Johann Hari

 ...and was interviewed today on Democracy Now, the best news show in the world. It's worth a listen. Thank you to everyone who wrote demanding his release. 

Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s superb, unsettling new history, “Churchill’s Empire” — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.

Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save and the world he helped to trash?

To read this article from the New York Times in full, click here.

The excellent young American journalist Jake Hess - who is a good friend of mine - has just been imprisoned in Turkey in extremely worrying circumstances. Hess has been factually reporting from Southern Turkey for over a year now on way the Kurdish civilian population is being treated. Here's a sample of his excellent reporting:

"Compared to most internally displaced Kurds in northern Iraq, Shamal Qadir is almost lucky. Since the Turkish army devastated his village, Kuzine, in a bombing raid Jul. 1, he’s been living in a schoolhouse, where room temperatures are comfortable and basic amenities are accessible.

Qadir is one of roughly 6,500 people who have been driven from their homes by Turkish and Iranian bombings of Kurdish border villages in northern Iraq since May 24."

For rigorously and compassionately reporting on a horrifying situation, Hess has been jailed.
AOL has the full story here.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Journalists Without Borders have both issued statements calling for his immediate release. He is a legitimate journalist of extremely high integrity.

Please take just a minute to call the Turkish Embassy in Washington DC on +1 202 612 67 00 +or email them at contact@turkishembassy.org and politely explain that you expect this outstanding US citizen to be treated with decency, and released at once. A country that calls itself a democracy should not be imprisoning journalists for telling the truth.

At first, this isn't going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide - the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft - so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: "We are like prisoners here."

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: "Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!" Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it's back to the dorm.

It's the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: "My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse... This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day." At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: "We're really livestock and shouldn't be called workers." They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, "to symbolize their improving life."

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations - corporations - to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here's just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: "When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn't even see his eyes."

So you might be thinking - was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse - and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting "there are no human rights here!" and "we want freedom!" The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" - by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn't enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this - and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn't a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude - or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent - but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To read his latest article for Slate, click here

Noam Chomsky is one of the most hysterically abused figures in the world today. Even his critics have to concede that his work inventing the field of linguistics -- and so beginning to decode the structure of how language is formed in the human brain -- makes him one of the most important intellectuals alive. But when he applies the same rigorous scientific method to figuring out the structure of how power -- especially the American government's - works, he is pepper-sprayed with smears. He is a self-hating Holocaust denier, a jihad-loving traitor, a Pol Pot-licking communist, and on and on.

If all you know of his work is the smears, then his new book Hopes and Prospects will be a revelation. In his rather dry understated way, he excavates the reality behind the babbling Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table for us to examine. Every one is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice -- yet each one is a shock if you rely on news brought to you by corporations and corrupt right-wing billionaires.

So, for example, he uncovers the story of why Haiti is so poor, and could be shaken to pieces by an earthquake that would have killed only a handful in California. It's a story of man-made earthquakes, one after another. The country was the first to rebel against slavery and to successful cast off the whip-hand -- and so it was brutally punished by the French Empire. Every time it has begun to rise onto its feet, it has been kicked back down, with the American Empire taking over to topple its elected leaders (the last was put on a plane at gunpoint in 2008) and stifle any moves towards development.

But who knows? Who has heard about it? Who ties to hold our leaders accountable for it? Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole, so we can remember them. He explains that Ronald Reagan -- the great hero of the American right -- was a great champion of jihadism. It was Reagan who encouraged Pakistan to simultaneously become viciously fundamentalist, and acquire nuclear weapons. Chomsky coolly condemns "the global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan," launched for geopolitical reasons, with no concern for the after-effects.

But Reagan remains unstained. Chomsky quotes the great American historian Francis Jennings, who noted of early twentieth century leaders: "In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings." Instead, Chomsky says, history is too often ruled by the maxim spelled out by Thucydidies: "The strong do as they wish, while the poor suffer as they must."

But it doesn't have to be this way. This is a book weaved through with hope and awe at all the people who have managed to slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky's strongest model -- and the world's -- is Bolivia's experiment with radical democracy. After thirty years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water being pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people rose up and elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America.

In his cool blizzard of facts and academic sources, the hot air of his critics seems to melt away. To pluck one example, the leftist-turned-neoconservative journalist Nick Cohen has accused Chomsky of being soft on jihadism (as well as of "not being bothered" by "the crimes of Adolf Hitler"). Yet Chomsky points out that an analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a "seven-fold increase in jihadism." If you really hate jihadism, you have to figure out what actually reduces it, rather than engage in bluster. Chomsky supported the path that produces fewer jihadis, while Cohen supports the path that produces more.

Chomsky presents all this plainly, and with -- and this is often overlooked -- a sly sense of humour. Describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan, he notes: "People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends." He picks through the Wonderland of U.S. propaganda-speak for the most comical examples. To pluck just one: Kennedy courtier Hans Morgenthau said that the "reality" of U.S. foreign policy lies in its "transcendent ideals", and when the historical record suggested the U.S. had fallen short of it, this was merely "an abuse of reality." He sternly warned that we must not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself."

When I was shamefully wrong about the war in Iraq myself, it was an email exchange with Noam Chomsky -- where he laid bare the best evidence about what was motivating the U.S. government -- that helped me figure out where I had gone so badly wrong. Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people - a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn't be left buried in our over-flowing sandpit of propaganda and lies.

I'm taking a short break, but in the meantime here's an article from May 2007 that, in light of the epidemic of suicides in the i-Pad factories in China, might be worth revisiting:

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids' market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: "Long live the company!" If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.

One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.

Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China's factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke - and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. "They don't care if I am crippled for life," she says.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed finally to allow Chinese workers like her - too late - some basic rights.

The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions. It would give them the right to a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the right to change jobs freely. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

This is not the first time big business has militated to prevent basic freedoms from being extended to China. Bill Clinton came to office promising "an America that will not coddle dictators, from Beijing to Baghdad", and at first, he acted on this rhetoric, issuing an executive order that decreed trade with China could only grow if China in tandem increased its respect for human rights. Enraged American business executives subjected him to nuclear-strength lobbying - so Clinton ditched his executive order after a year.

Ever since, Western governments have been justifying business with the Chinese dictatorship by saying our corporations and trade would inevitably and inexorably bring greater freedom to China.

But now the corporations that they claimed would bring freedom and democracy are in fact lobbying to crush freedom and opposing the plain democratic will of the Chinese people. As James Mann, the former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, puts it after years of observing the behaviour of big business in China: "The business communities of China and the United States [and, he might have added, Europe] do not harbour dreams of democracy. Both profit from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and both are content with it."

Their lobbying seems to have paid off. The (unelected) Chinese National People's Congress is due to vote on the new labour laws in the next month or so, but the proposals have already been massively watered down.

Scott Slipy, the director of human resources for Microsoft in China, bragged to BusinessWeek, "We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue."

It seems that Maoism is fine so long as its dictatorial urges are put to the service of Bill Gates and other billionaires, rather than one psychotic dictator.

These Western corporations are explicitly seeking a China where a tiny number of extremely rich people are free to organise, but the vast majority of poor people are physically prevented from doing so by the state.

Of course, these market fundamentalist economists claim this situation is in fact good for the Chinese people, because this system is the best way to enrich them. The obvious response is: let them decide. If they don't want to join trade unions, if they don't want workplace protections, nobody will force them. But give them the freedom to choose. Or are these economists saying the Chinese people are too stupid to know their own interests?

The American and European campaigns showing that we are not all willing to accept their serfdom and profit from it have already had successes. The European Chamber of Commerce has been shamed into retracting its initial opposition to the laws. After lobbying from trade unions and human rights organisations, Nike has now denounced the position of the American Chambers of Commerce to which it belongs and backed the law. The remaining Wal-Martian corporations need to be damned one by one - and subject to legal sanctions - until they relent and accept the rights of Chinese workers.

For the sake of millions of people like Lan and Meiren, we need to show these corporations that we refuse to shop until they drop.

Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists – and they are trying to give it the force of law.

Let's look at how this is being imposed in three parts of the world I have reported from: Israel/Palestine, Ethiopia, and Central America. Everyone now knows the Israeli navy committed a machine-gun massacre on a ship in international waters that was carrying humanitarian aid for the blockaded people of Gaza, who Israeli officials joke they have "put on a diet". The boat was armed with Holocaust survivors, Nobel Peace Laureates, food, medicine, cement to rebuild bombed-out homes, and a couple of metal bars that were grabbed at when armed gunmen illegally boarded the boat. Several of the photos released by the IDF "proving" there were other weapons there have already been exposed as old images that have been on the web for years. Some even still had tags on them identifying them as having been taken in 2003.

But how many people know that the Israeli government is slowly obstructing and silencing the organisations within Israel that are trying to get the country on to a saner and safer path? Israel has some of the most admirable peace campaigners in the world – people who remember the lessons of Jewish history and so document every abuse against human rights their government commits. But they are now facing – as Daniel Sokatch, the director of the pro-peace New Israel Fund, puts it – "a co-ordinated effort to stifle dissent and shut down the human rights community in Israel".

It began a year ago. The Israeli government and military refused to co-operate with the UN's investigation into the war on Gaza, but the Israeli human rights groups did. When it was published, authored by a Jewish judge, it proved to be a meticulous and accurate documentation of what happened: it rightly also condemned Hamas's war crime of indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli civilians. But rather than face up to what their leaders had done, many Israelis decided to attack the messenger by declaring the report's criticisms were down to the "fifth columnists" who had "collaborated" with the UN.

The feverish protests – depicting the human rights groups' leaders as horned demons or Hamas flunkies – focused on one fact: they receive some of their funding from European governments. The Israeli government announced this was an "unacceptable infringement" on "Israel's autonomy." At a Knesset hearing, one of the human rights groups' foremost critics demanded to know: "What right do they have to criticise the Israeli government?"

A new law is being passed that would strip any group receiving a shekel from other governments of their tax-empt status, and require them by law to describe themselves as paid agents of a foreign government every time they made a public statement. Their leaders have been arrested and detained on several occasions. Some Israeli politicians are calling for further restrictions still. There is, of course, a comical double standard here: the Israeli settler-right is drenched in money from the US, but there is no suggestion of restricting them.

But this argument – why should outsiders be allowed to criticise us? – is being used more and more as a reason for governments and groups to thwart human rights campaigns. In Ethiopia, the government of Meles Zenawi passed a law last year requiring all human rights groups to receive 90 per cent of their funding from within the country itself. It's cleverer than a ban – it sounds less authoritarian – but it has the same effect. As I saw earlier this year, the organisations that were rescuing little girls from having their vaginas hacked out, or being kidnapped and forced into life-long servitude to a "husband" they didn't want, have had to lay off almost all their staff. And there was nobody left to monitor Meles' claim to have won 99.6 per cent of the vote in the presidential election last week.

Half a world away, in Honduras, the same arguments are appearing, with the same motives. A year ago, President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and forced out of the country by a far-right military clique after making the mistake of mildly redistributing the elite's wealth to the poor. Fake elections were then held, boycotted by more than half of the population. Now the members of the peaceful National Front of Popular Resistance are being mysteriously murdered across the country, along with the journalists who try to document these crimes.

They are people like Claudia Brizuela, a left-wing talkshow host, who was shot in the face in front of her two kids, aged two and eight. A Honduran government spokesman laughed when asked about this and suggested the Resistance are killing their own members "to cause trouble." The critics of these new death squads are being described as "agents" of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, foreign governments with "no right" to talk about Honduras.

These arguments crop up in more unexpected places. Whenever I write articles supporting the rights of Muslim women or African gays or Iranian trade unionists, I get a pepper-spray of critics claiming I am being "imperialist". It's not "your culture". You're not Muslim, or African or Iranian. Stick to your own kind. These arguments usually come from people who consider themselves to be liberal, and would be astonished to discover they are using the same arguments as the Israeli right and the Honduran junta.

But this view exaggerates cultural differences. When delegates from all over the world came together in the wake of the Holocaust to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they thought there would be a massive and irreconcilable row about how to define them. It didn't happen. People everywhere, it turned out, want the same basic rights – and in every culture, there remain thugs who will try to take those rights away.

The differences between cultures are less significant than what we share. No human being wants to be tortured. No human being wants to be starved. No human being wants to be imprisoned without trial or reason. Even in cultures where these acts are normalised by some, the victims still scream and beg for it to stop. In the moment the torture begins, or the cell door slams shut, the cultural difference disappears, and the basic human desire for dignity and safety is all that remains. It is universal. It is never the "culture" of a torture victim to want the torture to continue.

So who are we to talk about Israel or Ethiopia or Honduras? We are humans, like them. Just as people there can – and should – oppose our Government's crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should oppose their governments' crimes against innocent people. It's called solidarity. It's one of the few things that can help the people of Gaza, or the women of Ethiopia, or the dissidents of Honduras now. Instead of sealing ourselves away behind cultural borders, we need more ships carrying hope to suffering strangers.

David Cameron has asked Niall Ferguson to rewrite Britain's history syllabus. Here are the articles I wrote about precisely who this man is, and another about Cameron and Ferguson's close friend Andrew Roberts who has also apparently been offering advice. If we were a country that took its past atrocities seriously, this would be a national scandal. 

Should Britain be giving refuge to Islamic fundamentalists, while sending the men and women who have been brave enough to challenge Islamism back to their deaths? This sounds at first like a straw man question. Who would ever suggest such a policy? Who would defend it? But the facts suggest we are doing it, every day.

On the day when the Special Immigration Appeals Commission decided to allow two Pakistani men they say are al-Qa'ida members to remain in London this week, two other young people were waiting for the British police to seize them and hand them over to men who will kill them. Their "crime" is to resist Islamic fundamentalism, in the name of human rights.

Kiana Firouz is a 27-year-old woman who grew up in revolutionary Iran, and slowly realised that if she ever acted on her natural impulses – to kiss and hold and love another woman – she would be subjected to a hundred lashes. If she did it again, she would be hanged, in a public square, before a jeering mob. But Kiana believed the freedom to fall in love was more important than her own safety. She stood up in Tehran and made a film showing that there are gay people there just as there are gay people everywhere, and they deserve to live and love freely. The police began following and threatening her. She knew what had happened to other gay Iranians – a bullet, a ditch, a lynch mob – so she came to a country she associated with freedom for gay people, Britain, and appealed to us to save her life.

We refused. The Home Office told her to go back to Iran and be "discreet" about her sexuality. But the law in Iran doesn't say discreet lesbians get out of jail free. They are tortured and killed just the same.

Dr Amit is a 29-year-old Pakistani who has asked me not to use his surname, for reasons that will become clear. He grew up in the Punjab, but since he was a young child, he found the religion that was relentlessly promoted by the state and the mosque and the schools absurd. Where was the evidence for this "God"? Why should we follow "His" dictates?

In 2008, he began to write a series of articles online, criticising Islam and all religions. He knew that people are jailed and tortured and executed for critically analysing Mohammed or the Koran or the power of institutionalised Islam within Pakistan, but, again, he believed somebody had to ask these questions, or no progress would ever happen. He knew the police would come looking. So he came to a country whose philosophical and intellectual traditions of scepticism towards religion he revered, and asked us to save his life.

We refused. He was told to go back and be "discreet" in his opposition to religious fundamentalism. But his articles are there, online, for the not-so-secret police to read and torture him for. By the time you read this, he will have been forced on to a plane. He told me: "I will try to hide myself somehow – change my name, not contact anyone I knew before. Maybe then I can survive. I'm terrified."

The courts have condemned Kiana and Amit, but at the same time, they have given a reprieve to Abid Naseer and Ahmed Faraz, who they say are strong al-Qa'ida sympathisers. (Remember though: this was a Kafka-trial where the defendants were not allowed to hear the evidence against them.) The judges ruled they cannot be deported to Pakistan, because there is a serious risk they could be tortured or executed by the Pakistani authorities.

Let's leave aside the repellent double standard for a moment and, for the sake of argument, assume the courts are correct about their affiliations. It is instinctively maddening to have to allow people to remain in Britain who despise many of the great things about this country – freedom for women and gay people and freethinkers – and pine for a theocracy that negates it all.

But that does not mean it is wrong. Would you ever hand a human being over to a torturer who was waiting with a blow-torch and a pair of pliers to take them apart? I doubt it. Our government mustn't do it either. No matter how despicable a human being is, they must be protected from torture and murder. That's why we can't send them back – although we should, of course, put them before a real trial immediately if they were involved in plots to commit murders of their own.

Far from showing us to be weak in the face of Islamism, this would show true strength. The Islamists say we are an empty materialist shell of a society, a brothel that believes in nothing but our own self-gratification. What better refutation is there than to say – here's what we believe in. We believe that torture is absolutely wrong. We believe it so strongly that even you – you, who hate us, and want to kill us – are protected from it.

This approach is far more effective than the neoconservative screeching for the water-board and the B-47. When I interviewed the growing movement of young Muslims in Britain who had been jihadis and trainee suicide bombers but have recanted and are now arguing for democratic values, I was struck by one thing. Every time we behaved like actors in an Osama Bin Laden rant-tape – by torturing and killing civilians in illegal wars – they became convinced he was right and resolved to kill us back. But when we refused to play to that script, doubt crept in.

To give one example of many, Majid Nawaz was in prison for being part of a hardcore Islamist plot to try to topple the governments of Egypt and Pakistan and seize its nukes – but when Amnesty International campaigned to protect him from torture, he realised the "Infidel" were rescuing him, because we have strong moral principles of our own. Now he is one of the most articulate campaigning enemies of Islamism. Of course, few Islamists will recant – but they are stripped of some of their most powerful recruiting tools and intellectual reinforcements when we sincerely oppose torture and murder.

So, yes, Naseer and Faraz should be kept safe from torturers and tried here because it is the right thing to do, and because it shows why the liberal way – if we follow it, instead of Bushite lunacies – is far better than their way.

But if we are going to protect them, how can we possibly not protect the people who are brave enough to stand up in Iran and Pakistan to denounce everything Islamist thugs try to force on innocent people? This isn't just about basic humanity. It is in our interests, too. There is a battle of ideas going on in Muslim societies between fundamentalists, and sane people who are happy to live alongside people who are different. At first, voices for secularism will be intimidated and small and scattered, as they were in the history of our country. But over time they will prick holes in fundamentalist certainties and bleed them. The more the fundamentalists are challenged – by their own countrymen, in their own language – the safer we become.

Brave, bold voices like Kiana's and Amit's do more to undermine Islamic fundamentalism than a thousand bomber-planes that only vindicate the Bin Laden narrative for so many. By sending these remarkable dissidents to die, we aren't only betraying them – we are endangering ourselves.

In the election campaign here in Britain, there is a big blood-splattered hole we are all supposed to ignore. We are at war. It is a war that 64 percent of Brits believe is "unwinnable" and should end now. It is a war that has killed 281 British people and an untold, uncounted number of Afghan civilians. It is a war that costs £4.5bn a year. It is a war to keep Hamid Karzai in power - even though he announced last week: "I swear I am going to join the Taliban." Yet the three biggest political parties are shouting their slogans over the hole as if it does not exist.

So what are they refusing to see? Hamid Karzai was picked by the US and British governments as the Afghan leader most likely to serve their interests, and his regime exists solely because of massive military support from them. Yet - in a sign of how Afghan opinion has tipped after eight years of war - even he now speaks with rage against them. He says the US and Britain's planned military assault on Kandahar this summer must not go ahead because the local population strongly oppose it. He warns there is "a fine line between resistance and revolt" and soon "this revolt will turn into a resistance and I will join it."

Now Karzai is following his own script, the authors of this war have dropped all pretence that they wanted an independent democratic government in Afghanistan. For example, Rudi Giuliani, who was one of the leading neoconservatives making the case for invasion, just said: "Karzai's there because of us, he's our creation, we put him there... I'm not sure we want to engage in the fiction that we're dealing with a democratically elected [leader]... that'd be a major fiction." He said that now Karzai fleetingly follows his people's demands rather than ours, there "might be grounds for shooting" him, and "we need to think about what comes after." He then added, with no irony: "This guy's a thug."

So - we are currently sending young people to kill and die in order to prop up a sort-of-kinda-elected President who (like his people) opposes almost all our actions and is threatening to defect to The Enemy. You might think that is worth discussing. Yet when Afghanistan comes up in this election, the sole subject of complaint is that our helicopters don't work as well as they should.

Why would Karzai, and so many Afghans, and Brits like me, turn like this, after welcoming the toppling of the vile Taliban in 2001? Here's a moment that distils why. Last month, General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander, was talking about how he guards the massive military convoys that move through the country. He said: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

That wasn't considered a story. It didn't dominate the headlines. It was considered a normal thing to say. But imagine somebody bragging that he had shot "an amazing number" of British people, but "none has ever proven to be a threat." How would we react? Ah, the main political parties say, but all these complications and casualties are worth it, because there is a wider driving purpose to the war. They say we must stay for one reason: to fight jihadism. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we don't deprive them of bases, they'll be hitting our places.

At first glance, this may sound persuasive. But look closer. Al Qaeda's attacks don't originate in these "bases", and don't require them: 9/11 was plotted in Hamburg and Florida; 7/7 was planned out in Yorkshire. Anything that could be done in a cave in Torah Borah could be done on a mountaintop in Yemen or a moor outside Manchester: it's highly mobile. If we charge in with Bazookas to conquer one of these places, they simply move to another - and goad us to follow. General Jim Jones, Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, says there are just 100 foreign jihadis in the whole of Afghanistan. They've simply packed up and gone elsewhere. So who are we fighting there? The CIA says they are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power" and have "no goals" outside the country.

But while the war is catching or killing very few jihadis, it is creating a huge number of them. After every bombing and every massacre, there is a swelling pools of relatives who scream at the camera that they now want to become suicide bombers. Those tapes are beamed back to Britain - where they are used to radicalize young Muslims. I have interviewed dozens of ex-jihadis - and they almost all named those videos as a key point in pushing them over from repellent religious bigotry into overtly planning violence. The 7/7 bombers themselves named it; the Detroit pantsbomber was howling about Afghanistan as he tried to detonate his scrotum.

If you really loathe and oppose jihadism, you have to soberly assess the best way to erode its power over time. Charging around with a blowtorch isn't putting out the fire. Indeed, the jihadists say quite clearly that they want the war to continue for as long as possible. Osama Bin Laden brags that it gives him extra recruits and will "bankrupt" the West.

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

The defenders of the war are reduced to chanting "Back Our Boys!" To use the troops as rhetorical human shields to shut down democratic debate about whether they should carry on killing and dying is the worst insult to the soldiers I know. If the only way to Back Our Boys was to demand they stay on an unwinnable battlefield, no disastrous war would ever have been stopped, and we would still be fighting East of Suez. If you really want to back our boys, get them out of the crosshairs and into their homes.

You may think I'm wrong about all this. I respect that - but don't you at least think this should be part of the election debate? Don't you think you should be presented with a choice? Why has it been left to the small, unfairly marginalized Green Party to speak for 64 percent of the public on this?

In Israel earlier this year, the former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons reassured the massed ranks of the Israeli establishment that growing British disgust at the military occupation of Palestinian lands was nothing to worry about because "public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue." She was saying - don't worry; Britain isn't a real democracy - its foreign policy serves the interests of geopolitics and corporations and elites, not those messy, fickle, inconvenient majorities. It's a view that spreads far beyond our policies towards Israel/Palestine. In a fascinating leaked CIA report on European public opinion, they say they are "counting on public apathy about Afghanistan" and boast that so far leaders have been "enabled... to ignore voters". They are worried the charge into Kandahar could cause disgust, but the British election will be over by then.

This muffled cry from the caves of Kandahar is a useful counter-point to this election. It reminds us that, while the small differences between the main parties at election time do matter, they often aren't the primary force that transforms the country. Almost every civilising change in Britain - from feminism to worker's rights to opposing bad wars - came from ordinary citizens banding together and demanding it all year, every year, whether there was an election or not, no matter how unlikely it seemed, until they prevailed. The British ambassador to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill says we will be there "for a generation" more. If you want to prove him wrong, then you have to demand it publicly - long after the terribly limited ballot papers are gathered into a fake middle and tossed away.

 ...by clicking here, here and here. (It's in three parts; later in the show we discuss the British election and the war in Afghanistan.)

Every woman remembers her wedding day with a tear in her eye – but, here in Ethiopia, the tears are different, and darker, and do not stop. Nurame Abedo is sitting in her hut high in the clouds, remembering the day she became a wife. She lives hundreds of feet into the countryside, thousands of miles above sea-level, in the hills of the bridal-kidnapping capital of the world. For 40 years, she didn't talk about her wedding, or how it came to happen. If she tried, she was beaten by her captor, who said good women never speak of such things. So she tells her story slowly, haltingly, her sentences punctuated by sudden high-pitched laughs that seem to erupt involuntarily from her gut.

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."

She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.

After three days, he finally left her alone in the hut. She ran for miles barefoot back to her family, wanting to return to her life, and to her childhood. She hurried through the door, weeping with joy. "But my father told me that now I had had sex with him, nobody else would want me because I was ruined goods, and I had to go back to him and be a good wife," she says. "My mother was very sad but she said it was true. I thought then, 'I have to do this. I have no choice'. I just prayed to God, 'Please help me, please...' I went back. Soon after that I was pregnant, and what could I do? Hah! Now many years have passed and I have six children. Life is hard for a woman. Hah!" She is crumpled now, her walk halting, her face creased. She stares past me, to where white wisps of cloud are swirling past the bare, bright-red soil.

Nurame has a distant sense of another life, one she will never lead now. "If it hadn't happened to me ... I would have been educated and got my own work and lived my own life. I wish to God that had happened." Her laugh erupts again, like a muffled scream. "Maybe I could have been happy. Now I am old. I have to be happy – at least I have children; I love them." She adjusts her black bandana and looks down. But then she says suddenly: "My husband is a good man. He does not beat me now. I love him. He is a very good man." She gives a big gap-toothed smile of apparent sincerity.

All the old women I meet – abductees for a lifetime – insist on this upbeat ending, in almost identical language, after recounting their tales of rape. "It is only hard for the first five years," one of them tells me, quite seriously. I think of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl held in a cellar for eight years, and who now grieves for her captor who killed himself. She has bought the house he imprisoned her in and reportedly sits in his cellar, alone. As I leave Nurmae, I ask her how she would feel if one of her daughters was abducted. Her face hardens. "I would find her. I would get her back." I wait for the awkward laugh, but this time it doesn't come. She stares, determined.

In Ethiopia, Nurame's story happens every day. In 2003 – the last year for which statistics are available – the National Committee on Traditional Practices of Ethiopia found that 69 per cent of marriages begin like this, with the triple-whammy of abduction, rape, and a forced signature. In a country with a mixture of Protestant, Catholic and Muslim, all religions practise it equally.

These stories have been sealed away for millennia, behind masks of pain and repression, but sometimes there are moments when history suddenly accelerates – and this is one of them. Across the fields and huts of this country, a mass rebellion of abductee-brides has broken out over the past decade. Ethiopian women have started to refuse to watch their sisters disappear into servitude. They are fighting back – and now they are asking for our help.

I Honey, honey

"Yes, I kidnapped several of my wives," says the tall, thin market trader, in a bland matter-of-fact tone. Abebe Anebo is a wiry 45-year-old man, with sunken eyes that are partially concealed in the shade of a grubby white baseball cap. He makes his living selling pots crafted from the earth by his seven captive-brides and his 25 children. He is returning from market when I meet him, leaving tracks in the muck. It has been raining for days, and the land seems to have erupted with wild green foliage and molten mud everywhere. Everyone is slipping and sliding. Like many men here, he sees nothing wrong with kidnapping a woman – indeed, he claims it is a sign of love.

"I used to see her in the market where I sell pots," he says fondly of the first woman he took. "She was beautiful. I never talked to her, but I loved her. One Monday I called my friends and we picked her up and took her to the car and away with us." What did she do? "She cried but once she was in the car she shut up. I knew her family and I wanted to be part of it – it's a good family. I told her cousin I was going to take her and he said it was fine." He says it as though he is describing buying a tin of beans.

I try to match his casual tone as I ask 'Did you rape her?' He laughs. It is not an embarrassed laugh, but an anticipatory guffaw, and he leans towards me, like he is about to offer a punchline. "I got her to sleep in the hut between me and the fire. The fire was very hot. In the end she had to come closer to me!" With that he cracks up, and all the men standing around laugh with him. I repeat the question 'So did you rape her?' "Yes, I did, obviously," he says, as though I am grouchily missing the gag.

What was married life like? "Once she was abducted, she fell into line. She lived her life. She made pots. She did what she had to. A man is like honey, honey to a woman – once she has honey, she is happy." She died in an accident a few years ago, he says. At a wedding, somebody shot a pistol in the air in celebration, and the bullet came back to earth and hit her between the eyes. Fortunately, he had seized a second wife, so he wasn't left alone.

But he grieves for that wife because she was a good worker. "Women are our factories. They work for their husbands. They cultivate land, they make pots, they treat animal skins... A woman should obey. If I tell one of my wives to do something, she does it." Why should she? "That's life. Even if I became a cripple, she would obey me. She is a woman. They like it."

But if women want it, why abduct them? Why not just ask? He is finding these questions grating now. He looks to the other men and smirks a little, then looks back at me. "This is how we did it! I thought it was normal. Our ancestors did it, our grandfathers did it, our fathers did it. My mother was kidnapped by my father." He admits that, yes, his mother sometimes cursed this fact, but that is just proof of her generally lazy and ungrateful nature. "She had a wealthy family, so when she was with them she was very lazy, and very proud that she didn't have to work. When my father took her she had to work, and she was always bitter and angry about that. She just had to get on with it though." How would he feel if one of his daughters was abducted? "I'd pity the poor man who took her!" he says, and everyone falls about laughing again.

But then suddenly the conversation slams into a 180-degree reverse, as it seems to everywhere on this subject. He says, with a solemn look: "I think abduction is illegal now. It's bad, you shouldn't do it. It's wrong." He says this with great solemnity, as if describing the death of a loved one. I'm confused: you just said a minute ago that women like it. He shouts: "Nowadays men have to be different! If I kidnap a woman now I'll probably be punished!" Then his tone shifts again, just as quickly and just as entirely. He warmly shakes me by the hand, bumps his shoulder against mine – a sign of affection – and continues on his way.

For days, none of this seems real to me. I drive along long clear roads where my vehicle is always the only car, and watch the women huddled together, walking miles for water, or food, or the market. They wear bright shimmering clothes, and, despite their look of pure and perfect exhaustion, they often smile and wave as I pass. Are they really captives? I watch the men strolling and joking and drinking. Are so many really kidnappers? Are they kidnapping tonight?

II Blackout

I uncover the story of how the fight-back began in the middle of a blackout – both electrical, and political. The capital city, Addis Ababa, has been without electricity for three days. Nobody is surprised. Nobody expects it to come back any minute. Nobody listens to the explanations from the dictatorship on the radio – the power plant is failing because wicked contractors inexplicably ripped off the government, and the government is doing all it can to stop this sabotage etcetera. No: the people are irritated instead because, one-by-one, their mobile phones are dying. With no way to recharge, the city's cell network is falling silent, and nobody can find their friends. The city is slowly getting lost.

In the middle of this darkness, Boge Gebre is sitting in her office, working. (Her name is pronounced Bo-gay.) She is the woman who began the rebellion of Ethiopian women – and at first glance, this is not improbable. She is slim and tall, like a weapon. When she was born in the early 1950s, she was expected to have the same life as Nurame. She says: "Women were regarded as no better than the cows they milked. We have round houses made from mud, and within each home there is a strict division. One side is for the men, and other is for the women and the animals.

"My mother's life was a nightmare. I don't know how she survived," she adds, looking down. "She was a very intelligent, very wise woman – but all her life she was abused and beaten – for nothing. She had her back stooped, her legs broken, her jaw broken, even though she did everything right. It was a nightmare, but for her it was a life. And somehow she still smiled. When there is no alternative, you somehow accept this as all you will get. In that situation, many women accept their situation as God-given, not man-made."

When Boge was 12, she was pinned down and had her genitals cut out with a knife. This is called "circumcision" – but it is actually mutilation, and it nearly caused her to bleed to death. It is part of a system that sees a woman's sexuality as something to be scraped and raped away. Afterwards, all that remains is scar tissue, with a little piece of wood inserted so urine can still pass through a tiny hole. This happened to all Boge's sisters too – and it killed one of them. When she came to give birth, her vagina had no elasticity, and the baby could not pass through the mess of poorly-healed scarring between her legs. "They couldn't pull out the baby," Boge says, "so they both died." Men came to abduct Boge twice – but both times she ran away before they could rape her. "So – here I am!" she says.

When she was told this was her culture and she had to accept it, she found the argument ridiculous. "I thought – how can this be my culture, if it kills me?" she says, leaning forward. "What is culture? It is something that is constantly changing. In Europe, you burned witches. That culture changed. Every woman has a sense of her own dignity. I knew I was not a cow, a chattel, and I did not want to be treated like one. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. This is true whatever your culture. Culture is not stagnant – it is transient."

One day, as a little girl, she was sent to stay overnight with one of her cousins when she saw the Amharic alphabet on the wall. She knew that, when she went home, she would not be allowed to see it again – her father beat her mother for even suggesting she go to school – so she sat up all night and memorised all 268 characters. Not long after, she ran away to a missionary school – they were amazed she knew the alphabet – and became the first girl in her village to be properly educated. They helped her get a scholarship to go to high school in Addis Ababa, and then she got another, to study microbiology in Jerusalem. From there, she was given a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Massachusetts. She saved any money she could from her grants and sent them back to her mother, who built a house with them. The village was in awe – a woman, providing for her family?

Boge knew she could have stayed in America, and tried to forget all this. "Yes, I could have had a better house and gone jogging on the beach or gone to a spa every weekend. But is that what life is all about? Could I have stayed there knowing my sisters were being cut and abducted and turned into servants? Einstein said you start living when you give yourself out. I feel I'm living now."

So she went back to Kembatta in the 1990s. "I knew the women themselves wanted to change it. Women don't lack brains, we only lack opportunity – to go to school, to be free and independent, to make our own choices." She went to the church – hers is a Protestant area – and asked to address the congregation.

She talked about HIV/Aids. Many men were shocked: they considered it an affront, a dirty subject. Afterwards the elders told her to forget about all that because the biggest problem in the area was the nearby gorge: kids couldn't cross it to get to the nearest school, and traders couldn't pass it to get to market. She knew she would gain credibility if she solved it – so she provided the cement and the iron bars and within a few months there was a bridge. "That bridge connected the village to the other side of the gorge," she says, "but it also connected me to their hearts."

So she suggested a bolder plan. She set up local assemblies where anyone could speak about the problems in the area – a place where old men and young girls could address each other as equals. Everybody said it was impossible, ridiculous, unthinkable. But she pressed on and established an organisation called Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Tope (KMG) – Kembatta Women Standing Together – and began organising the villages. Steadily, one-by-one, the assemblies happened, and at first women made mild and modest demands (from our point of view, at least). Couldn't men and women sit together in public? Couldn't girls stay at school as long as boys? Couldn't women become elders too, and decide on the affairs of the community?

On a torrentially rainy Sunday, I watch an assembly happen, in a classroom that seems to be in the process of being slowly smothered by vast, outsized plants. An old man stands up and says humbly: "Before KMG came, a woman never sat with a man. She wasn't even allowed to sit with her husband at meals. First the man ate, then the woman ate. Women were nothing. Things are better now, I can see that." A cacophony follows – of girls talking about the need for contraception, and abortion, and Aids tests, and men agreeing.

As the meetings went on over the years, their demands for equality swelled. Why should women's vaginas be mutilated? They screened a video of a female "circumcision" taking place for the men. One passed out; four vomited. "The rebellion just grew and grew," Boge says. At a wedding in 2003, the bride and all her bridesmaids wore signs saying: "I am uncircumcised." It was a Spartacus moment, and the women here weep as they remember it.

Bridal abductions have been technically illegal since 2005, but, outside the capital, the law is interpreted very loosely by the police and judges. When a 13-year-old girl called Woineshet Zebene Negash became the first Ethiopian ever legally to challenge a bridal abduction, the judge at her trial said: "What is the problem? He loves you – that's why he abducted you." He added she probably wasn't a virgin before the kidnapping – the medical tests were inconclusive – and so it couldn't be rape because "nobody wants to rape a girl who isn't a virgin". Even the girl's defence attorney said in court: "I think [she] was, like, 'Please rape me'."

But in these new forums, women began to speak about their terror of being kidnapped – and Boge was there to explain that KMG would ensure any man who committed it went to prison. She would harangue the police until they acted. KMG began to raise money from abroad – Boge says the money from the British charity Comic Relief (which spends the money raised through Sport Relief) was "a lifesaver".

But, just as light seemed to be breaking through, a bitter backlash began. One morning, a village elder awoke to find his 13-year-old daughter was missing. He had been a prominent convert against bridal abduction – and now, he was told, the men of the area were "taking revenge" for "undermining our culture". Boge would not let the police rest until they found her – and once the girl was rescued, the local women refused this time to say she was dirty and ruined and shun her. Not this time. Not this girl. Samiya Abebe, now a small 15-year-old girl in an outsized women's suit, tells me softly: "He grabbed me at the market and had my vagina mutilated and..." She can't bring herself to say much more. After he and his brothers held her captive for three months, she was pregnant. Before the rebellion, she would have become another Nurame, and faced a lifetime serving her rapist. "Actually, I would have killed myself," she says, with certainty.

But when she ran back, she was running into a transformed culture. Her family said it wasn't her fault and she was "brave and brilliant" for escaping. A group of girls her age who went to the KMG meetings arranged to walk with her to school and back every day so she wouldn't be scared. "They bought me presents – soap and schoolbooks – and said they wouldn't let anyone be mean to me... Now people know a girl can be kidnapped and come back – and live." Her baby was adopted. After all this, she came seventh out of 110 students. "If I finish my education, I can still be the woman I want to be," she says, and beams.

What is replacing abduction? The younger women say they want to choose their own husbands, with a firm, decisive nod. But when I ask the men, they disagree. "I will decide whom [my daughter] marries, and I will expect a high bridal price because my daughter is beautiful – 50 cows," one father tells me. I ask Awano Busmalo, the man who resisted bridal abductions so fiercely his own daughter was kidnapped, and even he says: "I will choose her husband. I will make sure he is HIV-negative and has enough money to provide," he says. And will his daughter be allowed to refuse to marry a rich, HIV-negative man? "No. That is my decision," he says. In his stare, I see that eradicating abductions is the start of the story of freeing Ethiopian women, not its climax.

The lights outside Boge's office – and across Addis Ababa – blink on for a moment, and then vanish again. She says: "I know if this progress is going to last, I have to change all of the community – including the men." It led her towards a man nobody saw as her ally – and a startling conversion.

III St Paul?

As I skid along the mud-streets of Kembatta with Alemu Dutbecho Kinole, women hail him everywhere. They cross the road to clasp his hand; with moist eyes, they cry "Thank you! Thank you!" He is a 39-year-old man with a slight beard, a leather jacket, and an intense, stooped stare. He looks creased, like he has been stored away in an old suitcase for years. He acknowledges their thanks with a nod, and a rat-a-tat-tat of questions about their lives today. "He rescued me from being cut!" one woman beams. "He saved my cousin from abduction," another adds. This is not how anyone thought Alemu's life would turn out – since he used to be Kembatta's most notorious bandit, and a kidnapper of women.

Alemu speaks in a low, catarrh-clogged growl, the result of a problem with his chest that no doctor here has been able to diagnose. He always sounds like he is hissing – and when he describes his past, this seems oddly appropriate. We sit in the sun in the hills and he lets loose a long monologue: "I took my wife by force in 1994. She was engaged to somebody else. I negotiated [with her family] for her but I lost to another man. So I used my Kalashnikov. I went to market with my Kalashnikov and I said if she didn't come with me I'd kill her. She came, there was no choice. I put her in my uncle's house and she was kept there. Her family refused to negotiate for her so I went with two grenades and I said if you don't negotiate I will blow you and your house up. They agreed and we were married. I thought, 'I love her, this is how you do it'. I didn't care if she loved me or not. On the second day she might escape, so on the first day you rape her."

He had been taught to seize and to steal, always. He was conscripted into the Ethiopian army by the communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam when he was 14 and sent out to fight against the rebel guerrillas. "I was very frightened, and every day I thought I would be killed," he says. They lived by seizing from the people at gunpoint. "I was fighting hot battles – there was a lot of violence." Once he was demobilised from the army, he just carried on living the same way – raiding passers-by and villages, and living off the proceeds. "I robbed so many people it is a miracle I am still alive," he says. Violence was how he ate and drank – and married.

When Boge first arrived in this area, he was sceptical. Why are these women trying to change the way things have worked here for as long as anyone can remember? What good can come of it? "I went to see the video of the circumcision taking place, and I was shocked. I didn't know it was so violent, so bloody. That was the first time I began to think," he says, lighting a cigarette. His wife – who was only 16 when she was seized – began to attend the KMG meetings and talk about the feelings she had long interred. When I meet her, Desalech Alema says bluntly: "I had been angry for a long time. I went with him because I had no choice. He raped me. I was crying so I couldn't shout for help. I wanted to run back to my family but he threatened to shoot me. Then I could say some of this."

Alemu nods, and says: "I hadn't ever thought in this way. I changed. When I heard about abductions, I began to weep. I felt guilty." Desalech breaks in: "He became a better husband. He started fetching water for me, and being kind." He laughs: "I am always checking to make sure she is fat! I want her to be very well-fed!" They both giggle, sharing a long glance.

The transformation seems so vast and so sudden that, for days, I find it hard to credit. Is it opportunistic? How could he not have known that abduction harmed women, and that it was wrong? Didn't he hear her screams? And yet it's not as if every man makes this show of repentance. The Kembatta Zonal Prison has a large guard-tower made of rusty sheet metal and barbed wire. But once the guards let you pass, it seems incongruous – a long rolling patch of greenery with a few white dorm huts with cows strolling around casually in the sun, flicking away flies with their tails. Swaying upbeat African music is blaring from a radio, while, in the corner, some prisoners are chopping wood. "I will bring you the kidnapper," says a female guard merrily.

They bring Zemach Subego into the prison office. He is a long-faced, long-limbed 22-year-old man who seems to feel no embarrassment about the reason why he is here serving a seven-year sentence. "I helped my cousin kidnap a girl," he says casually. "He loved her and he wanted to marry her. I don't see it as a crime. I didn't know it was supposed to be wrong. We offered her family an ox [as a bridal-price]." He rubs his thighs with his palms and smirks. "How could I know it was a crime? It is how my father got married. I didn't think the law would get involved." When I ask how the girl feels about it, he chuckles: "I am sure she is waiting for us when we get out! Who else will marry her now?" He laughs, and the guards laugh, and soon the whole room is in stitches. Outside, a cow hears the noise, and moos cheerfully.

When I come out, I look at Alemu differently. I watch him dart from meeting to meeting – one lobbying the police to prosecute abductions, another helping girls arrange workshops to stop genital mutilation. There is an intensity and frenzy to it that seems authentic – an act of manic repentance. I think of the story of St Paul, who persecuted Christians, only to become their defender. In a pause between meetings, Alema stands with me, and smokes. "I think a man can learn," Alemu says, and then corrects himself: "I think a man must learn."

IV Exodus

In Kembatta – the area where KMG is based – they have slashed the rate of bridal abductions by more than 90 per cent. Because of them, Nurame's daughters and grand-daughters will not rerun their mother's story in an endless recurring loop of misery. "It shows cultures can change when women are given a chance," Boge says. She stresses "we couldn't have done it" without the support of the money raised through Sport Relief. I think of all the kids doing sponsored runs and all the people calling up to make donations. The cynicism – the money doesn't get through, it'll never make a difference – is, in this place, this time, flat-out wrong. Now they need more money to save more girls: there are areas where the abductions remain endemic – and there is an added reason to act fast.

In theory, the Ethiopian government supports moves to eradicate bridal abduction: they know the country cannot develop if half its population is terrorised and not free. But a new law threatens to wipe out the progress that has been made – and effectively to dismantle the women's organisations.

Ethiopia has been slipping in a political mudslide towards being a police state for years. Ask a taxi driver or a random person on the street what he thinks of the Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, and he looks jolted and afraid. He will mumble a non-committal phrase – such as "He is our leader, yes" – and try to get away from you a soon as possible. The press serves up only the gruel of propaganda, pre-approved by the regime. As a former Marxist guerrilla, Zenawi was never a true democrat, but political freedoms have been in freefall since the last election. Critics of the regime and opposition politicians vanish into torture-jails and emerge lame and silent years later. There has been an exodus of Ethiopians who work in human rights, and they are now scattered across the globe.

To a dictator, any self-organising, self-confident community is a threat to be dispersed – even if the community is organising to achieve a goal the regime shares. If the people can talk to each other, there is a risk they will talk against the dictator. So last year, the Ethiopian government passed one of the most restrictive laws anywhere in Africa. They banned international human rights groups, saying it is "imperialist" to check to see if Ethiopians are being kidnapped or tortured. At the same time, they passed a law saying all Ethiopian human rights groups need to raise 90 per cent of their income inside the country. In practice, this means most of them have all but shut down.

The Ethiopian Women's Lawyers Association (EWLA) has been the great legal champion opposing abduction and genital mutilation. Now its leaders are in exile, unable to help anyone here. At first, its senior figures nervously refuse to talk to me. When one finally agrees to meet for coffee in an Addis Ababa café, she speaks only in oblique, fractured sentences, as if a secret policeman is standing over her shoulder. (I won't give her name, for obvious reasons.)

"More than 80 per cent of our staff have had to be laid off," she says, but adds quickly: "It is not a problem of government." The most she will say is there are still "some bad judges". When the interview is over, she seems physically to relax, her shoulders finally rolling out of a tense hunch.

KMG has been classified as a "humanitarian" rather than a "human rights" organisation – at every turn, it stresses it doesn't oppose the government, but only wants to hold it to the standards it says it sets for itself – so for now it can still raise international funds. But nobody knows when that too could be choked off – so the time to give is now.

On my final day in Ethiopia, Alemu takes me to meet a group of girls he has helped rescue from abductors. They do not have the broken incoherence of the older women I met, who have never known freedom. They talk about becoming doctors and lawyers and teachers; they meet my eye, and argue back to the men around them. When darkness begins to settle, we watch them disappear into the distance, joking and laughing among themselves. Alemu sucks on his cigarette with a hard wheeze and says: "If somebody had abducted Boge, what would this area look like now?" He shakes his head, and looks away.

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the women involved

The Sport Relief Weekend takes place from Friday 19 to Sunday 21 March and brings the entire nation together to get active, raise cash and change lives. The money raised through Sport Relief is spent by Comic Relief to help poor and disadvantaged people, living unimaginably tough lives, both at home in the UK and across the world's poorest countries. Sport Relief cash supports projects like KMG in Ethiopia to empower communities in support of the rights of women and girls to be free of harmful customary practices and other forms of abuse. To sign up and get sponsored for the Sainsbury's Sport Relief Mile go to sport relief.com; the Sport Relief big night of TV is broadcast on Friday 19 March from 7pm on BBC 1.

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti-quake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakable grief that could last for years. In the middle of Haiti’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions of people like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of The Free Market has rolled out across the world because The People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatize the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tents more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The Gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece ‘The Shock Doctrine’, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle. One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF – an institution set up by European and American governments after the Second World War – would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertilizer for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion”, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine began to scythe through the population. Nobody knows how many tens of thousands starved to death; nobody bothered to count. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. Whenever I report from the developing world, the IMF tracks of anti-development lie like wounds across the land. They systematically disregard the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of their commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country.” So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there’s a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries… to spend a fortune subsidising the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn’t dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It’s not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: they have just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. They are forbidden from embarking on a fiscal stimulus. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter.

Here’s where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist – after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatisation of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through. The drowned-out people couldn’t fight back any more.

After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled onto an earlier loan – which requires Haiti to steeply raise the price for electricity, and freeze wages for the public sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them. It was classic IMF: we’ll give you a hand, provided your people feel the back of your hand.

There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti’s rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port au Prince, where they built mud huts – and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as “the Plan of Death.” It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly.

But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country – by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called ‘No Shock Doctrine For Haiti’ had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein’s mega-selling expose, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be cancelled out by the IMF.

And it worked. The IMF backed down. They publicly renounced their conditions – and even said they will work to cancel Haiti’s entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF’s agenda works. Klein says it is “unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics.” Of course, they need to be watched vigilantly for any signs of backtracking. Already they seem to be rolling back some of their panicked initial rhetoric and saying that “beyond the emergency phase” they may go back to business-as-usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune.

But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF’s poverty-promoting machine steam-rollering across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 – for the causes of democracy and justice.

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the twenty-first century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy – picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up a truck and muttering “Hasta la vista, baby.” But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within twenty years.

The NATO forces now depend on a range of killer-robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatized by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses.” Fox News proudly calls it “the G.I. of the twenty-first century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, who will leave these models looking like a ZX Spectrum or the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and ‘die.’ So the military is building ‘autonomy’ into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to P.W. Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA. In his must-read book ‘Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First century’, he warns: “Humanity has started to engineer technologies that are fundamentally different from all before. Our creations are now acting in and upon the world around us.”

Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage. The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.

The military say this is a safer model of combat. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command says of the warbots: “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.” Why take a risk with your soldier’s life, if he can stay in Arlington and kill in Kandahar? Think of it as War 4.0. There are proposals to bring this model home into domestic law enforcement too: the Department of Homeland Security recently requested money to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the US-Mexico border.

But the evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong – because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 percent of US factories have “major robotics accidents” every year – a man having molten allunimium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren’t designed to kill.

On its first public outing in 2007, one of South Africa’s first warbots went haywire  and began firing explosive shells all around it at the rate of 550 a minute. Nine soldiers died. Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine gun pointed at your chest.

Robots find it almost impossible to distinguish an apple from a tomato: how will they distinguish a combatant from a civilian? You can’t appeal to a robot for mercy; you can’t activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch says: “War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians … If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes?”

Robots do make war much easier – for the aggressor. You are taking much less physical risk with your people, even as you kill more of theirs. One US report recently claimed they will turn war into “an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.” As Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defence: “It will make people think, ‘Gee, warfare is easy.’

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If we weren’t losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I’d like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take “us” out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill “them.”

There is some evidence that warbots will also make us less inhibited in our killing. When another human being is standing in front of you, when you can stare into their eyes, it’s hard to kill them. When they are half the world away and little more than an avatar, it’s easy. A young air force lieutenant who fought through a warbot told Singer: “It’s like a video game [with] the ability to kill. It’s like… freaking cool.”

When the US First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq was asked in 2006 what kind of robotic support it needed, they said they have an “urgent operational need” for a laser mounted onto an unmanned drone that can cause “instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.” The request said it should be like “long range blow torches or precision flame throwers.” They wanted to do with robots things they would find almost unthinkable face-to-face.

While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyze greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts they create “an almost helpless feeling… It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back. Imagine if the skies over Washington and Manhattan were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge. The Lebanese editor Rami Khouri says that when Lebanon was bombarded by largely unmanned Israeli drones in 2006, it only “enhanced the spirit of defiance” and made more people back Hezbollah.

Is this a rational way to harness our genius for science and spend tens of billions of pounds? The scientists who were essential to developing the nuclear bomb – including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrei Sakharov – turned on their own creations in horror and begged for them to be outlawed. Some distinguished robotics scientists, like Illah Nourbakhsh, are getting in early, and saying the development of autonomous military robots should be outlawed now.

There are some technologies so abhorrent to human beings that we forbid them outright. We have banned war-lasers that permanently blind people along with poison gas. The conveyor belt dragging us ever closer to a world of robot wars can be stopped – if we choose to. All this money and all this effort can be directed towards saving life, not ever-madder ways of taking it. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make the choice to look the warbot in the eye and say, firmly and forever, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

This article appeared in the Independent

Click here and scroll down to Sunday's edition of the show (November 29th). The interview starts twenty minutes in.

Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time. Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.

It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.

In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.

They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.

I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone.

Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.

But Dubai's bankruptcy does not end there: it is ecologically bust. This is a city built in the burning desert, where everything shrivels up and blows away if it is not kept artificially cold all the time. That's why it has the highest per capita carbon emissions on earth – some 250 percent higher even than America's. The city has to ship in desalinated water – which is more costly than oil. When it runs out of cash, it will run out of water.

Today Dubai will be bailed out by the United Arab Emirates, the oil-rich country of which it is only one state. But the oil will not last forever. More importantly, there is no Bank of Morality that could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.

You can watch an hour-long debate between me and a representative of the racist, misogynistic, homophobic party Hizb ut Tahrir on the Islam Channel by clicking here. (I was not gentle with them.)

Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

I. The Imam

My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasy spoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a young woman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan, but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His "crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secular Islam".

After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiously agrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in the middle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only £1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.

Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room. This building was once a factory, then a cinema; now, with Saudi money, it is a Wahabi mosque. Men are kneeling silently towards Mecca, rising and bending in reverential waves. "On Fridays, there are Islamists who stand outside and warn worshippers that their prayers won't count if they are led by me," he says as we squat in the corner, "because I'm supposedly an apostate. A fake imam." He looks away. "I get phone calls late at night. Threats. It's painful. You see, I was like them once."

And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived in Tottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he was five years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam to every nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principles in a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were very sheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.

He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – the Britain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have to understand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in the streets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use the Paki word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."

But Usama was offered a scholarship to the heart of the English elite – the City of London Boys' School, where he could practice cricket at Lord's. He bonded with the Jews at the school as outsiders and supporters of Tottenham Hotspur football team. He still speaks like the public schoolboy he was – in long, confident sentences.

Some berobed men are staring at us, so he takes me down to the mosque's office. "At that time, being a Muslim meant being an Islamist. It was taken for granted," he says. So when he was 13, he joined an Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociable conferences every weekend, they were told: you don't feel at home in Britain, but you can't go "home" to a country you have never visited. So we have a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows no boundaries and can envelop you entirely.

It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted by young Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I am nothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yet exist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.

Jimas told their members they were part of a persecuted billion, being blown up and locked down across the world. "It was a bit like a gang," he says. "And we had a strong sense of being under siege. It was all a conspiracy against Islam, and we were the guardians of Islam. That's how we saw ourselves ... A lot of my friends would wear the army boots, and carry knives." I realise now that for a nebbish intellectual boy, it must have felt intoxicating to be told he was part of a military movement that would inevitably conquer history.

For his summer vacation in 1990 – as a break from studying physics at Cambridge University – he went to wage jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan. He arrived with two friends from Jimas at an Arab-run training camp in the mountains of Kunar in Eastern Afghanistan. It was a sparse collection of tents and weapons left behind by the CIA in the snow and blood. They spent the days running up and down mountains learning how to fire Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. "When you fire a Kalashnikov, it echoes all around the mountain," he says. "After this boring life, you feel the adrenaline pumping."

The Arab fighters wore four layers of clothes and still shivered. They had never seen snow before, so every now and then, they would lay down their weapons to have a long, gleeful snow-fight. Once they had all learned how to kill, they were taken to the front line to shell the communist hold-outs. "One of the shells landed very close to us, about 100ft away." He fired in retaliation. "I hope we never killed anybody," he says quickly.

Usama tells his story fluently and fast, and rides over these difficult moments – a killing – like a speed-bump. He thought an earthly paradise would rise from the rubble he was creating – and remake the world in its image. "The expectation was that Afghanistan would become this dream Islamic state," he adds, "which would then spread all over the world." He returned to Cambridge University determined to convert as many of his fellow Muslim students as possible to Wahabism. "It was relatively easy to persuade them," he says. "People were looking for group identity. They were very confused: what does it mean to live as a Muslim in society like this? We had easy answers. Go back to the original sources, and [follow it] literally."

At the centre of this vision was the need to rebuild the caliphate – the Islamic state under sharia law persisted from the time of Mohamed until 1924. "It was a very dreamy, romantic idea," he says. "If anybody asked questions about how it would work, we would just say – the people that will make it happen will be so saintly, they will make the right decisions." It was the old promise of the revolutionary down the ages: there would be a single revolutionary heave in which all political conflict would dissolve forever, and a conflict-free paradise would be born.

Usama's job was to persuade people to go to fight in Afghanistan and, from the mid-1990s, Bosnia. He was one of the best – and he says, again very fast, that one of his successes was to radicalise Omar Sheikh, the man now on death row in Pakistan for beheading Daniel Pearl. "I set him off on his path to Jihad," he says. He looks a little excited, and a little appalled. The first thing he remembers about Sheikh – who he met at a Jimas study circle – is the fresh lemonade he made in his university rooms. "It was delicious. And we drank and drank. My first impression of him was that he was a clean-shaven, well-educated British public schoolboy. A lovely bloke."

Sheikh was furious about the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and demanded the study group lay down their Koranic debates and act. Usama told him: "If you're really serious, you can go and fight. I know people who have gone and fought. I can introduce you to them." And so his journey to torturing and murdering a Jewish journalist – simply because he was a Jew – began.

Usama doesn't want to talk about him any more: he changes the subject, and I have to bring him back to it. "Nothing is proved against him. He's fighting extradition," he says, after a long pause. "But ... " He has an awkward smile. An embarrassed smile. He quickly carries on speaking, ushering us away from Daniel Pearl.

People come in and out of the mosque office, and Usama lowers his voice a little. He says that as he was persuading young men to go and kill, he noticed something disconcerting: the Afghan mujahedin he had fought for were not building a paradise on earth after all. Instead, they were merrily slaying each other. "This great, glorious Islamic revolution – it didn't happen, at all ... they just killed each other."

As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt or Hamas suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more and more difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about the Jewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – human beings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity issues, and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist chants at demonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God," they yelled – something, he says, began to sag inside him.

The stifled language Usama is using to describe his past reminds me of a recovering alcoholic trying to piece together his fragmented memories and understand who he was. When he talks about anti-Semitism, he is clearly ashamed; he giggles almost randomly, looks away, and looks back at me with a puckered, disgusted look.

We have talked enough; we arrange to meet again. The second time I see him, in a café, he seems more guarded, as if he revealed too much. He shifts the conversation onto theology – the area where, I discover, every ex-jihadi feels happiest. He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bomb in his mind: "How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia."

Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he had to remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. "Jihad has many levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person you can be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kind of campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad." He signed up to the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom as anybody who died in an honourable cause. "There were martyrs on 9/11," he says. "They were the firefighters – not the hijackers."

He says he found himself making arguments he once thought unthinkable – like arguing that women should be allowed to show their hair in public. Jihadi websites run by his old friends started to declare him an apostate, a crime that under their interpretation of sharia is punishable by death.

There have been demands that he should be ousted from the mosque, but his father is its founder and chief imam, so he is protected for now. He says – leaning forward, his voice losing its public school composure – that the threats have only made him more sure of the need for reform. He has started to call for Muslims to abandon the "medieval interpretation of the sharia" that calls for the killing of apostates and homosexuals. He has said there should be a two-state solution in the Middle East. He has reached the conclusion that evolution is "a scientific fact".

And for the first time in his life, Usama has begun to allow himself to listen to music. "I was taught to believe it shouldn't be allowed. But now, I listen on the car radio." I ask him what music he likes, and he lets out a high-pitched giggle. "You'll get me killed!" he says. "Everything in the charts." He gives me some names, but then calls later and asks me not to print them: "That would be a step too far."

As the threats against him rattle across the internet, I like to think of this as my last image of Usama – a 39-year-old man slowly slipping off the Puritan chains in which he has been bound and finally, in his fourth decade, beginning to dance, as he is circled by the angry ghosts of his younger self.

II. The Prisoner

The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is Maajid Nawaz – a high-cheekboned 31-year-old who walks with a self-confident strut. I make an appointment with him through his personal assistant, and he strides into the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet in an immaculate and expensive suit. He seems to blend perfectly into the multi-ethnic overclass who use expensive hotels like this as their base; I have to remind myself with a jolt that, not so long ago, he was caught up in a murder in London, helped to plot a coup in nuclear-tipped Pakistan, and served three years in the most notorious prison in Egypt.

Maajid begins to tell me his story as if he is delivering a PowerPoint presentation. He has offered it before, and he will offer it again; it is his job now. He has distilled it into a script. When I try to poke beneath it with questions, he seems irritated, and returns to the comfortable form of words he has established as soon as he can.

His journey towards Islamism began, he says, at the sandy edge of Essex, in the dilapidated coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. It is an old, elegant Victorian resort town drooping under a century of disrepair, reduced to a smattering of tatty arcades and a long, neglected pier that reaches into a filthy sea. Maajid's parents were mildly prosperous first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. "My upbringing was completely liberal from the start," he says. "In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity." He went to mosque only once, when he was 11, and an imam hit him with a stick for speaking too loudly.

Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he had a large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajid turned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began – for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends were at the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group of young skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting "Seig Heil".

Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there", but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes. They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, they turned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking: "Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajid covered in his friend's blood.

The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cuts from the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kicking around on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is "8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a "Paki". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed, and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from his white friends, out of guilt. He drifted instead towards a group of young black people who were also being terrorised by Combat 18. They would meet at house parties and marinate themselves in hip-hop, Public Enemy, and cannabis fumes. He says: "Feeling totally rejected by mainstream society, we were looking for an alternative identity, and we found the perfect, cool, fashionable identity through listening to hip-hop and speeches by Malcolm X."

One day, his brother came home bearing a sheath of leaflets saying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia to Southend. He had stumbled on a stall in the High Street manned by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). They said he would never be accepted in irreparably corrupt, decadent and racist Britain: Combat 18 were the snarl hidden behind every net curtain. Western society was merely a purgatory for Muslims, and the only escape could be to migrate to a renewed and perfect caliphate somewhere in Arabia. He joined up that day.

Maajid climbed the ranks of HT fast, because – with his easy eloquence – he was especially good at recruiting new members. After a year, they sent him to live in London and conquer a sixth form college. Newham College is a sprawling glass-and-concrete school for 16- to 19-year-olds in the most depressed slab of London. There, Maajid found himself in a majority-Muslim environment for the first time. "I was like somebody who has been craving chocolate for a long time who ends up in Belgium. I thought: these are my people. I knew exactly how to manipulate their grievances. And I did it. We took over that college."

We are served tea by the kind of effusive waitress who works in high-end London hotels. Maajid does not acknowledge her. He says it was "unbelievably easy" to recruit young Muslims to Islamism at that time. He would start with lectures that "broke down the concepts they had been told they should hold dear – like freedom and democracy", he says. It was only in the second or third talk, once humanism lay in rhetorical rubble, that he would announce: "God is in a better position to set those limits than you are, because you'd always contradict yourself, being an imperfect human." So then he would announce: "Let me tell you what God says."

When Maajid enrolled, there were hardly any girls wearing headscarves; by the time he was thrown out a year later, most of them were. The stand-alones were jeered at and harassed.

Maajid was elected President of the college's student union and he was prickling with a Messianic sense of mission. He saw Newham College as a microcosm of the changes that were swelling in the world. "It literally felt revolutionary. We had taken over the campus, and that we were soon to take over the world ... We really believed the caliphate would be established any day soon." On the school's open day for prospective pupils and parents, they staged a massive prayer demonstration. Dozens of them stood in the main hall, yelling to Allah for vengeance. "We wanted to show the parents that if you're sending your kids here, these are the people in charge," he says.

I ask if anybody was arguing for a more liberal form of Islam. Maajid laughs. "Absolutely not. No way. In fact, the only people who were young that were articulating any form of Islam were the Islamists."

The only substantial push-back came from rival religious groups – especially students with a Nigerian Christian background, known universally as "the blacks". There was a racist hysteria that they were muggers and rapists and "somebody had to stand up to them", Maajid says. "Along came us, these crusading Islamists, who didn't give a shit. We'd stand in front of them and say – we don't fear death, we don't fear you, we only fear God." Allah was in their gang, and they were invincible. Young jihadis from outside the college started to hang around there, to defend the Muslims from "the Christian niggers". A tall, aggressive recruit from Brixton called Saeed Nur was appointed as their "bodyguard". He intimidated everyone into silence.

The news reports from the time confirm what happened next. One afternoon, a row broke over the use of the college pool table, as Maajid stood watching. A Nigerian student wanted to push the Muslims off it, and began making derogatory remarks about Islam. Somebody called Saeed to "sort him out". As soon as he arrived, the Nigerian student pulled out a knife – and Saeed produced a Samurai blade and thrust it straight into the boy's chest. As he fell, the other Muslim students set on him with hammers and knives and pool cues. They beat him to death.

How did he feel about the victim? Did he think about his family? He prods the questions away with a grunt. Maajid says he felt "indifferent" to the victim, but was pleased "the Muslims prevailed in the end". He adds: "We were heroes in HT ranks." And he is back to his story. He doesn't want to retrieve his emotions.

He was expelled, and spent the next few years ascending the ranks of HT, while pretending to study at various colleges. But he wanted to be at the heart of the jihad – and in 1999 he found a way. Abdel Kalim Zaloom, the global leader of HT, issued a command from his hidden base somewhere in the Middle East. Pakistan had just unveiled its nuclear weapons to the world. Zaloom wanted them to seize Pakistan, so when the caliphate came it would be nuclear-tipped. Maajid enrolled at Punjab University as a cover – and jetted off to the country his parents had left a lifetime ago.

In the sprawling slum-strewn chaos of Karachi, Maajid found "the first crack in my ideological armour ... I thought – oh, my God. I had idealised Muslim societies, but the people here know less about Islam than we do. And look at how disorganised it is."

He met with a slew of junior Pakistani army officers who had been training at Sandhurst, Britain's elite officer training academy. "They seemed like quite decent, amiable chaps, who believed in our ideology," he says. They had been recruited by other members to HT, "and I told them to rise up the ranks of the army, and when we had an opportunity, to mount a coup and declare the caliphate in Pakistan."

And then, in the strangely bland CEO-speak these ex-Islamists often lapse into, he adds enthusiastically: "It was a very exciting project. We thought it would happen in the medium-term."

Maajid won't be drawn – not now, and not in our later conversations – on the details of this coup plot. Perhaps this is because he is worried about compromising his ability to visit Pakistan. The Pakistani military spokesmen say it's a lie. The officers were, Maajid says, quietly arrested by Pervez Musharraf's government in 2003, and are currently in prison. Maajid decided to move on to Egypt, and arrived to study in Alexandria on 10 September 2001. When he saw the news from New York City, he felt – that word again – "indifferent". HT technically opposed the attacks, on the grounds they were carried out by private individuals rather than by the army of a renewed caliphate. But Maajid says "There was a huge wave of internal sympathy for [Bin Laden], because he's an ideological comrade, isn't he?"

He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."

Then, at 3am one morning, a cadre of soldiers smashed into Maajid's bedroom bearing machine guns and grenades. He was taken, blindfolded and bound, to an underground bunker below the state security offices in Cairo. There were around 50 other men penned in. For three days, he kneeled, and heard the men around him being tortured with electric cattle prods.

"I thought, 'This is something I have been mentally preparing for, for a long time. I knew this day would come,'" he says. On the third day, the guards dragged him into an interrogation room with another British HT member. They punched him in the face and whacked him with batons. They produced the cattle prod. Maajid told them they wouldn't dare to torture a British citizen. "So they took the cattle prod and began electrocuting my friend in front of my eyes."

The British Embassy called looking for its citizens. The interrogation stopped suddenly, and transferred them to prison. Maajid felt no gratitude. "All I thought was – why did it take them three days to find us? They obviously didn't care about the rights of Muslims." He laughs now – a cold laugh, at his former self.

In Mazratora Prison, Maajid was held in solitary confinement for thee months. It was a bare cell with no bed, no light, and no toilet: just a concrete box. Then he was taken out suddenly and told his trial for "propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" was beginning in the Supreme State Emergency Court. But Maajid's Islamist convictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions – the men who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.

HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.

"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."

For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat – Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dank cell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But "they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong".

After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.

These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.

Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphany excruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they would lead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being their fallen angel."

His trial was finally ending with the inevitable verdict: guilty. When he emerged from Mazratora Prison into the damp half-light of Britain, he was dazed. HT hailed him as a hero. "After four years of ignoring me, they wanted me to be their rock star ... I was asked if I wanted to be the leader." But in March 2007, he sent out a mass email saying he was resigning from HT, threw away his mobile, and went home to Southend.

He spent a long summer eating his mother's cooking, watching television, and seeing the school friends he had shunned more than a decade before. "It amazed me. These were ordinary British guys and they knew what I had become – that I had hated Britain. And yet when they saw me, they showed me such warmth," he says. "They remembered me as I was. They didn't care what I had done. They had time for me."

In September 2007, Maajid appeared on Newsnight – the BBC's flagship current affairs show – to announce that he recanted not just HT, but Islamism itself. "What I taught has not only damaged British society, it has damaged the world," he said.

With a small band of other ex-Islamists, Maajid decided to set up an organisation dedicated to promoting liberal Islam and rebutting Islamism. They named in the Quilliam Foundation after William Abdullah Quilliam, an English businessman who converted to Islam in the late 19th century and set up the first British mosque. They are taking the organisational skills and evangelical fervour of HT, and turning it against them. They are also taking nearly £1m from the British government – the only way, Maajid says, to do their work effectively.

The last time I speak to Maajid he is on the refugee-strewn North-West frontier of Pakistan, touring the country's universities. He is lecturing to huge audiences about his own experiences, and arguing against literalism in Islam. The massed ranks of the neo-Taliban are not far away. "People here and in Britain keep saying – we've been waiting for something like this for such a long time," he says over the telephone. "They're so happy people are starting to speak out. They're terrified to do it themselves, but this emboldens them."

A large audience of young Muslims is waiting for him. Maajid says assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joins the Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as he walks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.

III. Lost in liberalism

As the summer arrives and London begins to swelter, I sit with most of the "out" ex-jihadis in a slew of Starbucks across the city. We sip iced lattes and discuss how, not long ago, they tried to destroy Western civilisation.

They have different backgrounds: one is a Yorkshire girl with Hindu parents, another is a Northern boy whose father was a Conservative ultra-Thatcherite. Yet they are startlingly similar: they have all retained the humourless intensity of their pasts. And when they describe their Islamist former selves, they are distant and cold, as if describing a rather unpleasant acquaintance they did not entirely understand.

They wreath their stories in clouds of pointless detail: they talk for hours about the intricacies of seventh-century Meccan society, or the fine distinctions in the hierarchy of HT, willing you to understand it. It's a way of avoiding answering the hardest question – why? But from their scattered stories, I can trace something that seems genuinely new: an ex-jihadi way of looking at the world, that carries lessons about how to stop Western Muslims sinking into jihadism.

As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"

He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in this state of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it's Western society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."

Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I was in the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And I thought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that's in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?"

Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore the fact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build a paradise, but hell.

At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanistic nature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim", defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside. "Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on the outside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You pray five times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. You pay your charity – why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God of yours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if you don't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened. There's nothing to nourish you."

They had to go looking for other Islams – and often they found it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. "Wahabi Islam is totally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Usman says. "It lays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment of the day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separate and spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It is accessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence." In this new Sufi Islam, Usman found something he had never known before: a sense of calm.

Ed Husain insists: "There are a lot of Muslims who agree with us. A lot. But they're frightened. They see what's happened to us – the hassle, the slander, the death threats – and they think: it's not worth it. But you know what? When I first spoke out, I was alone. I had no idea that, a year on, there would be this number of people speaking out, and many more who are just offering resources and support. Once a truth is spoken, it takes on its own life."

IV. Not Strawberry Season

Anjem Choudhary waves his hand angrily through the air, and says that in the world he wants to create, the people I have been interviewing will be put to death. "They are apostates. I don't consider [them] to be Muslim in any sense of the word," he says. "Everybody knows the punishment for apostasy." My facial muscles must involuntarily react, because he leans forward and asks suspiciously: "Are you Jewish?"

Anjem is one of the last of the famous Islamists from the 1990s still walking London's streets, free and furious. A decade ago, this city hosted a stream of fanatical Muslims who kept cropping up in the tabloid press as semi-comic pantomime villains. But gradually, one by one, they have been deported or arrested, leaving Anjem as their final public face. He has said the Pope and the Mohamed cartoonists should be executed, and has lauded the 7/7 bombers as "the Fantastic Four".

I wanted to see what the people the ex-jihadis have left behind make of them – and to sense if they are seen as a real threat. Anjem suggests meeting me in the Desert Rose Café in Leyton, not far from Usama's mosque. The 41-year-old lives here on social security benefits, paid for by a populace he believes should – in large measure – be lashed, stoned or burned in the hellfires. A long beard covers his chubby face, and long white robes cover his swollen form. I was surprised he agreed to meet me. He rarely speaks to print journalists. The last time he did, he stormed out, accusing the reporter of being a paedophile.

He immediately launches into a lecture about how the ex-Islamists are all liars and charlatans. They are "government bandits, set up by them and funded by them to do their dirty work within the [Muslim] community ... They were never actually practising! They were ignorant of Islam."

When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits: "This is heresy ... The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of his life. If I start to say things like, 'I don't believe the sharia needs to be implemented,' then that's tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed ... To say that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement of apostasy."

Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. "I can't pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there's something that you don't like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they're in line with the sharia."

He describes what is going to happen to them with a grin: "After they've been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they will suffer the same punishment again and again and again."

I wondered if Anjem's biography fitted with that of the ex-jihadis' – or was there something different about them all along? Anjem says he was born in Welling in South-East London in 1967, where his father was a Pakistani immigrant who ran a market stall. He first realised the One and Eternal Truth when, one day in the early 1990s, he happened to hear a lecture at a local mosque by the Syrian-born Islamist Omar Bakri. Until then, Anjem had been living a life of sin as a young trainee lawyer, known to his friends as Andy. The British tabloids have exposed that he had sex with white women and dropped LSD.

But as he tells it, in the flames of Bakri's rhetoric, Andy was burned away, and Anjem was born. "Yeah, obviously, I had a period where I was not practising ... I have no shame at all in saying that I didn't always use to be like this. And I have great thanks to Allah that he guided me."

Yes, I say – but you would whip and lash and execute the person you were 20 years ago. His eyes flare. He pushes back his chair, half-rising to leave. "What I used to be like and what I used to say before isn't under discussion. If you're going to continue to ask about that, then I'll just stop the interview."

He then launches into half an hour of theological gobbledegook, where any question I try to interject is waved aside with a sneer. He has no interest in persuasion: with dull Torquemada eyes, he advocates the execution of anyone who disagrees. Is he scared of the ex-jihadis and their arguments? He is certainly angry with them – but he is so angry at everyone that it is hard to tell what this means.

He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternative is. "In the United States, bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home," he says. Paedophiles are rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Compare that with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says, "there were only 60 rapes".

Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by a tyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start fucking animals? Are you so rotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?

He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. "That is your last question," he says. And as I leave and look back at him through the glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.

They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?

This article appears in the Independent

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined – yet the mutterings from the marble halls of Washington DC suggest he may order a troop escalation.

Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and the Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a small military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The populations of both countries are in close agreement. The latest Washington Post poll shows that 51 per cent of Americans say the war is "not worth fighting" and that ending the foreign occupation will "reduce terrorism". Only 27 per cent disagree. At the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are "unacceptable", and the US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather than bombs.

But there is another side: General Stanley McCrystal says that if he is given another 40,000 troops – on top of the current increase which has pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years – he will "finally win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

How should Obama – and us, the watching world – figure out who is right? We have to start from a hard-headed acknowledgement. Every option from here entails a risk – to Afghan civilians, and to Americans and Europeans. It is not possible to achieve absolute safety. We can only try to figure out what would bring the least risk, and pursue it.

There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central government at any point in their history.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan – where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable – but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said recently there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps" they want there – but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

Even if – and this is highly unlikely – you could plug every hole in the Afghan state's authority and therefore make it possible to shut down every camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can scuttle off to the next day and pitch some more tents. Again, that's not my view. Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, says: "As we disrupt [al-Qa'ida], they will seek other safe havens. Somalia and Yemen are potential al-Qa'ida bases in the future." The US can't occupy every failed state in the world for decades – so why desperately try to plug one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water will only seep out anyway?

There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan – but they are a different matter to al-Qa'ida. The latest leaked US intelligence reports say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument – and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president – Karzai, or his opponents – will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses – without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America". They walked right into his trap.

Yes, there is real risk in going – but it is dwarfed by the risk of staying. A bloody escalation in the war is more likely to fuel jihadism than thwart it. If Obama is serious about undermining this vile fanatical movement, it would be much wiser to take the hundreds of billions he is currently squandering on chasing after a hundred fighters in the Afghan mountains and redeploy it. Spend it instead on beefing up policing and intelligence, and on building a network of schools across Pakistan and other flash-points in the Muslim world, so parents there have an alternative to the fanatical madrassahs that churn out bin Laden-fodder. The American people will be far safer if the world sees them building schools for Muslim kids instead of dropping bombs on them.

He can explain – with his tongue dipped in amazing eloquence – that trying to defeat al-Qa'ida with hundreds of thousands of occupying troops and Predator jets is like trying to treat cancer with a blowtorch. Now, that really would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

Traducido por Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi.

¿Está Barack Obama para conducir su presidencia en una cuneta sangrienta, llena de cadáveres? Se opina que el presidente anunciará cualquier día ahora su decisión sobre el futuro de la guerra en Afganistán. Sabe que los militares estadounidenses y británicos se han estacionado en el infierno de Helmand por más tiempo que la guerra primera y la guerra segunda mundial combinadas- pero los murmullos en los pasillos de mármol en Washington sugieren que ordene posiblemente un incremento del número de las tropas.

Ahora Obama tiene que decidirse a tomar el partido de la gente estadounidense y la gente afgana que instan que se reduzcan rápidamente las fuerzas estadounidenses, o el de un grupo pequeño de militares que exigen que se escale el conflicto. Las poblaciones de los dos países están de acuerdo. La última encuesta de Washington Post muestra que un 51% de los estadounidenses dice que no vale la pena luchar la guerra y que poner fin a la ocupación extranjera reducirá el terrorismo. No está de acuerdo solamente un 27%. Mientras tanto, un 77% de los afganos en el último sondeo de la BBC dice que los bombardeos aéreos actuales estadounidenses no son aceptables y que las tropas deben permanecer solamente si van a proporcionar asistencia para la reconstrucción en lugar de las bombas.

Sin embargo, hay otro lado: el general Stanley McCrystal dice que, si se los dan a 40.000 militares más- junto con el incremento actual que ha aumentado los niveles militares por encima de todas las cosas en los años de Bush- ‘ganará finalmente’ por romperles las espaldas a Talibán y Al-Qaeda.

¿Cómo podemos saber Obama y nosotros- el mundo espectador- quién tiene razón? Es necesario que empecemos con un reconocimiento firme. Todas las opciones suponen un riesgo- para los civiles afganos, y para los americanos y los europeos. No es posible lograr la seguridad absoluta. Podemos intentar explicarnos solamente qué correría el riesgo menos, y seguirlo.

Se corre obviamente un riesgo grande por mandar a 40.000 militares más con ametralladoras en un país que no entienden para limpiar áreas enormes de insurgentes que se parezcan exactamente a la población civil- y establecer el ‘control’ de los lugares que nunca hayan sido controlados por un gobierno central en cualquier punto de su historia.

Todas las estrategias militares de contra-insurgencia tienen una probabilidad que cree a más enemigos que mata en el tiempo. Se vuela un sitio sospechado del Talibán y se matan dos comandantes- pero se matan también 98 hembras y niños, cuyas familias se han resuelto a matar de ese día a los militares y expulsarlos del país. Éstos no son números hipotéticos. Son del teniente Coronel David Kilcullen que fue consejero de General Petraeus en su estrategia de contra-insurgencia en Irak. Dice que los bombardeos aéreos estadounidenses en la frontera de Afganistán y Pakistán han matado a 14 líderes de Al-Qaeda, pero han matado también a más de 700 civiles. Dice: ‘Eso es una tasa de éxito de 2% y una tasa de garantía de 98%. No es moral.’ Explica la paradoja aparente que venció a los Estados Unidos en Vietnam: si matas a más ‘chicos malos’, tienes que matar a más de ellos.

Hay un peligro aun más grande que esto. La estrategia del General Petraeus es expulsar el Talibán de Afganistán. Cuando tenga éxito, corren a Pakistán donde hay las bombas nucleares.

Para justificar estos riesgos, los que propongan la escalada necesitan argumentos muy persuasivos para demostrar cómo su estrategia ha reducido tan dramáticamente otros riesgos que valió más que estos peligros. No es inconcebible- sino hallé que el caso que dan de hecho para escalar la guerra, o continuar la ocupación, es basado en tres premisas que se vuelven el polvo afgano al examinar.

Primer argumento: hay que privar a Al-Qaeda de sus bases en Afganistán, o los utilizarán para planear atentados contra nosotros, y enfrentaremos a otro 9/11. De hecho, casi todos los atentados yihadistas contra los países occidentales se han planeado en los países occidentales, y requieren capacidades o entrenamiento tecnológico muy limitado. Las atrocidades de 9/11 fueron planeadas en Hamburgo y Florida por 19 saudís que necesitaron saber solamente utilizar los cortadores de cajas y chocar un avión. Los hombres bomba de 7/7 planearon su atentado en Yorkshire: fueron jóvenes británicos que aprendieron a fabricar bombas por la red. Un yihadista fue detenido solamente la semana pasada porque planeaba volar un rascacielos en esa base yihadista conocida, Dallas, Texas. Etcétera.

No hay en realidad casi ningunos combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. No es mi punto de vista: es lo que opina el General Jim Jones, consejero de la Seguridad Nacional Estadounidense. Dijo recientemente que hay 100 combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. Eso vale repetir: hay 100 combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. No muestra tampoco que funciona la guerra. El Talibán y los señores de la guerra que sean sus amigos controlan ya un 40% de Afganistán hoy. Pueden edificar todos los ‘campamentos de entrenamiento’ que quieran- pero han hallado solamente a cien brutos fundamentalistas que provean de personal.

Aunque (esto es muy improbable) se tapen todos los agujeros en la autoridad estatal afgana y por eso se haga posible que todos los campamentos se cierren, hay una docena de otros estados fracasados a los que puedan ir el día siguiente por crear más campamentos. Otra vez, no es mi opinión. León Panetta, director de la CIA, dice: ‘Aunque perturbemos el desarrollo de Al-Qaeda, buscarán otros lugares salvos. Somalia y Yemen son las bases de Al-Qaeda potenciales en el futuro’. Los Estados Unidos no pueden ocupar todos los estados fracasados del mundo para décadas- así ¿por qué intentan tapar de manera desesperada en una bañera llena de agujeros si el agua se filtrará en cualquier caso?

Hay muchos combatientes de Talibán en Afganistán- pero son diferentes de Al-Qaeda. Los informes revelados más recientes de la inteligencia estadounidense dicen, según the Boston Globe, que un 90% es una insurgencia tribal y localizada que se ve como oponerse a los Estados Unidos porque es una ‘potencia ocupante’. No tienen ningunos objetivos fuera de las fronteras de Afganistán.

Segundo argumento: Por quedarnos, mejoramos significativamente los derechos humanos afganos, sobre todo para las hembras. Éste es a mi parecer el argumento más fuerte- y el más deprimente. El Talibán es de hecho uno de las fuerzas más horribles del mundo, encarcelando a las mujeres en sus casas y torturándolas por los ‘crimines’ de mostrarse las caras, por expresar su sexualidad o por ser violadas. Siguen intentando asesinar a mi amiga Malalai Joya por el ‘crimen’ de ser creada para el parlamento con promesas de tratar a las mujeres como seres humanos, no como el ganado.

No obstante, como me dijo el mes pasado: ‘Tus gobiernos han reemplazado el régimen fundamentalista del Talibán con otro régimen fundamentalista de los señores de la guerra.’ Fuera de Kabul, el Talibán vicioso que hace cumplir la ley islámica ha sido reemplazado con señores de la guerra horribles que hacen cumplir la ley islámica. ‘La situación es ahora tan catastrófica como lo era con el Talibán para las mujeres,’ dijo. Cualquier presidente afgano- Karzai, o sus oponentes- será solamente en realidad alcalde de Kabul. Más allá de este pueblo es un mar de señores de la guerra, tan malos para las hembras como el mulá Omar. No es una diferencia por la cual debemos luchar o morir.

Tercer argumento: si nos retiramos, será una gran victoria para Al-Qaeda. Revitalizados, se alzarán a cabo en todo el mundo. De hecho, en noviembre de 2004, les dijo Osama Bin Laden a sus seguidores: ‘Todo lo que tenemos que hacer es enviar a dos yihadistas al punto más lejos al este y levantar un pedazo de tela en que se escribe ‘Al-Qaeda’ para hacer que los generales corran allí, y hacemos que los Estados Unidos sufran las pérdidas humanas, económicas y políticas, ¡sin que logren nada significativo! Estas guerras aumentarán (dijo) el reclutamiento de Al-Qaeda por todo el mundo, y en tiempo ‘harán que se quiebren los Estados Unidos’. Cayeron directamente en su trampa.

Sí, se corre un riesgo verdadero si nos vamos- pero es eclipsado por el riesgo de quedarnos. Una escalada sangrienta de la guerra aumente más probablemente el yihadismo que lo reduzca. Si Obama quiere minar verdaderamente este movimiento fanático horrible, sería mucho más prudente utilizar los cientos de billones que despilfarra para darles caza a cien combatientes en las montañas afganas para otro objetivo. Debe gastarlos para aumentar la policía y la inteligencia, y para crear una red de escuelas por Pakistán y otros puntos de crisis en el mundo musulmán, para que los padres tengan allí una alternativa a las escuelas islámicas fanáticas que produzcan a las personas receptivas a la ideología de Bin Laden. La gente estadounidense será mucho más salva si el mundo los ve edificar las escuelas para los niños musulmanes en lugar de bombardearlos.

Puede explicar- con su lengua llena de la elocuencia sorprendente- que tratar de vencer a Al-Qaeda con cientos de miles de tropas ocupantes y aviones de Predator es como intentar tratar cáncer con soplete. Ahora, eso merecería verdaderamente un premio Nobel de la paz.

Barack Obama est-il sur le point de fourvoyer sa présidence dans un bourbier sanglant jonché de cadavres ? Le Président doit annoncer dans les prochains jours ses décisions concernant la guerre en Afghanistan. Il sait que les troupes américaines et britanniques sont présentes dans l’enfer de la province de Helmand depuis plus longtemps que n’ont duré les deux guerres mondiales - mais la rumeur dont résonnent les salons de marbre de Washington suggère qu’il pourrait opter pour une l’envoi de troupes supplémentaires.

Obama devra décider s’il se tient aux côtes des peuples américain et afghan qui réclament une réduction rapide du déploiement des forces américaines, ou au coté de la coterie de militaire qui veulent une escalade du conflit. Les populations des deux pays partagent les mêmes opinions. Le dernier sondage du Washington Post indique que 51% des Américains estiment que cette guerre ne « vaut pas d’être menée » et que la fin de l’occupation étrangère « réduirait le terrorisme ». Seuls 27% des sondés sont en désaccord. À l’autre extrémité du fusil, 77% des Afghans, selon le dernier sondage de la BBC, jugent que les frappes aériennes des États-Unis sont « inacceptables », et que les troupes américaines ne devraient rester sur place qu’à condition d’aider à la reconstruction du pays au lieu de le bombarder.

A l’opposé, le général Stanley McCrystal déclare que si on lui fournit 40 000 hommes - en sus des renforts qui ont déjà porté la présence militaire au-dessus de son niveau durant les années Bush - il va « finir par l’emporter » en « brisant les reins » des talibans et d’Al-Qaïda.

Comment Obama - et le monde entier, qui l’observe - pourrait-il déterminer qui a raison ? Il faut commencer par prendre en compte la dure réalité. Chaque option choisie implique un risque - pour les civils afghans, comme pour les américains et les européens. Il n’est pas possible de parvenir à une sécurité absolue. Nous pouvons seulement essayer de comprendre quelles sont les décisions qui entraîneraient le moins de risques, et nous y tenir.

On encourt évidemment un risque énorme en envoyant 40 000 soldats armés jusqu’aux dents dans un pays qu’ils ne comprennent pas, pour « nettoyer » des zones immenses où les combattants insurgés ressemblent exactement à la population civile, et pour tenter de reprendre le « contrôle » de zones qui n’ont jamais été contrôlées par un gouvernement central à un quelconque moment de leur histoire.

Toute stratégie de contre-insurrection est confrontée au risque de se créer à terme plus d’ennemis qu’elle n’en met hors de combat. Quand on bombarde un site abritant des talibans et que l’on tue deux de leurs commandants, on tue également 98 femmes et enfants. Et leurs proches deviennent alors des ennemis résolus qui veulent tuer les soldats étrangers et les chasser de leur pays. Ces chiffres ne sont pas hypothétiques. Ce sont ceux du lieutenant-colonel David Kilcullen, qui conseillait le général Petraeus en Irak. Kilcullen précise que les attaques aériennes américaines sur la frontière pakistano-afghane ont tué 14 dirigeants d’Al-Qaïda, et ont entraîné la mort de plus de 700 civils. « C’est un taux de réussite de 2% pour 98% de victimes collatérales. Ce n’est pas moral, » a-t-il déclaré. Il souligne cette réalité paradoxale, qui a provoqué la défaite des États-Unis au Vietnam : plus vous tuez de « mauvais éléments », plus vous devez en tuer.

Il existe également un autre danger, bien supérieur. La stratégie du général Petraeus consiste à chasser les talibans hors d’Afghanistan. Quand il y parvient, ils s’enfuient au Pakistan - là où sont les armes nucléaires.

Pour justifier ce risque, les partisans de l’escalade ont besoin d’arguments très convaincants afin de démontrer comment leur stratégie réduirait les autres facteurs de risque de façon si drastique que ces gains valideraient leur stratégie. Ce pourrait être un raisonnement recevable. Mais les trois raisons avancées pour justifier l’escalade et la poursuite de l’occupation ne résistent pas, selon moi, à l’examen.

Premier argument : Nous devons priver Al-Qaïda de ses bases militaires en Afghanistan, sinon elle les utiliserait pour préparer des attaques contre nous, et nous serions confrontés à une répétition du 11 septembre. En fait, pratiquement toutes les attaques des jihadistes contre les pays occidentaux ont été planifiées dans les pays occidentaux eux-mêmes, et ne nécessitaient que des capacités technologiques ou des entraînements très limités. Les atrocités du 11 septembre ont été préparées à Hambourg et en Floride par 19 Saoudiens qui devaient seulement savoir comment utiliser des cutters et faire s’écraser un avion. Les attentats suicides du sept juillet 2005 en Grande Bretagne ont été planifiés dans le Yorkshire par de jeunes britanniques qui avaient appris sur Internet comment fabriquer des bombes. La semaine dernière, on a arrêté un jihadiste qui voulait faire exploser un gratte-ciel dans cette base de jihadistes notoires qu’est Dallas, au Texas. Et ainsi de suite.

En réalité, il n’y a pratiquement pas de combattants d’Al-Qaïda en Afghanistan. Ce n’est pas moi qui l’affirme, mais le général Jim Jones, Conseiller pour la Sécurité Nationale des USA. Il a déclaré la semaine dernière qu’il y avait 100 combattants d’Al-Qaïda en Afghanistan. Cela vaut d’être redit : il ya 100 combattants d’Al-Qaïda en Afghanistan. Mais cela ne signifie pas pour autant que cette guerre soit un succès. Les talibans ou leurs alliés seigneurs de guerre contrôlent 40% du territoire afghan aujourd’hui, en ce moment même. Ils peuvent construire tous les « camps d’entraînement » qu’ils veulent - mais n’ont trouvé qu’une centaine d’hommes de main fondamentalistes pour les remplir.

Même si - et cela est hautement improbable - on parvenait à restaurer l’autorité de l’État afghan dans toutes ces zones qui lui échappent, permettant ainsi de fermer tous les camps, il existe des dizaines d’autres Etats faillis où les jihadistes pourraient aller planter leur tente. Là non plus, ce n’est pas moi qui l’affirme, mais Leon Panetta, le directeur de la CIA : « lorsque nous attaquons [Al-Qaïda], elle part chercher d’autres refuges. La Somalie et le Yémen sont des bases potentielles d’Al-Qaïda dans le futur. » Les USA ne peuvent occuper tous ces Etat faillis dans le monde durant des décennies. Pourquoi alors s’échiner à tenter désespérément de boucher un trou dans une baignoire pleine de fuites, lorsque l’eau s’infiltrera de toute façon ?

Il y a de nombreux combattants talibans en Afghanistan - mais ils sont différents d’Al-Qaïda. Le dernier rapport du renseignement américain, dont le contenu est révélé par le Boston Globe, affirme que 90% d’entre eux relèvent d’une « insurrection tribale locale » et qu’ils « considèrent que leur lutte contre les États-Unis est justifiée par le fait qu’ils sont la puissance occupante ». Ils n’ont « aucun d’objectif » au-delà des frontières de l’Afghanistan.

Argument numéro deux : En restant sur place, nous améliorons sensiblement la situation des droits de l’homme en Afghanistan, tout particulièrement pour les femmes. C’est en ce qui me concerne l’argument le plus important - mais aussi le plus déprimant. Les talibans sont en effet l’une des organisations les plus détestables au monde, qui emprisonne les femmes dans leurs foyers et les torture pour avoir commis le « crime » de montrer leur visage, d’avoir exprimé leur sexualité, ou d’avoir subi un viol. Ils veulent assassiner mon amie Malalai Joya, qui a commis le « crime » d’être élue au Parlement avec un programme réclamant que les femmes soient traitées comme des êtres humains et non comme des animaux.

Mais, comme elle me l’a dit le mois dernier : « Vos gouvernements ont remplacé le régime intégriste des talibans par le nouveau régime fondamentaliste des seigneurs de guerre ». En dehors de Kaboul, les talibans malfaisants qui appliquent la charia ont simplement été remplacés par de malfaisants seigneurs de la guerre qui appliquent la charia. « La situation est désormais aussi catastrophique qu’elle ne l’était pour les femmes sous le régime taliban », indique-t-elle. N’importe quel président de l’Afghanistan - que ce soit Hamid Karzaï, ou ses adversaires - ne sera en réalité que le maire de Kaboul. Au-delà, s’étend le monde des seigneurs de la guerre, aussi néfaste pour les femmes que celui du mollah Omar. Il n’y a là aucun changement qui mérite que l’on se batte et que l’on meure pour lui.

Argument numéro trois : Si nous nous retirons, ce sera une grande victoire pour Al-Qaïda qui, revitalisée, va se développer considérablement à travers le monde. En fait, en Novembre 2004, Osama bin Laden s’était vanté devant ses disciples : « tout ce que nous avons à faire, c’est d’envoyer deux moudjahidines au point situé le plus à l’est et de brandir un morceau de tissu sur lequel est écrit « Al-Qaïda », pour que les généraux s’y précipitent, et que nous infligions à l’Amérique des pertes humaines, des revers économiques et politiques - sans qu’ils parviennent à accomplir quoi que ce soit de notable ! Ces guerres, avait-il déclaré, stimuleront le recrutement d’Al-Qaïda à travers le monde et finiront par « ruiner l’Amérique ». Les USA se sont précipités dans son piège.

Certes, quitter l’Afghanistan peut poser un risque réel - mais il est moindre que celui d’y rester. Une escalade dans ce conflit sanglant se traduira vraisemblablement par un renforcement du jihadisme plutôt que par son affaiblissement. Si Obama veut sérieusement s’en prendre à ce mouvement fanatique, il serait beaucoup plus sage qu’il redéploye différemment les centaines de milliards gaspillés actuellement à pourchasser une centaine de combattants dans les montagnes afghanes. Il vaudrait mieux les consacrer à renforcer la sécurité et le renseignement, ainsi qu’à la construction d’un réseau d’écoles à travers tout le Pakistan et les autres zones de tensions dans le monde musulman, offrant ainsi aux parents une alternative aux madrasas tenues par les fanatiques qui écoutent les discours de Ben Laden. Le peuple américain serait bien plus en sécurité si le monde le voyait bâtir des écoles pour les enfants musulmans au lieu de leur lancer des bombes.

Obama pourrait expliquer - avec son éloquence talentueuse - que tenter de vaincre Al-Qaïda avec des centaines de milliers de soldats d’occupation et des drones Predator serait l’équivalent de tenter de traiter le cancer avec un chalumeau. Et cela mériterait vraiment un prix Nobel de la Paix.

Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world's leaders one by one. They have killed the American President, the Russian head of state, the French President, and the Spanish Prime Minister.

Bomb attacks are ripping through the world's richest cities: explosions devastate Wall Street, the London Underground, a theatre in Barcelona, cafés in Paris, parades in Moscow. The police profile of a typical bomber warns: "He walks to his death with courage and no regrets." There is panic, and governments launch programmes of torture and deportation targeted at immigrant communities. Yet still the radicals wash defiantly across the world, killing as they go. They say they have "only one aim, one science: destruction".

It sounds like a feverish novel about al-Qa'ida, set 30 years from now. But it has already happened. It is a story from our past. In the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchist bombers did all this. They were prepared to die for their beliefs. They lived in the same places as today's Islamists – such as Whitechapel, in east London – and they struck the same targets, like lower Manhattan on a clear September morning.

In a new documentary – The Enemy Within, by Joe Bullman – young Islamists read the words of yesterday's Jewish anarchists, from their writings and trial transcripts. While the societies they dream of building after the bombs are very different, their rage, their alienation, and their tactics are almost identical. The words fit so easily into their mouths that the Islamists say it is "creepy".

Mark Twain said: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Are there lessons buried in this ripple of rage spreading across a century? For decades, anarchist radicals seemed like an ineradicable force that would bleed Western societies forever. Within a generation, they were gone. So can the anarchists show us what makes young men attack their own societies – and what makes them stop? Can it tell us what tactics defeat an amorphous underground movement, and what only makes them stronger? From the nitroglycerine of the 19th century, is there a fuse that ends with the jihadists of 2009?

I. Terminus

As the sun set on 12 February 1894, the Café Terminus at the Gare Saint-Lazare was full of young Parisians listening to an orchestra when the music stopped abruptly. A fireball consumed everything in sight: the world went black. When the survivors came round, there was a jigsaw of body parts around them, and people on fire, running, screaming. It was the work of a smartly dressed 20-year-old French accountant called Emile Henry. He had placed a bomb in a metal workman's lunchbox and hurled it at the orchestra. This wasn't his first attack: a few months before, he had blown up a police station, killing five people, and returned calmly to his desk, where he finished the ledgers he had been working on.

But it was the first time a private individual had randomly blown up civilians. As the historian Dr John Merriman, who teaches at Yale University, says: "It was the day that ordinary people became the targets of terrorists." But Emile Henry was not an anarchist from Central Casting. He was an intellectual born into the French bourgeoisie, living in part off handouts from his rich aunt. He was – by all accounts – a sensitive person who had spent his life appalled at the cruelty all around him. He claimed his act would save lives in the end: that he was murdering out of compassion.

Henry was living in a Paris of vertiginous inequalities. In a quarter of an hour you could walk from the palatial glamour of the opera house to slums where babies were routinely dying of tuberculosis. The divide ran right though his soul: he had the education of the rich, but he had slumped down into the tubercular slums.

Emile's father, Fortune Henry, had run away from his middle-class family in 1848 at the age of 16 to join the revolution in Paris. When Parisians seized control of their own city in 1871 and ran it as a democratic commune, Fortune manned the barricades and rallied the crowds. But when the French state recaptured Paris – massacring 25,000 people as it went – he was condemned to death, and fled to Spain. Emile Henry was born there, and he was raised on tales of how the French state had brutally suppressed freedom. The boy grew to see all governments as evil, especially when the Spanish authorities confiscated the family's belongings to punish their anarchist sympathies. His father was forced to work in filthy factories where he contracted mercury poisoning. He died when his son was 10.

Henry's mother begged for cash from her wealthy relatives, who helped send Henry to the best schools in Paris. He was an exceptionally successful student, and for a time – as a pale, tall young man, with a reddish beard – he became an engineer. But, on a meagre trainee engineer's salary, he was still stuck in the poorer arrondisements of Paris, where he was stunned by the waste of life all around him. The poor majority had no political voice, and scarcely enough food to live: a quarter of all children died before reaching adulthood.

"I would like simply to disappear, to annihilate myself, in order to escape the perpetual anguish that strangles and breaks heart and soul," he wrote. He concluded that wealthy Paris was dominated by "frauds", and "only the cynics and grovellers can get a place at the banquet ... [The rich have] appropriated everything, robbing the other class not just of the sustenance of the body but also the sustenance of the mind."

Across Europe, the nation-state was asserting its power over ordinary citizens in a deeper and harsher way than ever before, with governments seizing taxes and young men for conscription at an unprecedented rate. In response, there was a growing anarchist movement that simply said that the state was illegitimate, and should be disbanded.

The term "anarchist" had originally been an insult, but, in 1840, a French provincial printer's assistant called Pierre-Joseph Proudhon picked it up and wore it with pride. He said if governments were disbanded, people would organise themselves into peaceful democratic communes that would run their own affairs, without police or laws or taxes. It was the state – with its apparatus of coercion and violence – that made people bad. Remove the state, and you would have a natural order at last, based on personal freedom. Law is tyranny; property is theft.

In a society where the emaciated poor were routinely being worked to death, it was an appealing message. As he lay dying because he had been made to work in toxic factories since childhood, a porcelain worker known to history only as "M L" wrote: "Accursed society, you are responsible for my illness. Thoughtless and cynical bourgeois, do you not sense that I can transform myself into someone who can right wrongs, an avenger of the innumerable existences that your society has massacred, an avenger of all those who have revolted and live as outlaws, and those who have been tortured or eliminated? Bourgeois ... I want to talk with me at least some of those who are responsible for my death."

To Emile Henry, it seemed persuasive. He took money from his bourgeois aunt – and wrote cordial letters of thanks – but cursed the bourgeoisie as "evil". When he was ordered to attend the military lottery, where he could have been conscripted, he went on the run. At lectures across the city, he heard the argument put by anarchists that the only way to put their philosophy into practice was by "the propaganda of the deed". Acts of violence against the state or the populace would show the state's power was illusory and stir a general revolt. Just as most Muslims reject jihadism today, most anarchists rejected violence against civilians, calling it "common murder". But developments in France made Henry more determined to side with the furious fringe of anarchism: striking miners were crushed by troops, and the rich became richer. He wrote: "The entire bourgeoisie lives from the exploitation of the unfortunate, and all of it should pay for its crimes."

He was captured at the scene of the bombing. He said he had one regret: that he didn't kill more "bourgeois". If only he had a bomb big enough, he boasted, he would have blown up the whole of Paris. Only from the rubble could a just society emerge. In a letter to his mother, he said: "You must not believe those who will say that your son is a criminal. The real criminals are those who make life impossible for anyone with a heart, those men who uphold a society in which everyone suffers."

After Henry was executed at the age of 21, a series of revenge bombings staged by anarchists ripped through France. One of the killers, Auguste Vaillant, declared: "We will spare neither women nor children because the women and children we love have not been spared. Are they not innocent victims, these children, who in the faubourgs slowly die of anaemia, because bread is rare at home? Those women who in your workshops suffer exhaustion and are worn out in order to earn 40 cents a day? These old men whom you have turned into machines so that they can produce their entire lives and whom you throw out on to the street when they have been completely depleted? You will add other names to the bloody lists of our dead ... but what you can never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep, born in a poisonous society that is falling apart. It is everywhere, which makes anarchy elusive. It will finish by killing you."

II. All-American Anarchism

Emile Henry was only one member of a scattered freelance army who believed they could end the idea of government itself, and usher in an era of perfect freedom. Their attacks were made possible by the coincidence of two historical developments: the development of anarchist philosophy, and the invention of dynamite. In 1866, the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel invented this easy-to-carry, easy-to-make explosive, and it spread through the world's mining and construction industries like a rapidly fizzing fuse. But it took a tiny, malformed German anarchist to see how it could change the world's politics.

Johann Most was a 5ft-tall bookbinder filled with rage. As a child, an operation on his jaw had gone wrong, leaving it painfully jutting forward. His attempts to hide it under a huge red beard only attracted more attention. Most turned his humiliation outwards on to just causes – at least at first. He too ran away to Paris, and was immediately jailed after the crushing of the Commune, for demanding the vote for everyone. He argued for socialism, to be brought about through parliamentary democracy – and when he was released from jail he was elected to the German Reichstag on precisely this platform. But Otto von Bismarck launched a purge of all leftists, and Most had to flee again.

The purge crushed Most's belief in gradual reform. He became convinced the system could only be changed by blowing it up – and suddenly realised that explosives were now lying all over Europe and the US, in sheds controlled by ordinary workers. Dynamite needed no expertise to operate; it could be carried in your pocket; and it could kill. He announced: "It is within the power of dynamite to destroy the capitalist regime just as it had been within the power of gunpowder and the rifle to wipe feudalism from the face of the earth. A girdle of dynamite encircles the world!"

Most travelled from country to country, urging workers to pick up their dynamite and use it against the bosses who forced them to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, for starvation wages. He became the model for Ossipon, the refugee-anarchist Ossipon in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, who walks the street with a bomb forever strapped to him, ready to blow himself up the moment the police swoop. In anticipation of Islamism, Ossipon brags that his enemies "depend on life ... whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident."

Although it has been consigned to the memory-hole, one of the places where Most found the most recruits was the US. He washed up in the 1880s in a continent where 35,000 American workers died every year in industrial accidents. Whenever they went on strike for better conditions, they were savagely beaten by the police. The richest 2 per cent owned 60 per cent of the wealth, and the politicians and police did their bidding.

One of his most fervent disciples was a hard-drinking cowboy from Utah, never seen without a stetson and a strut. He was called "Big Bill" Haywood. He spent his childhood moving from one mining town to another, and had his eye slashed out in a mechanical accident when he was nine. By the age of 15, he spent almost all his time hacking at rock underground, where he saw men routinely get crushed or blasted. Writing about one typical town, he explained: "The people of this mining camp breathed copper, ate copper, wore copper, and were thoroughly saturated with copper ... Many of the miners were suffering from rankling copper sores, caused by the poisonous water. Human life was the cheapest by-product of this great copper camp."

Big Bill turned to anarchism after witnessing systematic state violence against ordinary people. When he organised a strike, US soldiers rounded up 1,000 miners at random and placed them in a barbed-wire bull-pen. They were detained there for seven months. As the police officer in charge declared, "To hell with the constitution!" They called it the "American Bastille."

Class war didn't seem like a metaphor to him: it was the reality of everyday life. The industrialist Jay Gould openly bragged: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." So Haywood – some historians believe – blew up the governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, in 1907, and his trial was the biggest news story of the year. His lawyer, the legendary Clarence Darrow, urged the jury to side not with "the spiders of Wall Street" but with "the men who toil with their hands ... through our mills and factories, and deep underneath the earth. I am here to say that in a great cause these labour organisations have stood for the weak, they have stood for every humane law that was ever placed on the statute books. I don't care how many wrongs they have committed – I don't care how many crimes – I just know their cause is just."

It is a sign of how widespread the sympathy for anarchists was that Haywood was acquitted, and became an American folk hero. He eventually had to flee the US during the First World War when he urged people to resist the draft, and was sentenced to 20 years in jail. He fled to the Soviet Union, found it to be "hell", and drank himself to death.

This is only one small slice of a larger story unfolding in every developed country. Anarchist-inspired attacks on politicians were remarkably successful, starting when three young men hurled bombs into a carriage carrying Tsar Alexander II in 1881, killing him and several members of the crowd. Anarchists claimed their heftiest scalp when, in 1901, a young militant called Frank Czolgosz waited in line to shake US President McKinley's hand in Buffalo – and shot him in the gut. (This act gave us President Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most aggressively imperialist and racist presidents in US history). But gradually the anarchist fervour boiled down further and further into attacks on ordinary civilians – which is why they still echo into our world today.

III. "It was written 100 years ago, but it is happening today"

Does this anarchism bear any relationship to the jihadists who bomb the very same targets today? When the film-maker Joe Bullman got young British Muslims with some sympathy for the 7/7 bombers to read the words of anarchists put on trial at the Old Bailey a century ago, they showed an exhilarated recognition. Adam Munevar Khan says: "It was written 100 years ago, but it is happening today – to the Muslims." Mohammed Rahmen says: "Anarchism has been represented to be a doctrine of insanity and murder – its principles, its ideals, they've been unmentioned, lied about. That really penetrated my way of thinking. That's exactly how Islam is."

The Islamists read the anarchist lines to camera with feeling. One of them says: "We are met by the cry of assassins, dynamiters, fiends – but let's see who utters these cries. It's the same people who daily massacre more people than the anarchists of all countries have ever killed." It could be Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 murderer, announcing: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight."

Yet it's easier, at first glance, to see the differences between the two ideologies. Anarchists loathed religion, seeing it as another form of tyranny to be destroyed; Islamists want their severe interpretation of religion to be obeyed by everyone. Anarchists were some of the first to fight for feminism and sexual freedom; Islamists want to imprison women in burqas and in their homes, and to kill gays. Anarchists demanded absolute free speech; Islamists chant "death to free speech". Anarchists loathed racism; Islamists are frequently racist against Jews. Anarchists wanted a society of absolute freedom; Islamists want a society of absolute obedience.

But neither had a very clear picture of what the world would look like after the smoke from their bombs had cleared. Their visions of the future were vague: both no-state and the caliphate were hazy hope-dreams. Below and beneath them, there were deep structural similarities.

Both groups believed their violence was justified by the larger illegitimate state violence they witnessed as young men. For the anarchists, it was the crushing of the Paris Commune and the executions of innocent anarchists after the Haymarket bomb of 1886 in Chicago; for the Islamists it is the assaults on the Palestinians, on Afghanistan, and on Iraq. However warped, they believe they are killing out of compassion for the victims of these crimes. The anarchist Emma Goldman wrote: "To those who say hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate."

They justified their attacks to themselves by claiming they were trying to give the wealthy, or the West, a taste of how "their people" felt. Yet in both movements, intriguingly, it was largely middle class intellectuals who turned to violence. Both Emile Henry and Mohammed Atta – the leader of the 9/11 hijackings – were engineers who found in mathematics a sense of purity and order and rationality that soothed them, and seemed like a refuge from a chaotic world. The leading anarchists in Europe – Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin – were both Russian noblemen, just as Osama bin Laden is the son of a Saudi billionaire. (Bakunin and Kropotkin, however, strongly opposed targeting civilians.) They were people who chose to renounce their riches and side with the embattled tribe "beneath" them, and claimed to be fighting for its survival.

Both waves of violence were reactions to tectonic shifts in how power worked in the world. Anarchist attacks were a violent reaction to the rise of the nation-state; Islamist attacks within the West are to a significant degree a violent kick-back against Western states asserting their power abroad. These reactions were only made possible by new networks of communication. For the anarchists, the revolution in shipping and telegrams made movement across continents suddenly faster and freer than ever: a genuinely international network moving rapidly between countries could develop for the first time. For Islamists, the internet made the movement of ideas and plans instantaneous: a global movement simultaneously operating in Tora Bora and Manhattan was suddenly possible.

And for this reason, both movements produced vicious backlashes against immigrants that went far beyond the people who actually carried out the attacks. In Bullman's film, he gets contemporary asylum-bashing pundits like Gary Bushell and Nick Ferrari to read the rage directed at Jews in Britain after a small number of Jewish immigrants became anarchists and launched bombings. Ferrari reads a Daily Mail column from 1911 that barks: "There are hundreds of anarchists in Whitechapel ... but there's no way of learning anything about them. In this great foreign city east of Aldgate the English policeman is an uncomprehending foreigner ... We can't continue to let the scum of Europe [come here]."

And this perhaps points to the most important echo of all. When governments reacted to these attacks, at first they charged angrily down a path that made anarchism worse – and guaranteed more of their citizens would die.

IV. Why did the attacks stop?

The postscript to anarchist bombings in almost every country was a bonfire of civil liberties. After Wall Street was blasted with a massive bomb in 16 September 1920, killing 38 people including a 16-year-old newspaper delivery boy, the US government launched a huge indiscriminate programme of deportations of "radicals" – often peaceful left-wingers. It was masterminded by a young man called J Edgar Hoover, who learned then the tactics of indiscriminate smearing he was to use throughout the cold war. For the first time in the country's history, Congress declared an idea to be "un-American", and said anybody preaching anarchism – however peacefully – would be held responsible for "aiding" the attacks. There was a raft of convictions of people who had done nothing except discuss anarchism and suggest there was some justice in its analysis.

There was a smattering of small countervailing voices in America, but in the initial hysteria, they were drowned out. The federal judge George W Anderson said the Justice Department was engaging in "utterly illegal acts, committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws." The US Attorney Francis Fisher Kane resigned, warning that "the policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice".

A presidential commission warned that this crackdown only made the anarchist warnings about a police state seem prescient. To the young men teetering on an act of violence, torture and police brutality made the anarchists sound right – and violent resistance necessary. The commission said the structural causes of the violence had to be dealt with instead, explaining: "The crux of the question is – have the workers received their share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country? The answer is emphatically – no ... Throughout history where a people or a group has been arbitrarily denied rights, reaction has been inevitable. Violence is a natural form of protest against injustice."

But nobody wanted to hear these arguments. The public and the politicians wanted vengeance. Some governments, like France's, exploited the attacks to shut down all left-wing protest. Hoover employed a raft of agents to find a bogus "Russian connection" to the Wall Street bombing, to justify aggression against the Soviet Union.

Eventually, the American people returned to their senses, and chose a president who saw the threat in a cooler way. President Warren Harding said: "It is quite true that there are enemies of the government within our borders. However, I believe their number has been greatly magnified."

But the countries that had the harshest crackdowns ended up with the largest anarchist movements of all, while those that reacted calmly and kept their freedoms open saw the movements implode much faster. Professor John Merriman – whose book The Dynamite Club is one of the best accounts of the anarchist attacks – explains: "After the Italian king Umberto I was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, the Italian state response was deliberately restrained and minor. This undercut the movement. By contrast, Spain reacted at the same time with a programme of brutal repression and torture. They ended up with the biggest anarchist movement in Europe. Then later, when they stopped torturing people, the anarchist attacks stopped. I'm not an expert on contemporary terrorism, but the lesson for us seems pretty clear."

From the 1920s on, the anarchist attacks began to dwindle, and by the late 1930s they were over. Why? What happened? Nobody is entirely sure – but most historians suggest a few factors. After the initial wave of state repression, civil liberties slowly advanced – undermining the anarchist claims. The indiscriminate attacks on ordinary civilians discredited anarchism in the eyes of the wider public: after a young man blew himself up in Greenwich Park in 1892, his coffin was stoned and attacked by working class people in the East End. The anarchists' own cruelty and excess slowly deprived them of recruits.

But, just as importantly, many of the anarchist grievances were addressed by steady reforms. Trade unions were finally legalised, and many of their demands were achieved one by one: an eight-hour working day, greater safety protections, compensation for the injured. Work was no longer so barbaric – so the violent rejection of it faded away. The changes were nowhere near as radical as those demanded by the anarchists, but it stripped them of followers step-by-step.

Could the same be done with Islamism? The lesson from the death of violent anarchism is that the solution lies beyond blanket violent repression of them or its polar opposite, capitulation to their demands. The answer is gradual reform that ends some – but not all – of the sources of their rage. Clearly, many of Islamists' "grievances" should be left unaddressed: we must never restrict the rights of women or gay people or end the freedom to discuss religion openly, as they demand. But there is plenty we can do.

When the huge violence directed at workers and the poor stopped, violent anarchist attacks stopped. An end to the extensive violence directed towards many Muslims could have a similar effect. It would require significant changes here at home. We would have to kick our addiction to oil, so we will no longer be drawn into hellish oil-grabs into Muslim countries, or into holding hands with murderous tyrannies like the House of Saud. We will have unequivocally to renounce torture (even when it is practised by "allies" such as the Egyptian dictatorship), and press for peace for the Palestinians instead of arming and funding the assault on them. This will never be enough for the jihadists, of course – but if we do it, they will find their base of furious young men dissolving beneath their feet.

The ghosts of Emile Henry and Johann Most and Big Bill Haywood are standing before us, with their sticks of dynamite slowly fizzing. Are we going to make the same mistake that our governments did when dealing with them – or, after a century, have we learned how to put out the fire this time?

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

If you're interested in anarchist philosophy more generally, check out Peter Marshall's book 'Demanding the Impossible', which is an excellent history of the idea.

Would you ever march up to a destitute African who is shivering with AIDS and demand he “pay back” tens of thousands of pounds he didn’t borrow – with interest? I only ask because this is in effect happening, here, in British and American courts, time after time. Some of the richest people in the world are making profit margins of 500 percent by shaking money out of the poorest people in the world – for debt they did not incur.

Here’s how it works. In the mid-1990s, a Republican businessman called Paul Singer invented a new type of hedge fund, quickly dubbed a “vulture fund.” They buy debts racked up years ago by the poorest countries on earth, almost always when they were run by kleptocratic dictators, before most of the current population was born. They buy it for small sums – as little as 10 percent of its paper value – from the original holder and then take the poor country to court in Britain or the US to demand 100 percent of the debt is repaid immediately, plus interest built up over years, and court costs.

If they can’t pay, the vulture fund goes after anybody who is paying the poor country money, trying to force them to give it to them instead. In one instance, a fund tried to get a court order freezing Belgian aid payments to the Congo, saying it should go into their bank account.

Let’s look at an example. In 1979 – the year I was born – the dictator of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, took out a loan for $15m from the dictator of Romania to buy some tractors. Most didn’t work. But after twenty years of non-repayment, the new democratically elected government of Zambia said it had no way to pay the loan, and negotiations began to cancel it. But a multi-millionaire called Michael Francis Sheehan, whose company Donegal International is based in a British tax haven, had spotted a chance. He bought the debt from Romania for $3m, and took Zambia to court in Britain for the full amount – which had now piled up to $55m.

The Zambian government explained that they don’t have the money. A fifth of their people are HIV positive, and there are only 600 doctors covering more than 12 million people. Most people are dead before their 38th birthday. The Zambian President’s advisor, Martin Kalunga-Banda explained – and aid groups verified – that if the government had to pay out for the dead dictator’s bills, “Medicines that would have been available to in excess of 100,000 people in the country will not be available…. [and] in excess of 300,000 children will be prevented from going to school.” The people who will go sick or uneducated were not alive when the loan was taken out.

The British judge who heard the case was clearly appalled, but he said the law gave him no choice but to require Zambia to pay $15m, a third of what had been demanded. Virtually all the debt relief the country had received that year – as a result of Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History – was wiped out.

What happens to the money once it is redirected from Africa’s schools and hospitals? Sheehan – who likes to be known as “Goldfinger” – is fond of vintage Cadillacs, and lives in a mansion in Virginia. Singer used the cash he took to become the biggest donor New York to George W. Bush’s 2000 Presidential campaign, and then went on to bankroll Rudy Giuliani’s bid in 2008.

Through the nineties and Noughties, there was an extraordinary campaign by ordinary Westerners demanding that Africa’s debt be dropped. It had a huge effect: $88bn was cancelled. Malawi – to name just one – went from having to pay $95m a year to $5m. But these vulture funds are unpicking this progress with their long beaks, by grabbing the final threads of debt, and demanding they are all paid at once. For example, vulture funds have been demanding $130m from Liberia – a fifth of its entire GDP.

I have been to two of the countries most aggressively targeted by the vulture funds – Peru, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I lived for a week in a gargantuan rubbish dump in Peru thirty-five miles north of Lima. It is home to more than five thousand children who have never stepped beyond its black writhe of flies and throat-choking stench. I found Adelina, a little eight-year old smudge, living there in a nest she had built from trash. She spends all day searching for something – anything – that she can sell. I asked her how often she eats, and she became bashful, and said: "I don't like to eat every much anyway." The vulture funds managed to get $58m out of Peru, on a debt they paid $11m for.

An hour’s drive from Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, I found an orphanage filled with emaciated children. Hundreds sat in dank rooms, rocking silently back and forward. The orphanage had a staff of one: an elderly French woman. Since six million people have died in the war in Congo, these are the lucky ones: at least they have a roof. The vulture funds demanded $100m from this country. When the government couldn’t – on a week’s notice – produce an inventory of everything they own for an American court, they began to rack up fines of $80,000 a week.

Most people, when they hear about this, ask – why is this lawful? Of course it’s important for countries to repay their debts when possible so they can continue to borrow for investment where necessary – but not if the debts were taken out by thieving dictators generations ago, and not at a loan shark profit rate of 500 percent.

As long ago as 2002, Gordon Brown said these funds were “morally outrageous”, but only now are there tentative moves on both sides of the Atlantic against them. In the US, the Democratic Representative Maxine Waters has introduced a draft bill called the Stop Vultures Act. It would ban vulture funds from seeking “usurious” payments – defined as anything more than the purchase price of the debt plus 6 percent a year interest. In Britain, the Labour MP Sally Keeble introduced a Ten Minute Rule Bill with similar proposals.

This pressed Brown to finally move. He says the British government will give a “debt relief discount” of 90 percent for any country in the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme. This would kill the vulture fund business model. It’s good – but it doesn’t go far enough. They are lots of poor countries that don’t fall into the specific HIPC category, and they will still be carrion under these proposals. It’s not yet clear whether Waters can get her Act through both houses of Congress, since the vulture funds spread campaign donations around.

The energy that drove Jubilee2000 needs to be summoned again to pressure both governments hard. Any measures in Britain will have to be introduced very soon because David Cameron’s Conservative Party is defending the vulture funds. Nick Dearden, the director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign: “At first, we had some Conservative MPs who supported us, but they were quickly silenced by Central Office. They have been saying action against vulture funds isn’t worth taking.” Ah, the sweet scent of compassionate conservatism.

Is this who we want to be? Do we want to be a society that allows billionaires to sue the starving, the sick, and the stunted for pennies borrowed by somebody else, long ago? If not, we have to shut these funds – now.

To join the campaign to stop vulture funds, click here.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

La lingua necessita periodicamente di una bella ripulita a fondo, con la quale raschiare via le frasi rimaste appiccicate al pavimento o buttare via una volta per tutte le metafore in putrefazione scivolate inavvertitamente tra le fessure dello schienale del divano. George Orwell aveva messo in guardia da tale pericolo: disse infatti che un giorno la lingua sarebbe inevitabilmente diventata un insieme indistinguibile di espressioni che hanno perso il loro significato originario oppure – eventualità di gran lunga peggiore – “sono state concepite di proposito per far sì che le menzogne suonino veritiere e l’omicidio rispettabile, per dare un’apparenza di solidità alle folate di vento”. Aveva anche consigliato come procedere: "Se si tolgono di mezzo queste cattive abitudini, si riesce a pensare più chiaramente, e pensare chiaramente è il primo passo indispensabile da compiere verso una rigenerazione politica".

Faccio qui riferimento a frasi e modi di dire che pur ponendosi come altrettante descrizioni obiettive del mondo, contengono di fatto una sorta di programma politico segreto, che agisce su chi le ascolta modificandone e plasmandone le opinioni. Un esempio lampante e recente è l’espressione “tecniche aggressive di interrogatorio”, un eufemismo creato ad hoc dalla destra americana per rendere asettica la tortura e soprattutto per farla risultare accettabile. Capita spesso che la lingua debba piegarsi ed essere alterata di proposito per motivi strettamente politici. Negli anni Ottanta, per esempio, i propugnatori della fallita “guerra agli stupefacenti” lottarono strenuamente per cambiare l’espressione “uso di stupefacenti” (drug use) – diretta, semplice, senza ulteriori implicazioni – in “abuso di stupefacenti”. Questa seconda espressione evoca al contrario immagini sinistre, essendo per esempio rapportabile a “child abuse”, violenza o maltrattamenti su minore. In ogni caso, che cosa significa di preciso? Come può qualcuno che fuma marijuana una volta alla settimana “abusare” dello stupefacente? Significa forse che “maltratta le proprie canne”?

E il commercio iniquo?

Quali sono le espressioni che depennerei ed eliminerei volentieri dall’uso comune? Eccone un breve elenco: etichettare i generi alimentari come prodotti del “commercio equo”. Questa espressione lascia supporre che pagare un salario decente a chi è disperatamente povero sia un gratificante cambiamento di direzione rispetto alla norma. In realtà, dovrebbe essere dato per scontato: si tratta di un errore e di una grave mancanza degli esseri umani civilizzati. Se credessimo una cosa simile, occorrerebbe cambiare tutte le altre etichette: dovrebbero essere dunque tutti gli altri prodotti a fregiarsi di etichette di altro tenore, per esempio “commercio iniquo”, “commercio rapace”, “commercio-paghiamolo-una-miseria”.

E poi: “mortalità infantile”. Questa espressione suona asettica, puramente clinica. Chi si commuove sentendola? In realtà è un’espressione che si riferisce a neonati che muoiono. Volete un esempio? Eccolo: in Malawi, nell’Africa sud-orientale, la terra si era impoverita dopo essere stata sfruttata in modo esagerato. Di conseguenza, il governo democratico ha adottato la zelante politica di elargire sussidi per l’acquisto di fertilizzanti. Gli agricoltori affamati del Paese ne hanno ricevuti sacchi interi a un terzo del prezzo reale, e il Paese è letteralmente rifiorito. A quel punto la Banca Mondiale è intervenuta, condannando l’accaduto come una “pratica distorsiva del mercato” e ha fatto sapere che se il Malawi intendeva continuare a ricevere prestiti doveva interrompere immediatamente tali pratiche. I sussidi così si sono fermati e i raccolti del Paese sono crollati. È iniziata una carestia e la “mortalità infantile” è aumentata. Ciò di cui parliamo usando questa espressione sono tantissimi neonati morti in modo assolutamente immotivato. Tre anni fa il governo del Malawi ha finalmente ingiunto alla Banca Mondiale di pagare i suoi prestiti, e i sussidi per i fertilizzanti sono ripresi. Adesso nessuno muore più di fame in Malawi e il Paese è diventato il principale esportatore unico di cereali per il World Food Programme dell’Africa meridionale.

I bambini non hanno dio

Altra espressione da cancellare: “bambini cristiani/musulmani”. Sistematicamente i bambini sono definiti “cristiani” o “musulmani” o “ebrei” o ancora in altri modi, conformemente alla religione praticata dai loro genitori, per legittimare il loro inserimento in scuole dove vige la segregazione imputabile alla superstizione, dove saranno indottrinati in tale confessione. I bambini, però – come Richard Dawkins ha fatto presente – non hanno religione. Non hanno letto i testi sacri, non hanno meditato su di essi, non sono giunti a una conclusione plausibile sulla base di prove. Chi utilizza dunque quell’espressione non vuole che lo facciano, o meglio vuole che lo facciano a un’età in cui le loro facoltà razionali sono ancora insufficientemente formate, e vogliono che idee, testi e parole si imprimano così a fondo nelle loro menti da far sì che si incolleriscano o si sentano confusi quando ascoltano argomenti razionali di contenuto esattamente contrario. Dovremmo pertanto riferirci a loro chiamandoli “bambini con genitori cristiani/musulmani/ebrei”, con la chiara implicazione che avranno il diritto di farsi le loro idee in fatto di religione.

Disfacimento dell'ecosistema

“Cambiamento climatico”: questa espressione è stata inventata dal sondaggista repubblicano Frank Luntz quando ha scoperto che i focus group ritenevano troppo terrificante l’espressione “riscaldamento globale”. “Cambiamento climatico” invece risulta dolce, gentile, evoca la nostra latente consapevolezza che il clima è cambiato naturalmente lungo tutta la sua storia. Anche “riscaldamento globale” è un modo di dire problematico, poiché ci fa immaginare qualcosa che sia rimasto troppo a lungo sotto il Sole. L’espressione più accurata per indicare tale fenomeno potrebbe essere “disfacimento dell’ecosistema”, o anche “scompiglio climatico” oppure “catastrofico riscaldamento globale provocato dall’uomo”. Si tratta innegabilmente di formule difficilmente utilizzabili, ma quanto meno sono oneste.

Di espressioni da cancellare ne potrei suggerire molte altre. Per esempio, l’uso dei titoli nobiliari da parte di commentatori e giornali della repubblica è alquanto bizzarro: perché non possiamo semplicemente chiamare per nome la famiglia Windsor, come facciamo con chiunque altro? Perché non parlare della “regina” chiamandola semplicemente Elizabeth Windsor? Perché non chiamare suo figlio Charles Windsor? Servirebbe a intaccare la loro ridicola e immeritata aura e contribuirebbe a introdurre una logica repubblicana nella nostra lingua. Orwell disse che dovremmo “lasciare che sia il significato a cercare la parola giusta, e non il contrario”. Se ci sono neonati morti chiamiamoli così: neonati morti. Se l’ecosistema si sta disfacendo, diciamo: l’ecosistema si sta disfacendo. Soltanto se inizieremo a descrivere in tutta onestà il mondo potremo iniziare a cambiarlo.

When did it die? When did our collective disgust at the sickness and sicked-up stomach juices that fuel the fashion industry get replaced by an oh-so-ironic appreciation? When did even most liberals and feminists stop snubbing it and start wrestling their way to the rope-line in search of a goody bag? London Fashion Week starts today, a seven-day parade of the Emperor’s Designer Clothes, made of tinfoil or feathers or rubber. A few years ago, I was sent backstage to cover this event – and it took more than a few London Un-Fashion Weeks of my own to recover from what I saw. I was forced to peer for the first time into the industry that is making so many of my female friends ill.

At the end of the cat-walk, there stood a parade of young women who looked like they were about to collapse. On camera, fashion models look worryingly thin. In the (non-)flesh, they look so emaciated that the only other place I have ever seen people like them is reporting on African famines. Their eyes are glazed, shut-down because they have no fuel to run on. These coked-out jangles of gristle and bone were smeared with cosmetics, squeezed into a dress design that appeared to be made of rubbish bags, and pushed out to shimmy down the cat-walk, to be applauded by the likes of Kate Moss and Hugh Grant. When they stumbled back, they appeared faint and listless, and leaned against a wall, looking like they needed an IV drip.

The fashion world claims two sets of victims. The first are the women who it uses as models, for a brief window, before discarding them. They are on average 25 percent below a normal, healthy woman’s weight. We know how they achieve this, because many former models say so: they starve themselves. They live on water and lettuce for weeks. When they fall below a Body Mass Index of twelve, they start to consume their own muscles and tissues. Several models have dropped dead from starvation after success at fashion shows in the past few years.

But there is a broader circle of victims, far beyond the cat-walk’s cat-calls. They are ordinary women who are bombarded with these highly manufactured images of “beauty” every day, and react either by feeling repulsive or trying out semi-starvation for themselves. A Harvard University study found that 80 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies, and only 1 percent are “completely happy”. Men, by contrast, were broadly happy with how they look: the accepted idea of male hotness is so broad it can range from 79 year old Sean Connery to twenty-stone James Corden. We are now living through an epidemic of female anorexia and bulimia, with over 50 million victims in Europe and the US. How many women do you know who are happy with the way they look?

The fashion industry promotes this sick vision coldly and joylessly. The recent documentary ‘The September Issue’ – following the production of Vogue’s biggest edition of the year – had one great revelation. Anna Wintour – the magazine’s editor, and the most powerful woman in fashion – is a brittle, sullen woman who appears to take no pleasure in anything, and only seems to show any vigour when she is being cruel to those around her. Presented with a picture of a stick-thin woman, she announces she “looks pregnant”. Presented with a man with a stomach, she reacts with incomprehension, as if fat is a revolting glitch in the human genome. She is the cruelty of the fashion world rendered into (not very much) flesh. She promotes the use of fur, indifferent to the cruelty to animals it involves. She promotes creepily thin models – is she indifferent to the cruelty to women it involves?

Her depression is infectious: it spreads out through the pages of Vogue. A study by the American Psychological Association found that after three minutes spent looking at a fashion magazine, 70% of women felt “depressed, guilty, and ashamed.” Vogue and its ilk are banned in most eating disorder clinics because they know it sends their clients spiralling. The magazine has done real harm to ordinary women. It super-charged the trend for bone-thin models with Twiggy in 1965, and it popularized the bogus idea of “cellulite” in 1973: before then, it was just considered normal female flesh.

But this raises the apparent paradox: if it makes women feel so lousy, why do they buy it? There was a flurry of excitement this summer when Glamour magazine showed a tiny little tummy on the model Lizzie Miller, who was – the shock! – a British size 12, still much slimmer than the average size 16. But when fashion magazines consistently show normal women, their sales fall. There is a masochistic impulse among women that draws them to these sick images. What is it?

The best answer lies in ‘The Beauty Myth’, the 1991 classic by feminist Naomi Wolf. She argues it is wrong to believe there is one objective standard of ‘beauty’. No. The Maori think there is nothing more beautiful than a fat vulva. The Padung adore droopy breasts. Obese women were hot here in the fifteenth century. Our idea of beauty changes depending on how we want women to be.

Wolf points out something remarkable in the shifting tides of the fashion world. Whenever women become stronger in the real world, fashion models – our collective vision of Beauty Incarnate – become weaker and scrawnier. In the 1910s, it was considered beautiful for women to have soft, rounded hips, thighs and bellies: most women’s natural shape. In the 1920s, when women got the vote, the idea of what was beautiful shrank. Suddenly models became bonier and feeble – and women started to starve themselves. In the 1950s, when women’s rights receded, women could be curvy and eat again. With the 1960s and the rise of feminism, models became smaller and smaller – until today, when women are breaking glass ceilings, and emaciated models are the norm.

Why would this happen? Women were kept down for millennia – and now, in a few generations, there have been incredible strides towards liberation. But the old patriarchal beliefs are deep in our cultural DNA, for both men and women. Wolf believes women suffer from “guilt and apprehension about our own liberation – latent fears that we may be going too far.” This skinniness-craze is “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disorientated by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed.” Women have replaced the prison of the kitchen with the prison of an unachievable body shape, as if it doesn’t make sense to be a woman without bearing a cruel burden. The more powerful a woman is, the more likely she is to be bulimic.

One day, we will look back on a time when women aspired to be Belsen-thin with the incomprehension we feel for Chinese foot-binding. But how do we get there? This is a problem that lies deep in our subconscious minds, and like all subconscious problems, it has to be dragged to the surface. Wolf says anorexic and bulimic women “are walking question marks pleading with schools, universities, and [the rest of us] to tell them unequivocally: Thus is intolerable. This is unacceptable. We don’t starve women here. We value women.”

She’s right. We need to start publicly scorning the people who promote sickness in women as if it was cool and glossy and gorgeous. Enough. Women should not be made to feel subconsciously bad about demanding equality; starvation is not the Siamese twin of female success. It requires more of us – men and women – to say: No more. This industry is sick, and stupid, and wrong, and when we see it, we will show our contempt. Can’t we have a vogue – and a Vogue – for that?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

As soon as I started reading this cry against the global wasting of women's lives, I could smell Shahnaz's face—what was left of it—again. By the time I met her in a hospital in Bangladesh, Shahnaz's face flesh was a mess of charred meat: Her skin, the soft tissue of her cheeks, and the bones beneath had been burned away. Her nose was gone, replaced by two flared holes. Her lips hung down over her chin like melted wax. Her left eyelid couldn't close, so a trail of tears was forever slowly tracking down over the wounds. Shahnaz was 21 years old, and her husband had just thrown acid in her face.

Her "crime"? To insist on continuing her studies—she loved science and poetry—when her husband wanted her to have babies. She smelled of a day-old barbecue left out in the rain.

In much of the world today, it is Shahnaz, not her husband, who would be judged to be in the wrong. For them, a woman is there to be a servile baby machine, and if she refuses, she can be beaten, raped, or burned with impunity. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his Chinese-American wife, Sheryl WuDunn, have written an impassioned exposé of this subjugation—and a roadmap to equality.

To read the whole article, click here.

The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee. George Orwell warned that language will inevitably become cluttered with phrases that have lost their meaning – or, worse, are actually "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". He advised: "If one gets rid of these bad habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."

I'm not talking about the clichés that crowd us every day. "Your call is very important to us..." we are told, by automated voices that don't give a toss about our call, because if they did, they'd employ somebody to actually answer the damn phone. "With all due respect..." you'll be told, before being thoroughly disrespected. They are disingenuous, but they don't have political consequences.

No – I am talking about phrases that, while posing as neutral descriptions of the world, contain a hidden political agenda that then moulds the assumptions of the listener. An obvious recent example is the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism deliberately created by the American right to disinfect torture and make it sound reasonable. Language is often deliberately bent and misshapen for political reasons in this way. For example, in the 1980s, the proponents of the failed "War on Drugs" fought hard to turn the phrase "drug use" – plain, straightfoward, and unloaded – into "drug abuse." It evokes sinister images – it sounds like "child abuse" – but what does it mean? How is somebody who smokes cannabis to relax once a week "abusing" the drug? Do they beat up their spliffs?

These phrases can be successfully driven from the language: during the Vietnam War, news reports blandly referred to slaughtered civilians as "collateral damage" – a bloodless phrase that evokes nothing. Today, even the Pentagon press officers avoid those words when describing the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it has been so thoroughly satirised.

So which phrases would I expunge? There's a useful book by the writer Steven Poole called Unspeak detailing thousands – but here's a short list of some of my own.

Labelling food as "Fair Trade." This phrase suggests that paying desperately poor people a decent wage is a nice ethical add-on, and a gratifying departure from the norm. In fact, it should be taken for granted – the default position of civilised human beings. If we believed that, the labelling would be reversed: it's all the other food that should be labelled as "Unfair Trade", "Rapacious Trade", or "Let's-Pay-a-Pittance Trade." The terrific comedian Andy Zaltzman suggests a sign that could be on the packets: it is a silhouette of an obese businessman pissing on an African child.

"Infant mortality." This sounds clinical and antiseptic – who feels moved when they hear it? – when what we are in fact talking about is dead babies. Here's an example. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country's soil became badly depleted by overuse, so the democratic government there adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The nation's hungry farmers were given sacks of it at a third of its real cost – and the country bloomed. Then the World Bank damned this as a "market distortion" and said that if Malawi wanted to keep receiving loans it had to stop them at once. So the subsidies stopped, and the country's crops failed. A famine began – and "infant mortality rose".

That's the dull phrase. What we mean is – lots of babies died, totally needlessly. Three years ago, the Malawian government finally told the World Bank to stick its loans, and subsidized fertiliser again. Now nobody there is starving, and the country is the single biggest exporter of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa. When on some rare occasion this is mentioned in the news, they might say in passing, "Infant mortality fell." The phrase that tells the truth is: hundreds of thousands of babies stopped dying.

"Christian/Muslim children." Routinely, children are referred to as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Jewish" or whatever their parents' religion, to justify corralling them into schools segregated by superstition, where they will be indoctrinated in that faith. But children – as Richard Dawkins has pointed out – have no religion. They haven't read the texts, thought through the ideas, and come to a conclusion on the basis of evidence. The purveyors of this phrase don't want them to, either – they want to get them at an age when their rational faculties are poorly formed, and implant it so deeply in their minds that they will become upset and confused when they hear rational counter-arguments. We should refer to them as "the children of Christian/Muslim/Jewish parents", with the clear implication that they have a right to form their own views.

"Climate change." This phrase was invented by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when he discovered that focus groups found the phrase "global warming" too scary. Climate change sounds nice and gentle, and evokes our latent awareness that the climate has changed naturally throughout history. Even "global warming" is problematic, since it makes us picture putting our feet up in the sun. The more accurate phrase would be "the unravelling of the ecosystem", "climate chaos", or "catastrophic man-made global warming." They're a mouthful, but they are honest.

"Out of context." I would allow this phrase to be used, but in highly restricted circumstances. Sometimes, a quote is taken out of context, but if you are going to make that accusation, you should be required to give the original context, and explain why the quote was wrong. Instead, this has become a get-out-of-jail free card for anybody who is caught saying something disgusting. For example, when I revealed that Jake Chapman said his art-works performed "a good social service, like the children who killed Jamie Bulger," he simply said this was "stripped from the proper context." How? I have read it in context repeatedly and can't see his argument. It wasn't preceded by a sentence saying "If I was an attention-seeking fool who didn't take anything seriously, I would say..." Similarly, when I revealed that the historian Andrew Roberts praises the Amritsar massacre of innocent civilians as "necessary", and lauds the maniac who ordered it, he said my quotes were "out of context." How?

There are many more I could offer. The use of royal titles by republican commentators and newspapers is bizarre: why can't we call the Windsor family by their names, as we do with everyone else? Why not refer to "the Queen" as Elizabeth Windsor, and her son as Charles Windsor? It chips away at their ludicrous unearned aura, and introduces a republican logic to the language. The phrase "the politics of envy" is routinely used to stigmatize the most basic instincts for social justice – including by New Labour politicians like Hazel Blears. As the superb book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett shows, the more unequal a society becomes, the higher the rates of crime, addiction, and sickness soar. To oppose that isn't envy. It is humanity.

Orwell said we must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around". If they are dead babies, call them dead babies. If the ecosystem is unravelling, say the ecosystem is unravelling. It is only when we honestly describe the world that we can begin to change it.

Eccoci arrivati all’ultima puntata di uno dei più grossi scandali della nostra epoca: le industrie dei Paesi più poveri del mondo stanno disperatamente cercando di produrre il Tamiflu, farmaco salvavita, in versione economica, ma non sono autorizzate a farlo. Per quale motivo? Perché così le società farmaceutiche più ricche possono tutelare i loro brevetti e – naturalmente - i loro introiti. Per comprendere che cosa sta accadendo dobbiamo partire da quello che apparentemente è un mistero. L’Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità da mesi sta lanciando moniti e avvisando che se la febbre suina dovesse propagarsi nelle aree più povere del pianeta, potrebbe provocare la morte di centinaia di migliaia di persone. Ciò nonostante, al contempo l’Oms ha fatto sapere ai governi di quegli stessi Paesi poveri di non avviare una produzione massiccia del Tamiflu, l’unico farmaco conosciuto che ne allevia i sintomi. E qui siamo in presenza di qualcosa di molto più grosso: i nostri governi hanno scelto, ormai da decenni, di accettare uno strano sistema per mettere a punto farmaci che risultino redditizi. La maggior parte del lavoro svolto da scienziati e ricercatori per arrivare alla messa a punto di un farmaco venduto in farmacia si svolge nei laboratori delle università statali, sovvenzionati dalle nostre tasse.

Di norma, le aziende farmaceutiche subentrano soltanto in seguito nel processo di sviluppo di un nuovo farmaco, accollandosi parte delle dispendiose – anche se in buona parte poco creative - fasi conclusive, quali l’acquisto di sostanze chimiche e la necessaria sperimentazione. In cambio, esse alla fine godranno dei diritti esclusivi di produzione di quel farmaco e incasseranno gli utili da esso derivanti negli anni a venire. Gli effetti di questo modus operandi sono spesso devastanti. Le aziende farmaceutiche proprietarie del brevetto per i farmaci contro l’Aids, per esempio, si rivolsero a un tribunale per fermare il governo del Sudafrica che stava cercando di salvare i propri cittadini agonizzanti somministrando farmaci generici – altrettanto efficaci rispetto a quelli brevettati – con una spesa di circa cento dollari l’anno. Volevano infatti che essi pagassero tutti i diecimila dollari necessari ogni anno per l’acquisto della versione brevettata del farmaco. Senza alternative. L’opinione pubblica rimase talmente indignata da tale comportamento che reagì e ottenne una deroga alle normative commerciali globali. Si concordò che in caso di grave emergenza di ordine sanitario i Paesi poveri avrebbero potuto produrre farmaci generici, ovvero il medesimo farmaco ma privo del nome registrato, e sarebbero stati esentati dall’obbligo di versare le royalty alle aziende farmaceutiche.

Ed eccoci alla situazione contingente, la soluzione alla febbre suina: in base alle nuove norme i Paesi più poveri possono produrre tanto Tamiflu generico quanto desiderano. Le aziende farmaceutiche in India e Cina fanno sapere di essere pronte ad avviare la produzione, ma Roche – l’azienda farmaceutica che ne detiene il brevetto – vuole che la gente acquisti soltanto la versione di sua produzione. E l’Oms sembra schierarsi dalla parte di Roche. L’Oms – quanto di più qualificato vi sia per valutare che cosa è una grave emergenza in grado di legittimare un’eccezione ai regolamenti sui brevetti – in pratica sta lanciando questo messaggio: non ricorrete a scappatoie. Che cosa accadrà, alla fine? James Love, di Knowledge Economy International – un’associazione che si batte contro l’attuale sistema dei brevetti farmaceutici - afferma: "I Paesi poveri non sono preparati come avrebbero potuto essere. Se scoppia una pandemia, il numero delle persone che perderà la vita sarà estremamente superiore a quello che avrebbe dovuto essere".

La tesi addotta da Big Pharma a difesa di questo sistema è semplice e a prima vista perfino ragionevole: dobbiamo far pagare cifre più alte per i “nostri” farmaci così da poter mettere a punto un numero maggiore di medicinali salvavita. Da uno studio condotto da Marcia Angell, ex direttore del New England Journal of Medicine, risulta invece che soltanto il 14 per cento del budget delle aziende farmaceutiche è adoperato per mettere a punto farmaci, di norma nella parte conclusiva e meno laboriosa. Tutto il resto va a finire nella commercializzazione e rientra tra gli utili netti. Oltretutto, le aziende farmaceutiche con quel 14 per cento sprecano una vera fortuna, mettendo a punto farmaci-fotocopia (i “me-too drugs”) che hanno esattamente la medesima efficacia di un farmaco già esistente, ma si caratterizzano rispetto a esso per una sola molecola diversa, così da poter essere registrati un'altra volta e assicurare all’azienda farmaceutica un altro brevetto ancora.

Subiamo tutti le conseguenze di questa disfunzione: di recente il Commissario dell’Ue per la libera concorrenza Neelie Kroes ha calcolato che a causa di questo sistema corrotto, gli europei finiscono col pagare le loro medicine il 40 per cento in più di quello che dovrebbero. Perché questo sistema resta in vigore, se è così negativo? Perché le aziende farmaceutiche, che nei soli Stati Uniti nel decennio scorso hanno speso oltre tre miliardi di dollari in “contributi” alla politica e alle varie lobby, fanno funzionare il sistema a loro esclusivo vantaggio. Esiste tuttavia un metodo nettamente migliore per mettere a punto nuovi farmaci, proposto per la prima volta da Joseph Stiglitz, insignito del premio Nobel per l’Economia: i governi dell’Occidente dovrebbero costituire un fondo di svariati miliardi di dollari che premi e offra remunerazioni in denaro agli scienziati e ai ricercatori che mettono a punto cure o vaccini per le varie malattie, assegnando i premi più consistenti per chi debella malattie che mietono milioni di vittime, per esempio la malaria. Una volta versata la cifra, i diritti di utilizzo delle formule e dei farmaci dovrebbero essere di pubblico dominio. Chiunque e ovunque, insomma, potrebbe produrre il farmaco.

L’incentivo finanziario rimarrebbe in sostanza identico, ma tutto il genere umano ne trarrebbe vantaggio e le assurdità del sistema attualmente in vigore avrebbero fine. Quantunque non sia propriamente economico – verrebbe a costare infatti lo 0,6 per cento del Pil – un simile piano a medio termine ci permetterebbe di risparmiare una vera fortuna, perché i vari sistemi sanitari non dovrebbero più sborsare ingenti cifre alle aziende farmaceutiche. Nel frattempo il costo effettivo di una medicina calerebbe drasticamente e decine di milioni di persone nel mondo sarebbero in grado di accedervi per la prima volta nella loro vita. Ogni iniziativa volta a modificare l’attuale sistema, in ogni caso, è ostacolata dalle aziende farmaceutiche e dai loro lobbisti, ma il principio stesso di delimitare le conoscenze mediche così che soltanto poche persone possano trarne guadagno deve essere considerato una delle più grandi assurdità della nostra epoca, un sistema malato da abbattere. Soltanto allora, infatti, potremo globalizzare davvero lo spirito di Jonas Salk, lo scienziato che mise a punto il vaccino antipolio e che si rifiutò di brevettarlo dicendo semplicemente: "Sarebbe come brevettare il Sole".

L'imaginaire érotique occidental est saturé de fantasmes sur la sensualité et la lascivité prêtées aux femmes orientales. Dans l'univers du porno, la mention la plus recherchée sur la Toile est «fille asiatique». Le seul terme suffit à évoquer des légions d'adolescents solitaires et suants dans les sous-sols d'Amérique et d'Europe. Mais ce stéréotype ne date pas d'Internet; il est né en même temps que les grands empires coloniaux. Ces recherches nonchalantes du plaisir sur le Web mutilent la mémoire de cinq siècles d'exploitation coloniale.

Dans son étrange dernier livre [2], qui traite de la rencontre entre deux cultures sexuelles et de la façon dont l'une et l'autre se sont influencées et s'influencent encore aujourd'hui, le journaliste Richard Bernstein condense en de multiples anecdotes des décennies de recherche sur le sujet. Et les fortes effluves de testostérone et de semence qui se dégagent de l'ouvrage dès les cent premières pages sont assez déconcertantes.

L'histoire est fascinante. Au 16e siècle, les marins portugais commencèrent à quitter l'Europe chrétienne fondamentaliste pour parcourir les mers en quête de ressources et d'épices à piller. Ce faisant, ils découvrirent aussi, en abordant à Goa, Malacca, Sumatra ou au Japon, une manière différente de vivre le sexe qui leur permit de lâcher la bride à des désirs depuis longtemps réprimés. «D'un côté se trouvait la monogamie chrétienne qui chargeait l'acte sexuel de signifiant religieux et d'interdit, et qui le considérait comme impie hors du mariage. De l'autre se trouvait la culture orientale où le sexe était strictement ordonnancé, notamment pour les femmes, mais également dissocié et du péché et de l'amour,» écrit ainsi Bernstein.

Harems

Là où l'Occident associait le sexe au mariage, pour le condamner quand il s'échappait du lit conjugal, l'Orient donnait libre cours à sa libido dans les harems, les maisons closes et une tripotée d'autres endroits consacrés. «En Orient,» s'enthousiasme Bernstein, «il était considéré comme acquis qu'il y aurait toujours une réserve de femmes, souvent suprêmement belles, cultivées et séduisantes, dont le seul rôle consistait à contenter les désirs masculins.» Le fantasme de la «poupée asiatique» était né. Rudyard Kipling fut l'un des premiers à lui consacrer une ode: «J'ai une jeune fille plus délicate et plus douce, dans une terre plus pure et plus verte / Sur la route de Mandalay.»

Depuis les années 1970, et la parution du classique L'Orientalisme: l'Orient créé par l'Occident [3], dans lequel Edward Said détaille les mille et une condescendances et idées reçues que l'Occident entretient vis-à-vis de l'Orient, ce type d'épanchements est considéré comme une vue de l'esprit moulée par le racisme et l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme. Selon Said, les marchands occidentaux ont décrit l'Orient comme un creuset de péché et de dépravation pour mieux justifier la colonisation et l'appropriation de ce que bon leur semblait, des épices aux ressources naturelles en passant par les femmes. À cela, Bernstein rétorque que «la vision érotisée de l'Orient renferme un noyau dur de vérité que les partisans de Said répugnent à admettre.»

En Orient - notion fourre-tout que Bernstein utilise pour englober l'Afrique, l'Asie et le Moyen-Orient - les colons ont véritablement rencontré une culture sexuelle différente. La prostitution était véritablement pratiquée à découvert, sans la chape de tabous et de honte que faisait peser l'Europe sur elle. Les dirigeants politiques possédaient véritablement des harems avec des jeunes femmes à disposition. Les hommes n'étaient pas censés être monogames. Tout méprisants et racistes qu'ils aient été dans la description de ces cultures, les Occidentaux ont véritablement vu tout cela.

Les colons ont eu deux réactions contraires face à cette rencontre: la moitié l'ont accueillie à bras ouverts, et les autres se sont agrippés à leur Bible et à leurs chapelets. Bernstein excelle davantage dans l'exposé du premier groupe, avec de longs paragraphes détaillés et d'innombrables références aux «petits seins menus» et aux «hanches étroites» dont je me serais bien passé. L'Europe se passionna pour ces harems remplis de jeunes vierges nubiles, se repaissant à l'envi de ces «révélations sulfureuses». À en lire certains extraits, l'on dénote une projection freudienne riche d'enseignements sur la sexualité frustrée de l'époque. Dans la description des jeunes vierges se rabattant sur les pratiques saphiques dans l'attente du choix du sultan, un désir frénétique affleure sous les gloussements de la morale bien-pensante. Bref, l'Europe plongea dans un rêve collectif humide d'amour libre en terre captive.

Kama Sutra

Bernstein s'attarde sur deux Occidentaux qui ont particulièrement savouré cette liberté au regard des carcans de leur pays natal: le grand romancier Gustave Flaubert et l'explorateur britannique Richard Francis Burton. Tous deux considéraient l'Orient comme une terre de virtuoses du sexe passés maîtres dans la pratique des grands plaisirs de la vie. Mais si Flaubert goûta ces jouissances en privé, Burton en devint un prédicateur hors pair. Rentré en Angleterre, il rédigea une littérature abondante sur ces pratiques sexuelles inexplorées, décrivant avec émotion comment une femme «peut s'asseoir à cheval sur un homme et provoquer l'orgasme non pas en se tortillant ou en bougeant, mais en serrant et en relâchant l'organe masculin avec les muscles de ses parties intimes.» Sir Burton fournit également à la Grande-Bretagne la première traduction anglaise du Kama Sutra [3], et il fut un ardent défenseur de l'éducation sexuelle.

Cependant, la plupart des hommes passés par l'Orient préférèrent taire leurs explorations sexuelles, du moins jusqu'à ce que les Américains entrent dans la danse, avec tambours et trompettes, à l'approche du 20éme siècle. La pénétration de l'Orient par les Américains sera illustrée pour la première fois par Giacomo Puccini dans l'opéra Madame Butterfly [4]. L'histoire est désolante: un banal lieutenant américain nommé Pinkerton, en poste à Nagasaki à la fin du 19éme siècle, s'octroie la main de Cio-Cio-San, une jeune fille de 15 ans. Le lieutenant reparti, celle qu'on appelle Madame Butterfly donne naissance à un enfant et se languit de son mari durant trois terribles années. Quand Pinkerton revient enfin, c'est accompagné d'une épouse américaine, et pour réclamer sa progéniture. Cio-Cio-San se tranchera la gorge, laissant un drapeau américain claquer en sourdine dans la main de l'enfant.

Sur les milliers de Pinkerton débarqués par la suite au Vietnam, bien peu se sont embarrassés de fausses cérémonies de mariage. Après être passés de la mère patrie du puritanisme à un pays où le sexe était déculpabilisé, ils ont irrémédiablement modifié la culture américaine. La moitié des soldats américains ayant servi au Vietnam y ont perdu leur virginité, laissant dans leur sillage un demi-million d'enfants métis traités en parias. Par un étrange tour de l'Histoire, la progression de l'amour libre doit ainsi peut-être autant à la guerre de Lyndon B. Johnson et Nixon qu'aux hippies et aux libertins.

Bernstein a le mérite d'aborder un sujet tortueux auquel on préfère souvent ne pas penser. Et pourtant... il y a quelque chose de profondément dérangeant dans un ouvrage qui semble parfois si complice de l'exploitation même qu'il entend étudier. Ce n'est pas tant le ton qui est en cause, bien que l'aveu détourné de l'auteur sur ses premières expériences sexuelles dans un bordel asiatique soit quelque peu répulsif; c'est surtout un état d'esprit nauséabond à l'égard des femmes.

À propos du rôle des femmes dans cette collision culturelle et sexuelle, Bernstein tombe dans la myopie à force d'être nuancé. Décrivant des hommes qui ont envahi des pays étrangers, renversé leurs dirigeants, volé leurs ressources et ensuite jeté quelques piécettes aux femmes pour qu'elles écartent les jambes, il écrit ainsi: «Du point de vue politiquement correct actuellement en vogue, [ce comportement] est fortement condamnable et illustre l'iniquité de la domination coloniale. (...) Essayons cependant d'envisager l'histoire érotique de l'Orient et de l'Occident comme partie intégrante de la grande aventure humaine, une aventure dans laquelle les femmes, les filles et les garçons impliqués n'étaient pas nécessairement passifs.»

Des femmes consentantes ?

Faut-il vraiment essayer ? Les arguments qu'emploie Bernstein pour nous convaincre que ces femmes ont été maîtresses de leur destin manquent singulièrement de force. Il nous cite l'exemple d'une reine arabe qui a choisi de faire l'amour avec un voyageur occidental; mais une reine est-elle vraiment représentative ? Si l'auteur concède que «la plus large part de l'offre sexuelle en Orient a toujours été, et reste, fondée sur l'exploitation et l'injustice,» il n'en défend pas moins les hommes qui ont pris part à cette exploitation, tels Burton et Flaubert : «Ils n'ont pas utilisé la force ; ils n'ont maltraité aucun enfant; ils ont fait ce à quoi on les invitait.»

Cela est faux, quoi qu'on en dise. Ces hommes ont pu agir comme ils ont agi uniquement parce que leur gouvernement avait au préalable imposé à la population, par la terreur et par la force, la soumission. Flaubert a évoqué cette «terreur palpable chez tout le monde» en présence de l'homme blanc; et quand un jeune garçon lui proposa de «baiser» sa mère moyennant finances, l'écrivain jugea l'occasion «excellente». De son côté, Burton a certainement décrit les us et coutumes sexuelles des filles asservies d'après l'expérience qu'il en a eue. Comment un acte sexuel avec des personnes réduites à l'esclavage et terrorisées, plongées dans la misère induite par le viol colonial, peut-il être comparé à une «invitation» ? Comment ces femmes auraient-elles pu dire non ?

Cette libération sexuelle n'a libéré que les hommes. Les femmes étaient le plus souvent asservies ou emprisonnées contre leur gré dans des harems ou des maisons closes, et punies par une violence systématique quand elles tentaient de rejeter le rôle de jouet sexuel qu'on leur avait dévolu. Lors de mon enquête sur le trafic sexuel au Bangladesh, je suis allé dans l'un de ces «harems» qui émoustille Bernstein. Situé à la frontière indienne, ce n'était qu'un claque formé de huttes en tôle rouillée abritant des matelas poisseux. Les femmes qui s'y trouvaient avaient pour la plupart été volées à leur famille à l'adolescence, puis gardées captives, droguées et obligées de satisfaire les hommes pour quelques roupies. Celle qui restera à jamais gravée dans ma mémoire s'appelait Beauty, elle avait alors 34 ans. Vendue au bordel à 13 ans, elle y vit depuis et elle y mourra.

Difficile de ne pas penser que Bernstein a écrit ce livre en partie pour apaiser sa propre conscience. Quand il reconnaît que le système reposait sur la répression des femmes, c'est pour balayer la question aussitôt; quand il décrit la libération que ce fut pour les hommes, c'est pour l'approuver avec une conviction jubilatoire.

La réalité est, en définitive, bien plus sombre que ce que veut bien raconter Bernstein. Les hommes européens et américains ont en effet accédé à la libération sexuelle en Orient. De retour chez eux, certains ont contribué à la libération des mœurs dans leur propre pays, et au bénéfice de tous. Mais cette libération s'est faite au prix de l'exploitation éhontée du système patriarcal jusqu'au-boutiste des pays colonisés, et suggérer que des femmes tyrannisées et profondément démunies y ont participé volontairement est révoltant.

Inversion des situations

L'histoire de Bernstein, et la nôtre, s'achève sur une ironie mordante: à l'exception de l'Asie du Sud-Est, les pôles de l'antagonisme sexuel Orient-Occident se sont nettement et brusquement inversés: «Les pays où les Occidentaux recherchaient autrefois le plaisir et l'excitation comptent aujourd'hui parmi les endroits les plus conservateurs de la planète en matière sexuelle.» Burton, qui vit le Moyen-Orient comme un phare de la liberté sexuelle, y serait aujourd'hui décapité pour ses actes.

En Afrique, en Chine, en Inde et au Moyen-Orient, ce retournement s'est fait très vite. À la moitié du 19éme siècle, «une grande partie du monde entretenait la culture du harem; ce n'est que dans les quelques pays occidentaux, dans le petit pré carré de la chrétienté, qu'il n'en allait pas ainsi.» À la fin du siècle, c'était déjà l'inverse.

Comment cela est-il arrivé ? Il est à regretter que Bernstein offre peu de réponses pertinentes, si ce n'est qu'au final, l'Orient colonisé aura attiré plus de missionnaires que de Burton. Dans la nouvelle de Somerset Maugham, Rain [5], un missionnaire dit ainsi: «Je crois que le plus difficile a été d'instiller, chez les indigènes, le sens du péché.» Mission accomplie, et avec un franc succès. L'Orient, imprégné de ce sens du péché occidental, s'est figé dans une nouvelle frigidité.

Depuis, Babylone, la Grande Prostituée, a retroussé ses jupons pour migrer vers Amsterdam. Le vieux fantasme colonial de la fille orientale qui ne veut, ou ne peut, rien refuser, tombe en poussière un pays après l'autre. Que les onanistes du monde entier se le disent: sur la route de Mandalay, les «poupées asiatiques» sont à présent des poupées qui disent «non».

Johann Hari, chroniqueur pour le quotidien anglais The Independent. Amnesty international lui a récemment décerné le prix du journaliste de l'année.

Traduit par Chloé Leleu

What does it say about Britain that today we merrily laud a historian who celebrates the most murderous acts of the British Empire – and even says women and children who died in our concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity?

Andrew Roberts is routinely described in the British press as a talented historian with a penchant for partying. They affectionately describe how the 46-year-old millionaire-inheritee sucks up to the English aristocracy. He brags: "To [the] charge of snobbery I plead guilty, with pride," saying he has "an exaggerated sense of – and tak[es] an unapologetic delight in – class distinctions." But all this Evelyn Waugh tomfoolery masks the toxic values that infuse Roberts's works of "history".

Roberts, who has a new book out this week, describes himself as "extremely right-wing". To understand him, you need to look at a small, sinister group of British-based South African and Zimbabwean exiles he has associated with. In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as the shadow white government of South Africa. Its founder, a former member of the neo-fascist National Front, says: "In a nutshell our policy can be summed up in one sentence: we want our countries back, and believe this can now only come about by the re-establishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent."

The club, according to its website, flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting. The British High Commission has accused the club of spreading "hate literature".

The dinner was a celebration of the 36th anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a unilateral declaration of independence from Great Britain, because it was pressing the country to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for this racist rule, Roberts, according to the club's website, "finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which he said he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements".

When I first pointed out this connection, Roberts said he gave a "historical speech", hadn't realised the Springbok Club was a racist organisation, and didn't recall anyone saying anything racist. Wasn't the apartheid flag, and the fact they were there specifically to celebrate the anniversary of a white supremacist declaration, a hint?

That Roberts would cheerfully lap up the applause of the Springbok Club is not surprising: it is perfectly logical to anybody who has read his writing, which consists of elaborate defences for the crimes of a white man's empire – and a plea to the US to continue its work.

How should this empire exercise its power? One useful tactic, Roberts appears to believe, is massacring civilians. The Amritsar massacre is one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the British Raj. In 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on 10,000 unarmed men, women, and children who were peacefully protesting, and about 400 died. Dyer was even repudiated by the British government. As Patrick French, an award-winning historian of the period, explains: "The biographies of Dyer show that he was clearly mentally abnormal, and there was no way he should have been in charge of troops."

Yet Dyer has, at last, found a defender – Andrew Roberts. In his book A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, he says that after Dyer shot down the peaceful crowd, "[i]t was not necessary for another shot to be fired throughout the entire region". He later comments: "Today's reactions to Dyer's deed are of course uniformly damning ... but if the Amritsar district, Punjab region or southern India generally had carried on in revolt, many more than 379 people would have lost their lives."

It is an extraordinary rationalisation for killing women and children in cold blood, and rejected by virtually all other historians. It was only after I exposed this passage that Roberts finally said: "I have never approved of massacring civilians."

But in his writings Roberts is even supportive of politicians who take mass punishment to its most extreme conclusion: concentration camps. His political hero is Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister who, during the Boer War, constructed concentration camps in South Africa that inspired Hermann Goering. Under Salisbury, the British burned Boer civilians out of their homes and farms and drove them into concentration camps, so they could grab control of one of the most strategically important parts of Africa. The result was that about 34,000 people – some 15 per cent of the entire Boer population – died in the camps, mainly of disease and starvation.

Roberts presents a very different picture. He says the British introduced "regime change" in Pretoria out of a concern "for human rights". Far from being a "war crime", the concentration camps "were set up for the Boers' protection". The mass deaths there were not a result of British policy. No: they were primarily the prisoners' own fault, because they didn't know how to take medicine or treat disease, and deliberately spread lice.

The "evidence" he gives for this is the word of a single British doctor who worked in the camps. What would our picture of the German camps look like if we relied on the words of a Nazi-employed doctor? Professor Mike Davis, an academic expert on the British Empire, says: "His arguments about the Boer concentration camps are similar to the arguments of the apologists about the Nazi camps."

This is not merely a matter of the past. Roberts sees his histories as road maps to the future, advising George W Bush, at a White House dinner to celebrate his histories, to adopt "the whole idea of mass internment", saying: "I think it is the way the administration of Iraq should go." Incredibly, he cited Ireland as a model of how internment can work, a claim that provokes incredulity in Irish historians.

This man is a high-society yob and he would be shunned in a culture that took human rights seriously. But it appears that in Britain today justifying mass murder will be cheerfully overlooked, provided the killing was carried out under the flapping of the Union Jack, and you can sprinkle some tart gossip into the pages of Tatler afterwards.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read Andrew Roberts' response here.

He doesn't defend any of his historical claims. No: he claims I have a "secret crush" on him. Because that, obviously, is the only reason why anybody would criticise a defender of concentration camps. It's the level of a ten year-old boy's playground abuse: confronted with hard evidence he is defending monstrous human rights abuses, he says: "Urrrrgh, but he's gay!"