We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.

Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.

Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?

Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies. After a few hours of studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a conversation with a real human being.

Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book. What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts. The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.

Weapons of mass disinformation

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…

I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes. Who hasn’t clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory of how you got here in the first place?

That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe. Some of the founders of this country were unashamed conspiracy-mongers. What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion (as anyone paying attention to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).

Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us. As New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in his book The Chaos Machine, “This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

The lost art of saying hello

Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment. Nor can Donald Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing genuine harm to yourself.

In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”? Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people? Or the explosion of those baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich, claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to grieve for their own son?

No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even deeper than that.

When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.” According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still, the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the survey’s authors called a “loneliness epidemic.”

When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night. Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics. But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee or a phone call with them.

I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials. Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it). All the while, powerful interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.

Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t be found in Washington, D.C.

One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures — human connection. The lost art of saying hello.

Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media era, we should know better than to believe those empty paeans used as cover for the relentless pursuit of profits. Now more than ever, it’s time to step away from those weapons of mass disinformation.

I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them. Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.

Andy Kroll writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is an investigative journalist with ProPublica based in Washington, D.C. His just-published book is A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy. Follow him on Twitter @AndyKroll.

Copyright ©2022 Andy Kroll — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 December 2022
Word Count: 2,316
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Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn’t help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city’s homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there. Other warning signs indicated that you could only sit for 30 minutes at a time at the food-court tables, while barriers had been placed where benches used to be to make it that much harder to congregate, no less sit down.

With winter descending on the capital, all this struck me as particularly cruel when it came to those unfortunate enough to be unhoused. That sense of cruelty was heightened by the knowledge that legions of policymakers, politicians, and lobbyists — with the power to pass legislation that could curtail evictions, protect tenants, and expand affordable housing — travel through Union Station regularly.

When I left D.C., I headed for my hometown, New York City, where Penn Station has been made similarly unwelcome to the homeless. Entrances are closed; police are everywhere; and the new Moynihan terminal, modern and gleaming, was designed without public seating to ward off unwanted visitors. Worse yet, after a summer spent destroying homeless encampments and cutting funding for homeless services, New York Mayor Eric Adams recently announced that the city would soon begin involuntarily institutionalizing homeless people. Rather than address a growing mental health crisis among the most marginalized in his city with expanded resources and far greater access to health care, housing, and other services, Adams has chosen the path of further punishment for the poor.

It’s a bitter wonder that our political capital and our financial capital have taken such a hard line on homelessness and poverty in the richest country on the planet. And this is happening in a nation in which eight to ten million people lack a home entirely or live on the brink; a nation that reached record-high rents this year (with three-quarters of our largest cities experiencing double-digit growth in prices); that spends more on health care with generally worse outcomes than any other advanced economy; and that continues to chisel away at public housing, privatize health care, and close hospitals, while real-estate agencies, financial speculators, and pharmaceutical companies enrich themselves in striking ways.

Walking around Union Station, I also couldn’t help thinking about the administration’s decision to end the recent rail strike by stripping workers of their right to collective bargaining and denying them more than a day of paid sick leave a year. The president claimed that breaking the strike was necessary to protect the economy from disaster. Yet little attention was given to the sky-high profits of the railroad companies, which doubled during the pandemic. The price tag for more paid sick leave for union workers was estimated at about $321 million annually. Compare that to the $7 billion railroad companies made during the 90 days they opposed the strike and the more than $200 million rail CEOs raked in last year. In the shadow of such figures, how could paid sick leave during an ongoing pandemic be anything but a basic necessity for front-line workers?

The deeper meaning of Democracy

All of this left me thinking about the ongoing debate over American democracy, not to mention the recent Georgia runoff where Senator Raphael Warnock, even as he celebrated his victory over Herschel Walker, pointed to the negative impact of voter suppression on the election. Today, the rise in outright authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism in our body politic poses a genuine danger to the future health and well-being of our society. At the same time, a revived pro-democracy movement has also begun to emerge, committed to fighting for free and fair elections, the rule of law, and the peaceful transfer of power. But let’s be honest: if we stop there, we cheapen the noble urge for a truly decent democracy.

It’s precisely when our governing ideals are under ever more intense attack that you should ask what we mean by invoking democracy. Do we mean an electoral system shaped by the will of the majority? If so, given growing voter suppression tactics, our system is already a far cry from any democratic ideal. Or do we mean more? In fact, shouldn’t democracy mean more?

For me, a democratic society means that everyone, including the poor, has a say in how our lives are lived and workplaces organized. It’s a society in which the homeless aren’t criminalized, the health of workers is protected, and people are treated with dignity by a government of their choice. And I truly believe that, when you strip away the partisan rhetoric and political spin, this is a vision shared by a majority of Americans.

In response to Mayor Adams’s encampment sweeps this summer, one homeless man interviewed by the Guardian offered this explanation: “Fascism works like that — as soon as there’s a tightening of the belt or any sort of shift into harder times, that fascist and oppressive elements within countries will immediately try to attack the most vulnerable.” So how do we fight such an emboldened threat and the dangers faced by those at greatest risk among us?

I certainly don’t have the full answers to such questions, but a partial solution, I suspect, lies in building a pro-democracy movement attuned not just to elections (and the legal fights that, these days, regularly go with them in Congress and state legislatures), but to the needs and dreams of everyday people. And that would require a willingness to reach into communities that have all too often been forgotten or abandoned and earnestly follow the leadership of the people who live there.

Permanently organizing the unorganized

At this time of year, some communities celebrate Las Posadas, re-enacting Jesus’s birth in the humble city of Bethlehem. Though many of us have been taught to imagine that birth as a moment of tranquility, there is, in fact, great hardship and conflict at the heart of the nativity scene. Indeed, Jesus was born in a time of tremendous violence and injustice. In the days leading up to his birth, a militarized police force had pushed migrant people back to their lands of origin so that the authorities could demand taxes and tributes. The local ruler had sent out spies to ensure that his authority wasn’t challenged and, lest anyone dare to do so, had ordered thousands of young Jewish boys murdered. Amid that swirl of state-sanctioned violence, Mary and Joseph were driven from their home, forcing Mary to give birth in a small, dirty manger. Jesus, in other words, was born homeless and undocumented in the land of empire.

During Las Posadas, communities from the Bronx to Los Angeles retell that story, highlighting the gentrification of neighborhoods that’s pricing out the poor, unjust immigration policies that are unfairly separating families, and a housing crisis that’s left millions in need of — dare I use the word? — stable living quarters during the holidays. Included in the social critique that lurks behind Las Posadas is the belief that everyday people should have the right to determine the course of their own lives, rather than be pawns to the machinations of the wealthy and powerful.

In Texas and New Mexico, the Border Network for Human Rights celebrates Christmas among the thousands of families it’s been working with for the past 20 years. Fernando Garcia, its director, has taught me much about organizing among the poor and dispossessed, offering a vision of “permanently organized communities.” At the heart of the Border Network’s vision is the idea of organizing an enduring network of connected families living in that part of our country. As for its focus, as Garcia explains it, “Whatever issue they feel that they need to tackle is the priority.”

Building durable and lasting organized communities, especially among those most impacted by injustice, is something a pro-democracy movement should take seriously indeed. In fact, it’s one place where, all too sadly, we lag behind the forces of authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism. In many poor communities, politicized reactionary churches and parachurch organizations are already well practiced in providing not just political and theological messaging and training, but material aid and a sense of belonging to hurting people. Those concerned with justice and inclusion would do well to follow suit. In the coming years, movements dedicated to democracy and our economic flourishing need to invest time and resources in building permanently organized communities to help meet the daily needs of impacted Americans, while offering a sense of what democracy looks like in practice, up close and personal.

As the threat of yet more political turmoil and escalating violence looms, isn’t it time to break through the isolation that so many people feel with a new sense of collective power? Which brings me to a larger point: in order to build a pro-democracy movement capable of contending with the influence of authoritarianism and bad theology, we need to leave progressive bubbles and silos and commit ourselves to organizing the unorganized — and following their lead.

The newly launched Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) offers a helpful template. The USSW emerged from the Fight for $15 movement and a long history of Southern organizing. Calling for “community unionism,” it intends to link labor struggles to community life, while supporting workers as they fight for justice.

Awakening the sleeping giant

Before the Covid-19 pandemic first began spreading across the fissures of racism and poverty in our society, not to speak of the current crisis of inflation and impending recession, there were already 140 million Americans who were either poor or a $400 emergency away from poverty. Those numbers have only grown. Some poor people are already politically active, but many aren’t — not because the poor don’t care but because politics-as-usual doesn’t speak to the daily stresses of their lives.

There is, in other words, a sleeping giant out there that, when awakened, could shift the political and moral calculus of the nation. Were that mass of poor, impacted people to begin to believe that democracy could mean something real and positive in their lives, watch out. Should that happen — and, as Frederick Douglass once said, “those who would be free themselves must strike the first blow” — you could end up with a pro-democracy movement that would be unstoppable.

Almost five years ago, I helped launch the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival alongside Bishop William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, as well as my colleagues at the Kairos Center, and thousands of directly impacted people, community organizers, and religious leaders. Our core theory of change, drawn from our study of history, is that the most transformative movements in our national storybook have always relied on generations of poor, deeply impacted people coming together to help lead a national change for the better.

Part of our analysis is that poor people nationwide could become a transformative voting bloc if only politics were more relevant in their lives. In 2021, the Poor People’s Campaign released a report on the impact of poor voters in the 2020 elections. It showed that, contrary to popular belief, poor and low-income people made up a remarkably sizable percentage of the electorate (and, surprisingly enough, an even larger percentage in battleground states). Looking at racial demographics among such voters, the report found that turnout was significant, whatever their race. Given the total vote share for Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats that year, the data even challenged the notion that poor white voters were a crucial part of Donald Trump’s base.

Today, our electoral system has become gridlocked and increasingly gerrymandered to empower minoritarian rule at the expense of the will of the majority. Thanks to that, it can often feel as if the country is evenly split on issues ranging from healthcare, housing, and jobs to abortion and environmental protection. But non-partisan polls continue to reaffirm that the majority of the country supports more economic, racial, and gender justice. Results from ballot measures in the midterm elections reflect a similar reality, whether it was people in various states voting to protect the right to abortion, passing higher minimum wage laws, or expanding Medicaid.

And contrary to what too many of our politicians and the media that support them claim, this country can indeed afford such widely popular and deeply needed ballot measures and policies. In fact, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stieglitz wrote in his award-winning The Price of Inequality, the question is not whether we can afford housing, healthcare, paid sick leave, living wages, immigrant rights, and more; it’s whether we can afford not to — especially since failing to address the people’s needs weakens our democracy.

In fact, right before the midterms and the beginning of the holiday season, retired professor of humanities Jack Metzgar wrote at Inequality.org: “Because the wealth of the wealthy confers both economic and political power, we cannot adequately defend democracy if we go on allowing our economic oligarchy a completely free lunch… Next time you hear a politician say ‘we’ can’t afford something that clearly needs doing, just stop a moment and think — about what a wealth tax on a very small proportion of Americans could accomplish.”

Indeed, it can be done! Si, se puede! After all, isn’t this the true story of Christmas? So, this season, when you listen to Handel’s Messiah, attend to the words about lifting from the bottom up: “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

As 2022 comes to a close, this is where I draw hope and inspiration.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Copyright ©2022 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 December 2022
Word Count: 2,291
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Arizona is ground zero for the wackiest theories and craziest political candidates.

Exhibit A: Kari Lake, the Republican who ran for governor in the recent midterm elections. Though she lost in November, she’s still campaigning — on social media, in the courts, and in her own beclouded imagination. She refuses to accept that Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, won by 0.6% of the vote. It’s a delusion she shares with Donald Trump who tweeted that Lake should be “installed” in the position anyway, like a triumphant coup leader. Lake, Trump, and all-too-many Americans now believe that any election in which a MAGA extremist doesn’t achieve a pre-ordained victory is, by definition, “stolen.”

Then there’s Blake Masters, the losing Arizona Republican Senate candidate, who accused the Biden administration of encouraging millions of immigrants to enter the United States “to change the demographics of our country.” That’s a clear reference to the “great replacement” theory according to which outsiders (foreigners, non-Whites, Muslims), abetted by liberals and globalists, are using immigration and higher birthrates to replace “indigenous” White majorities. It has become ever more popular among White nationalists, alt-right activists, and mass murderers from El Paso to New Zealand who cite it in their manifestos.

Perhaps the craziest of that crew is Ron Watkins, the leading proponent of the QAnon cult of misinformation, who moved to Arizona to run for Congress. According to QAnon, an international cabal of Satanic pedophiles extract and consume a mysterious substance found in the bodies of trafficked children. Oh, and these well-connected devil-worshippers also control the United Nations, the global economy, and even the Oscars.

Watkins never made it out of the primaries, but Lake and Masters ran very close races, while other conspiracy theorists did win seats in the Arizona state senate, including election-denier Wendy Rogers, January 6th insurrection attendee Anthony Kern, and QAnon supporter David Farnsworth. Don’t be fooled by their campaign literature. Those Arizona Republicans and others like them across the country are not conservatives. Rather than preserve the status quo, they want to overturn democratic institutions, as well as elections.

Their success should come as no surprise. A large number of Arizonans believe that the government lies about everything from the Covid pandemic to the availability of water, and paramilitary groups like the Patriot movement have made inroads into that state’s politics. The three most widespread and demonstrably false far-right narratives — globalist-Satanists control the economy, elections are being “stolen,” and foreigners are out to “replace” Whites — flourish in a state that, long, long ago, gave the world Barry Goldwater, the original radical right-wing politician.

But it’s a mistake to attribute the strong showing of those far-right candidates solely to such crazy talk. Exit poll data from the last election suggests that Arizona Republican voters prioritized very real bread-and-butter issues like inflation, which was causing them significant hardship. No matter what you think of rising prices, they’re real, unlike the macabre fictions of QAnon. And it wasn’t only White nationalists who supported such candidates. Kari Lake, for instance, picked up 47% of the Latino vote.

Sure, the far right attracts plenty of “deplorables” from outright racists and homophobes to QAnon crackpots. But far more of those who support candidates like Kari Lake and her global counterparts — Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Narendra Modi in India, among others — are actually “persuadables,” voting in their perceived self-interest based on perfectly real economic and political needs. By courting such voters, the far right has managed to pivot from the fringe to the mainstream.

And those same persuadables may now hold the key to the future of democracy.

What motivates far-right voters

Not so long ago, Sweden would have been considered the un-Arizona. In the post-World War II era, that Scandinavian state became the symbol of democratic socialism. Yet even there, the far right has gained ground, precisely by reaching those persuadables.

For one thing, though Sweden is still far more equitable than the United States, it’s no longer quite so socially democratic. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of center-left governments cut back on barriers to the free flow of capital and trade, helping to globalize that country’s economy, and paving the way, in 2006, for a center-right government that implemented neoliberal tax cuts and rolled back welfare programs.

The result: a marked increase in economic inequality. From 1980 to 2019, the transfer of wealth to the richest one percent of Swedes was on a par with Thatcherite England and so, by 2017, that country had a greater per-capita concentration of billionaires than any other in Europe, except Switzerland. In 2019, The Economist reported approvingly on the sheer number of Swedish super-rich and also their apparent popularity.

But not with all Swedes, it turns out. The neoliberal globalization of that economy also produced lots of “losers,” who now support the Swedish Democrats. Founded in 1988 and led by neo-Nazis, that party held early meetings that, according to Le Monde, featured “brown shirts and party members performing the Nazi salute, and their security was provided by skinheads.” After new leaders jettisoned the Nazi trappings and focused instead on the immigrant “threat,” the party began to climb in the polls, coming in second in last September’s elections with 20.5% of the vote and so helping a new right-wing government take over.

To break into the mainstream, that previously marginal party increasingly relied on its populist economic platform, offering to increase government handouts and cut some taxes to appeal to working-class voters and the unemployed. Racism and Islamophobia have certainly played a role in boosting support for it, but the party has benefited most from a surge of anger at the economic austerity policies that have made Sweden one of the least equal countries in Europe.

Across that continent, the far-right has relied on anti-globalization messages, effectively raising a middle finger to both the European Union and world financial institutions. In the east, such parties have won power in both Poland and Hungary, while, in the west, they have siphoned off votes from Communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere.

If opposition to austerity politics has been the meat and potatoes of such far-right parties, the special sauce has been social messaging, especially about immigration. When it comes to ginning up fear and resentment, border-crossers are the perfect scapegoats. The Sweden Democrats, for instance, have promised to deport immigrants who have committed crimes or are simply “asocial” and they don’t want to accept more migrants unless they come from neighboring (in other words, White) countries.

The far right is obsessed with those who cross not just territorial borders, but also the more conceptual borders of gender, sex, and race. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán changed the constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman, while effectively banning adoption by same-sex couples. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared that her party says “yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.” Jair Bolsonaro spent his term as Brazilian president denying the existence of racism in his country while undermining the rights of indigenous communities.

At the heart of such far-right social policies is an effort to assuage the anxieties of dominant groups — Whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians — over the erosion of their economic status and reassure them that they won’t suffer a decline in social position as well. In the process, left and liberal parties, which might once have appealed to voters left behind by globalization and neoliberalism, have lost out on what should have been “their” issues.

Crafted to appeal to voter interests, the far-right agenda can often seem far indeed from the universe of conspiracy theories in which Jews control the world through financier George Soros or leaders of the Democratic Party run a child trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. Still, a major reason for the far right’s success has been its ability to toggle between pragmatic policies and extremist messaging.

Two sides of the same coin

A month before the Italian elections, Giorgia Meloni released a curious six-minute video in which she managed to effortlessly switch from English to French to Spanish. In the process, she denounced Nazism and anti-Semitism, while pledging her support for NATO and Ukraine.

In those six minutes, Meloni introduced herself to the rest of Europe as a multilingual cosmopolitan who rejects the fascist roots of her own party. Inside Italy, the video appealed to those appalled by the far right’s flirtation with Vladimir Putin and concerned that its rise to power might jeopardize the European Union’s financial support. Precisely because Meloni didn’t deliver those remarks in Italian, the speech was less likely to alienate her core nationalist supporters.

The Meloni video is a perfect case of code-switching: speaking in different ways to different audiences. Far-right politicians around the world are often remarkably adept at switching the crazy on and off, depending on their audience. Viktor Orbán has typically been careful to keep his anti-immigration views couched in race-neutral terms. Only when talking to ethnic Hungarians in Romania did he frankly admit that Hungarians don’t want to become a “mixed race.” Pauline Hansen, leader of a far-right Australian party, thought she was addressing a gun lobbyist when she floated the outlandish notion that the country’s worst mass shooting in 1996 was a false-flag operation to boost gun control. Running for the Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance typically voiced many conspiracy-laden views — the 2020 election was stolen, discredited radio host Alex Jones was “a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow” — that he would never have defended before more liberal audiences.

“Dog-whistling” is just another version of this phenomenon, where politicians embed coded language in their speeches to address different audiences simultaneously. References to “law and order,” “family values,” or “globalists” can mean different things to different people. Only the in-crowd will understand the Pepe the Frog image in a right-wing politician’s tweet. Attendees at a Trump rally might hear a catchy tune without realizing that it sounds a lot like the QAnon anthem.

What makes this code-switching and dog-whistling so dangerous is the proximity of the crazy and sane parts of the far right’s discourse. In fact, the three most prominent false narratives just happen to map neatly onto the far right’s three most prominent mainstream appeals.

So, for instance, the economic policies of globalization and neoliberalism have indeed created hardships for certain communities like blue-collar workers, rural residents, and older voters. And while such policies are pushed by powerful institutions like transnational corporations and banks, they are not the result of a Jewish conspiracy, a cabal of Satanists, or a group of globalists with a shadowy “great reset” plan to use Covid to destroy the sovereignty of nations.

Mainstream parties the world over are indeed full of corrupt politicians who often do their damnedest to game the system. Still, the notion that liberals and leftists have “stolen” elections in the United States or Brazil by hacking electronic voting systems or fabricating thousands of ballots has been debunked over and over again.

War, civil unrest, and climate change have indeed created one of the largest waves of refugees and immigrants since World War II. Those poor souls are desperate to find shelter and safety in other countries. But they have no plan to “replace” the majority White populations of Europe, the United States, or Australia. In truth, many would return home if only it were possible.

By their very proximity, the illegitimate arguments borrow a veneer of credibility from the legitimate ones, while the latter derive some raw power from the former. It’s just one short step, for instance, from acknowledging the corruption of political parties to believing they’ve stolen elections. Ironically enough, if anyone’s trying to rig elections, it’s far-right parties — Republicans using voter suppression tactics or Hungary’s Fidesz party controlling the media landscape to reduce the public voice of the opposition. The far-right frequently projects onto its adversaries the very sins it routinely commits behind the scenes.

Worst case, best case

In his September 30th speech announcing the annexation of four provinces of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in his now-familiar uber-nationalism to justify the abrogation of international law. But he also took several bizarre detours. Western countries, he argued, were advancing toward “outright Satanism.” Moreover, the West “is ready to step over everything in order to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder the world.” Finally, he decried all those who tell children ”that there are various supposed genders besides women and men” and offer them “a sex-change operation.”

These were odd assertions in what should have been a speech focused on geopolitics, but Putin was dog-whistling like crazy. He was sending a message to his far-right supporters at home and abroad that he, too, believed Satanic liberals controlled the world and were indeed “grooming” children to change their sexuality and gender.

Unlike Giorgia Meloni, Putin doesn’t need to move to the center to reassure European allies or win over independent voters. The invasion of Ukraine severed his ties to Europe — even to the European far right — and he’s rigged elections in his own favor for years. His unfettered use of false narratives offers a nightmarish look at what would likely happen if far-right politicians around the world were to win ever more elections, rewire democracies to ensure their future dominance, and begin to take over international institutions like the European Union or even the World Bank. Untethered from the compromises of electoral politics, the far right will forget about those persuadables and, like Putin, let its freak flag fly.

It’s still possible to head off the next set of Putins, Melonis, and Trumps at the pass. But that means avoiding the false temptation to promote comparably crazy stuff or appealing to true deplorables. Instead, a coalition of the sane must try to understand the real political and economic reasons why those persuadables vote for Kari Lake and her brethren — and then craft arguments and policies to win them over.

It can be done. Even as Italy turned to the far right, just enough voters rejected Kari Lake and Jair Bolsonaro at the polls. Despite Trump-driven Republican politics and an Elon Musk-driven Twitter, the crazy can be constrained and the radical right rolled back. But that means engaging citizens where it matters most: their heads, their hearts, and above all their pocketbooks.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated. He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy is Songlands. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.

Copyright ©2022 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 December 2022
Word Count: 2,413
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Hey, cheer up because it truly is a beauty! I’m talking about this country’s latest “stealth bomber,” the B-21 Raider, just revealed by Northrop Grumman, the company that makes it, in all its glory. With its striking bat-winged shape and its ability to deliver a very big bang (as in nuclear weapons), it’s our very own “bomber of the future.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it at its explosive debut, it will “fortify America’s ability to deter aggression, today and into the future.” Now, that truly makes me proud to be an American.

And while you’re at it, on this MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) world of ours, let that scene, that peculiar form of madness, involving the potential end of everything on Planet Earth, sink in. As a retired Air Force officer, it reminded me all too vividly of my former service and brought to mind the old motto of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), “Peace Is Our Profession.” Headed in its proudest years by the notorious General Curtis LeMay, it promised “peace” via the threat of the total nuclear annihilation of America’s enemies.

SAC long controlled two “legs” of this country’s nuclear triad: its land-based bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. During the Cold War, those Titans, Minutemen, and MX “Peacekeepers” were kept on constant alert, ready to pulverize much of the planet at a moment’s notice. It didn’t matter that this country was likely to be pulverized, too, in any war with the Soviet Union. What mattered was remaining atop the nuclear pile. A concomitant benefit was keeping conventional wars from spinning out of control by threatening the nuclear option or, as was said at the time, “going nuclear.” (In the age of Biden, it’s “Armageddon.”)

Luckily, since the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world hasn’t gone nuclear again and yet this country’s military continues, with the help of weapons makers like Northrop Grumman, to hustle down that very path to Armageddon. Once upon a time, the absurdity of all this was captured by Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, the satirical 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, which featured a “war room” in which there was no fighting, even as its occupants oversaw a nuclear doomsday. Sadly enough, that movie still seems eerily relevant nearly 60 years later in a world lacking the Soviet Union, where the threat of nuclear war nonetheless looms ever larger. What gives?

The short answer is that America’s leaders, like their counterparts in Russia and China, seem to have a collective death wish, a shared willingness to embrace the most violent and catastrophic weapons in the name of peace.

Nuclear bombers and ICBMs return!

There’s nothing magical about the nuclear triad. It’s not the Holy “Trinity,” as a congressman from Florida said long ago. Even so, it’s worshipped by the U.S. military in its own all-too-expensive fashion. America’s triad consists of bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons (B-52s, B-1s, B-2s, and someday B-21s), those land-based ICBMs, and that most survivable “leg,” the U.S. Navy’s Trident-missile-firing submarines. No other country has a triad quite as impressive (if that’s the word for it), nor is any other country planning to spend up to $2 trillion over the next three decades “modernizing” it. The Air Force, of course, controls the first two legs of that triad and isn’t about to give them up just because they’re redundant to America’s “defense” (given those submarines), while constituting a threat to life on this planet.

Recently, when the Air Force unveiled that B-21 Raider, its latest nuclear-capable bomber, we learned that it looks much like its predecessor, the B-2 Spirit, with its bat-like shape (known as a “flying wing” design) driven by stealth or the avoidance of radar detection. The Air Force plans to buy “at least” 100 of those planes at a projected cost of roughly $750 million each. Count on one thing, though: with the inevitable delays and cost overruns associated with any high-tech military project these days, the flyaway cost will likely exceed $1 billion per plane, or at least $100 billion of your taxpayer dollars (and possibly even $200 billion).

Four years ago, when I first wrote about the B-21, its estimated cost was $550 million per plane, but you know the story, right? The F-35 was supposed to be a low-cost, multi-role fighter jet. A generation later, by the Air Force’s own admission, it’s now a staggeringly expensive “Ferrari” of a plane, sexy in appearance but laden with flaws. Naturally, the B-21 is advertised as a multi-role bomber that can carry “conventional” or non-nuclear munitions as well as thermonuclear ones, but its main reason for being is its alleged ability to put nuclear bombs on target, even without Slim Pickens (“Major Kong” in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) riding down on one of them.

The main arguments for expensive nuclear bombers are that they can be launched as a show of resolve but also, unlike missiles, recalled, if necessary. (Or so we hope anyway.) They have a “man in the loop” for greater targeting flexibility and so complicate the enemy’s defensive planning. Such arguments may have made some sense in the 1950s and early 1960s, before ICBMs and their sub-launched equivalents were fully mature technologies, but they’re stuff and nonsense today. If nuclear-capable nations like Russia and China aren’t already deterred by the hundreds of missiles with thousands of highly accurate nuclear warheads in America’s possession, they’re not about to be deterred by a few dozen, or even 100, new B-21 stealth bombers, no matter the recent Hollywood-style hype about them.

Yet logic couldn’t matter less here. What matters is that the Air Force has had nuclear-capable bombers since those first modified B-29s that dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the generals are simply not about to give them up — ever. Meanwhile, building any sophisticated weapons system like the B-21 is sure to employ tens of thousands of workers. (There are already 400 parts suppliers for the B-21 scattered across 40 states to ensure the undying love of the most congressional representatives imaginable.) It’s also a boondoggle for America’s many merchants of death, especially the lead contractor, Northrop Grumman.

A reader at my Bracing Views Substack, a Vietnam veteran, nailed it when he described his own reaction to the B-21’s unveiling:

Social democracy? Perish the thought. The U.S. economy is propped up by a militarized Keynesianism tightly embraced by Congress and whatever administration is in the White House. So, no matter how unnecessary those bombers may be, no matter how their costs spiral ever upwards, they’re likely to endure. Look for them flying over a sports stadium near you, perhaps in 2030 — if, that is, we’re still alive as a species.

As the Air Force buys new stealth bombers with your tax dollars, they also plan to purchase a new generation of ICBMs, or a “ground-based strategic deterrent” in Newspeak, to plant in missile silos in garden spots like rural Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The Air Force has had ICBMs since the 1960s. Roughly 1,000 of them (though that service initially requested 10,000) were kept on high alert well into the 1980s. Today’s ICBM force is smaller, but ever more expensive to maintain due to its age. It’s also redundant, thanks to the Navy’s more elusive and survivable nuclear deterrent. But, again, logic doesn’t matter here. Whether needed or not, the Air Force wants those new land-based missiles just like those stealth bombers and Congress is all too willing to fund them in your name.

Ka-ching! But hopefully not ka-boom!

Just as the purchase price for the B-21 project is expected to start at $100 billion (but will likely far exceed that), the new ICBMs, known as Sentinels, are also estimated to cost $100 billion. It brings to mind an old saying (slightly updated): a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. In a case of egregious double-dipping, Northrop Grumman is once again the lead contractor, having recently opened a $1.4 billion facility to design the new missile in Colorado Springs, conveniently close to the Air Force Academy and various other Air and Space Force facilities. Location, location, location!

Why such nuclear folly? The usual reasons, of course. Building genocidal missiles creates jobs. It’s a boon and a half for the industrial part of the military-industrial-congressional complex. It’s considered “healthy” for the communities where those missiles will be located, rural areas that would suffer economically if the Air Force bases there were instead dismantled or decommissioned. For that service, shiny new ICBMs are a budget bonanza, while helping to ensure that the real “enemy” — and yes, I have the U.S. Navy in mind — won’t end up with a monopoly on world-ending weaponry.

In the coming decades, expect those “Sentinels” to be planted in fields far from where most Americans live under the guiding principle that, if we keep them out of sight, they’ll be out of mind as well. Yet I can’t help but think that this country’s military is out of its mind in “planting” them there when the only harvest can be of mass death.

It’s a MAD old world

As MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman would undoubtedly have said, “What, me worry?”

Oh, MAD old world that has such nukes in it! Color me astonished, in fact, that America’s nuclear weapons mix hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. That sort of world-ending persistence should tell us something, but what exactly? For one thing, that not enough of us can imagine a brave new world without genocidal nuclear weapons in it.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev actually did so. They came close, in fact, to reaching a deal to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sadly, Reagan proved reluctant to abandon his dream of a nuclear space shield, then popularly known as “Star Wars” or, more formally, as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Since Reagan, sadly enough, U.S. presidents have stayed the course on nukes. Most disappointingly, the Nobel Prize-winning Barack Obama spoke of eliminating them, supported by former Cold War stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, only to abandon that goal, partly to solidify support in the Senate for a nuclear deal with Iran that, no less sadly, is itself pretty much dead and buried today.

If saintly Reagan and saintly Obama couldn’t do it, what hope do ordinary Americans have of ending our nuclear MADness? Well, to quote a real saint, Catholic peace activist Dorothy Day, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” It’s hard to think of a system more filthy or rotten than one that threatens to destroy most life on our planet, so that this country could in some fashion “win” World War III.

Win what, exactly? A burnt cinder of a planet?

Look, I’ve known airmen who’ve piloted nuclear bombers. I’ve known missileers responsible for warheads that could kill millions (if ever launched). My brother guarded ICBM silos when he was a security policeman in SAC. I sat in the Air Force’s missile-warning center at Cheyenne Mountain under 2,000 feet of solid granite as we ran computerized war games that ended in… yep, mutually assured destruction. We were, at least individually, not insane. We were doing our duty, following orders, preparing for the worst, while (most of us, anyway) hoping for the best.

A word of advice: don’t look for those within this nightmarish system to change it, not when our elected representatives are part of the very military-industrial complex that sustains this MADness. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, with real freedom, could act to do so for the benefit of humanity. But will we ever do that?

“We’re going backwards as a country,” my wife reminds me — and I fear that she’s right. She summarized the hoopla at the B-21’s recent unveiling this way: “Let’s go gaga over a mass-murder machine.”

Collectively, it seems that we may be on the verge of returning to a nightmarish past, where we lived in fear of a nuclear war that would kill us all, the tall and the small, and especially the smallest among us, our children, who really are our future.

My fear: that we’ve already become comfortably numb to it and no longer can take on that culture of mass death. I say this with great sadness, as an American citizen and a human being.

No matter. At least a few of us will have profited from building new ultra-expensive stealth bombers and shiny new missiles, while ensuring that mushroom clouds remain somewhere in our collective future. Isn’t that what life is truly all about?

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2022 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2022
Word Count: 2,226
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Mike Savala’s boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.

“Third response today,” said Savala, shaking his head.

This hillside in my own backyard in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains hadn’t seen lightning for months and yet it had still burst into flames. All summer long, it had baked in heat that extended into an unseasonably hot autumn. Now, in late October, it was charred by a fire of mysterious origin. A spark from a wandering hiker? An errant ember from a burn pile? Spontaneous combustion?

Savala, a fire-crew boss for the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians, scanned the sky. Cloudless. There had only been three inches of precipitation since July 1st — 15% of normal. And no wonder, since California is in the throes of its fourth dry year. More than 95% of the state is now classified as under severe or extreme drought.

Although small and easily contained, this tiny fire in rural northeastern California was another wake-up call, up close and personal, about an ominous trend. A warming planet and changing land use are fueling a dramatic surge in forest fires worldwide. Terrifying projections forecast a 57% increase in extreme fires globally by century’s end. The indisputable cause: climate change.

“The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes,” a team of 50 researchers from six continents reported in “Spreading Like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires,” published this year by the United Nations Environment Program. That document describes what can only be viewed as a future flaming version of planetary collapse that could push humanity perilously close to a precipice of no return.

Like dozens of previous reports from the U.N. and other international organizations, it describes a situation that, while dire, isn’t yet hopeless. Despite those ever stronger, hotter, drier winds that will fan the flames, governments could slow climate change by improving their forest management techniques, planning and preparing far better, and communicating more effectively. To reduce the likelihood of future mega-fires means working with forests where fire is an element as essential to ecosystems as sunshine or rain. It also means working with forest communities, where local knowledge accumulated over generations is too often shunned. And of course, it means honestly confronting our reluctance to wean ourselves from the fossil fuels that power our factories, cars, and those absurdly unnecessary leaf blowers that are backing us toward the cliff.

A fiery feedback loop

If my small backyard fire was a personal wake-up call, the 2021 Dixie fire was a four-alarm blaze. On its rampage from the Feather River Canyon through Lassen Volcanic National Park and beyond, it destroyed my adopted town of Greenville, 160 miles northeast of San Francisco. In fact, it torched close to a million acres. Nearly half of them burned so intensely that the once-majestic, now blackened pine and fir forests there may never again support the biologically diverse ecosystems that drew me here so long ago.

The single-largest fire in California’s history, Dixie was part of a record-breaking fire year globally. Around the world, fires burned nearly 23 million acres, an area almost the size of Portugal. Dixie contributed to the worldwide loss to fire of more than a third of the tree cover that disappeared in those 12 months, according to a report from the World Resources Institute. And this is only a preview of what’s to come. Scientists believe that there may be a 30% increase in extreme fires globally by 2050.

Such an acceleration of forest fires will, it seems, spare few parts of the world. Fires, burning longer and hotter, are already flaring in unexpected places, shattering assumptions about what’s safe, let alone normal. Even the Arctic, that remote expanse of sea ice, treeless permafrost, and minus 40-degree Celsius temperatures, home to polar bears, lemmings, and snowy owls, is now beginning to burn. After July 2019, the hottest month on record so far, fires erupted across the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia. As temperatures soared to as much as six degrees Celsius above normal, flames spurted across an expanse of tundra larger than England.

Arctic fires are particularly worrisome because of the vast amounts of carbon locked beneath that frozen soil. Much of it, after all, is peatlands, largely formed at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. Although it covers just 3% of the Earth’s surface, peat sequesters 42% of the carbon stored in all other types of vegetation, including the world’s forests. Global warming is now drying out that peat, making it ever more susceptible to fire. As it burns, of course, it releases that carbon.

Nor is such a bio-feedback loop limited to the Arctic. As the world becomes hotter and drier, the carbon we emit from our reliance on fossil fuels is drying out forests everywhere, making them ever more prone to burn, while extending burning seasons globally. Firefighters in California used to don fire-resistant Nomex shirts in May or June, knowing they could shed them by mid-October. Now, there’s barely a pause before things heat up again and those shirts go right back on.

As wildfires are transformed into year-round challenges, the carbon they release only further contributes to emissions from other sources, making it that much more difficult to halt rising temperatures. Think of it as a mutually exacerbating feedback loop: wildfires are worsened by climate change, which, in turn, is intensified by the ever-fiercer wildfires.

Management for better — or worse

Forests around the world evolved with fire, hosting species that came to depend on its cleansing power for renewal and the flushes of nutrients it releases. Indigenous people understood this and learned to live with fire. Over the last century, however, many forests have been fundamentally altered by a misunderstanding of its essential role in forest resilience. While climate change is indeed the primary driver of the global increase in wildfires, forest management has played its own substantive and mostly negative role in that increase by overemphasizing the importance of fire suppression.

Scientists and policymakers are urging fire-fighting agencies to rethink their use of financial and human resources. Instead of focusing primarily on how many crews can be mustered for fire suppression, the emphasis should shift to planning and prevention. Most countries devote less than 0.2% of their wildfire expenditures to such planning, according to U.N. researchers. In the United States, just 40 cents of every dollar spent on managing wildfires goes toward reducing fire risk or helping forest communities like mine recover in ways that could make them more resilient.

“There isn’t the right attention to fire from governments,” says Glynis Humphrey, a fire expert at the University of Cape Town and one of those U.N. researchers.

Whether it’s the collapse of forest ecosystems before our eyes or the trauma of entire towns like Greenville burning up in raging infernos, forest managers are slowly starting to respond to the global crisis — with sadly mixed results.

A wave of deadly fires in Portugal in 2017 that killed 117 people and ravaged 1.3 million acres evoked fierce popular condemnation of the government’s response, prompting that country to adopt an aggressive 20-year plan to transform its fire management. It aims to use fire as a tool, while increasing understanding of its positive role in such a heavily forested country. Prime Minister Antonio Costa has restricted funding aimed at combatting fires to less than 10% of the total spent, while rural communities are to become more involved in protecting their homes and businesses. However, his new plan was barely launched last summer when temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) and 40-mile-per-hour winds contributed to yet another series of out-of-control wildfires, forcing evacuations of whole communities and a nationwide state of emergency.

Throughout the western United States, a century of public policy committed to suppressing all wildfire has left our forests unnaturally crammed with small-diameter trees and brush. Scientists documented as much as a sevenfold increase in tree density in the Sierra mountains between 1911 and 2011. While large old-growth trees have evolved to live with fires, those small trees and shrubs form an unnatural bed of fuel for future infernos. As a result, blazes in the West increased by seven large fires a year from the mid-1980s through 2011, according to a study by scientists at the University of Utah and the University of California, Berkeley.

What needs to be done is clear, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at Berkeley. “Active stewardship is the only way we’ll ever get out of this.”

In California, state and federal officials have committed to reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires by returning fire to the forest ecosystems that evolved with it. They’ve set a goal of igniting planned fires to burn away such brush and seedlings on one million acres annually. In September 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation allocating $1.5 billion to wildfire mitigation projects, the largest such investment in state history. Last January, the federal government also announced a $600 million program to support California’s wildfire recovery efforts. As well-intentioned as such programs may be, however, they have so far fallen well short of their objective. Fire managers hope that, in 2022, they will have set prescribed burns on 200,000 acres, only 20% of the goal. Add in logging to thin overcrowded stands of trees and they may reach 300,000 acres.

Amid the frightening statistics on rising temperatures and scorched acres, an 8,800-acre area in California demonstrates the potential for active management to reduce the dangers of destructive wildfires. In 2019, Forest Service crews set intentional fires on the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada near Caples Lake. Last summer, when the 222,000-acre Caldor fire roared through there en route to South Lake Tahoe, it left a finger of green where prescribed fires had reduced the forest’s fuels. While that was only a small island of resilience, consider it an enormous example of possibility.

The promise of technology

Some of the government agencies most criticized for their management of wildfires are now turning to technology to help detect them before they turn into infernos. In this, they are not alone globally.  Take Australia, where fires in the catastrophic 2019-2020 summer season, the worst in that country’s recorded history, killed 34 people directly and another 445 through smoke inhalation. Often sparked by lightning at a time of warmer-than-average temperatures and lower-than-average precipitation, they destroyed about 6,000 buildings and killed an estimated 1.5 billion animals. In response, last year, Australia launched a satellite system connected to ground-based cameras and aerial drones meant to spot any fire within one minute of ignition.

Sonoma County, California, has similarly been testing fire-detecting artificial intelligence technology for two years now. In 2017, that area just north of San Francisco was devastated by the deadly 37,000-acre Tubbs fire. Three other fires followed in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, county officials linked artificial intelligence software to an already existing system of tower-mounted cameras. Called ALERTWildfire, it snaps photographs every 10 seconds, exposing smoke and flames. The AI sifts through the camera images in a fashion designed to increase the speed of detecting such blazes and so getting firefighters to them faster.

After the first full season, the results, however, were anything but overwhelming: AI detections beat humans in spotting fires only once out of every 10 times. Now, managers are directing their AI-adapted cameras to look for fires where humans are unlikely to spot them — as Sam Wallis, a community alert and warning manager, put it: the fires “way out in the middle of nowhere, the ones that really scare us.” He’s also optimistic about AI’s potential for detecting nighttime fires, which can smolder in the forest duff for significant periods before bursting into uncontrollable flames. Overall, Wallis said, “the AI is not a silver bullet, but it is a bullet.”

Last year, Pacific Gas and Electric also began adding AI software similar to the kind Australia is testing to its network of cameras. It’s a better-late-than-never effort to reduce the number of deadly wildfires sparked all too notoriously by its own faulty equipment. The company has, after all, been implicated in at least five major California wildfires including the Dixie one.

Then there are the “dragon eggs.” The Forest Service is dropping those ping-pong-sized balls from remote-controlled aircraft to start controlled burns designed to return fire to its natural role of keeping forest fuels more balanced. The chemicals in the spheres ignite when they hit the ground. During the Dixie fire, drones dropped such incendiary balls on a mountainside ahead of the advancing flames to start what’s known as a backfire and did indeed create a fire-unfriendly zone in its wake.

Such management efforts may prove effective both in returning forest stands to a state of fire resilience and in curbing runaway blazes. They don’t, however, relieve officials of what many consider their unconscionable failure to enact the most basic laws to curb the greenhouse gases that are driving such climate-change-induced disasters. Apocalyptic scenes — cities blanketed in smoke, vast landscapes left lifeless — have prompted proposals before the U.N. to include “ecocide” as the 5th international crime, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.

Sadly, humanity may already have passed the point of simply managing ourselves out of the fiery apocalypse scientists predict we’re heading for. Global mean surface temperatures are already up 1.09 degrees Celsius and rising. The precipice looms.

Yes, technology can help and, if the feet of agencies are held to the proverbial flames they’re committed to managing more effectively, the oncoming inferno may yet be slowed, if not halted altogether. But if we don’t take responsibility for what’s happening, all our talk, all that bureaucratic lingo about creating a low-carbon economy and hitting net zero in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 may be little more than what environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called the “blah blah blah.”

Still, hope is empowering and activity galvanizing. While it’s taken far too many destroyed towns to get there, California, at least, is beginning to grasp what’s needed to live with fire. Both cultural and monetary support is now strong — and growing — for prescribed burns and fuel-treatment projects. And so, locally, we take chainsaws to the smaller trees overcrowding our woods, using what we remove to heat our homes. We prune the branches from the large fire-resilient trees, chopping them to fit our stoves. We rake the small debris and forest litter into burn piles, wishing we had a way to utilize those forest products, too, instead of adding to the very emissions we’re trying to reduce. And we keep on igniting small, safe burns to return resilience to these lands that once enjoyed the benefits of fire. On such a planet in such a time, the question remains: Will any of it be enough to live with the fire next time?

Days after our backyard blaze flared up, it snowed: eight inches of reassurance that this fire, at least, would not smolder and restart. But by the end of November, the Sierra had no additional rain and state officials were at the edge of declaring a fourth year of drought. Somewhere in our future, the inferno still lurks.

Jane Braxton Little writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is an independent journalist who writes about science and natural resources for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She moved to Plumas County in 1969 for a summer that has yet to end.

Copyright ©2022 Jane Braxton Little — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 December 2022
Word Count: 2,584
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As of December 8, 2022, Guantánamo Bay detention facility — a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country’s never-ending Global War on Terror — has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days. It told the story of the military officers and staff who received the prison’s initial detainees at that U.S. naval base on the island of Cuba early in 2002. Like the hundreds of prisoners that followed, they would largely be held without charges or trial for years on end.

Ever since then, time and again, I’ve envisioned writing the story of its ultimate closure, its last days. Today, eyeing the moves made by the Biden administration, it seems reasonable to review the past record of that prison’s seemingly never-ending existence, the failure of three presidents to close it, and what if anything is new when it comes to one of the more striking scenes of ongoing injustice in American history.

The beginning

When, in January 2002, those first planes landed at Guantánamo (which we came to know as Gitmo), the hooded, shackled, goggled, and diapered prisoners in them were described by the Pentagon as “the worst of the worst.” In truth, however, most of them were neither top leaders of al-Qaeda nor, in many cases, even members of that terrorist group. Initially housed at Camp X-Ray in open-air cages without plumbing, dressed in those now-iconic orange jumpsuits, the detainees descended into a void, with little or no prison policies to guide their captors. When Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, the man in charge of the early detention operation, asked Washington for guidelines and regulations to run the prison camp, Pentagon officials assured him that they were still on the drawing board, but that adhering in principle to the “spirit of the Geneva Conventions” was, at least, acceptable.

Those first 100 days left General Lehnert and his officers trying to provide some modicum of decency in an altogether indecent situation. For example, Lehnert and those close to him allowed one detainee to make a call to his wife after the birth of their child. They visited others in their cells, talked with them, and tried to create conditions that allowed for some sort of religious worship, while forbidding interrogations by officials from a variety of U.S. government agencies without a staff member in the interrogation hut as well. Against the wishes of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, a lawyer working with the general even called in representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

By the end of March 2002, the U.S. had installed prefab prisons at Guantánamo in which those detainees could be all too crudely housed and had brought in a new team of officers to oversee the operation while pulling Lehnert and his crew out. The new leadership included people reporting directly to Rumsfeld as they put in place a brutal regime whose legacy has lasted, in all too many ways, to this day.

Despite General Lehnert’s efforts, in the nearly 21 years since its inception, Guantánamo has successfully left the codes of American law, military law, and international law in the dust, as it has morality itself in a brazen willingness to implement policies of unspeakable cruelty. That includes both physical mistreatment and the limbo of allowing prisoners to exist in a state of indefinite detention. Most of its detainees were held without any charges whatsoever, a concept so contrary to American democracy and legality that it’s hard to fathom how such a thing could happen, no less how it’s lasted these 7,627 days.

Bush’s prison

As the 35 prisoners still in Guantánamo illustrate, no president has yet found a way to close that prison completely. George W. Bush, who opened it, did eventually acknowledge that it would be best to shut it down. As he put it to a German television audience in May 2006, “I very much would like to end Guantánamo. I very much would like to get people to a court.”

He was, however, anything but decisive on the subject. As he told a White House press conference that June, “I’d like to close Guantánamo, but I also recognize that we’re holding some people that are darn dangerous, and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts. And the best way to handle — in my judgment, handle these types of people is through our military courts.” That month the Supreme Court invalidated the ad hoc military tribunals that had by then been formed at Gitmo and, in the fall of 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, formally creating the courts Bush had imagined.

Pointing out that shuttering the prison was “not as easy a subject as some may think on the surface,” the president then began pursuing another approach — namely, releasing uncharged prisoners and returning them to their home countries or transferring them elsewhere. And his administration did, in the end, release about 540 of the 790 prisoners held there. Gitmo accepted its last prisoner in March 2008.

Meanwhile, a 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting detainees the right to challenge their detention by filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court opened a new path toward future freedom. Twenty-three of those detainee petitions were granted before Bush left office, but the prison, of course, remained open.

Obama’s well-intentioned but failed efforts

Barack Obama initially signaled his desire to close Guantánamo on the campaign trail and then, in one of his first acts as president, issued an executive order calling for it to be shut down within a year. “If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities,” it read, “they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.” With new energy, the Obama administration plunged ahead on the two fronts Bush had halfheartedly pursued: establishing military commissions and transferring certain prisoners directly to their home countries or others willing to accept them.

On Obama’s watch, a reformed version of the Guantánamo tribunals was authorized by the passage of the 2009 Military Commissions Act, resolving five cases, all with guilty pleas. In addition, his administration edged toward closure by transferring nearly 200 more prisoners to willing countries in a vigorous effort over the final year and a half of his presidency. Still, he encountered unanticipated opposition within Congress. Although the military commissions did start anew under Obama, so many years later, their trial of the five prisoners alleged to have been actual 9/11 co-conspirators has still not been scheduled.

In addition, under Obama, numerous habeas corpus petitions were filed in federal court, often falling victim to defeat in appellate courts. As Shayana Kadidal, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ senior managing attorney for Gitmo litigation, summed it up at Just Security: “By 2011, the then sharply conservative D.C. Circuit had rendered it more or less impossible for detainees to prevail on their habeas petitions.”

Obama’s team did seem to add a new possibility for aiding the closure process by transferring one detainee to federal court for trial on terrorism charges. In 2010, Ahmed Ghailani stood trial in New York City for participating in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison on U.S. soil. But in the end, the trial proved fraught with problems, including the fact that the defendant was acquitted on 284 of 285 charges and so it would prove to be not just the first but the last such trial. In fact, in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress included a ban on the transfer to the United States of any further Gitmo detainees for any reason whatsoever.

All told, though the Obama administration poured far more energy into the effort to close Gitmo than the Bush administration had, the president failed during his terms in office to do so. In his last year, Obama continued to push hard with the rallying cry, “Let’s go ahead and get this thing done!” He called for renewed federal trials on U.S. soil and prisoner incarceration in the United States, noting that Guantánamo was “contrary to our values” and “undermines our standing in the world” — not to mention the $450 million annual price tag for keeping it open.

He put the blame for failure squarely on the growing political divide in the country and openly worried about what it meant not to succeed. “I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next President, whoever it is,” he said. And, of course, we know just who he was.

Trump’s “bad dudes”

Not surprisingly, passing Guantánamo on to Donald Trump fulfilled whatever misgivings he had. Unlike Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump displayed no interest whatsoever in closing it. His instinct was to reaffirm its standing as a legal black hole. On the campaign trail in 2016, in fact, he swore that “we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” On taking office, he almost instantly signed an executive order to keep Gitmo open.

Still, no new detainees were actually added during his term in office. In 2020, he even suggested it should house people infected with Covid, but as it turned out, expanding its activities was as elusive a goal for Trump as closing it had been for his predecessors.

While his threats of adding inmates amounted to naught, his presidency basically put that prison camp on pause. He even stopped the process of transferring five detainees cleared for release by the Obama team. Only one prisoner, Ahmed Muhammad Haza al-Darbi, who had pleaded guilty in 2014 in the military commissions, was released during Trump’s time in office. Meanwhile, the military commissions remained essentially stalled on his watch and Congress continued the ban on moving any of the detainees to the U.S.

Biden’s Gitmo

When Joe Biden entered office, 40 prisoners remained at Guantánamo Bay. In his first weeks, his aides called for a formal review of their cases and his spokesperson Jen Psaki announced the administration’s intention to close the prison camp before he left office. Having learned from Obama’s mistakes, however, Biden made no sweeping public promises.

His administration nonetheless put renewed energy into both transfers and trials. The military commissions have indeed ramped up in recent months. Pretrial hearings have recently been held in the four pending military tribunal cases. In addition, plea deals that would take the death penalty off the table are reportedly being negotiated for the five 9/11 defendants.

Three of the five detainees cleared for release by the Obama administration have finally been transferred to other countries, while all but three of the 27 prisoners not cleared when Biden took office have been greenlighted to go home or to a third country. In doing so, several previously blocked thresholds were crossed. As of early 2021, when the government cleared detainee Guled Hassan Duran, it signaled that, for the first time, there was a willingness to release even those who had been subjected to torture while held at CIA “black sites” in the early years after 9/11. The point was made even more strongly three months later when Mohammed al Qahtani, who experienced some of the worst treatment at American hands, was also finally released.

Meanwhile, in September 2022, President Biden appointed former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and former ambassador to Kosovo, Tina Kaidanow, to oversee the transfer of prisoners cleared for release. While her position doesn’t replicate the formidable office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure that Obama established and Trump nixed, it is a promising move. The job of arranging each prisoner transfer, assuring the security of the detainee, and assessing that the release will not pose a danger to the United States is challenging but achievable, as prior releases have demonstrated. All told, recidivism rates for Guantánamo detainees, as reported by the Director of National Intelligence, have been 18.5%, though only 7.1% for those released under Obama.

In the end…?

The last question, these 7,627 nightmarish days later, might be this: Are there any options for the final Gitmo prisoners? In 2017, military defense lawyers Jay Connell and Alka Pradhan, joined by researcher Margaux Lander, pointed out that, under international law, victims of “torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” have the right to full rehabilitation. In addition to seeking the removal of the death penalty in their cases, the 9/11 defendants at Gitmo have reportedly asked for access to a torture rehabilitation program.

Pradhan, who represents 9/11 defendant Ammar al Baluchi has summed the situation up well:

In fact, after all these years in prison, releasing those who might otherwise still stand trial and putting them in rehabilitation centers might indeed be a good idea.

There are many ways to address a wrong. Arguably, the greater its magnitude, the more leeway should be given for subsequent actions. As the Biden administration has taken steps towards closing Gitmo, perhaps the gesture of sending the defendants in the military commissions to rehabilitation programs is a good one.

For years, General Lehnert has told Congress, media outlets, and anyone who would listen that it remains imperative, however difficult, to finally shut the prison down. As he has written, “Closing Guantánamo is about reestablishing who we are as a nation.” It might not quite accomplish that, but it would certainly be a formidable step in that direction. After all, its legacy of torture, indefinite detention without charges or trials, and the reckless disregard for the rule of law will no doubt haunt us for years.

There is no way to fathom the harm caused by the torture, cruel treatment, legal limbo, injustice, and dehumanization that has become the definition of Guantánamo. But for the first time in all these years, its actual closure might realistically be on the horizon. One can always hope, right?

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author most recently of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press). Julia Tedesco, Adam Sticklor, and Claudia Bennett conducted research for this article.

Copyright ©2022 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 December 2022
Word Count: 2,460
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“Welcome back!” read my friend Allan’s email. “So happy to have you back and seeing that hard work paid off. Thank you for all that you do. Please don’t cook this evening. I am bringing you a Honduran dinner — tacos hondureños and baleadas, plus a bottle of wine.” The tacos were tasty indeed, but even more pleasing was my friend’s evident admiration for my recent political activities.

My partner and I had just returned from four months in Reno, working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, on their 2022 midterm electoral campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, with the votes in Nevada’s mostly right-wing rural counties cancelling out those of Democratic-leaning Las Vegas, that union campaign in Reno saved the Senate from falling to the Republicans. Catherine Cortez Masto, the nation’s first Latina senator, won reelection by a mere 7,928 votes, out of a total of more than a million cast. It was her winning margin of 8,615 in Washoe County, home to Reno, that put her over the top.

Our friend was full of admiration for the two of us, but the people who truly deserved the credit were the hotel housekeepers, cooks, caterers, and casino workers who, for months, walked the Washoe County streets six days a week, knocking on doors in 105-degree heat and even stumping through an Election Day snowstorm. They endured having guns pulled on them, dogs sicced on them, and racist insults thrown at them, and still went out the next day to convince working-class voters in communities of color to mark their ballots for a candidate many had never heard of. My partner and I only played back-up roles in all of this; she, managing the logistics of housing, feeding, and supplying the canvassers, and I, working with maps and spreadsheets to figure out where to send the teams each day. It was, admittedly, necessary, if not exactly heroic, work.

“I’m not like the two of you,” Allan said when he stopped by with the promised dinner. “You do important work. I’m just living my life.”

“Not everybody,” I responded, “has a calling to politics.” And I think that’s true. I also wonder whether having politics as a vocation is entirely admirable.

Learning to surf

That exchange with Allan got me thinking about the place of politics in my own life. I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in activism of one sort or another for most of my 70 years, but it’s been just good fortune or luck that I happened to stumble into a life with a calling, even one as peculiar as politics.

There are historical moments when large numbers of people “just living” perfectly good lives find themselves swept up in the breaking wave of a political movement. I’ve seen quite a few of those moments, starting with the struggle of Black people for civil rights when I was a teenager, and the movement to stop the Vietnam War in that same era. Much more recently, I’ve watched thousands of volunteers in Kansas angrily reject the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned a 50-year precedent protecting a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. Going door to door in a classic political field campaign, they defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas constitution, while almost doubling the expected turnout for a midterm primary.

To some observers, in a red and landlocked state like Kansas, that wave of resistance seemed to come out of nowhere. It certainly surprised a lot of professionals, but the capacity to ride it didn’t, in fact, come out of nowhere. When given a choice, it turns out that a substantial majority of people in the middle of this country will vote in favor of women’s bodily autonomy. But many of them won’t do it without a push. To build such a successful electoral campaign required people who’d spent years honing the necessary skills in times when the political seas appeared almost unendurably flat.

Some of those skills, learned through repeated practice, were technical: crafting effective messages; targeting the right voters; navigating coalitions of organizations with sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing priorities. And some might be called “moral skills,” the cultivation of internal characteristics — patience, say, or hope — until they become second nature. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called those moral skills “virtues” and believed we acquire them just like any other skill — by practicing them until they become habits.

You could compare some of us with a political vocation to a surfer sitting on her board constantly scanning the sea ahead, hoping to discern the best waves as they form, hoping she’d practiced well enough to ride them. Like so many surfers of this sort, I’ve probably wiped out more often than I’ve successfully ridden the waves.

Character flaws for justice

“This is the year,” I told a different friend long ago, “that I want to develop character flaws.” She was understandably startled, not least because my character has never been what you might call spotless.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“Because I’m getting ready to work on a political campaign.” I was only half-joking. In fact, doing politics effectively requires habits that don’t come naturally to me — like keeping information close to my vest rather than sharing everything I know with all comers.

There’s a fine line, too, between sitting on information and telling lies. In fact, to do politics effectively, you must be willing to lie. This truth is often taken for granted by those involved. A recent New York Times article about a man who can’t stop lying referred to a study of people’s self-reported truthfulness. Writing about those who admit to lying frequently, reporter Ellen Barry says,

As Barry sees it, politics is self-evidently a profession that compels its practitioners to lie. And I tend to agree with her, though I’m less interested in the lies candidates tell voters to get elected than the ones organizers like me tell people to get them to join, stick with, or fund a campaign.

Often, we lie about whether we can win. As I’ve written previously, I worked on campaigns I was sure we were going to lose, but that I thought were worth fighting anyway. In 1995 and 1996, for instance, I helped build a field campaign to defeat California Proposition 209, which succeeded in outlawing affirmative action at every level of government. We didn’t have much of a chance, but we still built an army of volunteers statewide, in part by telling them that, though our opponents had the money, we had the people capable of engaging voters no one expected to participate.

So, we said we could win because we were thinking ahead. Proposition 209 represented a cynical effort (indeed, its authors called it the California Civil Rights Initiative) to harness white anxiety about what would soon be a nonwhite majority in California. We hoped that building a multi-racial coalition to fight this initiative, even if we lost, would prepare people for the struggles to come.

But did I really know we couldn’t win? At some point, I suppose I traded in one virtue — truthfulness — for another — hope. And then, to project confidence and encourage others to hope as well, I had to start believing my own lies (at least a bit).

The funny thing about hope, though, is that sometimes the lies you force yourself to believe turn out to be true. That’s what happened this year with the campaign in Nevada. You never have enough canvassers to talk to every voter, so you have to choose your main target groups. UNITE-HERE chose to target people of color in working-class neighborhoods who rarely or never participate in elections.

Voters in Nevada are unusual in that more than a third of them (37%) are registered to vote with a small party or have no party affiliation at all. This is the largest single group of voters in the state, and it included many of our targets. Registered Democrats have a 6% edge over Republicans in Nevada, but the question always is: Which way will the people in the mysterious middle vote — for us or them? During two weeks of early voting, I downloaded the statistics on the party affiliations of the voters in Washoe County, where I was working. Democrats were winning the mail-in ballots, but when it came to in-person voting, the Republicans were creaming us. It didn’t look good at all — except that the numbers of small-party or no-party voters dwarfed the consistent edge the Republicans held. Which way would they jump?

I typically kept those statistics to myself, since it wasn’t part of my job to look at them in the first place. In the upbeat daily briefing for our canvassing team leaders, I concentrated instead on reporting the crucial everyday numbers for us: How many doors did we knock on yesterday? How many conversations did we have with voters? How many supporters did we identify? Those numbers I could present with honest enthusiasm, pointing to improvements made, for instance, by working with individual canvassers on how to keep doors open and voters talking.

But the funny thing was this: the hope I was projecting turned out to be warranted. The strategy that failed in California in 1996 — bringing out unlikely voters in communities of workers and people of color — succeeded in Nevada in 2022. When we opened the mystery box, it turned out to contain voters for us.

One more conversation

I once had a friend, Lauren, who, for years, had been a member of one of the political organizations that grew out of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society. She’d gone to meetings and demonstrations, collated newsletters, handed out flyers, and participated in a well-functioning system of collective childcare. One day, I asked her how the work was going.

“Oh,” she said. “I dropped out. I still spend every Wednesday night with Emma [the child whose care she had shared in that group], but I’m not doing political work anymore.”

“But why not?”

“I realized that everything about politics involves making people do things they don’t want to do and that’s not how I want to spend my life.”

Even now, years later, I can see her point. Whether it’s asking my fellow part-time university teachers to come to a union meeting, trying to get a stranger to accept a leaflet on the street, or convincing a potential voter to listen to me about why this election matters and should matter to them, my strange vocation often does involve attempting to get people to do things they don’t particularly want to do.

Of course, it’s because I do believe in whatever I’m trying to move them toward that I’m involved in such politics in the first place. Usually, it’s because I believe that my goal should be their goal, too, whether it’s racial or economic justice, women’s liberation, or just keeping the planet from burning up.

But that leads me to another character flaw politics requires. You could call it pride, or even arrogance; it’s the confidence that I know better than you what’s good for you. Oddly enough, it may turn out that it’s when I’m pushing the most selfish goals — when I’m working for something I myself need like a living wage or the right to control my own body — that my motives stand up best to my own scrutiny.

It’s then that I’m asking someone to participate in collective action for my own benefit, and what could be more honest than that?

Politics as a vocation

“Politics as a Vocation” was the title of a well-known lecture by German sociologist Max Weber. In it, he famously defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Even when the use of force is delegated to some other institution — say, the police — Weber argued that citizens accept the “right” of the police to use violence because it comes from the state. That source of legitimacy is the only thing that separates a police force (so to speak) from any other violent gang.

For Weber, politics meant either leading a state or influencing its leaders. So if a state controls the legitimate use of force, then politics involves deciding how that force is to be deployed — under what conditions and for what purposes. It’s a heavy responsibility that, he claimed, people take on for one of only two reasons: either as a means to an end (which could be anything from personal wealth to ending poverty) or for its own sake — for the pleasure and feeling of prestige that power bestows.

“The decisive means for politics,” Weber wrote, “is violence.” If he was right, then my friend’s intuition that politics is about making people do things they don’t want to do may not have been so off the mark. Even the form of politics that appears to challenge Weber’s premise — the tradition of nonviolent action — involves a form of coercion. Those who willingly expose themselves to political violence are also trying to make people do something they don’t want to do by invoking empathy (and possibly feelings of guilt).

If, in some fashion, all politics really does involve coercion, can a political life possibly be a morally good one? I still think so, but it requires tempering a commitment to a cause with what Weber called the “ethic of responsibility” — a willingness not only to honestly examine our motives but to genuinely consider the likely results when we choose to act on them. It’s not enough to have good intentions. It’s crucial to strive as well for good — if imperfect — outcomes.

“Politics,” Weber said, “is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective.” But there’s another kind of life he also recommended, even if with a bit of a sneer, to those who don’t measure up to the demands of politics as a vocation. Such people “would have done better,” he observed, “in simply cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations.”

And therein lies the greatest moral danger for those of us who feel that our vocation is indeed politics: a contempt for that plain “brotherliness” (or sisterliness) that makes ordinary human life bearable. There’s a saying attributed to Carlos Fonseca, one of the founders of Nicaragua’s revolutionary party, the Sandinistas: “A man [of course, it’s a man!] who is tired has a right to rest. But a man who rests does not have the right to be in the vanguard.”

And there it is, a fundamental disrespect for ordinary human life, including the need for rest, that tempts the activist to feel her calling makes her better than the people she’s called to serve.

In the end, if we do politics at all, it should be precisely so that people can have ordinary lives, ones not constrained and distorted by the kinds of injustice political activists try to end.

“I’m just living my life,” my friend Allan told me. In truth, his life is far more admirable than he believes. I’d say that he has a vocation for kindness every bit as heroic as any political calling. We’re not the only folks he feeds. The day before he visited us, he’d delivered dinner to another friend after her shoulder surgery. He spends little on himself, so he can send most of the money he earns to his family in Central America. During the worst of the pandemic shutdown, he regularly checked in on all the old folks he knows, startling my partner and me into realizing that we’ve lived long enough to fall into the category of elders to be looked after.

At the end of this long political season, back home from Nevada, I find that I’m full of admiration for the life my friend Allan is “just living.” As I wait for the next Trumpist wave to rise, may I remember that “just living” is the whole point of doing politics.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2022 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 December 2022
Word Count: 2,738
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Almost anyone would agree that war is horrifying and peaceful countries should do their best to help its victims. The widespread eagerness to welcome fleeing Ukrainians after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded their country last February is a heartening example of such aid. But behind that altruism lies an ugly truth: most of the countries embracing Ukrainians are simultaneously persecuting equally desperate refugees from elsewhere.

Such unequal mercy would be no surprise from nations like Ukraine’s neighbors Hungary and Poland, controlled by nationalist parties that have rarely welcomed anyone not white and Christian. However, the same thing is happening in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and here in the United States, the very democracies sworn to protect those fleeing war and persecution and that, in the case of America, sometimes turned those people into refugees in the first place. Our Global War on Terror alone has displaced an estimated 37 million people since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

One of the worst examples of this unequal mercy is taking place in Greece, a major gateway to Western Europe for anyone fleeing the Middle East or Africa. Between February and mid-April of this year, some 21,000 Ukrainians made it to Greece — more in three months than the total number of asylum seekers who entered the country in all of 2021. There, the Ukrainians were instantly granted temporary protection status, giving them access to medical care and jobs, subsidized housing and food allowances, schooling for their children, and Greek language classes for adults.

This is an admirable example of how all people who flee danger and war should be welcomed. But I’ve been visiting Greece for years now to research my new book, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, and I know a lot of refugees there who have found no such generosity. Most are Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi, but some are Kurdish or Palestinian, while others come from African countries, including Cameroon, Eritrea, Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and the Republic of Congo.

They, too, escaped war, violence, and other kinds of persecution. In fact, the Syrians, just like the Ukrainians, fled Putin’s bombs when he was helping Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, hold onto power. Yet unlike the Ukrainians, these refugees are forced to languish for years in inhumane, slum-like camps, while their children are denied schooling. They are routinely turned away from hospitals, doctors, or dentists, and are all too often treated with disrespect, even hatred, by landlords, employers, and regular citizens. That hurts. As my friend and co-author, the Syrian writer and refugee Eyad Awwadawnan, whom I first met in Greece, put it, “I think the world should do all it can for Ukrainian refugees, but we are getting a clear message from the Greek government that we are worth less than they are.”

Doomed to helplessness

During my visits to Greece between 2018 and 2022, I witnessed many examples of its appalling treatment of refugees. At one point, in a camp on the Northern Aegean island of Samos, I found more than 3,000 people living in shipping containers or tents in and around an old military base, surrounded by piles of garbage swarming with rats. They had no potable water, the few toilets were broken, the food mostly inedible, and there was no security for women, children, LGBTQ+ people, or anyone else particularly vulnerable to bullying, assault, or rape. Thousands more asylum seekers were similarly trapped on other islands with nowhere to go and nothing to do, while yet others were locked up in Greek prisons for merely exercising their right to seek asylum. In our book, Eyad and I describe the way people are arrested and imprisoned simply for steering their boats to Greece, or for coming from the wrong country.

Since its New Democracy government took power in 2019, well into the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing administration of Donald Trump here in the United States, the Greek government has been ratcheting up its mistreatment of Middle Eastern and African refugees even further. One of its first acts was to evict everyone granted asylum from subsidized housing or camps, while also withdrawing all financial aid. In this way, they were flung into a homeless, jobless void — that is, into forced helplessness. Winning asylum is supposed to mean winning international protected status as a refugee, but in Greece it now means the opposite — getting no protection at all.

Then, in June 2021, just before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the Greek Minister of Migration, Notis Mitarachi, announced that all new arrivals from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria would be denied the chance to apply for asylum and deported to Turkey, which he deemed a “safe third country,” a legal term for a safe haven for asylum seekers. Yet as human rights groups have made clear, Turkey is anything but safe for those in flight from war or persecution. Not only does Turkey refuse to recognize Syrians as refugees, but it never signed onto the part of the U.N. 1951 Refugee Rights declaration banning refoulement, the term used for returning refugees to a country where they may be subjected to persecution. This means that Turkey can legally send refugees back to the nations they fled, no matter what dangers await them there.

Last April 16th, Greece upped its persecution even further by closing the housing it offers vulnerable people, such as victims of torture, trafficking, and rape, and sending them to live in camps where there is no security at all.

None of these policies apply to Ukrainians.

At sea, matters are even worse. The Greek authorities and Frontex, Europe’s border and coast guard agency, have been pushing refugees back out to sea instead of rescuing them. They have left families and children abandoned on flimsy rafts or inflatable boats, or on tiny islands without shelter or food. During the pandemic, Greece and Frontex treated some 40,000 refugees this way, causing at least 2,000 to drown — abuse that’s been well-documented by human rights groups. Yet Greece’s immigration minister has denied that any of this is happening.

No less shocking is the way Greece has criminalized the rescue of refugees at sea. Volunteers who go out to search for and rescue the capsized boats of desperate immigrants are being arrested and charged with human trafficking. Sara Mardini, a Syrian professional swimmer portrayed in Netflix’s new movie The Swimmers, is one of these. If convicted, she faces 20 years in prison.

Hard as it may be to grasp the idea of making it illegal to rescue drowning people, Greece is far from alone in engaging in such behavior. Just this month, Italy, Malta, and Cyprus banded together with that country to call for the European Union (EU) to take measures against civilian sea rescuers. Of course, the train drivers and airplane pilots who brought Ukrainians into the rest of Europe are never similarly targeted.

The Greek government has justified all this unequal mercy with chilling language, declaring Ukrainians “real refugees” and everyone else an “illegal migrant.” In just that spirit, last month, Greek authorities forced Afghans in a camp outside Athens to cede their housing to Ukrainians and instead live in filthy and derelict shipping containers.

That government has long claimed that it is not at fault for treating refugees so badly because it lacks the money and personnel to handle so many of them. But the minute those 21,000 Ukrainians arrived, the same officials suddenly found themselves able to help after all.

Greece is not entirely to blame for such violations of international law, because many of them are underwritten by the EU, which has been pumping money into the country to keep refugees out of Western Europe since 2016. Recently, for example, the EU paid $152 million to the Greek government to build five remote prisons for asylum seekers. I saw the prototype for them on the island of Samos: Camp Zervou, a collection of white metal shipping containers on a bare patch of land in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a double layer of hurricane fences topped with barbed wire and surveilled by closed-circuit cameras. It is hot, bare, and hideous. Such prisons will not, of course, hold Ukrainians.

Breaking hearts and laws

Greece is hardly the only country meting out all this unequal treatment. The persecution of non-white refugees seems to be on the rise not just in countries with far-right governments, but in those previously known for their liberality. Along with this persecution, of course, goes the same sort of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric Donald Trump (not to speak of the Republican Party as a whole) continues to use about those crossing our own border.

Take the United Kingdom, for example. The new Conservative Party Prime Minister Rishi Sunak just offered France $74 million to increase its border security by 40% with the goal of arresting more “illegal migrants” and smugglers to stop them from crossing the English Channel.  (An asylum seeker, by the way, is not an “illegal migrant.” The right to cross borders to seek asylum is enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention.) That same $74 million could have been put toward legal and humanitarian services for asylum seekers, helping them find safe ways to apply for protection in either France or the United Kingdom, and so depriving smugglers of business without throwing those refugees into even further danger.

Within France itself, while President Emmanuel Macron quarrels with the British over who is to blame for the rising number of refugees trying to cross the Channel, Jordan Bardella, the new leader of the country’s increasingly popular far-right party, has rested his entire platform on closing France’s borders to “drastically limit” immigration. He has made it clear that he’s talking about Muslims and Africans, not immigrants like his own Italian parents.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Giorgia Maloni, the new right-wing prime minister, has just issued a decree forbidding male refugees from getting off rescue boats or setting even one foot on Italian soil. Similarly, Sweden, once a bastion of progressive ideas, elected a new government this past September that cut its refugee quota from 5,000 people a year to 900, citing the white supremacist trope that non-white, non-Christian refugees will otherwise “replace” traditional Swedes.

I could go on: France, Greece, Italy, Malta, and Spain are fighting over who will (or won’t) take stranded boats of refugees, pushing those desperate seagoers from shore to shore like so much litter. The Danes are sending Syrians back to Syria, even after they’ve lived in Denmark for years. Australia is incarcerating asylum seekers under horrifying conditions in detention centers and on isolated islands. And Britain has locked thousands of refugees in warehouses, passed laws denying them basic services like health care and housing, and tried to implement a policy of forcibly deporting some of them to Rwanda.

Here in the U.S., we’re not doing much better. True, President Biden has managed to curtail some of the worst of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, undoing the former president’s Muslim ban and raising the number of refugees allowed into the country every year, but his efforts have been inconsistent. Just this October, shortly before the Democrats barely held onto the Senate in the midterm elections, he expanded the Trumpian Title 42 border policy to include Venezuelans, who, only a week or so earlier, were being welcomed into the country. That policy uses Covid fears to force asylum seekers to stay in dangerous, sometimes deadly camps in Mexico, while rendering it virtually impossible for them to even apply for, let alone win, asylum in the U.S. (Biden originally promised to do away with Title 42 altogether, but the Supreme Court blocked his effort. After declaring that he would continue the fight, he now appears to have reversed course.)

Ukrainians are, however, exempted from this Mexican purgatory as a way of “recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine” (to quote the Department of Homeland Security). Some Afghans are similarly exempt, but only those who worked with the U.S. during our devastating 20-year war in their country. Everyone else is kept waiting for months or even years for their asylum decisions, many of them in detention, regardless of the humanitarian crises they also fled.

All the unequal mercies described here are not only breaking hearts, but laws. A little history: In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt and the newly formed United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in reaction to the shocks of the Holocaust and the mistreatment of Jews seeking asylum. Three years later, the U.N. held a convention in Geneva to create a bill of refugee rights, which were ratified into law by 149 nations, including Australia, Britain, Canada, Greece, most of the rest of Europe, and the United States. (Some countries didn’t sign on until 1967.) The idea was to protect the dignity and freedom of human beings everywhere, while never again spurning refugees in the way that had sent so many Jews back to their deaths.

The Geneva Convention defined refugees as people forced to flee their countries because of “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group” and who “cannot return home or [are] afraid to do so.” It gave them the right to international protection from discrimination and persecution; the right to housing, schooling, and the chance to work for a living; the right not to be criminalized for simply seeking asylum; and, most importantly, the right not to be subjected to refoulement — and be returned to the countries they had fled.

Thanks, in part, to that convention, when people are driven to flee their countries, they head for the safety and dignity they believe they will find in the West, a belief we are now betraying. To rectify this, the EU’s governing arm, the European Commission, must insist that Europe’s unequal treatment of refugees be replaced with humane, accessible processes that apply consistently to all asylum seekers, regardless of where they come from. The same should be done in Australia, Britain, and the United States. After all, the way we treat refugees today speaks volumes not only about how humanitarian we are, but about how we are likely to act in the future when climate change forces ever more people to flee their homes just to stay alive.

On the other hand, should we continue to favor white Christian refugees over everyone else, we will not only shred the promises and values enshrined in our democracies, but fertilize the poison of white supremacy already festering in the very heart of the West.

Helen Benedict, co-author with Eyad Awwadawnan of Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, has been writing about refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 books of fiction and nonfiction. She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. (This article originated at TomDispatch)

Copyright ©2022 Helen Benedict — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2022
Word Count: 2,428
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On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country. Even his own family’s neighborhood, the well-heeled Defense Housing Authority complex, had been thoroughly inundated with, as a reporter wrote at the time, “water gushing into houses.”

Having endured 19 years of suffering inflicted by the brute force of imperialism during America’s “Global War on Terror,” Paracha, along with all of Pakistan, will now suffer through the climatic devastation wrought by the invisible hand of economic imperialism. Indeed, even as his family members were embracing him for the first time since that fateful day in 2003 when he was seized in an FBI sting operation in Thailand, governments and corporations throughout the Global North were sharpening their knives, preparing to reassert their dominance as they do at every year’s U.N. climate conference — this one being COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.

But delegates from climate-vulnerable, cash-poor countries like Pakistan and Egypt, along with members of climate-justice movements from across the planet, were also there. Tired of being pushed around, they had other plans.

A breakthrough and an all-too-predictable flop

At previous COPs, negotiations inside the hall were focused primarily on what’s come to be known as “climate mitigation” — that is, trying to keep future greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere — along with adaptation to climate disruptions, past, present, and future. For the first time in official negotiations, COP27 would also feature the demands of low-income, vulnerable countries eager to be compensated for the devastating impacts they, like flooded Pakistan, have already suffered or will suffer thanks to climate change. After all, the global overheating of the present moment was caused by greenhouse gases emitted during the past two centuries, chiefly by the large industrial societies of the global North. In the shorthand of those negotiations, such polluter-pays compensation is known as “loss and damage.”

At previous climate summits, the “haves” resisted the very idea of the have-nots demanding loss-and-damage compensation for two chief reasons: first, they preferred not to admit, even implicitly, that they had created the crisis now broiling and drowning communities across the Global South, and, second, they had no interest in shelling out the humongous sums that would then be required.

This year, however, the shocking death and destruction inflicted by the inundation of Pakistan and more recently of Nigeria stoked an already surging movement to put loss and damage on COP’s agenda for the first time. And thanks to unrelenting pressure from that climate-justice groundswell, COP27 did end with the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the rich world approving an agreement to “establish a fund for responding to loss and damage.” Echoing the thoughts of many, climate justice leader Jean Su tweeted that the deal was “a testament to the incredible mobilization of vulnerable countries and civil society. Much work still to be done, but a dam has broken.”

The euphoria that followed over the creation of a loss-and-damage fund was well justified. But, as Su noted, the struggle is far from over. In a correction to its story reporting on that agreement, the Washington Post made clear that, although the batter had now been mixed, the cake was anything but in the oven. The paper informed readers, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly said wealthy nations agreed to pay billions of dollars into a loss and damage fund. While they agreed to create a fund, its size and financing mechanism have yet to be worked out.” Those two remaining how-much and how-to-do-it questions are anything but trivial. In the loss-and-damage debate, in fact, they’re the main issues countries have been arguing over for many years without resolution of any sort.

If the world does commit sufficient (or even insufficient) funds to pay out on loss and damage (and that’s a truly big if ), vulnerable countries may finally have the means to begin recovering from the latest climate disasters. Tragically enough, however, there’s little question that, as ever greater amounts of carbon and methane continue to head for our atmosphere, whatever the affected populations may need now, it’s likely just a hint of the sort of compensation they’ll need in a future guaranteed to be full of ever-increasing numbers of disasters like the Pakistan floods.

And the reason for that isn’t complicated: COP27 negotiators failed to match their loss-and-damage breakthrough with any significant progress on reining in greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts to come to an agreement on phasing out the chief sources of those emissions — oil, gas, and coal — flopped, as they have at all previous COPs. The only thing the negotiators could manage was to repeat last year’s slippery pledge to pursue a “phase-down [not ‘-out’] of unabated [not ‘all’] coal [nor ‘coal, gas, and oil’] power.”

On the one hand, civil-society movements prevailed in the debate over loss and damage. On the other, energy imperialism remained all too alive and well in Egypt, as corporate interests and the governments that serve them extended their 27-year winning streak of blocking efforts to drive emissions down at the urgently required rate. Yeb Saño, who led Greenpeace’s COP27 delegation, told Phys.org, “It is scarcely credible that they have forgotten all about fossil fuels. Everywhere you look in Sharm el Sheikh you can see and hear the influence of the fossil fuel industry. They have shown up in record numbers to try and decouple climate action from a fossil fuel phaseout.”

How to pay?

The World Bank estimates that the floods in Pakistan caused more than $30 billion in damage, while rehabilitation and reconstruction will cost another $16 billion. And that, says the bank, doesn’t even include funds that will be needed “to support Pakistan’s adaptation to climate change and overall resilience of the country to future climate shocks.” The floods seriously harmed an estimated 33 million people, displaced 8 million from their homes, and left more than 1,700 dead. According to the World Bank’s report, “Loss of household incomes, assets, rising food prices, and disease outbreaks are impacting the most vulnerable groups. Women have suffered notable losses of their livelihoods, particularly those associated with agriculture and livestock.” The disaster starkly illustrated the indisputable moral and humanitarian grounds for compelling the governments of rich countries to pay for the devastation their decades of fossil-fuel burning have caused.

For Pakistan in particular, America’s lavishly funded war-making and national-security industries are joined at the hip with the global climate emergency. While those forces are directly responsible for depriving Paracha and countless others of their freedom or lives, the greenhouse-gas emissions they generate have also contributed to the kind of devastation that he came home to when finally released. Furthermore, these industries have wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent on preventing, adapting to, and compensating for ecological breakdown.

So far this fall, Washington has pledged $97 million (with an “m”) in flood-relief aid to Pakistan. Sounds like a lot of money, but it amounts to just one five-hundredth of the World Bank’s loss-and-damage estimate. In bleak contrast, from 2002 to 2010 alone, at the height of that Global War on Terror, the U.S. government provided Pakistan with $13 billion (with a “b”) in military aid.

To dodge blame and minimize their costs, the rich countries have been proposing a range of alternatives to simply paying loss-and-damage money to low-income ones as they should. Instead, they’d far prefer to have disaster-plagued governments finance their own climate-change recovery and adaptation by borrowing from banks in the North. In effect, rather than obtain relief-and-recovery funds directly from the North, countries like Pakistan would be obligated to make interest payments to banks in the North.

Fed up with having unbearable debt burdens thrust upon them time and time again, countries in the South are saying no thanks to the proposition that they go even deeper into debt. In response, the North has been tossing out other ideas. For instance, encouraging development banks like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to release disaster-hit countries from their obligations to pay some portion of the money they already owe as interest on past debts and use it instead to support their own recovery and rebuilding. But countries in the South are saying, in effect, “Hey, for decades, you’ve used your power to saddle us with punishing, unjust debt. By all means, please do cancel that debt, but you’ve still got to pay us for the climate loss and damage you’ve caused.”

The rich countries have even floated the idea of taking a portion of the money they’ve previously earmarked for development aid and depositing it in a global fund that would pay damages to vulnerable countries suffering future climatic disasters. Note the key to all such “solutions”: no extra expense for the wealthy countries. What a sweet deal! It’s as if, domestically, the U.S. government started issuing smaller Social Security checks and used the money it “saved” that way to pay Medicare benefits.

The new COP27 loss-and-damage fund is supposed to prohibit such shell games, while also pulling climate finance out of the realms of imperialism, debt servitude, and what Oxfam calls the “disaster begging bowl.” What’s needed, says Oxfam, an organization focused on alleviating global poverty, is “a fair and automatic mechanism for financial support — rooted in the principle that those who have contributed most to the climate crisis pay for the damage it causes in countries least responsible and hardest hit.”

How much and where to get it?

When confronted with numbers ending in “-illion,” as Americans were during the debates over the congressional spending bills of 2021 and 2022, it’s easy enough for your eyes to glaze over and miss the orders-of-magnitude differences among such figures. In an American world where the Pentagon budget alone is headed for $1 trillion sometime in this decade, it’s easy enough to forget, for example, that a million of those dollars is just one-millionth of a trillion of them. In response, in discussing the staggering sums needed to deal with our already desperately overheating planet and the amounts available to pay for loss and damage, we’ll now put everything in terms of billions of U.S. dollars.

High-emitting countries like ours have run up quite a climate tab. A June 2022 report from the V-20 group, which represents 55 of the world’s lowest-income, most climate-vulnerable economies, estimates that, from 2000 to 2019, their membership lost $525 billion thanks to climate disruption. That’s a huge blow to a staggeringly large set of countries whose gross domestic products add up to just $2,400 billion. But in the Global North, such sums and even far larger ones, while more than pocket change, are still easily affordable, as that Pentagon budget suggests.

By Oxfam’s reckoning, hundreds of billions of dollars could be raised for paying loss-and-damage by taxing fossil-fuel extraction, international cargo shipping, frequent flying, and other significantly carbon-producing activities. Progressive wealth taxes could net even more: $3,600 billion annually, according to the Climate Action Network (CAN), which also estimates that ending government subsidies to corporations (one-third of which go to fossil-fuel companies) could net $1,800 billion annually. Furthermore, cuts in military spending could free up a whopping $2,000 billion per year globally. The latter could be an especially juicy target. For instance, by CAN’s estimate, the United States’s fair share of payments owed to the Global South for climate mitigation and adaptation, plus loss-and-damage reparations, would come to roughly $1,600 billion over the next decade. And those 10 payments of $160 billion each could be covered if the Pentagon just ditched production of its most disastrously expensive jet fighter, the $1,700 billion F-35, and diverted the money toward climate assistance.

It’s always the government’s job to spend big when America faces a dire emergency, wherever the money comes from. In 2020-2021, Congress passed more than $3,000 billion in Covid relief — enough to pay our international climate tab, as estimated by CAN, for 19 years.

“Our cause is one”

Shortly after Saifullah Paracha’s return to Karachi in October, another family, in Sharm el Sheikh 2,340 miles away, had embarked on what reporter Jeff Shenker called “a desperate and possibly reckless mission” to save the life of one of their own: the British-Egyptian human-rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, possibly Egypt’s most prominent political prisoner.

Abd el-Fattah, who has spent most of the last decade behind bars for speaking out against Egypt’s oppressive regime, had been on a partial hunger strike since April. After visiting him on November 18th, his family reported that he had broken his hunger strike “out of a desire to stay alive, but he would resume it if no progress was made regarding his freedom.” His sister Sanaa Seif told reporters inside the COP27 conference hall,

What is Guantánamo Bay but a place where the American empire has practiced its human-breaking tactics for 20 years without accountability offshore of any system of justice? What is the U.N. climate summit but a meeting place where the world’s elite have protected their power for 27 years and counting?

Living as a “forever prisoner” (as the Guardian dubbed Saifullah Paracha in 2018) was, he once said, “like being alive in your own grave.” Forever wars, forever prisoners, forever climate chaos, forever theft. That’s the world we live in, where governments like those of the United States and Egypt throw innocent Muslims like Saifullah Paracha and pro-democracy dissidents like Alaa Abd el-Fattah into prison for standing in the way of their forever-repressive interests.

Reporting on the struggle to free Abd el-Fattah, Shenker noted, “The phrase ‘We Have Not Yet Been Defeated’ became the unofficial slogan of COP27, a reference to the title of a book by Abd el-Fattah published in 2021, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.” Could the perseverance and courage of people like Paracha, Abd el-Fattah, and the activists for climate justice and human rights — both those who attended the conference at Sharm el Sheik and countless others around the world — make it possible someday to drop the “Yet” and say simply, “We Have Not Been Defeated”?

Priti Gulati Cox is an artist and local organizer for CODEPINK Sidewalk Gallery of Congress, a community street art space in Salina, Kansas. Her visual work It’s Time is growing month by month as it chronicles what could be the most fateful era for our country since the 1860s. Find her on Twitter at @PritiGCox.

Stan Cox writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a research fellow in ecosphere studies at The Land Institute. He is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books. Find him on Twitter at @CoxStan.

Copyright ©2022 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2022
Word Count: 2,464
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Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.

Count on one thing: this movement isn’t going away. It won’t be defeated in a single election cycle and don’t think the authoritarian threat isn’t real either. After all, it now forms the basis for the politics of the Republican Party and so is targeting every facet of public life. No one committed to constitutional democracy should rest easy while the network of right-wing activists, funders, media, judges, and political leaders work so tirelessly to gain yet more power and implement a thoroughly undemocratic agenda.

This deeply rooted movement has surged from the margins of our political system to become the defining core of the GOP. In the post-World War II era, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964, from President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, President Ronald Reagan, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in its current Trumpian iteration, Republicans have long targeted democratic norms as impediments to establishing a neoliberal, race-based version of all-American authoritarianism. And that movement has been far too weakly opposed by far too many Democratic Party leaders and even some progressives. Don’t think of this phenomenon as right-wing conservativism either, but as a more dangerous, even violent movement whose ultimate aim is to overthrow liberal democracy. The American version of this type of electoral authoritarianism, anchored in Christian nationalist populism, has at its historic core a white nationalist pushback against the struggle for racial justice.

Liberal democracy for some, racial authoritarianism for others

Liberal democracy had failed generations of African Americans and other people of color, as, of course, it did Native Americans massacred or driven from their ancestral lands. It failed African Americans and Latinos forced to work on chain gangs or lynched (without the perpetrators suffering the slightest punishment). It failed Asian Americans who were brutally sent to internment camps during World War II and Asians often explicitly excluded from immigration rosters.

The benefits of liberal democracy — rule of law, government accountability, the separation of powers, and the like — that were extended to most whites existed alongside a racial authoritarianism that denied fundamental rights and protections to tens of millions of Americans. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s defeated the longstanding, all-too-legal regime of racist segregationists and undemocratic, even if sometimes constitutional, authority. For the first time since the end of the Reconstruction era, when there was a concerted effort to extend voting rights, offer financial assistance, and create educational opportunities for those newly freed from slavery, it appeared that the nation was again ready to reckon with its racial past and present.

Yet, all too sadly, the proponents of autocratic governance did anything but disappear. In the twenty-first century, their efforts are manifest in the governing style and ethos of the Republican Party, its base, and the extremist organizations that go with it, as well as the far-right media, think tanks, and foundations that accompany them. At every level, from local school boards and city councils to Congress and the White House, authoritarianism and its obligatory racism continue to drive the GOP political agenda.

The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party. It was neither the beginning nor the end of that effort, just its most violent public expression — to date, at least. After all, Trump’s efforts to delegitimize elections were first put on display when he claimed that Barack Obama had actually lost the popular vote and so stolen the 2012 election, that it had all been a “total sham.”

During the 2016 presidential debates, Trump alone stated that he would not commit himself to support any other candidate as the party’s nominee, since — a recurring theme for him — he could only lose if the election were rigged or someone cheated. He correctly grasped that there would be no consequences to such norm-breaking behavior and falsely stated that he had only lost the Iowa caucus to Senator Ted Cruz because “he stole it.” After losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump incessantly complained that he would have won the popular vote, too, if the “millions” of illegal voters who cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton hadn’t been counted.

Donald Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, 74.2 million to 81.2 million in the popular vote and 232 to 306 in the Electoral College, leaving only one path to victory (other than insurrection) — finding a way to discount millions of black votes in key swing-state cities. From birtherism and Islamophobia to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, racism had propelled Trump’s ascendancy and his political future would be determined by the degree to which he and his allies could invalidate votes in the disproportionately Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and Latino and Native American votes in Arizona and Nevada.

The GOP effort to disqualify Black, Latino, and Native American votes was a plot to create an illegitimate government, an unholy scheme that took an inescapably violent turn and led to an outcome for which the former president has yet to be held accountable. Sadly enough, the forces of authoritarianism were anything but dispatched by their defeat on January 6th. If anything, they were emboldened by the failure so far to hold responsible most of the agents who maneuvered the event into motion.

Democracy, authoritarianism, or fascism?

The last decade has exposed a severely wounded American democratic experiment. Consider it Donald Trump’s contribution to have revealed how spectacularly the guardrails of liberal democracy can fail if the breaking of laws, rules, and norms goes unchallenged or is sacrificed on the altar of narrow political gains. The most mendacious, cruel, mentally unstable, thin-skinned, vengeful, incompetent, narcissistic, bigoted individual ever elected to the presidency was neither an accident, nor an aberration. He was the inevitable outcome of decades of Republican pandering to anti-democratic forces and white nationalist sentiments.

Scholars have long debated the distinction between fascism and authoritarianism. Fascist states create an all-engulfing power that rules over every facet of political and social life. Elections are abolished; mass arrests occur without habeas corpus; all opposition media are shut down; freedoms of speech and assembly are curtailed; courts, if allowed to exist at all, rubber-stamp undemocratic state policies; while the military or brown shirts of some sort enforce an unjust, arbitrary legal system. Political parties are outlawed and opponents are jailed, tortured, or killed. Political violence is normalized, or at least tolerated, by a significant portion of society. There is little pretense of constitutional adherence or the constitution is formally suspended.

On the other hand, authoritarian states acknowledge constitutional authority, even if they also regularly ignore it. Limited freedoms continue to exist. Elections are held, though generally with predetermined outcomes. Political enemies aren’t allowed to compete for power. Nationalist ideology diverts attention from the real levers and venues of that power. Political attacks against alien “others” are frequent, while public displays of racism and ethnocentrism are common. Most critically, some enjoy a degree of democratic norms while accepting that others are denied them completely. During the slave and Jim Crow eras in this country — periods of racial authoritarianism affecting millions of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans — most whites in the South (and perhaps a majority outside of it) either tolerated or embraced the disavowal of democracy.

Under the right confluence of forces — a weakened system of checks and balances, populist rhetoric that taps into fears and perceived injustices, an anemic and divided opposition, deep social or racial divides, distrust of science and scientists, rampant anti-intellectualism, unpunished corporate and political malfeasance, and popularly accepted charges of mainstream media bias — a true authoritarian could indeed come to power in this country. And as history has shown, that could just be a prelude to full-blown fascism.

The warning signs could not be clearer.

While, in many ways, Trump’s administration was more of a kakistocracy — that is, “government by the worst and most unscrupulous people,” as scholar Norm Ornstein put it — from day one to the last nano-seconds of its tenure, his autocratic tendencies were all too often on display. His authoritarian appetites generated an unprecedented library of books issuing distress signals about the dangers to come.

Timothy Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny was, for instance, a brief but remarkably astute early work on the subject. The Yale history professor provided a striking overview of tyranny meant to dispel myths about how autocrats or populists come to and stay in power. Although published in 2017, the work made no mention of Donald Trump. It was, however, clearly addressing the rise to power of his MAGA right and soberly warning the nation to stop him before it was too late.

As Snyder wrote of the institutions of our democracy, they “do not protect themselves… The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” He particularly cautioned against efforts to link the police and military to partisan politics, as Trump first did in 2020 when his administration had peaceful protesters attacked by the police and National Guard in Lafayette Square across from the White House so that the president could take a stroll to a local church. He similarly warned about letting private security forces, often with violent tendencies (as when Trump’s security team would eject demonstrators from his political rallies) gain quasi-official or official status.

The period 2015 to 2020 certainly represented the MAGAfication of the United States and launched this country on a potential path toward future authoritarian rule by the GOP.

The vulnerabilities of democracy

Journalists have also been indispensable in exposing the democratic vulnerabilities of the United States. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen has, for instance, been prolific and laser-focused in calling out the hazards of creeping authoritarianism and of Trump’s “performing fascism.” She writes that while he may not himself have fully grasped the concept of fascism, “In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.”

While Trump is too lazy, self-interested, and intellectually undisciplined to be a coherent ideologue, he surrounded himself with and took counsel from those who were, including far-right zealots and Trump aides Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. Bannon functioned as Trump’s Goebbels-ish propagandist, having cut his white nationalist teeth as founder and executive chair of the extremist Breitbart News media operation. In 2018, he told a gathering of European far-right politicians, fascists, and neo-Nazis, “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Someone who knows the former president better than most, his niece Mary Trump, all too tellingly wrote that her uncle “is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself.” For her, there is no question the title fits. As she put it, “[A]rguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s years-long struggle to figure out if they should call his lies, lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media — and the Democrats — will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.”

Mainstreaming extremism and democracy’s decline

Given these developments, some scholars and researchers argue that the nation’s democratic descent may already have gone too far to be fully stopped. In its Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges — Resistance Grows, the Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project, which assesses the democratic health of nations globally, summarized the first three years of Trump’s presidency this way:

“[Democracy] has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy.” Referring to its Liberal Democracy Index scale, it added, “The United States of America declines substantially on the LDI from 0.86 in 2010 to 0.73 in 2020, in part as a consequence of President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, opposition politicians, and the substantial weakening of the legislature’s de facto checks and balances on executive power.”

These findings were echoed in The Global State of Democracy 2021, a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that argued, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

The failure of Donald Trump’s eternally “stolen election” coup attempt and the presidency of Joe Biden may have put off the further development of an authoritarian state, but don’t be fooled. Neither the failure of the January 6th insurrection nor the disappointments suffered in the midterm elections have deterred the ambitions of the GOP’s fanatics. The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, however slim, will undoubtedly unleash a further tsunami of extremist actions not just against the Democrats, but the American people.

Purges of Democrats from House committees, McCarthyite-style hearings and investigations, and an all-out effort to rig the system to declare whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate the preemptive winner will mark their attempt to rule. Such actions will be duplicated — and worse — in states with Republican governors and legislatures, as officials there bend to the autocratic urges of their minority but fervent white base voters. They will be supported by a network of far-right media, donors, activists, and Trump-appointed judges and justices.

In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.

Clarence Lusane is a political science professor and interim political science department chair at Howard University, and Independent Expert to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. His latest book is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy (City Lights). This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2022 Clarence Lusane — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 November 2022
Word Count: 2,457
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