Slavery Reparations?

Reparations game relies on simplistic tale of whites exploiting blacks
There is a vital lesson for Australia from morally unfair calls for Britain to pay reparations for slavery.

Nigel Biggar 

Anthony Albanese, it seems, would rather not be in the Caribbean this week. Reports have it that he’s only attending the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua because King Charles personally twisted his arm.

In principle, the Commonwealth could be an exciting forum for the building of relationships, exchange of ideas and cooperative endeavour on such things as climate change and education across the globe. It comprises 56 nations from six of the world’s seven continents, many of whom share common traditions of English law and parliamentary democracy. And while the majority of members were formerly parts of the British Empire, the most recent entrants were not. Rwanda, Mozambique, Togo and Gabon – colonised variously by the Germans, Belgians, Portuguese, and French – each found the benefits sufficiently attractive as to apply for membership.

Tragically, however, the constructive potential of the Commonwealth is at risk of being squandered in a rancorous dispute over whether and how to reckon with past wrongs. With the King’s arrival in Antigua on Friday, the clamour for British reparations for historic slavery has reached its highest pitch. This is the climax of an international campaign that’s been gathering momentum since March, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama. This described transatlantic slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

On Tuesday, the King told leaders at the official opening of CHOGM that “we cannot change the actions of those who came before us ... We can, however, learn from the past.

“The transatlantic trade in enslaved persons still casts a shadow over these islands and other members of our Commonwealth,” he said.

Before he arrived, the King had visited Guyana to celebrate 60 years of independence. There his ear was no doubt bent by the president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, who has called for “a full and unconditional apology” for the slave trade and commented last week that “you [the British] … benefited tremendously from the darkest days in human history”.

A cartoonishly simplistic tale

Yet the claim that Britain should pay reparations for slave-trading and slavery, mostly from 1670 to 1833, is historically distorted, morally unfair and politically opportunistic. It depends on a cartoonishly simplistic – even racist – tale of whites exploiting blacks.

Transatlantic slavery was, while gravely unjust, not extraordinary. Difficult though it may be to appreciate, up until the early 19th century slavery was a universal institution practised on every continent by people of every skin colour. Even escaped black slaves in Jamaica in the 1700s and freed slaves in the American South up to the 1860s kept slaves of their own. So, it’s really no surprise that some British people were involved. But how many? According to recent research trumpeted by The Guardian under the headline “Enslaving Nation”, there were at least 13,000 investors. Which sounds impressive, until you notice that these were spread over 360 years from 1510. During that period perhaps as many as 150 million individuals lived in Britain – of whom British investors in slavery amounted to 0.0086 per cent. Enslaving nation? Really?

What’s more, British complicity needs to be put into context. Africans and Arabs were involved in African slave-trading and slavery for far longer and on a far larger scale. One estimate calculates that at least 35 million enslaved Africans were exported over the Atlantic to the Americas, through the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and across the Indian Ocean. Some black slaves ended up in Japan. Since Arabs and Europeans seldom did the slave-raiding themselves, Africans themselves were responsible for the primary enslavement of almost all the exports. And among those trafficking African slaves were the ancestors of many Ghanaians, including president Mahama himself.

As Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, the Nigerian novelist and journalist, wrote in The Times last week, “black people’s demands for reparations cannot realistically proceed without a sincere acknowledgment of the role played by Africans in capturing and selling other Africans. This … is an appeal for historical honesty”. Nwaubani speaks with authority: her great-grandfather was an Igbo slave-trader.

Whereas African responsibility for original enslavement was almost 100 per cent, the British share of the subsequent trade was about 9 per cent. In 1804, it’s reckoned there were 45 million chattel-slaves in the world – most of them in Asia – of which those in the British West Indies amounted to 1.7 per cent. In about 1850, the Fulani people deployed up to 4 million slaves in vast plantations in what’s now northern Nigeria. So, at that one time, there were more slaves in that one part of Africa than all the 3.26 million the British took across the Atlantic in two and a half centuries.

So, the involvement of a minority of Britons in slavery was not at all extraordinary in scale. But was it extraordinary in brutality? Was it really part of “the gravest crime in human history”? Not obviously. Slaves in West Africa were sometimes buried alive with their deceased masters. One report in 1797 has it that up to 1500 people were sacrificed at royal funerals in Asante.

What’s more, the treatment of European slaves by Arabs in North Africa in the early modern period was very brutal indeed. Take Miguel de Cervantes, the famous author of Don Quixote, who was captured and enslaved in Algiers in 1575. According to a first-hand witness, Cervantes “was on the verge of losing it [his life] on four different occasions when he was nearly impaled or hooked or burned alive”.

Three centuries later, in the 1860s, the Sudan was reckoned to furnish the Arab slave trade, annually, with 35,000 pre-pubescent African boys, to produce about 3800 eunuchs. That is, just under 90 per cent died in the process of being forcibly castrated with a razor.

Was the slave trade profitable for Britain?

What about the president of Guyana’s claim? Is it true that Britain “benefited tremendously” from the slave-trade and slavery? If you believe the Marxist historian Eric Williams, the answer is yes. In Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1940, Williams claimed that profits from slave-trading made “an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development”. But in 2010, David Brion Davis, the distinguished historian of slavery and its abolition in the Western world, pronounced the last rites on Williams’ thesis, declaring it “wholly discredited by other scholars”. More recently, the most eminent living historian of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, has reckoned slavery’s contribution to Britain’s industrial economy as “small”, and its contribution to the economy of Liverpool – Britain’s biggest slaving port in 1750 – as “trivial”. The winner of the 2025 Nobel prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, agrees. Without profits from slavery, he has written, Britain’s industrial prosperity would have grown “at a marginally slower pace”.

European monks try to buy the freedom of white slaves from the Sultan of Morocco’s slave traders in the 17th century. Picture: Giles Milton’s book, White Gold.

The argument in favour of British reparations distorts the truth about the past partly by ripping British involvement in slavery out of its historical context, and partly by exaggerating its contribution to Britain’s industrial prosperity. It also refuses to take into account the fact that Britain was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish both slave-trading and slavery, permanently. It then led the world in suppressing them both from Brazil, across Africa, to Australasia. In 1817 Britain paid Spain £50m ($96m) in today’s values to sign a treaty abolishing the slave-trade within its territories. And between 1806 and 1867 it’s estimated that British taxpayers spent the equivalent of £90bn ($173bn) trying to stamp out the transatlantic trade alone, when the government’s resources were but a fraction of their present amount. The American political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape have judged Britain’s efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade to be “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”. So, to finger the British – of all peoples – for slavery-reparations is outrageously unfair.

It’s also politically opportunistic and, according to some who are familiar with domestic politics in the Caribbean, not entirely sincere. Observing the susceptibility of Britain’s “progressive” elite to feeling guilt over a colonial past about which they know little, they’ve decided to exploit it. Yet, according to the Guyana-born Trevor Phillips, the reparations campaign “is theatre with a purpose”. “Do not be fooled into thinking the region’s leaders much care about what the British think about slavery”, he writes. “They need their own people to see them having a fight with the old colonial master. And it really doesn’t matter whether they win or not. What counts in the sight of the region united in a common cause”. That cause is really the independence of small island states in the face of superpower pressure from the US and China.

A painting of leading English abolitionist, William Wilberforce.

Reparations is a game played largely by the political class. “It is clear to me that ordinary people in the Caribbean realise that the campaign to wrest funds from Britain is driven by their own elite,” says Lord Tony Sewell, who lives between his urban residence in London and a farm in Jamaica. “Young people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana are not on the streets burning the British flag and demanding reparations … They all ask hard questions of their current leadership, not of a past colonial master. There are real problems in the Caribbean about education, levels of poverty, climate change and the building of civic society. Most of these have nothing to do with slavery and its legacy …. People in Kingston know this and refuse to join a war against a straw man”.

So, rather than play the game and yield to the cynical exploitation of misplaced white guilt, the King and his British government should publicly lament the inhumanity of worldwide slavery and the fact that some Britons ever played a part in it. But then they should point to Britain’s unequalled and sustained commitment to suppressing slavery all over the world from 1807 onward and invite Commonwealth members to collaborate in addressing contemporary slavery in states such as Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Libya. That would save the Commonwealth from collapsing into a divisive, performative dispute over the remote past, and free it to attend constructively to the real environmental and educational challenges of the present.

Reckoning with ‘colonial sins’

There is a lesson here for Australia, whose own politics have long suffered from a divisive controversy about how to reckon with colonial sins. The “progressive” left likes to tell a simple story of guilty white oppression and innocent black victimhood. But the truth is that Europeans didn’t introduce violence and displacement into an Aboriginal Eden. Aboriginal peoples were perfectly accustomed to killing and invading each other before Britons ever set foot in Sydney Cove. And, without downplaying the settler atrocities of the 19th century, the fact is that Aboriginal Australians now have the good fortune of being equal citizens in one of the most prosperous and liberal countries on earth. It could have been otherwise. When the Maori reached the Chatham Islands in 1835, they slaughtered 10 per cent of the Moriori people and enslaved the rest. Sooner or later, they would have landed in Australia.

Members of the Wik peoples pictured in far north Queensland, c. 1927. Picture: Supplied

In his 2009 book, The Politics of Suffering, the anthropologist Peter Sutton argues that disputes about the past often get in the way of sorting out the present. After spending several decades among the Aboriginal Wik peoples of northern Queensland, he became convinced that their social dysfunction was caused less by historic colonialism than by contemporary factors. Yet he found that the “progressive” elite was in thrall to an ideological “politics of compassion” that resisted the implications of expert or statistical evidence and obstructed the crafting of realistic remedies: “Simplistic causal accounts continue to grow like healthy weeds …. [For example,] [t]he kids don’t go to school because the teachers are racists”. “What enables the purveyors of such pap, and those who swallow it,”, he asked, “to so suspend their normal critical faculties?”. The answer he gives to his own question about the springs of such “uncaring kindness” is career-interests: “Victimhood becomes, for many, the family business, a business of status as well as of economics”.

Perhaps it’s time to stop playing the historic reparations game. Perhaps, it’s time to get serious about diagnosing present problems accurately, so as to address them effectively.

Nigel Biggar is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025) and, with historian Robert Tombs, Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story about Britain (Swift, 2026).

The Woke revolution

 Just as cultural energy in the West has moved fluidly from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter, climate strikes, trans activism and now pro-Palestinian fervour, we can trace a similar rhythm in the revolutionary waves of the 20th century. These, too, promised justice, redemption and the cleansing of a corrupt world – only to collapse beneath the weight of their own moral absolutism.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 promised liberation for workers but quickly descended into mass arrests, purges and famine as ideological loyalty replaced the rule of law. Two generations later, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long convulsion in which teenage Red Guards destroyed temples, denounced teachers and tore apart their own families. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and declared the start of “Year Zero”, its vision of agrarian socialism leading to the deaths of nearly two million people.

Each of these revolutions shared a common grammar: a sense of absolute moral clarity, a desire to root out internal enemies and a belief that justice required purification. Their language was different, their geography varied, but their structure and psychology were the same. Like today’s activists, their adherents believed they stood on the right side of history, that neutrality was complicity and redemption could be achieved only through total commitment.

In each case, the fervour eventually burned itself out. But revolutionary energy never goes extinct. It waits for the next generation disillusioned enough to take it up again. Cultural movements of the past decade, though far less violent, run on the same emotional circuitry as the most destructive revolutions of the 20th century. They offer belonging, clarity and a sense of moral purpose along with the seductive thrill of joining a righteous vanguard.

It may be that this energy, in the second decade of the 21st century, has not yet peaked. On the contrary, it may be only beginning. More and more young people feel they have no economic future. If the next generation becomes disenchanted enough, they may not demand reform but revolution. And when this energy is finally harnessed by left-wing economic populists – when it shifts its focus from race, gender and sexuality to class, to elites, landlords, property owners and professionals – that is when liberal societies will once again find themselves in real danger.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.

Capitalism Needs Champions

 The Wallstreet Journal

Capitalism Needs Champions

Matthew Hennessey

Let Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York serve as your periodic reminder that capitalism is in dire need of able defenders. Socialism has more cheerleaders than it deserves, considering its record of consistent failure. Markets need champions too. This is always true, especially now. If you thought soft-headed notions about inequality and making the rich pay their “fair share” would die out as dinosaurs like Bernie Sanders faded from the scene, you should know by now how wrong you were. The 83-yearold Vermont senator isn’t fading. He’s still jetting around the country barking about oligarchs and exploitation. In Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Mamdani, he has talented and energetic heirs. They will be around for decades. Believers in free markets and free people need to strap in. The adversary is formidable—young, good-looking, social-media savvy. It’s going to be a long, exhausting fight. In this twilight struggle the truth has an advantage: Socialism is incompatible with human nature. People are driven to build, to invest, to strive and be productive, to pursue their own families’ well-being above all. Socialism subverts these impulses. It reCapitalism Needs Champions quires coercion to achieve anything resembling success. It’s an intellectual lab leak. Misery follows wherever it’s tried. Yet each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart. They know they can make it work this time. The young voters who supported Mr. Mamdani were primed by their expensive educations to buy his line that capitalism is rigged in favor of the rich. All they’ve ever been told—by teachers, professors, TV and TikTok—is that markets are inhumane. Capitalism is rapacious and bad for the climate. They may never have heard a single word to the contrary. This is a failure of education, yes. Basic economics is rarely taught in high school or required in college. But it’s equally a failure of public relations. Who is making a sustained and coherent public case for American-style capitalism? The field is wide open. We need new Milton Friedmans and Thomas Sowells. The product itself isn’t the problem. Free markets have made life better, healthier and more prosperous in demonstrable ways for billions of people. Anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago. Take a moment to imagine life without washing machines or chemotherapy. Competitive markets foster innovation and allocate resources with remarkable efficiency. They work. Even when markets come up short or create externalities like pollution, the incredible wealth they generate can be used to fill the gaps. When socialism fails, as it inevitably does, the only option is brutality. This always gets glossed over on MSNBC and CNN. I’d like to hear Mr. Mamdani explain how he plans to keep New Yorkers captive when his experiment goes south. Markets are more than efficient, which would be argument enough in a head-tohead competition with socialism. They’re also moral. Markets enable willing and mutually beneficial exchange among free people. They abominate coercion. They encourage a belief that tomorrow will be better than today. No one would bother investing absent an expectation that it will pay off. Capitalism is synonymous with confidence in the future. No, the problem isn’t capitalism. The problem is complacency. Capitalists take too much for granted. They assume the product is so good it will sell itself. Mr. Mamdani’s victory shows otherwise. The world is full of capitalists who don’t realize that’s what they are. The owner-operator of a corner deli is no less a capitalist than Jeff Bezos. Most capitalists go about their business quietly. By serving customers’ needs, they do more for society’s overall well-being than any charity. They should be celebrated, not vilified. Politicians vying to lead cities built on business ought to understand and respect market forces. Capital is mobile and goes where it’s treated well. There are no walls around Wall Street. Margaret Thatcher correctly diagnosed socialism’s inherent defect: Eventually you run out of other people’s money. Mr. Mamdani seems committed to teaching 8.2 million New Yorkers this lesson the hard way. My appeal isn’t to tech gurus and investment bankers. It’s to all the everyday capitalists in New York and beyond, the striving small-business owners and sole proprietors who are building something of value where nothing existed before. If you believe in free markets, speak up. Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor. Socialism is on the march. If you believe in free markets, it’s time to speak up. 

Values

 Where are our values?

A slew of recent articles declaring that we are living beyond our means, are addicted to government support and that tough times are coming raises the inevitable question. Do Australians have the mettle to weather a storm? Well, do we? For to prosper in our new world, we would need our old values: thrift, consideration for others, duty, responsibility, selflessness and tenacity. These values may have been forged by our Judeo-Christian culture, but they were fortified by tough times. Strengthened by deprivation. Reinforced by lessons about the courage and integrity of our historical heroes. Yet today it seems these values are not just dated but risible.

But while we may well mourn their loss, these values didn’t fall.

They were pushed. For when we reduced our family size, our children didn’t have to make do, didn’t need to learn thrift or learn the lessons of being one of many.

When we built bigger homes with separate bedrooms and multiple bathrooms, they didn’t learn the need for compromise, co-operation and consideration. When we swapped the grand backyard for a media room, they didn’t learn about teams, turns and negotiating, and could go for days without being inconvenienced, challenged, wrong or disliked. When we shielded them from hurt and sadness, showered them in empty praise and fought their battles, they didn’t learn strength and tenacity.

When we took on their responsibilities, they didn’t learn independence. When we stopped looking after our own elderly, they didn’t learn duty or selflessness.

And when the government stepped in with its ever-increasing list of benefits including, incredibly, paying us to care for our own, they learned dependence.

Tough times require strength.

Values, our muscle.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

The loss of values and truth

 Indulgent West

Elica Le Bon is bewildered by the West’s appetite to “sacrifice values on the altar of tolerance”. I think she’s being generous. I would suggest that we sacrificed our values on the altar of indulgence.
We swapped restraint, duty and self-control for a world of self-love, instant gratification and cheap highs. Duty became old-fashioned. Shame, even after poor behaviour, was considered not just outdated but outrageous.
Judgment was (ironically) condemned.
We swapped fortitude, tenacity and responsibility for dependence.
Restraint for licence.
Christianity for crystals. Courtesy, respect and moderation gave way to uninhibited freedom and finally to permissiveness.
There was no right or wrong.
Everything was relative. Thus we were ripe to be asked to tolerate the intolerable. And we had no grounds to refuse. Because in a world of moral and cultural relativism we can’t declare any one behaviour or any one culture better or worse than another.
But that’s simply not true.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

Finally A reality check

 US leads the way in reversing cultural decline of the West

KONSTANTIN KISIN

Since speaking at the last Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, it’s clear that the tide is turning and our American friends are leading the way.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled.

This is happening not just in the US government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.

Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave $US3m ($4.7m) to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Kanye West would have done it for free!

Thanks to the end of censorship on X, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.

So that’s the positives, but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia.

Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.

I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of Britain and much of the Western world.

But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things human beings have invented over the past two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. One of simplest things most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.

But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here. 

We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: If you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer.

Because we all know the answer.

We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.

A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history. Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history.

Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them.

Recent election results around the world bear that out.

Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches and ill-advised hand gestures.

They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.

We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired. So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.

On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner.

The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward.

Free speech is not a rightwing value or a left-wing value, it’s a Western value.

The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”.

Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first, and white, black, male, female and all that other stuff a distant second.

And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.

None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.

We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t? So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty.

The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner, yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.

Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

Idealism the road paved to hell

 Idealism the link between medicine and monsters

Melanie Phillips

The fall of the Syrian dictator ­Bashar al-Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants also qualified doctors? Assad is by training an ophthalmologist.

Among the godfathers of Islamist terrorism, there has been a steady stream of doctors. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s henchman, was a surgeon who practised at Egyptian army clinics, a Saudi Arabian hospital and with the Red Crescent in Pakistan.

George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Fathi Shaqaqi, a founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were doctors.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas leader behind the human bomb attacks against Israelis in the 1990s, studied pediatric medicine and taught parasitology and genetics.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was found guilty of crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars, qualified as a doctor and psychiatrist.

Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the despot of Ivory Coast from the 1960s to the 1990s, started out as a doctor. His contemporary, Hastings Banda, who ruled Malawi in a reign of terror and fed opposition members to crocodiles, trained as a doctor in Tennessee and at Edinburgh University and practised medicine in England.

In Haiti in the 1960s, Francois Duvalier, a qualified doctor who won popularity through a campaign against tropical diseases, used his nickname Papa Doc to win trust and justify his repression.

The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore also wondered about this phenomenon. In an article in 2013, he noted that Assad chose to specialise in treating the eyes ­because this involved less contact with blood. Yet Assad is up to his own eyes in blood, having presided over the slaughter of some 600,000 people in Syria’s terrible civil war.

Despite their ruthless behaviour, however, such people usually don’t view themselves as killers.

Assad often used the language of medical healing and cleansing.

Such individuals may see themselves as fighting injustice or doing the work of God. Indeed, they often view killing as the highest form of sanctified duty. In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden signed a fatwa declaring: “The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.”

Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammad, told CNN in 2012: “Before you call me and my brother terrorists, let’s define its meaning. If it means those who are bloodthirsty merciless killers, then this is not what we are about.”

This is because jihadi killers believe they are treating a diseased organism in the form of the non- Islamic world that must be purged of spiritual poison and made healthy by the application of Islam.

Maybe the reason so many tyrants and terrorists turn out to be doctors is because the idealistic ­impulse to treat sick people translates, under the pressure of ideology or perceived injustice, into a desire to remedy the apparent sickness of the body politic. That’s why the national conversation about Islamic human bomb terrorists is always conducted entirely at cross-purposes. The West believes that such terrorism can be motivated only by despair. On the contrary, the jihadi bomber believes he is achieving the highest possible ideal of holy work.

This radical disjunction has reportedly been understood by none other than the daughter of MI5’s director-general, Ken McCallum.

When he finally told his children the nature of his work, his daughter asked him: “Dad, the people that you work against, do they think they’re doing the right thing too?” As McCallum said, this was a good question. Indeed, his daughter had grasped an important point. It’s a fair bet that bad people don’t wake up in the morning and think “How many evil deeds can I perpetrate today?” They all justify to themselves the terrible things they do.

Assad claimed he was fighting the war to protect his country against religious fanatics. Russia’s President Putin claims that, by invading neighbouring countries, he is reuniting his dismembered motherland and righting a historic wrong. The Soviet Union thought it was creating the workers’ paradise.

Hitler thought he was ridding the human race of impurities. The 18th-century French revolutionaries thought that, by guillotining aristocrats during the Terror, they were saving France from a corrupted elite.

We may look at the bodies piled up and perceive, in the fanaticism that secured their fate, a monstrous abuse of power. To the perpetrators, however, the idealistic end always justifies the horrific means. Over the years, many philosophers have concluded that idealism is the road to hell. This is because ideals are a fantasy of perfection detached from reality.

They set up binary choices – oppressor versus oppressed, corruption versus purity or, as activists chant, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.

But life is messy. People disagree profoundly about which ­ideals to pursue. The divisions are often blurred and the choices overlap.

It’s because utopia is unattainable that those pursuing ideals such as the eradication of want or prejudice end up browbeating, scapegoating or wiping out those seen to be standing in their way.

Monstrous individuals tell themselves the lie that they’re fighting the good fight. Assad told himself such a lie; those now fighting to replace him are undoubtedly men in the grip of similarly lethal illusions. Idealism can express noble emotions; but it is also a ­direct line to tyranny and worse.

The Times