EDITOR'S LETTER
HISTORY MAKES PEOPLE MAKE HISTORY
The butterfly effect: Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides (2024), directed by Jia Zhangke
In the opening chapters of War and Peace, the protagonists – minor members of the Russian aristocracy – gather for an intimate soirée of dancing and gossip. We are on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, a historical event of such magnitude that its consequences still reverberate over 200 years later in the form of the war in Ukraine. The central theme of War and Peace is the relationship between history and the apparently insignificant concerns and actions of ordinary individuals. Tolstoy’s drama contrasts the trembling heart of a teenage girl with a crush against the travails of the Emperor of Europe. One is considered insignificant, even silly, and forgettable; the other as important as can be, soon to be turned into chapters in leather-bound books. But in the novel it becomes hard to tell them apart. History, in Tolstoy’s telling, makes a folly of them both; it is a vast, collective novel without an omnipotent central narrator, where both the teenager with a girlish crush and mighty Napoleon are unwitting characters written in someone else’s book.
This interplay of personal and historical is vividly evoked in Jia Zhangke’s epic Caught by the Tides (2024). The film was shot over 20 years, and contains documentary footage as well as dramatic vignettes, following an everywoman, Qiaoqiao (played by Zhao Tao, Zhangke’s wife and frequent collaborator), as she drifts through the social, urban and technological transformations of China in the 21st century. Against this immense backdrop, and all in search of her lost lover, Qiaoqiao makes her way from karaoke halls to large-scale demolition sites, from poverty, corruption and violence to a women’s support group in a Christian church where, starving, she finds some comfort in the form of a stolen packet of noodles. Yet from the vanishing riverbanks of the Three Gorges to the sanitised and pristine streets of a post-Covid future, her journey is less romantic and more spiritual, a pilgrimage in which she moves through the tumult of history as the very fabric of the world around her is transformed.
The rise of China since the turn of the century has long been underestimated, misunderstood and sometimes regarded with suspicion in the West. It remains, arguably, the fastest and greatest feat of development and modernisation in human history. In the film’s opening scenes, Zhangke contrasts the rich social and communal fabric of his characters with their stark material poverty; towards the end, this has warped into a profounder alienation, induced by a supermarket brimming with technicoloured produce.
Qiaoqiao is identified in the film with a butterfly leitmotif, as if to underline her fragility in the midst of the storm. She lives a life shaped by forces too vast to fathom, let alone control. Yet on history’s stage, she struts with style, retaining a granite-like sense of personal dignity even in her most abject moments, looking for a chance to assert herself. In a scene reminiscent of Zhangke’s earlier film Unknown Pleasures (2002), Qiaoqiao tries to storm out of a stationary bus in a rage after being told by her lover that he is going to leave town without her. Twelve times she rises to leave the bus and is pushed back to her seat – like a butterfly bouncing off a window – before he finally gives up and allows her to get out.
Obstructed but not stopped. She is subject to history, but history in turn is made by her actions and decisions. In an uncanny encounter towards the end of the film, she stops to chat with a robot wandering the sterile aisles of a superabundant store. In her version of the butterfly effect, she co-authors a Chinese present brimming with future.
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The Terminator (1984) was a box office hit, combining action and sci-fi with comic effect, as was the trend in Hollywood at that time. In this case, the comedy had much to do with leaning into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robotic acting and unshakable Germanic accent as powerful tools of characterisation. Arnie had no trouble convincing us that he was a robot – we just had to be convinced that he was from the future and not the small Austrian town of Thal. In the final scenes – the big reveal – his human skin and flesh are burnt off to shockingly reveal his metal skeleton and burning red eye (a nod, no doubt, to that other great AI antagonist of cinema, HAL 9000).
When the Israelis bombed the first hospital in Gaza back in November of 2023, they claimed it was Hamas’s own doing. Later, they said it was in fact the IDF, but a mistake. Then, they offered up a hurriedly generated 3D model of the supposed terrorist command and control centre under the hospital. Denial turned into accusation turned into obfuscation and eventually, justification. Like an unending ladder into a hellish basement, every step led in the same direction: crime led to bigger crime, murder to mass-murder, atrocity to genocide.
Two years on, the Terminator is not so shy. One damaged hospital has turned into a total erasure of all hospitals without so much as a blink. A five-hundred-pound bomb released over a seaside café hosting a birthday party is just an everyday event, just words and numbers. And behind this industrial-scale slaughter machine is the glowing menace of new AI technologies, the fruits of our progress as a species turned into a deadly dish served with relish.
The “Lavender” AI recommendation system, for example, dispassionately identifies targets to be obliterated, sometimes by automated quadcopters and the ghoulishly named “Where’s Daddy?”, which allows said targets to be followed into their homes so that a strike there can wipe out the entire family. In our current hellish reality, the Terminator no longer bothers with banter, 1980s fashion or a layer of human flesh. The IDF stumbles through the ruins in full metal jacket to get on with its grim task, barely stopping to film a TikTok along the way.
When I wrote about the genocide in Gaza back in 2024, I had to fact-check several times the claim that the total explosive power unleashed on the tiny strip of land had exceeded three Hiroshima-sized bombs, something that sounded unearthly and unimaginable. Eighty years on from the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan this July, now eight times the destructive power of Fat Boy has been unleashed over Gaza, an area barely the size of inner London. Yet another shocking fact that we can add to the many others that fail to elicit a response from what appears to be an unshockable world.
Or so it seemed. Over the last two years, we have tried to use our platform to write and draw attention to the genocide; to attend marches, meetings and mournful benefit dinners, always with the sinking feeling that none of it would, or could, make any difference. The UK government continues to provide weapons as well as legal and diplomatic cover for Israel, while the mood and the sentiment of the people of the UK are evidently on the side of the Palestinian cause. You can see that represented not just in numerous polls and marches but also in the 800,000 people who have, so far, joined a new and as yet unnamed political party with the explicit aim of blocking all arms sales to Israel.
When direct action by citizens became a serious hindrance for Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems, the UK government stepped in by proscribing Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. In a staggering reveal worthy of the Terminator, the machinery of power was laid bare for all to see: no need for human flesh to cover the skeleton of the Israeli killing machine and the supporting arms-industrial complex.
On Saturday 9 August 2025, almost 500 people were arrested by the police in London for a sitting protest and holding signs that read, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. This was the largest number of people arrested by the force on a single day in the last ten years. Most of those arrested were over the age of 60, including the 75-year-old Chris Romberg, a former army officer and son of a Holocaust survivor, who told journalists that he had come to London from North Wales.
From history, we inherit not only the rules and conditions of production and governance, but the very sensibilities, emotional reflexes and limits of imagination that they produce. Like Qiaoqiao, we are battered about by history, but history in turn is formed by what we choose to do. As the ranks of the grey-haired in the backs of police vans prove, an individual is not simply an agent in history but also its parent – or grandparent. Masoud Golsorkhi