August is the quietest month – to mangle TS Eliot’s verse – or so news editors used to think. Politicians go on holiday, governments shut down, people head for the hills or the beach. Not much happens. Not so this August. The world this month is experiencing an extraordinary peaking of volatility, instability and insecurity, unprecedented in recent times. It’s scary, it’s shocking, it’s a wild ride.
Sudden revolutions, wars current and imminent, terrible crimes, high-stakes feuding, famines, cost of living crunches, violent riots and unfathomable market panics come not as single spies but in battalions. In a world where mutual destruction, steeped in cruelty and despair, is a favoured human pastime, grim vistas of Eliot’s The Waste Land beckon anew.
In truth, the idea of idle, becalmed August has never really held water. The month is named for Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first emperor – hardly a quiet, retiring figure. The First World War erupted in August 1914. In 1945, the US dropped two atom bombs on Japan. In 1100, a crossbow bolt allegedly fired by a lone assassin skewered William Rufus, king of England. Very Game of Thrones. Very Trump.
More recently, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in August 1990 triggered the first Gulf war. In 1991, Moscow’s so-called August coup aimed to depose the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash.
In contrast, in August 2024 no particular world-shattering event stands out. Instead, one dread calamity rapidly follows another, merging to create an alarming sense of anarchic unravelling. Last week’s revolution in Bangladesh captured the tone. Recalling the 1986 “people power” overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Sheikh Hasina, a pro-democracy prime minister turned late-life autocrat, did not merely lose her job. She nearly lost her head, legging it into last-minute exile. Bangladesh, in turmoil and beset by score-settling, must piece itself back together. It won’t be easy.
Or take the uproar following Venezuela’s election travesty. President Nicolás Maduro, no Chávez he, thought it was in the bag. Then the actual votes started coming in. Appalled, he belatedly realised he was losing. Publication of results was abruptly suspended, Maduro claimed a bogus victory, and the familiar lies, crackdowns and violence began.
Except, this time, like Bangladesh, repression hasn’t worked. Vote tallies have not been released, so no one believes him. The US and Europe say that opposition candidate Edmundo González won. Even friendly leftwing governments in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are jibbing. Hundreds have been arrested, dozens have died. Yet Maduro won’t budge, and so the crisis deepens.
Common denominators applicable elsewhere may be detected amid the mayhem. Poverty, lack of opportunity and official corruption roil the global street. In Kenya, young anti-government demonstrators sparked copycat generation Z protests in Nigeria and Uganda. About 70% of Africa’s fast-expanding population is under 30. Youthful insurrection is not confined to a single calendar month. It’s ongoing.
A growing propensity among authoritarian leaders to ignore international law and the UN charter is another common factor. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of sovereign Ukraine is a cautionary example. The conflict dramatically intensified this month after a large Ukrainian force invaded Russia right back – to Vladimir Putin’s hilariously hypocritical indignation.
In the Middle East, matters go from bad to seriously worse, fuelling fears of region-wide war. Iran’s response to the assassination of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran is awaited with trepidation. It’s an old story. Western countries conduct emergency evacuations. Israel, backed by the US, prepares to strike back. Nervous Arab leaders urge restraint, as is their wont.
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Horrors grow familiar by repetition, losing power to shock. Yet some outrages cut through. A report this month by the Jerusalem-based rights group B’Tselem fundamentally challenged tacit western connivance in the Israeli government’s criminal behaviour since the 7 October attacks. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and fellow hardliners, the report demonstrated, are running “torture camps” for Palestinian prisoners.
B’Tselem scrupulously documented “institutionalised abuse” including severe beatings, sexual violence, starvation, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs. The findings echo those of UN experts. Nearly 10,000 Palestinians are in Israeli jails, many held without charge. It’s a scandal. It’s the new Abu Ghraib. Yet, unabashed, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sickeningly suggests that starving Palestinians in Gaza is “justified and moral”.
Will August 2024 mark a turning point in attitudes to Israel’s outlaw regime? It should, but probably won’t. Likewise, the UN’s declaration last week that 600,000 people face famine conditions in displacement camps in North Darfur was a stark reproach – the predictable culmination of a shameful story of international indifference and neglect. Sudan’s civil war is a catastrophe with dire implications for the whole Sahel region, terrorism and migration – yet few seem to notice, let alone care.
Long August evenings of anti-migrant riots, led by the thuggish UK counterparts of European neofascist racists and xenophobes, are a reminder of how disruptive and divisive an issue migration is in all the western democracies. The violence brought the sense of global dysfunction close to home for many living in post-Brexit Britain’s economically deprived areas.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the wealthy wolves of Wall Street and other financial centres were busy making their own contribution to international insecurity with an irresponsible, rollercoaster display of record stock market instability. Yet jobbers’ jitters surely reflect the fears and uncertainties of a world running clean out of control.
Speaking of control, the “indispensable” country that much of the world looks to in times of trouble spent August hopelessly distracted by domestic political tumult. Don’t expect the US to sort things out, unless Joe Biden produces a parting rabbit. Harris v Trump is shaping up to be the knock-down, scratch-your-eyes-out, photo-finish fight of the century.
Who knows? Maybe September will be calmer.
Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
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