and] recognising that it is a culmination of many moments before this day,” Mickens said. “What people don’t seem to remember – due to all the efforts to erase history – is that black people, African people, have resisted the institution of chattel enslavement and the trafficking of Africans since the first hour the crime was committed on the shores of Africa.”

Before Wednesday’s vote, Mahama lamented the continuing erasure of Black history in the US through increasing censorship of teaching the “truth of slavery, segregation and racism” in schools.

“These policies are becoming a template for other governments and some private institutions,” he said at an event at the UN headquarters. “At the very least, they are slowly normalising the erasure.”

UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’ | Slavery | The Guardian

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It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price.

​

“A Belgian court ordered Étienne Davignon, a former diplomat, to stand trial for war crimes related to the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected leader. While the trial is a step towards accountability, it is seen as insufficient, as the true responsibility lies with the Belgian and American governments. Atonement would require a full apology, acknowledgment of institutional responsibility, and investment in Congo’s governance and people.

​

March 26, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET

Patrice Lumumba in Léopoldville (today Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) after his arrest in December 1960.Bettmann/Getty Images

By Stuart A. Reid

Mr. Reid is the author of “The Lumumba Plot.”

A Brussels court this month ordered Étienne Davignon, a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat, to stand trial for war crimes related to the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of Congo. Human rights groups cheered. The Lumumba family called it “the beginning of a reckoning that history has long demanded.” After decades of equivocation, Belgium finally seemed willing to confront its colonial past.

If only it were so simple.

The desire for accountability is entirely legitimate. Mr. Lumumba’s overthrow and assassination was one of the Cold War’s great crimes — a conspiracy involving White House officials, C.I.A. spooks, U.N. diplomats, Congolese separatists, and, yes, Belgian envoys. It cut short the life of a young and charismatic leader, installed a kleptocratic dictator in his place and set what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo on a ruinous path from which it has never entirely recovered.

No one apart from the Congolese people has ever paid a price. Neither the United States nor the United Nations has formally apologized. In 2002, Belgium’s foreign minister expressed “profound and sincere regrets” for Mr. Lumumba’s death, but hedged by pinning blame on “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time.” A 2020 letter from Belgium’s king to Congo’s president about the early colonial period, when his great-great-granduncle King Leopold II ran an ivory- and rubber-producing slave state, merely observed that “acts of violence and cruelty were committed.”

The Belgian court’s decision is a poor substitute for a true reckoning. The accused nonagenarian, Mr. Davignon, was a bit player in the events. He is the sole survivor among a list of a dozen or so Belgian officials whom the Lumumba family alleges bore responsibility for Mr. Lumumba’s death.

The legacy of Mr. Lumumba’s assassination is weighty and enduring. Early meddling distorted Congo’s politics, and in the 65 years since Mr. Lumumba’s killing, his country has been ruled by corrupt, unresponsive leaders of various stripes, often with the backing of foreign patrons. The vast majority of Congo’s population lives on less than $3 a day. Outside powers still treat it as little more than a source of violence and misery — and minerals, in which Congo is extraordinarily wealthy.

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Mr. Lumumba’s death was the culmination of a coordinated, largely foreign effort to remove him from power. An uncompromising nationalist whose party won Congo’s first free democratic elections, he became prime minister of the newly independent country in June 1960. Within weeks, an army mutiny and the Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga plunged Congo into crisis.

The Eisenhower administration, worried that Mr. Lumumba was aligning with the Soviet Union, authorized a C.I.A. scheme to assassinate the prime minister. A C.I.A. chemist flew to Congo with poison, but the plot was never carried out — in part because by then, a different scheme was in motion.

On Sept. 5, 1960, President Joseph Kasavubu, Mr. Lumumba’s chief rival, announced that he had dismissed Mr. Lumumba. Nine days later, Col. Joseph Mobutu, the country’s 29-year-old army chief, seized power in a C.I.A.-backed coup, marking the beginning of decades of misrule.

Mr. Lumumba was eventually detained at a military camp outside the capital, Léopoldville. But by the end of 1960, his supporters in the country’s east were amassing power, and the incoming Kennedy administration seemed poised to shift toward a less hard-line U.S. policy that might involve a deal restoring his government. Among Mr. Lumumba’s opponents, a search was underway for a more permanent solution that could offer some plausible deniability.

As Colonel Mobutu’s cabal developed plans to send Mr. Lumumba somewhere it was certain he would be killed, the C.I.A. station chief effectively gave a green light. Belgian officials lobbied Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway province of Katanga and a sworn enemy of Mr. Lumumba, to accept the prisoner. On Jan. 17, 1961, Colonel Mobutu’s security chief arranged for Mr. Lumumba to be transferred from military detention and flown to Katanga. That evening, after hours of torture, he was executed by a firing squad of Congolese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers. His body was later dissolved in a barrel of sulfuric acid.

Mr. Davignon’s role in this atrocity was, by all accounts, limited, and he has denied the charges against him. In the summer of 1960, he was a 27-year-old trainee diplomat at the Belgian Embassy in Léopoldville, junior in rank but with direct access to Congolese political leaders.

Like his superiors, Mr. Davignon apparently considered Mr. Lumumba an erratic, hostile leader and worked to remove him from power. He and a Foreign Ministry colleague were tasked with providing the legal pretexts the president would use to dismiss Mr. Lumumba. In a cable to Brussels, they explicitly referred to their goal as the “overthrow of the government according to our wishes.” After that had been accomplished, Mr. Davignon lamented that Mr. Lumumba had “not yet been neutralized.”

As Mr. Lumumba languished in prison, Mr. Davignon was back in Brussels. By then, he was a valued member of “the Congo cell” at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, helping to draft the foreign minister’s correspondence on the crisis. The record shows that Mr. Davignon knew that Mr. Lumumba was being transferred somewhere he would surely be killed. If there is evidence that Mr. Davignon’s role went beyond this, it has not appeared in the extensive public records now available.

That’s not to say that Mr. Davignon bears no responsibility. He was, at the very least, a cog in a machine that helped topple an elected prime minister and send him to his death — or, as Mr. Lumumba’s family put it, “one of the links in the chain.”

But an ordinary criminal court in Brussels is an awkward vehicle for delivering restorative justice of this scale. The Congolese people will gain little from prosecuting a man who drafted cables.

What would actual atonement look like? For Belgium, it would entail a forthright apology and an admission of institutional responsibility. For the United States, it could mean the same, as well as investing in Congo’s governance, its institutions and its people, instead of merely racing to secure its cobalt. In other words, Washington could treat Congo as a nation with aspirations of its own rather than a mine to be managed.

The U.S. government could also open up the Congo files. Sixty-five years on, C.I.A. documents about the agency’s role in Mr. Lumumba’s demise are still studded with redactions related to bribes, collaborators and other important information.

Mr. Lumumba’s daughter Juliana once told me that she is often asked, after Belgium’s various quasi-apologies, what more she wants. Her answer: “We want the truth.”

 

Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case

A jury found the companies harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress.

March 25, 2026  Updated 3:37 p.m. ET

Meta’s chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, at Los Angeles Superior Court last month.Mark Abramson for The New York Times

By Cecilia KangRyan Mac and Eli Tan

Cecilia Kang reported from Washington, Ryan Mac from the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County and Eli Tan from San Francisco.

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The social media company Meta and the video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress, a jury found on Wednesday, a landmark decision that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.

Meta and YouTube must pay $3 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering and other financial burdens. Meta is responsible for 70 percent of that cost and YouTube for the remainder.

The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.

The jury of seven women and five men are deliberating further to decide what punitive damages the companies should pay for malice or fraud.

The verdict in K.G.M.’s case — one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat — was a major win for the plaintiffs. The finding validates a novel legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury. It is likely to factor into similar cases expected to go to trial this year, which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products.

The personal liability argument draws inspiration from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco last century, in which lawyers argued that the companies created addictive products that harmed users. The companies have largely dodged legal threats by citing a federal shield, called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects them from liability for what their users post.

TikTok and Snap both settled with the plaintiff for undisclosed terms before the trial started.

Wednesday’s verdict follows a ruling this week by a New Mexico jury in another case brought by the state attorney general there, which found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users of its apps from child predators. That jury decided on Tuesday that Meta should pay $375 million in that case.

The trial in the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County began last month, with the jury taking more than a week of deliberation to reach its verdict. The $3 million in financial damages are a drop in the bucket for Meta and YouTube’s parent company Google, which bring in billions in revenue every quarter.

But the lawyers, parents and consumer interest groups supporting plaintiffs in other suits hailed the jury’s decision as a major step to rein in social media giants.

“This is the first time in history a jury has heard testimony by executives and seen internal documents that we believe prove these companies chose profits over children,” said Joseph VanZandt, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokeswoman said.

Google also said it disagreed with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesman.

The cases have been compared to those against Big Tobacco last century, when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were accused of hiding information about the harms of cigarettes. The companies reached a $206 billion master settlement with more than 40 states in 1998 that led to an agreement to stop marketing to minors. Strict tobacco regulations and a decline in smoking followed.

Though the California Superior Court of Los Angeles County verdict is an initial victory against tech giants, legal experts said it was unclear if the decision would represent a similar turning point. Eight other cases brought by individual plaintiffs are slated to go to trial there. A set of federal cases brought by states and school districts in Oakland, Calif., at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, are scheduled for jury trials this summer.

“There is a long road ahead, but this decision is quite significant,” said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and expert on media law. “If there are a series of verdicts for plaintiffs, it will force the defendants to reconsider how they design social media platforms and how they deliver content to minors.”

Concern about social media use has mounted globally. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called for adding warning labels to social media explaining that the platforms were associated with mental health harms for adolescents. In December, Australia barred children under 16 from using social media. Malaysia, Spain and Denmark are considering similar rules.

But most efforts to regulate social media in the United States have failed. K.G.M., whose first name is Kaley, filed her lawsuit in 2023 against Meta, Snap, YouTube and TikTok. Kaley, who lives in Chico, Calif., said she had begun using social media at age 6 and claimed the sites caused personal injury, including body dysmorphia and thoughts of self harm.

Her case, which was presided over by Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, represented one of the strongest personal injury cases among the thousands of suits filed.

Ahead of the trial, lawyers for the companies argued to the judge that the cases should be dropped, evoking speech protections. Lawyers for the plaintiff countered that the case was about product design, not speech.

While Snap and TikTok settled, lawyers for Meta and YouTube proceeded, saying they had a strong legal defense. It was too hard to prove social media was addictive and caused personal harms, the companies said.

During opening arguments, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers, Mark Lanier, presented the jury internal company documents from Meta and YouTube that showed tech executives knew of and discussed the negative effects of their products on children. Mr. Lanier argued that features like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and auto-play videos were designed to entice and hook young users to compulsively engage with the platforms.

Meta countered that K.G.M.’s mental health issues were caused by familial abuse and turmoil. YouTube argued that it was not a social media company and that its features were not designed to be addictive.

During the five-week trial, K.G.M.’s lawyers grilled Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. The executives rejected claims that Instagram, which K.G.M. began to use at age 9, could be described as “clinically” addictive.

K.G.M. testified about her childhood and using social media as both a creative outlet and an escape from bullying at school. She spent hours a day on Instagram and posted hundreds of photos using beauty filters to mask her insecurities, which she said led to her body dysmorphia.

On Wednesday, all but two of the jurors found both companies liable, determining that Meta and YouTube were negligent in designing their platforms, and that their products harmed K.G.M. The plaintiff, dressed in a tan sweater and long pink dress, sat in the first row of the public benches and listened intently to the verdict, but showed little emotion.

The jury next heard arguments from Mr. Lanier and representatives for Meta and YouTube on punitive damages.

Mr. Lanier held a jar of M&M’s, saying each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the companies’ value.

“You can take out a handful and not make a difference,” he said, scooping out a few with his hand. “You can take out two handfuls and not make a difference.”

Meta’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, suggested that the jury could avoid punitive damages completely. Meta is already on the path toward making changes toward protecting young users, he added.

Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, apologized to K.G.M.

“We are sorry for the things you have suffered,” he said. “We at YouTube truly hope there have been things at YouTube that have enriched your life and allowed you to express yourself.”

Mr. Lanier responded by saying “a lawyer apology is not the same as accountability.” He used his teeth to crack off the shell of a single blue M&M.

“This is like $200 million,” he said. “They do not want to feel the pain for what they did.”

Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.

Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco."

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Trump, Who Calls Mail-in Voting ‘Cheating,’ Just Voted by Mail

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“President Trump, who has criticized mail-in voting, voted by mail in a Florida special election. Despite his claims of widespread voter fraud, Trump has used mail-in voting himself and supports exceptions for illness, disability, military service, or travel. The SAVE Act, which Trump supports, aims to restrict mail-in voting and increase voter identification requirements.

​

President Trump has long fixated on mail-in voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. But he recently used the method in a Florida special election.

March 24, 2026Updated 7:14 a.m. ET

President Trump at Palm Beach International Airport on Monday.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

President Trump, who has long railed against mail-in voting — including on Monday, when he called it “mail-in-cheating” — used the method himself in a Florida special election scheduled to take place on Tuesday.

According to voter records on the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website, Mr. Trump voted by mail in Palm Beach County, home to his Mar-a-Lago Club. Records show he has been registered to vote there since 2019 — and that he mailed his ballot at least one other time, in 2020.

The website noted that Mr. Trump’s voter status was “by mail ballot” and that it had been counted in the special election that will determine whether Democrat Emily Gregory or Republican Jon Maples, whom Mr. Trump endorsed, will represent Mr. Trump’s district in the Florida state house.

Mr. Trump’s most recent vote, reported earlier by The Washington Post, comes as the president torpedoed negotiations to end the partial government shutdownto demand Republican lawmakers pass legislation called the SAVE Act that would stiffen voter identification requirements and make mail-in voting significantly more difficult.

The White House said in a statement that the legislation was not designed to eliminate mail-in voting. “The SAVE America Act has common-sense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed,” the statement said. “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.”

During an appearance in Memphis, Tenn., on Monday, he argued that the voter identification bill was essential to national security. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court appeared poised to reject Mississippi’s mail-in ballot law, a decision that could upend mail-in voting throughout the country. A decision in the case, brought by the Republican Party, is expected by late June or early July. It could affect hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots for hotly contested congressional races in November.

Mr. Trump has long fixated on mail-in-voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, and has called the SAVE Act one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the country’s history. During his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections” and called for “no more crooked mail-in ballots,” though states that vote entirely by mail see very little fraud.

Mr. Trump has called for some exceptions for mail-in voting, such as when voters are ill, disabled, traveling or in the military. But it is unclear why Mr. Trump chose to mail his ballot for this week’s Florida’s special election. He has spent the last two weekends in West Palm Beach during the early voting period, which started on March 14 and ended on Sunday.

According to the elections website, his polling location is within a 15-minute drive of both his residence and his golf club.

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.“

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Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian

What a savage!

"It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.

Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.

Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.

Hegseth and company are promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death

During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.

Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.

Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.

Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.

It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.

Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).

The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.

The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.

Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).

Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.

• Jan-Werner Mueller is a Guardian US columnist"

Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death