The Fuse of History Is Lit

Earlier this month a British academic named Michael Rainsborough wrote an insightful essay on the United Kingdom’s descent towards civil war. Once the head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, Rainsborough was dismissed from his post for committing a series of “thought crimes.” His final offense came in the form of a co-authored essay entitled, “The British Road to Dirty War,” in which he and former colleague David Betz diagramed “the hollowing out of British democratic institutions” and the dangerous rule of a permanent governing class filled with authoritarian elites. Now working in Australia, Rainsborough returns...