I suddenly found myself thinking it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

This letter was originally published on 3 August 2014. Brian Eno is an artist, musical innovator, record producer for artists ranging from David Bowie to U2 and Coldplay. He is president of Stop the War Coalition.

Dear All of You,

I sense I’m breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can’t keep quiet any more.

Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shredded (the hospital’s word) by an Israeli missile attack – apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are – hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.

I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won’t sign up to it.

What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But – for Christ’s sake! – it’s not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don’t get it. I really hate to think its just the power of AIPAC… for if that’s the case, then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don’t think that’s the reason… but I have no idea what it could be.

The America I know and like is compassionate, broadminded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can’t work it out: I know you’re not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren’t heard or registered?

How come it isn’t your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears the word ‘America’? How bad does it look when the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn’t and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?

I was in Israel last year with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in Jerusalem. Showing us round were a Palestinian – Shadi, who is her sister’s husband and a professional guide – and Oren Jacobovitch, an Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service under a cloud for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them we got to see some harrowing things – Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire mesh and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and laughter; a whole village evicted and living in caves while three settler families moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a hill diverting its sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland below; The Wall; the checkpoints… and all the endless daily humiliations. I kept thinking, “Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?”.

As for the Peace Process: Israel wants the Process but not the Peace. While ‘the process’ is going on the settlers continue grabbing land and building their settlements… and then when the Palestinians finally erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered and shredded with state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells because Israel ‘has a right to defend itself’ ( whereas Palestine clearly doesn’t). And the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up someone’s olive grove while the army looks the other way.

By the way, most of them are not ethnic Israelis – they’re ‘right of return’ Jews from Russia and Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and Brooklyn who came to Israel recently with the notion that they had an inviolable (God-given!) right to the land, and that ‘Arab’ equates with ‘vermin’ – straightforward old-school racism delivered with the same arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of Louisiana used to affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It’s like sending money to the Klan.

But beyond this, what really troubles me is the bigger picture. Like it or not, in the eyes of most of the world, America represents ‘The West’. So it is The West  that is seen as supporting this war, despite all our high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear that all the civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and Western Culture are being discredited – to the great glee of the mad Mullahs – by this flagrant hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification that I can see  – but it doesn’t even have any pragmatic value either. It doesn’t make Kissingerian ‘Realpolitik’ sense; it just makes us look bad.

I’m sorry to burden you all with this. I know you’re busy and in varying degrees allergic to politics, but this is beyond politics. It’s us squandering the civilisational capital that we’ve built over generations. None of the questions in this letter are rhetorical: I really don’t get it and I wish that I did.

In September 2018, Brian Eno alongside a host of artists wrote published an open letter supporting the appeal from Palestinian artists to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 hosted by Israel. “Until Palestinians can enjoy freedom, justice and equal rights, there should be no business-as-usual with the state that is denying them their basic rights.”

So: may I make something absolutely clear: I think Donald Trump is a complete disaster. And Brexit is a disaster too. That said, what I think is an even greater disaster is that we in the US and the UK – and increasingly the rest of the world – live inside political systems that can produce absurd results like these.

We now see political careers built upon lies and deceit and encouraged by openly biased media organisations, more concerned about revenue and ratings than giving the public real information. It’s this whole system that has to change: not just who leads the government but something deeper and more fundamental in our political and social processes. Democracy assumes an informed public: it doesn’t work if the media are corrupt. Changing the faces at the top doesn’t alter anything if the whole machinery beneath them stays the same – the rich become the super-rich, the middle class stagnates and the poor get poorer.

My hope – the only hope really – is that Trump in office will reveal himself for what he really is, and that the public will roundly and unequivocally reject him and everything he stands for – his terrible policies, his jingoism, his arrogance, his childishness, his lies, his prejudices and his small-mindedness. In rejecting Trump we’ll also start to take down the whole malignant media-political structure that so lovingly nurtured him.

As I’ve written before, I believe that Trump can turn out to be not the beginning of a long decline, but the end of one – the turning point. For 40 years we’ve been sliding into a deepening pit of inequality, fear-driven nationalism and conservatism, and mostly not noticing. Trump’s presidency could inadvertently change that – not because he’s going to do anything right but because his election is energising people to come to grips with the fact that their political system is fundamentally broken and it’s time to do something about it. The demonstrations that happened last weekend are a reflection of this new mood.

It would have been better if we hadn’t got to this point, but that’s where we are. My feeling is that a Clinton presidency (or even a ‘remain’ vote in Britain), though more comfortable in the short term, wouldn’t have dealt with the fundamental problems that beset both our political systems. Trump has proven beyond doubt that the system is broken, so let’s fix it.

The basic message of gospel is ‘everything’s gonna be alright’, and that’s a fantastic message, says Brian Eno.

Interviewed by The Quietus in April 2016, Brian Eno explained why gospel music moved an atheist like him so much. Doris Sykes, singing here He’ll Make Everthing Alright, is one of Eno’s favourite gospel singers.

With gospel, why do you feel so deeply affected by it? It being a religious music and you…

…not being religious. Well, there’s something I like about it as a music form, which is that it involves a lot of people who aren’t professionals. Most of the people you hear in the recordings are not being paid anything. I think that really makes a difference. They’re there as a kind of community who are there for some other reason than ‘this is my job’. Nearly everybody there has a day job and so I kind of like the idea that people really are doing this for the sheer commitment of it. They don’t have to do it. They could be doing something else with their time. This is the one time of the week for those people when, suddenly, they can be this person and you can hear that incredible liberation coming out of it.

I was worried about it at first. Why am I so moved by a music based on something that I just don’t believe in? What I started to think was that one of the things we humans like doing is surrendering. We love to be in a situation where we’re out of control, in a sort of controlled form. We constantly pitch ourselves into situations like books, or films, or sex, or drugs, or music, where we’re taken somewhere where we didn’t expect to go and it’s amazing. It’s lovely to do it with a group of other people who are also being taken.

I think that kind of consolidates something very important in humans, which is the idea that we are good at two things: we’re good at controlling – we know that because of all our technologies and our ability to take over the world and fuck it up – but we’re also good at letting ourselves go and being carried along with things. If you think about it, that must be what animals mostly have to do. Animals can’t take control of their affairs in the way that we can. But what they can do is learn how to go with the flow. They pick up on things, they’re sensitive, they’re intuitive in ways that we admire and would like to be. But to be like that you have to surrender. You have to stop trying to push the control button all the time. You have to say, “Okay, I’m not in control anymore. I’m going with it.”

Ideally, what you’re doing on the axis between control and surrender is you’re finding the right place to be at any moment in your life. Sometimes you can take control, sometimes you can do precisely what you wanted to do without interference. There are lots of times in your life where that isn’t going to be possible so you have to have another strategy and that involves some kind of surrender. Partly having faith in the other people who are with you, but also having faith in everything. The basic message of gospel is ‘everything’s gonna be alright’, and that’s a fantastic message. A message of optimism. All of these songs, if you listen to them, even the ones that are quite gloomy, they’re really saying ‘it’s gonna be alright’. You’ll get through it. That’s the message I want to hear.

This is an extract from an article in The Quietus in which Brian Eno described his 12 favourite records. Read the full interview here…