We recorded this in Nikos’ studio—an unusual opportunity—and used it to go straight to the essentials: why most people fail at public speaking, and what it actually takes to become good.

Not talent. Not charisma.
Work. Preparation. And a focus on delivering value.

If you care about expressing ideas clearly and powerfully, I think you’ll find this worth your time.

Watch here:

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Unfortunately, as predicted, the same pattern that followed the ‘unconditional surrender’ in Iran now seems to be actualising in Lebanon.

Just a week ago, I wrote, "Lebanon may become the immediate one if the same pressure for a ceasefire is now turned northward.” That is precisely what now seems to be happening.

After Hezbollah resumed missile fire, Israel expanded the war in southern Lebanon. It pushed in more deeply, caused widespread destruction, and gained meaningful ground. Once again, the language of appeasement resurfaces before completing the task.

But this is not new. We already had a ceasefire in Lebanon in November 2024. At this point, one almost loses track of the endless “temporary” arrangements Israel makes, the pauses, the understandings, the recycled promises of stability. They lead nowhere. Hezbollah remains, the threat remains, and the same war returns. At some point, repetition of failure stops being an error and becomes madness.

And the reason is simple. Hezbollah is not merely one enemy among others. Its entire purpose is the destruction of Israel. As long as it still has fighters, commanders, rockets, money, leadership, and political power inside Lebanon, the threat to Israeli life remains in place. That is why leaving Hezbollah standing is not some neutral compromise. It is a failure of the government. The first duty of any Israeli government is to protect the lives of its own citizens. If it knowingly leaves on its border an armed movement dedicated to Israel’s destruction, then it is not fulfilling its most basic job.

This is also why the whole theatre of “peace with Lebanon” is so absurd. Israel is being asked to make peace with a state that does not actually control the territory from which Israel is being attacked. The formal government in Beirut does not possess sovereign control over the south. It does not command the force that dominates that territory. Hezbollah does. And Hezbollah is not some fringe militia outside the system. It is deeply embedded in Lebanon, both militarily and politically.

This is not new. In my November 2024 essay on the previous Lebanon ceasefire, I wrote: “Such an agreement would leave Hezbollah intact.” I also wrote: “It’s either madness or treason.” Looking at this latest round, it is hard to say it more plainly now.

Since October 8, 2023, the northern front has already cost Israel at least 134 lives: 46 civilians and 88 soldiers. In the renewed Lebanon fighting of 2026 alone, at least 15 Israelis have already been killed: 13 soldiers and at least 2 civilians. And after all that blood, Hezbollah still stands.

There is something grotesque about this by now, and the grotesque part is not only Lebanon. It has become the pattern of the entire war since October 7th. Israel fights as though its survival is at stake, because it is, and then governs as though survival were negotiable. Soldiers are sent into hell, gains are made, blood is shed, and then just before the enemy is broken, the state loses its nerve and calls the interruption wisdom. This is no longer an isolated error. It is a recurring national obscenity: heroism at the front, surrender at the top.

And the mechanism is always the same. Territory is entered, infrastructure is destroyed, civilians are displaced, and then, before the enemy is annihilated, diplomacy arrives to rename incompletion as prudence. Bridges are destroyed, populations are pushed northward, then the crossings are repaired, civilians return, and the same threat begins to reconstitute itself. Destroy, pause, rebuild, return, repeat. At a certain point, the repetition becomes so grotesque that one begins to wonder whether the refusal to finish the war is no longer weakness, but policy.

There is no mystery here. We have seen it already. We are seeing it again. And if this is repeated knowingly, after all the previous rounds, then it is no longer merely an error.

It is madness.

It is a betrayal of the Israeli people.

And it will keep happening as long as these lunatics run Israel.

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Today victory was celebrated in Tehran.

That is the image one must begin with. Less than a year ago, in June 2025, Trump was demanding Iran’s unconditional surrender. Here we are now, for the second time, with something much closer to the unconditional surrender of victory by the West itself.

That is the image one must begin with, because it shatters all the euphemisms at once. Not the tweets from DC. Not the grotesque self-congratulations about “peace”. Not the vocabulary of de-escalation, stabilisation, exit strategies, and all the other cowardices by which the West disguises its fear of victory.

The celebrations.

Because these celebrations tell the truth.

A regime does not celebrate when it has been defeated. It celebrates when it has survived, when the blows stop short of the final one.

That is what happened here.

The Iranian regime was wounded, exposed, and shaken. Its aura of invulnerability had been punctured, its leadership thinned, its weakness dragged into the open.

And then, exactly then, came the ceasefire.

No, not a “temporary ceasefire”. This was not a “temporary ceasefire”; it was a ceasefire, which is to say a halt before victory, wrapped in phrasing designed to make the halt sound smaller, softer, and more sophisticated than it was.

In reality, it was a rescue.

Trump’s rescue for the ayatollahs. Trump’s rescue for the IRGC. Trump’s rescue for the mullah regime at the very threshold of their defeat.

And the language he used to announce it was almost too perfect, too revealing in its vulgarity. Everything was “complete”, “immediate”, “safe”, “definitive”, “long-term peace”, and “met and exceeded”. He does not merely boast. He renames. He takes surrender and calls it victory, interruption and calls it peace, an unfinished war and calls it resolution. He declares success in order to avoid having to achieve it.

This is not statesmanship. It is Newspeak.

Nor is it new. We saw this with Iran last June as well: force, then hesitation, then the renaming of incompletion as success. This is not an anomaly. It is the method.

And yet the sickness does not end in Washington. There is another form of it, smaller, pettier, but no less corrupt, and it is spreading through the Israeli reaction as well. One sees videos from Tehran, motorcycles, celebrations, and cheering in the streets, and instead of asking the only serious question, why are they celebrating, one is told this is “the battle over the narrative.” The narrative. As though war were a seminar in media studies and the regime’s jubilation only one interpretation among many.

No. This is not a narrative. It is evidence.

The problem is not that Iran is shaping the narrative. The problem is that we are refusing to describe reality.

A regime like this does not judge victory the way ‘experts’ do. It does not ask how much steel output was lost, how many factories were hit, how many installations were damaged, or whether the enemy can produce a pleasing spreadsheet of physical destruction. It asks cruder, simpler, more decisive questions: Are we still in power? Are we still ruling? Did the enemy stop? Will we live to reorganise, repress, replenish, and fight again?

If the answer is yes, then their celebration is absolutely justified.

That is what is unbearable to admit. The regime may be bloodied, humiliated, and damaged for years. But if it remains standing, sovereign over its terror machinery and still master of the threat, it has not been defeated. It has been spared.

We have seen this before. In fact, the most nauseating feature of the whole affair is how familiar it is. We saw it in Gaza. We saw it in Lebanon. We saw it in Israel’s endless parade of half-wars and half-victories. We saw the enemy celebrate then, too. We saw Hamas march in the streets one ‘deal’ after another, and every time the public was told not to believe what it saw. “It is only for show.” “It is only psychological warfare.” “They are controlling the narrative.”

No. They were responding to reality. The lie was not in the celebration. The lie was in what we were told afterwards.

And Hezbollah stands before us as the great monument to this lie. Hezbollah is what a ceasefire looks like a year later. It survived because it was allowed to survive. It rearmed because it was allowed to rearm. It became a permanent strategic nightmare because wars that should have ended in destruction ended instead in arrangements, understandings, pauses, and the other euphemisms of frightened civilisations. Now, with Iran, we are repeating the same mistake on a larger scale, with higher stakes, and under a greater illusion.

So let us strip the matter down to its bones.

If the regime remains, this is not victory.

If the source of the threat remains, this is not victory.

If the enemy can regroup, restore its chain of command, and resume the war at a time of its choosing, this is not victory.

If the war had to stop before the threat was politically broken, then this is not peace. It is a rescue.

That word matters. Rescue. Because it says what all the nicer words are trying to hide. This was not some tragic compromise reached after triumph. It was the active political salvation of a regime that had not yet been pushed far enough.

And it is not enough to lay this at Trump’s feet alone. Netanyahu chose to go along with the rescue.

Yes, Israel is smaller. Yes, Israel has done extraordinary things in this war. Yes, the achievements of Israeli intelligence, military daring, operational penetration, and national resilience have been astonishing. That is precisely what makes this so contemptible. Israel generated momentum. Israel created leverage. Israel opened a possibility that had seemed almost unimaginable. And then, once again, the political meaning of that achievement was handed over to American timidity and accepted by an Israeli government that has spent years teaching its citizens to live inside an infinite war.

Netanyahu’s record, taken as a whole, is one long education in incompletion: enemies left standing, rounds of war without finality, temporary arrangements elevated into strategic doctrine, and a public expected to confuse the mere continuity of life with actual safety. I do not trust the long-term future of Israel to men who keep stopping short and calling the result prudence.

And beneath all of this lies the real issue, the one larger than Trump, larger than Netanyahu, larger even than this particular ceasefire.

The West does not know how to win.

Not because it is weak in arms, technology, intelligence, or force. It has all of that in abundance. What it lacks is moral clarity. It no longer begins war by asking, what does victory look like? It begins by asking, how do we get out? It seeks an ‘exit strategy’ before it has even defined a victory condition. It worries about the off-ramp before it has decided whether the enemy deserves a cliff.

A moral civilisation asks, ‘What would victory require?’

A degenerate one asks, ‘How do we leave?’

Trump did not lack an exit strategy. The ceasefire was the exit strategy.

The problem was never that these people did not know how to stop. The problem was that they were always preparing to stop. The language of so-called peace, the frantic declarations of accomplishments, and the insistence that everything essential had already been achieved—all of it was the rhetoric of men who had decided in advance that completion was too demanding, too dangerous, and too morally strenuous for them to bear.

There is, of course, one possible exception, one final possibility under which all this might someday look less disgraceful than it appears now. If this ceasefire were truly part of a deeper strategy to trigger or exploit an internal revolution in Iran, then judgment would have to be suspended. If the ceasefire were the pause before implosion, the lull before the regime’s own people finished what outside force had begun, then perhaps one could speak differently.

But I do not believe it.

I do not believe that a leadership incapable of finishing the obvious task of securing the Straits of Hormuz is secretly conducting a subtler masterstroke behind the curtain. The simpler explanation is the true one. They wanted out.

Yes, it could have been worse. Yes, under different leadership the war might never have begun at all. Yes, history may in some bitter sense have been fortunate that the task fell not to people even softer, even more evasive, even more addicted to paralysis. Fine. Grant all of that. It changes nothing essential. Better than immediate surrender is still no substitute for victory. We were lucky enough to have leaders willing to begin the war and unlucky enough to have leaders too weak to finish it.

And now the consequences begin to spread.

This rescue will not remain confined to Tehran. It will echo across the region. Every Islamist movement will draw the same lesson: survive, endure, wait for the West to lose its nerve, and live to fight again. It will embolden proxies and encourage anti-Western forces everywhere. The message is simple: the West can hit hard, but it no longer knows how to finish the job. Iran is the strategic disaster. Lebanon may become the immediate one if the same pressure for a ceasefire is now turned northward.

And so we arrive at the most humiliating thought of all: that our best hope may be the enemy’s own nature. That they will violate the ceasefire, overplay their hand, and, by remaining true to themselves, force us to recover our own clarity. Such is the depth of our confusion that we begin to hope the enemy will save us from ourselves.

When a society loses the will to victory, it begins to depend on the enemy’s recklessness to restore its own clarity.

That is where we are.

And so we return to Tehran, because that is where the truth was visible from the start.

They were celebrating.

They were not wrong.

They understood that they had survived, that the war had been halted before the final consequence was imposed, and that the stronger side had lost its nerve. They understood that the West still fears victory more than they fear defeat and that all they have to do is endure until that fear reasserts itself. They understood, in other words, exactly what happened.

They were rescued.

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The wind along the riverfront had a way of cutting through the coat, but I was warm enough, still satisfied with the herring sandwich I had just eaten. I wandered toward the old city centre, letting the streets pull me inward, when a small plaque caught my eye.

Historic Wine House.

“For more than three hundred years,” it read, “wine has been traded in this merchant building in Lübeck. A large range of wines from various regions of Germany, Europe, and overseas can be found here, including the famous Lübecker Rotspon.”

Curious, I stepped inside.

A tall old German man in a hat greeted me with a wide, easy smile and asked whether I was looking for something specific. The shop opened into aisles filled with bottles from France, Italy, and across Germany. I looked around for the name I had just read outside, the Rotspon, wondering quietly where exactly wine could be made in Lübeck. The climate did not strike me as particularly friendly to vineyards.

I asked him about it.

“Of course,” he said, pointing toward the cashier. “By the teller.”

There stood an array of deep red bottles labelled Lübecker Rotspon. I asked again, half amused, where the vineyard was.

“There isn’t one,” he explained. The wine came from Bordeaux and was brought north; it undergoes its own ageing process at Lübeck, deepening in colour and richness. The result is something distinct, neither entirely French nor entirely local, a wine created by the journey itself.

I asked for a bottle.

Only then did I notice, beside the cashier, an old oval plaque bearing the emblems of cities: Hamburg, Mecklenburg, Schleswig, England, Denmark, Prussia and Lübeck itself. Some names familiar, others belong more to history than to present maps. I found myself staring at it.

I asked about it.

The man shrugged slightly and said it had been there a very long time. I could not tell exactly how old it was, only that it felt as if it belonged to an earlier age. perhaps even to the Hanseatic world that had once tied these cities together through trade. Whatever its exact origin, it did not feel like decoration. It felt like a memory left standing.

I thought how strange and familiar it felt. It looked almost like the modern websites where one goes to buy something and finds a row of logos, trusted partners, guarantees, and affiliations. The same instinct, centuries apart: to show who stands behind the exchange.

And the wine itself told the same story. Lübeck did not grow the grapes. The value came from what happened between places, from transport, ageing, trade, and relationships carried over long distances.

I asked more questions about whether the shop had always belonged to the same family and how long it had been there. He answered each one calmly, exactly, without flourish. The building had been in one family for centuries, he said, until it changed owners in the 1980s; it is still privately owned.

What struck me was what he did not do. He never tried to impress me. He never began a speech about tradition or heritage. Everything I learned came only because I asked. There was no performance in the place, no attempt to convince me it was special. It simply was. The age of the wood, the quiet certainty of the man behind the counter, and the ancient emblems resting beside the wine all seemed to exist without the need for explanation.

And somehow, that made it more convincing.

I opened the bottle later that evening. The colour struck me first, a deep, almost dense red, darker than I expected, as if the wine carried time inside it. The taste felt aged and grounded, richer than the bottles I usually associate with Bordeaux, changed somehow by its journey north.

And I kept thinking about that plaque.

It struck me how unusual it was. I can’t recall a wine shop where the cashier’s story was about the cities it traded with, not the shop, lineage, prestige, or the house’s greatness. Most places want you to know their own history, how exceptional they are, and how long they have endured.

Here, the emphasis seemed different.

Instead of proclaiming its own importance, the shop pointed outward, toward partners, routes, and exchanges. The pride did not seem to lie in standing alone but in belonging to something larger, a network held together by trust.

And that, perhaps more than any explanation, said something about Lübeck.

It felt less like humility than a quiet pride, not in the house itself but in being part of a network strong enough to carry something across distance and improve it along the way.

For a merchant, perhaps there could be no greater achievement than this: to be the kind of trader others rely on, to be counted on year after year, shipment after shipment.

II. The City of Traders

That small wine shop began to feel like a miniature of the city itself.

What I had encountered there, the quiet pride in relationships, the emphasis on trust rather than self-display, was not an isolated curiosity. It pointed toward something larger that once defined Lübeck and many of the cities around the Baltic and North Sea: the world of the Hanseatic League.

These were not empires nor kingdoms ruled from palaces. They were cities bound together by trade. Merchants formed networks across water and distance, creating relationships that allowed goods, information, and reputation to travel together. Deals depended less on force than on reliability. A trader’s true capital was not simply what he owned, but whether others trusted him enough to trade again.

Among these cities, Lübeck stood at the centre. It was not merely another participant in the network but, for long stretches of its history, its leading force, the city whose influence shaped the rules and whose city hall functioned as a kind of political and commercial anchor for the League. Walking through Lübeck, one senses that history is everywhere: a city accustomed to coordinating, mediating, and setting standards for others.

If a ship failed to arrive, if a cask did not match its promise, or if a merchant gained a reputation for deceit, the consequence was immediate. Trade stopped. Without trust, there was no transaction at all.

Long before modern legal systems stretched across borders, these cities developed mechanisms that made agreements work. Contracts were respected because the alternative was exclusion from the network itself. City halls and local authorities existed to secure these arrangements, not to direct trade, but to protect the conditions that made voluntary exchange possible. Enforcement appeared only when agreements were broken.

The success of one trader strengthened another. A merchant who sold good wine created demand for the exporter who supplied him, and the exporter in turn, relied on the merchant’s ability to maintain trust with customers. Value emerged not merely from the goods themselves but from the network of relationships that sustained them.

It is difficult to look at this system without recognising in it some of the earliest expressions of what we would later call capitalist principles: voluntary exchange, long-term self-interest, reputational capital, and prosperity created through cooperation rather than coercion. Wealth emerged not through aristocratic privilege or conquest, but through merchants and craftsmen whose success depended on being worth trading with.

In a world still largely organised around bloodlines and titles, Lübeck ran on something more fragile and more demanding: a reputation that had to be rebuilt with every shipment.

Suddenly the emblems I had seen everywhere in Lübeck made sense. In markets, shops, and city buildings, the seals of other cities appeared again and again. They were not decorative. They were statements of credibility, visible reminders that prosperity depended on trust maintained over generations.

III. The City Hall

At the centre of Lübeck stands the building that tells you much about the city, and, unlike many medieval cities, it is not the church.

It is the city hall.

The Rathaus is, at first encounter, a confusing object. Photographs never quite prepare you for it. Standing in front of it, you realise it does not entirely make sense as a single building. Parts of it rise from the medieval period; others were added during the Renaissance. Styles overlap without fully blending. It feels less designed than accumulated, as if each generation simply added what was needed, negotiating with what already stood there rather than replacing it.

The Gothic section rises like a wall, tall, severe, almost fortress-like, crowned with pointed forms that pierce the sky, each carrying small flags. Red brick repeats in patterns of black and white, broken by emblems and symbols of both the city and the Holy Roman Empire. Seen from below, it is imposing enough to make you feel small, much like a great church.

And yet the building resists becoming purely monumental. The great windscreen walls, pierced by circular openings, soften the severity in a strange way. They look almost theatrical, like a stage set rather than an impenetrable façade. You can see through them. The structure presents itself rather than sealing itself off, suggesting a civic space meant to be witnessed rather than feared.

There is something telling in how the building orients itself. The severe Gothic wall, the part that feels most like a fortress or a cathedral, faces the church directly, as if acknowledging a rival in the same language. The more open side, theatrical and permeable, turns toward the market and the street, toward the people and the trade it existed to serve.

At street level, the tone shifts again. Renaissance additions introduce elegance where the Gothic had been severe. Here appear once more the familiar emblems, cities, partners, and allies, arranged almost like a catalogue of relationships. Gold glimmers in the details. The message is unmistakable: this is wealth, but wealth born from exchange.

What struck me most was how the building faced the market square. The Rathaus does not turn away from commerce; it looks directly onto it. Authority and exchange stand opposite one another, in conversation. The city hall governed the marketplace but was also visibly dependent on it, a reminder that civic power here emerged from trade rather than standing above it.

Standing there, the building felt almost like a city within a city. Not a space meant for everyone, but a place where serious matters were decided: contracts, disputes, agreements, and the quiet machinery that allowed trade to continue. The exterior could feel stern, almost defensive, but inside the rooms were lavish and richly decorated, designed not only to impress but to signal stability and continuity.

It was not what one imagines when thinking of a modern city hall. Today such places often evoke bureaucracy or administration. Here, the feeling was different. This was a seat of power directly connected to commerce, a place meant to ensure that agreements were honoured, that disagreements could be resolved, and that the city’s reputation remained intact.

Because reputation was everything.

The good name of Lübeck was not an abstraction; it was a practical necessity. If the city failed to protect fairness and reliability, trade would move elsewhere. Authority existed not to replace exchange but to safeguard it.

Beside the Rathaus stands a great church, beautiful, towering, and open to the public. While standing between the two, it was impossible not to notice where the center of gravity seemed to lie. The church represented spiritual life; the city hall represented the secular order that governed daily exchange.

Whether consciously intended or not, the impression was clear: here was a city where civic authority and trade stood at the heart of its identity.

Lübeck felt like one of those early moments in European history when power began to shift, when contracts and cooperation started to rival faith as the organising principle of urban life.

IV. The Modern Distance

Walking through Lübeck today, it is impossible to pretend that the city exists unchanged. The Hanseatic world is gone. The ships are different, the markets globalised and the political order entirely transformed. Whatever mediaeval realities existed alongside this system, and there were many we would not wish to repeat, belong to their own time.

And yet something remains visible.

What lingers is not the structure itself but an idea: the assumption that trade is fundamentally a relationship, not a contest. Everywhere in the city, in its emblems, its architecture, and its quiet pride in partnerships, one senses a worldview in which exchange was understood as mutually beneficial. Prosperity did not come at another city’s expense but through cooperation sustained over time.

Modern discussions about trade often sound different. Trade is frequently spoken about in terms of winners and losers, deficits and tariffs, as though exchange itself was a zero-sum game. Economic relationships are measured by imbalance rather than by the value created between participants.

It is a telling irony of our modern vocabulary that our primary tool for ensuring a fair market is called “anti-trust” law. In the Hanseatic world, trust was the very soul of the market, the invisible bond that allowed a shipment from Bordeaux to be aged and sold in Lübeck with total confidence. Today, we treat “trust” as a threat to be dismantled, a synonym for a corporate cartel. We have moved from a system where trust was the foundation of the market to one where ‘Trust’ is a legal liability to be dismantled. In Lübeck, the merchant’s word was his heaven; in the modern world, the contract is our only security.

From the perspective of Lübeck, this way of thinking would have felt alien.

The merchants’ loyalties were shaped less by the will of a single ruler and more by the network that sustained their prosperity. What mattered was not devotion to a distant sovereign, but reliability within the circle of exchange itself. In that sense, loyalty flowed toward relationships chosen freely, toward agreements that served one’s long-term interests, rather than toward arbitrary authority.

Trade was not a loss to be minimised. It was a relationship to be maintained.

This is perhaps what still feels advanced about the city. Not its age, nor even its wealth, but the mentality embedded in its streets: the understanding that long-term prosperity depends on trust, and that trust depends on seeing others not as adversaries but as partners in mutual gain.

And perhaps that is why Lübeck feels so alive today.

The old city is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes, endlessly walkable, and filled with restaurants, wine bars, antique shops, rare books, silverware, jewellery, and small treasures tucked into narrow streets. History does not sit behind glass here; it appears casually on corners, in names, and in quiet emblems that refer to cities long gone or renamed, Danzig among them, reminders of a world held together by trade.

You notice it in places like that small wine shop, still selling Rotspon centuries after the idea first appeared, still living by relationships that began far beyond its walls.

Lübeck does not feel like a city performing history. It feels like a city still inhabiting it.

And perhaps that is what makes it so enjoyable to visit. The past is not presented as nostalgia but as something continuous, something you can walk through, drink, and carry home in a bottle of dark red wine born from the journey between places.

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In 1965, Gilbert Kaplan was twenty-five years old and working on Wall Street. His life belonged to the world of finance, deadlines, ambition, and New York momentum. Nothing in it seemed to point toward Gustav Mahler.

A close friend asked whether he wanted to come to a rehearsal of Mahler in Carnegie Hall. That was all he said: Mahler. Kaplan was not especially interested, but he agreed. He had no idea what he was about to hear. The orchestra was the American Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was Leopold Stokowski.

At first, nothing outwardly dramatic occurred. Kaplan stayed for the entire rehearsal and found the music interesting, perhaps even strangely compelling, but he left without imagining that anything decisive had happened. He had heard something unusual; that was all.

And yet that night he could not sleep.

The music returned to him in fragments. Sounds kept coming back to him, unbidden, insistent, as if something had entered his inner life without permission and refused to leave. He was restless, haunted. Whatever he had heard that afternoon had lodged itself somewhere deeper than ordinary enjoyment. It had not merely impressed him. It had taken hold of him.

The next day, he bought a ticket to the performance.

This time, he sat through the full concert, and the symphony began to work on him with increasing force. What had seemed merely unusual at the rehearsal now revealed its full scale. The music moved through grief, terror, struggle, and longing toward something vast and exalting, and by the final moments, Kaplan was sobbing, nearly hysterical. A boundary had been crossed. His life would never be the same again.

That was how the call arrived.

Not as a grand decision. Not as the culmination of years of preparation. It came almost by accident, through a friend’s invitation, through a rehearsal he had little reason to attend, through a sleepless night, and then through a performance that completed what the rehearsal had begun. A young man went to hear Mahler without knowing what he was in for, and from that moment onward the music refused to leave him.

What happened next would have seemed improbable to anyone who had watched him walk into that rehearsal. But that came later. For now, it was enough that something had begun. The experience did not recede into memory. It remained, deepened, and refused to leave him.

II. The Resurrection

What kind of music was this that a young man could wander almost accidentally into a rehearsal and then lie awake at night, unable to escape its return?

Not the kind that merely pleases. Not the kind that decorates life, refines taste, or offers culture as a polite accomplishment. Mahler’s Second asks for something far more dangerous than admiration. It asks whether one is still capable of wanting the highest things.

This is why the symphony cannot coexist with the cynic. Not because it argues against him in concepts, but because it renders him trivial. It has no patience for the man who sneers before he feels, who calls longing childish, who treats reverence as embarrassment, and who hides behind irony because he has already decided that greatness is unattainable. Mahler does not flatter that part of the soul. He destroys it.

And he does so honestly. Nothing here is cheap. Nothing is granted in advance. The symphony begins in catastrophe: the funeral march of the first movement is immense, apocalyptic, and unsparing. Death is not hinted at. It is declared. Something great has fallen, and the music knows it. It cries out over the death of the hero with a force that makes lesser notions of tragedy sound decorative.

Then comes memory. The second movement turns backwards toward life, toward dance, tenderness, innocence, and distance. It does not yet redeem what has been lost. It remembers it. It looks back upon life with nostalgia, with beauty, with the aching grace of something already gone.

But memory is not enough. The third movement begins to twist. Here irony enters fully. Motion continues, but meaning begins to dissolve within it. The world starts to sneer. The spirit reels. One feels, from within the music itself, the temptation of mockery, instability, and exhaustion. It is here that the symphony passes through the territory of the cynic, not as a posture, but as a genuine spiritual danger.

And then, when it almost becomes unbearable, comes Urlicht (Primal Light).

Not triumph. Not spectacle. A voice.

After all the scale and violence that precede it, this entrance feels almost impossible in its simplicity: “O Röschen rot!” (“O little red rose!”) A small human plea rising out of the abyss. “Der Mensch liegt in größter Not! / Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein!” (“Man lies in greatest need! / Man lies in greatest pain!”) Nothing could be further from the smugness of the cynic. This is not cleverness. It is a necessity. It is the naked wish that suffering would not be final. It does not yet answer the symphony’s question. It does something harder. It reopens the possibility that an answer may exist.

And then the heavens break open.

The finale does not merely conclude. It erupts. The skies are torn apart. The dead are summoned. What began with funeral rites now strains toward resurrection, not as ornament, not as pious decoration, but as a victory wrestled out of terror, grief, irony, collapse, and endurance. And when at last the chorus enters, “Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du” (“Rise again, yes, you shall rise again”), the entire symphony has earned the right to say it. This is not optimism. It is a transfiguration purchased at the highest cost.

That is why Mahler’s Second overwhelms in the way it does. It does not offer cheap consolation. It does not flatter weakness. It does not tell man that suffering is unreal, only that it is not final. It passes through death, irony, terror, and collapse, and still dares to say yes. That is the power of it.

And once such a work enters a life, it does not simply sit there as a beautiful experience. It begins to work on a man. It returns in fragments, in memory, in longing, in unfinished pressure. What Kaplan had encountered was no longer merely a symphony he admired. It had become a force in his life.

III. The “Amateur”

What made Kaplan unusual was not merely that he loved the symphony. It was that the love did not remain at the level of admiration. It grew, year after year, into something more demanding.

For a long time, the obsession remained inward. He built his career, worked full-time, and created an immensely successful financial publication. But all the while Mahler’s Second remained a permanent force in his life. He pursued it with extraordinary seriousness. He listened to every recording he could find, read every book and essay available to him, sought out every living expert he could reach, and travelled widely to hear the work performed wherever he could. This was the 1970s. There was no internet, no instant archive, no effortless abundance of information. Everything had to be hunted down deliberately, and he hunted it down.

At a certain point, he had consumed nearly everything that could be consumed from the outside. He had heard the symphony, studied the symphony, and followed the symphony across the world. And then he realised that there remained one level of encounter he had not yet unlocked, perhaps the highest one: not merely to hear the work, not merely to study it, but to stand inside it and bring it to life himself.

That was the moment.

It was not the decision of a young enthusiast in the first heat of inspiration. It came only after years of obsession, years of listening, years of study, years in which the music had remained present and deepened rather than faded. And it came, too, at a point in his life when he had the means to take such a decision seriously. He could afford the time, the instruction, and the discipline that such an insane ambition would require.

‘Insane’ is not too strong a word for how it must have sounded. Kaplan had no musical training whatsoever. No conservatory background. No institutional pedigree. No ordinary path could justify such a leap in advance. Most people, hearing such an idea, would have laughed at it, and many did. But he did not treat it as fantasy. He treated it as a responsibility.

He found a private tutor, a young professional conductor, and devoted himself to study with punishing seriousness. In the summers, he worked for eight hours a day; during the rest of the year, for three. At first, he conducted from memory, not out of theatrical bravado, but out of limitation: he could not yet read a full orchestral score well enough to conduct from the page. But what began as a necessity became a mastery. Over time, he came to know the work from within, until every passage, every entrance, every bar lived in his memory. The symphony was no longer simply something he revered. It had become something he inhabited.

He even conducted it with a baton that had belonged to Mahler himself, as though every possible distance between the work, its creator, and the man who had devoted his life to it had to be narrowed.

That is the distinction on which the whole story turns. Kaplan did not choose conducting as an act of display. He arrived at it only after exhausting every other way of loving the work. Conducting was not the vanity of a rich amateur who wished to place himself above the music. Kaplan enriched his own life first. That was the motive, the meaning, and the achievement. That others were enlarged by it was the earned consequence of something genuinely his own.

He had listened from below, studied from below, pursued every trace of it from below, and at last concluded that the only way left to go deeper was to enter the work completely.

Only then did he step onto the podium.

IV. The Verdict

And when he did, he put far more than musical ambition on the line. He put his name, his seriousness, and the reputation he had built in another world at risk before the public.

At Lincoln Center, in his very first public appearance as a conductor, Kaplan invited thousands of colleagues from the financial world to hear him lead Mahler’s Second. It could have been a ruinous embarrassment. Instead, it became a triumph. The Village Voice critic would call it “one of the most profoundly realised Mahler Seconds in the last 25 years.”

Nor was it a one-night curiosity. He returned to the work again and again, conducting it over decades, in more than a hundred performances. The validation reached further still. The Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestra bound to Mahler by history itself, stood behind him. There would be a Deutsche Grammophon recording. What had once seemed absurd was now reality.

And that is where the story becomes philosophical. Because everything in our culture prepares us to misread such a life. If a man without credentials devotes himself to a work of art with total seriousness, we are taught to suspect vanity. If he crosses a boundary he was not meant to cross, we call it hubris. If he succeeds, we explain it away.

But there is simply no honest way to explain Gilbert Kaplan in those terms. The obsession is too specific, too exacting, too faithful for that. Had he wanted applause, he could have chosen something easier, broader, and more obvious. Instead, from 1965 until his death, he gave a vast portion of his adult life to a single work of art. One work. One symphony. One summons.

Everything was against him. No formal training. No natural path. No guarantee of success. He risked ridicule, embarrassment, and failure, and he went on anyway. Not because it was useful, but because he loved the thing and could not betray what he had heard.

That is not hubris. That is fidelity.

And more than that, it is self-interest in the highest and healthiest sense. Kaplan did not sacrifice himself to some dead duty, nor did he chase a hollow whim. He identified the thing that most deeply answered his soul and then built part of his life around it with discipline, courage, and joy. He lived his dream not as fantasy, not as escapism, but as achievement. That is one of the noblest forms self-interest can take: to recognise what one truly loves, what one cannot forget, what gives one’s life height and meaning, and then to pursue it seriously enough that it becomes real.

And because it was so genuinely his, it did not remain enclosed within him. That is the beauty of it. The healthiest self-interest is never sterile. When a man pursues the highest thing in himself honestly, the result need not diminish the world. It can enlarge it. Kaplan enriched his own life first, and precisely by doing so, he enriched the lives of others as well.

Even his conflicts reveal the same truth. And of course, there were conflicts. There had to be. But when they came, Kaplan did not hide behind the fashionable vanity of “my interpretation”. He returned to the score. That was his ground. Not whim, not ego, not self-display, but Mahler’s own markings, Mahler’s own instructions, and Mahler’s own command. As he himself put it, “I feel that I’m always working for Mahler.” And again: “Apart from tempo, I don’t ask the orchestras I conduct to follow my interpretation. I ask them to observe what Mahler wrote, and on most everything, I don’t lose an argument because it’s in the score.”

That is a profound clue to the kind of conductor he was. He did not stand before the work as a man trying to decorate it with himself. He stood before it almost as a disciple, trying with all the force available to him to serve the will of Gustav Mahler as faithfully as he could read it.

That is why Kaplan is heroic. Not merely because he pursued a passion, but because he carried it so far that it became history. He showed that one may begin late, begin outside the institutions, begin without permission, and still answer the deepest thing in one’s life with enough seriousness that it enters the permanent record. In that sense, he did more than fulfil a private dream. He widened the horizon of the possible.

And after each performance, there would be someone in the audience going through what had happened to him in 1965. Kaplan could see it in the face before him: the stunned look, the inner rupture, the sense that a boundary had just been crossed. That, perhaps, was the deepest reason he went on. Not applause, not recognition, but the sight of the symphony doing to another soul what it had once done to his. He once spoke of “living out their private dream.”

He was not only proving something. He was bearing witness. He was saying, in effect: this is the thing that took hold of my life, and I want you to hear why.

V. Maestro

And so Gilbert Kaplan enters that rare lineage of cultural figures who do not merely admire greatness but cross into its history through the seriousness of their devotion. Not because he composed a symphony, and not because he was born into the world of conductors, but because he took one work of art so seriously that he made himself part of its living tradition. The financier, the outsider, the so-called amateur, reached a realm that should by every conventional measure have remained closed to him. That is why I do not hesitate, at the end, to use the title: Maestro Gilbert Kaplan.

But the point of the story is not to leave him frozen there as a monument. The point is the music itself. It always comes back to the music. What seized him in 1965 was not an idea, not a status, not a career path, but a real experience, one powerful enough to alter the course of his life. And what he wanted, clearly, was not only to go deeper and deeper into that experience himself but to place others before it as well. That is why he kept conducting the work. That is why he carried it across the world. That is why, after every performance, it mattered to him that somewhere in the audience another human being might be going through what he himself had once gone through.

So the proper end to this story is not reflection, but action.

Listen to the Resurrection Symphony.

Not as homework. Not as a cultural duty. Not because one is supposed to admire Mahler. Listen to it because something immense is there, and because there remains the possibility that it may do to you, in some measure, what it once did to Gilbert Kaplan.

If you have read this far and have not yet heard it, then go and hear it. Better still, begin with Kaplan’s recording of the Resurrection Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon, and let him try, one more time, to pass the experience on.

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A state exists to protect the rights of its citizens. That is its purpose. That is its only moral justification. If it does that, it has legitimacy. If it does not, its legitimacy is compromised, no matter how opulent it is, no matter how many monuments to vanity it builds, no matter how many Western fools it dazzles with its staged modernity.

That is the standard by which a state should be judged: protecting the rights of its citizens. Everything else is secondary. If a regime permits outside forces to threaten, bombard, and terrorise its civilians without paying any price, then it is not merely failing at one policy task. It contradicts the very reason states were formed in the first place. A state that will not defend its people ceases, in the deepest moral sense, to be a state at all.

Israel and the United States have unequivocally acted on that principle with extraordinary success. The US and Israel have shown the world that they take their self-defence seriously, are willing to act on it, and possess the competence and moral clarity to act decisively.

Since February 28, Israel and the US have eliminated the upper echelon of the Iranian regime and many thousands of its soldiers and officers. They have destroyed its navy, its air force, and its air defences. Its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes have been devastated. The Israelis’ and Americans' overwhelming display of strength and determination has shattered much of the Islamic Republic’s project to destroy Israel and assert dominance over the Middle East.

Iran has been exposed as fundamentally vulnerable: a regime whose airspace can be penetrated, whose leadership can be decapitated, and whose military prestige has collapsed within days. But Iran is not the only Middle Eastern actor this war has exposed. There is another, and it is not one state but many.

For weeks, the Gulf has been under direct bombardment. Iran's missiles and drones have struck city after city, hitting airports, harbours, energy infrastructure, hotels, homes, and commercial districts. The names Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha evoke opulence, commerce, and global confidence. In this war, they have come to mean something else as well—fire, fear, damage, death.

These cities were built as monuments to luxury, stability, and global prestige. For weeks now, they have looked like something else entirely: frightened, burning, exposed. The illusion of immunity has collapsed.

And what do these regimes do in the face of their destruction?

Nothing.

They issue graphic designs. They invoke international law. They say that they reserve the right to respond and that their patience is running thin.

Even after Iran struck one of Qatar’s major natural gas facilities, their response was to give Iranian diplomats 24 hours to leave. That is absurd. It is the response of a clown state pretending to be a legitimate one.

These regimes cannot even hide behind the excuse of powerlessness. Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia have spent fortunes on the latest and greatest American and Western military equipment: jets, missile batteries, radar systems, command networks, elite training, and every visible symbol of modern force. They are not unarmed. They are not helpless. They are more than capable of joining the effort to strike the source of the threat and help Israel and America end it for good. But they do not. And that reveals something important. These are not fighting states. They are regimes of money, vanity, and hired protection. They use wealth to buy hardware, to rent security, and to bring in some mercenaries and foreign specialists, but not to cultivate courage and strategic independence. What, after all, do they need an army for, if not for this? If not for Iran, then for what? This is the moment for which a military exists. And they have failed it completely.

A state that is attacked has an obligation to stop the attacker. Not merely to absorb the blow. Not merely to intercept. Interception is not enough. Interception is mere survival. Defence means eliminating the source of the threat. Defence means ensuring that the next missile is not launched. That is what Israel and America are doing. They are carrying the burden while the Gulf states hide behind them, blame Israel and the US in public, and posture as though they are somehow above the war. Privately, many of them want Washington and Jerusalem to keep going until Iran can no longer threaten their lifelines. Publicly, they speak the language of appeasement, international law, and de-escalation. They want the result, but not the responsibility. They want the danger removed, but not by their hand.

Saudi Arabia, the largest and supposedly most powerful of these states, may be the most humiliating example of all. For over twenty days, it has been under direct attack. Its capital city has been targeted. Its oil infrastructure has been hit. And what does Riyadh have to say after all this? Yesterday, their foreign minister said this:

The patience that is being exhibited is not unlimited.

After twenty days of missiles and drones, that is what they have to say? It is grotesque. A regime with all that wealth, all that prestige, and all that American-supplied hardware still answers deadly attacks with words. Not action. Just patience, delay, and diplomatic language. And this is not even the first time. In 2019, Saudi Arabia’s oil heart was struck by Iranian proxies, and even then, the lesson Tehran learned was the same: that the kingdom’s most vital infrastructure could be hit without any truly devastating response. Saudi Arabia taught Iran that lesson once already. It is repeating it again now. 

And Kuwait should be stated bluntly. Without the U.S.-led coalition in 1990, Kuwait would have become Saddam Hussein’s territory. That is a historical fact.

One can go further. Had Iran been allowed to move unbroken toward a nuclear weapon, these states would likely now be facing not just these missiles and drones but nuclear bombs.

And here the contrast with Israel matters. Israel did not simply write cheques and hope for the best. It built capacity. It built doctrine. It built technology. It built a culture that takes existential threats seriously. The Gulf regimes, by contrast, have largely used money to buy systems, borrow deterrence, and rent security. That is not the same thing as building a moral state.

That is why the word ‘parasitical’ fits. These so-called kingdoms are, more precisely, oil-funded feudal orders. They do not generate strength so much as fasten themselves to it. They feed on American power. They leech off Israeli blood. They draw their sustenance from Western technology, Western force, and a regional order maintained by others. They want sovereignty without burden, safety without courage, and strategic gains without strategic action.

And their ugliness is not only external. It is internal too. These are not free societies. They are regimes of censorship, hierarchy, and intimidation, sustained in part by systems of near-servile imported labour and by populations denied the elementary rights of free citizens. There is no freedom to criticise the government, no elections. What they market as modernity is, underneath the glass and spectacle, a fundamentally unfree and morally degraded social structure.

That matters because a regime’s conduct in war does not float above its character at home. It grows from it. A society built on fear, deference, and controlled speech will not suddenly produce courage, independence, and moral worth when missiles begin to fall. It will produce what it already knows: passivity, PR management, and dependence on others. Authoritarianism is not power. It is weakness institutionalised. It is what insecure rulers build when they know that free men and women would not willingly grant them such power. That is why these regimes appear so spineless now. They are not betraying their nature. They are revealing it.

Dependent. Evasive. Parasitic. Illegitimate. That is what these regimes are. A state exists to defend the lives of its people. If it will not do that, if missiles can strike its cities and infrastructure again and again and nothing meaningful follows, then it has forfeited its claim to sovereignty in any moral sense. What remains is not a moral nation but a hollow shell: an assembly of wealth, spectacle, and foreign protection pretending to be a state.

Israel, by contrast, remains the one state in the region acting on the full moral principle of self-defence. That is why it stands alone as the region’s only real moral beacon. Not because it is perfect. It is not. It is deeply flawed in many ways, and I have said so often. But it is, fundamentally, a free society. Its citizens can speak, argue, criticise, vote, create, build, and fight as self-governing human beings. That is precisely why it can fight. Liberty is not a weakness. It is a strength.

This war should force a rethinking of the Abraham Accords themselves. I argued before against the fantasy of Saudi Arabia joining them, and these events have only clarified why. What exactly is the value of an accord with regimes that blame Israel for acting in self-defence while quietly benefiting from that very action? What kind of partnership is this, in which Israel is expected to carry the burden of courage while its supposed partners reserve for themselves the comfort of denunciation, appeasement, and moral distance?

There may be economic benefits in dealing with these states. That is true. But they are limited, transactional, and tied to regimes that have now revealed their true nature. Economics is not the highest issue here. Survival is. Human flourishing is. Civilisation is. And in that realm, these regimes have shown that they are incapable of standing as partners.

The deeper conclusion is this: these are not the accords that matter.

The real accord—the real Abrahamic accord—is not with these oil-funded, neo-feudal orders, built on modern slavery, dependence on the US, and the hollow prestige culture of TikTok influencers. It is with a future free Iran.

A free Iran would not be a client state, not a façade sustained by foreign protection, not a regime that hides behind others while condemning them in public. It would be a real nation: with scale, depth, history, human capital, and civilisational weight. With such a country, one would not need to pretend. One could have real trade, real cooperation, real peace.

Not “normalisation”, but genuine partnership. Not an arrangement of convenience, but a relationship of substance.

And in that light, the supposed importance of the Gulf regimes shrinks dramatically.

They are not the future of the Middle East but an interlude.

The future is with Israel and a free Iran. And it’s coming closer by the day.

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I. Adagio

Eight Hours in Hamburg

You have eight hours alone in Hamburg today.
What are your plans?
“I’ll start at Café Paris, and we’ll see from there…”
I didn’t even get through that door –
It was too crowded.

So I’ll eat strudel at Café Roncelli.
That too did not work out:
No strudel before 11:00.
One must understand that one cannot plan.
Otherwise, disappointment becomes a way of life.
There is always a structure,
but work is required to discover it.
There is a path; I am moving along it,
but I still haven’t understood where.
Perhaps it will become clear on the next page.

Walking in the Air

Sometimes I feel that I am walking,
but there is no floor beneath me.
As if at any moment I might fall.
From such a fall,
I will not get up.

Choosing Nothing

I have a strange tendency.
At times, when there are too many options,
I choose nothing.
As if the very act of choosing
were an injustice.
So it is better not to choose.

In other cases,
I choose the simplest,
the most basic.
I hope I won’t act like this when I have to
Find a new job.
I might find myself
back in the supermarket.

II. Scherzo

Picture with a Cinnamon Pastry

I’m sitting on a bench on Mönckebergstraße, opposite Roncelli.
There is a shop that is booby-trapped with all kinds of cinnamon pastries
adorned with whipped cream and a range of colours not to be found in the natural world.
A sextet of tourists, armed with polyester pom-pom hats and puffer jackets, stand and stare,
longing for the sugar bomb.
They take pictures,
they tag,
image-posing, having-the-time-of-their-lives types.

In my head, only one thing:
How fast this thing would make me run to the bathroom.
When the “book” hour was over,
that same sextet of aliens moved on.
The next picture is waiting for them around the corner.
Perhaps this time,
with a sausage.

At the Museum

I continued on to the Kunsthalle.
I didn’t have much time left alone in the city.
Soon, she will get off work.
Tomorrow I fly back early in the morning.
In the end, I ordered the tickets for this evening’s concert at the Laeiszhalle:
a Brahms piano concerto,
Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead.
Maybe I already live there, I wondered to myself.

By now, I was tired of criticising the tourists;
I turned to the gallery of the Dutch Old Masters.
Here I am again, sitting on a bench.
A square room,
the floor, dark brown parquet.
The walls, light blue.
Eight gilded frames and a bit of text between them.
In one corner, a white marble cast.

I retreated from the museum,
without even saying hello to the Wanderer,
the first time in my life I’ve committed such a vile act.
Perhaps I’ll soon go back to right the wrong.
In the meantime, I’m at the museum café.
Maybe there I’ll be able to write;
My back hurts from the benches with no backrest.

I went over to the barita,
I saw that a double espresso costs 4.5,
An Americano, 4.9.
I asked for an Americano with a double shot.
She said that it costs 6.

“A euro fifty for a drop of hot water?” I asked her in astonishment.
“Yes,” she replied, without emotion.
I paid her.
There’s another retreat.

A Sick Man

As a sort of desperate act to recover,
I arranged for myself a weekend packed with the highest art, with my beautiful wife, in the port city.
We began on Friday at the Elbphilharmonie with Honegger and Strauss.
Last night with Puccini, Tosca at the opera house.
And this evening, Brahms and Rachmaninoff at the Laeiszhalle.
All this is very fine,
but is it not an act of criminal avoidance,
an act of sick blindness?

Instead of dealing with my problems,
I pour money over them,
expecting “Art” to heal me.
Why should it?
Is it blind?
Stupid?
Does it not see what I’m trying to do?

As it heals,
So it also kills.
For there is one thing art is incapable of tolerating:
the liar,
The dishonest man.

I naïvely think I am leading myself to a hospital,
But for me it is in fact a slaughterhouse.

Get up!
Wake up!
Lest you end up where you deserve:
not at the opera,
the concert halls,
the art museum,
But the central station!
The Hauptbahnhof!
(The Central Train Station)

That’s where you belong,
You scoundrel!

Do you think it’s a coincidence
that the last work you will hear
is Isle of the Dead?

Get up,
go stand before the Wanderer.
You have one last chance.

III. Allegro ordinaro

On the Summit

A moment before I enter that room,
a moment before I climb to the summit.
I sit for a moment on that same uncomfortable bench.
The back pain is no longer felt.
As I climbed the stairs,
a chorus resounded in my ears,

Laufet, Brüder
Laufet…
Run, brothers,
run…

Freudig
wie ein Held…
zum Siegen.
Joyfully,
like a hero…
toward victory!

Laufet!

Wie ein Held…
zum Siegen!

A deep breath.

O Wanderer,
I am guilty.
I used you as a tool,
as an excuse,
I forgot…
I forgot…
It is all me.
Only I can change it.
The resurrection comes only from me.

Aufstehen!
Rise!
Ich will Aufstehen!
I will rise!

Everything is in my hands,
under my control.
Not to the Hauptbahnhof.
Not to aimless drifting,
not to be at the mercy of the dead creators.
I am a creator too,
I am alive!
I will live!
Not dependent on anyone,
not on Puccini,
not on Brahms,
not on anyone.
Only on myself.

If there is no floor,
I will tile it with my own hands.
If there is no path,
I will pave it.
If there is no music,
I will compose it.
If there is no resurrection,
I will live it!

Hamburg Symphony was written in Hamburg in December 2025. The text published here is a lightly revised version of the one performed live on stage. Those who wish to hear it aloud can find the filmed reading on YouTube here:

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It was a day when the state of Israel eliminated one of the most brutal dictators in recent times.

A man who was just last month responsible for the horrible massacre of many tens of thousands of his own people, who protested against him.

“Death to Khamenai!” these brave protestors called.

Israel had answered their call.

This man led the ancient nation of Iran, not towards flourishing, not towards peace and prosperity, as a proper leader should.

You see, Khamenai wasn’t interested in a material gain on this earth, but a glorious afterlife. He couldn’t care for his own people’s suffering; there was only one goal in his mind: the destruction of Israel.

An entire 80-million-person county’s resources were focused on building the means to destroy another country, 2000 kilometres away. Not because Israel has ever done anything to Iran, but because of a fanatical, mystical belief that it is a duty bestowed upon him from Allah.

His death is a tremendous act of justice to the countless people his regime tortured, kidnapped, raped, and murdered.

Israel has shown the whole world that it is willing to do anything necessary to protect itself.

The Middle East as we’ve known it is on the edge of a new era.

Whether or not Iran will become a free nation after this is still to be determined. It will be up to the Iranian people to take charge and choose a good path after this Israeli and American operation.

It’s a time to celebrate and commemorate the heroic IDF and the US military personnel who’ve made the world a lot safer.

I very much hope that the best is yet to come.

Congratulations to Iranians everywhere.

Watch my fuller analysis on the livestream from yesterday, just as I got the official confirmation of Khamenai’s death:

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This morning marks the beginning of a new era in the Middle East.

Israel and the United States launched a coordinated operation aimed at annihilating the core of the Iranian regime, not at symbolic retaliation or containment.

This is not a surgical operation.
This is not a “limited operation”.
This is all-out war with the clear goal of destroying the Ayatollah regime.

And indeed,

Senior Revolutionary Guard and military leaders were targeted.
Architects of the nuclear programme were eliminated.
Advisors to the Supreme Leader struck.
Even the residence of the Supreme Leader was attacked, with uncertainty about whether he was present. Hopefully, he was.

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has been the epicentre of evil in the Middle East. It armed proxies. It funded terror networks. It fuelled October 7th. It threatened Israel’s annihilation while enriching uranium. It crushed its own citizens with unimaginable brutality, killing over 30,000 of its own just last month.

And the world was appeased.

Appeased while centrifuges spun.
Appeased while missiles were built.
Appeased while hangings were happening.

It is now no more.

Israel once again demonstrates that it does not wait passively under existential threat. It leads. It acts. It bears the burden others prefer to debate. This time, the United States did not restrain that initiative. It joined it.

And Iran’s response tells its own story.

In an ironic twist, Iran’s missiles were fired not only at Israel but also across the Gulf. Qatar, Kuwait. Saudi Arabia. Bahrain. The UAE. Jordan. There’s great poetic justice to the fact that some of these very countries, especially Qatar, are finally suffering the consequences of their decades of sponsoring terrorism and supporting Islam’s war against Israel and the West.

And there is another audience watching: the Iranian people.

A regime that murders its own citizens, suppresses women, jails protesters, and steals national wealth for foreign militias does not represent a civilisation. It parasitises one.

There has never been a better chance for a free Iran than now. Much of the job will be done by the US and Israel, but it can only be finalised by the Iranian people. There will never be a better chance.

Take it now!

Long live free Iran!

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I. Allegro

“I am going to write a symphony.”
He kept on saying to himself,
to his teachers,
to his family.
to his friends.

Nobody writes symphonies anymore.
That was the usual reply.
“What do they perform in the hall?”
He used to ask in return.

Silence was always the answer.

“What are you? Brahms?”
“I am Raphael.”
He would always say back.

He always had the idea:
It’s going to start lyrical,
Like a great violin concerto.
The second movement will be stormy,
The third, playful, yet gloomy.
And the finale,
Epic.

He would not go anywhere without his scores.
He treated his sheet book like a bible.
Even more than that.

He had in his room a portrait of Beethoven.
He would stare at him.
sometimes for long hours.
He used to tell me that at night,
before going to bed,
He would focus on his image.
So that maybe, he will come to his dream,
As he once did.
“I spoke to Ludwig.”
I thought he might have been losing it.

But maybe he did speak to him.

At parties,
He had a strange habit.
When he could find a piano.
He would play,
Not sonatas,
No.

He would play the first trumpet notes
of Mahler’s 5th.
Then, he would immediately look around
to find who recognised it.
Usually, he could find someone.
Then he knew they would be friends.
When he couldn’t,
He would leave early with sourness in his lashes.

Every New Year’s Eve.
He would fly to Germany.
“So long as they keep singing die Freude, at New Year’s,
There’s hope.”
He used to tell me.

II. Andante

Every day after work,
He would sit in his room.
First, to prepare himself.
He would listen to his dear Gustav.
Each day suited a different symphony.
He told me,
“Never listen to the 6th more than once a day.”
“It’s dangerous.”

Then, he would open his red book.
And compose.
At that time,
He would not be disturbed.
As if he were in a little hut in the Alps.
It was him and his score.

Every day.
Sometimes, even after the small hours.
“For when the muse comes, you must let her in!”

His ex-girlfriend,
with whom he was for years,
Used to say,
“He loves his scorebook more than me.”
I think he did.
And I think he made the right choice.

One winter, he called me.
“I finished the first movement.”
I rushed to his house.
We gathered a small group of friends,
He would play it on his piano.
We looked at each other.
We looked at him.
We smiled.

III. Scherzo

Maybe it was six months after that,
He called me and proclaimed:
“It’s ready.”
We all gathered again,
We were sitting on small orange pillows around his piano.
The carpet was red.

We all knew the first movement.
It was like a hymn for beauty.
For all the beauty that was no longer,
It had dark undertones.
One could see it as a funeral march for beauty itself.
But it was defiant.
Much like our Raphael.

The second movement was much darker,
The third seemed even ironic.
And the finale?
So noisy.
When it ended,
We were happy,
We were so proud of our friend,
We knew what he went through,
There wasn’t a day that he didn’t face doubt.
We never doubted him.
We knew he was special.

But then one of us spoke.
He was always the gentle one.
He said,
“It became very fast at the end…
almost as if you were rushing away from it.”

Raphael did not answer.
He froze.
His hand hovered above the keys.

“Too fast?” he whispered.

We felt the air tighten.

“I meant only to help…”

“Help?” he said.
“Did I ask you for help?”

Silence.
Not one of us dared move.

He turned back to the piano.
He would not look at us again.

We left quietly.

IV. Finale – Con fuoco

He woke up slowly.
Straight from bed to his red book.
Turned around:
A long stare at Ludwig.
Back to the book.

“Symphony No. 1 in C minor”
The first page proudly proclaimed.

He took his fountain pen out.
He didn’t want to touch it.

But he had to.

He would barely leave his room.
He even quit his job.
I remember asking him,
“Did you have any doubts?”
“Never.”
“What made you change it?”
“Ludwig…”

I didn’t know what he meant.
Was it another work of his that inspired him?
Or did he come to his dream?
I never dared to ask.
I knew asking him about “Ludwig” was futile.

He disappeared for some time after that.
Nobody knew where he went.
Rumours said Vienna; others said Hamburg.
Months passed.

Then one morning, I received a letter.
It had no return address.
Inside:
A ticket:
“Philharmonie. Saturday. Symphony in C Minor. 20:00.”

I went.
It was a beautiful hall.
Marble everywhere,
A golden Lyre hung over the pipes.
It was almost full.

The orchestra rose.
The conductor walked in.
My heart almost stopped.
It was him.
Raphael.

He bowed once.
Raised his baton.

And began.

I knew the first movement.
Once, I heard it as a hymn for beauty —
for beauty that was no longer.
Now it sounded like beauty reborn.
The dark undertones were still there,
But they no longer mourned.
They proclaimed.

The second, once I called it dark,
Now it was vast.
It had the depth of night before dawn.
He fought the storm again,
But this time the storm obeyed him.

The third,
which once seemed ironic,
now danced with knowing joy.
It laughed,
not in mockery,

But in victory.
And the finale...
Oh, the finale.
It began in darkness,
in the same C minor he’d sworn to conquer.
But slowly,
the harmony turned.
The brass stood,
the strings lifted,
and the hall itself seemed to breathe.
C minor became C major—
Defeat turned to triumph.

The audience rose before the last note had faded.
People cried,
some shouted his name.
I looked at Raphael—
His arms open wide,
baton still in hand,
as if holding something invisible.

And then, drenched with sweat,
He grinned.
Bowed to his orchestra,
Raised his arms,
and bowed.

Flowers rained from the balconies.
For a moment,
He looked as if he had seen Ludwig again.
And then,
for the first time,
I understood.

He hadn’t written a symphony.
He had written our resurrection.

And he was right all along.
He was not Brahms.
He was Raphael.

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The idea is simple, and unfortunately quite practical. In many parts of the world right now, including here in Israel, there are moments when you have to run to a bomb shelter. And in those moments, you discover something unexpected: music matters.

So I asked a strange but honest question. If you have ten minutes in a shelter, what music do you want in your ears?

The result is a tier list of classical music for wartime situations. The tone is intentionally lighthearted and darkly humorous. But behind the humour lies a serious point. Art is not decoration. It is a necessary part of life, especially in difficult circumstances.

The video is spontaneous, a bit chaotic, and very personal. It also includes short excerpts of the works discussed, so you can feel the differences rather than just hear me talk about them.

I’m curious to hear your reactions. Your ranking will probably look very different from mine, and that is exactly what makes the conversation interesting.

You can watch the video here:

And if you end up making your own “shelter playlist,” I would genuinely love to know what is on it.

Stay safe, wherever you are.

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Everyone calls Shostakovich’s Fifteenth “enigmatic.” The word gets repeated like a superstition, as if this symphony were some final cryptogram one isn’t meant to understand. I think that’s lazy, and an injustice to one of his finest works. Shostakovich was not an obscurantist. He was one of the greatest narrative composers who ever lived, one of the very few who could tell a story with pure sound and make its architecture unmistakable. Think of the Leningrad Symphony: that isn’t ambiguity but narrative clarity of the highest order. He knew how to stage characters, how to build contrasts, how to let themes collide and answer each other, how to turn an orchestra into an entire civilisation moving toward something.

The Fifteenth does this with perhaps the clearest narrative logic of his entire symphonic output. It is one of his most brutally naked works, honest to the point of discomfort, and it hides behind neither grandiosity nor Soviet bombast. The official interpretation that tried to present it as “heroic and optimistic” is simply laughable; it survived only because nobody bothered to listen closely. This is deadly serious music, among the most emotionally vulnerable symphonies he ever wrote, second only to the Fourth.

And the narrative is not subtle. Ideas return and evolve. Contrasts matter. Voices fight, avoid each other, collapse, rise, and fail. The symphony constructs a world that obeys its own internal logic. To dismiss all of this as “strange” or “enigmatic” is to admit you don’t really want to understand the work. Most of what I describe here became clear to me on my first listen; that’s how direct Shostakovich is when he wants to tell a story. Yes, the sounds are unusual; yes, the quotations can seem odd. But the notion that the Fifteenth is a hazy autobiographical scrapbook is just another shortcut. It makes complete sense if you hear it for what it is: a constructed universe with metaphysics, characters, and consequences.

I suggest reading this essay alongside the music itself: read a movement section, then listen to that movement. Let the symphony answer for itself.

I recommend this recording with the legendary Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 2014:

I. The Souvenir Shop

The first movement is the establishing shot. We are already inside the world. There is no noble statement, no serious build-up. Instead, we are in a little shop full of musical junk. Pizzicato strings pluck away, high woodwinds chirp, the glockenspiel and other bright percussion tinkle like cheap glass. Everything is small, bright, brittle. It is like walking into one of those tourist shops that sell plaster busts of Beethoven and plastic snow globes of the Eiffel Tower.

The symphonic tradition is on the shelves as merchandise.

Then, into this comes what is arguably the most cliché tune imaginable: the gallop from Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Once upon a time, it was an emblem of heroic action, rebellion against tyranny, the pure Romantic myth of the liberator. By the time Shostakovich uses it, it is a cartoon, a television jingle, something you hear in advertisements and circus acts. And he does not restore its dignity. He shrinks it further. It pops in and out like a ringtone. The brass play it cleanly, but the context is humiliating: it is just another toy on the rack.

It’s even funny, almost rudely so: every time the music looks like it might get serious, he suddenly shoves the William Tell gallop in your face, like a circus jingle barging into a prayer. That’s not ambiguity. That’s Shostakovich laughing bitterly at what “heroic music” has been reduced to.

We are in the souvenir shop of a dead civilisation.

This is classical music commercialised. It is the heroic nineteenth century turned into a cheap product. The whole movement is beeps and boops, fragments and quotations, but nothing really grows. Nothing is allowed to develop into a serious statement. This is “after classical music.” After Beethoven, after Wagner, after Mahler, after the idea that the symphony is the vessel of man’s spiritual life. The forms still run, the machine still ticks, but the meaning has drained out.

What is just as important as what happens in this first movement is what very deliberately does not happen. Nothing resolves. Nothing arrives. Ideas appear, flicker, and vanish. Themes are introduced only to be abandoned. Even the moments that seem to build toward something collapse back into fragments. It’s not that Shostakovich fails to develop the material; it’s that development itself is being denied.

There is a theme, but it is almost aggressively simple. It doesn’t grow, doesn’t deepen, doesn’t transform. It just exists, like a slogan or a jingle. There are brief surges of drama, the orchestra swells, tension accumulates, and then, just as abruptly, the energy is cut off. A snare drum appears, hinting at action, order, march-like purpose, but it never leads anywhere. The gesture is there, the follow-through is not.

The piccolo plays a crucial role in establishing this world. It cuts through the texture with a brittle, piercing brightness that feels overexposed, almost cruel. This is not lyricism; it’s glare. From the very beginning, Shostakovich denies the listener any comfortable sonic refuge. The piccolo doesn’t decorate the music; it defines the environment. And once you notice it here, you start hearing it as a structural voice that will return later, always aligned with the same metaphysical function.

And then the movement simply… stops. Not a true ending, not a resolution of tension, not even a collapse in the Mahlerian sense, just cessation. As if someone turns off the mechanism mid-gesture. That, too, is not accidental. It tells you immediately what kind of universe you are in. This is a world made of snippets, beeps, fragments, surfaces. A microcosm where events happen without consequence, where momentum never earns its destination, where sound itself feels provisional.

By the end of the first movement, before anything “big” has happened, Shostakovich has already shown you the metaphysics of this universe. This is the space the rest of the symphony will inhabit. Everything that follows is contained inside it.

II. The Collectivist “We”

Before anything else, this has to be said: the opening cello solo of the second movement is one of the most beautiful moments Shostakovich ever wrote. Not clever beautiful, not ironic beautiful, not beautiful “despite itself,” but genuinely, openly lyrical. The sound is human in the most unguarded sense, a single voice speaking slowly, patiently, without sarcasm or distance. In a symphony that has so far denied growth, warmth, and resolution, this sudden expansiveness feels almost shocking.

That is precisely why it matters.

Because this beauty does not redeem the world it appears in. It does not reorganise the surrounding reality. It exists fully and in isolation.

It is tempting to say that the second movement is a world without “we,” a landscape of isolated solos, each instrument speaking alone. That is not quite right. There is a “we” here, but it is the Soviet “we,” the collectivist “we” that destroys genuine community.

The orchestra may be full, but Shostakovich refuses to let it function as a single organism. Instead, the movement unfolds as a sequence of exposed, solitary voices. The cello speaks alone, then retreats. The entire brass section enters like an overwhelming higher force, crushing the cello’s space, and then withdraws. The cello returns, only to be pushed aside again. Even when the strings gather, they immediately thin into a single line that never quite finds its place within anything collective. Nothing settles. No voice is allowed to belong.

Everything feels naked, observed, vulnerable. Later, we hear isolated entries: solo trombone, solo violin, the cello once more. These are not confident solos projecting individuality; they are voices stepping forward and immediately pulling back, wary of being heard for too long. It feels less like dialogue than like a room full of people who know that speaking too openly is dangerous. Each voice exists, but none are willing or able to join truly.

This is what life under a collectivist regime feels like. Formally, you are part of the group. Realistically, the group is constructed so that every person is structurally pitted against every other. “To each according to his need”. It creates a zero-sum world. If I work more, you can take more. If you slack, my effort carries you. My ability becomes your claim. Your need becomes a drain on my life. The more competent I am, the more I am punished.

The result is a society where success is punished, and envy is rewarded, where the safest psychological posture is to withdraw, to never fully join. You live surrounded by people, but you cannot genuinely cooperate with them, because the moral-political system turns cooperation into a liability.

That is what the second movement sounds like. These solos are not private lyric scenes in a friendly universe; they are monologues in a room full of potential informers. These players are not blending because they cannot trust the “we” they inhabit. If they truly act together, they become vulnerable to a system that feeds on their effort and betrays their individuality. So the cello speaks, then disappears. The bassoon appears and keeps its distance. The trombone steps into the light, delivers its line, and retreats.

Later in the movement, the full orchestra erupts. It is brutal, massive, and impersonal. It does not grow organically out of the solos; it breaks into the texture from the outside. At this moment, the ticking mechanism is absent. For a brief stretch, you are allowed to forget the toy world altogether. What replaces it is raw force: a slow, heavy surge of sound that feels like collective power asserting itself. There is no irony here, only weight.

The contrast with the cello is devastating. The cello’s voice is intimate, inward, genuinely mournful; the brass answers it not with dialogue but with overwhelming pressure. The tempo itself contributes to the sorrow, slow, deliberate, almost ceremonial. This is not agitation; it is grief moving at the speed of inevitability. The brass sounds less like conquerors than like the machinery of history passing judgment.

And then, gradually, the eruption dissipates. The mass withdraws. Solos re-emerge, cautious, exposed, isolated once again. Only after this does a ticking small wooden box return, quietly reasserting the world we were briefly allowed to forget. When the celesta enters, we are fully back inside it: the beeps, the fragile metallic light, the solo cello singing once more under the same conditions as before.

That sequence is crucial. Shostakovich lets you step outside the mechanism just long enough to feel what it would mean for it not to exist, and then he reinstates it unchanged. The sorrow of the movement lies precisely there: not in the eruption itself, but in the fact that nothing the eruption expresses is allowed to alter the world it passes through.

This is not a world without “we.” It is a world with only “we,” but a “we” so warped by forced collectivism that it annihilates the possibility of a voluntary, benevolent community. It is a musical portrait of a society where official togetherness guarantees that no one can truly stand together.

III. The Puppet Dance

The third movement does not really “arrive.” It erupts. Shostakovich marks it attacca, straight out of the slow, mourning world of the second movement. In a good performance, Haitink shows this perfectly; there is no breath, no space, no chance to process what you’ve just heard. One moment, you are inside one of the most sorrowful cello and brass landscapes he ever wrote; the next, the floor is yanked away, and you are thrown into this wired, twitching Allegretto.

By this point, you have already spent almost half an hour inside this universe: the kitsch shop of the first movement, the collectivist anti-ensemble of the second. You ought to be given a moment to breathe, to digest the grief. Instead, Shostakovich makes it all one continuous experience, one unbroken nightmare. The third movement is not a new chapter; it is the same world snapping back into gear with a cruel little grin.

In fact, by now it has become possible to hear something even more radical. The symphony up to this point has behaved almost entirely like a scherzo. The first three movements together form a vast, distorted super-scherzo, perhaps the largest and most extreme ever written. The toy-shop Allegretto, the broken inward grotesquerie of the second movement, and now this puppet dance are not separate events; they are different manifestations of the same unstable logic. Everything slips, mocks itself, refuses weight and dignity. This is Mahler’s scherzo principle pushed to its endpoint. Mahler stretches the dance until it begins to rot; Shostakovich makes the rot permanent.

At this point, the scherzo is no longer just implied; it becomes brutally explicit. What might once have functioned as comic relief now reveals itself as the natural state of this world. If this is a scherzo, it is one that has forgotten how to be playful. The dance does not lighten the load; it sharpens it. The texture is bony and thin. The strings play clipped, sarcastic figures. The winds chatter nervously. This is not a warm village dance gone sour, like Mahler’s Ländler. It is closer to a skeleton trying to remember the steps of a waltz, reenacting them out of habit, long after any human impulse behind them has died.

And over the whole thing, there is that little wooden sound, the dry, ridiculous tap of the wooden box, clicking away. It is the stupidest possible sound to put over a symphonic dance, and that is precisely why Shostakovich uses it. It turns the entire orchestra into a puppet theatre. Whatever the strings or winds do, that little click dominates. Every gesture looks like it is being yanked on strings from above. The musicians sound silly, not because they are silly, but because the sound-world they are trapped in makes their efforts look absurd.

This is the Soviet joke: a regime that cheapens everything, that turns even suffering and art into grotesque spectacles. The third movement is a danse macabre where the dead are forced to dance for someone else’s amusement. Compared to Mahler’s cynical scherzos, this is even more extreme. Mahler’s jokes still have flesh on them. Shostakovich gives you bones and a woodblock.

By now, the pattern is clear. Every time something like a traditional symphonic resource appears, heroic material, slow depth, scherzo, dance, Shostakovich sabotages it from the inside. You keep expecting the piece to behave like a “normal symphony,” and it keeps refusing the contract.

IV. Metal & Wood

The finale is where everything is revealed. This is where the film pulls back and shows you what universe you have been living in all along.

It opens in a way that seems to promise more of the same: small repeating figures, patterns without direction, the suggestion that the toy shop is about to switch back on. At first, you think: fine, the beeps and boops are returning, we are still in the same cramped little shop, in the same degraded world. Nothing new.

But the beeps don’t come.

Instead, the strings begin a genuinely beautiful melody, surprisingly light in character, gently lifted by cheeky pizzicatos in the second violins. Then the woodwinds join, the piccolo once again taking a prominent role, and the horns begin to support this new line. For the first time, it feels as if the music might actually be going somewhere outside that strange world of clicks and toys.

A long, sustained passage unfolds, lyrical, poised, undeniably beautiful. There are dark undertones, shadows in the harmony, but compared to what we have heard so far there is also something like hope. For a while, you can almost believe that this might be a real symphonic ascent, that the universe of the piece is finally opening up instead of closing in.

And then the celesta returns.

Here, the celesta is not a cheap twinkle. It is something ethereal, a metallic light hovering above the texture. The strings and woodwinds start to spin a line that actually goes somewhere. The harmony begins to move, the phrases lengthen, the music remembers what it means to breathe. And it’s here, at the very opening of the movement, that Shostakovich makes one of his most devastating gestures: he quietly quotes the rising, yearning phrase from the opening of Tristan und Isolde. It passes by almost without you noticing, but it sets the emotional premise of what follows: longing without fulfilment, desire that has nowhere to land. He lets Wagner’s cry of metaphysical yearning hover there for a second, and then buries it.

This is the first time in the entire work that something like a genuine, serious, symphonic line takes shape.

It feels like a hero stepping out of the shop.

All through the first three movements, we have been stuck inside this sad little souvenir universe. Now, finally, someone opens the door and steps into the world outside, a beautiful outburst of the entire orchestra takes place, and the colours change. The silly woody clicks are gone. Instead, we have metal: celesta, glockenspiel, triangle, bright high percussion that feels like forged steel and starlight, not toys. Maybe there’s hope? Not so fast.

A snare drum joins, and with it comes something that looks like a march. But listen carefully: this is not a confident military stride. The rhythm is unsteady, underfed. These are the steps of someone who has been exposed to radiation before he even began to walk. The hero tries to march, but his body is already wrong. He wants to act, but the world he is walking into is hostile, poisoned, and indifferent.

This is what authoritarianism does to human agency. Outwardly, you move, you work, you make choices. In reality, the structure was decided before you arrived. You walk through a script someone else wrote.

It is not like Mahler’s 6th symphony, where you watch an hour-long struggle before the total collapse. Here, there is almost no struggle. There is a gesture of will, and the reality around it is already rigged. The hero never stood a chance.

And Shostakovich even proves this literally in the score. Into this fragile, wounded ascent, he drops the Fate motif from Götterdämmerung, the music that, in Wagner’s world, signals the machinery of destiny finally intervening, the moment the gods or the heroic cosmology should step in. But here it appears for a heartbeat, does nothing, and dies.

So now both Wagnerian worlds have been invoked:
Tristan (unfulfillable desire) and Götterdämmerung (inescapable doom).
In a normal universe, one of these would break the frame: longing would transform the world, or fate would crash down with meaning. Here, both slide off the glass of the terrarium. Neither can penetrate the mechanism.

Then the brass rise up. Trombones and horns sing a heavy, resigned lament. It feels like a eulogy, and it comes far too soon. They mourn him as if he is already dead. It is premature mourning, the voice of history saying: of course, he will fail; this world does not allow men like that to succeed. The bass drum thuds underneath, heavy and impersonal, the sound of the regime or of fate, it hardly matters which.

After this, the strings produce something like a dream. Suddenly, the music lightens. A melody appears that sounds almost optimistic, almost like a memory of a different world, a world in which effort could lead to joy, in which love or work or art could actually remake a life. It is as if the hero, even while being crushed, imagines another reality, a parallel track: what might have been. In light of the Tristan quotation, this dream has the quality of a final inner yearning, beautiful, impossible, already dissolving.

But the brass keep cutting in. Short, dark interjections, jolting the dream. The strings rise again, the dream continues a little further, but it has the quality of hallucination: something projected inside a body that is shutting down.

The celesta returns, as if some higher power has finally answered. But it does not intervene. It glows from a distance. It is beautiful, but it does nothing. It is the universe as seen by someone dying: indifferent, remote, serenely untouched by his fate. And if you listen very closely, what the celesta plays is not new at all. It echoes the world of the first movement, the same simple intervals, the same childlike, mechanical contour. The sound that seems to promise transcendence turns out to belong to the very place we began. The light is real, but it comes from inside the system.

And then the most devastating thing happens:
The wood comes back.

The little wooden percussion, the xylophone, the dry clacks and taps that defined the toy-shop world of the first and third movements, alongside the piccolo return as if nothing had happened. After all that, the emergence of the hero, the stumbling march, the brass funeral, the hallucinated hope, the distant stars, the cries of Tristan and the warnings of Götterdämmerung, the silly wooden apparatus reasserts itself. The world goes back to beeps and boops.

This is the metaphysical reveal.

The whole symphony, all forty-odd minutes of it, was inside the shop. There is no “outside.” The hero never left the system. His attempt to step out, to build, to flourish, took place entirely inside a closed mechanism that does not care. The forces that rule this universe are not good and evil, not God and devil, not tragic man versus tragic fate. They are wood and metal arguing with each other. Everything else is decoration.

Metal is effort, transcendence, agency, the shimmer of something beyond the given. Wood is triviality, puppetry, the cheap, mechanical, deterministic world of collectivist authoritarianism, the Soviet “we” that eats human beings. For a few minutes in the finale, metal tries to rise, supported by strings and winds. It even gains real momentum. The snare drum, for all its weakness, gives it a kind of rhythm, a path. The brass take notice and mourn what they know is coming. The strings dream the last dream.

But in the end, wood wins.

The final moments are a dialogue between those two substances. The metal glows, the wood clicks back; the metal chimes, the wood keeps up its idiot regularity. Right at the end, there is one final “kling,” one last lonely bell of metal, pure and high. It hangs for a moment. And then the work stops. No catharsis, no chorale, no judgement. Just a tiny sound disappearing into a world that was always already controlled.

What makes this ending so unsettling is that it is genuinely beautiful, but not in any human sense. This is not beauty grounded in struggle, pain, love, or redemption. It is closer to the kind of beauty one feels looking at deep space: cold, distant, mathematically perfect, indifferent to whether anyone is there to observe it. The sound is man-made, yet what it reveals feels beyond the human realm altogether. The machinery does not merely function; it glows. And that glow does not comfort. It confirms that the system is complete, self-sufficient, and aesthetic on its own terms.

That is why the final bell does not feel tragic in the Mahlerian sense. There is no final human cry against fate. There is only the quiet recognition of a world that never needed us to begin with.

From that perspective, this is one of the most nihilistic symphonies ever written, not in the adolescent sense of shouting that nothing matters, but in the adult sense of showing a universe in which a man’s freedom, a man’s inner hero, is structurally blocked. You may feel choices. You may feel movement. But when the camera pulls back, what you see is a little shop in a ruined city, stocked with broken myths and cheap replicas, run by a mechanism that does not need you.

The brilliance is that Shostakovich never lectures. He never puts this into words. He lets the instruments tell the story. The first movement gives you the world’s surface: commercialised culture, heroic clichés turned into toys. The second shows you what collectivism does to human relationships: the endless series of solos who cannot afford to truly join. The third shows you what passes for fun: a dance of puppets under a stupid little click. And the fourth finally shows you what this all rests on: the metaphysical structure of a universe made of wood and metal, where a hero can appear for a second and then vanish without consequence.

That is why the finale is the key. It does not just end the symphony; it explains it. It says: This is what it is like to live in this world. This is what it is like to be Shostakovich in the Soviet Union. You think you have choices. You think, perhaps, that if you just step carefully enough, if you are subtle enough, ironic enough, clever enough, if you encode enough double meanings into your symphonies, you might win. But the structure is not on your side. The wood is.

And yet, he still lets the metal sound that last, single, honest tone. That may be the one thing the system cannot erase: the fact that, even in such a world, someone saw it clearly enough to write this.

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This morning's concert with the Israel Camerata Jerusalem Orchestra at the Tel Aviv Museum deepened a conviction I've been developing: that attending live performances is one of the best non-work things I can do with my time. I arrived with modest expectations. I've never been to these smaller chamber-orchestra concerts and assumed they'd feel like a reduced version of the 'real thing.' What I got instead was something far richer: not just beautiful music, but proof of why showing up to live art matters so deeply.

The setting was quite refreshing: You arrive for a concert while the museum itself is alive, people moving between exhibitions, culture happening in parallel rather than in a sealed-off temple. During the intermission, I went out to the sculpture garden, where there’s a café, daylight, sculpture, and coffee. Music felt embedded in a broader life of art, not isolated from it. I found that deeply enjoyable.

The concert opened with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, and it was a very smart choice. It immediately captured the audience. It’s one of those pieces that simply works, beautiful, transparent, inevitable. I even heard an elderly woman near me say out loud at the end, “What a beautiful work.” That told you everything. Opening with Mendelssohn wasn’t just musically satisfying; it was dramaturgically intelligent. Had they opened with Schumann instead, the hall would have felt heavier from the start.

Only then came Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, performed here as an Israeli premiere nearly 180 years after the work was written. Being present at such a premiere is, in itself, an honour and a rare treat.

Placed after Mendelssohn, Schumann revealed a very different musical temperament. Where Mendelssohn feels effortless and immediately graspable, Schumann asks more of the listener. The music is denser, more inward, more restless. It does not present itself with the same ease, and that difference was instructive to hear. Rather than diminishing the experience, the contrast sharpened it. You could feel how thoughtfully the program had been constructed, not only to please, but to provoke listening.

In that sense, the Schumann worked exactly as it should have. It opened a different emotional and structural space in the hall, preparing the ground for what followed, and it was genuinely interesting to encounter it in this context, as part of a living musical conversation rather than as a familiar repertory staple.

After the intermission, the Israeli piece was Yizkor by Aharon Harlap. It stood out immediately. It was incredibly beautiful, romantic in spirit, emotionally direct, no modern nonsense, and very short. It said what it needed to say and stopped. It was also beautifully performed.

The composer himself was there, sitting in the audience with his wife. Watching him walk onto the stage and seeing the audience respond to him was deeply moving. There is something profoundly beautiful about seeing a living composer hear his work performed by a serious orchestra, placed alongside Mendelssohn and Schumann. What an honourable place to be. What joy that must be.

What struck me even more was that several young people approached him to thank him before I did. There was a real, spontaneous reception to the piece. This wasn’t polite appreciation; it was genuine recognition. Seeing young listeners walk up to a composer born in 1941 was very powerful to watch. It felt like a real moment of transmission, something being passed on.

The audience was genuinely overjoyed. They clapped strongly and warmly. And after the piece ended, there was silence, real silence. You could feel that it had hit them. That kind of silence after an emotionally powerful performance is not easy to achieve, either in writing the music or in executing it. It truly landed. And it’s something you never get from a recording.

I approached Mr Harlap afterwards and thanked him deeply. I was glad to hear that he is actively composing, and it made me very curious to hear more of his work. I left feeling grateful to have discovered him this way, and I can wholeheartedly recommend exploring his music further, particularly his Requiem and Bassoon Concerto.

The concert ended with Schumann’s Piano Concerto, one of my all-time favourites. The soloist, Alon Kariv, was only 25 and brilliant. His playing was mature, emotional, strong, powerful, not showy, not a young pianist trying to prove something, but a real kinship with the music. The wonderful conductor, Doron Salomon, was visibly joyful, and it was a pleasure to watch him interact with the soloist, letting him shine. That joy carried the whole hall.

I think what all of this ultimately comes down to is very simple: you have to go to live performances. Even when the program is not your favourite. Even when it is not something you were longing for or circling on your calendar. There is an opportunity in almost every concert, especially when it is played by a serious orchestra. If the program is thoughtful and the performers are committed, something usually happens.

I did not come to this concert because Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale is a personal favourite. What drew me was the Piano Concerto, and yet the entire morning turned out to be a wonderful surprise. The location, the programming, the living composer, the audience reaction, and the conversations afterwards. None of that could have been anticipated in advance.

That is exactly the point. Live music creates conditions for things you did not plan for. It places you in situations where something unexpected can enter. You cannot get that from recordings, nor can you get it by only chasing your personal canon.

So I encourage people to do this. Go to these concerts. Spend a Friday morning like this. Spend your weekends and evenings engaging with high art, even when it is not perfectly tailored to your taste. More often than not, it will reward you in ways you did not expect.

Thank you, Camerata Jerusalem!

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I. Finishing The Job

These days pull me back to June.

To those strange, electric days when the war with Iran began not in fear, but in something dangerously close to joy. Not joy at destruction, joy at clarity. Joy at the feeling that, at last, the job would be done. That history had opened a narrow window, and that we had finally stepped through it.

For a brief moment, it felt as though the long paralysis had broken. The missiles still fell, the sirens still howled, but beneath it there was something new: confidence. Direction. A sense that this time, we would not stop halfway. That this would not be another chapter in Israel’s long tradition of winning tactically and surrendering strategically.

And then, as always, we stopped.

Not because we were beaten.
Not because we ran out of capability.
But because we once again refused to finish what we had started.

I wrote that we would pay for it later. That the bill would come due. That unfinished wars do not disappear; they wait.

So far, the price has been paid almost entirely by others.

By Iranian men and women who believed that Israel and the United States would finally finish the war that the regime declared. That the world, finally, would not look away. That Israel and the United States would finally act in their own defence, and in doing so, break the regime’s grip.

They paid with their lives.

Thousands butchered in the streets.
Thousands more disappeared into prisons, torture chambers, and silence.

That alone should command moral clarity and solidarity, but it does not, by itself, warrant risking the lives of Israelis or Americans.

What does warrant it is: self-defence.

The Iranians now being butchered in their own streets are not the only ones who are now paying and will continue to pay the price for having this evil regime.

We will pay too.
We will pay in missiles over Tel Aviv.
We will pay in funerals.
We will pay in children running to shelters, again and again, because we mistook restraint for wisdom and delay for strategy.

Israel’s refusal to win wars is not unique to Iran.

It is the same disease we see in Lebanon.
The same refusal in Gaza.
The same pattern, repeated until it no longer shocks: strike hard, stop early, declare victory, and prepare excuses for the next round.

We do not lack strength.
We lack resolve.

And that failure, not the war itself, not the enemies we face, is becoming the defining legacy of Netanyahu.

He will be remembered not as the man who warned of danger, but as the man who recognised it, confronted it, and then chose to leave it alive. Unless, of course, he changes course, there’s still time.

II. The Willingness to Bear the Cost

What many outside Israel and even many from within don’t quite understand is the willingness of the Israelis to suffer the consequences of war with Iran.

I was in Tel Aviv the entire time. I felt it in the streets, in the shelters, in the silences between sirens. People were not euphoric in a childish sense, but there was something steadier and more serious, acceptance.

It was understood, almost instinctively, that this would be hard. That it would be unpleasant. That we would spend long hours underground, wake up at night, cancel plans, watch buildings burn, and bury the dead. No one pretended otherwise.

And yet the mood was not despair.

It was resolute.

There was a quiet consensus that if this is what it takes to finally remove the hammer hanging over our heads, then so be it. For as long as I can remember, growing up in this country meant living with an unspoken sentence: maybe one day you will wake up to a nuclear mushroom cloud. Not metaphorically. Literally.

That is not paranoia. That is what the Iranian regime has promised us, openly, repeatedly, for decades.

And suddenly, suddenly, there was a chance to end it.

We watched our pilots fly missions that will be studied for generations. We watched intelligence operations unfold with a precision that bordered on the unbelievable. Mossad agents walking into the heart of darkness. Pilots flying into hell and returning.

It brought joy, not the joy of destruction, but the joy of competence. Of seeing Jewish sovereignty act like sovereignty. Of knowing that this time, we were not begging history for mercy, but shaping it.

Yes, it was painful.
Yes, seeing our brothers and sisters killed was unbearable.
But morale did not break.

People did not panic. They did not demand surrender. They did not beg for “quiet at any price.” There was no mass hysteria, no collapse into defeatism. If anything, there was a rare sense of unity: do what needs to be done, and finish it.

That is why what followed felt like betrayal.

Not just a strategic betrayal, but a psychological one.

The sudden halt did not bring relief. It brought cynicism. It taught people, once again, that courage is permitted only up to a point, and that clarity will always be interrupted by someone else’s comfort.

And now, watching it unfold again, watching Iranian civilians pay with their lives for believing that this moment was real, the bitterness cuts even deeper.

For now, the price is not being paid primarily in Tel Aviv.
For now.

It is being paid in Iranian blood. In crushed protests. In shutdown internet lines. In mass graves, we will only learn about years from now.

That is tragic in itself.

But tragedy deferred is not tragedy avoided.

If this regime survives, if it learns, adapts, and rebuilds, the price will come back to us. It always does. In missiles. In funerals. In children raised under sirens.

And the most corrosive cost of all will be this: the slow replacement of resolve with cynicism. The sense that even when we are willing to endure hardship, even when morale holds, even when history opens a door, someone will always step in to close it.

That is how nations lose their future.

Not because they cannot fight.
But because they are not allowed, or do not dare, to finish.

III. The War America Refused to Name

Iran is not drifting toward war with the United States.
Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979.

This is not rhetoric. It is not a metaphor. It is not ideological exaggeration. It is the regime’s own definition of itself.

From the moment the Islamic Republic seized the American embassy, paraded American diplomats as trophies, and ritualised humiliation as a founding act, the regime declared war, not only on Israel, but on America as such. Not on policies. Not on administrations. On the civilisation it calls the Great Satan.

That language was never symbolic.

It was programmatic.

The Islamic Republic does not see America as a rival. It sees it as an enemy to be defeated, exhausted, humiliated, and ultimately erased. This has been stated openly, repeatedly, for decades, in sermons, in slogans, in doctrine, in action.

What is extraordinary is not Iran’s clarity.

It is America’s denial.

For nearly half a century, the United States has refused to acknowledge that it is already in a state of war. It has treated Iranian aggression as a series of isolated incidents: a hostage crisis here, a proxy attack there, a missile test somewhere else. Always something to be managed, contained, and negotiated.

Never something to be finished.

And so Americans ask, sincerely or cynically: Why is this our problem? Why is this about us?

The answer is quite straightforward:

Because the same regime that chants “Death to America” as it develops intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, should be taken seriously.

And because that regime is no longer content with regional reach.

This is where the refusal to name the war becomes suicidal.

Iran is not merely developing nuclear capabilities. It is developing delivery systems, intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose purpose is not Tel Aviv.

It is New York.

A nuclear Iran is not a Middle Eastern problem. It is a global threat with an explicitly American target list. The idea that Israel is “dragging” the United States into something misunderstands the order of causality entirely.

Israel is fighting the war Iran has already declared, and America has refused to admit.

This is why the present moment matters so profoundly.

For the first time since 1979, the regime is exposed simultaneously on three fronts:

• Militarily

• Economically

• Internally

And yet, once again, America hesitates, not because it lacks power, but because it still refuses to accept the premise that there is a war at all.

You cannot win a war you refuse to name.
You cannot deter an enemy whose ideology you pretend is negotiable.
And you cannot plead ignorance when the missiles are no longer theoretical.

History will not ask whether America intended to confront Iran.

It will ask whether it recognised reality before reality arrived on its shores.

IV. The Iranians

There is no honest way to talk about the future without talking about the Iranian people.

And there is no honest way to talk about the Iranian people without saying something uncomfortable.

Yes, they live under a brutal, suffocating, murderous regime.
Yes, dissent is punished, often fatally.
Yes, fear is real, and courage is costly.

All of that is true.

But it is also true that regimes do not float above societies like weather systems. They are sustained, materially, socially, and psychologically, by the people beneath them. Through taxes. Through labor. Through silence. Through inaction. Through the decision, repeated millions of times, to endure rather than confront.

This is not a moral condemnation. It is a statement of reality.

When the mushroom cloud eventually rises, if this regime is not stopped, it will not ask who was oppressed and who was complicit. It will not distinguish between protesters and loyalists. It will not care who was brave in private and silent in public.

There is another truth that must be stated, however uncomfortable it may be.

History does not adjudicate the inner thoughts of populations when the machinery of annihilation is set in motion. The Jews who were murdered in Auschwitz were not spared because some Germans resisted the regime, or because there existed underground networks, or because many citizens lived in fear rather than enthusiasm. Whatever private doubts or quiet opposition existed within Germany did not stop the trains, did not halt the gas chambers, and did not prevent the Second World War.

Six million Jews were murdered. Europe burned. And history did not absolve Germany on the grounds that “not everyone agreed.”

That is not cruelty. It is reality.

In the same way, when a regime builds weapons of mass annihilation and openly declares its intent to use them, the question of private dissent within the population, while morally relevant, does not alter the consequences. Nuclear war does not discriminate between protesters and conformists. It does not pause to examine who paid taxes willingly and who did so under duress.

This is not a moral condemnation of the Iranian people. It is a recognition of the tragic structure of total war.

The German regime was brutally oppressive. Resistance existed. Fear was widespread. None of that prevented catastrophe. The burden of history still fell where power was enabled, sustained, and left unbroken.

The same standard must apply here.

In June, I was angry, deeply angry, because I saw an opportunity that was not taken. The regime was exposed. Its defenses punctured. Its myth of invincibility was shattered. Israel even called the Iranians to rise up against their oppressive regime, and yet the streets of Iran, despite the sky being ruled by Israeli jets, remained largely quiet. That silence mattered. It may have cost history its best chance.

Now, months later, something has changed.

Not because the regime softened, it never does, but because economic collapse finally forced reality through the cracks. And when the Iranian people rose, they did so with astonishing courage.

I will say this clearly: what we have seen in recent days is heroic.

Women burning the images of their Ayatollah in the open street.
Men chanting freedom, knowing exactly what the price might be.
People standing upright after decades of enforced submission.

It was a beautiful sight. I wrote about it. I meant it.

And now, as the regime responds in the only language it knows, mass murder, disappearances, darkness, my thoughts are with them. Genuinely. The courage it takes to persist under such conditions is immense.

But here is the line that must not be crossed, even in sympathy:

It is not the responsibility of Israel, or of America, to give freedom to the Iranian people.

Freedom is not a humanitarian export.
It is not something one nation owes another.
The moral responsibility of a state is first and foremost the defence of its own citizens.

From that perspective alone, those who argue against intervention are not wrong in principle.
And yet, here is the crucial point: Intervening now is self-defence.

The same regime slaughtering protesters today is building the weapons that will kill Israelis tomorrow and Americans the day after. The same apparatus crushing dissent is refining delivery systems designed for cities that are not Iranian.

Leaving the Iranian uprising to be crushed is not merely tragic. It is strategically suicidal.

It is a betrayal of ourselves.

It is the abandonment of Israeli children who will grow up under nuclear threat.
It is the abandonment of Americans who believe geography still protects them.
It is the abandonment of the future in exchange for a few years of quiet.

That is why this moment matters.

Not because we owe Iranians freedom, they owe it to themselves.
But because helping dismantle the regime that enslaves them is inseparable from defending our own lives.

To walk away now is not a restraint.
It is suicide delayed.

V. Now, or Never

I do not know how this ends.

I may be wrong about what happens next. I hope I am. I would rather be embarrassed by my pessimism than vindicated by disaster. But this essay is not meant to forecast events; it is meant to name the stakes and the pattern that keeps repeating: power exercised brilliantly, then halted before the threat is removed. If the United States and Israel act decisively after this, the conclusion is not that this essay was naïve; it is that the warning was necessary.

I do not know whether this moment will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic, or as yet another chapter in the long record of hesitation and retreat. I do not know whether help will come, whether the United States and Israel will act decisively, whether the Iranian army itself will fracture and do what only it can do from within.

That would be the ideal outcome.

A regime collapsing under the weight of its own crimes.
An army refusing to fire on its own people.
A nation reclaiming its future without foreign boots, without occupation, without humiliation.

That would be the cleanest victory imaginable.

But hoping for the ideal does not absolve us from confronting reality.

This is a brutal regime, entrenched deeply in a large, resource-rich country. Its entire structure exists for one purpose: survival through terror. The IRGC was not designed to compromise, to reform, or to retire quietly. It was designed to crush resistance and wait out hesitation.

It will not fall easily.

And yes, acting against it carries risk.
Yes, it is uncomfortable.
Yes, it may cost lives.

All of that is true.

But the idea that inaction is the safer path is an illusion. It always has been.

The price of delay is not peace. It is escalation deferred. It is danger multiplied. It is a catastrophe postponed until it arrives in a form far worse than anything we are afraid of today.

That is why this moment matters.

Not because certainty is possible, it never is.
But because some moments do not return.

This is one of them.

Europe, for all practical purposes, has abdicated. Not only responsibility, but self-interest. It no longer acts even when threatened directly, even as Iranian money, ideology, and proxies hollow it out from within. Europe has chosen paralysis.

The only actors left in the West who still possess both capacity and agency are Israel and the United States.

And this is not a call for an act of kindness to the Iranians.
Israel does not exist for that purpose.
It is a call for self-preservation.

Iran is not only a threat to Israelis.
It is not only a threat to Iranians.
It is a threat to Americans, and yes, to Europeans as well, whether they admit it or not.

Acting now is not humanitarian exhibitionism.

It is the recognition that existential dangers must be confronted before they mature beyond control.

To the brave men and women of Iran, those who stood up, who burned the symbols of their oppressors, who marched knowing exactly what the cost might be, I say this plainly:

You are inspiring.
You are courageous.
You are fighting for your own future, and that matters more than anything else.

I stand with you.
And I hope, genuinely, that you prevail.

But hope alone is not policy.

If those who have the power to act choose once again to stop short, if they confuse caution with wisdom, and delay with responsibility, then the reckoning will come.

It will come soon.

The Iranian people will pay the highest price. They already are.
But others will pay as well, in Israel, in American cities, in places that still believe distance is protection.

This is a monumental opportunity.

Not because victory is guaranteed, but because failure will be irreversible.

Now or never.

History rarely offers clearer choices.

Show them hell.

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This is too early in the year to tell, but it very well might be the image of the year.

They are women standing bareheaded in the open, lighting a cigarette from the burning image of their dictator. Calm. Defiant. Unafraid. Not pleading, not performing, not asking the world to save them.

This is not protest theatre. This is sovereignty reclaimed.

For decades, the regime taught its people, especially its women, that their obedience was virtue, that silence was wisdom.

The Iranian people were led to believe that they are being oppressed by a powerful regime, and now that lie is being burned in the street, reduced to ash, used as fuel for a moment of quiet contempt.

That image matters.

Because revolutions are not born in crowds shouting slogans. They begin when fear breaks. When a single human being decides that humiliation is no longer an acceptable price for staying alive.

This is not “unrest.” It is not desperation. It is not chaos.
It is moral clarity made visible to the masses.
The king is naked.
And his victims are no longer afraid.

The Iranian lion inhales, lights a cigarette, and lets the tyrant burn.

II. Revolution

This is not a protest asking for better subsidies, marginal relief, or a kinder version of the same cage.

What is unfolding in Iran is a revolutionary movement, and that is precisely its beauty.

It began where all lies eventually collapse: in the economy. In empty wallets, collapsing currency, bread that costs more each week, lives that no longer add up. People who worked hard, obeyed the rules, kept their heads down, and still found themselves unable to feed their families. And they understood something essential: that this ruin was not accidental. It was chosen.

Chosen by a regime that poured its money into missiles, militias, and nuclear fantasies while its own streets decayed.

That recognition changed everything.

What started as an economic protest did not stay economic for more than a moment. Because once people name the cause of their suffering, they stop negotiating with it. They reject it. The streets were not filled with requests, but with refusal. Millions, across cities and generations, no longer afraid, no longer pretending.

This is a generation that has reached its limit.

It is women who will no longer live with their heads bowed or covered, who step into the open knowing exactly what it costs, and deciding it is worth it. It is men who refuse to work endlessly only to watch their labour finance Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, or wars in Yemen while their own children go hungry. It is the old who remember an Iran before 1979 and know, with painful clarity, what was stolen from them. And it is students who understand that their future does not have to be this narrow, this grey, this suffocating.

They are not asking for permission. They are not drafting demands.

They are burning the symbols of the regime in the streets and standing their ground when the enforcers arrive. They are beating fear itself back, and in doing so, they are exposing the truth that the regime cannot survive: that its power exists only so long as people consent to their own humiliation.

This is not reform.
It is a revolution.
It is a nation deciding that forty-seven years is enough.

III. The Paper Tiger

What the Iranian people are rising against is not their country. It is their country’s occupation.

The Islamic Republic is not an expression of Iranian civilisation. It is its hijacker. A regime that took an ancient nation, rich in culture, memory, and ambition, and reduced it to a staging ground for religious war. It replaced pride with fear, excellence with obedience, and life with martyrdom as policy.

It survives not only through repression but through inversion. Poverty is recast as virtue. Submission is sold as faith. Death is elevated into heroism. And this inversion is exported outward, to Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, turning entire regions into extensions of the same sickness.

In Israel, this has never been misunderstood.

We have known for decades that the enemy was never the Iranian people. We have known that this regime endures not because it represents Iran, but because it has been allowed to. Enabled. Tolerated. Repeatedly rescued by a West too weak to confront evil when confrontation was required.

This regime did not survive because it was sanctioned. It survived because it was sanctioned and then forgiven. Because it was negotiated with, traded with, and legitimised. Because war was postponed in the name of “stability,” and nuclear ambition was treated as a diplomatic puzzle instead of a civilizational threat.

The failure was total.

Worse still, the West did not merely hesitate; it inverted reality. In American universities, the Islamic Revolution is celebrated as righteous resistance. Iran is recast as the oppressed force. Israel, fighting for its survival as a free society, is portrayed as the villain. This moral corruption has spread across Europe and beyond, until clarity itself became suspect and tyranny learned to speak the language of justice.

That is the true depth of Western decay: not ignorance, but confusion elevated into virtue.

And yet, in a bitter irony, it is the people of Iran who now remind the world what moral clarity looks like. Not in conferences or slogans, but in fire and refusal. In the simple, unmistakable act of naming their jailer and rejecting him.

When a people stop mistaking their captor for their country, the regime loses the only thing that ever sustained it.

And that is why this moment is so dangerous for the Islamic Republic, and so hopeful for its good people.

IV. The Opening

History does not offer unlimited chances.

There are moments when pressure accumulates quietly for years, even decades, and then suddenly releases, when fear breaks faster than it can be repaired, when a regime realises, too late, that it no longer controls the tempo of events.

This is such a moment.

For the first time in a long time, the Iranian people are not alone in the open. The United States has spoken clearly. Trump has repeatedly stated that America will not allow the regime to carry out mass slaughter against its own people. Whether that promise will be tested, and whether it will be fully kept, remains to be seen. But the statement itself matters. It shifts psychology. It gives courage to those in the streets, and it terrifies a regime that survives on the assumption that no one will stop it.

That alone is enormous.

Because fear is the regime’s real currency. And for the first time, it is being drained.

Then, in June of last year, came the twelve-day war. And with it, a revelation that cannot be undone. The world saw it, but more importantly, the people of Iran saw it. They saw that the regime they were taught to fear as omnipotent is, in fact, fragile. That the Islamic Republic is a paper tiger. That it is vulnerable, utterly vulnerable, to a country nearly a hundred times smaller than itself.

That knowledge changes everything.

There have been protests in Iran before. There have been large ones, brave ones, costly ones. But this moment is different. Not because the people are angrier, but because the illusion has collapsed. The illusion of invincibility. The illusion of permanence. The illusion that nothing can be done.

Now the people know they are not rising against a god, but against a decaying structure held together by intimidation and habit.

History moves gradually. But when it does, it demands precision, not patience. Half-measures at moments like this are not neutral; they are lethal. Every call for “restraint,” every delay in the name of stability, hands the regime its last remaining weapon: time.

And yet the alignment is unmistakable.

The Iranian people are moving. Israel has long named the threat without illusion. The United States, at least for now, is no longer pretending neutrality between a jailer and his prisoners. These convergences do not linger. They appear, and they vanish.

This is why 2026 feels different.

Not guaranteed. Not ordained. But possible.

And possibility, when history opens the door this wide, carries its own moral demand.

V. Prepare Yourself to Live!

Regimes fall.

That is the truth tyrannies work hardest to conceal, but history never forgets it. No system built on fear, exhaustion, and lies lasts forever. And this one, more than most, is hollowed out from within. Everyone has had enough. The people know it. The regime knows it. The world is beginning to see it.

This is not naïve hope. It is historical realism.

The Islamic Republic is weak because it has nothing left to offer its people. No future. No dignity. No truth. It survives only by intimidation and inertia, and those are brittle foundations. Once they crack, collapse follows quickly.

I hope, above all, that this moment is completed by the Iranian people themselves. That they finish what they have begun. That they reclaim their country without replacing one master with another. But if assistance is needed, I hope Israel will not hesitate. I hope the United States will do what it can. This is not interference with domination. It is in alignment with liberation.

Because this regime is not only Iran’s burden. It is a threat to the entire world, most dangerously through its genocidal ambitions and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Ending it is a necessity.

To the people of Iran, this must be said clearly:

You have not suffered for nothing.

Prepare yourself to live!
You were not born for nothing.
Not lived for nothing.
You will rise.
You will rise again, and you will live.
You will live free.

Your young people will live without fear. They will travel, create, argue, love, and build. They will come to Tel Aviv as friends, and we will come to Tehran to celebrate with you what has been denied to you for far too long.

Peace in the Middle East will not come from illusions or slogans. It will come when tyrannies fall, and free peoples meet as equals.

That will be quite the celebration.

To freedom.
To peace.
And to the lion of Iran, rising at last.

All the best!

If you enjoyed Philosophy: I Need It, and want to see more, you can support my work by buying me a coffee. Every contribution makes a real difference. Thank you!

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Happy New Year!

This year was extraordinary for this project, and that is especially thanks to you.

We began the year with fewer than 400 readers. Today, we are approaching a thousand. The audience has more than doubled, and it has become remarkably international. Readers now come from over 20 countries across six continents. Essays were read close to 50,000 times this year, and monthly readership now averages around 5,000 views. That tells me something simple and important. This work matters to people.

I also released my first book, The Weight of Silence. It has already sold over 100 copies worldwide. Real people chose to buy my writing. I am very proud of that.

Looking back at what was published this year, I see how much ground was covered. More than an essay per week was released on average. My favourites include The Aesthetics Manifesto, which came from years of thinking about beauty and style. The Tel Aviv essay, which remains one of the pieces I am proudest of. And the piece on Felix Nussbaum, written after visiting his city and museum, where poetry and history met in a rather surprising and unsettling way.

The essays on the war in Israel brought many new readers. Some were analytical. Some were poetic. They spread widely because people were searching for clarity rather than slogans. Another favourite was Where Are Our Cultural Heroes, which did surprisingly well.

This year, I also began experimenting more boldly. I blended poetry into essays. I published my first “symphony in prose.” I shared several standalone poems. The responses were encouraging and gave me confidence that this form deserves to grow. The direct support I received from readers, especially through Buy Me a Coffee, was foundational. It made it possible to treat this project as serious work. For that, I am deeply thankful.

If you have been reading consistently this year, and if these essays have given you value, I would appreciate it if you considered reciprocating by making a contribution or becoming a member by clicking here. This is how independent writing survives. Your support makes it possible for me to devote serious time to bigger work. Support at any level genuinely makes a difference, and I am deeply grateful to those who choose to take that step.

Looking ahead, I want to take another creative step. I am working toward a new major literary project. It might be a book. It might be a film. It might be a play. I am deliberately exploring forms. Fiction and poetry will continue, and so will the non-fiction that lies at the heart of this platform. I will keep writing about music and about painting and art history, because both are essential to the vision behind Philosophy: I Need It.

I also hope for a less tragic year. This past year was difficult for many reasons, both political and personal. Even so, I tried to turn difficulty into work. Essays. Poems. Reflections. Sometimes even music. I hope the next cycle brings more light and that the work reflects that light.

My hope for 2026 is peace for Israel. And the strength to keep building this project with your support.

To all of you, I wish a year of fulfilment, prosperity, peace, justice, and creativity.

Whatever happens, creation is the answer. To quote from Goethe’s Faust Part II:

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for being such a positive part of my year.
More is coming soon.

All the best,

Yonatan

The Fountainhead introduced one of the most radical heroes in modern literature. Howard Roark is not heroic because he is charming, successful, or socially admirable. He is heroic because he is internally governed. He acts from a clear hierarchy of values, works with complete focus, and measures his life by the integrity of his creative achievement rather than by approval or applause.

Roark is a fictional figure, but he is not a fantasy. He names a recognisable human type: the individual for whom creative work is not an activity but a necessity, and for whom compromise is not tragic but unthinkable. Such figures are rare in history, rarer still among artists, and rarer still when examined without sentimentality.

If one looks for historical examples of this Roarkian type, the usual candidates may be political leaders, industrialists, or solitary innovators of the modern age. The most compelling parallel I know belongs elsewhere. It is the composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), a figure whose life and work display the same inner law, the same refusal to dilute a vision, and the same willingness to accept isolation as the necessary cost of upholding and accomplishing one’s central purpose.

Creative Vision Over Public Approval

Mahler did not compose in response to taste, expectation, or demand. His music proceeds as if no audience were present at all. From the earliest performances of his symphonies, he was accused of excess, too long, too loud, too grotesque, too emotionally naked. These objections did not surprise him, nor did they alter his course. The works exist because they had to exist, in the form they took, at the scale they demanded. Mahler once said that “a symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything,” and he composed as if this were not a metaphor but a fundamental conviction.

This did not mean Mahler was indifferent to how his work was received. He read reviews, worried over premieres, and felt the sting of incomprehension. But he refused to let that caring alter his compositional decisions. The distinction matters: his integrity lay not in the absence of desire for approval, but in the discipline to compose as if that desire were irrelevant.

This is not the posture of rebellion. Mahler did not seek to provoke, shock, or redefine himself against the present. His was a deeper indifference. Like Roark, he worked according to an inner law and accepted misunderstanding as structural rather than personal. Approval, when it came, was incidental; when it did not, it was irrelevant.

What is striking, in retrospect, is not that Mahler misunderstood his audience but that he never attempted to correct the mismatch. He made no aesthetic concessions to frequency of performance, critical fashion, or institutional comfort. The symphonies grew ever larger, more complex, more uncompromising, as if the distance between his inner necessity and the world around him could only widen.

If one needs a single example of how radical this inner necessity could be, the Third Symphony is enough. It is almost two hours long, written for a huge orchestra, children’s choir, women’s chorus, and alto soloist. It unfolds over six movements, each one turning its attention to a different rank of existence, nature, life, man, the angels, before arriving at a final answer: that love is the highest value and the deepest power in the world. Nothing in the symphonic repertoire before it looks like this. No patron, no audience, no tradition ever demanded such a work. No one said, “We must have a symphony that does this, here’s a government grant.” It exists because one man’s vision required it.

It is one of the most radically first-handed acts of composition in history. And it is not an exception. In different ways, each of Mahler’s symphonies is like this: unmistakably personal, uncompromisingly individual, and written as if there were no authority higher than the truth of what he had to say.

Mahler’s confidence was not psychological bravado. It was the quiet certainty of someone answering to a standard that does not consult others. One hears in this not defiance, but inevitability, the sense that the work unfolds because there is no legitimate alternative.

Loyalty to Form, Not Fashion

Mahler is often described as a breaker of traditions, a composer standing at the threshold of modernism, the last of the romantics. Howard Roark is described similarly. In both cases, the phrase gets cause and effect backwards.

Roark does not set out to overthrow architecture. He rejects inherited forms only when they have become dishonest, decorative shells emptied of purpose. What he builds looks radical because it grows from a stricter fidelity to structure, material, and function than his profession is willing to tolerate. Tradition breaks against him because it has already hollowed itself out.

Mahler belongs to this same category. He does not abandon the symphony or attack it from the outside. His famous remark that “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire” is often quoted for good reason: what he inherited from the symphonic past was not its surface, but its flame. The length, the density, the sudden breaks and juxtapositions were not conceived as shock tactics. They are what happens when a composer asks the symphony to tell the truth about a modern inner life, and refuses to abridge the answer.

This is a different kind of radicalism from the fashionable one. Mahler’s symphonies do not announce a break with the past; they carry the past forward until its sentimentalities and evasions can no longer survive. Roark and Mahler both stand at the point where tradition, confronted with integrity, either deepens or shatters. Neither man chases the new. The new is simply what remains once the false has been removed.

Solitude Without Theatrics

A figure like this does not stand in the middle of his time. He stands slightly apart from it. Both Roark and Mahler move through worlds in which they are necessary and never quite at home.

Mahler repeatedly removed himself to Alpine solitude to compose. The image is not romantic but practical: long days, isolation, a landscape stripped of distraction, and a mind left alone with the demands of the work. The symphony, for Mahler, is not a collective negotiation or a cultural compromise. It is the product of a single consciousness ordering vast material according to its own inner necessity.

Roark works under similar conditions. His buildings are not the result of committee thinking or social conversation. They are conceived as unified forms, each element answering to the logic of the whole. A Roark building, like a Mahler symphony, is unmistakably the work of one mind. Not improvisational, not consensus-driven, but integrated from foundation to final detail.

What separates solitude here from isolation is purpose. Mahler does not withdraw in order to escape the world, but in order to return to it with something whole. The mountain hut serves the same function as Roark’s drafting table: a place where the noise of opinion dissolves and only the requirements of the work remain.

Neither man turns this solitude into a mythology of suffering. It is not cultivated as an identity. It is simply the condition required for undiluted creation. When the work is finished, both re-enter the public sphere, knowing it may resist or misunderstand what they bring, and accepting that fact without complaint.

Integrity Without Compromise

Mahler’s unwillingness to compromise was not confined to composition. It governed his entire professional life, most visibly in his work as a conductor. On the podium, he demanded absolute fidelity to the score and total seriousness from the musicians under him. Interpretive shortcuts, routine, or convenience were intolerable. Rehearsals were relentless. Standards were non-negotiable.

This posture earned him results and enemies. Under Mahler’s leadership, the Vienna Court Opera reached an extraordinary level of artistic excellence and coherence. Standards were raised across the board, rehearsals intensified, discipline tightened, and the repertoire was treated with a seriousness it had not known before. The institution flourished precisely because Mahler refused to treat art as an administrative routine.

At the same time, hostility accumulated. Mahler did not cultivate conflict, but he accepted it as the price of refusing to dilute his demands for the sake of harmony. Institutions value smooth functioning; Mahler valued truth to the work. Where it came into conflict, he chose the work every time. The friction was inevitable.

Here, the parallel with Roark becomes quite exact. Roark does not compromise because compromise is not a practical adjustment; it is a moral failure. To alter a design for approval is to abdicate authorship. Mahler holds the same principle, whether composing alone or standing before an orchestra. The music comes first, and everyone involved must rise to it, or step aside.

Solitude follows naturally from this position, but it is not the core of it. The core is integrity: the refusal to falsify a vision in order to make it easier for others to accept. Mahler’s Alpine retreats serve that integrity, but the same stance appears publicly, under pressure, in rehearsal rooms and opera houses, where the cost is social conflict rather than quiet isolation.

That cost was real. Mahler accumulated adversaries not because he provoked them, but because he would not accommodate mediocrity. Like Roark, he understood that enemies are not chosen; they emerge where standards meet resistance. The refusal to compromise does not guarantee isolation, but it makes it an ever-present possibility.

It would be a mistake to imagine that this integrity required withdrawal from institutions. Mahler understood exactly how much authority was required simply to make his work possible. His positions in Hamburg, Vienna, and later New York were not concessions but strategic necessities. Without his reputation as a formidable and respected musical director, it is unlikely that his symphonies would have been performed at all. Even with that authority, they were greeted with hesitation, resistance, and often open hostility.

Ken Russell’s film Mahler crystallises this hierarchy in a single exchange. When a journalist asks Mahler whether he considers himself a composer or a conductor, he replies: “I conduct to live; I live to compose.” The line is fictional, but the order it establishes is exact. Conducting is survival. Composition is purpose.

Roark articulates the same principle in The Fountainhead, insisting that he does not build in order to have clients, but has clients in order to build. In both cases, institutions are not authorities to be appeased but instruments to be used, necessary, demanding, and never confused with the work itself.

Mahler’s standing made the premieres possible. It protected the work long enough for it to be heard. Without that standing, the symphonies might not have failed; they might never have existed publicly at all. His independence did not float above institutions; it moved through them, using their weight to bring into the world works no institution would have asked for on its own.

The same logic applies to Roark. He studies, apprentices, and works within architectural firms not because he accepts their authority, but because mastery of the field is a prerequisite for independent creation. Institutions provide access and skill; they do not confer permission. What endures, in both cases, is not what was done on their terms, but what was created once the authorship remained undiluted.

Enemies as Consequence, Not Strategy

Neither Roark’s buildings nor Mahler’s symphonies are acts of spite. They are not shaped in reaction to resistance, criticism, or hostility. The naysayers do not enter the creative calculation at all. This is made explicit in one of the novel’s most devastating moments, when the villain, Ellsworth Toohey, having failed to break Roark, asks him what he thinks of him. Roark answers simply: “But I don’t think of you.”

This is not a gesture of contempt, but an expression of complete independence. Toohey is irrelevant to the act of building. His hostility has no creative significance. Roark’s work proceeds without reference to its enemies because it answers to a standard that does not consult them.

Mahler occupies the same position. His symphonies do not argue with objections; they ignore them. Their scale, intensity, and formal ambition are not defensive manoeuvres or aesthetic provocations. They are the natural outcome of a non-compromising mind following an inner necessity to its full conclusion. Like Roark, Mahler does not create against opposition. He creates as if opposition were beside the point.

It is precisely this posture that generates enemies. Institutions built on accommodation experience non-negotiable standards as a threat. People who expect compromise read indifference as arrogance. Yet the conflict is secondary. Neither Roark nor Mahler derives meaning from antagonism. The work is not a reply; it is a statement.

In the end, this stance explains both their victory and their immortality. Because they never built in reaction to the present moment, their work outlived it. What survives is not a record of struggle, but an intact vision, buildings and symphonies that remain whole because they were never bent. The refusal to compromise did not merely preserve their integrity; it ensured that what they created would endure beyond the noise that once surrounded it.

Friendship With Standards: Bruno Walter & Steven Mallory

Non-compromise is often mistaken for misanthropy. In reality, it creates the conditions for a very precise and demanding kind of friendship. Both Roark and Mahler are incapable of generosity toward the unearned, but once genuine value is recognised, their loyalty is unwavering.

Bruno Walter first came to Mahler after hearing his First Symphony when he was 18. At a time when very few people understood what Mahler was doing, the young Walter recognised something singular in that music and sought him out. Mahler, in turn, immediately recognised Walter’s seriousness, musical intelligence, and integrity. What followed was not an act of charity, but an exchange grounded in judgment. Each saw value in the other and responded accordingly.

Mahler took Walter under his wing in the fullest sense. He mentored him for more than a decade, helped him secure positions, entrusted him with real responsibility far earlier than most conductors would have received it, and stood behind him when opposition arose. At moments when Walter struggled financially, Mahler quietly sent him money, not as compassion for weakness, but as practical support for something he knew was worth preserving and developing.

What makes the relationship extraordinary is both its duration and its symmetry. Mahler did not withdraw his support once Walter began to succeed, nor did he grow threatened by his growing authority. He treated him as a bearer of the same standards. And in time, Walter became one of the principal carriers of Mahler’s music, bringing the symphonies to audiences across Europe and later the wider world, preserving them at a moment when their survival was far from guaranteed. This was not gratitude returned; it was recognition fulfilled.

The Fountainhead offers several examples of Roark’s selective loyalty, but the clearest is Steven Mallory, the sculptor. Mallory is crushed by a culture hostile to integrity, yet Roark recognises the absolute honesty of his work immediately. His response is not pity or encouragement, but sustained belief translated into action. Roark stands by Mallory not because Mallory needs him, but because Mallory’s work deserves to continue.

In both cases, the relationship is mutually beneficial without being transactional. Mahler needed Walter as much as Walter needed Mahler, not emotionally, but structurally. The same is true of Roark and Mallory. Integrity recognises integrity, and when it does, loyalty follows naturally.

What Remains

Seen in this light, Mahler’s friendships do not soften his severity; they complete it. The same principles that made him uncompromising also made his alliances durable. Standards, once fixed, govern everything: the work, the collaboration, and the legacy that survives both.

Howard Roark is a fictional construct; Gustav Mahler is a historical man. The distance between them matters. A novel can present an ideal without remainder; a life never can. Yet the point of a literary archetype is precisely that, once named, it allows us to recognise certain patterns in reality with greater clarity.

Mahler fits that pattern more closely than most. He was a man who worked according to an inner law, who refused to falsify his vision for the sake of approval, who accepted enemies as the cost of standards, and who reserved his deepest loyalty for the few minds he judged as serious as his own. The symphonies and the buildings grow out of the same posture: a conviction that the work must remain whole, even if the world around it does not.

There was a price. Mahler drove himself with a ferocity that may well have shortened his life. The intensity, the overwork, the refusal to ease off even when his health was failing; these are not incidental details. They raise an uncomfortable question: perhaps this is simply what such a life demands. Perhaps there is no gentler way to bring into existence works on that scale, with that level of inner honesty.

While we don’t have the opportunity to speak with Mahler or Roark directly about their challenges, we can immerse ourselves in their incredible work. So, let’s celebrate their genius by listening to a beloved Mahler symphony or diving into our favourite passage from The Fountainhead.

To a year of uncompromising, epic and beautiful work.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

-Yonatan

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Before moving into analysis, it must be stated straight: the Bondi Beach attack on 14 December 2025 killed 15 civilians, including a 10-year-old girl, and dozens more were wounded, many still hospitalized and recovering from serious injuries. The victims ranged in age from children to elders, and their lives were ended in an instant at what should have been a peaceful Hanukkah celebration. My thoughts are with those still fighting to recover from their wounds and with the families now living with losses that nothing can undo.

Much has been said about the Bondi Beach massacre: about the weak police response and the hollow words of the disastrous prime minister. What followed the attack was not clarity or responsibility. It was evasion.

Almost immediately, the public conversation was diverted into familiar, comfortable channels. Gun laws. Immigration policy. Procedural failures. Each political camp rushed to instrumentalise the tragedy in the service of its own agenda.

On the left, the massacre is treated as justification for further restrictions on civilian self-defence, another argument for disarming the public and narrowing the ability of citizens to protect themselves. On the right, the attack becomes an excuse for crude, blanket arguments about immigration, as if the problem were merely one of borders or numbers.

Both sides are exploiting a vicious antisemitic attack to advance pre-existing political programmes. And in doing so, both are avoiding the central issue.

This was not about guns.

It was not about immigration.

It was about Islamism.

The attacker has been identified with ISIS, an enemy the West prefers to speak of in the past tense, as though it were defeated. But how can an ideology be defeated if it continues to encourage murder across continents? Hamas itself celebrated this attack. That fact alone should have shattered the pretence that this was anything other than ideologically driven.

ISIS is not merely an organisation. Hamas is not merely a militia. They are expressions of a political-religious ideology that sanctifies the murder of Jews. An ideology that remains alive precisely because Western leaders refuse to name it.

And what is not named cannot be fought.

Instead of a serious analysis, we are offered a ritual. Candlelight vigils. Sombre speeches. Politicians filmed looking grave and sorrowful. Tragedy is aestheticised, mourned, and then safely absorbed, without consequence, without diagnosis, without action.

This is the worship of sentimentality in place of responsibility. Emotion replaces judgment. Performance replaces seriousness.

There is, however, a vital and genuinely beautiful aspect to this story, and it must be addressed honestly.

The heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed and of others who ran toward danger, including Gefen Bitton, an Israeli who assisted him, matters. It demonstrates, clearly, that not all Muslims are terrorists, supporters of terrorism, or antisemites. Their courage deserves recognition and respect.

But the meaning of that heroism must not be distorted.

I do not claim to know Ahmed al-Ahmed’s personal views on religion or politics. That is not the point. The point is this: had he been a radical Islamist, he would not have intervened. He would not have disarmed the attacker. He would not have saved lives.

That distinction matters.

There are already voices eager to use this act of courage as proof that “Islam has nothing to do with this,” that the problem is merely individual pathology or abstract hatred. That is false. It is yet another evasion.

The attack was executed by radical Islamists inspired by a murderous ideology. Some of its damage was prevented by a non-radical Muslim and by other individuals who chose courage over fear. Both facts are true, and neither cancels the other.

A civilisation that cannot identify its enemies cannot defend itself. A society that cannot protect its Jewish citizens openly, unapologetically, and by confronting the ideology that targets them has forfeited any claim to moral seriousness.

That is the core of this story. Not policy tweaks. Not legislative theatre. Not performative grief.

Until the ideology itself is named, condemned, and confronted, explicitly and without fear, nothing has been learnt. And when nothing is learnt, the next attack is not a question of if.

It is only a matter of time.

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Back in 2022, during a long journey across the United States, I found myself in Los Angeles. I’d heard of the Huntington, a mansion turned museum with one of the world’s finest collections of English art, and I couldn’t miss the chance to see The Blue Boy. Gainsborough’s masterpiece is one of the most beloved portraits ever painted. I looked forward to the moment of encountering him with reverence.

Instead, I was met with something close to desecration. Right in front of The Blue Boy’s rightful place hung a contemporary “reinterpretation”, a self-portrait by an “artist” I’ll refrain from naming, posed mockingly in imitation of the museum’s most prized possession. A parody hung before a masterpiece. And that, somehow, became the point. Instead of walking away uplifted, I left appalled, offended even, on Gainsborough’s and Mr Huntington’s behalf. How could such a thing hang in Mr Huntington’s house, right before his most prized possession?

From that moment, I became sceptical, almost cynical. Whenever I hear of a new exhibition, I expect irony, mockery, or some curatorial need to “update” the past. So when I heard that the Hamburger Kunsthalle was presenting a major Anders Zorn exhibition, I braced for disappointment.

And what a relief it was to be wrong.

II. The Red Man

The exhibition was enormous, with watercolours, etchings and oils side by side, each luminous. The watercolours didn’t even look like watercolours; they carried the depth and weight of oils, alive with colour and light. Zorn could paint a harbour, a crowd, a nude, or a royal portrait with equal conviction. His Midsummer Dance (1897) glowed with joy, peasants dancing in the Swedish twilight, a celebration of life’s pulse. Omnibus (1892) captured the bustle of Paris with astonishing immediacy, while his Self-Portrait in Red (1915), painted amid the First World War, shone with quiet defiance.

Each work carried the same spirit: a broad, unmistakable love of life.

He loved women; that’s obvious from his nudes. But it wasn’t lust or performance; it was admiration, an artist’s gratitude for beauty. He loved the good life, and he celebrated it. His nudes are not provocations but affirmations, sunlit bodies, glimmering water, the joy of being human. In a century that was turning toward despair, Zorn remained on the side of life.

And among all the paintings in the exhibition, there was one that genuinely stopped me, the portrait of Abby Marion Deering Howe from 1900. The image I took on my phone doesn’t come close to capturing its majestic force. In the room itself, the red is overwhelming in the best possible sense: not aggressive, not theatrical, but rich, full, saturated with life. The entire canvas glows.

She sits on a red couch, in a red dress, surrounded by that same atmosphere of red, and yet she doesn’t disappear into it. She emerges from it. Her presence commands the frame. The softness of the fabric, the subtle sheen on the silk, the warmth of the background, Zorn turns all of it into a celebration of her beauty, her sensuality, her dignity. It is sensual without being crude, elegant without being cold, vivid without being gaudy. It lives. It’s one of the most visually striking portraits I have recently seen, and you could feel people around the room pausing longer there, as if the painting were almost pulling them in.

This is the kind of work that shows exactly what I mean when I say Zorn loved life. There is no irony here, no mockery, no distancing device. He is not commenting on female beauty; he is affirming it. He paints her with admiration, with warmth, with that unmistakable Zorn confidence that life is good and therefore worth portraying in its fullness.

This painting alone could have carried the entire exhibition.

And then there is the portrait of Emma Zorn in the Paris Studio (1894), an extraordinary marital portrait. Many great artists, when painting their wives, slip into idealisation: the perfect setting, the perfect pose, a kind of sentimental beauty that says nothing true about the relationship. Zorn does the opposite.

He paints Emma exactly where she belonged in his life: in the studio, among his canvases, working with him. She stands in her red dress with white polka dots, sorting through his paintings, looking directly at him, at us, with a mixture of intelligence, calm assurance, and a familiarity that only comes from shared labour.

This isn’t a romantic fantasy. It’s a profound show of respect.

Emma wasn’t an accessory to his career; she was central to it. Their partnership was a remarkable artistic marriage: She managed his business affairs, curated his legacy, shaped his public image, and kept the entire enterprise functioning. She was the structure that allowed his genius to thrive.

And Zorn acknowledges that fact in the most honest way possible:
Not by pretending she was a decorative muse,
But by placing her at the centre of his creative world, holding his paintings, the extensions of his body, of his mind, of his vision, with complete natural authority.
In a sense, I see it as a kind of self-portrait.
Emma and the canvases together are Zorn.
She is holding him, his work, his identity, the two of them fused into the life they built.

It is, in its way, one of the most loving portraits imaginable, because it depicts not fantasy but truth: a marriage built on work, trust, and a shared life in art.
A portrait of a wife, yes, but even more, a portrait of a relationship.

If that portrait of Emma shows the inner world that shaped him, the village scenes show the outer world he never abandoned.

Both are Zorn, the intimate and the communal, the studio and the soil.

Two works stayed with me long after I left the room.

The first is Lucky with the Ladies (1883–1885), a watercolour so rich and full that I had to double-check the label; it simply doesn’t look like a watercolour. A group of villagers walking along a path, the young man escorting two women with a confidence that borders on playful pride. The colours, the fabric, the light, it is joyful, affectionate, gently sensual. Zorn treats these women with the same warmth and admiration he gives to aristocratic sitters. It is, again, that unmistakable positivity: a celebration of masculinity and femininity, of human presence, of the simple pleasure of being alive.

The second, Dance in the Gopsmor Cottage (1914), is even more revealing. A cramped room, bodies spinning, skirts flying, light flickering off the rafters. It has the energy of Degas, that same impressionistic immediacy, but instead of Parisian ballerinas, Zorn gives us villagers dancing in a rural cottage. It’s extraordinary: he borrows the language of high French Impressionism and plants it in the soil of his own people. It shows exactly who he was. No matter how many presidents he painted, no matter how many wealthy patrons sought him out, he always returned to these scenes, these people, this world.

This wasn’t nostalgia. It was loyalty. It was affection. It was identity.
And it shows something essential about Zorn: he was at ease among kings, but his heart never left the village.

Zorn was a man of the world. He travelled everywhere, Sweden, Paris, London, Venice, New York, and belonged to each without losing himself. He could paint American presidents and Swedish fishermen with the same dignity. From aristocratic portraits to peasant dances, he found the same nobility in work, movement, and light.

And then there is his self-portrait in the red three-piece suit, a painting that reveals more about Zorn the man than any biographical summary could. How often does one see a painter, especially in that era, dress himself in such bold colours? A red three-piece suit, a green tie, and yet nothing flamboyant or unserious about it.

It is confidence without pretentiousness.
Conviction without noise.
A proud sense of his own culture, his own taste, his own values.

You look at this portrait and understand that this was a man who refused to disappear into the background. He stands there holding his cigarette with a deliberate calm, a measured assurance. Nothing fast, nothing frantic, nothing hurried. This is the pose of someone who knows exactly who he is, where he comes from, and what he stands for.

It is extravagant, yes, but in the way beauty itself is extravagant: unapologetically. Zorn isn’t pretending to be exotic, nor is he retreating into dull simplicity. He is exactly himself: colourful, disciplined, rooted, and absolutely unafraid of being seen.

A self-portrait is always a declaration.
This one says: I am a man of the world, and I stand by myself without compromise.

He came from nothing and never forgot it. Born to humble beginnings in Mora, raised by his grandparents, he rose to paint kings and presidents. He was made rich by his own brilliance, not by birth or favour. Even success didn’t soften him; he remained loyal to his roots, establishing a prize and foundation to support other artists. He didn’t only create, he ensured others could.

Even the Great War didn’t break him. When Europe’s spirit collapsed, when many artists abandoned beauty for bitterness, Zorn kept painting the same lakes, the same light. It showed what he was made of: stern conviction, moral clarity, belief that art must affirm life, not lament it.

All of this, the life, the convictions, the loyalty to beauty, formed the man whose work I saw that day. And it mattered where I saw it. Zorn’s worldliness, his rooted confidence, didn’t hang in a vacuum; it hung in Hamburg, a city that has always lived between worlds.

III. The Right City

What place could be more fitting for such an exhibition than the Hamburger Kunsthalle, that junction between Scandinavia and the rest of the world. The Hanseatic city once embodied the very grandeur and abundance that Zorn’s art radiates: a worldly confidence, a love of craft, a celebration of life’s fullness. To see his work there felt symbolic, as if Hamburg itself recognised a kindred spirit, a man who turned worldly experience into beauty.

At the same time, only a few kilometres away, at the Elbphilharmonie, a “recomposed” Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony was being performed, a mutilation presented as progress—two visions of art in one city: one affirming beauty, the other dismantling it. Hamburg contained within one day the entire struggle of our age, between those who create and those who only comment.

IV. The Moral Act of Curation

What struck me most was what the Kunsthalle didn’t do. They didn’t pair Zorn with some ironic counterpoint to prove their cleverness. They didn’t insert provocation or apology. Even the blurbs next to some of the paintings were to the point. They simply trusted the art. That restraint, today, is moral courage.

It’s sad that we’ve reached a point where such basic curatorial decency feels almost transcendent. To simply let beauty exist, without irony, without commentary, has become a moral act. In a more rational world, this would be taken for granted. But today, it feels like witnessing our once great civilisation waking up.

One might think: so what, they just put up an exhibition and refrained from adding commentary to make it “relevant.” They didn’t plaster it with explanations or attach their narcissism to the painter’s greatness. They simply let him speak. Yes, that’s their job.
But we live in an age of narcissism and nihilism, where curators, those meant to be guardians of the greatest achievements of humanity, have not only failed in their duty but often work to dismantle the very thing they were entrusted to protect. That’s why this matters. Today, simply doing the right thing has become exceptional.

The Kunsthalle is not perfect; it carries its share of modern tendencies. But in this instance, it acted with integrity. And I commend that.

It’s outrageous when you think about it. Try explaining to a 19th-century Viennese or Parisian that people now go to museums expecting mockery, that curators, once guardians of beauty, now use masterpieces as props for their own destruction. He would think you’d gone mad. For him, a museum was a temple. Reverence was assumed. The very idea that one would hang a parody before The Blue Boy or “recompose” Tchaikovsky would have sounded like a nightmare. And yet that is our normal.

That is why this exhibition in Hamburg was more than an aesthetic experience. It was a moral act that maintains civilisation in an age of decay. It is easy to underestimate the importance of something so seemingly ordinary, a museum doing its job, but in times like ours, it becomes an act of courage.

It was, simply, an incredibly positive and inspiring exhibition, radiant, humane, and utterly free of cynicism. No irony, no nihilism, no apology for beauty. Just art that believes in life.

I’m so glad I happened to be in Hamburg at that time. To stand before those paintings was to remember what art can be: generous, alive, human. If you’re anywhere near Hamburg, go. There’s still time. See it for yourself. It’s a reminder that beauty still exists, and that sometimes, even now, a museum can get it exactly right.

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Most of you have already met The End as a poem. I first published it here on September 4th:

Read the original text of The End

Over the last weeks, I’ve turned it into something else: a small, apocalyptic short film.

I recorded myself reading the poem, added music, and built an eerie visual world around it with AI imagery – a kind of “poem-film” about standing on the edge, watching the sun go dark, and asking what still deserves to go on.

This is a project I’m genuinely excited about. It took me quite a while to put it together. The voice acting isn’t “perfect,” but it is me – and I like that it’s my own voice carrying the text. If this format lands, I see a lot of potential to bring more of my work to life this way.

You can watch it here:

Watch The End – Poem-Film on YouTube

If it speaks to you, a few things would really help:

• Like the video on YouTube

• Leave a comment – tell me what “the end” means to you, or how the film version hits you compared to the text

• Share it with someone who might appreciate this sort of thing

If you want to support more work in this direction:

☕ Support my work on Buy Me a Coffee

Thank you, as always, for your support, your attention, and your thoughts.
Looking forward to hearing what you make of this experiment.