No Limits to Evil?

Walter Clemens

Not all world leaders are evil.  The Russians are bombing hospitals in Syria, but the president of Ethiopia has just won the Nobel Prize for fostering peace in the Horn of Africa.  Meanwhile, the presidents of China, Russia, India, Turkey, and  the United States are distinguished by their almost unimaginably evil actions.   

Claiming that he will restore China’s former glory, President Xi  Jinping is becoming the country’s most supreme bully since Mao Zedong.  Establishing a totalitarian dictatorship, he uses omnipresent surveillance cameras to grade everyone’s behavior. His Great Firewall filters information from outside. Human rights lawyers and dissidents languish in jail.  More than a million Uighurs endure concentration camps while their children learn Xi Jinping Thought in boarding schools.  Similar destinies are rolling out for Tibetans and other minorities. Defying an international court, China claims most of the South China Sea. What fate awaits the demands of Hong Kongers for freedom?

Post-Soviet Russia has combined the worst excesses of free enterprise with a police state and neo-imperialism.  Ex-Communists became billionaires while Boris Yeltsin waged two wars against Chechens and kept troops in Moldova. President Vladimir Putin has seized borderlands from Georgia, annexed Crimea, and occupied eastern Ukraine.  Having resumed the Soviet patronship of   the Assad dictatorship,  Putin’s forces now pulverize civilians in northern Syria. Even though the Russian economy goes nowhere, Putin invests in planes and missiles that menace most of NATO (except, for now, Turkey).  Putin’s hackers wreak havoc from Estonia to the United States.

New Delhi continues its holier-than-thou posturing while doing little  to improve the lot of most Indians still wallowing in poverty, ill health, and ignorance. Fanning widespread hostility to Muslims, President Narender Modi  locks down millions of Kashmiris and refuses to consider a plebiscite or mediation.  When Pakistan protests, Modi hints at nuclear war.

The Ottomans allowed some tolerance to minorities.  Modern Turkey, however, has sought to eliminate—physically and culturally—Kurds, Armenians, and its other non-Turkish inhabitants. Persecuted also in Iran, Iraq,  and Syria, many Kurds have sought their own independent state.  The United States and other outsiders have occasionally allied with Kurds as partners.  Now Donald Trump has deserted them again and opened the way for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to extend his  genocide across Turkey’s border.

President Trump is no better than the other potentates except that his evil is often mindless except to mollify his  base. Having pledged in 2016 to withdraw from the Middle East, Trump spoke with Erdoğan and then redeployed U.S. troops away from northern Syria where Americans had backed Kurds in fighting the Islamic State.  Awakened to his own blunder, Trump immediately stated that “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”  True to form, however, he has done almost nothing.  Forces from Russia, Iran, Syria, and Turkey have moved into the vacuum.  Trump’s mindless if not treasonous foreign policies parallel his rampages against air and water quality in the  fifty states.  Both at home and abroad he has catered to mafia-types while striving to enhance his own often ill-gained wealth.

Evil on the world stage is not new. The cruel policies of leaders in  Iran, Saudi Arabia,  Israel, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Brazil are also well known.  Power readily corrupts.  Even the richest and most powerful individuals often twist every rule to gain more wealth and power. Americans have often joined this wrong-doing. Since 1945, however, the United States and other democracies have done much to bolster human rights and  development. They have helped to realize Immanuel Kant’s vision of a democratic peace.  But something is new. “Once upon a time,” Michelle Goldberg writes, Americans “spread ideals of democracy and the rule of law” to places like Ukraine. “Now? We send Giuliani”—now being investigated by the FBI.

The United Nations cannot curtail the evils being inflicted  on humanity unless the democracies do more than decry bad behavior. Liberal forces in Russia are denied a place on the ballot. In India they are drowned out by fanatic Hindus. In Israel they are stymied by fear of terrorists. In Europe they are subdued by fears of immigrants and cracks in the European Union.  In the USA  Republicans backed by a third of the electorate do nothing to curtail the evils of their own leader. Can there be any prospect for a better world unless a farsighted administration wins power in Washington and pushes other  governments and global actors to do the right things?

Western China and the New Silk Road

Kenneth Surin

Coming to China every few months has almost become a regular occurrence for me, though this time I am in a part of China I have not been to before.

China’s developmental model has for decades been tilted towards export-based manufacturing. This model has brought immense benefits to China. Its eastern coastal regions, Guangdong and its hinterlands in particular, have flourished, while China inland and to the west has lagged behind this hectic developmental pace.

I spent a day in Beijing en route, and was struck by how much cleaner the air was. When last there 8 years ago the air I breathed seemed to have more sulphur than oxygen in it—this time my mask with a respiratory filter was not needed.

It was probably only a matter of time before Beijing’s air quality improved. The ruling elite is based here because it is the capital, and they were not going to want to keep a breathing apparatus next to them at all hours. Significant measures were bound to be taken, and they have been.

Delhi, where I’ll be early in the new year is another matter—I’ll definitely need my respiratory mask there.

I spent several days in Lanzhou, a city of 5 million people in western China’s Gansu province. Lanzhou shares an arid plateau with nearby Mongolia, and is 1525m/5003ft above sea level.

Lanzhou is a reflection of the government’s attempt to deal with the relative lack of development outside China’s eastern coastal areas.

Once ranked as one of China’s top-10 polluted cities, Lanzhou has been cleaned-up by reducing smoke-stack pollution and ridding the Yellow River of pollutants (though several smoke-stacks were still belching smoke as I was taken around the city).

The river, although 3400kms/2113m from its mouth in the China Sea, is wide and swift-moving. Factories are no longer allowed to dump pollutants in the river locals call Mother River, which was once likened to an open sewer.

Where there’s a political will, it’s really not impossible to get such things done.

Apart from pollution, desertification due to its proximity to the Gobi Desert has been a major problem for Lanzhou. A massive tree-planting scheme has been successful in halting the onward-march of the desert.

Once a stopping-off point on the ancient Silk Road, Lanzhou is close to some major historical sites. Tourism is already a big earner for the local economy, and infrastructure is being enhanced to make life more convenient and attractive for the growing number of tourists. Six-lane roads are being constructed all over the city, and Lanzhou’s two existing metro lines are being augmented by more lines that will cover the entire city when completed.

This focus on infrastructure is a key component of China’s Road and Belt initiative, whose official goals are “to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database”.

In addition to infrastructure investment, the Road and Belt initiative will also emphasize education, construction projects, railway and highway expansion, enhancement of power grids, and iron and steel production.

The Initiative will cover more than 68 countries, encompassing 65% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP (using 2017 figures).

This economically-driven cosmopolitanism matches that of the Old Silk Road, whose known travelers included (in addition to the Chinese) Koreans, Levantines, Armenians, Persians, Turks, Russians, Venetians (Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco Polo, the first two being the father and uncle of the more famous Marco), Florentines, Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, Moroccans (Ibn Battuta), and the famous Franciscan monk William of Ruysbroeck from the Flanders, among others.

I spent a couple of days in Dun Huang, a historic town on the Old Silk Road, next to the Gobi desert, famous for its ancient Buddhist grottoes. There is also a substantial Muslim presence in this region— Lanzhou is 20% Muslim. It is evident that the Old Silk Road was a conduit for the transmission of religions and cultures, and not just commerce.

The Old Silk Road may have been cosmopolitan, but it did not partake of a globalized world in the way that its contemporary equivalent does.

China’s Road and Belt initiative will certainly represent an intensification of globalization, as it modernizes several less-developed regions in this display of Chinese “soft” power intended to counterbalance in a much needed way the US’s baneful world-wide hegemonic display of “hard” power and military muscle.

But there can be lags in this impressive modernization.

Accompanied by my Chinese guide, I went to the post office three times to mail touristy postcards to family and friends in the US and UK. I had to show my passport to the clerk before I was allowed to buy stamps, each postcard was then weighed, and the stamp-purchase for each postcard was finally entered manually into the clerk’s computer. A postcard cost 6 yuan to mail, but there were no stamps in exactly this denomination, so I had to buy 3 stamps– ¥4.20, ¥1 and ¥0.80– to get the requisite 6 yuan. The transaction took 15 minutes when it should have taken 2-3.

China is technologically more advanced than the US in many ways: a maglev train capable of reaching speeds of 373mph/600kph will go into production in 2021, also bridge design and construction, synchronized traffic-light systems, cell-phone technology, household electronics, alternatives to carbon-based energy), but I’ve been to Third World countries where scanners are used to expedite greatly such postal transactions, as well as not requiring ID in order to sell someone a few stamps for their postcards!

Another post office I went to had run out of all its stamps. Yet another post office told me, or rather my Chinese guide, that I only needed ¥5 for each of my postcards, which left me confused because I had paid ¥6 in the post office I’d been to previously. I hope those postcards with ¥5 stamps reach their destinations.

On the plus side, China’s post offices also serve as banks, a boon to the public many western countries– with their rip-off banking systems– should see the need to implement for themselves.

However, a country which has (for example) built the world’s longest bridge and its fastest trains deserves a better ground-level postal service.

As I was leaving the country, China reported its slowest economic growth in 26 years—its economy grew by 6% for the 3 months ending in September. A fall in domestic demand was partly responsible, but the main factor was the sharp fall in China’s exports to the US, its biggest foreign market, due to Trump’s trade war.

Exports to the US fell a remarkable 21.9% in September compared to a year ago, while imports of American goods dropped by 15.7%. The US economy is of course being hurt just as much, if not more, by the tariff war.

There is probably no serious cause for alarm here– 6% is more than twice the US growth rate and about 3 times that of the western European countries. Moreover, falling growth rates carry with them some benefits for the environment since the prevailing rate of resource depletion will also be slowed down.

A World Partnership for Ecopolitical Health and Security

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The world in 2019 is in deep trouble. States still act in their own interest, scarcely paying attention to the evolving horrors of climate change, war, hunger, ecological impoverishment of the planet and rapidly growing population.

In such a precarious ecopolitical environment, we have the United States run by a president acting like a two-year old, always putting his personal and family profits above national and international interests.

Ecopolitical governance

An alternative to this madness would be for the US (after Trump), the European Union, Russia and China to create a genuine partnership for human survival and security. This arrangement would eclipse the military project of NATO and guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.

Such a move would dramatically cut military spending, showing that civilisation still matters. What if those saved vast sums of money, currently put to planning slaughter and destruction, could be put to peaceful use? Like jointly addressing the existential threat of climate change and the social and ecological problems unsettling the US, EU, Russia and China?

Imagine an ecological and political alliance between North America, Europe, Russia and China that gives birth to a World Environment Organisation for addressing climate change and the protection of human and environmental health. Imagine that nothing in international relations, including world trade, could take place if it caused ecological harm.

People would learn to respect nature as the very foundation of life on Earth. Imagine, furthermore, such an organisation funding substantive programs aimed at reversing the environmental decline of the planet, banning plastics, cleaning the plastic pollution of the seas, and, particularly, slowing down climate change, which threatens all life on Earth.

Such a task would be both daring and demanding because, as in the golden age of Greece, the human effort of the twenty-first century must be to invent a new science and a new politics to solve human problems, but without destroying the world.

Twentieth-century science and economic development (in the unitary capitalist models in use in the twenty-first century) are obsolete and dangerous: they have been tainted and moulded by the violence and fear of the nuclear bomb.

Factory farming

Industrialised agriculture is a paradigm of  the application of bomb-inspired science. It is a gigantic mechanical enterprise contemptible of the natural world. It is fuelled by Earth-warming petroleum. It has brought into being systems of death rather than life.

The immense one-crop plantations of agribusiness are artificial deserts that devastate biological diversity. The poisons that farmers spray over them control insects, diseases and grasses only as an afterthought. This is because these toxins are primarily political. They enable landowners or states to be sole masters of huge territories while, at the same time, emptying rural areas of small family farmers, peasants and indigenous people. They are a form of toxic chemistry for the preservation of political power in the world’s countryside. They are deleterious to both nature and people.

Agriculture constructed and infected by poisons is factory agriculture, an industrialisation of the very face of the Earth.

Industrialised farming rivals climate change in its global deleterious effects. It is converting everything to a machine. In the US, for example, it has abolished rural America, turning it into a colossal mechanised hybrid of plantation and state.

About 98 per cent of America’s food contains some toxins. In the state of Georgia, for example, not one farmer grows peaches without poisons.

Domesticated animals exist in high-tech factory environments that resemble sterile concentration camps. They house thousands of pigs, chicken and cattle, which are no longer animals but units of machinery. Nevertheless, confined animals emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

Agribusiness is also undoing food itself, scrambling the genetic stuff of corn and soybeans to bring all food and crops under the dominion of a handful of global corporations.

That is why we need to invent a new science that is tainted not so much with power but with ethics, ecology and civilisation. Aristotle argued that cataclysms repeatedly reduce human societies to a point where it is necessary to search in the rubble to rediscover human culture.

We are not yet the refugees of a global catastrophe, but we are headed in that direction. Industrialised agriculture is the first step in that decline and fall.

Slow down climate change

The invisible toxins of our industrialised culture are warming the planet, making it, slowly and in the near future, unfit for life. Alaska’s permafrost is thawing and massive chunks of ice are disintegrating in the Arctic. Amazon is burning.

It is probably impossible to stop entirely the warming of the Earth. But we can slow it down, diminishing its chronic cataclysmic effects by steadfastly eliminating and ending the use of fossil fuels and our onslaught on the planet.

Are we clever enough, but not moral enough to avoid committing suicide?

Yet there’s a way out of our current killer policies: first of all, solar and other forms of renewable energy suffice in replacing oil, coal, petroleum and nuclear power.

Second, nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction are useless, unusable without provoking a holocaust. These are truly the ultimate biocides. They should be abolished.

Third, family farmers and peasants are willing to and capable of raising all the food we need, as long as we dismantle the monstrous agribusiness plantations and animal factories.

Expanding the variety of our food crops from the rich diversity of traditional agriculture will go a long way to improving our diet, and lessen the need to dam rivers for irrigation. Such a change of direction would give a new lease of life to millions of villages in the tropics while bringing back to rural Europe and America the culture, democracy and nutritious food of prosperous small family farmers and peasants.

If the US, EU, Russia and China sign on a version of this modest proposal, we boost ecopolitical civilization and human survival.

We need a World Environment Organization.

The Far Right’s War on Culture

John Feffer

The far right is on a roll. Just a few years ago, liberals and conservatives would have considered its recent political victories a nightmare scenario. Right-wing extremists have won elections in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and Poland. They pushed through the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. In the most recent European Parliament elections, far-right parties captured the most votes in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Hungary.

Sure, Trump is being impeached, Brexit is a mess, and the far right in Austria and Italy have suffered recent setbacks. Still, looking at the bigger picture, it’s hard not to conclude that such extremists have acquired the sort of mainstream legitimacy across the planet that they haven’t enjoyed in nearly a century.

What’s worse, those electoral victories obscure an even deeper, potentially far more influential success — in the world of storytelling. The radical right has developed a global narrative that, by uniting virulent racists and commonplace conservatives, mass shooters and populist politicians, is already injecting fringe ideas into mainstream culture.

Admittedly, it’s not a story that has either universal appeal or will win any literary awards. Still, by telling it over and over again in different languages to a growing number of listeners, the far right is having a profound impact on global culture. In many places, it may already be winning the crucial battle for hearts and minds.

The radical right’s story is rooted in the most basic plot of all: us versus them. Its main nemesis is determined, so the tale goes, to storm the battlements of the “civilized world” and, in what’s called a “great replacement,” oust its innocent inhabitants. Since this isn’t the Middle Ages, the evil adversary isn’t deploying siege engines or an army of pillagers. Its tactics are more insidious: taking over institutions from the inside, infiltrating culture, and worst of all birthing lots of babies.

But who exactly are the pronouns in this story? The idea of “the great replacement” is based on the fantasy that “they” (especially migrants and Muslims) are intent on replacing “us” (whites, Christians). Some versions of the narrative have an anti-Semitic slant as well, with Jews lurking in the shadows of this fiendish plot. For racists, the Others, of course, have darker complexions. For Islamophobes, the outsiders practice the wrong religion.

If you’re not a member of the far right, if you don’t subscribe to its YouTube channels or follow its burgeoning Twitter accounts, you might have only scant acquaintance with this story. But once you start looking for it, the great replacement turns out to be omnipresent.

Between 2012 and 2019, for instance, 1.5 million tweets in English, French, and German referenced it. You could hear an echo of the phrase at the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, when neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other demonstrators chanted, “You will not replace us!” But the phrase really broke into the headlines in March 2019 when a mass shooter who opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people, titled the online manifesto he prepared for the occasion, “The Great Replacement.”

By now, it’s become alarmingly clear that an increasing number of people are taking this bizarre, historically deficient, and thoroughly warped story to heart.

Once Upon a Time

At first glance, the man who came up with the idea of the “great replacement” might not seem like your usual suspect. Renaud Camus was a radical student demonstrator in Paris in 1968 and in 1981 voted for socialist Francois Mitterrand for president of France. A noted poet and novelist, he published books on his gay identity that attracted accolades from the likes of intellectual Roland Barthes and poet Allen Ginsberg. By the early 2000s, however, Camus had begun to outline a new philosophy that distinguished between “faux” or false French (immigrants or their children) and real French (those who had lived in the country for many generations). In 2010, he published a book entitled Le Grand Remplacement bemoaning the prospects of a France and a Europe transformed by immigration.

Camus’s work became the foundational text for a growing movement called Generation Identity, a modernized version of white nationalism that has influenced the alt-right in the United States, gained momentum on the Internet, and become a global phenomenon. The “identitarians” embraced Renaud Camus and spread his ideas in a virtual echo chamber all their own. “The playing field is not level,” points out Julia Ebner of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The far right now has a striking “advantage in terms of algorithms of social media favorable for spreading conspiracy theories and potentially harmful and inciting content.”

And keep in mind that it’s not just explicit racists and Islamophobes who are pushing this meme. A softer version, embraced by mainstream conservatives, transposes the racial anxiety at the heart of the Great Replacement into a cultural key. “Our civilization,” it claims, is now at risk. French culture must be preserved. European civilization is being undermined. The American way of life is endangered. “Africa wants to kick down our door and Brussels is not defending us,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in 2018. “Europe is under invasion already and they are watching with their hands in the air.”

This isn’t a new story. It was so prevalent in the 1920s that F. Scott Fitzgerald lampooned the idea in his famed novel The Great Gatsby when he put such arguments in the mouth of one of his characters. “If we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged,” Tom Buchanan says over dinner in the first chapter. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Buchanan was then echoing arguments in well-known books like The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). Such arguments would take firm root in Europe as well. Adolf Hitler, for instance, called Grant’s book “my bible.” The Nazis, of course, didn’t just impose immigration controls to ensure the supremacy of the white race. They took Gatsby, Grant, and Stoddard to their logical, genocidal conclusion.

In the wake of the defeat of Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese racism in World War II, a global consensus emerged, shared by capitalists and communists alike, that the extreme version of the replacement story had been consigned to the trash bin of history. In the West, the political center would eventually sign on to some variant of multiculturalism in which immigration became an integral part of civilization, not antithetical to it.

The end of the Cold War, however, brought an end to this consensus. Communism was effectively over and union membership declining. Liberal parties attracted to the Third Way politics of President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were abandoning their working-class base. In the industrialized world, economic globalization was creating greater insecurity among the middle class and the working poor. In this context, multiculturalism and immigrants became easy targets for a rising white nationalism. In the 1990s, the growing popularity of previously fringe politicians like Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia paved the way for future parties and movements that would far more vigorously break the anti-fascist taboos of the past.

In the 1920s, the far right had found an effective way to attract adherents by blaming all the ills of the nation on “degenerate races.” This story of racial eugenics united both conservatives like President Calvin Coolidge and conspiracy theorists like Grant and Stoddard. “The demographic replacement is a similar master frame that can unite both clear extremists and conservatives who might be worried about demographic change,” warns Matthew Feldman of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. “Once you add those two together you have potential majorities in many countries. They’ve found a winning formula. There’s nothing that I’ve seen that comes remotely close to countering that formula.”

Same Old Story

When war broke out in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, it was the first time that bloodletting on that scale had taken place in Europe since the end of World War II. The subsequent fragmentation of the country would also prove a giant step backward for the project of European integration. Here was a multicultural state, the first in line among the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe for membership in the European Community (later, the European Union or EU), that a set of Balkan politicians would tear apart thanks to political expediency, nationalist ideology, and economic arrogance.

At the time, the widespread ethnic cleansing that took place during the Yugoslav wars was generally seen as either a throwback to an earlier era of genocide (ancient hatreds) or a final bout of violence accompanying the end of the Cold War (temporary antagonisms). It was, in either of these scenarios, entirely backward looking.

By now, the Yugoslav successor states have indeed put those wars behind them, with Slovenia and Croatia even joining the EU. But the desire for ethnic purity has not disappeared, not in the Balkans or in Europe as a whole. Only recently, for instance, new walls have appeared in the Balkans — between North Macedonia and Greece, Slovenia and Croatia, Hungary and Serbia — this time to maintain greater homogeneity by keeping out migrants and refugees from the Greater Middle East and North Africa. Meanwhile, the EU is paying Turkey billions of dollars to stop more desperate Syrian refugees from heading for Europe, while investing resources in Libya aimed at preventing migrants and refugees from making their way across the Mediterranean. Fleeing war and poverty, those migrants and refugees have only grown in number as European sentiment against them has reached new heights.

The European far right has risen in the slipstream of such xenophobia. Buoyed by its electoral success, the far right now wants to take a further giant step that might indeed return Europe to the days of ethnic cleansing — not just keeping out immigrants but expelling ones already there. This policy of “remigration” is the active corollary of the great replacement.

For decades, the European right rejected multiculturalism, insisting on the full assimilation of all immigrants. Now, it has given up on assimilation entirely. The platform of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for instance, reads: “Germany and Europe must put in place remigration programs on the largest possible scale.” Already the biggest opposition party in the German Bundestag, or parliament, the AfD similarly increased its representation in the European Parliament in 2019 and also surged dramatically in the states of the former East Germany in recent local elections. The AfD’s position on immigrants is particularly disturbing given that the Nazis, before they embarked on the Final Solution, promoted their own version of remigration by proposing to send Jews en masse to Madagascar.

Ideas like the great replacement and remigration, having percolated in the identitarian movement for close to two decades, have now circulated back to the states of the former Yugoslavia. The far right has found fertile ground in Serbia and in the Serbian regions of Bosnia. And mass murderers like Anders Breivik in Norway and the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand have drawn a straight line between their brutal acts and the ethnic cleansing supported by war criminals like Serbian politician Radovan Karadžić during the breakup of Yugoslavia. In this way, the proponents of the great replacement are keeping alive the spirit of the worst war Europe has experienced on its soil since World War II.

Tell Me Something Else

The obvious response to the far right’s great-replacement story, here and in Europe, is to promote more humane immigration and refugee policies and a more inclusive vision of society. But that story — along with celebrations of multiculturalism, nods to the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), and the endless repetition of the EU’s official motto of “unity in diversity” — has not proven sufficiently compelling to those around the world anxious about their own slipping status in society.

A better story is needed: a story that somehow captures the same “us” versus “them” dynamic.

How about this: believe it or not, the great replacement is indeed actually happening, just not the way the far right imagines. We are about to be replaced by a desperate set of adversaries. This foe is crafty and able to get through nearly all our careful democratic defenses.

The difference with the far right’s narrative boils down to pronouns. The “us” in the counter-story I imagine is not a marginalized group of people. The us is all of us on a fast-heating planet.

As for the “them,” it’s tempting to follow the example of that other Camus — Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus — when he equated fascists with rats in his novel The Plague. The far right and its mainstream collaborators, along with the energy extraction industry, the finance sector, and corrupt oligarchs, are certainly a form of pestilence, a “them” that needs to be countered. Since 1965, just 20 of the major fossil-fuel companies have produced a third of the greenhouse gas emissions sent into the atmosphere. And now they’re aided by Donald Trump and his top environmental and energy officials, intent as they are on heating the planet to the boiling point for their own profits, as well as similar figures around the world.

But here’s the thing, we don’t have to work hard to dehumanize the adversaries they’re letting loose on all of us because they aren’t human at all.

The list of “them” would, for instance, begin with a buzzing mosquito. After all, as a result of rising global temperatures, disease-bearing mosquitos are now spreading far beyond their normal range. That would include the mosquitos responsible for transmitting the Zika, dengue, and chikungunya viruses. Dengue fever, present in only 10 countries in the 1970s, can now be found in 120 of them. And there is no question that, as the planet heats, malaria-bearing mosquitos will return to the United States after having been eradicated nearly 70 years ago. Climate change may also produce new types of mosquitos that could be even more effective in transmitting disease.

Lest you think that the mosquito is hardly worth losing sleep over unless it’s buzzing around your tent at night, remember that this tiny creature may well be the deadliest adversary humankind has ever faced. In his new book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, Timothy Winegard argues that, as a result of the illnesses they’ve transmitted, mosquitos have killed 52 billion people, about half of everyone who has ever lived on the planet. This tiny creature, in other words, has proven a truly genocidal force.

It’s not just mosquitos, of course. The “them” that we’re going to find ourselves up against will include disease-bearing ticks, rats, and a range of crop-devouring insects. Such creatures are all, in essence, standing on the sidelines and cheering climate change on. Their gain, our loss: it’s no more complicated than that.

We don’t need an evil space invader to unite the planet in a common fight. The adversary is just above our heads and right beneath our feet. In combatting a pestilence that affects everyone, we can tell an inclusive story that can appeal even to former supporters of Donald Trump, Hungarian ruler Viktor Orbán, and others. The far right is all about drawing borders and excluding “undesirables.” They will always win at that game.

It’s time to flip the script. We are indeed in the fight of our lives. When it comes to the climate crisis, a great replacement does loom on the horizon. Humans and the civilization that goes with us may, it turns out, be all too replaceable. It’s time for everyone — and I mean everyone — to pull together, forget our superficial differences, and win this epic battle of us versus them.

The Complexity of Citizenship Amendment Bill: The Cloth of Fear

Kabir Deb

“If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence. If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end”~ Bayard Rustin

For people outside Barak Valley, it is much easier to give their opinion on the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, whereas those who are living in the Barak Valley region or in the Bengali regions of Brahmaputra Valley, it’s tougher to the same extent to decide anything about the impact of Citizenship Amendment Bill because one decision can be false too.

The bill has taken over the seven sisters and it is leading to wide anger from various communities. Many are supporting it to the last extent whereas even more number of people are protesting against it by even giving a decision that if the bill is passed then they would either go for self immolation or they would fight for an independent state. Recently, after Assam, CAB just took over whole Mizoram as many Mizos started protesting against the Bill since it would grant citizenship to many Chakma citizens who they claim as “illegal immigrants”.

In Assam, the scenario is far more complex since it has established various angles because of different ideologies running in a nonsense manner without even thinking that what the bill suggests and what can be its impact. However, those who protest against it from a racist perspective are far worse than the human rights activist, because the former discriminates one community as an illegal community while the latter fights for every community. The complexity, however, cannot be seen because either some are blindly believing it because of communal love whereas another community (Assamese Community) protests for the growing impatience and intolerance against another community which is the minority community.

THE HISTORY OF THE OPPRESSION

Has the nation ever asked the Bengalis of Barak Valley, Assam, about what we feel about the word ‘freedom’? No. If you ask us about this very word, we would simply call it a pigeon’s flight. To us, freedom has never been a part and parcel of our soul rather we were deliberately imprisoned by the masters of this national politics to suppress our culture and voice. Today, even after the implementation of unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Bill no one bothers to focus on our history. If the nation would have read about our history, then they would have felt our oppressed soul. With deaths multiplying it is high time to remember the day when we were forced to join Assam and with it came a properly planned imprisonment.

To understand the barbaric history, you need to go back to the time of partition of Assam. Shocked? Don’t be. It is true that the nation always talks of two partitions as the major partitions of India, but no, right at that very moment, Assam was also divided on the basis of religion and language. The only difference here lies is that this partition was of the interest of British, East Bengal as well as Assam (or the Assamese). In this partition, the Bengalis of Southern Assam faced the catastrophe in the highest level. 1930, the year in which the sword was first struck over the process of partition where an Assamese politician, passed a resolution in which he demanded to rename the undivided state of Assam since the state is having a majority of Bengali people as compared to the Assamese population. It initiated because the region of Sylhet was transferred by the British from Bengal to Assam in 1874 making the state full of Bengali people who spoke in Sylheti.

All of the acts of the British made the discriminatory Assamese people more active to evacuate the Bengalis of Assam by dividing Sylhet back to East Bengal, so that the state stays for the Assamese although Bengalis lived in Assam for more than a thousand years. The Assam Pradesh Congress were so discriminatory that they never wanted any Bengali to stay in Assam since we may destroy their homogeneity. In 1945, the party released a manifesto to brainwash the brains of all the Assamese so that they can protest against the Bengalis of Assam.

Then came the year of 1946, in which Gopinath Bordoloi, the then Prime Minister of Assam started the politics to throw the Sylhet district away from Assam caging the few Bengalis of Southern Assam. For the manifesto, the Sylhet district was finally handed over to East Bengal in which the division took place on the basis of religion. In the voting system, Sylhet got divided because the Muslim majority wanted to join the East Pakistan. The politics of this partition when the Assamese, British and the Muslim league voted for the same partition of Sylhet district, since the Assamese wanted their homogeneity, British had the notion of dividing the nation before leaving India while the Muslim League wanted to have all the Muslim majority of Sylhet to build power.

But among all of the acts, the people who suffered were the original Bengalis of Southern Assam since Sylhet got divided making Assam more linguistically dominant and from history, we can understand that the Assamese have dominated over the Bengalis. Partition was done in such a manner that the region of Southern Assam with Karimganj, Silchar etc., became completely isolated since right after that East Bengal was divided to give rise to another nation named Bangladesh. So, if we notice the demography then we can very clearly understand that it was a deliberate step by three communities to suppress the Bengalis. It has always been said that in the partition the Assamese parties stayed silent and that is a clear indication of their discriminatory demand.

After Sylhet got divided, it became clear that the Bengalis had nothing for them because the state is of the Assamese and the government would favour their demands and needs, and it can be seen and felt even today. The time saw huge communal riots on the basis of religion and language killing more than lakhs of people. Rebels fought to save Bengali language while others fought against the Muslim. All of these started for that one manifesto of the Gopinath Bordoloi. After that Hindu Bengalis started migrating from Bangladesh since it became tough for them to live in a Muslim majority country at the time of communal warfare. Today the Citizenship Amendment Bill, works unconstitutionally against these Bengalis who were forced to leave Bangladesh for the communal riots.

Today if you visit Southern Assam, you would find the lack of communication, little exposure and no industry to sustain the economy of this region and all of it happened for the linguistically dominant but discriminatory Assamese politicians. Southern Assam today has Bangladesh in its South with other states blocking its path making the transport facility dormant. Once the region had the highest import – export facility since the then East Bengal helped us to export goods to other countries as well as to other regions of India. Today it hardly gets any medium to connect this region to other parts of India. It is joined to Sikkim by a small road which today has been blocked by numerous check posts. So, after all of this freedom for us is just a bread which hangs above our head while our hands are tied backwards.

If you ask us, how well do we see our culture getting caged, then we would say, it is on the doomsday since, the culture is the sole thing where oppressed could speak of their sufferings! With the dominance of the Assamese, suppression of the Bengali language started in Assam. People won’t tell you because they have to live here but it is the truth because it is quite obvious from the history. If you read “Prothom Alo” (First Light) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, then you could clearly see that the culture of one region had to connect with the culture of another region to survive. Before partition of Assam and Bengal, the Bengalis of Assam had the most effective spread of culture since the Sylheti people had an easy connection with the Bengalis of Assam and West Bengal. This blend gave us some of the most brilliant novels, poems and plays but after the partition we lost everything.

Today if you watch a reality show, you could clearly see that one who goes from Assam has to represent the culture of Assamese and the rest of the India knows even the Bengalis of Assam using the culture of the Assamese, for example, Bihu isn’t the festival of the Bengalis of Assam but the rest of the India knows that it is our festival. People of upper Assam hardly like to talk in Bengali even after they come to Southern Assam but they force the Bengalis of Assam to talk in their language after we go to upper Assam. Quite discriminatory! Interestingly, few people know that Bengalis live in Assam. So, it is quite clear that from 1874, the Assamese majority along with others have always tried to suppress the Bengalis by partitioning the state on the basis of language and then seizing the Bengali community from having any communication to the rest of the India. Unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Bill, is yet another tool of the Assamese and right wing government to suppress the Bengali community. Detention camps are a clear proof of how they want to suppress the people. It is time for the rest of India to grow up and please have a look over us. We belong to the same nation are not different in any manner but we are suppressed.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF THE BILL

As the people of Assam, more population of Southern Assam, are instructed to move to Foreigners Tribunal, a legal body to help the victims of this mass exodus from being declared as immigrants, they are selling their land, home, jewelries to at least have the right to call them as Indians. Families are forcefully pushed into detention camps and a culture of fear is what one can find in Assam, especially Southern Assam. Yet the people of the rest still aren’t able to understand the cold blooded complexity this bill carries.

● From the perspective of people who live in the region of Barak Valley, if the Citizenship Amendment Bill, is seen then it is clearly dividing the Bengali community into two on the basis of religion: Hindus and Muslims. Even after that, most of the Bengali community supports it because of the growing intolerance inside the Assamese community, which demands for the elimination of the Bengali citizens completely.

Leaders of various political parties protest against the Bill in a very communal manner by saying that, “The Bengali community shouldn’t be allowed to live in the state and so the bill shouldn’t be allowed to pass. And if allowed, then they would demand for an Independent Assam since Assam belongs to Assamese citizens only”. The loud discriminatory and derogatory comments in an open field with thousands supporting the comments is quite enough for people of Barak Valley and Bengali regions of Brahmaputra Valley to support the bill making it a “good move”. It is like the Satan of a pessimistic story. Satan gets the support because the whole plot itself is negative and the only hope to live in the society is by letting Satan live which is supporting them.

● The Assamese community with their own political parties find Assam to be under threat since the state is being populated by the Bengali community and if spoken in a religious manner, then populated by Muslims, which the Assamese citizens find as a threat to the state and it would sustain if the bill is passed and hence, they protest against the Bill. It is quite devastating to see that the whole community, which had the history to be discriminatory over the Bengalis, today finds an even more derogatory path to eliminate the Bengali community over a political platform. The political leaders along with the extremists protest against it by breaking alliance (which is just a way to collect votes) and shooting bullets over the Bengalis of Brahmaputra Valley. For the people, who sit in an air conditioned cabin, it is quite easy to give their own opinion but the field scenario is far more devastating because the whole process of division is racist and communal.

● From the perspective of the Citizenship Amendment Bill itself, we can clearly see that the bill is a silent weapon of the ruling government to divide the Bengali community along with creating an agitation between the Assamese and Bengali. The bill clearly has little protection for the largest minority community of Assam, Bengali Muslims or Muslims as a whole. It plays the trick of divide and rule by dividing the Bengali community into Hindus and Muslims, thus reducing the strength and hence, making the fight even more brutal. It also agitates the Assamese community and hence, pushing the community to be more racist and communal.

It is quite easy to say that the bill is just communal. But the reality is, “the bill is both communal and racist” and as we all know, a victim of racism would be with the helping hand he/she gets from the government without even seeing the pros and cons and that is far more deadly for peace and humanity. It is just like a virus with government as the engineer and the communities of the state as the victim. The government injects the virus to experiment on its interests and no one identifies the side effects because the mutation and pain is a pleasant thing to play politics on.

● If the bill is seen from the perspective of Human rights activists, then it would be sane for the citizens of this country. But it would be insane to ignore the perspective of the Bengali community, and just giving an opinion on the basis of the bill only. The activists protest against the Bill because it is communal in nature since it divides the Hindus and Muslims but at the same time, it is the duty of the activists to visit the Bengali regions of Assam and to identify the reasons that why the community supports the bill! The bill is a danger because it is communal and it is a big reason to stand against the Bill plus what is even more disastrous is the elimination of people in the form of refugees to live in camps. The people who were citizens of this country yesterday, today live in Refugee camps and that is what ruins the Constitution. The bills isn’t just communal to the Muslims but it is racist to the same extent towards the Bengali unity but it is also inhuman towards the thriving humanity of this country.

So, basically, the support for the bill comes out:

of blind faith over a helping hand when the major community of the state passes communal and racist remarks before thousands without any strict judicial action against the minority community of Assam.

because of religious support for the Hindus and a repulsive attitude towards the Muslims.

because of the ongoing extremism by the Assamese extremists.

The complexity which the bill introduced inside the population cannot be seen from one angle without being a part of the state or without speaking to the communities living in the state because the bill has multiple faults and both the support and protest is for the flaws of the bill which for the mass is unseen because the covering of racism and communalism is thicker to penetrate.

Digital Inclusion is still a Distant Dream in India

Rahul Kumar

Technology has revolutionized the world. Without innovating & adopting new technologies, no country in the world can make a sustained and fast economic and social advancements in a globalized world. India`s story of digitalization began when the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, introduced computer science in the country. Taking this step forward, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launched Digital India project in 2015 under which several programmes such as Broadband Highway, Universal mobile connectivity, Public Internet Access, E-governance, E-Kranti through electronic delivery of services, Information for all, Electronic manufacturing, IT for Jobs, Early harvest. There are several digital India programmes being run by the government in the country in an effort to digitize the whole country. Some progress, of course, has been made but there are still many challenges in the path. It is, therefore, necessary to examine the current status of the progress made in the direction of digitalization. It has been observed that a few people running tech companies in the country are reaping the benefit of digitalization and the majority of the people particularly living in the remote villages of India are excluded from the benefits of digitalization.

According to census 2011, 70 percent of the Indian population lives in the villages of India. “Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL)” was launched to connect 250,000 villages with high speed. Broadband & internet connectivity in the remote villages of India is still irregular. The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) survey (2015) also found that 76 percent of Indian respondents cited lack of awareness about the internet as the reason they weren’t online. In addition to this, access to electricity is another hurdle in rural areas, with only 55 percent of rural households having access to electricity (Census of India, 2011).

The World Development Report noted that almost 1.063 billion Indians were offline. (World Bank, 2016). According to McKinsey Global Institute 2019 report, India is lagging behind the four most digitized economies of South Korea, Sweden, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

Digital exclusion is astonishing particularly in the villages of India due to poverty. According to India Exclusion Report 2016, internet access in India remains beyond the reach of close to 1.063 billion people as the lower-income group does not have discretionary money4 to spend on cyber cafes or to get Internet connectivity on their own to access digital information.

One study (Ericsson Consumer Lab, 2015) estimates that even with the low and competitive prices of devices and data plans compared with the rest of the world, internet access in India remains beyond the reach of close to 1.063 billion people as the lower-income group do not have discretionary money.

The Ericsson Consumer Lab Report (2015) stated that in India, for the consumers who do not use mobile broadband, affordability was the prime obstacle to the adoption of ICT services as 88 percent of Indian consumers on 2G felt that mobile broadband is too expensive. Two-thirds of Internet users in India are in the age group of 12-29 years as per IAMAI. According to a report by (IAMAI), the gender gap is higher in rural areas as compared to urban.

Digital literacy is the main cause of digital exclusion. The larger majority of India, particularly in the villages of India, still do not feel the necessity of internet in their life. In addition to that, the majority of the people living in remote villages of India have not seen even a computer or mouse but to talk about operating such technological devices. According to (World Bank 2104), language is the barrier. At least 80 percent of all content on the internet is in one of 10 languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian, or Korean.

When we talk about digital India we find that the current situation is abysmally dismal in three important sectors viz. Agriculture, Healthcare and education. Agriculture is still the mainstay of the Indian economy. McKinsey report 2019 illustrates that Indian farmers have a dearth of machinery and relatively little data on soil health, weather, and other variables. Marginal farmers are still struggling because of poor logistics and warehousing. Mckinsey reports that $ 15 billion worth of agriculture produce goes to waste before reaching consumers. The condition of the healthcare system in rural villages of India is still pathetic. Government hospitals and dispensaries largely suffer due to short of qualified doctors & nurses. The shortage of free medicine for poor patients in the villages of India is a permanent feature.

According to Mckinsey report 2019, Indian women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as women in Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa – and ten times as likely as women in the United States. According to India Exclusion report 2016, “Women with no internet are not able to access the vast plethora of health-related services, especially related to the sensitive issues that women are not comfortable discussing with others”.

In the education sector, only rich students are in a good financial position to avail of the benefits of advanced technologies. The online education is gaining impetus due to two important reasons. One, the Modi government is short of necessary funds to support the up-gradation of technical infrastructure in the government-run academic institutions; other, the so-called advisers of Modi government including the RSS want to exclude the people belonging to the marginal sections of a society from the mainstream society by allowing & strengthening online learning platforms in India. For example, the entry of Coursera, an American online learning platform into India is likely to further exclude millions of poor students who can neither afford computer nor internet.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister for Electronics and Information technology (Meity) unveiled a Start-up portal in Delhi. Five outstanding women tech entrepreneurs who have made a success story in the field of digital India were awarded a certificate and cash money (Rs 2 Lakhs each). All awardee women belong to the higher castes, mostly from Brahmins. These upper-caste awardee women are laced with technical degrees hence they are able to make a successful story. These are few such women across the country. The story of poor women living in slum areas are quite disturbing.

Women living in the slum areas in urban cities like Delhi, Gurguram, etc. do not have knowledge of computers. Some of them did not even see a laptop in the vicinity of their residence. I conducted a survey with 50 poor women in a highly populated slum area called Kusumpur Pahari(Delhi) mostly with migrant families from Bihar, UP, Haryana so & so on. The majority of the women in this slum area work as a maidservant. A 35 years married woman from Uttar Pradesh told about her daily life routine, “I belong to UP and came to Delhi & got married. My husband is a driver. I do not know how to operate a computer. I do not know what is the internet and how it functions. My life is so busy from morning till late evening to meet both ends for the family. Another respondent aged 28 married woman from Bihar commented, “Computer & Internet is electronic toys with which rich and educated people can play & they are playing well. I do not know how a computer functions. Life is difficult in Delhi. I work as a maidservant in DDA flats and do not have time to look for such expensive electronic toys”. A 25 years newly married woman explained I hear people talking about the internet. It costs to have internet facility so my family cannot afford. A 42 years old married woman responded, “I do not know about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Whatsapp etc. My children studying in a government school do not have a computer at home. They do not have a mobile phone”.

The age group 25-42 shows that there is a vast gap between speech and action. From this survey, we can draw a conclusion that the majority of poor people have no access to computers, the internet what to talk about cutting-edge technologies. The poverty existing among them will never allow them to rise in life as compared to the awardee tech women. The rich high tech entrepreneurs’ men or women will always exploit these poor people for their own economic advancements. E-commerce is monopolized by IT firms which are mostly run by rich Brahmins in India. The profit being raised through E-commerce is eaten away by these rich Brahmins in India. The small scale manufacturers in village industries remain in financial debt. IT firms in India have no agenda for addressing social ills prevailing in the society. For example, in India every 8 minutes, as per a BBC report, a child is missing. Hardly, any IT firm in India work on such social issues & develop a data-driven application. IT firms in India have been following unethical practices under the nose of the government to generate revenue.

In his speech, Ravi Shankar Prasad spoke about women empowerment through digital technology. While talking about some women in the villages he emphasized that today women feel empowered to touch a computer & mouse. But the Minister did not tell how village women are empowered by touching a computer or mouse. It is sorry to say that women belonging to the SC/ST/OBCs, Muslims, Christians castes living in the remote villages of India have no access to computers, computer mouse, and the internet. A tiny percent of urban women are participating in the digital transformation. The gap is as deep as the government of India has no funds to skill the illiterate women living in the villages of India to learn computer and take the benefit of digital transformation. This imbalance will create further social & economic distance between rich & poor. A few success stories in the last five years do not guarantee that India will be at par in technological advancements with China, the USA, Korea, UK, Japan or any developed nations.

As a matter of fact, the digital transformation is only for the elite class of the society, male or female. India is still a super-poor country. The voters as per World Bank poverty line $2(Rs140) a day) in India. By empowering digitally a few in the country will never serve the purpose. Delhi & Bengaluru are not India. The Modi government must first uplift as many people as possible from the poverty then think of making a “digital India”. The unbalanced digital mass movement will cause social & economic turbulence in the coming years.