Nationalism vs. Nature: Warming and War (Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice) [1st ed. 2023] 3031360559, 9783031360558

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Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice

Bruce E. Johansen

Nationalism vs. Nature Warming and War

Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice Series Editors Bruce E. Johansen, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA Adebowale Akande

, IR Globe Cross-Cultural Inc, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research on all areas at the nexus of populism, identity politics, as well as natural and social justice. The series welcomes theoretically sound and empirically robust monographs, edited volumes and handbooks from various disciplines and approaches on topics such as nationalism, racism, populism, human rights, diversity, discrimination, identity of minority groups, LGBTQ rights, gender politics, minority politics, social and environmental justice, political and social effects of climate change, and political behavior. Taking as its benchmark global relevance and research excellence the series is open to different approaches from the case study to cross-cultural and transnational comparisons. All books in this series are peer-reviewed.

Bruce E. Johansen

Nationalism vs. Nature Warming and War

Bruce E. Johansen University of Nebraska at Omaha Omaha, NE, USA

ISSN 2731-894X     ISSN 2731-8958 (electronic) Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice ISBN 978-3-031-36055-8    ISBN 978-3-031-36056-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 A Road to Climate Hell?������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 Destructive Power Has Increased Exponentially������������������������������    2 1.3 War, Peace, a Sustainable Earth, and Our Future ����������������������������    3 1.4 The Ultimate Environmental War Crime������������������������������������������    4 1.5 Global Warming Becomes a Serious Issue ��������������������������������������    5 1.6 Looking a Serious Catastrophe in the Eye����������������������������������������    6 1.7 The Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t Care: It Merely Holds Heat ��������������    6 1.8 The Goal Is Cooperation������������������������������������������������������������������    8 1.9 Humans’ Mutual Slaughter and the Shaping of Culture������������������    8 1.10 Will a Majority of Humans Ever Agree on Anything? ��������������������    9 1.11 Linguistic Roots of Nationalism ������������������������������������������������������   11 1.12 “Every Nation Has Delusions About Itself That It Holds Dear”������   12 1.13 Pride in Language and Culture Is Not the Same as UberNationalism ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 1.14 Adolph Hitler Nursed a Nationalistic Myth of His Own������������������   14 1.15 Normalizing Nazi Nationalistic Fantasies����������������������������������������   15 1.16 Synopses of Chapters������������������������������������������������������������������������   18 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21

2

Crises of Climate and Nationalism: Here and There, Then and Now������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 2.1 Heeding the Geophysical Facts��������������������������������������������������������   24 2.2 Forums for Human Squabbles����������������������������������������������������������   26 2.2.1 Nationalism vs. Nature���������������������������������������������������������   28 2.3 Fossil-Fueled Self Interest����������������������������������������������������������������   29 2.4 The Texture of Global Warming ������������������������������������������������������   30 2.5 Floods and Politics����������������������������������������������������������������������������   31 2.6 It’s Hot Out There (Again!): When Daily Heat Becomes Climate Change����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 2.7 Zhong Quotes Begin Here����������������������������������������������������������������   34 v

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2.8 Where and When Will Be “After Warming”? ����������������������������������   39 2.9 Warming Climates and Species Migrations��������������������������������������   41 2.10 Warming Interrupts Gabon Elephants’ Food Cycle��������������������������   43 2.11 Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica������������������������������������������������   43 2.12 Increases in Bleaching Indicates Doom for Corals Worldwide����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46 2.13 The United Nations Secretary General Rings Alarm Bells: Again������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46 2.14 The Basics: Carbon Dioxide and Methane Levels Surge (Again)������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 3

Nationalism, Politics, and Money: Autocrats, Oligarchs, Ex-Presidents, Czars, Manifest Destiny, Fascists, Rich Ex-Communists, Uber-­Nationalists, Reich und Volk, Nazis, The KKK, etc.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 3.1 The Geophysical Facts����������������������������������������������������������������������   51 3.2 Deaf to the Song of Nature ��������������������������������������������������������������   52 3.3 Can the Carbon Dioxide Curve Be Bent Downward?����������������������   53 3.4 Right-Wing Climate Change Deniers Take Office Across Europe ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 3.5 Praise the Lord and Pass the Votes����������������������������������������������������   54 3.6 The Russian Empire Wasn’t Contracting: Until After World War II�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 3.7 The Empire Off the Rails������������������������������������������������������������������   56 3.8 “Be Not Afraid”��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   57 3.9 Ukraine as Russian Colony��������������������������������������������������������������   58 3.10 A “War” or a “Special Operation”?��������������������������������������������������   59 3.11 Putin: At War with a Ukraine That “Doesn’t Exist” ������������������������   60 3.12 Ukrainians Taste the Freedom of Independent Culture and Freedom��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 3.13 Stalin’s Repression����������������������������������������������������������������������������   62 3.14 Ukraine: Putin’s Vietnam?����������������������������������������������������������������   62 3.15 To “Recast” a War, “Resettle” Its Children��������������������������������������   63 3.16 Destruction on a Staggering Scale����������������������������������������������������   64 3.17 Assassination of a Russian Propagandist������������������������������������������   65 3.18 Ukrainians Tortured at Russian “Filtration” Points?������������������������   67 3.19 Russia’s Sea of Pollution������������������������������������������������������������������   68 3.20 Ultranationalism: Dare Not Call It Corruption ��������������������������������   70 3.21 Trump: Yes, Rich, but Not in Putin’s League������������������������������������   71 3.22 Ultranationalism: A Smothering Conformity�����������������������������������   73 3.23 A Growing Sense of Nationality: Military Annexation and a Domestic Boom������������������������������������������������������������������������������   76 3.24 Radical Right Nationalism and Incipient Fascism in the United States ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77

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3.25 Massaging the Political Process with Quiet but Plentiful Money ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   78 3.26 Leo’s Fingers on the Scales of Justice����������������������������������������������   80 3.27 The Number Three Most Powerful Person in the World?����������������   81 3.28 Following the Money������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 3.29 The Ghost of Neo-Nazism Rising����������������������������������������������������   84 3.30 The Birth of Neo-Nazism in Germany����������������������������������������������   84 3.31 Forbidden Nazi Symbols and Propaganda in Germany��������������������   85 3.32 Extremism and Electoral Politics������������������������������������������������������   87 3.33 A Cultish Appeal������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 3.34 Making Fascism Trendy��������������������������������������������������������������������   90 3.35 Hitler’s Birth House as Historical Metaphor������������������������������������   93 3.36 Empires and Worldviews������������������������������������������������������������������   94 3.37 The United States’ “Manifest Destiny”��������������������������������������������   95 3.38 The US Wages a “War” Over Immigration and “White Replacement Anxiety”��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96 3.39 The United States’ White Man’s Manifest Destiny in Our Time������   97 3.40 Right-Wing Nationalism’s Worldwide Spread����������������������������������   99 3.41 Welcome to Today’s Sweden������������������������������������������������������������  101 3.42 Right-Wing Nationalism Elsewhere in Europe��������������������������������  104 3.43 Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum ��������������������������������������������������  105 3.44 The Nazi Manifest Destiny ��������������������������������������������������������������  106 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  108 4

 Ultranationalism as a Form of Mass Insanity ��������������������������������������  113 4.1 Excuses for War��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 4.2 The Monstrosity of Evil Enhanced by Ultranationalism������������������  115 4.3 Speaking of Forced Marches������������������������������������������������������������  118 4.4 The World Between Putin’s Ears������������������������������������������������������  119 4.5 In War Crimes, I See Wounded Knee������������������������������������������������  121 4.6 American Domestic “Barbarians at the Door”����������������������������������  121 4.7 Russians Destroy Infrastructure: Attempt to Make Ukrainian Cities Unlivable��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  122 4.8 Context: The “Right” Resurges at the Wrong Time��������������������������  124 4.9 War Crimes in Ukraine ��������������������������������������������������������������������  125 4.10 Uber-Nationalism as an Invitation to Torture�����������������������������������  126 4.11 The War That No One Wants������������������������������������������������������������  128 4.12 The War to End All Wars������������������������������������������������������������������  129 4.13 Really the War to End All Wars��������������������������������������������������������  130 4.14 Stopping the Steal? ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 4.15 Setting Up for Future Elections with False Premises ����������������������  132 4.16 Truth Does Not Matter����������������������������������������������������������������������  133 4.17 Incessant Lying as a Form of Mass Insanity ������������������������������������  135 4.18 The Cruelties of Nationalism������������������������������������������������������������  136 4.19 Praise the Lord and Pass the Ballot Box������������������������������������������  138

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4.20 Roe v. Wade’s Demise: The Postabortion Future������������������������������  140 4.21 A Hunger for Domination����������������������������������������������������������������  141 4.22 Christian Nationalism’s Chilling Political Amalgam������������������������  142 4.23 Why Has Christian Nationalism Developed so Quickly? ����������������  144 4.24 Empire-Building as a Psychological Disorder����������������������������������  144 4.25 Reminders of Brutal Nationalism from Tibet ����������������������������������  146 4.26 White Supremacy, American Style: The Know Nothings’ Brief Surge ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  147 4.27 Ideological Affinities������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 4.28 Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump: Past as Prologue��������������������  150 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  152 5

Gun Fetish Nation������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 5.1 Live Update: All Victims in Michigan State Shooting Were Students, Police Say��������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 5.2 A Uniquely American Plague ����������������������������������������������������������  156 5.3 Blood on the Stars and Stripes����������������������������������������������������������  157 5.4 Gun Ownership and Use: Myths and Realities ��������������������������������  158 5.5 United States vs. the World’s Gun Deaths: The Numbers����������������  159 5.6 Guns and Deaths (Including Suicides) in International Context������  160 5.7 Shootouts at the “Home of the Brave” Corral����������������������������������  163 5.8 Save My Soul, Rev. DeSantis!����������������������������������������������������������  163 5.9 Fear of Crime Stocks the Arsenal ����������������������������������������������������  164 5.10 The Legalities of Mass Murder��������������������������������������������������������  166 5.11 Guns, Fear, and Social Divisions������������������������������������������������������  167 5.12 The Gun Fetish Dictionary. United States Edition, c. 2023��������������  170 5.13 Making Light of Our Gun Fetish������������������������������������������������������  173 5.14 Failing a Test of Sufficient Conservatism ����������������������������������������  174 5.15 Gun Anxiety Sells More Guns����������������������������������������������������������  175 5.16 Guns, Grievances, and a Sense of Personal Power ��������������������������  176 5.17 The More Who Die, The Less We Care��������������������������������������������  178 5.18 Game-Changing Measures That May Actually Reverse the Gun Boom������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 5.19 Could This Problem Be Solved by a Gun Ownership Tax?��������������  189 5.20 The Republican Solution: More Guns, Again����������������������������������  189 5.21 Thoughts and Prayers: They Do the Trick Every Time��������������������  190 5.22 Words Fail ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  194

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White Pride, Worldwide: The Nationalistic Roots of Racial Hatred�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 6.1 Seize the Country of an Inferior People and Exterminate Them ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  198 6.2 Protected by the First Amendment����������������������������������������������������  199 6.3 A Supermarket of Online Hatred������������������������������������������������������  200 6.4 Racism as First Amendment Cover��������������������������������������������������  200

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6.5 Kanye (“Ye”) West: Hitler’s Pseudo-Black Buddy��������������������������  202 6.6 Trump Stands with the Mob��������������������������������������������������������������  202 6.7 Trump and His Small Army of Quasi-Brownshirts��������������������������  203 6.8 Watch It, “Ye,” the First Amendment Can Turn You into a Diddling Fool, Too ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  203 6.9 “Ye’s” Fascist Fashions��������������������������������������������������������������������  205 6.10 Sterling Credentials as an Aborning Young American Fascist����������  205 6.11 American History’s Fascistic False Starts����������������������������������������  206 6.12 “White Extinction Anxiety,” False Walls, and a Common Destiny����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  207 6.13 Race, Religion, and Nationalism������������������������������������������������������  208 6.14 Common Destiny or Common Demise��������������������������������������������  208 6.15 Street Fighting for White Pride��������������������������������������������������������  209 6.16 The Ukraine War at a Bloody Street Level ��������������������������������������  212 6.17 The Growth of Anti-Semitism����������������������������������������������������������  213 6.18 The Word “Caste’s” Roots����������������������������������������������������������������  214 6.19 She Didn’t Die����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  218 6.20 Taking Notes on Eugenics����������������������������������������������������������������  219 6.21 The Unique Cruelty of Lynchings����������������������������������������������������  219 6.22 A Euphoria of Hate ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  221 6.23 Burning Bodies ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  223 6.24 Reminders of Stations in Life ����������������������������������������������������������  224 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  226 7

 How High? How Soon? How Hot, How Long? Climatic Changes to Come����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 7.1 How Does the Melting of the Thwaites Glacier Fit into This Scenario?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 7.2 How Far?: Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Continue to Rise������  231 7.3 How Strong and Numerous Do Hurricanes Have to Get?����������������  232 7.4 How Much Do Fossil-Fuel Companies’ Profits Have to Rise?��������  233 7.5 How Many Disasters Can the Earth Withstand? ������������������������������  233 7.6 How Much Glacial Ice Must Melt Before Humanity Realizes That We Have a Problem?����������������������������������������������������������������  236 7.7 Ice Loss in Greenland Hits New Record������������������������������������������  236 7.8 How Many Times Can We “Surrender to Oil” Before a Problem Becomes a Catastrophe? ������������������������������������������������������������������  237 7.9 How Many Extremes Will Inflict Enough Pain to Represent a Real Problem?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  239 7.10 How Are Russian Politics Intertwined with the Climate Crisis?������  240 7.11 How Did Donald Trump’s and Xi Jinping’s Energy Policies Fit into This Problem?����������������������������������������������������������������������  242 7.12 How Long Will It Be Before the “Curves” for CO2 and Methane “Bend” Down? ������������������������������������������������������������������  243

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Contents

7.13 How Long Will It Be Before Daily Weather Reports Indicate Severe Problems?������������������������������������������������������������������������������  244 7.14 What Is the Role of Ukraine in the World Climate Crisis?��������������  245 7.15 When Will We Link the Connections Between War and Habitat? ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  246 7.16 How Long Will It Take to Connect Heat Events in Different Parts of the World?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  246 7.17 How Long Will Habitats Be Destroyed by Wildfires Before People Tame Them?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  247 7.18 How Long Will It Be Until Most People Believe: “This is Definitely Global Warming?”����������������������������������������������������������������������������  248 7.19 How Long Will It Be Until Enough People Realize That We Are Living on Borrowed Time?��������������������������������������������������  251 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  254 8

 The Carbon Footprint of War����������������������������������������������������������������  257 8.1 United States’ Off-Shore Wars����������������������������������������������������������  257 8.2 War, Profits, and Greenhouse Gases ������������������������������������������������  258 8.3 The United States’ Position as Military Polluter������������������������������  260 8.4 Growing Carbon Production in World Wars I and II������������������������  260 8.5 Sketching the Carbon Footprint of a Small War ������������������������������  261 8.6 Size, Scope, and Complexity������������������������������������������������������������  262 8.7 Environmental Effects of the Ukrainian War������������������������������������  263 8.8 War as an Adjunct to Nationalism is Obsolete����������������������������������  263 8.9 Key Facts About How War Impacts the Climate Crisis and the Environment��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  265 8.10 Key Facts About How War Impacts the Climate Crisis and the Environment��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  265 8.11 Agent Orange Deforms Generations������������������������������������������������  267 8.12 The Nightmare Continues: “Monster Babies”����������������������������������  269 8.13 Bloodshed on a Historically Unprecedented Scale��������������������������  270 8.14 The Tally of Human Damage������������������������������������������������������������  271 8.15 The Future: Eliminate War and Environmental Catastrophe������������  272 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  273

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 Conclusion: A Future to Love—Or Loathe? ����������������������������������������  275 9.1 Reframing Human Nature����������������������������������������������������������������  275 9.2 Changes in the Built Environment����������������������������������������������������  276 9.3 Our Climate Goose May Be Seriously Cooked��������������������������������  279 9.4 We Are Capable of a Reversal in the CO2 Curve������������������������������  280 9.5 So, Can We Help the Scientists and Diplomats Find Solutions?������  280 9.6 Real Solutions Require Major Changes (and Some Satire)��������������  281 9.7 Necessary Steps��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  281 9.8 What of Equality? ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  283 9.9 Back to the Climate��������������������������������������������������������������������������  283 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  284

Chapter 1

Introduction

“If ecological disaster is to be avoided, we need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia….This concept, prominent in Eastern thought was also a feature of Western monotheist religions before we began treating nature as a mere resource.” (Briefly, 2022) —Karen Armstrong. Sacred Nature. New York: Knopf, 2022

Here’s my 20-word elevator pitch: Nationalism and Nature: Warming and War studies global warming and war as dual existential threats that must be extinguished together (or everybody loses). Or My 100-Word Elevator Pitch for a Taller Building This is a book about the two major maladies facing humankind, which seriously question our abilities to mount the kind of personal, national, and international cooperation to subdue either. We need only four words to begin: fossil fuels, nationalism, and war. Most of us advocate cutting (or cutting out) fossil fuels as a solution. Eliminating or at least severely limiting nationalism to reduce war as a tool of foreign policy (and combat global climate change at the same time) faces us with a serious discussion that has hardly begun—although we must do both to accomplish either.

1.1 A Road to Climate Hell? On November 8, 2022, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the Conference of Parties 27 (COP 27) assembly of about 100 nations, meeting in Egypt, that the world is on a “road to climate hell with its foot on the accelerator.” Guterres told world leaders to “cooperate or perish,” as he singled out the world’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_1

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1 Introduction

two biggest sources of greenhouse gases, China and the United States (Borenstein, 2022, A-5). “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact—or a Collective Suicide Pact,” said Guterres. We will never make peace with the climate unless we also tame humankind’s propensity for nationalistic violence. We are said to be in the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humanity controls nature, where we have been botching our environment seriously, in planet-wide way for about two centuries. We had pollution before that, but its size and toxicity were limited by the size of Earth’s largest urban areas. We also had weapons and wars, but none of them contained nuclear radioactivity. Tanks were something of a novelty. Aircraft’s use in war was a subject of science fiction. Rifles were rudimentary, and wheeled vehicles probably meant Model Ts. Our time in the Anthropocene may be short because the term implies that Someone, somewhere controls something. Our short-lived Anthropocene may already have faded into a thus-far unnamed new epoch in which no one really controls anything. We now are living and dying post-Anthropocene, where and when a nuclear accident could start a world war from which survivors will envy the dead. Our climate also may already be seriously out of any kind of human control, as it deals out death and misery with a frequency and power unknown before carbon dioxide and methane became dominant forces in weather and climate that masks natural cycles. Come with me to the Earth 200 to 300 years ago, hardly the bat of a gnat’s eye in human occupancy of the Earth. Human weaponry involved ships under sail, basically firing cannon balls at each other with explosions meant to hit (and sink) other nations’ similar watercraft. Empires changed hands based on such battles, establishing colonial boundaries that have most of us, in North America north of the Rio Grande, speaking English rather than Spanish or French, or one (or more) of several hundred indigenous languages. The major motive military forces at sea were sail manipulated by wind. The main means of travel on Earth were horses, cannons, and columns of men engaged in running battles. The main source of fossil fuel emissions was campfires and smoldering ashes from opposing sides’ wooden forts, as well as the occasional sailing ship that had been burned to its waterline.

1.2 Destructive Power Has Increased Exponentially In roughly two centuries, humankind’s ability to manipulate the environment to kill each other in war has increased exponentially. Flash forward to the present day, when human ingenuity has provided us with the tools of self-destruction by war waged with ballistic missiles topped with nuclear warheads, ground troops reinforced with tanks and other older forms of wanton destruction, and various biological weapons. Nuclear weapons also raise the possibility of death by mass radioactive poisoning that could cruelly kill millions of people in a manner during which, it has been said, the living will envy the dead.

1.3  War, Peace, a Sustainable Earth, and Our Future

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The human propensity toward arms races (to and including nuclear weapons) along with combustion of fossil fuels pose our two existential questions at once: death by human-caused war or human-caused fossil-fuel emissions (e.g., mainly carbon dioxide and/or war). That, or a more prosaic end of civilization as fossil fuels accrete to a point where human, other animals, plant, and animals’ habitats became poisoned by excessive heat, or other maladies (such as disease) stemming from such warming? Which apocalypse may directly face us first? We have the material bases of both in our hands now. Within the lives of our children and theirs, these questions will very probably become matters of mass life and death rather than speculation, as today. Which one may end life on Earth, and our planetary habitat first? Are we facing an end game with the tools of mass destruction both ways, with the human instincts that have changed very little since the time when we faced off in conflicts aided by sticks and stones? The most obvious solution would seem to be that as many members of humankind as possible will have to agree on how to solve both of these problems. This sounds so easy and simple, but since when has all of humankind ever agreed on anything? And on what must we agree? What divides us, and what has stood between us since the first stone was cast with ill intentions? What drives the urge to go to war, even at such great cost to human and natural life? Will we ever get past these problems without doing our best to deal with notions of one group’s superiority over another? Beliefs in national superiority of one group over another forms part of our international existential problem, along with nationalism supercharged with many varieties of racial and religious hatred.

1.3 War, Peace, a Sustainable Earth, and Our Future Thus the title Nationalism and Nature: War and the Environment. This book attempts to merge thinking on both subjects, to compare and contrast human affairs, past and present. It may be the first to do this; I have been looking; if anyone in our audience knows of any others, please let me know. I am seeking to engage a common conversation about war, peace, and our environmental future. More positively, do we have any possibility of escaping either of these existential threats? If so, how and when? Do we have any potential to respect the Earth and each other that lead to real, sustainable peace and prosperity? Everyone wants solutions, or so we say. What we do, however, may be different. We have the tools of both end games in our hands today, but our road toward enduring solutions is narrowing. The proportion of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere has steadily increased since the first lumps of coal were hacked out of the Earth and used for propulsion or heating, about 200  years ago. At the same time, weapons of war have become steadily more numerous and lethal.

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Both existential questions accrete urgency with each year of delay. The threat of a radiated future through reckless use of nuclear weapons arose at about the same time as the seriously intensifying threat from rising greenhouse gases. As of 2022, eight nations had nuclear weapons, and one had materials, but no warheads. Today, as we call the nuclear roll, we see: • • • • • • • • •

Russia—6255 nuclear warheads The United States of America—5550 nuclear warheads China—350 nuclear warheads France—290 nuclear warheads The United Kingdom—225 nuclear warheads Pakistan—165 nuclear warheads India—156 nuclear warheads Israel—90 nuclear warheads North Korea—none, but material to build 40 to 50 nuclear warheads

1.4 The Ultimate Environmental War Crime During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin from time to time rattled his nukes, implying that he might use them as part of a broader war, while calling his assault on Ukraine a “sacred duty.” Did he ever think of the irrefutable fact that we all share the same atmosphere and that radiation does not stop at borders? Or is destruction of Earth’s life an acceptable form of collateral damage to satisfy Putin’s passion for restoring a Russia with borders as expansive as those of the pre-collapse Soviet Union? Has Putin realized that a major nuclear war would make every inhabitant of Earth a loser, everyone and everything victims of the ultimate environmental war crime? In 80 to 90  years, we have gone from a handful of test bombs deliverable by rudimentary aircraft flying over fixed locations to between 13,000 and 14,000 nuclear warheads deliverable mainly by missiles programmed for launch anywhere to impact targets anywhere else. Our conventional weapons of warfare also have increased in number and sophistication. As this book was being written, the United States had been publicizing its newest stealth bomber. Such a tool of mass murder it has become! International conflicts provide us with wars (such as the present-day invasion of Ukraine by Russia), which provide laboratories for refinement of existing weapons in real time, as stockpiles grow. Meanwhile, the proportion of carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere continues to rise nearly without pause. In the case of CO2, its natural cycle has ranged from about 180 to 280 parts per million (ppm) until the discovery of coal and oil to about 420 ppm today. This curve has not bent downward in a meaningful way since the advent of the fossil fuel age. As it is, at 420 ppm, we are as high as in the Pliocene 2 to 3 million years ago, when the Earth had no “permanent” ice, and sea levels were much higher. The difference between then and now is substantial,

1.5  Global Warming Becomes a Serious Issue

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reflecting, in part, the amount of warming “in the pipeline,” which hasn’t yet become evident at Earth’s surface because of a thermal inertia feedback loop. The raw materials of both of our existential problems thus increase more or less without pause.

1.5 Global Warming Becomes a Serious Issue Please permit me to indicate how far we have come since the “early days” of paying close attention to climate change. In 1980, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) made a case, with several colleagues, for the importance of “infrared forcing,” a scientific term for global warming. Very few people outside of a few farsighted scientists and some very serious environmentalists paid much attention. In 1988, when Hansen testified before Congress about global warming’s dire prospects, he grabbed a headline on the front page of the New York Times. More heads began to turn. One of those was U.S. Senator Al Gore, who also had read the science, and, in 2000, ran for president of the United States, when climate change was a minor issue to most people. He was narrowly defeated by George W. Bush in a race so close that it ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. (Bush later picked up some of Gore’s major message and became a major proponent of wind power in Texas). In the early1990s, when I began to read the science, most people I spoke to about prospects of a dire future of rising temperatures, increasing wildfires, melting ice caps, et al. thought I had been bitten by a rabid hippie. Most political polls indicated that global warming was a non- starter with the general public. Flash ahead to September 2021, with temperatures and seas rising, out-of-season tornadoes in the United States Upper Midwest within days of Christmas (we had one near Omaha), wildfires raging months out of the usual seasonal cycle, record heat around much of the world, hurricanes strengthening quickly over warming ocean waters worldwide, and more. Climate change had become a staple of TV national news, and many people had at least an inkling that something very serious was happening. Something very interesting did happen in the world of banking. David Malpass, president of the World Bank, caused worldwide objections by dismissing the threat of global warming when he refused to acknowledge that fossil fuels are causing serious warming of the atmosphere. Malpass had been nominated for the office 3 years earlier by then-president Donald J. Trump. Al Gore was in the audience when Malpass lit a spark in a room full of bankers and regulators. Wow, I thought: a quarter century from rabid hippies to reading matter for the president of the World Bank. Carbon dioxide had come a long way.

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1.6 Looking a Serious Catastrophe in the Eye However, many veterans of this battle didn’t believe that actions to start bending the carbon dioxide curve downward had come far enough, fast enough, to avoid a serious catastrophe within 50 to 100 years. The proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere had already reached about 420 parts per million (ppm) as of 2023, consistent with a level at which survival of many plants and animals on Earth could soon be in jeopardy. Such evasions of geophysical law were of no concern to President Putin, who was playing by the dicta of dictators, an elite club of the rich and famous, who thought they could wish geophysics away. Perhaps they were so ignorant as to miss the fact that greenhouse gases could change the world’s atmosphere to the world’s detriment. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide and methane played their own natural hand, holding heat, and the more they held, the hotter the atmosphere became. No number of weapons on Earth could nullify the work of greenhouse gases except one. Nuclear weapons may throw enough ash, dust, and debris into the atmosphere to block out the sun and produce cooling at the surface that most of our food crops and animals would die. Greenhouse gases don’t know anything about irony, so they would never “realize” that the only way to counter their effects (other than reduce their prevalence in the atmosphere) would be nuclear war. When considering nationalism, do not forget that every large nation contains property and exercises rights over smaller areas than have been reserved for indigenous peoples after a larger, stronger power rolled over them, usually with armed power, liquor, and disease. In the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America, for example, thousands of smaller nations also exercise a range of legal rights. Native American rights are sometimes guaranteed by nearly 500 treaties signed by the immigrants, mainly from Europe. The indigenous nations have left their marks on the food that people in the majority society eat, the way they govern themselves, how they dress, the words that they speak, and much more. Navajos, Lakota (Sioux), Aztec, Maya, and hundreds more have shaped our lives.

1.7 The Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t Care: It Merely Holds Heat As a box score of media reaction to the tidal flow of opinion regarding climate change, Kyle Paoletta’s “The Incredible Shrinking Doomsday” (Harper’s, April, 2023) is the best dissection I have seen in 30 years of reading and writing about what some human beings who have an important role in interpreting reality (in the case of our climactic future, an overwhelmingly important issue) to the rest of us. While it is an amazingly detailed piece of writing, however, Paoletta’s analysis omits some very important ways of measuring where we are and where we are going.

1.7  The Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t Care: It Merely Holds Heat

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First, the carbon dioxide, methane, etc. do not care which commentator has a sunnier view of whether we will have a climate catastrophe, nor how he or she has changed his or her mind in the last few years. These are games that people play. We can add the number of wind turbines and solar panels and then congratulate ourselves on how much progress we have made. One very important measure of our progress is the amount of carbon dioxide, etc. in the atmosphere, which was not mentioned in Paoletta’s critique, nor in most of the media reports surveyed. Before the industrial age began, the proportion of CO2 for several centuries had ranged from about 180 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm. At 180 ppm, an ice age usually would set in; at 280 ppm, climate resembled the nineteenth century, slightly cooler than today. What has happened since our industries and transportation have burned increasing amounts of C02, etc? The CO2 level has skyrocketed to about 425 ppm. With a few very short pauses (such as the recent pandemic), the levels of these gases have steadily risen to new records every year. We will not be making progress against temperature rises which are at the root of our changing climate until that curve begins to fall and continues to do so until it breaks about 350 ppm and continues to fall. These are the geophysical facts, and it is a test that we are failing, no matter what talking heads, book authors or web masters tell us. One more useful measure of our progress or lack thereof will be thermal inertia, the amount of time required for a given level of greenhouse gases to express its heat level in the atmosphere. Over land, this feedback loop requires about 50 years to reach its heat level. In the oceans, this figure is 100 to 150 years. Thus, on land, where we live, the climate is, on the average, reflecting the weather of 1973. A debate over where our consumption of fossil fuels is taking us is rather useless without knowledge of how the atmosphere works. Unfortunately for all of us, much of our media commentary does not reference much of the science that is so necessary to dealing with this problem. Unlike the media scoreboard tallied in Harper’s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), a body of experts convened by the United Nations, has a grip on the science, and its sirens are wailing: within the next decade…nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level (Plumer, 2023). That report offers the most comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet is changing. It says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil, and natural gas. That number holds a special significance in global climate politics: Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, virtually every nation agreed to “pursue efforts” to hold global warming to 1.5 °C. Beyond that point, scientists say, the impacts of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures, and species extinction become significantly harder for humanity to handle. “The 1.5 degree limit is achievable, but it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said. In response to the report, Guterres called on countries to stop building new coal plants and to stop

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approving new oil and gas projects (Plumer, 2023). “The pace and scale of what has been done so far and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change,” said Hoesung Lee, the chair of the climate panel. “We are walking when we should be sprinting” Plumer, 2023). When it comes to coal-fired power, all the bad press fired at it hasn’t kept coal capacity from growing right up into 2023, as this book was on its way to press. Global Energy Monitor, which tracks energy markets, said that in 2022 the capacity to burn coal for energy increased by 19.5 gigawatts worldwide, enough to provide power to about 15 million homes. The largest share of the increase came from China (26.8 gigawatts, with 100 gigawatts in planning stages). The largest decline (13.5 gigawatts) was in the United States (Arasu, 2023, D-7).

1.8 The Goal Is Cooperation The connection between this chapter and this book’s “red thread,” as my prescient editor Niko Chtouris calls the connection of one part of a book to the rest of it is this: Our goal is cooperation. How sweet this sounds, how marshmallow nice, an idea so nice-sounding but, given a human history of cooperation on limiting war (especially the possibility nuclear war) and curbing the growth of carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere, how unattainable. Human beings, propelled by mutual mistrust, bickering over resources, and other reasons, have only agreed (usually for a limited time in such endeavors as regional treaties and the United Nations) to do anything but fight. I often recall a story told by Carl Sagan: The universe is so big that planets with suns and planets that resemble ours are probably plentiful. Some of them probably contain very interesting and instructive forms of life. However, our chance of meeting any of them is probably very low because of distance, as well as our one and only example, our propensity advanced civilizations’ ability to destroy themselves through lack of cooperation at crucial crossroads [I have added the following] in weapons technology and climate management. We havre seen very little evidence thus far that the Earth’s residents are passing these crucial tests.

1.9 Humans’ Mutual Slaughter and the Shaping of Culture Please also understand just how erroneous the idea Native Americans have been subjugated has been. Yes, the immigrants from Europe killed 80 to 90 per cent of the hemisphere’s Indigenous peoples as the immigrants subsumed two continents, one of the greatest holocausts in world history, but they also absorbed place names (including the city and US state in which I live). No one made them do it. Many American words stem from indigenous roots, and so does about half of what we eat. We are a composite culture, and at least some of our historians know it.

1.10  Will a Majority of Humans Ever Agree on Anything?

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The United States is the most individualistic nation in the world, with more personally owned guns than any other, and not by a small number. A gun (or several of them—how many can anyone fire at once?) is a very personal expression of interpersonal domination and power. One person plus one gun is an automatic imbalance of personal power (or nationalism) over another person plus no guns, for any time or reason, for any purpose, or lack thereof. As noted several times in this work, people in the United States also experience more mass shootings, per capita, than any other nation on Earth. In there middle of 2023, the U.S.A. was averaging two mass shootings (four or more people killed or seriously injured  per day). The number of seriously lethal  guns in private hands and deaths. by their use have been rising side by side for several years, contrary to the argument of gun supporters that more guns make our lives safer.  One might guess that these numbers are connected. Yet, quite a few Americans nearly worship their guns and vigorously oppose any attempt to control their use as an infringement of a relationship with the Second Amendment that amounts to a crushing dictatorship. Our experience thus far is that any serious solution to the national shooting spree must involve cooperation of people, with fewer guns used for more clearly defined purposes. Most nations of the world have reached this stage of development, but the United States has not. The climate crisis also involves a great deal of interpersonal cooperation to reduce the atmosphere’s load of greenhouse gases to a level that will sustain a habitable Earth. No form of support allows us to ruin the Earth for human habitation by generation of excess greenhouse gases any more than we are entitled to turn a Topps grocery store into a shooting gallery, which has been only one stage for recent mass shootings. We must adopt the same standard of thinking as our standard of living that will require standards of decency and compassion, not guts and glory. We must join other systems of behavior that require human cooperation. We also must accept some limits on our freedoms in order to survive as a species. This requirement also includes other peoples. If we cannot cooperate, we will not survive. Our propensity for conflict and our acceptance of fossil fuels will kill us as organized societies, and this will occur within the next century. This work also includes other human activities that must be seriously curtailed in order to survive as a species, such as curtailing war using today’s weapons, especially nuclear ones. This is our “red thread.” Thank you, Niko. We teach each other to think with the whole Earth in mind.

1.10 Will a Majority of Humans Ever Agree on Anything? To repeat: What are you doing, professor, asking all of the World’s 200-plus nations to cooperate on anything, even if it is a solution to nationalistic hubris that will at least postpone our reckless slide into a world of a chaotic climatic change or war-­ torn radioactive ashes? Climate change could ruin our habitat in a century if we do not get busy, as a group, and work our way off fossil fuels. All of this is going to

10

1 Introduction

require an end to human behavior based on conflict involving a scale and intensity never before seen by a world population of almost 9 billion people who will have to cooperate in ways never used before to avoid an end, eventually, of a rich, cavalcade of history and culture from which we write our histories, as well as our geographies, along with everything else that we know, or hope to know. I am particularly interested in ways in which cultures diverge to find ways in which everyone could cooperate to deal with two existential crises that are closing in on all of us. Both (the growing savagery of war and the increasing atmospheric violence of climate change) are colliding during our lifetimes. Both are related intimately, beginning with their origins at the hands of human beings. For the rest of these resemblances, read this book, please (and many others), and get up from this experience ready to do something that will be important, as all peoples must take part knowing that no one else is going to sacrifice anyone else’s wonderful, varied, beautiful, and historically rich fellow cultures. We are aiming at the dangerous types of nationalism, not its beautiful aspects, which everyone should learn to admire. While we discuss the problems that overzealous nationalism poses for Earth’s future, we ought to consider an important debit that it leaves behind: the lethal combination of religious extremism, a form of nationalism that has strewn so much of the world with blood over the centuries. We never will come close to stemming the twin existential threats facing everyone on Earth without addressing the ironies involving the practice of many faiths vis-a-vis those who dwell inside their doctrinal walls and those who live and practice other faiths outside these bounds. All of our major religions have beauties, but they can also profess hatred for people individually or in groups to be outside their realms. Human history spills over with examples of religious faithful practicing conquests and cruelty toward nonmembers, ancient, past, and present. One example, only about half a century in the past, is the Partition of India (1947). After three centuries as a colonizer of India, the British ended their role as ruler by drawing borders between Muslims (in West and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) and Hindus, in the rest of the subcontinent. John Cyril Radcliffe, an English barrister who drew the lines, may have thought he was doing little except tending to some unfinished imperial business. History tells us that Radcliffe had no particular expertise in how to set such boundaries sensitive to Hindu and Muslim cultures. He had never lived east of Paris (Sehgal, 2023, 64). After drawing the lines, the barrister flew back to Britain as quickly as he could, having burned all of his papers pertaining to his 5 weeks of work on the Partition. Learning of the deaths that followed his work, Radcliffe refused his salary of 3000 British Pounds (about 40,000 Rupees at the time) but complained that he hadn’t had enough time to complete the work properly. A year after the Partition, he was awarded a Knight’s Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. Anyone who has been to India (I have) knows it as a complex place full of distinct peoples in many places, unable to contain within two nationalistic religious groups a thousand miles apart. Many of the British who gave their consent to the Partition must have known this. The fact that a supposedly simple act of turning one nation into two would create one of human history’s bloodiest collections of migrations should not have surprised the colonists.

1.11  Linguistic Roots of Nationalism

11

The region convulsed with violence….Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that 75,000 women and girls were abducted and raped, one-third of them under the age of 12. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history. “Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities [were] transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi, to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with their children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry.

All of this, and much, much more, following, by a few months, the deadliest war in the history of the planet, provoked by acute differences in nationality and religion, which had killed tens of millions. Now, in a world so riven with hatreds stemming from nationalism, ethnicity, and religion, who among us would even try to unite everyone in favor of quelling militarism and greenhouse gases, even with a warning that both, left unchecked, could end life on Earth?

1.11 Linguistic Roots of Nationalism “Nation” is derived from the Latin natio, which may mean people, or any group who share a common birth or other bond. Natus (also from Latin) implies birth from a common mother, or the ability to trance ancestors to a common mother. With the exception of a few relatively small groups, most often indigenous peoples who have been conquered and nearly killed off, “nation” no longer strictly fits its derivation from Latin. Witness the United States, which has been a migrant draw for its entire existence. The United States also has become a worldwide empire with more than 100 military bases, which is a military network, but also an initiator of human contact with many peoples from around the world. War also spreads culture; notice the spread of baseball, born as a US game (partially rooted in indigenous ball games), spread by military occupation: Japan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, etc. The land area that became the United States is also home to several hundred indigenous bands, peoples, tribes, and nations, each of which has its own history of contact (often brutally oppressive) with all manner of immigrants from everywhere. Attitudes vis-a-vis immigration tend to be relaxed in the United States, save for presidents (Donald Trump comes to mind) who want to make recent arrival targets of misleading stereotypes. The truth is that all of us have laid a few bricks in this house that we call “America.”

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1 Introduction

1.12 “Every Nation Has Delusions About Itself That It Holds Dear” “Every nation has delusions about itself that it holds dear, delusions that take the form of stories. America’s own foundational stories—its heroes and archetypes, its go-to plots, are perhaps better read not explored to understand ourselves, but as permission to avoid understanding…ourselves. Some of our most internalized parables of American motive, American character, are soothing mis-directions. What is a western, after all, but a kind of hermeneutic care package of perversive lionizing myths about the most shameful facts of our inheritance? Who were the pioneers, really, or the founding fathers? Where does the wealth of America’s capitalistic princes come from? What is a self-made man? (Dee, 2022, 82). We are in something of a golden age of this kind of prophylactic, dissent-averse national mythmaking. “Make America Great Again” is essentially a demand to return not to any actual bygone America, but to the core myths themselves, and to criminalize disloyalty to them (hence the panic among right-wing politicians over “critical race theory” (CRT). The skew of wealth has become greater across the world in our time than perhaps any in the memory of history. The number of billionaires in the United States increased from 66 to more than 700 between 1990 and 2020. The median hourly wage increased only 20 per cent in that time, well below inflation. The number of people owning truly gigantic yachts (longer than 250 feet, about 80 yards) has increased from fewer than 10 to more than 170 in the same period. Raphael Sauleau, CEO of Fraser Yachts, told Evan Osnos of The New York Times that the last few years have brought “COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us” (Osnos, 2022a, b, 30). Russia is no longer communist. Far from it. It is now ruled by oligarchs. A unified view of threats from climate change and war was illustrated by a mother during the 2022 World Economic Forum.

I write to you today as a parent. “A terrified American parent,” told the 2022 World Economic Forum:

“When children are killed in their school, I try to keep my terror in a place far from where I am. Until I can’t. Until someone forces me to connect the safety of our children in a country awash in guns to the safety of our children on a hotter planet. That’s what happened this week at the World Economic Forum here, when Al Gore, the former vice president, drew a straight line between gun policy and climate policy….“Some of the same reasons why the United States has been incapable of responding to these tragedies are the same reasons—lobbying, campaign contributions, the capture of policymaking, the control of politicians with money, lobbyists—that it has been impossible to

1.13  Pride in Language and Culture Is Not the Same as Uber-Nationalism

13

pass climate legislation,” Gore said. “Our democracy has been paralyzed, bought, captured….Climate change and what to do about it dominated many of the sessions….All the while, extreme weather, supersized by climate change, brought suffering to millions of people. A punishing heat wave in India and Pakistan, followed by flooding. Devastating rains and mudslides in South Africa. Fire and drought in the American West, followed by devastating rains and floods.….That will, no doubt, shape the future of all our children…. as a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good.” (Children at Risk, 2022). Partisan nationalism does immense damage to the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific cooperation regarding public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the…nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of worldwide concern and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movements of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to cooperate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis and the inculcation of military crises. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable Earth.

1.13 Pride in Language and Culture Is Not the Same as Uber-Nationalism Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international cooperation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. Pope Francis has pointed out that for all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. For all of our hyper-connectivity, said Francis,

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1 Introduction

“We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as types of nationalism that have failed the peoples of the world when they need cooperation and solidarity in the face of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey can take us to some odd ports of call, intellectually, from Vladimir Putin, to Donald Trump, to Thomas Jefferson:” Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these (perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become), may be a short man physically, but he has large ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empires, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and US president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70–$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves (Johansen, 2021, x).

1.14 Adolph Hitler Nursed a Nationalistic Myth of His Own One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a form of supernationalism.

Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East”—the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union at that time. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Nazis’ Mississippi River, and covered wagons were readied for the Nazi “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples that

1.15  Normalizing Nazi Nationalistic Fantasies

15

they deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, Hitler partook of a long-standing romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors in the United States. To Nazis who agreed with these notions, the United States was moving toward its model. US racial attitudes sometimes were called upon as evidence to the Nazis that America was evolving in the “right” direction (e.g., toward Nazism) despite public rhetoric about racial equality (Johansen, 2021, xii).

1.15 Normalizing Nazi Nationalistic Fantasies While the United States did have Nazi sympathizers (Charles Lindbergh being the best known during the 1930s), majority opinion in the United States was very far from that. Given subsequent events (World War II, et al.), the Nazis’ nationalistic point of view vis-a-vis the United States and its history sounds downright screwy— reflective of evidence that the Nazis were perfectly capable of normalizing their own nationalistic fantasies well beyond any outside measuring standard. How mysterious to Hitler & Co. today’s worries may have seemed, describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb faces its future. The old ways, in which international arguments often ended in devastating wars, are obsolete by reason of necessity and survival, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities and endanger many species of plants and animals. Authoritarians become the handmaidens of nationalism, world wars, and, in this analysis, end times, eager seekers of a war that no one will win. In humankind’s history, we have never before had deadly serious, dual prospective apocalypses: on one hand, the future of our environment has never been so imperiled, given that oil, our major source of power, comfort, convenience, and profit, produces carbon dioxide when combusted, which will eventually provide enough heat in the lower atmosphere to fry our habitat, unless we learn to use other power sources, and do it quickly, in harmony with every other people and nation on Earth, as we also tame our propensity to hate, fear, and covet the resources of our neighbors. If we have a choice, we need to recognize that the best route is also the most difficult. Bear witness as well that, given the geophysical facts, the easy but most destructive way  to live is to keep burning oil, coal, and natural gas; enjoy our privileges as the Earth’s favored species as others die; and plead ignorance as the carbon dioxide curve and temperatures of oceans rise, glacial ice melts, as hurricanes and other storms intensify, as both deluges and droughts destroy the lives of many people around the world.

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1 Introduction

Do these special circumstances make anyone feel special? No? This is certainly not stand-up comedy. And one more thing: after you read this book, if you feel like giving up, wrapped in hopelessness, please realize that grieving the coming loss of our habitat is not the easy way out of our double apocalypse. The children of our children will not have such a luxury. It would be very nice if all 8 or so billion of us could decide to beat our swords (and nuclear weapons) into plowshares before we use them (and, as a side benefit, quit shooting at each other on the streets, and in grocery stores, on military bases, etc.). Bear in mind something that comes to mind the week before 4th of July (in the United States, at any rate): we are members of a species that loves to blow things up. We also live in a world with a large number of international grudges to get over. We will solve these problems or we will reap what we have sown. This is a tall order, of course. The taller order, no doubt, would be to survive in a ravaged world in which the scraps of who, whom, and what survives will struggle over irredeemable scraps. I give us 50 to100 years to build an infrastructure of survival. Depending on our progress, we may have more. Continuing on our present path may grant us less. Our ability to construct a world without war is our first necessary task. Once again, I realize that such an accomplishment will strike most of us living today as unachievable. We have, after all, evolved our wicked attitudes toward each other through almost two centuries of wars that have become ever more violent. Those two centuries began on horses, shooting single-shot revolvers and small cannons, without electricity or even fuel oil or gasoline. By two centuries ago, we were burning a very small amount of fossil fuels on ground transport and airplanes that now look like toys. Thirty years after that, the United States dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Albert Einstein, whose theoretical physics had made such things possible, is said to have nearly experienced a mental breakdown when he realized that a small group of theoretical physicists, armed with Einstein’s theories, surrounded by bomb-making technicians, were now capable of destroying much of the world that our fathers and grandfathers call home. For the next 80 years, humankind refined its conventional weapons and spread the rudiments of world-gutting nuclear power. In my youth (I was 73 as of January, 2023), the number of nations with nuclear weapons could be counted on one hand. Today, the numbers are still growing. At about the same time (certainly by 1980), prescient scientists began to understand that accumulating greenhouse gases (of which carbon dioxide is the greatest but not only danger) were raising global temperatures. At the beginning, changes were so small that most people didn’t notice them. By the year 2000, however, one had to have a very thick head and a depressingly blank brain not to notice that not only were temperatures rising but glaciers were receding, seas were beginning to rise, and wildfires were becoming much more common, larger, and hotter, occurring at all times of the year. Rainfall was becoming more intense, and some hurricanes were becoming stronger. Kentucky, Nebraska, and Indiana (et al.) experienced large tornadoes in December. Weather worry warts were no longer a rare breed, but some of our thickest heads also were very good at aggregating power and calling

1.15  Normalizing Nazi Nationalistic Fantasies

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developing natural phenomena “hoaxes.” Donald J. Trump comes to mind. While he was the loudest and most ignorant of the lot, Trump was hardly the only one to advertise his monumental ignorance as truth. Ours has become an age of wildly arrogant, power-hungry leaders. Trump isn’t the only one. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, is still waging the politics of unrestrained war, invading other peoples’ countries (Ukraine being the latest as of this writing) without cause (but with modern weapons), killing, pillaging, practicing the barbaric rituals that might have been better suited to the age of sticks and stones, when they would have done less harm. Today, this capo has nuclear weapons, which (as with Putin) he thus far has used only as a threat to get his way. He is not thinking a hundred years into the future vis-a-vis climate change and the nature of worldwide human relations. By the last half of the twentieth century, something very important was happening to humankind’s relationship with the planet Earth. The weight of human beings was passing that of every other creature on the planet Earth. As the same time, each of us, on average (an important distinction) was using a larger proportion of the Earth’s resources—wood, oil, soil, and much more. We had, by the turn of the twenty-first century, reached what many scientists (and other literate people) were calling the Anthropocene, a new epoch, in which human beings exercise control of Earth’s future—no matter whether that influence is malign or benign. As the human race continues to squabble over resources as well as nationalistic differences based in religion and ethnicity, we may ask whether our role in the Anthropocene is a blessing or a curse. We, humanity, about 8 billion of us, have assumed control of Earth’s future on short notice, on borrowed time, whether we are ready or not to maintain a sustainable Earth that meets our energy needs without combusting fossil fuels, because their consumption will cause our atmosphere to heat beyond humankind’s ability to withstand it. I do not say “may.” I say “will,” unless we banish fossil fuels from our energy equation, and do so very quickly, perhaps in 50 to 100 years, maximum. We may even have already passed through the Anthropocene into an as yet unnamed epoch in which humankind no longer controls what happens on Earth, a scarred place where the ragged remnants of humankind go to war over a dwindling stock of ruined (perhaps irradiated) resources. There exists another, more beneficent path, but the road is narrowing, a place where people have dissolved borders and learned to cooperate across national and ethnic boundaries, meanwhile respecting and appreciating what is distinctive about the history and present situation of Earth’s rich quilt of peoples. No one must give up history, culture, or language, but we must face mutual challenges together. As we learn to cooperate, correcting climate change will become a measure of our success or failure. First, everyone must understand the urgency of solutions and then act. The carbon dioxide, methane, etc. do not care what we do with our precious Mother Earth. They merely hold heat. This is not so complex a problem if we realize, when we falter, what the other options will be. This is, however, a world for which thinking human beings must fight. There will be no shortcuts or excuses for our threatened world.

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1 Introduction

1.16 Synopses of Chapters In Chap. 2, we will encounter prospective timelines for Earth’s end times: what will kill our Earth as a viable home first—climate change or war bred by nationalism? Both of our existential issues are getting muscular exercise every day, as the carbon dioxide curve builds upward in the wrong direction, and (describing only the most newsworthy of many international provocations around the World) Russian President Vladimir Putin is strutting his nukes so that he can invade a country, Ukraine, that isn’t even his (although his version of history says that it is). The root of most wars is the presence of land and natural resources in dispute by at least two international aggregations at once. In the background, temperatures and oceans rise, and glaciers melt. Who is going to surrender his hubris, while results from our two existential questions carry us toward the end of most life on our only planet? I have made Chap. 3 title extra-long to illustrate the number of actors in play as nationalism weaves its world-girdling web around our chances to escape its grasp as wars supporting its use by nation-states and their leaders find larger armies, more sophisticated technology, and more rancid misinterpretations of history to support their reasons for annexing other peoples’ lands sand resources. Once again, humanity’s taste for international expansion continues as global warming becomes more intense. While greenhouse gases have no emotions, laughter might be in order as human beings fight over land and resources as more dangerous problems lay in wait. This is by no means a soccer match. What becomes of a world in which war crimes are everyday business, where and when a powerful nation seeking to restore a crumbling empire uses showers of explosive missiles, sexual torture, and Orwellian lies in an attempt to dismember the home, schools, farms, churches, etc. of a civilized people for doing nothing more than occupying their own country and refusing to accede to the historical bloodlust from an oligarch with blood-spattered dreams of restoring the dimensions of an ancient empire? Dare anyone tell the Oligarch that we live in a different world now, one in which atmospheric chemicals sketch the parameters of a much more wretched future? The Oligarch does have any inkling that he now lives in a world where the rules of nature now  call the tune through the use of the geophysical facts. If ww do not heed them, our home world will die. In Chap. 4, we ask what becomes of a war involving a civilized people for doing nothing more than occupying their own country and refusing to accede to the historical bloodlust from an oligarch with blood-spattered dreams of restoring the dimensions of an ancient empire? Dare anyone tell the Oligarch that we live in a different world now, one in which atmospheric chemicals sketch the parameters of a much more wretched future? The Oligarch does not live in a world where the rules of nature call the tune. Instead, the Oligarch rattles his nukes (the world’s tallest stack!) and implies that the neighbors of the nation that has been attacked may be next. In the meantime, in another battle that the Oligarch does not see, or even acknowledge, chemicals warm the atmosphere and constantly distort. The weather. One thing that war does very efficiently is to monopolize the attention of those who

1.16  Synopses of Chapters

19

wage it. In fact, the practice of war increases the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide, methane, and other trace gases that heat the atmosphere at an accelerating rate. Greenhouse gasses recruit no armies. They bear no historical grudges, and no desires to restore old empires. They have no imperial dreams. All they do is hold heat in a way that distorts weather and, eventually, climate, in ways that make life much more difficult for all people. In Chap. 5, we visit the world’s largest single nation, in terms of wealth, the United States of America, which has been developing as a gigantic shooting gallery, where the toting of lethal firearms has become a form of personal nationalism involving the freedom to express the timeless desire to slaughter other people, usually by the young and male, to unload hot lead on people that they usually do not know, as a way to express mental instability or other problems. The border between the shocking and the ordinary has moved; we awaken so often these days to news that the numbness has barely ebbed since the last one. By Valentine’s Day of 2023, the United States had endured 68 mass shootings in a month and a half. A “mass shooting” is usually defined as an event in which least four people have been killed or seriously wounded. Ownership of one (or an entire houseful) of firearms and ammunition capable of killing scores of people at the touch of a button has been elevated in the United States to a fetish and nearly an addiction, a vehicle of nationalistic personal domination, power, and control from shooters with grudges and trigger-taut hatreds, often comprising a nation of one, compelling obedience to hot lead fired in anger. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution is prized by them as an absolute right to build a personal arsenal in which one person may exercise power usually reserved for nations at war, invoking the law of the jungle as far as his bullets can reach. (Yes, his. Female mass shooters are very rare, but hardly unknown). Nearly half of “United States citizens own at least one gun and profess Second Amendment rights to carry and use any kind of personal armament, from small handguns, to hunting rifles, to AR-15 submachine guns of a kind usually taken into battle by troops of the US Army and Marine Corps. Like other expressions of extreme nationalism, the curse of the gun fetish and the attention that it absorbs is a diversion from really important problems, such as accelerating warming of the atmosphere. Who is going to grant attention to a warming Earth when hot lead seems more newsworthy? The gun fetishes are very likely to dismiss climate change as a fraud or a hoax drempt up by scientists hustling grant money. In Chap. 6, racism is raw on the web page of Stormfront.org, with its salutations to George Armstrong Custer as a hero of oppressed white men, and a philosophy that takes pride in no-regrets conquest. The message at Stormfront.org to Native Americans is simple: “We” are the superior race. “We kicked your ass and took your continent. Tough shit.” Every Month is White History Month!” brags Stormfront. org’s main home page. To hell with anyone else’s political correctness. “White Pride—World Wide!” Inferior races get used to it. Stormfront.org is the place to go for interviews with David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, the complete published works of Adolph Hitler, and the latest in White Pride chic, including a bewildering variety of swastikas and

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Celtic-­cross pendants, T-Shirts, and flags. Don’t forget the hot-selling Stars and Bars, the Confederate Battle Flag, which is one of the American neo-Nazis’ favorite icons. Visit the graphics library, and download your own swastikas, iron crosses, and SS insignia. And don’t pass up the archive of “Holo[caust] Hoax” comic strips. As with other “white power” groups, the main selling point here is ultranationalism of the whites-only variety. As with the gun fetishists, climate changes get no notice at all, residing in the waiting room of critical race theory. Chapter 7 deals with human perceptions and change. How hot, for example, does daily weather have to get, and how high must flood waters in oceans have to flow before a large enough proportion of the human race get a clue that something is very wrong with our habitat and that an overload of greenhouse gases is the major cause? How high above records does hot weather have to go? How many feet does sea level need to rise? How far, then, does awareness of these problems have to spread beyond the pages of the New York Times and scientific journals to have a measurable effect on human behavior? If one reads and appreciates the most accurate sources, he or she already has a powerful inkling of where were we are headed. For example, during the last week of September 2022, Hurricane Fiona, having maintained much of its strength over the Gulf Stream, rolled into Nova Scotia as the most powerful such storm in the recorded history of Canada, perhaps a category 3. By the winter of 2022–2023, in the United States, tornadoes in January—powerful ones—were, for a time, becoming almost as common as mass shootings. These have ceased to be news novelties. With a surprising speed, what used to be side dishes in a political and natural freak show have taken shape as a new risky reality. An individual’s politics also tend to correlate closely with acceptance or denial of global warming’s reality. A strong belief in scientific realities also includes acceptance of support for scientific theory. People who follow changes in climate change phenomena also tend to support changes in climate. For example, a theory that West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier could melt was not new to glaciologists a quarter century ago. The difference now is that scientific research ships are now sitting at the edge of this huge Florida-sized ice mass as their occupants watch it break up. In Chap. 8, the power of human beliefs in nationalism as expressed in support for war is interspersed with support for ideas while we eliminate greenhouse gases from our way of life. We also must  eliminate humankind’s  desireto subdivide itself into various religious and nationalistic groups that go to war with each other. That will be another very tall but very necessary order for a species that has been finding reasons to go to war, on and off (as the faces and races of enemies change), since human beings discovered hatred and learned how to express it with ever-more-destructive weapons. The technological efficacy of these weapons has evolved from sticks and stones to hydrogen bombs delivered by missiles targeted over thousands of miles. Given humans’ ability to refine missiles and other weapons while ignoring existential threats such as pollution of land and oceans, global warming, etc., our ingenuity at creating and “improving”: weapons may be our downfall.

References

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If we can’t correct our course, in more than one way, the other option will not be at all pleasant. In Chap. 9, a position is argued that to bend the carbon dioxide curve and bring it downward to a sustainable level will be only a beginning. Any plan to solve the warming of the atmosphere must address the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. No excuses. Nothing will change in a corrective manner until the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere declines substantially and steadily for several decades. Today, we have just broached 425 parts per million. The top of the cycle in the usual preindustrial cycle (without a boost from humanity) has been about 280 ppm. We cannot maintain a livable world with a CO2 level of the Pliocene, with no sea ice and oceans perhaps three dozen feet higher than today, with land and ocean temperatures that would kill most flora and fauna, including human beings. A lot of work will be required to reframe human nature. Thus, our transition more amenable weather will require changes in basic human nature. Is this utopian? Yes, it most assuredly is, but it beats the other option, which is, literally, the end of the world as we know it, with all of its natural wonders and wretched wickedness.

References Anderson, J. L. (2022a, October 3). The palace gates. The New Yorker, 30–41. Anderson, J.  L. (2022b, September 26). Did a Nobel peace Laureate Stoke a civil war? The New  Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/ did-­a-­nobel-­peace-­laureate-­stoke-­a-­civil-­war Arasu, S. (2023, April 9). Coal capacity climbs worldwide. In Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, D-7. Armstrong, K. (2022). Sacred nature. Knopf. Borenstein, S. (2022, November 8). UN Chief: World on ‘Highway to Climate Hell’. In Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, A-5. Briefly. (2022, August 2). Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, A-5. Briefly Noted. (2022, October 3). The New Yorker, 65. Burbank, J. (2022, March 22). The grand theory driving Putin to war. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/russia-­ukraine-­putin-­eurasianism.html Burnett, T. M. (2020). Nationalism today: Extreme political movements around the world (2 vols.). ABC-CLIO. Children at Risk. (2022, May 27). New York Times. Retrieved from https://youridealpresent.com/ children-­at-­risk-­the-­new-­york-­times/ Chung, C. (2022, October 27). Climate protester glues his head [on] ‘girl with a pearl earring’ painting. New York Times. Cumming-Bruce, N. (2020, July 5). Venezuela [floods have] have killed thousands, U.N. reports. New York Times, A-8. Dee, J. (2022, June). The secret history: Hernan Diaz dismantles the American dream. Harper’s Magazine, 82–86. Gallagher, D., & Benveniste, A. (2020, October 4). Market capitalism has failed in pandemic. In Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, 6-A. Gelles, D., & Rappeport, A. (2022, September 22). World Bank leader accused of climate denial, offers new response. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/ climate/malpass-­world-­bank-­climate.html

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Horowitz, J. (2020, October 5). Pope criticizes failure of countries to unite in fighting pandemic. New York Times, A-12. Johansen, B. E. (2021). Introduction. In B. E. Johansen & A. Akante (Eds.), Nationalism: Past as prologue. Nova. Mikanowski, J. (2019, August). The call of the drums: Hungary’s far right its inner barbarian. Harper’s Magazine, 51–59. Nolan, R. (2020, September). Cage of gold: The corrupt business of deportation. Harper’s Magazine, 82–88. Osnos, E. (2002, August 9). The new world of the superyacht: The bigger the boat, the more important the owner. Auto Evolution. Retrieved from https://www.autoevolution.com/news/the-­new-­ era-­of-­the-­superyacht-­the-­bigger-­the-­boat-­the-­more-­important-­the-­owner-­195523.html Osnos, E. (2022a, July 18). The haves and the have yachts. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-­haves-­and-­the-­have-­yachts Osnos, E. (2022b, July 25). The floating world. The New Yorker, 30–41. Paddock, R. C. (2019, July 18). Myanmar generals are barred from the U.S. New York Times, A-12. Paoletta, K. (2023, April). The incredible disappearing doomsday. Harper’s Magazine, 25–31. Plumer, B. (2023, March 21). World has less than a decade to stop catastrophic warming, U.N. panel says. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/climate/global-­ warming-­ipcc-­earth.html. Pope Francis: Our Undemocratic Democracy. (2022, August 22). The New Yorker, 65–68. Sehgal, P. (2023, January 2 and 9). Blood lines. The New Yorker, 64–69. Sheppard, R. (2018). Persistent revolution: History, nationalism, and politics in Mexico since 1968. University of New Mexico Press. Troianobski, A. (2022, August 21). Brazen attack near Moscow rattles Russians: The daughter of a prominent ultranationalist, herself a hawkish commentator, was killed by a car bomb deep in Russian territory. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/ world/europe/ukraine-­russia-­car-­bomb.htm Troianovski, A., Santora, M., & Bilefsky, D. (2022, August 20). As attacks mount in Crimea, kremlin faces rising domestic pressures. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2022/08/20/world/europe/ukraine-­attacks-­putin-­war.html

Chapter 2

Crises of Climate and Nationalism: Here and There, Then and Now

Shall we lay down a bet? What will kill our Earth as a viable home first? Climate change or war bred by nationalism? What if all three are intertwined, and to banish one, we have to get rid of both? Why are you reading this book and running an acute risk of being slapped in the face with so much angst? Here, and now, with temperatures and the carbon dioxide curve going in the wrong direction, and Vladimir Putin strutting his nukes so that he can invade a country that isn’t even his? Aren’t 10 time zones, (or is it 9 or 11?) enough for one oligarch? Even one oligarch who has something in the vicinity of $200 billion stashed here, there, and elsewhere? At the time that this is being written, much of our world is at war in alliance with Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin, the brutal nuvo czar of Russia, having bombed his unprovoked into Ukraine (heretofore a civilized place) with plans to (as Col. LeMay was fond of saying about Vietnam) “Bomb ‘em back into the Stone Age.” Putin hasn’t called them “gooks”—not yet. While the Ukrainians usually shoot at other soldiers, the Russians nearly always shoot at, bomb, or explode Iranian “kamikaze” drones at people or structures that they use (apartment blocks, office buildings, factories, markets, etc. Every attack (including pillaging of homes, torture, shooting, crushing women on bicycles, etc.) is a war crime, so many of them that even the victims have difficulty keeping track. Putin has been reminding the world that he’s got nukes, while much of the world tries to turn his homeland into an international pariah state. Russia has become a seamless tyranny, where anyone who calls what has been happening in Ukraine a “war” can go to prison for 10 years or more. Young men subject to a haphazard draft flee the country by the hundreds of thousands. Big Brother never stooped so low in mangling language to produce Newspeak. In Putin’s shadow, it’s not a war, but “spetz operatsiya,” “a special operation.” If you say otherwise, see you in the Gulag after a show trial. Practice after me: two plus two equals five. In environmental context, war is a very carbon dioxide- and methane-intensive business. How many tons of greenhouse gases do Russia’s fighter jets pour into the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_2

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atmosphere as Putin’s air war demolishes homes, schools, factories, and more? Putin is probably not in the mood to calculate such things. He wants to reacquire an empire the size of the Russian empire (or the Soviet Union) at its height, in a hurricane of nationalistic hubris, build himself a statue, with a plaque that names him a hero of humanity. He is not the kind of fellow who counts carbon dioxide molecules. So how will peacekeepers cool the fires of nationalism in the name of Earth’s survival? Silly question? Well, then our game is over before we begin.

2.1 Heeding the Geophysical Facts Let’s try global warming. Perhaps everyone with a whiff of the geophysical facts can agree that bringing down the carbon dioxide and methane levels in our atmosphere is a good idea. Yes, many people do, as long as someone else does the heavy lifting. International climate conferences have become games of nationalistic hubris as different countries debate how to deemphasize their roles in climate-change treaties with the least pain for themselves. Everyone squabbles as the heat-holding gases accumulate, and the “Masters of War” (thank you, Bob Dylan) still build the big bombs and rattle their nukes. This has been going on long before the major tools of war were sticks and stones and the Earth’s population of human beings’ major contribution to the atmosphere’s load of greenhouse gases was burning wooden cooking fires. What has a changed is the size and lethal nature of the weapons. That has changed and so has the proportion of greenhouse gases. By our own advent on our world, both have reached existential status, which means that each, or both, can make the Earth uninhabitable more quickly than any of us wants. Now, both danger via global climate travail and war seem to be racing each other to a finish line that no sane person should wish to cross. So, war propelled by nationalistic fury isn’t going to save the Earth. So where does that leave us? So how about dodging this massive bullet with massive changes in human behavior to favor cooperation in the name of human survival vis-a-vis climate changes is going to require basic changes in human behavior quickly. We will not solve the global warming problem until we forsake nationalism as a tool of international diplomacy. They both must go as a matter of planetary survival and will require international cooperation on a level at which this planet has never before experienced. Are we capable of such changes, or are we as a species, eventually dead? A few heat-goosed hurricanes, huge wildfires, droughts, and deluges later, quite a few voters, have become able to identify the phrase “global warming,” even if most of them are more interested in the price of gas than the future of the Earth. Thus, the horse-racing nature of our politics has not changed much since the Republic was founded. Here, with all due tomfoolery, we have a profile of the new American Republican: Ron DeSantis, proto-fascist (or not so much, depending on the winds of the moment), profoundly devoted to the cause, as some pundits have remarked, “Trump with brains” (Filkins, 2022, 30), which is to elevate himself to the presidential

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nomination of the Republican Party’s science-challenged right wing, where if you hear the phrase “global warming,” the next phrase you will hear is “hoax!” That was easy; take a double apocalypse and wish it away. Poof! We can how get down to political business: Ron DeSantis is not unlike Trump 2.0, except that he reads things that agree with is point of view, and is “incredibly disciplined” about it (Filkins, 2022, 32). But what about the future of Earth? Not on the political menu today. Get serious. Always on the prowl for new ways to scare wayward members of The Base to new heights of spiteful dispersion against the ruination of what he perceives as The American Way, with unswerving nationalistic hubris, whether it be engaging the evil woven by Critical Race Theory (CRT), or taking on the message of that left-­ leaning Micky Mouse, that commie rodent, who hails from corporate Disney World in DeSantis’ home state. For anyone who still believes that The Mouse is nothing but innocent entertainment, get with the political program. Nature never seems to get a seat at DeSantis’ political table. The political roots of climate change denial date to before the concept was widely recognized. Even during the 1970s, the Republican Party was acquiring a culture of conformity that made denial of scientific concepts easy, and then all but mandatory. By 1980, when James Hansen et  al. framed the likelihood of global warming in Science, the shock troops of denial were already lining up and receiving funding from the oil industry. For historians of the G.O.P., the ultimate in ideological conformity has always had a name for its elements that are, in the words of one analyst “batshit crazy.” “Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican [said]. “They have had lots of different names—they were the John Birchers, they were the ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the ‘religious right.’ And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them….Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. And all the nasty stuff that was in the underbelly of American politics got a voice. What was 35 per cent of the Republican Party is now 85 per cent. And it’s too late to turn back” (Filkins, 2022, 33). Veterans of Republican politics were faced with a quandary in the time of Richard Nixon, about half a century ago. Their traditional white base was shrinking, so they had a choice between attracting more minority voters and concentrating on mainly white, lower middle-class segments of the electorate whose participation rates were very low at that time. These included a large number of lower middle-class blue-­ collar voters. The Republicans opted for the white working class and exploited their racial anxieties. This strategy gelled with Trump, who actively stoked the fears of white-hot resentment, but forgave Trump’s class standing as a billionaire. According to Stuart Stevens, an advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, Trump embraced white anxieties so effectively that he turned the Republicans who embraced this strategy into a “white grievance party.” Stevens continued: “To me, Ron DeSantis is a fairly run-of-the-mill politician who will do almost anything to get elected. The problem is what the party has become. It’s a race to the bottom” (Filkins, 2022, 37).

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As most women, men, and children go about their everyday business on our Earth, ominous “firsts” are occurring nearly daily around the planet as the level of carbon dioxide rises, and all manner of plants, animals, and natural processes change, doing their best to survive nature’s new regime, imposed by rising temperatures and other forms of malign weather. Wars are fought, and many men, women, and children die because of orders given by men who have never given a thought to geophysical processes that must change—quickly—so that living things on Earth may survive, from whales to insects. And, oh, our wonderful technology! Gone, perhaps sooner than we might imagine. How often does the phrase “disturbing first” appear in the pages that follow? It all happens with a distinct lack of planning or the imprint of human agency. We all are born, we live, and we die as nature changes without soul or natural design, just the commands of natural survival. Carbon dioxide and methane change our world without wish or command, just the inevitable laws of nature. They hold heat without conscience. A narrative of events during the years 2022–2023 suggests what lies ahead. Very few people link the warming of the planet with human beings’ propensity to aggregate into groups and foment hatred that leads to wars. Nationalism’s inculcation of wars has been with us nearly from the birth of humankind as intelligent beings on this Earth. These days, people, corporations, and governments rise and fall, profit, and lose fortunes from their use. Just how long will these relationships last? How long until humankind loses its privileged and assumed control over events on our only planetary home? The carbon dioxide and methane do not care about their dominance over our lives. They merely hold heat because of our activities. They make no plans for us. Plans imply human agency. Don’t blame nature. Blame ourselves. Our news media do not make or break these plans. They do sometimes report them. Thus, we are able to note the doings of human politics as the carbon dioxide and methane curves rise. We squabbling human beings, slowly realizing just how damaging rising temperatures, warming oceans, melting glaciers, etc., can be, have been, and will continue to be, meeting on almost an annual basis with the stated purpose of slowing these changes. Actually, a secondary purpose that often obscures the first is the preservation of nationalistic power blocs. Since the last major downturn in CO2 levels, the last ice age, the proportion of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled, to a point where resulting effects on climate are now easily noticeable. Still, despite the warnings of our most sensitive scientists, the human killing games continue as arms stockpiles increase and our industries turn out deadlier ways to kill each other.

2.2 Forums for Human Squabbles The major forum for human squabblings over climate takes place at annual or biennial meetings of the Conference of Parties (COP). As of 2022, as of this writing, this exercise has been held every year or two 27 times. Every so often, a specialized

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world junta is held in a worldly city, be it Kyoto, or Paris, or elsewhere. As the years have passed the warnings of United Nations diplomats and our best-known scientists, duly noted in this text, have grown more urgent as the international debates and disquisitions continue among as many as 200 nations. The major outcomes, outside of a few easily evaded targets, have been close to zero. A lot of jet fuel has been burned non-reaching these non-outcomes, as authoritarian, nationalist blocs stall progress. If carbon dioxide could laugh, it would be having a glorious guffaw at the games that we play as the planet’s ice melts before our eyes, as storms become more intense, as wildfires increase in frequency and furiously. The latest COP as of this writing (2023) has been number 27, which took place during the first 2 weeks of November, 2022, at Sharm el Sheikh (commonly abbreviated to “Sharman”), an Egyptian city on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, featured the usual power blocs doing well-known diplomatic dances for which they have become famous. “How [Vladimir] Putin and Friends Stalled Climate Progress” wrote some of the world’s best journalists in the New York Times, odds-on the best newspaper in the world (Sengupta et al., 2022). Despite all the world conferences devoted to cutting greenhouse gas levels, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere reached the highest level on record in 2022, as humans pumped 36 billion tons of the gas into the atmosphere. At about the same time, the United States’ performance at curbing greenhouse gases had declined compared to other countries, as measured each 2 years by the Environmental Performance Index, published every 2 years by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities. Meanwhile, scientists in India found that heat waves have become hotter, with “chances of a heat wave in South Asia like this increas[ing] by at least 30 times since pre-industrial times” (Fountain, 2022a, b). Prospects that global climate talks will produce significant declines in greenhouse gases seem to be running declining. At Glasgow during 2002, more than 100 countries pledged to cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, although Russia and some other large methane polluters were not among them. Ironic, isn’t it, that the major actors in these climatic squabbles have been fossil fuels, which exercise no judgments over what human beings do with them? Ironic, isn’t it, that oil plays such an outsize role in a forum convened to deemphasize its use? And so it was again. The greenhouse gasses had no comment for the press. “The war in Ukraine is putting climate action on the back burner while our planet itself is burning,” said Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, who has a gift for saying in a few words what bedevils the entire Earth (Sengupta et al., 2022). Or perhaps, as Bob Dylan once sang long before he won a Nobel Prize for Literature: “You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.” Humans again choreographed their war dances in a forum meant to address climate action. “He [Putin] has been abetted by powerful world leaders who share his nationalist or authoritarian leanings and who, together, have swept in to buy his coal, oil and gas and enabled him to finance his war” [in Ukraine],” wrote a New York Times’ battery of news reporters (Sengupta et al., 2022). Even at a conference meant to escape their grip, fossil fuels call the tune. If carbon dioxide had a sense of humor, it would be howling, laughing without interruption. The Times’ climate team

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continued: “While their motivations for backing Mr. Putin vary widely—driven largely by pressures they face at home—collectively they have bedeviled global climate cooperation at a time when the warming planet is wreaking havoc on Earth’s seven [now 8 or more] billion people” (Sengupta et al., 2022).

2.2.1 Nationalism vs. Nature “The war on Ukraine will cast a dark shadow over the global climate summit starting this week in Egypt. Those talks are predicated on a willingness among nations to work together to slow climate change. The resurgence of nationalism far and wide—of which Mr. Putin’s invasion of a neighbor represents an apex—clashes with that ideal.” [Emphasis added] This was, of course, not the first time that the dictates of nationalistic war have undercut the necessity of international cooperation with the future of the planet at stake. Thus Nationalism vs. Nature. Political power is still rooted in fossil fuels, even at a climate change conference meant to deemphasize them. The same Times article (Sengupta et al., 2022) described how little attention the world of fossil fuels was paying to a future beset (as many scientists and environmentalists said) by existential questions regarding climate change: Xi Jinping of China and India’s Narendra Modi stepped up after the attack on Ukraine to buy immense volumes of Russian coal and oil at bargain prices, cushioning their own economies from a global energy crisis while allowing Mr. Putin to keep profiting from energy exports despite Western sanctions. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who has denuded swaths of the Amazon rainforest for gold and beef, flew to the Kremlin just days before the invasion and, sitting side by side with Mr. Putin, offered “solidarity to Russia.” Afterward, he announced Russia would send new supplies of desperately needed fertilizer and diesel. Even Saudi Arabia—the world’s biggest oil exporter—bought more Russian fuel oil this year, taking advantage of exceptionally low prices.

Authoritarian and nationalist leaders were making sure that investment in a nonfossil-­fueled future was running a pallid second place if it was not in their self-­ interest, hardly a recipe for global cooperation and change. Nationalistic self-interests have dominated more than 30 world climate meetings or summits since the middle of the last century. Or so wrote The Times: “Mr. Putin heads a petrostate and has never welcomed a pivot away from fossil fuels. Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro eschewed international cooperation. And while Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi have both promoted renewable energy, their cooperation with Mr. Putin and their expansion of coal mining and combustion in the name of energy security has kept their emissions growing” (Sengupta et al., 2022).

2.3  Fossil-Fueled Self Interest

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2.3 Fossil-Fueled Self Interest Looking past these expressions of fossil-fueled self-interest, is it possible that decreasing costs of wind and solar which have begun to transform domestic markets in the United States could do the same in Europe and Asia? The Earth’s energy future has become more complex than simple fossil-fueled politics may portend. Solar panels as far as the eye can see have become the new normal in parts of China, where large numbers of people have expressed strong opposition to consistently dirty air. China is nationalist and authoritarian, yes, but mass desires of 1.4 billion people have a way of transcending political labels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) anticipates that demand for natural gas in China will peak by 2030 and that coal and oil may peak at about the same time. Meanwhile, the diplomatic climate change dances continue. Petropolitics practiced by power politicians steals the stage, once again. At the same time, Putin, no new-aged tree hugger under any circumstances, placed his political chips on rising prices of oil and gas with a massive pipeline system planned for the Arctic, including Siberia, which are said to contain enough energy resources to sustain Putin’s desire for a growing Russian empire reaching from Ukraine, Poland, the Balkans, and other large parts of the former Soviet Union eastward to the Pacific and Arctic. Putin has imposed “state” control (i.e., control by state-sanctioned oligarchs) over Russia’ immense oil and gas industries, which reward his friends with some of the largest financial portfolios in the world. Putin’s wealth has not been disclosed, but various estimates range upward to $70 billion, perhaps $200 billion, roughly 50 times that of his friend Donald Trump. The Soviet Union, once said (a century ago) to be evolving as an egalitarian worker’s paradise, now has a vast working class whose members earn less than $10,000 (in rubles) per year in a state controlled by oligarchs such as Putin. Owners of large chunks of the “means of production” who refused to sell on Putin’s dictat have been jailed. In October 2003, Putin ordered the arrest of Russia’ richest man, oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, broke up his company, Yukos, and turned over most of its assets to state-owned Rosneft. At the same time, Putin was courting Xi, ruler of China’s state apparatus and its Communist Party. Putin and Xi pledged to extend Russia’s Siberian pipeline system into China. Xi hedged his bets on fossil fuels with plans with a call for an “ecological civilization” that reflected popular discontent with the pollution of oil, coal, and gas. This idea was enshrined as “Xi Jinping Thought,” the highest nationalistic goal for Chinese development. Thus had “ecological development” become enshrined in CCP’s cannon, sometimes also called petropolitics. Even with Xi’s plans for solar and wind power, China still was burning half the world’s coal and, in 2021, announced that its coal-generating capacity would rise by 33 gigawatts, more than the rest of the world combined, reflecting China’s appetite for all manner of power, as its economy expands.

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2.4 The Texture of Global Warming Indications of global warming do not arrive all at once in all parts of world. Weather is innately variable, and climate varies on a longer time scale. Weather is the story; climate is the plot. Event by event, days, weeks, and months at a time, temperatures rise and fall, precipitation also rise and fall, both by length of events and intensity; deserts grow, baked by relentless sunshine, occasionally punctuated by intense rain and flooding. Through all of this, the levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other minor greenhouse gases maintain a steady rise, as individual climate crises increase in both number and intensity, aggravating human conflicts, and sometimes playing a role in starting or maintaining frictions between governments, which react by holding world conferences which aim to hold worldwide greenhouse effects within certain limits to decrease their roles in global warming and distortions of weather. This is a familiar script to observers of these meetings, which have been held since the early 1990s. Thousands of delegates contribute to the use of an incredible amount of jet fuel necessary to convene large meetings, where many of them debate and attempt to negotiate various terms that are amenable to the nationalistic interests of their constituencies. Sometimes the delegates reach targets, usually expressed as a percentage cut in increases or (rarely) actual declines in carbon dioxide levels over a certain period of time. Once home, the delegates encounter a familiar array of local (sometimes multinational) interests that run counter to the international agreements. Soon, another meeting (Conference of Parties-28 was being planned as this book was being written) and the process begin anew. Once they are emitted into the atmosphere, usually by human beings satisfying various creature comforts, preparing our food, fueling our motorized vehicles, transporting ourselves from place to place, warming or cooling our dwellings and workspaces to our standards of comfort, increasing numbers of people usually produce more of these gases, modified by scientific advances that increase efficiency, or increased demand associated with material affluence. Wars break out that increase greenhouse gas production, and so forth. “Another critical factor is climate change” [wrote] Matthias Schmale, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator. “Climate change is real, as we are yet again discovering in Nigeria, [due to heat and floods]” he said (Maclean, 2022). “The rain is not the only factor…[said] Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, Sadiya Umar Farouq, [who] blamed the scale of disaster on the failure by branches of government other than her own to take action. “There was enough warning and information about the 2022 floods, but states, local governments and communities appeared not to take heed,” the minister wrote on Twitter (Maclean, 2022).

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2.5 Floods and Politics The scale of natural disasters, enhanced by climate change, can be made still worse by the failure of two or more governments to cooperate. For example, in 2022, Nigeria suffered its worst floods in several years, not only because of the usual culprit (heavy rains) but also because Nigeria and Cameroon failed to observe existing treaties that were meant to protect their shared watersheds. Thus, flooding plus politics produced disaster. The toll included damage to about 200,000 homes, other infrastructure, and uncounted acres of farmland, amidst deaths to more than 600 people, more than 2400 injured, and more than 2400 other people displaced. The floods lasted for more than a month (MacLean, 2022). Ruth Maclean of the New York Times outlined some of the human damage: Residents of affected states carry their belongings up to the tops of their houses and get around by canoe on roads now deluged with water. Trucks full of food and fuel become stuck for days. In some areas, water levels are almost up to the eaves of the West African country’s distinctive pitched, painted metal roofs, making them appear to float. In other places, the tops of cars are just visible but the water around them ripples with raindrops, closing in fast. The rain is not the only factor, however.

To cite one example: “Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, Sadiya Umar Farouq, blamed the scale of the disaster on the failure by branches of government other than her own to take action. There was enough warning and information about the 2022 flood, but states, local governments and communities appear not to take heed,” the minister said. “Another critical factor is climate change. [wrote] Matthias Schmale, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for the country. “Climate change is real, as we are yet again discovering in Nigeria,” he said (Maclean, 2022). Prospective conflict between China and Taiwan provides a classic setup for nationalistic warfare. China’s imperial state has flexed its muscles from time to time during about 5000 years of existence. Today, Hong Kong, Tibet, and other formerly independent peoples west of China’s existing Han core (such as the Uighurs, north of Tibet) find themselves on the firing line. Once again, in the fall of 2022, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said that China was conducting “cognitive warfare” as it spreads misinformation over the Internet and other mass media, in addition to military exercises aimed at intimidation. “The situation around the Taiwan Strait continues to be tense, and the threat has never ceased,” Tsai said in a speech during a visit to an air defense and missile battalion in the eastern country of Hualien. “In addition to frequent intrusions by China’s aircraft and ships, China also used… false information to create disturbance in minds of people,” the president told the Associated Press (Wu, 2022).

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Tsai also referenced China’s use of drones “to increase pressure on Taiwan’s military,” following incidents in which Taiwanese troops based on islands just off the Chinese coast warned off, and in once case shot down unmanned aerial vehicles that had been hovering over their positions” (Wu, 2022). Tensions had spiked after US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei. Afterward, China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait and over the island into the Pacific and sent ships and planes across the midline of the strait that had long been a buffer against outright conflict (Wu, 2022). On July 20, 2022, record heat plagued Europe, with temperatures as high as 106 F. in Britain (an area mainly without air conditioning), as well as large fires in Portugal and other places around the Mediterranean Sea. Severe fires also scorched parts of Alaska, Siberia, etc., all adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, providing more illustrations of how climate change creates needs for transborder cooperation. Note the number of countries involved in one heat wave. Heat waves and floods increasingly beset countries with different languages, cultures, and histories but very similar climactic conditions: Days before a glacier in the Italian Dolomites broke off with the force of a collapsing skyscraper, crushing at least ten hikers under an avalanche of ice, snow, and rock, Carlo Budel heard water running under the ice. “I heard what sounded like a river’s torrent,” said Budel, who lives in an isolated refuge next to the glacier on the 11,000-foot Marmolada mountain. At the mountain’s base, he watched a yellow helicopter fly overhead searching for signs of life, or remains. Budel recalled that when he first scaled the glacier at the end of summer not even a decade ago, he hardly needed ropes, there was so much snow. “The difference between now and then is scary,” he said. “At this point we are on another path.” It is an increasingly common path for a world confronting the deadly consequences of extreme weather brought on by man-­ made, and irreversible, climate change. A year after Greece lost lives, livestock and entire swaths of forest to wildfires, and deadly floods swept through Germany, the calamity in these mountains this week provided the latest evidence that almost no part of the continent can escape the effects of Europe’s new, intense, and often unlivable summer heat. That includes the highest peak of the Dolomites (Horowitz, 2022).

During the same period, Italy was suffering through yet another scorching heat wave, which contributed to agricultural disaster from the worst drought in 70 years along the Po River, its longest waterway, cutting off fountains and parching parts of the country. “These kinds of events…are getting more and more frequent…with enhanced global warming,” said Susanna Corti, the coordinator of the Global Change unit of Italy’s National Research Council (Horowitz, 2022). Prof. Massimiliano Fazzini, a climate expert with the Italian Society of Environmental Geology, said in 2022 that Italy had about 920 glaciers, almost

2.6  It’s Hot Out There (Again!): When Daily Heat Becomes Climate Change

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entirely in the Alps, though only about 70 of them were monitored annually by the Italian Glaciological Committee. Their contribution of snow and melted ice varied considerably on an annual basis, but the water from them was usually used to fill artificial lakes that provide electricity or to direct water to rivers in times of drought. In the last 20 years, Professor Fazzini said Italy had lost 25 percent of the water from those shrinking glaciers.

2.6 It’s Hot Out There (Again!): When Daily Heat Becomes Climate Change During the summer of 2022, millions of Americans were once again in the grips of dangerous heat. Hot air also smothered Europe, causing parts of France and Spain to feel in parts of May as it usually does in July or August. High temperatures scorched northern and central China even as heavy rains caused flooding in the country’s south. Some places in India began to experience extraordinary heat in March, though the start of the monsoon rains brought some relief in summer. It’s too soon to say whether climate change is directly to blame for causing severe heat waves in several national economies, which also are top emitters of heat-­ trapping gases at roughly the same time, a few days into summer. While global warming has been making extreme heat more common worldwide, deeper analysis is required to tell scientists whether specific weather events were becoming more likely or more intense because of human-induced warming. A team of researchers who studied 2022s devastating heat in India found that climate change had made it 30 times as likely to occur. Thus, we can probably remove these events from random heat to enduring climate change. Even so, concurrent heat waves seem to be hitting certain groups of far-flung places with growing frequency, for reasons related to the jet stream and other rivers of air that influence weather systems worldwide. For example, California has been experiencing severe drought (usually in the late spring, summer, and fall) alternating with flooding winter rains, which have come to be associated with an “atmospheric river.” (In the old days, it was called the “pineapple express” after its origins near Hawaii.). The spring and summer of 2002 were distinctive for worse drought even after several similar years, whereas the following winter was inundated by extreme, damaging rain and snow. The point here is that climate change seems to have intensified extreme events of all kinds. A secondary point is that extremes can cause damage going both ways. Extremely intense fires destroy foliage. Bare ground is an important cause of landslides and floods that sweep away trees that once impeded cascading floods down mountainsides. Studies have shown that parts of North America, Europe, and Asia are linked this way. Scientists are still trying to determine how these patterns might change as the planet warms further, but for now, it means simultaneous heat extremes will probably continue to affect these places where agricultural and economic activity is concentrated.

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2.7 Zhong Quotes Begin Here “To have a heat wave, we need the heat, and we need the atmospheric circulation pattern that allows the heat to accumulate,” said Daniel E. Horton, a climate scientist at Northwestern University. With global warming, he said, “we’re definitely getting more heat.” But climate change may also be affecting the way this heat is distributed around the world by globe-circling air currents, he said (Zhong, 2022a, b). “Simultaneous weather extremes in numerous locations aren’t just meteorological curiosities,” wrote Zhong. He added: Individual heat waves can lead to illness and death, wildfires, and crop failures. Concurrent heat waves can threaten global food supplies, which have been under perilous strain since Russia invaded Ukraine during February of 2022. While heat waves are shaped by complex local factors such as urbanization and land use, scientists no longer have much doubt about whether climate change is making them worse. Soon, the world’s most devastating heat waves may simply have no historical analogue from the time shortly before humans starting pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some scientists argue, rendering obsolete the question of whether climate change is a main driver. It has become the main agent of climactic change.

The warming of recent decades has already made it hard for scientists to determine what to call a heat wave and what to treat as simply a new normal for hot weather, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, who was quoted by Zhong (A). “If the threshold for a heat wave is just the mercury exceeding 100 °F. for several days in a row, for instance, then it’s “not at all unexpected,” Dessler said, as quoted by Zhong (A). To see them occurring more regularly, in several regions at once, is another matter, evidence of an enduring pattern. “As time goes on, more and more of the planet will be experiencing those temperatures, until eventually, with enough global warming, every land area in the mid-­ latitude Northern Hemisphere would be above 100 degrees,” Dessler said (Zhong, 2022a, b). Even when scientists look at how often temperatures exceed a certain level relative to a moving average, they still find a big increase in the frequency of simultaneous heat waves. One recent study that did this found that the average number of days between May and September with at least one large heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere doubled between the 1980s and the 2010s to around 152 from 73. But the number of days with two or more heat waves was seven times higher, growing to roughly 143 from 20. That’s nearly every single day from May to September. The same study also found that these concurrent heat waves affected larger areas and were more severe by the 2010s, with peak intensities that were almost one-fifth

2.7  Zhong Quotes Begin Here

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higher than in the 1980s. On days when there with at least one large heat wave somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, there were 3.6 of them happening per day on average, the study found. These “dramatic” increases came as a surprise, said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University and a coauthor of the study (Zaske, 2022). Singh and her co-authors also looked at where concurrent heat waves occurred most frequently during those four decades. One pattern stood out: large simultaneous heat waves struck parts of eastern North America, Europe, and central and eastern Asia increasingly between 1979 and 2019—“more than what we would expect simply by the effect of warming,” Singh said (Zaske, 2022). The study did not try to predict whether heat waves in this pattern will become more frequent as global warming continues, she said. Scientists are working to pin down how the meanderings of the jet stream, which has long shaped weather patterns for billions of people, might be changing in this warming era. One factor is the rapid warming of the Arctic, which narrows the difference in temperatures between the northern and southern bands of the Northern Hemisphere. How exactly this might be affecting extreme weather is still a matter of debate. Those temperature differences are key forces driving the winds that keep weather systems moving around the planet, said Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. That means extreme events like heat waves and heavy downpours are likely to last longer. “The longer a heat wave lasts, the more you push natural and societal systems to the edge,” Kornhuber said. Climate change already means the world will see more extreme weather events, and more extremes occurring simultaneously, he said. “These circulation changes, they will act on top of it,” he said, “and would make extremes even more severe and even more frequent” (Zhong, 2022b). Tiffany May reported in the New York Times that China has been dealing with several weather and climate emergencies in some parts of the country, including the worst flooding in several decades, which have, in some cases, submerged many houses and cars and produced record heat in some central and northern provinces that have caused many roads to buckle. “Water levels in more than a hundred rivers across the country have surged beyond flood warning levels, according to People’s Daily, authorities in Guangdong Province….closing schools, businesses and public transport in affected areas.” The flooding has disrupted the lives of almost half a million people in southern China. Footage on state media showed rescue crews on boats paddling across waterlogged roads to relieve trapped residents. In Shaoguan, a manufacturing hub, factories were ordered to halt production, as water levels have reached a 50-year high, state television reported. Guangdong’s emergency management department said that the rainfall has affected 479,600 people, ruined nearly 30 hectares of crops and caused the collapse of more than 1700 houses, with financial losses totaling $261 million, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

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Temperatures rose to as high as 104 °F in several northern and central provinces. Roads buckling in the heat were compared to earthquake damage. Consumption of electricity surged to record high levels. The rising use of power is part of a broader pattern during which farmlands have been built into cities. Many people achieved better employment, even as pollution has risen and large areas covered by pavement have backed up floodwaters and raised temperatures. All of these effects have combined with atmospheric warming caused by greenhouse gases to raise temperatures still more. China has tried to counter these problems by increasing the amount of land devoted to green spaces such as grass, shrubs, and trees. Significant environmental damage has already been done, May wrote (2022). The devastation and disruptions resulting from greenhouse gases that have already been emitted are likely to continue in the coming years.” Problems tend to compound each other in China—as well as in the United States. Politicians and scientists have warned that climate change and rapid population growth have been shrinking the Great Salt Lake and creating wind-blown toxic dust that has been creating poisonous air around Salt Lake City. The same people that have publicized this problem admit that no easy solutions exist. Nevertheless, they call it an “environmental nuclear bomb” (Fountain, 2022a, b). Weather still displays its innate variability, which can confuse observers who need to study longer-term records’ trends. For example, as the summer of 2022 began, much of the United States was in the midst of a third consecutive week of unrelenting heat, with sweltering temperatures stretching across the Southern Plains and the Mississippi Valley into the Great Lakes and the Deep South (Paz, 2022). Six months later, much of the United States was shocked with record cold, courtesy of an Arctic oscillation that swept southward with wind chills as low as minus 50 F. Life-threatening blizzards blasted the entire continent at once, a rare event. As the oscillation turned northward over Europe, surprised New Year’s revelers greeted 2023 in T-shirts on ski slopes denuded of business-sustaining snow. What a difference a few days under a very pronounced atmospheric regime can in different parts of the world can make. The United States’ summer of 2022 began with 11 major cities breaking daily heat records, including usually cool Minneapolis, which reached 101 °F. The previous record high for that date had been 88 degrees, set in 1993. The 2022 record was 13 °F above the previous daily record unusually large margin (Paz, 2022). A day or two later, 21 heat records were broken across the Ohio Valley and the Southeast. Nashville and Charlotte, N.C., both of which reached 101  F, breaking previous records of 100. Macon, Ga., soared to 105 degrees, 4 degrees warmer than the record set in 1988. Daily highs reached the middle 90s near the Great Lakes, 15 to 20 degrees above seasonal averages. Chicago reached 99 °F. Much of this heat wave was caused largely by a stifling heat dome, a stagnant high-pressure system of a type that has been parking itself over various regions of the world. That startling high of 108  F in Seattle (and about 115 to 120 northeast of Seattle in British Columbia’s Fraser River Valley) in prior years had been caused mainly by an anchored heat dome.

2.7  Zhong Quotes Begin Here

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Europe’s unusual early January 2023 heat wave was part of a repeating pattern, a mark of sustained rises in average temperatures that actually indicate a longer-­ term trend attributable to climate change, “with Britain, France and Spain announcing that 2022 was expected to be the hottest year on record following a summer of heat waves” (Kwai, 2023). “The record-breaking heat across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change, just as climate change is now making every heat wave more likely and hotter,” said Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College London, in a statement. “As long as greenhouse gas emissions continue, heat waves like these will become increasingly common and severe” (Kwai, 2023). The warmth enveloped all of Europe, from the “coastal Spanish town of San Sebastián, [where] residents swapped coats for T-shirts and headed to the beach for a swim” to Warsaw [Poland] and Belarus, where usual early January days barely nudge the freezing point. People there stripped off heavy coats when temperatures reached the mid-60s F (Kwai, 2023). “The unusually warm opening days of January broke dozens of weather records across Europe,” wrote Isabella Kwai in the New York Times. “Meteorologists called the warm spell and the records it broke ‘staggering,’ as several countries saw the hottest start to the year ever measured….The unseasonal warmth capped a year of already historic highs” (Kwai, 2023). Similarly, one downpour and flood may be dismissed as a singular event, but when such events are repeated over a large area with increasing frequency and severity (as indicated in the following extract from the New York Times), patterns develop that indicate extended and more damaging climate change:

“NEW DELHI—Heavy pre-monsoon rains in India and Bangladesh have washed away train stations, towns and villages, leaving millions of people homeless as extreme weather events, including heat waves, intense rainfall and floods, become more common in South Asia (emphasis added). “More than 60 people have been killed in days of flooding, landslides and thunderstorms that have left many people without food and drinking water and have isolated them by cutting off the internet,” according to officials. “Climate scientists have said that India and Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their proximity to the warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, which are increasingly experiencing heat waves. The rising sea temperatures have led to “dry conditions” in some parts of the Indian subcontinent and “a significant increase in rainfall” in other areas, according to a study published in January by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune (Singh & Hasnat, 2022).

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On Sunday, India’s meteorological department warned of “thunderstorms with lightning and very heavy rainfall” in many parts of the country’s remote northeast where the Brahmaputra, one of the world’s largest rivers, has inundated vast areas of agricultural land, villages and towns over the past couple of weeks. The floodwaters of the Brahmaputra and other rivers have arrived with fury in Bangladesh, a low-lying nation of about 170 million people, where extreme rainfall and landslides washed away a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp overnight last year. In 2020, torrential rains submerged at least a quarter of the country (Singh & Hasnat, 2022). Roads that were cut off by floods have made relief efforts challenging, officials say. But the devastation has left millions of people with nothing “ (Singh & Hasnat, 2022). “The flood situation is terrible in our village in Zakiganj,” said Mahmudul Hasan, 29, who was taking shelter with six family members in Sylhet. The family has not received any food or water, said Mr. Hasan. And he said he was constantly worried about his home. “Our house is made of mud,” he explained (In other words, the rain washed it away.) (Singh & Hasnat, 2022). A heat wave [that] swallowed South Asia, bringing temperatures for one-fifth of the entire human population…is now weeks [in duration], and the heat wave continues. Real relief probably won’t come before the monsoon in June. (And, one may add in these years of extremes, probable floods, as described above (Wallace-Wells, 2022)). Thermometers hit 115 °F in India and 120 in Pakistan in April [2022], …already at or past the limit for human survivability. Birds fell dead from the sky…. After a brief lull, the temperatures and humidity began to rise again. On May 14, it was 51 °C in Jacobabad, a city of almost 200,000, with a “wet-bulb” reading of 33.1—just below the conventional estimate for the threshold of human survival, which is 35. More recently, scientists have suggested a lower threshold, even for the young and healthy, of just 31 °C. Ten weeks in, the heat wave is testing those limits (Wallace-Wells, 2022).

Wallace-Wells points out (2022) that more than half of the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in the recorded residency of humanity on Earth have been produced in the past 30 years—“after Al Gore published his first book on warming; since the U.N. established its climate-change body, the I.P.C.C. Beyond Wallace-­ Wells’ point that greenhouse gases have continued to rise substantially since human committees have been established to curtail them, what does this say about humankind’s assumptions that such bodies will contain the atmosphere’s load of carbon dioxide and methane in the future? Wallace-Wells has an inkling (2022): “Over the past decade [2012–2022], extreme heat events have grown 90 times more common”

2.8  Where and When Will Be “After Warming”?

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[emphasis added]. If you can endure getting more scared than you are already, do the theoretical math for a century. Wallace-Wells mentions a “heat dome” over the Pacific Northwest of the United States during the summer of 2021, described above, which has now earned a place in global-heating hell as one of the six worst heat waves in recorded history. “There we have seen what an extreme event looks like in a warmer world,” Dr. Otto said (Wallace-Wells, 2022)…. The planet is already warmer today than at any point in the history of human civilization—warmer than any world any human has ever known. In that kind of world, which is ours, global averages often flatten and obscure as much as they illuminate. A 70-degree anomaly in New York City would be 122 °F. in March, 134 in April and 142 in May. In Rio de Janeiro, it would be above 150; in New Delhi, perhaps 170 (Wallace-Wells, 2022). My God, it is getting hot out there! Ranging as high as 170 C., temperature would be well above the limits of human and animals’ endurance for a few minutes. Bear in mind that this is a projection of quality that may be dubious, especially in the near future. “Within our own lifetimes,” Wallace-Wells wrote “we may find ourselves living on a planet warmed beyond a level [that] scientists long characterized as “catastrophic,” though well below the level casually described as “apocalyptic.” One important question is: how often? (Wallace-Wells, 2022).

2.8 Where and When Will Be “After Warming”? To start: will there be anything living left “after warming”? How much “warming” would indicate to what’s left of scientific inquiry or fantasy that we have reached a post-warming world? How would whomever and whatever life remained “after warming” go about rebuilding our badly scarred world? Without an archive devoted to the world “after warming,” we will have to fall back to the nonfiction world of continuing warming, which will continue until the curves that tell us how much carbon dioxide, methane, etc. our atmosphere contains has reached an apogee and begun a long decline toward levels known to humanity at precrisis levels. Today we are approaching 425 parts per million for CO2. In the preindustrial world with its cyclical pattern, a high reading of about 280 ppm at the top usually fell to about 180 ppm, which often signaled an ice age. Based on geological records reaching several million years into the past, a CO2 level of 425 indicates melting of all surface ice, sea levels several dozen feet higher than today, and heat at or near intolerable levels for animal and plant life on land and in the oceans. We have a few dozen years left before the real action begins because of thermal inertia, which delays effects about 50 years on land and 150 years in the oceans. Thus, two or three generations on land and seven to eight generations in the rising oceans, whomever remains may have reason to ask whether life on Earth is due for a respite, that magic level “after warming” only if levels of carbon dioxide, methane, etc. have been stopped at stone cold (no pun intended) at today’s levels. If

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the levels begin to fall, and continue to do so, we have arrived at the world “after warming.” In the meantime, in today’s world, greenhouse gas levels continue to rise, along with temperatures, as indicated, to consider one example of many, by statistics for India in NASA’s Earth Observatory (Pratt, 2022) and Government of India (2022). An intense heat wave in mid- and late April 2022 brought temperatures 4.5 to 8.5 °C (8 to 15 °F) above normal in east, central, and northwest India—just weeks after the country had recorded its hottest March since the country’s meteorological department began keeping records more than 120 years previuously.

On April 27, 2022, the highest temperature in the country, 45.9  °C (114.6 °F), was recorded in Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. The day before, a high of 45.1 °C (113.2 °F) was reported at Barmer in West Rajasthan in the northwest, according to the India Meteorological Department. Many other localities recorded temperatures of 42–44 °C (108–111 °F).

The effects of the heat wave include heat-related illnesses, poor air quality, little rainfall, and reduced crop yields. Additionally, power demand has spiked, and coal inventories have dropped, leaving the country with its worst electricity shortage in more than 6 years. In the northern regions of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, mountain snow has been rapidly melting. Additionally, more than 300 large wildfires were burning around the country on April 27, according to the Forest Survey of India. Nearly a third of those were in Uttarakhand.

A bulge in the jet stream and a dome of high pressure had kept an unseasonably warm, dry air mass parked over the country, according to meteorologists. The heat wave conditions were expected to intensify in the next few days and persist for at least another week.

Heat waves are common in India in the spring and early summer, especially in May, which is typically India’s hottest month. But they are often relieved by the onset of the monsoon season from late May through September. The number of spring heat waves has been increasing, according to India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, as 12 of the country’s 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2006. A June 2015 heat wave killed more than 2000 people (Pratt, 2022); emphasis added).

2.9  Warming Climates and Species Migrations

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The number of ways that a warming environment can affect its creatures is as varied as the plants and animals themselves. In a warming world, for example, bats in Southeast Asia will be especially prone to spreading viruses to other mammals, researchers found. Over the next 50 years, climate change may drive thousands of viruses to jump from one species of mammal to another. The shuffling of viruses among animals may increase the risk that one will jump into humans and cause a new pandemic.

2.9 Warming Climates and Species Migrations Scientists have long warned that a warming planet may increase the burden of diseases. Malaria, for example, is expected to spread as the mosquitoes that carry it expand their ranges into warming regions. But climate change might also usher in entirely new diseases, by allowing pathogens to move into new host species. “We know that species are moving, and when they do, they’re going to have these chances to share viruses,” said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University and a coauthor of the new study (Zimmer, 2022). To understand what that sharing will look like, Carlson and his colleagues built a computer model of potential spillovers in a warming world. The researchers started by projecting how thousands of mammals might shift their ranges as the climate changes between now and 2070. “As temperatures increase, many species are expected to spread away from the quickly heating Equator toward more comfortable habitats,” added Carlson. “Others already have been moving upward on hills and mountains seeking habitats that are cooler. Species that share habitats for the first time also come into contact with viruses and infect new hosts” he added. “To understand the odds of new infections, researchers built a virus database paired with their hosts, which were nearly always mammalian. Particular viruses may be found in more than one species, having jumped the species barrier (Zimmer, 2022). Using machine learning, a computer technique, researchers have constructed a model capable of anticipating whether two or more species might share a virus. These species often overlap geographically, the researchers found, increasing a possibility that they may share a virus. Hosts are often more likely to encounter each other, increasing the probability that viruses that they share will have more opportunities to infect each other. Carlson and his colleagues also showed that closely related species were more likely to share a virus than distant relatives, probably because closely related mammals usually are biochemically similar to those that infect one species are likely to have a relatively easier time with relatively similar ones. Along the same line, species may find evading immune systems easier to evade if they are similarly adapted. Compiling and comparing their findings, Carlson and colleagues were able to anticipate when mammal species initially came together in a hotter world. Among 3139 species, they were able to find more than 4000 cases where viruses would or could move between species. The research also was able in many cases to indicate

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whether one virus or several would jump. The models also were able to predict cases in which several viruses carried by one host might spread to others. The researchers were not able to say exactly which viruses would move between which species. What matters, they agreed, is the sheer scale of what’s to come. “When you’re trying to predict the weather, you don’t predict individual raindrops,” said Christopher Trisos, an ecologist at the University of Cape Town and a coauthor of the new study. “You predict the clouds themselves” (Zimmer, 2022). Rachel Baker, a disease ecologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, said that the research “was an important step forward in understanding how climate change will affect the world’s dangerous viruses.” She said that this study is important because earlier studies focused only on single viruses, whereas the new methods were able to survey many of them, potentially the entire world. “It’s a great advance,” she said. “We want to know as soon as possible if there’s some link between climate change and pathogen spillover” (Zimmer, 2022). Bats in Southeast Asia probably will be very prone to these links. In the past, many species of bats in one particular region have been restricted small ranges which do not often contact each other. As the Earth warms, these bats seek out more amenable habitats and cross paths with formerly uncontacted species. Such movements may be dangerous to humans because viruses that move to new hosts can quickly evolve into species; they evolve in ways that allow them to more easily infect human beings. For example, according to one source, “The coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002 originated in Chinese horseshoe bats and then jumped to another species such as raccoon dogs sold in Chinese animal markets before infecting people” (Zimmer, 2020). In February 2022, other scientists disclosed two new studies which made a case that COVID-19 may have became infectious to humans by jumping from bats to wild mammals at markets in Wuhan, China, then to humans. “We believe that is something that could happen a lot as a result of the interspecific transmission events that we’re predicting,” said Gregory Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University and who worked as a coauthor on the COVID study (Zimmer, 2022). Researchers also aimed their attention at associating mammals’ supposed migrations to new habitats by 2070, assuming certain climatic conditions, and migrations based on them. This line of research led to another reason that migrating mammals (such as rats) might provide disease vectors into densely populated urban areas. “They won’t be migrating to wildlife refuges. It turns out [that] those are…places [where] we’ve built cities,” Carlson said (Zimmer, 2022). “A rare rodent that has little contact with humans might pass a virus to raccoons, which live in urban areas. That is, opening an entirely new pathway for this virus to spread to humans,” Albery said (Zimmer, 2022). Dr. Christine Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, cautioned that such a broad model can’t account for details that may have a big impact on individual viruses. “We need locally grounded field studies to understand the impacts of climate on species’ movements and disease transmission risk,” she said (Zimmer, 2022). According to their computer-aided studies, the researchers who were involved in the

2.11  Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica

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same studies found that temperatures had already changed enough to move viruses between habitats.

2.10 Warming Interrupts Gabon Elephants’ Food Cycle Sometimes species can be negatively impacted when warming kills a food source. For example, Gabon, in western Africa, is home to most of Africa’s elephants, where they are sheltered in the Lope National Park. The forest cover has been unable, however, to prevent warmer nights and a decline in rainfall which is threatening their survival. The most nutritious part of the elephants’ diet is fruit of the Detarium microcarpum tree. The elephants are part of an ecological cycle with this fruit as their major food source. They follow paths known to be best for the fruit (which they teach to young progeny). They eat the fruit and then excrete feces containing the seeds, which are scattered across a rich bed of earth ideally suited for their propagation. At this point, climate change intervenes. The Detarium microcarpum trees put on fruit best when temperatures fall to 66 °F at night. Any higher temperature than that causes their number of seeds to decline, as the elephants go hungry, and fewer seeds are left behind to begin a new cycle of tree growth. Scientists in the park have been finding emaciated, starving elephants. In addition, if rainfall has fallen below 10 inches a year, also the trees bear even less fruit. Without natural fruit, the elephants have taken to raiding gardens (Bhattacharjee, 2022).

2.11 Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica It is relatively common for ice shelves in Antarctica to spawn icebergs. It is much less common for an entire ice shelf to completely disintegrate. In March 2022, however, an entire ice shelf in East Antarctica did both. The collapse has reshaped a part of the Antarctic landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable. For the first time since satellites began observing Antarctica nearly half a century ago, an ice shelf had collapsed on the eastern part of the continent [emphasis added]. The change happened very quickly. At the start of March 2022, the floating shelf fed by the Glenzer and Conger glaciers was still intact. By the middle of the month, it had fallen apart. This image pair (below), acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the shelf before and after it disintegrated (Cowing, 2022). “The whole shelf collapsed in just around two weeks,” said Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The icy remnants of both glacial shelf ice and adjacent sea ice dispersed from the waters around Bowman Island within weeks. “All of this took less than a month,” Shuman said. “It was quite the blowout” (Hansen, 2022).

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The first image shows the ice shelf floating on the Mawson Sea on February 22, 2022, prior to the collapse. Fast ice—a type of sea ice that becomes “fastened” to the edges of ice shelves, coastlines, and icebergs—is also part of the mix. For 2 years prior to this image, the shelf was already in a state of decline. According to Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the shelf was losing ice at an average rate of about 1 square kilometer per day through the natural process of iceberg calving (Hansen, 2022). February 22–March 21, 2022. The progression of the collapse is visible in the image series above. Images were acquired with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites

In early March 2022, the shelf in front of the Glenzer Glacier calved a substantial iceberg named C-37, which measured about 144 square kilometers (56 square miles). A few pieces broke off, such that C-37, which was measured about 81 square kilometers on March 12 when MODIS acquired the second image in the series. The substantial loss of ice meant the shelf disconnected from Bowman Island. Some sea ice remained attached to the island. “Without being supported by a land anchor, the ice shelf was destabilized and primed to collapse,” said Jonathan Wille, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes (Hansen, 2022). According to Wille, an atmospheric river on March 15 appeared to have triggered the shelf’s final collapse. The weather system also caused temperatures in eastern Antarctica to soar 40 °C above normal during the storm, with large ocean swells and strong winds pushing against the ice shelf. The swells and winds probably caused the ice in front of Conger Glacier to break up and disperse.

2.11  Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica

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The third MODIS image above shows the area on March 16 after the final collapse. The event spawned Iceberg C-38, which at the time measured about 415 square kilometers (160 square miles). The final image in the series shows the crumbled shelf ice and fast ice as it dispersed in the sea on March 21. The loss of an ice shelf can indirectly contribute to sea level rise. “Ice shelves are essentially the ‘safety band’ holding up the rest of the Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Walker said. When they collapse, the ice behind them can more quickly flow into the ocean. “And that is what raises sea levels” (Hansen, 2022). By Antarctic standards, the ice shelf and glaciers that it held back are relatively small, so the impacts from the collapse are expected to be minimal at the site itself. However, scientists are more concerned about the site of the collapse. “All of the previous collapses have taken place in West Antarctica, not East Antarctica, which until recently has been thought of as relatively stable,” Walker said. “This is something like a dress rehearsal for what we could expect from other, more massive ice shelves if they continue to melt and destabilize. Then we’ll really be past the turnaround point in terms of slowing sea level rise” (Hansen, 2022). In other words, this is an ice-melting bomb likely to go off as temperatures rise. The collapse of the 450-square-mile Conger ice shelf in a part of the continent called Wilkes Land occurred in mid-March 2022. It was first spotted by scientists with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and appeared in satellite images taken on March 17 according to the National Ice Center in the United States (Fountain, 2022a, b). Kathryn Hansen of NASA’s Earth Observatory explained (2022) that “Ice shelves are floating tongues of ice at the end of glaciers that in Antarctica serve as outlets for the continent’s massive ice sheets. Stresses cause cracks in the floating ice, and meltwater and other factors can cause the fissures to erode and grow to a point where the shelf disintegrates rapidly. According to the National Ice Center, the largest fragment of the Conger shelf after the collapse was an iceberg, named C-38, that was about 200 square miles in size (Hansen, 2022). The loss of a shelf can allow faster movement of the glaciers behind it, leading to more rapid ice sheet loss and thus greater sea-level rise. Ice-shelf loss is a major concern in West Antarctica, where warming related to climate change thus far has been having a greater effect than in the east. Several very large glaciers in West Antarctica are already flowing into or toward the sea and if their ice shelves collapse completely, sea levels could rise on the order of 10 feet world-wide over several centuries (emphasis added). However, the two glaciers that are presently behind the Conger sheet are relatively small and, even if they were to accelerate, would have minimal effect on sea level, on the order of fractions of an inch over a century or two, said Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (Fountain, 2022a, b). While some ice shelves have collapsed in West Antarctica, notably the much larger Larsen B, in 2002, the Conger collapse is the first observed in East Antarctica since the era of satellite imagery began in 1979, said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts (Fountain, 2022a, b).

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2.12 Increases in Bleaching Indicates Doom for Corals Worldwide The year 2022 offered a disturbing, but silent, first mass coral bleaching in a year of La Niña, which usually cools water around coral reefs, providing time for restoration and healing. By 2022, however, destruction of the Great Barrier Reef east of Australia was reaching a point where it was bleaching more years than not. New York Times reporter Damien Cave reported from Sydney that: “A wide stretch of the Great Barrier Reef has been hit by a sixth mass bleaching event, the marine park’s authority said [in an] alarming [message about] the coral that points to the continued threat of climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions. [Australian] government scientists who used helicopters and small planes to survey 750 separate reefs across hundreds of miles…found severe bleaching among 60 percent of the corals.” Bleaching events have now occurred in four of the past 7 years, with 2022 offering a disturbing first—a mass bleaching in a year of La Niña, when more rain and cooler temperatures heretofore have provided a brief respite for sensitive corals to recover (Cave, 2022, emphasis added). “We’re seeing that coral reefs can’t cope with the current rate of warming and the frequency of climate change,” said Dr. Neal Cantin, a coral biologist who led one of the teams observing the state of the reef. “We need to slow down that warming rate as fast as possible” (Cave, 2022). The year 2021 was the hottest on record for oceans worldwide, the sixth year in a row. As waters warm, wrote Cave, “The blocks of underwater graveyards, with gray fields of brittle, dead coral covered in wisps of ugly algae, have been growing with each mass bleaching since the first one occurred in 1998.”

2.13 The United Nations Secretary General Rings Alarm Bells: Again António Guterres, United Nations secretary general, rung alarm bells against global warming once again in 2022, amidst reports from all over that it is increasing. Guterres said instead of replacing Russian oil, gas, and coal, nations must pivot to clean energy. The warning from Guterres made an association between climate change and nationalism. Countries that want to use Russia’s oil and gas during the war in Ukraine are “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” he said (Friedman, 2022). Optimistic promises made by many countries at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 are not going to hold temperatures to 1.5  °C by the end of the twenty-first century. Beyond that, the world will face catastrophic conditions. “The 1.5 degree goal is on life support,” he said at a conference on sustainability via a video address hosted by The Economist. Furthermore, he said, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending world energy markets and undermining climate goals. “This is madness,” said Guterres. “Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.” What’s more, he said, investment in coal will lead to billions in stranded assets” (Cockburn, 2022).

2.14  The Basics: Carbon Dioxide and Methane Levels Surge (Again)

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Within a few days, nature put an exclamation point behind the secretary general’s remarks with a massive, E-3 out-of-season tornado that ripped through the urban core of New Orleans, through some of the same parishes as notable hurricanes such as Katrina, Ida, et al. Freakishly warm winds also raced across parts of both of the Arctic and Antarctic, pushing temperatures to between 50 and 70 °F above normal. Seth Borenstein, chief climate reporter for the Associated Press, filed the following for the international wire September 23, 2022: Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records…as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high Concordia station was at 10 °F, which is about 70  °F warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station [rose to] above 0  °F. [the freezing point], beating its record by about 27 degrees, according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera. The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 °F.

It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier. “They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south [poles] both melting at the same time,” Meier told the Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.” “It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added. “Wow! I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent. “Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara (Borenstein, 2022).

2.14 The Basics: Carbon Dioxide and Methane Levels Surge (Again) Borenstein (2022) continued: “For the second year in a row [2021], concentrations of the potent planet-warming gas [methane] jumped by the largest amount since measurements began four decades ago…. adding to concerns about the planet-­ warming gas, which spews from oil and natural gas operations. Levels of methane in the atmosphere increased last year by the largest amount since measurements began four decades ago, government scientists said… Large amounts of methane pour into the air from wells and pipelines, sometimes through unintentional leaks. Other sources include livestock, landfills and the decay of organic matter in wetlands.” “Our data show that global emissions continue to move in the wrong

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direction at a rapid pace,” said Richard W.  Spinrad, the NOAA administrator. “Reducing methane emissions is an important tool we can use right now to lessen the impacts of climate change in the near term, and rapidly reduce the rate of warming” (Zhong, 2022a, b). “Carbon dioxide still contributes much more to the warming of the planet than methane. The NOAA analysis indicates that levels of carbon dioxide also continued to rise rapidly in 2021. During the past 10  years, carbon dioxide concentrations grew at their quickest pace in the six-plus decades since monitoring began.

References Bhattacharjee, Y. (2022, May). A fragile refugee for forest elephants. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Bhattacharjee,+Yud hijit.%E2%80%9DA+Fragile+Refugee+for+Forest+Elephants.%E2%80%9D+National+Geo graphic&ie=UTF-­8&oe=UTF-­8 Borenstein, S. (2022, March 19). Hot poles; Antarctica, Arctic…50 to 70 degrees above normal. In Seattle Times. Associated Press. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-­world/ hot-­poles-­antarctica-­arctic-­70-­and-­50-­degrees-­above-­normal/? Carlson, C. J., Albery, G. F., Merow, C., et al. (2022). Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk. Nature, 607, 555–562. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-­022-­04788-­w Cave, D. (2022, March 25). ‘Can’t cope’: Australia’s great barrier reef suffers 6th mass bleaching event. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/world/australia/ great-­barrier-­reef-­bleaching.html? Cockburn, H. (2022, March 21). ‘This is madness’: UN warns against turning to fossil fuels because of war in Ukraine. The Independent (London). Cowing, K. (2022, March 28). Ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica. NASA Space Ref. Retrieved from https://spaceref.com/earth/ice-­shelf-­collapse-­in-­east-­antarctica/ Filkins, D. (2022, June 27). Party crasher: Can Ron DeSantis supplant trump as the dominant force of the G.O.P? The New Yorker, 28–41. Fountain, H. (2022a, June 14). One site, 95 tons of methane an hour: In January, a satellite detected 13 plumes of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, coming from the largest coal mine in Russia. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/climate/ methane-­emissions-­russia-­coal-­mine.html? Fountain, H. (2022b, March 25). In a first, an ice shelf collapses in East Antarctica. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/climate/east-­antarctica-­ice-­shelf-­ collapse.html Friedman, L. (2022, March 21). U.N. chief warns of ‘catastrophe’ with continued use of fossil fuels. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/climate/united-­ nations-­fossil-­fuels-­climate-­crisis.html Government of India. Earth System Science Organization. Ministry of Earth Sciences. Department of Meteorology. Press release. (2022, April 22). Monthly Weather and Climate Summery [sic] for the Month of March, 2022. Hansen, K. (2022, March 29). Earth observatory, NASA.  What’s new week of 29 March 2022. Retrieved from https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://earthobservatory.nasa. gov/__;!!PvXuogZ4sRB2p-­t U!S5dpHYsRf9FypK43XjDZNTEmWPAJiNtpYGCg Xhu_UhUoch0Y7Wu5Mr8EtqsK8tS0zT0duvM$ Horowitz, J. (2022, July 7). Glacier tragedy shows reach of Europe’s new heat. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/world/europe/itaninly-­glacier-­ collapse.html?

References

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Kwai, I. (2023, January 4). Some in Europe toasted the new year in T-shirts. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/world/europe/europe-­warm-­weather-­ climate-­change.html Maclean, R. (2022, October 18). Nigeria floods kill hundreds and displace over a million. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/world/africa/nigeria-­floods. html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20221018&instance_id=74930&nl=todaysheadlines&re gi_id=35795487&segment_id=110300&user_id=8953ac8150496623ee2c782e2065b2e1 May, T. (2022, June 23). Extreme weather hits China with massive floods and scorching heat. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/world/asia/china-­floods-­ heatwaves.html? Paz, I. G. (2022, June 23). Heat records have fallen this week from Minneapolis to Macon, Ga. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/heat-­minneapolis-­ chicago-­atlanta-­south.html Pratt, S. E. (2022, April 27). Early season heat waves strike India. NASA Earth Observatory. Retrieved from https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149766/early-­season-­heat-­waves-­strike-­indiaL Sengupta, S., Myers, S.  L., Andreoni, M., & Raj, S. (2022, November 5). A handful of powerful world leaders rallied around Russia and undercut global cooperation. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/05/climate/putin-­russia-­climate-­ change-­progress.html Singh, K. D., & Hasnat, S. (2022, May 22). Millions displaced and dozens dead in flooding in India and Bangladesh. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/ world/asia/flooding-­india-­bangladesh.html Wallace-Wells, D. (2022, May 17). Can you even call deadly heat ‘extreme’ anymore? New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/india-­heat-­wave-­ pakistan-­climate-­change.html Wu, H. (2022, September 5). Taiwan leader cites threat of Chinese ‘cognitive warfare.’ Associated Press. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-­technology-­china-­misinformation-­f9b 030d8c11f2250a2a516d73059b257 Zaske, S. (2022, December 16). Concurrent heat waves becoming more frequent. WSU News & Media Relations. WSU [Washington State University] Insider. Retrieved from https://news.wsu. edu/press-­release/2021/12/16/concurrent-­heatwaves-­seven-­times-­more-­frequent-­than-­1980s/ Zhong, R. (2022a, April 7). Methane emissions soared to a record in 2021, scientists say. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/climate/methane-­emissions-­ record.html Zhong, R. (2022b, June 24). Heat waves around the world push people and nations ‘to the edge’. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/climate/early-­ heatwaves.html

Chapter 3

Nationalism, Politics, and Money: Autocrats, Oligarchs, Ex-Presidents, Czars, Manifest Destiny, Fascists, Rich Ex-Communists, Uber-Nationalists, Reich und Volk, Nazis, The KKK, etc.

What becomes of a world in which war crimes are everyday business, where and when a powerful nation seeking to restore a crumbling empire uses showers of explosive missiles, sexual torture, and Orwellian lies in an attempt to dismember the homes, schools, farms, and churches (etc.) of a civilized people for doing nothing more than occupying their own country and refusing to accede to the historical bloodlust from an oligarch with blood-spattered dreams of restoring the dimensions of ancient empire? Dare anyone tell the Oligarch that we live in a different world now, one in which atmospheric chemicals sketch the parameters of a much more wretched future? The Oligarch does not live in a world where the rules of nature call the tune. Instead, the Oligarch rattles his nukes [the world’s tallest stack!) and implies that the neighbors of the nation that has been attacked may be next. Meantime, in another battle that the Oligarch does not see, or even acknowledge, chemicals warm the atmosphere and constantly distort the weather. One thing that war does very efficiently is to monopolize the attention of those who wage it and are victimized by it. In fact, the practice of war increases the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide, methane, and other trace gases that heat the atmosphere at an accelerating rate.

3.1 The Geophysical Facts Greenhouse gasses recruit no armies. They bear no historical grudges, and no desires to restore old empires. They have no imperial dreams. As stated earlier, all they do is hold heat in a way that distorts weather and, eventually, climate, in ways that make life more difficult for all people, other animals, and plants that may be extinguished as “collateral damage” to the warmakers and anyone, as well, who would rather live in peace. Greenhouse gases hold heat over time that compounds its effects, like a very large bank account compounding interest. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_3

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Greenhouse exists within a natural, grand atmospheric dance to which the Oligarch pays no attention and makes no acknowledgment, despite plentiful examples throughout Earth and its atmosphere, despite the overwhelmingly dangerous effects that they will or have had, on every living thing on our planet, one of which is our closest galactic neighbor. Venus is very close to Earth in many ways, but it has no tectonic plates, which moderate the effects of fierce, fiery activity beneath Earth’s crust by means of violent discharges, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and so forth, venting carbon dioxide, methane, etc. (in smaller proportions) that disperse throughout the atmosphere. These raise the levels of these gases in our atmosphere, but only in small amounts compared to humankind’s combustion of fossil fuels. Having no way to vent its subsurface gases, Venus’ load of carbon dioxide and other gases exploded into its atmosphere quickly enough millions of years ago to raise that planet’s temperatures several hundred degrees relatively quickly enough to provide a surface temperature (475 °C, or about 900 °F) that precludes the growth of anything. Venus’ surface is also studded with several thousand active volcanoes. These are the geophysical facts, which are not generally well-known to the Earth’s rich, famous, powerful, and generally ignorant individuals who decide whether most peoples engage in peace or war. Imagine giving Vladimir Putin a test on the basic principles of atmospheric physics. Putin has been heard saying that Russia is generally a cold country that could use some warming. He seems ignorant of the fact that we now live in a world where temperatures of more than 100 F have been recorded above the Arctic Circle in Russia. Ask Donald J. Trump or Ronald DeSantis what the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide must reach before irreversible heating swallows the Earth and consider the bumbling answer one would probably receive. Trump might blurt that the question is irrelevant because all the scientists are doing is cooking up fables to hustle grant money. We have, on our fragile Earth, a general disconnect between the political Uber upperclass who debate war and peace, and the scientists who describe what awaits us in the geophysical future. This chapter describes the uses to which the powerful fan the flames of interpersonal hate and conflict to stoke human hubris—how powerful humans, exploiting nationalism, build empires and exterminate enemies (real or imaginary) while calling nature’s reality “hoaxes” or refusing to engage natural reality at all. As mentioned before, the realties of carbon dioxide’s conduct on this planet could care less what the likes of a Putin think of them.

3.2 Deaf to the Song of Nature We are enveloped in a world in where many very powerful people, for the most part, cannot hear the song of nature, even if it is loud, and filled with terrifying importance. Mainly, the drums of war beat far away from other meetings, where invisible chemicals that hold heat are on the docket of climate summits. All of these meetings seem to have something in common. They are filled with people who hear the song of nature, but the governments which sent them to these hopefully Earth-healing

3.3  Can the Carbon Dioxide Curve Be Bent Downward?

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meetings often do not. Thus, the solutions that are so necessary for solutions to humanity’s and the Earth’s problems are very quickly going nearly nowhere, in an atmosphere suffused by massive amounts of jet fuel burned to transport them to and from these very important discussions where atmospheric goals are set but usually not met. Every day begins with the world and its peoples’ facing the same arms races, the same weapons of mass destruction, and the same oligarchs preaching doctrines which sane leaders would have rejected long ago. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide, methane, and other destructive gases still continue to run their world-­ ending errands. The carbon dioxide graphs still illustrate rising proportions of carbon dioxide, etc. as if the meetings aimed at curbing them have never been held.

3.3 Can the Carbon Dioxide Curve Be Bent Downward? Humans hold their political forums and take positions on issues regarded as important to them. Ex-president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and ex-President Donald Trump in the United States derived joy from the felling of forests and the mining of gold in the Amazon Valley, raising the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn into office as president of Brazil January 1, 2023, for the second time, having defeated Bolsonaro in a close election in the fall of 2022. Now the question for Brazil resumed what it has been for the rest of the world: can the upward proportion of carbon dioxide be broken? Vanessa Barbara, a Brazilian journalist, author, and a columnist for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, commented, regarding Brazil and Bolsonsaro, that the country was about to “emerge from the swamp of political despondency…. Now we spend much of our time asserting (in an increasingly exasperated manner) that carbon dioxide actually exists and that climate change is not a globalist hoax. Day after day, the integrity of public discourse has been diluted by conspiratorial claims, turbocharged by error-prone social media and encouraged by the likes of Bolsonaro, Putin, and Trump. We have been obliged to waste our time publicly refuting the theory that vaccines contain nanobots or that, as Bolsonaro put it, the Amazon rainforest ‘cannot catch fire.’ All that energy, which could have gone to demanding a better public health care system or a stronger response to climate change, was instead swallowed up combating lurid nonsense” (Barbara, 2022). In 2023, “Brazil is ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis,” da Silva told supporters in his victory speech. “We will prove once again that it’s possible to generate wealth without destroying the environment.” The president-­ elect once had helped slash deforestation rates in the Amazon rainforest. He said [that] he stood ready to do it again. The Amazon Valley also is one of the world’s most biodiverse places, and protecting it is key to fending off a global biodiversity crisis. De Silva’s pledge matters because Brazil contains much of the Amazon rainforest. Right now, the forest absorbs planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in tree roots, branches, and soil. By one estimate, there are 150 to 200 billion metric tons

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of carbon locked away in the Amazon forests. That could change, however; (in fact, it is now changing, based on the pace of industrialization and deforestation there). If deforestation continues (by fire, expanding agriculture, or other means), the Amazon basin may very soon become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, adding to the worldwide burden of such gasses.

3.4 Right-Wing Climate Change Deniers Take Office Across Europe Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with fascist roots. Another party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament, Viktor Orban’s far-right Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide, Marine Le Pen won 41 per cent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections, and Bolsonaro came very close to winning reelection in Brazil. He lost, yes, but then staged a riot similar to Donald Trump’s supporters’ invasion of the US Capitol January 6, 2021, Bolsonaro’s people trashed the Brazilian capitol complex in Brasilia January 8, 2023, with the same slate of antienvironmental demands (such as opening the Amazon to further exploitation on the Trump model), along with an extra imitation: Bolsonaro’s own assertation that the election was stolen from him. During the last week of March 2023, demonstrations of more than 300,000 people surged across Tel Aviv, Israel, and other locations in Israel, protesting moves by its ultra-conservative government to drastically revise the country’s Constitution, including the judiciary’s role. In effect, the protestors asserted that the government’s executive branch, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was establishing an autocracy, not unlike those in many other countries, including, for example, Russia and Hungary, where governmental executives, usually under control of powerful nationalists, have assumed control. Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, had sided with the protesters, who opposed Netanyahu’s proposals to weaken the judiciary’s power over Israel’s Parliament, and to give the executive more power in selecting Supreme Court justices. Several universities closed their doors, as union leaders discussed a general strike. Police barricaded Netanyahu’s home, and bonfires set on and near major highways. None of these upheavals had anything to do with the existential climate crisis that is facing everyone on the planet.

3.5 Praise the Lord and Pass the Votes Another form of nationalism that has grown in appeal and power in the United States is a call to heaven—Christian nationalism, in which members claim a special power, that God’s sponsorship provides them special privileges. The notion that the United States ought to wield its power as a wholly Christian country has grown

3.6  The Russian Empire Wasn’t Contracting: Until After World War II

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from a fusion of the Tea Party, America First, The Patriot Coalition, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA), and others—all white and adamantly right-­ wing. “The idea that God has ordained Christians to exercise control over political institutions in order to prepare for the Second Coming…. ‘They don’t believe in one person, one vote,’ Philip Gorsky, a sociologist at Yale University [said]. ‘They think they are involved in a battle between good and evil’” (Griswold, 2022, 22). Some believe assertions that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump are divinely inspired by God and that Democrats are demonic and engaged in witchcraft. So why is Putin so obsessed with conquering Ukraine to the point of throwing an estimated 200,000 often untrained Russians to meat-grinding deaths in a year of war by February 2023? To put that number in perspective, the United States lost about 55,000 men in Vietnam during roughly 10 years (1965–1975). As the United States went into Vietnam on the shaky assumption that doing anything else would expose the United States to conquest by Russia and China, Russia has its own boogeyman: that allowing an independent Ukraine to exist at all endangers the very existence of Russia as a nation. To many Americans, this seems to be an inversion of historical facts. How could a relatively small country endanger one that spans an almost a dozen time zones? Much of the answer to Russia’s greed for Ukraine’s land lies in their intertwined histories. Russia and Ukraine grew up as neighboring states more or less at the same time, 700 to 800 years ago, but as Russia, with a few notable exceptions, built its future on an autocratic, oligarchical model exemplified by the tsars, Ukraine leaned toward the west, toward democratic Europe. The political heartlands of Ukraine, and Kiev and Russia, and Moscow, are only a few hundred miles apart. What’s more, Putin’s own lifetime has been spent in a Russia that has been eroding, especially to the west. This erosion has a special meaning to Putin, with his desire to be an imperialist of the Great Russians, a schematic in which Ukrainians were known in Russia’s Imperial Court as “Little Russians” (Figes, 2022). From time to time when the autocratic, oligarchic nature of Russia was strongest, Ukraine would be slapped back into order like an errant child. And so it was in February 2022, when Putin & Co. assembled a long cavalcade of vehicles and squads of missile-bearing fighter jets, figuring that a stiff swipe at Kiev would quiet the uppity Ukrainians, who fought back, evading what Putin & Co.’s oligarchs and autocrats regarded as an established, historical pattern. From Putin’s point of view, the West (Europe and the United States) were putting them up to it.

3.6 The Russian Empire Wasn’t Contracting: Until After World War II The Russian empire has not always been collapsing, a fact that Putin seems to take as a point of personal pride. A glance at the friendliest nationalistic, geographic, and political angles, it has been growing. Between 1500 and the Bolshevik Revolution

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of 1917, imperial Russia undertook what may have been a land-speed world record for nationalistic expansion, as Orlando Figes, in The Story of Russia (2022, 67) wrote, “From the nucleus of Muscovy, it expanded into the world’s largest territorial empire,” at a rate, on average, of 130 square kilometers (50.2 square miles) every day. Russia, as a worldwide imperial state, survived the fear-ascendant rule of Josef Stalin, in which 376,000 people were shot to death (mostly as “enemies of the people”) in 1937 and 1938. Most of these had been dragged in from various gulags and other prison camps as proof that no one could escape the national purge. At the same time, more or less, Stalin’s engineers built a string of rickety, minimally productive industrial plants to show off the Soviets’ industrial might during the advent of World War II. From an environmental point of view, these Potemkin villages were worldchampion belchers of carbon dioxide and other more immediately lethal gases. Stalin absolutely was no “friend of the Earth.” By the time he died, on March 5, 1953, of a massive hemorrhagic stroke involving his left cerebral hemisphere, Stalin seems to have left no record of environmental thinking, much less any idea of carbon dioxide’s heat-holding properties. Several hundred people died at his funeral (most were trampled). The official figure was 109, an artificial number; the real number was probably in the thousands. After Stalin, Russia, aside for a few of Stalin’s henchmen, was ready for a more genial head of state. One did arise, Nikita Khrushchev, who was a rotund 5-foot-­ three, and no teddy bear, but he was capable of cracking a wide smile and turning heads (or raising a shoe) at international meetings. Khrushchev, who served a First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He died September 11, 1971, at the age of 77.

3.7 The Empire Off the Rails The Soviet imperial state began to go off the rails about 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell. By the end of World War II, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had an extensive part of Asia and Europe on lockdown, reaching into northeastern Germany, through the Baltic States to the north, Poland, Czechoslovakia Hungary, Romania, and parts of Yugoslavia, plus the steppes of the Southern USSR, and a number of smaller countries bordering the Black Sea. For all of their Marxian bluster about the liberty of working people (“You have nothing to lose but your chains!” shouted Marx). This empire denied basic freedoms of national Independence to the largest single, assemblage of peoples on Earth except, perhaps, the British empire. The USSR had to build walls to keep its people in retaining a thick barrier of vassal states. About 1990, the walls began to crumble as the USSR cracked apart and lost about a quarter of its surface area and a large proportion of its population outside of its western core around Moscow. Environmental pollution played a significant part in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in both Europe and Asia, as pollution from

3.8  “Be Not Afraid”

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large, monumentally inefficient manufacturing plants and coal-fired power-­ generating facilities (mentioned above) marred landscapes across Siberia. Rising temperatures allowed toxic chemicals to grow in lakes across many regions, as fish and many water creatures died in large numbers. During the 1970s, food was often very short in Russia, in such short supply that people were encouraged to drink Vodka, which was always available. Purchases of alcohol were taxed, which filled state coffers before massive amounts of oil were found on Russian territory. At times, with little to eat, the government took the easy route between a drunken populace and organized food riots by sober, hungry people (Figes, 2022, 256–257).

3.8 “Be Not Afraid” After the early 1990s, a period of semi-democratic chaos swept Russia, at a time when which Putin was honing his nationalistic, repressive political doctrines within the KGB. Russia’s line of existential influence ran down the eastern edge of Poland, which had been liberated from the crumbling Soviet mega-state by a Polish pope (in a nation that is 95 per cent Catholic) who joked about Stalin’s ridicule (“How many tanks does the Pope have?”) by engaging a huge gathering, hundreds of thousands of Poles, who supplied their answer: “None!” John Paul had concluded his speech with three words: “Be not afraid!” The crowd roared in affirmation. The fact that this rally could assemble without the authorities’ intervention was evidence that John Paul had already pulled a Vatican coup. In a matter of weeks, Russian influence in Poland was past tense. In East Berlin, the Berlin Wall crumbled and the roughly north-south ambit of Russia’s de facto border had receded eastward several hundred miles. I remembered passing through the Brandenburg Gate in 1974, through barbed wire, over a stagnant river from which East German police were hauling corpses of Germans (and others) who had tried to jump the Wall, and failed, as they became target practice for guards. Fifteen years later, one (me, in this case) could ride a bicycle along Poland’s eastern border and look into Ukraine. “It’s over there!” across rolling hills eastward that reminded me of Iowa, my escort shouted to me. And when Ukraine began to assert a nationalistic animus that was both new very old, a state leaning toward NATO and the European Union, Putin, now a neo-tsar (at least in his own mind) was watching the line of “the West” crawl up his spine. Thus, what seemed to Western Europe and the United States like nationalistic normality appeared to Putin as a horrid repudiation of history as interpreted by him and others, of a border going in the wrong direction. Thus, Putin’s repeated theme that the Ukrainians were invading Russia when it was Russia that had crossed the border east to west. This line of thought seemed to Americans so ass-backward that a massive wave of compassion swept the United States and the rest of NATO in favor of Ukraine. The United States, of course, is a nation hardly 250 years old that had spread across the continent of North America in a manner not unlike that of the Russians across

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Siberia, spreading environmental pollution in a manner not so much different from the United States’ “winning of the West.” Gold, silver, and uranium mining scarred the US West, producing despoliation of mountains and streams across the West, scarring fish runs along its West Coast. As in the newly conquered American West, indigenous peoples of Siberia were pushed eastward, sequestered in reservations (gulags) and at times massacred. By 1987 and 1988, coordinated pressure rose from Russians, even in the ruling classes, to abolish the one-party state, which was being held responsible for many of Russia’s social and economic problems, in what would have been the country’s largest political change since the Revolution of 1917. Proposals ranged from a United States-style federal system to out-and-out independence for the Soviet socialist republics which wanted it. The Baltic states called for independence. Parts of Western Ukraine and Moldova also opted for independence before the central government in Moscow cracked down. Gorbachev’s liberal regime was removed in favor of Putin’s, and liberalizing changes swiftly ended. Russia’s second aborning revolution had been squashed.

3.9 Ukraine as Russian Colony Even given the contradictions of US history, the line of repressive, nationalistic thinking used so often by the Russians to justify an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that seemed so Orwellian to Western Europe and the United States: (“NATO is coming to get us”?) emerged from a long train of Russian history. In 882, for example, Rus warriors captured Kiev, and the grand prince Vladimir forcibly transported entire Slav communities from the northern forests to areas around it (Figes, 2022, 22–24). The first mentions of Moscow, a small village, at that time appear in the historical record about 250 years later. By the mid-fifteenth century (1436 to 1533), the Russian state had expanded three times in size and population (Figes, 2022, 62). Influence spread both ways, however; “Tsar’s” root is “Caesar,” and some oligarchic royalty in the expanding Rus state called it the Third Roman Empire. The occupants of Kiev were called Kievan Rus, a trading center that was sacked by the Mongols during the early thirteenth century. No doubt Putin and his new oligarchs found Russia’s imperial history instructive. Riches and domination were in their blood. No Marxist, Putin: His net worth has been estimated at more than $200 billion as of roughly 2022. Unlike many in Europe, Canada, and the United States who interpret what Putin calls a “special” operation in Ukraine as an unprovoked act of aggression and terror perpetuated by Russian air power and ground forces, Putin asserts that it is the West that poses an existential threat to Russia. As Russia has reduced many apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets to rubble, the Russians have maintained that these actions and others (including assassination of civilians and looting of their homes) are “defensive” in nature.

3.10  A “War” or a “Special Operation”?

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Following the onset of the invasion during February 2022 (calling it a “war” is punishable with prison time in Russia), Putin and ancillary ministers in his government made several statements declaring that important NATO countries are preparing an assault on Russia, perhaps including nuclear weapons, to pry Ukraine from Russian influence. Putin has said several times that NATO “wants to eliminate Russia….They have but one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part—the Russian Federation.” If The United States and its allies defeat Russia, incised Putin, ethnic Russians may not survive as a distinct people” (Katell, 2002, A-7). Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said “for him [Putin] it’s all about protection, and he believes that the Russian world has been attacked from the West, and Ukrainians are a part of this Russian world” (Katell, 2023, A-7). While to many Americans such reasoning may seem Orwellian, it fits Putin’s train of thought and definition of truth. He asserts domination over a nation and people who mostly are fighting his army and air force for their lives, even as Russia’s de facto borders have been moving eastward over time. Even Ukraine, which was solidly under Russia’s influence for several centuries, applied for membership in NATO once the war that the Russians were not allowed to call a “war” began.

3.10 A “War” or a “Special Operation”? Examining Putin as a prototype tsar omits great differences and nuances in Russian history. The tsars were different from each other. Catherine II, for example, and Peter the Great were much different from Ivan the Terrible. Some leaders who held absolute power in this oligarchic state believed that the people could not develop enduring institutions without freedom to innovate, to disagree, and to criticize one another, as well as errant leadership. These were in the minority, but they did speak aloud, and were not always sent to prison for holding a blank sheet of paper on a public street, which was the depth to which public political life sometimes fell under Putin, who was becoming a parody of nationalism’s rule by absolute fear 1 year into the war in Ukraine. Even under the tsars, Russia sometimes possessed a strain of belief that it could not mature as a state unless room was made for self-government. It would not have that until serfdom ceased to be Russia’s major mode of labor relations. During the first few years of his reign, Tsar Alexander loosened some restrictions on censorship. He also ordered measures that brought some degree of power to Russia’s Supreme Court and its Senate, to act as a minor balance of powers. Alexander in 1809 also set in motion plans for a constitution based on Napoleon’s Code, with a national parliament. Within a few years, however, all of these grand plans were sacked because of internal tensions, religious and secular, within Russia’s ruling classes. When tsars were tempted to move Russia toward a European style of freedom, they were reminded that even a taste could carry its own perils. Catherine II, for

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example, was infatuated by the Enlightenment, to the point of writing numerous letters to Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others. Alexander loosened restrictions on censorship. Shortly after reform-minded tsars knocked on freedom’s door, Western Europe was consumed in heads-rolling revolutions in 1789 and 1848. The bloody, class-conscious revolution of 1848, with its invitation to all workers to unite (This war brought forth the Communist Manifesto and its “You have nothing to lose but your chains”) was, in Moscow, only a slight rumble of thunder on the horizon of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. “You were right in not wanting to be counted among the philosophes” Catherine wrote to Baron Friedrich Grimm, as the French Revolution erupted into the Jacobin lethal upheaval of 1794….[For] experience has shown that all of that leads to ruin; no matter what they say or do, the world will never cease to need authority. It is better to endure the tyranny of one man than the insanity of the multitude” (Jones, 2016, 293). In the meantime, Russia was seeking open ports on the Black Sea, establishing itself in places that will sound familiar to any observer of today’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 1783. The reward was an ice-free port, something that was very difficult to find in the world’s largest contiguous country. Ukraine, meanwhile, which was chafing under the rule of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declared its independence on January 22, 1918. A week and a half later, Ukraine signed a treaty with Germany that essentially made the former a protectorate of the later. Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Lithuania also sought German protection. Soviet troops withdrew from Ukraine, which was then occupied by about 500,000 Austrian and German troops who stripped Ukraine’s farms and towns bare looking for something to eat. Having looted everything they could get, the Austrians and Germans marched home and turned Ukraine into a forward base for the Red Army. By 1922, Ukrainians, probably hungry and baffled by the number of times different flags had waved over their country in head-­spinning succession, unwillingly found the Russians in charge again, with a new name: the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.

3.11 Putin: At War with a Ukraine That “Doesn’t Exist” The thought processes of Putin were not often overtly rational except, perhaps, in his conquest-obsessed mind: According to Vladimir Putin, Ukraine doesn’t exist. Before he started his murderous full-scale invasion, he repeatedly denied the country’s existence in pseudo-historical essays and speeches. He is just the latest in a long line of Kremlin rulers who have tried to deprive Ukrainians of their [sovereignty]. For a man so obsessed with history, he should have worked out that centuries of unsuccessful attempts to destroy the Ukrainian nation show that Ukraine very much exists (Khromeychuk, 2022).

3.12  Ukrainians Taste the Freedom of Independent Culture and Freedom

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The czars tried to stifle Ukrainian freedom of speech and self-expression generally by banning Ukrainian-language publications, shutting down Ukrainian cultural societies, and exiling or imprisoning cultural leaders. At least as importantly, they inhibited expression by keeping all but a few Ukrainians in poverty, so that they could not afford such things as books, other types of education, and other aids to artistic expression. The tsars barred Ukrainians from anything that would aid their social mobility. Nevertheless, Ukrainians fought back, wrote Olesya Khromeychuk in The New  York Times (2022). “This period was notable for efforts to forge Ukrainian identity. In the absence of an independent state, writers, poets and artists became the figures who shaped national identity, which was then deepened through consciousness-­raising community organizing. Some of the greatest examples of Ukrainian literature were written in this period, including the fiery poetry of Taras Shevchenko, whose line “Fight and you shall prevail” is recited as a mantra by Ukrainian civilians and troops as they fought the Russians, beginning in 2022.

3.12 Ukrainians Taste the Freedom of Independent Culture and Freedom Between the collapse of the Czars’ empire and the consolidation of the USSR’s repressive political apparatus, the Ukrainians tasted a sense of their own culture and freedom. At first, the Bolsheviks were forced to recognize Ukraine as a separate nation but later threatened to seize its territory. The Ukrainians maintained their independence into the 1920s, and again in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Against their desires, the Russians were forced to recognize Ukrainians’ earth-­ centered agricultural base in the context of national independence as a separate nation and not a mere deviation of the Russian people, as the czars and later the Russians (and later the Soviet Union) had asserted. A large part of Ukrainian independence involved respect of agriculture and respect for the earth in a cultural context. Ukrainian culture flourished in the 1920s. The Soviet policy of indigenization, encouraging the use of local languages, was a pragmatic step on the part of Moscow to better disseminate Soviet ideology to its multiethnic territories. Inadvertently, it facilitated the growth of local cultural expression that was socially challenging, aesthetically experimental and politically provocative. Ukraine’s unruly homegrown culture exposed the hypocrisy of the USSR, where all nations were equal but some were more equal than others,” wrote Khromeychuk (2022).

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3.13 Stalin’s Repression By the 1930s, however, the Stalin regime was trying in earnest to repress the Ukrainian nation and economic base. Elites were executed or sent to labor camps. Ukrainians were subjected to a deliberate attempt to destroy their nationhood. While the elites were exiled or executed and several million peasants and other poor people were deliberately starved through a program that had its own name (Holodomor) and bureaucratic structure, designed by Stalin, Ukrainians who demanded independence were ruthlessly repressed. Ukrainians who dared to demand autonomy were Russified and denied independent cultural expression. All the same—and because of the repression—a desire for independence remained. During the decades of Soviet rule, sometimes this urge manifested simply in keeping Ukrainian language and traditions in private use and at other times in open and organized struggle against the Soviet regime. In 1991, a week before the Soviet Union blinked out of existence (for a very short time), 92 percent of Ukrainian voters—just under 30 million people—supported a declaration of independence in a national referendum. Statehood, at long last, had again been restored. Since then, this supposedly nonhistorical nation has continued to defend its sovereignty against Russia’s authoritarianism. War-crime laden repression. In three decades, Ukrainians have mounted several large protest movements and revolutions, testament to citizens’ deep, and dogged civic consciousness. “This historical experience—of statelessness and struggle, repressive external rule and hard-won independence—has shaped Ukraine into the nation we see today: opposed to imperialism, united in the face of the enemy, and determined to protect its freedom. For the people of Ukraine, freedom is not some lofty ideal. It is imperative for survival,” wrote Khromeychuk. Ukraine’s ethnic complexity has become a national asset, wrote one national observer. “Ukraine has always been a melting pot of cultures, languages, and traditions. The result of that intermingling is the modern Ukrainian political nation, members of which speak Crimean Tatar, Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and many other languages in addition to Ukrainian. And as a viral meme from the start of the invasion showed, all of them can tell a Russian warship and its commander exactly where to go” in fluent Russian (Khromeychuk, 2022).

3.14 Ukraine: Putin’s Vietnam? By mid-2022, Ukraine was starting to look like Putin’s Vietnam, where the United States stationed as many as 550,000 troops between 1965 and 1975. On August 24, 2022, the Kremlin announced that 130,000 more troops had been committed to the “special” situation in Ukraine on top of 300,000 already committed. (The wildly unpopular draft was canceled 2 months later.) As with Vietnam, the “action” began with a small group of armed men under a flag with the stated intention that the

3.15  To “Recast” a War, “Resettle” Its Children

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commitment would be easy and short—take out Kyiv and roll home. Within a few weeks, the initial force had been routed, with more troops and weapons sent. The Kremlin’s forces advanced in the south, then stalled, as the Ukrainians adopted guerilla tactics and learned how to use weapons sent by the United States. As in Vietnam, the initial troop deployment (and many thereafter) was undertaken for intangible rewards, i.e., to stop communism from moving into South Vietnam, and then elsewhere. Vladimir Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine also had intangible benefits: Putin and other right-wing political forces in Russia’s desire to expand the Russian empire back to its extent under communism, or if one has political objections to that, back to the empire of the tsars.

3.15 To “Recast” a War, “Resettle” Its Children One way to rip out a nation’s sovereignty during a war is to kidnap (euphemism = “resettle”) its children. In areas of the Ukraine that Russia had occupied during the first year of the war, several thousand Ukrainian children were taken, often from institutions, and “resettled” with families in Russia, adopted, and given Russian citizenship. The official line in Russia was that the children were being rescued from an intolerable situation. The Russian rationale for snapping up Ukrainian children omitted such circumstances, asserting that the children were being saved by a beneficent Russian state. The children were being raised under a blanket of propaganda in which Russia was portrayed as a charitable savior. It was first and foremost a slick practice of nationalism under an aegis of international charity. Under international law, such “resettlement” is often defined as a war crime, depending on circumstances. It also may be defined as genocide. One ulterior motive in this case may be replacement of declining population in Russia. The policies’ goal is to “replace any childhood attachment to home [in Ukraine] with a love for Russia” (Bubola, 2022). Local authorities around Mariupol told similar stories of children who had survived the Russian assault in Ukraine ended up in nearby hospitals. However, one by one, the children vanished. “They simply took away all the children who were left without parents,” said one source. “We still do not know where these children are” said one distraught parent (Bubola, 2022). “The Russian government carefully choreographs the pipeline from the Donetsk region to Moscow,” wrote Bubola, “Now you are at home, in a circle of friends,” the Russian-imposed mayor of Donetsk told a group of boys from Mariupol. He shared a video of the moment on Telegram (Bubola, 2022). Russian officials in Donetsk invited reporters into group homes to witness children receiving cellphones, gifts, and clothes. State-run television airs the children’s arrival in Moscow by train. Putin instituted a streamlined process allowing the swift nationalization of Ukrainian children. The first group would become Russian citizens in July, officials announced.

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“I did not recognize those kids with whom we traveled in April [2022] on the train to their new life,” Ksenia Mishonova, the children’s rights commissioner for the Moscow region, said. “Now they are our little fellow citizens!” (Bubola, 2022). The “welcome mat” to Russia was rolled out even by Putin himself, according to Russian sources in a “a half-hour weekly class called “Conversations About Important Things” in which he “teaches children to be proud of Russia” (Bubola, 2022). Thus was the blanket of propaganda drawn over Ukraine children whose parents were being labeled fascists and terrorists, as Russian missiles bombarded their apartment blocks, schools, and much more to ashes. Similarly, Xi (of China) subjugated Tibetans and Uighurs in “re-education” camps by the hundreds of thousands, supposedly for their own good.

3.16 Destruction on a Staggering Scale Ukraine’s national identity was tested again and again in 2022. Returning to towns that had been brutally crushed during the late fall, Ukrainians found destruction on a staggering scale, vital services cut, and the prospect of a cold winter ahead. The profound scars left by the Russian invasion of Ukraine indicated that one larger nation compelled by raw ultranationalism, claiming a neighboring nation as its own without cause, where a tactic of the aggressor was to conflict pain on civilians aimed at making them suffer, to compel society-wide dispirited collapse. A few weeks later, however, the Ukrainians rose again in a fresh offensive. Putin’s army was seizing civilians and forcing them into the war with scant training, very little equipment that worked, not even with adequate food or combat boots (!). War in street shoes! The Russian riff raff broke into Ukrainian homes and shops, stealing whatever they could get. Outside, civilians were rounded up, imprisoned in their homes, then assaulted, sexually assaulted, and burned. Outside, random civilians were lined up, often in wooded areas, shot to death, and stripped of clothing, after which they were shoved into shallow graves. Overhead, missiles destroyed apartment houses, markets, schools, government offices, and shopping centers, among many other purely civilian sites. By late November, with winter setting in, the missiles and drone attacks became organized as raids on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure—electricity, natural gas, and water. Every murder of civilians, every attack on apartments, etc. were a war crime. The Ukrainians were taking photographs and notes. Putin was so determined to prove that Ukraine didn’t exist that he turned Russia into a worldwide pariah in an effort to destroy an elegantly beautiful nation into a smoking ruin of broken apartment blocks, schools, churches, hospitals, and shattered bodies, proving himself to have become one of the world’s most hideous of ultranationalists, all because a nation that he insisted didn’t exist had stood up to him with great cost in blood and ruined earth. The following word picture was written by Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, October 24, 2022.

3.17  Assassination of a Russian Propagandist

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KAMIANKA, Ukraine—little moved in the village of Kamianka, except for a cat bolting from under the rubble of a destroyed house and metal roofing banging in the wind.

Serhii, a livestock farmer, sat slumped beside the burned ruins of his home. “I came here in case I could find anything and to clear up a bit,” he said. “But there is nothing,” he said, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at the wreckage (Gall, 2022).

The scale of the destruction is staggering across hundreds of towns and villages recently vacated by Russian troops in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine. The few residents who have traveled back into the war zone to check on their property, like Serhii and his wife, Iryna, often stand speechless with dismay before the devastation.

In Kamianka, the retreating Russians pillaged everything on their way out. One thing they did not take, or bury, were bodies of the Ukrainian dead, which laid strewn across the town’s roads. This was typical throughout Ukraine. The retreating Russian troops’ behavior was worse than that of wild, ravaging animals.

3.17 Assassination of a Russian Propagandist Hundreds of people, including lawmakers, writers and cultural leaders, attended a televised memorial service in Moscow for Daria Dugina, a right-wing commentator who was killed in a car bombing August 29, 2020, provoking many Russian war hawks to call for vengeance and vowing that Russia would win the war in Ukraine. At the main television center in Moscow, people laid flowers near her coffin and expressed condolences to her father, Aleksandr Dugin—a political theorist, ultranationalist, and fervent supporter of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, who has long called for Moscow to adopt an expansionist foreign policy—and her mother, Natalia Melentieva” (Nechepurenko, 2022). For her funeral, and in observance of her work, a TV studio converted into a memorial hall, Ms. Dugina’s parents sat beside the coffin, underneath a large black-­ and-­white photo of their 29-year-old daughter, sometimes joined by her friends and associates. Several spoke into a microphone, insisting that Ms. Dugina’s death would strengthen Russia’s resolve to defeat the rebellious Ukrainians (Nechepurenko, 2022).

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Russian authorities accused the Ukrainian special services of ordering and planning Ms. Dugina’s killing on a highway near a wealthy district outside Moscow. Ukrainian officials have denied the claim, as a top official accused Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, of carrying out the bombing. Mr. Dugin was among the first to speak, having said that his daughter had “died in front of his eyes.” He did not explain further, but there were reports in Russian media outlets that he had been traveling in a separate car behind Ms. Dugina. “Her death could only be justified by the highest achievement—by victory,” he said, bursting into tears. “She lived in the name of victory and died in its name, in the name of our Russian victory” (Nechepurenko, 2022). A New York Times report indicated the level of Russian anger over the assassination: “Sergei Mironov, a Russian lawmaker and leader of the Just Russia party, accused President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine of ordering the killing and said his government must be deposed by Russia. Leonid Slutsky, a State Duma deputy, said that political forces in Russia must unite behind President Vladimir V. Putin: ‘one country, one president, one victory.’ Other Russian officials read letters, including from Mr. Putin, who awarded Ms. Dugina posthumously with Russia’s Order of Courage, given to Russians for acts of courage and valor. Patriarch Kirill I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, also sent condolence statements (Nechepurenko, 2022). Often, the exercise of nationalism involves one state or religion’s desire to annex or occupy another’s land and expropriate its natural resources. This impetus is as old as human societies themselves. At times, one state may lay claim to land and resources that it didn’t even know existed, as when Columbus “discovered” a hemisphere’s worth of land that was not even (yet) on its accurate maps. Once the land’s existence had been confirmed, the “discoverers” went about assembling reasons for placing it under their jurisdiction, having mainly to do with the requirements of their God, about which the indigenous people knew nothing. Soon, as has been the case with Putin’s unbidden invasion of Ukraine, perhaps 100 million indigenous peoples on two continents named after an Italian mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), also suffered acquaintance with exploring Europeans with conquest on their minds. Such attention did not spare roughly 90 per cent of the continents’ human beings from dying, mainly from Europeans’ imported diseases. America’s “discovery,” often involved searches for, or on behalf of, the Europeans’ infamous triad: God, gold, and glory. In the case of God, the Western Europe’s religious doctrines required that Native peoples’ “souls,” be placed under the superintendency of the arrivals’ Roman Catholic Church. The indigenous peoples were granted no choice in the matter. Thus, the exercise of nationalism often involved an exercise of religious or military force upon peoples who didn’t realize what was coming and, because of an imbalance of power exercised by superior (that is, deadlier) weapons, had no choice. Until slavery was outlawed, the peoples on the receiving end of this form of nationalism found their lives disrupted forever, without permission, by invaders who told them that this change was taking place for their own benefit, whether the peoples whose lands and souls were being seized agreed or not. Usually, they didn’t.

3.18  Ukrainians Tortured at Russian “Filtration” Points?

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Columbus’ assumed right to “own” the lands and souls of indigenous peoples on a continent that he hadn’t known anything except myth shared something with the Russians’ invasion of a country that Putin & Co. argued did not exist. Ultranationalism to some degree stakes its claims to legitimacy on contradictory reasoning that conquest demands assumed inferiority—or even the nonexistence—of its target. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine entered the beginning of its second year in early February 2023, the Russians often seemed irritated at the Ukrainians’ refusal to disappear quickly enough to follow Putin’s demand that they cease to exist as an independent political, economic, and cultural entity, a battle that had suffused their relationship for several centuries. According to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s vaguely defined nationalistic right to the geographic territory controlled by Russia’s imperial empire at its height. This would include much of Eastern Europe from Finland through the Baltic states, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and Romania, what was once Yugoslavia, a group of smaller and much of the southern Russian states north of Turkey, most of which declared independence after the Soviet Union (USSR) collapsed. Ukraine became a test case for Russia. In this case, a conflict over territory and claims of historical validity. Also was waged over one of the world’s foremost producers of exported grain. In a hungry world in which population has been increasing, the seizure of food-producing territory involved a valuable asset, farmland and food. The intangible—an imaginary claim to another nation’s land—becomes tangible. The staging of a war crime at a Ukrainian nuclear plant could cause not only war crimes of a monumental size and scope against human beings but also crimes against the environment. For most of this war, Russian troops have occupied Europe’s largest and most productive nuclear power plant, raising fears elsewhere that they may hit it with explosives and cause an “accident” that could spread radiation across Western Europe, effectively beginning World War III. What becomes of this plant could tell the world whether Putin is merely a land-hungry despot or a truly insane war criminal. Much of what Russia has been doing (such as massive bombing of civilian targets) meets the standards of war crimes. Exploding a nuclear plant would raise the specter of mass murder by radiation poisoning. Thus far, by mid-2023, this outcome remained a matter of speculation.

3.18 Ukrainians Tortured at Russian “Filtration” Points? As the war continued, the United States said at a United Nations Security Council meeting August 8, 2022, it had evidence that, “hundreds of thousands” of Ukrainian citizens were “interrogated, detained and forcibly deported to Russia in ‘a series of horrors’ overseen by officials from Russia’s presidency” (Lederer, 2022). Russia called the disclosures “fantasy.” The Ukrainians were being moved to Russia forcibly through several “filtration points” where they were subject to “interrogations, data collection and strip searches, and tortured, then moved to a Russian detention

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center, never to be seen again (Lederer, 2022). This treatment was meted out to Ukrainians whose names had been supplied by the Kremlin as people who were deemed to be uncooperative by other means. US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that “estimates from a variety of sources, including the Russian government, indicate that Russian authorities have detained, interrogated, and forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians. “These operations aim to identify individuals Russia deems insufficiently compliant or compatible to its control,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “And there is mounting and credible evidence that those considered threatening to Russian control because of perceived pro-Ukrainian leanings are ‘disappeared’ or further detained” (Lederer, 2022). Thousands of children have been subject to filtration, “some separated from their families and taken from orphanages before being put up for adoption in Russia.” According to US information, “more than 1,800 children were transferred from Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine to Russia” just in July, she said (Lederer, 2022). Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that more than 3.7 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 children, had gone to Russia or areas under its control but that they “aren’t being kept in prisons” (Lederer, 2022). “They are living freely and voluntarily in Russia, and nobody is preventing them from moving or preventing them leaving the country,” he said (Lederer, 2022).

3.19 Russia’s Sea of Pollution The premier Marxian ideological guides to communism, composed in the nineteenth century, contain no advice on environmental preservation, which was fundamentally in line with capitalistic theory and practice at the same time. The world was perceived as an endless source of natural resources that could be obtained and used at minimal cost to producers. To put it metaphorically, nature has been usually regarded as mother lode instead of Mother Earth. In Russia, Mother Russia is a favored characterization over Mother Earth as well. Choices in spoken languages carry over into ecological choices as well. For many years, Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and largest body of fresh water, was used mainly as a dump for electrical generation waste until international pressure from many of the same groups that had been banned in Russia forced a moderate degree of cleanup after the year 2000. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage site, hosts about 1500 indigenous species of flora and fauna, and these are threatened by polluted runoff and air pollution from a cellulose production plant on one of Baikal’s major tributaries, as well as a coal-fired power plant on another. Lake Baikal’s cleanup has been treated as a showpiece, but not as a guide for many other polluted bodies of water, which remained in the same debased condition that had been evident since the fall of communism as a guiding ideology after 1990. Long after that, most Russian power plants had been left to age, lacking up-to-date

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pollution-control technology. At that time, most of Russia’s decision-makers regarded pollution as a necessary price for industrialization. Many of the issues have been attributed to policies that were made during the early Soviet Union, when many officials felt that pollution control “was an unnecessary hindrance [for] economic development and industrialization, and, even though numerous attempts were made by the Soviet government to alleviate the situation in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the problems were not completely solved” (Conley & Newlin, 2021). Regarding air pollution, the main sources have been increasing usage of cars and trucks in urban areas. By the 1990s, 40 percent of Russia’s territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste. According to Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, Russia in 2004 was warming 2.5 times faster than the rest of the globe. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Volgograd, as well as other major industrial and population centers, have the highest concentrations of air pollution. Overall, the air of more than 200 cities in Russia exceed pollution limits, and this is increasing as more vehicles appear on the roads” (“Russia: Environmental Issues”, 2004).

When industrial production declined, emissions of air pollutants from those sources also declined, although the [number] of motor vehicles on the roads skyrocketed. Currently, vehicle emissions exceed industry emissions in most Russian cities. Air pollution is attributed to 17% of childhood and 10% of adult diseases, as well as 41% of respiratory and 16% of endocrine diseases. Overall, about 80 per cent of Russia’s air pollution comes from automobiles, including trucks. Water pollution is a serious problem in Russia, 75% of surface water, and 50% of all water in Russia is now polluted. Less than half of Russia’s population has access to safe drinking water.

Toward the end of the Soviet era, the government increasingly recognized the need to take care of the spawning sites and habitats of fish, in order to return fish catches to what they had been. This has caused health issues in many cities as well as in the countryside, as only 8% of wastewater is fully treated before being returned to waterways. Obsolete and inefficient water treatment facilities, as well as a lack of funding, have caused heavy pollution and have also resulted in waterborne disease spread, such as an outbreak of cholera spread by the Moskva River in 1995. Industrial and chemical waste is often dumped into waterways, including hydrogen sulfide, which has been linked to the large-scale death of fish in the Black and Caspian seas. Lake Baikal was previously a target of environmental pollution from paper plants, but cleanup efforts since then have greatly reduced the ecological strain on the lake.

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Conley and Newlin commented that, on the nature of air and water pollution in Russia: Some of the most noxious of dumping in Russia involves nuclear waste such as the area around Lake Karachay. Other sites of military nuclear waste dumping into the Sea of Japan before 1993. Testing of nuclear weapons, including production, also has ruined environmental sites, including the Mayak atomic weapons production plant near Chelyabinsk. Single-source pollution is a major contributor to Russia’s air pollution problems. Most power plants in Russia are aging and lack modern pollution control equipment, resulting in large amounts of toxic emissions and waste. Several major cities are threatened by these problems, as are delicate ecosystems. Radioactive contamination has damaged several regions in Russia. Lake Karachay, adjacent to the Mayak complex in Chelyabinsk, is one such example of the nuclear industry’s careless past and is now considered to be one of the most polluted places on Earth. Lake Karachay has been reported to contain 120 million curies of radioactive waste, including seven times the amount of strontium-90 and cesium-137 that was released in the April 1986 explosion of the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The area surrounding the Mayak complex suffers from radioactive pollutants from over 50 years of plutonium production, processing, and storage.

3.20 Ultranationalism: Dare Not Call It Corruption The wages of an ultranationalist need not impoverish a massive ego. There’s no reason in the Russian order of thought for a “man of the people” to have the money of a plebian. Thus, ultranationalism can make a politically adroit person very well off, even he or she says it’s for the good of “the people.” We have already mentioned the net worth of Putin in a range, because he does not release real figures as most US presidents do, with the singular exception (in recent years) of Donald J.  Trump. Although we have no index of Putin’s net worth, it is probably quite a bit higher today than it was when the Russian president was a functionary at the KGB. After he ascended to the peak of Russian political power in the Kremlin, Putin swiftly begin moving public life in Russia back to the times of Stalin, after a few years of relative liberalization. One of Putin’s first moves was to put a sock in the mouths of two men named Gusinsky and Berezky, who owned television stations that had been critical of Putin’s war in Chechnya. These two men and others had earned the popular title “oligarch” by enriching themselves like a robber-baron capitalist in America—or in Russia until Putin took charge, which meant that there was a new sheriff in town, one man who could carry the titles of autocrat and oligarch at the same time. Other Russians who tried this trick could be hauled away in handcuffs, charged with being an “enemy of the people,” called a filthy capitalist, and sent to one many labor camps, of which the gulags

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were only the best known, thanks to international media exposure. In other words, with apologies to George Orwell, some animals really are more equal than others. Putin also was consolidating a bureaucratic word for killing enemies who might be caught in the act of exercising a smidgen of political power without da capo’s assent. The legislative Duma, for example, was complexly shorn of any power to check the authoritarian nature of Putin’s power. It still met, but only to do what Putin had requested, and enshrine it with a rubber stamp. Something else that became legally forbidden in 2014 was implicit criticism of the Soviet Union’s role in the “Great Patriotic War” (World War II), including Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler in the partition of Poland that officially started the war. In addition, any information that was “disrespectful of society” became illegal. Several journalists and historians were prosecuted under this law, which carried a penalty of up to 5 years in prison, just enough to let a defendant know who is boss. Such measures, and many others, enjoyed widespread popular support in Russia with viewers of TV talk shows, 91 per cent of whom believed that the Stalin’s pact with Hitler had been necessary. More than 90 per cent believed that Gorbachev’s reforms pre-Putin had been a catastrophe (Figes, 2022, 282). A majority of Russians also expressed disagreement, or even fear, of NATO’s expansion eastward after World War II.  A country whose influence had reached westward of Berlin, for example, found its political borders backed up to the eastern reaches of Ukraine, a few hundred miles from Moscow, Russia’s political heartland. In the Russian calculus, the invasion of Ukraine had become utterly necessary to keep NATO from spilling into territories that had been Russian since the beginning of Russia’s political memory (Ukraine requested entry into NATO during 2023). Many countries (Latvia to Poland to Romania) already had memberships in NATO, with Ukraine’s pending as of 2023. All of these countries and more had long been defined as part of “Russia’s World” (Russkii mir), which Putin had pledged to protect to the extent of the Soviet Union’s boundaries before World War II. Putin adamantly defined Ukraine as part of this world, thus Ukraine’s role as a major flashpoint of international conflict. Putin saw Ukraine as part of “Greater Russia” since the nearly millennium-old time of the Kievan Rus. Any role for NATO (“Nazis” to Putin) was regarded as an existential threat to Russia. Lech Walesa, a hero of the Polish resistance to Russia, called the war in Ukraine “an important historic opportunity to cage the bear” (Sarotte, 2022, 184). Putin warned large domestic audiences on several occasions that the United States and NATO were establishing forward bases near Kharkiv, Ukraine, from which nuclear missiles could reach Moscow in less than half an hour.

3.21 Trump: Yes, Rich, but Not in Putin’s League Donald Trump’s net worth of roughly $3 billion makes him roughly the 1000th richest person on Earth, or about a fly on a lizard’s rear end compared to Putin, whose net worth as of October 2022 equaled about $150 to $200 billion. The problem, for Trump, was that as 4 years as president of the United States, a gig that he had

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entered in January 2017 with about $4.5 billion was shrinking at about $1.5 billion a year, while he was engaged in electoral combat. He’s just not much of a money manager. Two more years of bleeding cash at that rate, and he might have been shining shoes on Fifth Avenue in New York City (by 2020, with his days in the Oval Office numbered, his net worth had shrunk to $2.1 billion). Putin, as the only person remotely expected to win, has had campaign expenses that are very, very small compared to Trump’s. More than 14  months after leaving office, while still contesting results of the 2020 election (and having lost about 60 legal challenges to the results), Trump saw his net worth rise to about $3 billion, according to numbers fromForbes (Alexander, 2022). What accounted for the increase in Trump’s wealth? According to Forbes, part of it was the launch of Truth Social, the social media company being cast as a conservative alternative to Twitter. WroteForbes’Dan Alexander: Donald Trump, master of reinvention, has a new title: tech entrepreneur. It’s a stretch for the 75-year-old who doesn’t even use email, preferring instead to scrawl notes in marker. But he doesn’t mind jumping into ventures in which he has little previous experience [N.B. such as national politics]— and this gig should prove far more lucrative than the presidency. In fact, it has already boosted his net worth by $430 million” (Alexander, 2022).

Trump has spent much of his life—and his presidency—exaggerating his wealth. In a “Summary of Net Worth as of June 30, 2014” that Trump released when he announced his presidential bid in 2015, Trump claimed to be worth $8.7 billion. “I’m really rich,” Trump said at his campaign announcement that year. “I have total net worth of $8.73 billion. I’m not doing that to brag. I’m doing that to show that’s the kind of thinking our country needs” (Alexander, 2020). A month after that initial assessment, the Trump campaign put out a press release touting that his net worth had already risen substantially. “Real estate values in New York City, San Francisco, Miami and many other places where he owns property have gone up considerably during this period of time,” asserted the release. “His debt is a very small percentage of value, and at very low interest rates. As of this date, Mr. Trump’s net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS” (The ALL CAPS were in the original release because, well, it’s Trump.) (Alexander, 2020). Trump also spent his presidency bemoaning the fact that being president was costing him money. It was one of very few times in his life when Trump was actually telling the truth, whether he knew it or not. “I said to one of my friends, a very wealthy friend, I said, ‘You know, I’ll bet you it cost me $2 or 3 billion and it’s worth every penny of it,’” Trump told Fox News in 2018. “I don’t need the money

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and it’s worth every penny because I’m doing so much for the country” (Alexander, 2020). According to Cable News Network, April 4, 2022, “Pinpointing Trump’s exact wealth is extremely difficult due, in large part, to the fact that he refused to release any of his tax returns either while he was running for president or during his four years in office. Trump insisted that tax returns did a poor job of cataloging a person’s wealth, which is, um, not true, unless your numbers have been massively massaged” (Cillizza, 2022).

3.22 Ultranationalism: A Smothering Conformity Ultranationalism may be an act of casting a large population in in one’s own image, such as in the present-day Peoples Republic of China. The ultimate ultranationalist leaves little room for individuality. Modern digital technology makes this act of snuffing out difference so much easier. China’s maximum leader, Xi Jinping, has inserted himself into every corner of Chinese life, leaving no room for anointed successors, or even marginal dissent. Suffice to say that China permits the least possible criticism of internal dissent. That is, of course, the ultimate state of affairs for the massive ego of an ultra-nationalist. If enough people get angry enough, holes appear in this smothering blanket, as in China late in 2022, when protests against COVID lockdowns turned, at least for a time, into broader dissidence over freedom of expression. The protests lasted for a few days, before armies of police smothered the nonconformists into the usual silence enforced on errant noncompliance. In 10 years of ruling China [as of 2022], Xi Jinping has expunged political rivals, replacing them with allies. He has wiped out civil society, giving citizens no recourse for help but his government. He has muzzled dissent, saturating public conversation with propaganda about his greatness. Now, having secured a precedent-defying third term, Mr. Xi is poised to push his vision of a swaggering, nationalist China even further, with himself at the center (Kaufman, 2022).

The ultranationalistic autocrat savors enforced conformity to a degree that individual expression is squeezed into smaller and smaller boxes. “His [Xi’s] consolidation of power is splashed across the front pages of the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece. At the end of every party congress for the past 20 years, the paper has exhibited photos of the maximum leader alongside other high-ranking officials, signaling a model of collective leadership. “But that tradition ended at the last party congress, with Mr. Xi’s face filling almost the entire page,” wrote Chang et  al. in The New  York Times (2022). This year’s congress [2022] cemented his control even further. Mr. Xi is now positioned to be China’s most

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powerful leader since Mao Zedong, whose nearly unfettered authority allowed him to lead China into years of famine and bloodshed. As a result, Mr. Xi’s reach into everyday Chinese life is almost certain to grow even more—in a country where he is already seemingly everywhere.” The old communist dictat of consensus has vanished in today’s China. Xi Jinping’s thoughts have become the Biggest Brother in all of human history, fact or fiction. “One of Mr. Xi’s central messages is that he alone has the ability to lead China to glory,” wrote Chang et al. He has framed his policies such as “zero Covid”—the attempt to wipe out coronavirus infections with lockdowns and mass testing—and an aggressive posture toward Taiwan. That means that, even as some of those policies hurt the economy, [they] stoke public discontent and raise geopolitical tensions, “to question them is to question him—increasingly unthinkable in today’s China” (Chang et al., 2022). It becomes ultranationalist at peak potency when the world model of national leadership has swung toward that pole and away from a world in which a large number of people may be permitted to negotiate a human future. Even accounts of the past (in this case, the Museum of the Communist Party of China) project the image and wishes of the Maximum Leader, whose hold on an ultranationalistic state is expected to last for his lifetime, and in official memory, long after that. Xi has been massaging history so that his image will subsume China as close to forever as he and supporters of his memory can stretch it. Even accounts of the party’s history now revolve around Mr. Xi, as if its evolution was all building inexorably toward his leadership which opened last year [2020–2021] in Beijing. The museum is ostensibly dedicated to the party’s 100-year history. But almost an entire floor of the three-story exhibition space is about Mr. Xi. The museum’s closing display is a paean to Mr. Xi’s vision for China. The center photo evokes a comparison to Mao, with Mr. Xi wearing a Mao suit. [emphasis added]….The museum seems designed to reinforce the cult of personality around Mr. Xi and suggests that his agenda has the backing of history. His quotations are plastered on the walls throughout the exhibitions—even those about events decades before his birth, such as anti-imperialist student protests in 1919—as if only he can explain and validate these key moments in party history (Yuan, 2022).

In nearly every public space (walls, malls, and other public places), an observer cannot turn a cheek without meeting the smiling face of Xi as “the core” of all that is approvable and allowable in today’s China. And so Big Xi watches everyone, everywhere, for any reason, through many millions of cell phones, mounted on light standards, peering through windows, millions of eyes peering into everyone’s moves. Even the purchase of a meal from a street vendor may be monitored. The watchers know when you were there, what you ordered, and how much you paid, at every stop” (Chang et al., 2022). This description continues: “Around the country,

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slogans adorn malls and bridges proclaiming the centrality of Mr. Xi. Many refer to him as ‘the core,’ a phrase that propaganda officials have coined to describe both Mr. Xi himself and his political ideas. Because of the length of the phrase ‘with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core,’ some banners stretch across entire overpasses” (Chang et al., 2022). “With Comrade Xi Jinping as the core Unite more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. Take practical actions to welcome the victory of the Party’s 20th National Congress” With Comrade Xi Jinping as ‘the core’” (Chang et al., 2022) The description of Mr. Xi as “the core” has been around for several years. However, its omnipresence glows through with its increasing brightness and intensity. At the closing ceremony of the 2022 Congress, delegates voted without dissent to require upholding “Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position” as an “obligation of all party members” (Chang et al., 2022)—not only party members, but children as well, into whose textbooks have crept a large dose of “Xi Jinping Thought.” Xi’s “thought” also was inscribed into the Communist Party’s Constitution in 2017, so its status was further reinforced at the Congress, through a resolution, something that would seem very unusual (if not legally forbidden) in the United States. In China, however, the Constitution is more a vessel of indoctrination rather than a design for the institutions of government. Thus, the molding of the Constitution by a Party Congress is taken to be appropriate as an extension of Xi Jinping Thought. The emphasis on lavish, highly visible homages to Mr. Xi has created pressure for local governments, schools, and other institutions to demonstrate their loyalty. Homages to Mr. Xi also came from several groups that do not usually combine to pledge their fealty to a single person, such as: Zoo Keepers Monks Prisoners Doctors and Nurses Uyghur Students Patients Firefighters Taoist Priests Kindergarten Teachers Mongolian Nomads Factory Workers Christians Even as Mr. Xi constructed his own state of personal devotion as a standard of state policy, certain subjects were avoided, such as evaluations of the Cultural Revolution, which can go too far in a country still scarred by the original Cultural

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Revolution, which was a generally violent period of violence, destruction of families, and useless fanaticism used by Mao to bolster his own power. Still, even in Mr. Xi’s smothering embrace, large social and political movements are heard and allowed some space in public places—that is, until the police smother them. For example, very large demonstrations developed in 2022 against “zero COVID” policies that locked millions of people into their apartments for months at a time. The demonstrations were broken up by police, but the policy was revised, even as the number of people with the disease rose sharply. Similar changes followed large demonstrations against environmental problems that had left China with some of the world’s worst air and water pollution. The poisoning of some rivers had become a national disgrace; dead pigs were found floating in some of the nation’s largest rivers. Dirty air was partially cleaned up as well, at least so that Beijing did not have the worst in the world. New Delhi and the Ganges River, in India, had assumed that title. The ban on artifacts from the Cultural Revolution also had holes. Some people reprinted Mao’s “Little Red Book,” which carried his thoughts, much as Xi had distributed his own pocket-sized nostrums three generations later. Photos of villagers, students, hotel chefs and government workers poring over copies of the Little Red Book circulated in some state media outlets. For a time, Xi’s thoughts were advertised as “a treasure in the palm of your hand,” (according to one government government website (Chang et al., 2022). Soon, references to The Little Red Book became very scarce.

3.23 A Growing Sense of Nationality: Military Annexation and a Domestic Boom The Earth’s most muscular case of nationalistic territorial expansionism in the early twenty-first century has been China, which has annexed huge amounts of territory during that last 70 years that it claims as its own. Beginning with Tibet about 1950, the Chinese have annexed, continued its expansion with the Uyghurs and Xinxiang in the twenty-first century, as well as Hong Kong at about the same time. By 2020, the Chinese were reigniting a long-simmering controversy over nationality with Taiwan. Xi Jinping, supreme leader of what is now the second largest nation-state in the world, has told younger generations that China “can finally look at the world as an equal. ‘It’s no longer as backward,’ he said in 2021. ‘The East is rising, and the West is declining,’ he declared, at a time when the United States and other Western countries seemed mired in high COVID infection rates, racial tensions and other problems” (Yuan, 2022). Xi’s “confidence doctrine” has “told China’s 1.4 billion people to be proud of its culture, its governance system and its future as a great power” (Yuan, 2022). In less than 30 years, China has emerged from an impoverished country struggling with

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relict forms of communism to a hybrid capitalistic/socialist surveillance state that exports more of its production to the world than any other country. China constantly harasses Taiwan with air and sea drills around the island. China’s leadership often regards the United States as a crumbling, disoriented former empire, “backward, shabby and underwhelming” (Yuan, 2022), confusing the usual rough and tumble of US politics as systematic breakdown. China also ignores US leadership in many technological fields, popular culture, etc. Chinese visitors also commented on chronic everyday shortcomings in the United States that are unusual for such a powerful country whose sense of nationality has propelled it around the world: Some of them refused to take the New York subway system, saying it was dirty, smelly and full of service disruptions. They were appalled by the lack of public transportation in Los Angeles and the poor highway conditions in Silicon Valley. They didn’t understand why wealthy San Francisco was plagued with homelessness. They were greatly disturbed by gun violence and the failure of laws to control it. Most of those people weren’t nationalists. They were educated elites who grew up in poverty, benefited from China’s opening up and had seen the United States as an ideal. The United States awed and disappointed them at the same time.

But for many other Chinese, especially younger ones, the idea of a rising East and a declining West is an accepted fact…. the United States, is increasingly portrayed as evil or in decline….News programs and social media are filled with such dogma, and political science classes, at the urging of Mr. Xi, are teaching it (Yuan, 2022).

“For China, the danger of drinking its own propaganda Kool-Aid is that it stops looking at its own problems while exaggerating America’s weaknesses,” commented Liu Yuan in The New York Times (2022): “When people stop queuing up for visas in front of the U.S.  Consulates,” said Liu, “then the U.S. is in decline” (Yuan, 2022).

3.24 Radical Right Nationalism and Incipient Fascism in the United States Most of us have heard the old saying: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Money, in huge amounts, directed at Republican issues and candidates also could become the mother’s milk of incipient fascism. Here is a tale of plans to

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self-­righteously break the back of the long-used assumption that the United States is a “liberal democracy.” As with Donald Trump and much of his “base,” even the word “liberal” on its face is often regarded as a detested slur and a curse to be used not only for political opponents, who are regarded as by Trump’s “base” as enemies. A slur and as the target of a gigantic fund-raising effort meant to strangle what’s “left” of democracy in the United States. There’s nothing illegal in the United States about hijacking language in the service of political purposes. It’s all legal as the rules of electoral politics are now written in the United States, and its sponsors are crafty, in that they steer clear of some of Trumpism’s more brutal edges. Similar efforts are underway in European nations such as Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Poland. Each has taken its own road toward a right-wing autocracy. In the United States, one of the least well-known but very important engineers of this political movement has a name that very few non-right-­ wing fundraisers will recognize: Leonard Leo, whom US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has called the third-most important man in the world (McGreal, 2022). When he made this remark, Justice Thomas did not name the other two most important men. Among those who know him, Leo is one of several people whom, along with Trump, helped lay the road to a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, and a rightward movement in the country’s legal arbiters at the federal level as a whole. Now, as a headline in The New  York Times put it in October 2022: “Leonard Leo pushed the Courts right[ward]. After leading efforts to put conservatives on the bench, the activist has quietly built a sprawling network and raised huge sums of money to challenge liberal values. Now he’s aiming at American society” (Vogel, 2020). The strategy is not complex: Replace judges with amenable individuals, and the law will change. Change the law, and enforceable behavior will change. Behavior will change, and society will change with it, and liberal democracy will die.

3.25 Massaging the Political Process with Quiet but Plentiful Money It’s a simple, but long-term strategy. Occasional backpedaling will occur, such as the election of Joe Biden as US president, with a razor-thin majority in Congress or the Senate, but it will be squashed with adroitly placed propaganda. Because our political society abhors the word “propaganda, let’s call it “advertising,” an acceptedly capitalistic substitute. Soon the language itself will change, word by word, a strategy that, as “Newspeak,” in which George Orwell might take some pride. Following Leo’s already-hatched plans for the judicial branch of the US government, the legislative branch will be a logical second step. In fact, Republican revisionists already have found some cracks in the language with which to begin turning that branch long-term red. It has the ring of a familiar playground for corruption:

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legislative districts, the borders of which are redrawn every 10 years, after the federal Census. The procedure is so longstanding that it even has a name: “gerrymandering,” named after its originator, one Mr. Elbridge Jerry. The courts have been well-used to argue over just exactly how odd-shaped a “jerrymander” legally may be, and how much it may deviate from established voting district lines before it violates precedents. Some of the most freshly drawn districts occasionally have resembled snakes engaged in strange acts of coitus. One might believe that the twisted borders of these silly-looking districts could not get any weirder, but a case that was pending in the US Supreme Court during 2022 aimed to politicize the process more sharply by increasing the power of state legislatures, bringing the politicized nature of the process into sharper focus. The effect, according to Liptak and Corasaniti in The New York Times (June 30, 2022), “has the potential to amplify the influence of state lawmakers over federal elections.” If the US Supreme Court by giving state legislatures independent power, without review by state courts, to set election rules in conflict with state constitutions” (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). The case may affect the 2024 election, by allowing the courts legal power to affect the presidential race if problems occur over how state courts interpret state election laws. “In taking up the case,” according to The New York Times, “The Supreme Court could upend nearly every facet of the American electoral process, allowing state legislatures to set new rules, regulations and districts on federal elections with few checks against overreach, and potentially create a chaotic system between states, with differing rules and voting eligibility for presidential elections….The Supreme Court’s decision will be enormously significant for presidential elections, congressional elections and congressional district districting,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge. “And therefore, for American democracy” (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). Given an affirmative ruling by the Court, states’ varying protections against partisan gerrymandering established through the states could essentially vanish. The ability to challenge new voting laws at the state level could be reduced. This is yet another attempt by conservatives to switch power from the federal level to the state legislatures, where Republicans often outnumber Democrats; state legislatures may be allowed to send their own slates of electors, nullifying the role of the Electoral College, another avenue for changes that probably would favor Republicans more often than not. By late in 2022, four justices had already expressed at least tentative support for this case. Before the fall, 2022 elections, Republicans had complete control in 30 legislatures at the state level, more than enough to give them an edge on any important issue, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a fact resulting in passage of several new voting restrictions. Democrats controlled only 17 legislatures of 50 at the state level in 2022. Republicans have targeted states with large populations in which elections were close in 2022. In states where results have been close, including North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Republican strategy is to lock in their power to enact laws by block voting for at least 10 years, and very probably long thereafter,

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locking in another procedural guarantee that enables Republican power to influence the content of future legislation. In the same way, Republican operatives are scurrying throughout the rules in several states to gain advantages here and there, with aid from important fundraisers to solidify power for generations to come.

3.26 Leo’s Fingers on the Scales of Justice The well-financed fingertips of Leo’s fundraising apparatus, built after he served as an influential executive at the Federalist Society, interweaves all of these issues, in and about its role in tipping the scales of justice toward judges whose opinions will be expressed in decisions favorable to Republican positions. According to The New York Times, to lobby millions of dollars during each electoral cycle, to blast schools for teaching critical race theory (CRT) and assailing corporations such as BlackRock, Uber, and American Airlines that have been “financially supported, or in some cases launched, by an opaque, sprawling network shaped by Mr. Leo and funded by wealthy patrons, usually through anonymous donations that critics call ‘dark money’” (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). One thread that federal government should play a smaller role in public life and a larger one on religious values supporting Leo’s philosophy that government should play a smaller role in life and that institutions and individuals should be challenged for embracing what he sees as subversive liberal positions. Thus do Leo et al. place their fingers on the scales of justice. While Trump generally supports the campaigns of Leo, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, he has avoided many of Trump’s most incendiary positions as well as his loud, bullying, bull-horned political approach. Leo also has not supported assertions by Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. He generally avoids issues that divide Republicans, while sticking to what all of them want, principally money. The New York Times described how Leo’s approach blends cutting-edge political financing techniques—“some of which he…says are copied from the left”—with deep connections to the Republican establishment and a willingness to harness some of the culture-war issues animating the base. Unlike Trump and most of his “base,” this fundraising dynamo works without much publicity, and it does not take small donations. Most of its fundraising is amassed with aid from squads of right-­ wing lawyers and minimizes the impact of federal taxes—often to nearly or wholly zero. It’s all done with as little political noise as possible (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). If most people don’t know Leo’s name, that’s how he wants it. To get where he could quietly weave his political magic in the shade, Leo had hit the ground running with conservative political lobbying and fundraising after 4 years building his organization part time, while he led the Federalist Society, “an influential conservative legal group through which he helped advise Republican presidents on the selection of Supreme Court justices” (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022).

3.27  The Number Three Most Powerful Person in the World?

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With little attention, Leo then began to build a wide net of very well-heeled nonprofit and for-profit enterprises that were interested in making large, regular tax-­ exempt contributions to aid consistently conservative causes. Leo asked the donors who or what they would like to aid and then set about funneling their money to the beneficiaries. The network hired contractors and consultants suitable to the types of work that needed to be done, usually a form of communication to officeholders or voters. By standards of the trade, these were experts, committed to the causes they were espousing, and very well paid on contracts that reached well into the seven figs. A significant proportion of these fees found their way back into Leo’s pockets, because he often owned a controlling interest in them. Some of the more familiar names associated with Leo’s enterprises are the 85 Fund and Concord Fund, CRC Advisors, and the BH Group. (When he departed the Federalist Society, Leo was hired to lead CRC Advisors, “which advises and helps manage conservative nonprofits” (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). Later, he was listed as trustee and chairman of the Marble trust. While such an arrangement might sound like a very well-paid form of highway robbery to people with a limited knowledge of corporate financing, it was all perfectly legal under U.S. tax law. Most of the donors seemed unbothered by the fact that Leo was doing well while doing good—that is to say, investing in a more conservative (sometimes further right-wing than that) society in which they would be even more comfortable, financially and ideologically. Between 2015 and 2021, Leo’s nine “core groups” spent about $500 million on various causes deemed beneficial to appropriately right-wing causes. The New York Times examined Leo’s tax returns “transfusion” and associated documentary evidence and found that grants had been made to about 150 groups with affiliated tastes in politics; about half of this amount was transacted between mid-2019 and 2021. All of these figures do not include a $1.6 billion donation (The New York Times called it a “transfusion”) from a “Chicago electronic manufacturing magnate” in the second half of 2020 by the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation to Leo’s Marble Foundation Trust (Liptak & Corasaniti, 2022). Before the surprising $1.6 billion “transfusion,” the Seid Foundation had been known for much smaller grants to the Chamber Opera of Chicago.

3.27 The Number Three Most Powerful Person in the World? Power can travel on little cat’s feet. In September 2018, during a live event, the Gregory S. Coleman Memorial Lecture, hosted by Leo, Justice Clarence Thomas joked about how honored he was to be sharing the stage with Leo, calling him the No. 3 most powerful person in the world. Reports from the scene indicated that Thomas let the comment pass without further elaboration. Leo helped by joking “Right! God help us. God help us,” as a chorus of laughter rippled through the

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audience. Thomas refrained from further unsolicited bragging when he didn’t disclose the names of his top two most powerful people in the world. Justice Thomas is accustomed to keeping his head down when the conversation rolls around to the role of mega-millions in the world of law-making and judicial rulings. Every so often, however, the curtain rolls back, as in early 2003 when Thomas was disclosed to have taken a few days off the clock at a well-heeled vacation spot in Indonesia, with a boost from a private jet and an enormous yacht. Asked about a style of life that exceeds anything a Supreme Court Justice could afford on the taxpayer’s dime ($285,400 a year for 2023), Thomas adopted his usual ah-­ shucks-­but-it’s-legal pose. Thomas has been invited several times to fly and cruise with Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer and investor, whose net worth as been conservatively estimated to be in the low seven figures. The carbon footprint of such a vacation is—well—you get an idea when the yacht is measured as more or less than that of a football field (Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame owns a 416-footer). When he is not hob-knobbing with the not-so-rich and famous, Crow may be adding to his “collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs” (Bouie, 2023). Get your private-jet landing permit while it’s hot, however. France has been considering a ban of private-jet travel to curb consumption of fossil fuels, and Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam has taken the same step for the same reason. In 2020, groups linked to Leo spent a total of $122 million on issues that animate the conservative base, including working to confirm conservatives to federal judgeships, fighting to restrict access to abortion, and defending measures that Republicans cast as protections against voter fraud but that Democrats contend restrict voting. One of the groups, the Rule of Law Trust, which has been involved in judicial confirmation fights, received $153 million from the Marble Trust. Another, the Concord Fund, received $16.5 million from the new group. Two other funds that steer money into conservative politics, Donors Trust and Schwab Charitable Fund, received a total of $59.1 million from the Marble trust, according to the filing. A century and a half ago, The Republicans were the more liberal of the two major parties. They were, in fact, once called “The Party of Lincoln,” who won the Civil War and was the most influential among European-American parties that “freed” the slaves. (If Blacks are included in such tallies, Frederick Douglas may have given Lincoln a run.) The Democratic Party in 1875 was doing its best to hang onto its antislavery bona fides. Even today, $1.6 billion is a stunning amount, even for a system in which money talks more loudly than “an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms [in 2022], and for years to come” (Vogel & Goldmacher, 2022). From shaping the courts in slabs of cold, hard cash, Leo & Co. have taken their show on the road to influence law and policy regarding voting rights, abortion, climate change, and the role of states vis-a-vis the federal government on voting rights, with more to come. And what is more, Leo’s organization received the $1.6 billion with few or no tax liabilities.

3.28  Following the Money

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3.28 Following the Money Seid, a veteran businessman with an eye for money-making machinery, always Republican (or at the very least) a conservative donor who likes to make his money talk, with no taxes if possible, and would rather not be noticed. He made most of the money as head of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite. As chairman and chief executive of Tripp Lite, Seid made enough money that shaving off $1.6 billion didn’t change his lifestyle, even after he paid for some very sharp tax-reducing talent. The New York Times traced the money: “Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion, according to tax records provided to The New York Times, corporate filings and a person with knowledge of the matter. “The nonprofit, headed by Leo, the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds. No taxes, going both ways. Uncle Sam stripped down to a little less than his underwear! The Republican way. In a way, the Republicans were catching up with the Democrats, who in 2020 brought in more “dark money” than they did, which helped to defeat ex-President Trump—that is, if you believe that the election was not stolen from Trump (Goldmacher & Vogel, 2022). Relatively, how much money is $1.5 billion on the campaign cash scale? It’s as much as the top 14 to 18 nonprofit organizations that usually give money to Democrats. Campaigns for high office have been subject to inflation much like the rest of us. According to The Times, This is how Leo’s money machine avoided any taxes at all. It’s all in the US tax code, supposedly for good causes. “Marble Freedom Trust is registered under a section of the tax code—501(c)4—for organizations that focus primarily on what the Internal Revenue Service calls “social welfare” and as a result are exempt from paying taxes that the IRS would have collected from them. Such groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy, but their supporters are not entitled to deduct donations from their personal income taxes. Supporters can, however, donate assets that a nonprofit can sell and avoid capital gains taxes on the sale (Goldmacher & Vogel, 2022). Taxes not paid by the mega (one might say MAGA) wealthy, made up of people who make much less money. That or what they don’t send to our dear Uncle goes onto the United States’ ever-swelling national debt, which had just passed $31 trillion as of this writing, increasing roughly $1 trillion a year. Republicans may howl about free-spending Democrats, but money in their pockets doesn’t count in this game of deficit math. The game goes ways. The Marble Trust has a lofty mission statement that says nothing about it being a wonderful tax dodge for the mega-rich to spread political propaganda. To be honest, the Democrats do it as well, something that Leo and others complain about incessantly. It’s all caught up in fuzzy pilot-speak that supports the nation’s sacred

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documents: the trust, we are told, exists to maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. “Marble was used as the trust’s icon because it is enduring and maintains a clarity of purpose. How a rock [that is, Marble] can have clarity of purpose is a mighty stretch of the English language, but this is propaganda-land, where profitable contortions of language are lingua franca.

3.29 The Ghost of Neo-Nazism Rising One wonders whether Neo-Nazis could manipulate the tax code with the elan of the Republicans and Democrats. Probably not; they are too busy engaging in utterly racist and incredibly stupid, ugly, race-based fantasies to hire tax lawyers. Adolph Hitler has risen anew in Germany during the early twenty-first century, following the immigration there of almost a million refugees, many of them Muslims, from war-torn nations in the Middle East and Africa. A string of bombings and other incidents attributed to the Islamic State (ISIS) also has spurred a small amount of white nationalist extremism in Germany and torn scars from old wounds. Before you mistake this evil weed to be solely Germany’s problem, realize that it is sprouting in many countries, under other names, including the United States. For more details, perhaps more than you would like to know, see below and Chap. 6. Many of today’s ethno-hip neo-Nazis avoid that incendiary label and maintain that they advocate “ethnopluralism,” meaning that any given ethnic group should live only in its country of origin. Applied historically, of course, that would require hundreds of millions of people of European heritage to return, mostly to the Western Hemisphere (among other places) to its original, indigenous owners, the Native American peoples of the world. Europe would then become a very crowded place. Taken in neo-Nazi parlance, “ethnopluralism” requires only that non-Germans move out of their countries of origin.

3.30 The Birth of Neo-Nazism in Germany While most Nazi leaders who survived the end of World War II, following Hitler’s suicide, professed little interest in redeveloping their ideology, a few infiltrated right-wing political parties, such as the conservative Deutsche Rechtspartei, which had five members elected to national office in 1949. Some ex-Nazi Party members also formed a Socialist Reich Party under the direction of Otto Ernst Remer. The SRP favored alliance with the Soviet Union against the United States and thus found a hospitable environment in East Germany early in the Cold War. In Austria, any attempt to advocate anything resembling Nazi-style ideology became a criminal offense in 1947. In Germany, East and West, expression of support for Nazi doctrine, publication of Hitler’s works, as well as denial of the Jewish Holocaust were

3.31  Forbidden Nazi Symbols and Propaganda in Germany

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outlawed. Most displays of the Swastika and other Nazi symbols carried criminal penalties. The Socialist Reich Party and Communist Party were banned in 1952 as antithetical to liberal democracy. The crimes of the Nazis were so odious that most Germans had little taste for anything resembling them. Even so, during the 1950s, seeds of neo-Nazi organization began to sprout. Between 1953 and 1961, the Deutsche Reichspartei received an average of 1 per cent of the vote in national elections. A few younger people formed units of the Wiking-Jugend, loosely resembling the Hitler Youth. A movement called Esoteric Nazism gained a modest following through books by Savitri Devi, born in France, who wrote such titles as Pilgrimage (1958), describing important Third Reich sites, and The Lightning and the Sun (1958), which theorized that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Other Nazi-style fantasies oriented themselves toward paganism and the occult. Some fantasized that Third Reich colonies were surviving under the Arctic ice cap. It was all fiction, and silly fiction at that. Der Fuhrer probably would not have been amused. In the meantime, back in the real world, Otto Strasser, a prominent leader of the German Social Union, returned to the country from exile during the middle 1950s. The GSU had been formed in 1956 from left-wing elements of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party, abbreviated as “Nazi,” a German acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Many leftists in the NSDAP had been purged by Hitler. The GSU suffered lack of popular support and dissolved in 1962.

3.31 Forbidden Nazi Symbols and Propaganda in Germany While profession of Nazi doctrine is legal in Germany (as is organization of Nazi political parties), as long as they do not physically threaten the established order) public display of the Nazi swastika, the Waffen SS logo (showing parallel lightning bolts) and other symbols are illegal, unless such display is strictly for historical purposes. In fact, display of the swastika was punishable by up to 1 year in prison under German law after World War II. Holocaust denial also is a crime, according to the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch § 86a) and § 130 (public incitement). The same legal code outlaws use or display of other symbols, such as the flag of the Islamic State (ISIS). Even the Nazi salute is legally forbidden. Possession or publication of Hitler’s works (such as his manifesto Mein Kampf, meaning “My Struggle,” published in 1925) was banned after World War II, although educators and other scholars were selectively exempted. After Hitler’s death, copyright of Mein Kampf passed to the state government of Bavaria, which refused to allow any copying or printing of the book in Germany. Publication of the book was legalized again on January 1, 2016, when its copyright passed into the public domain. A new edition with critical annotations by several scholars was published in German and sold out (about 85,000 copies) within a week at a price of about $100 each.

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Currently, the relevant passages from Germany’s criminal code restricting Nazi symbols read: § 86 StGB Dissemination of Means of Propaganda of Unconstitutional Organizations (1) Whoever domestically disseminates or produces stocks, imports, or exports or makes publicly accessible through data storage media for dissemination domestically or abroad, means of propaganda: 1) Of a party which has been declared to be unconstitutional by the Federal Constitutional Court or a party or organization, as to which it has been determined, no longer subject to appeal, that it is a substitute organization of such a party. […] 4) Means of propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization, shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than 3 years or a fine. […] 3) Subsection (1) shall not be applicable if the means of propaganda or the act serves to further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching, reporting about current historical events or similar purposes. […] § 86a StGB Use of Symbols of Unconstitutional Organizations (1) Whoever: 1. Domestically distributes or publicly uses, in a meeting or in writings (§ 11 subsection (3)) disseminated by him, symbols of one of the parties or organizations indicated in § 86 subsection (1), nos. 1, 2, and 4. 2. Produces, stocks, imports, or exports objects which depict or contain such symbols for distribution or use domestically or abroad, in the manner indicated in number 1, shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than 3 years or a fine.     (2) Symbols, within the meaning of subsection (1), shall be, in particular, flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans, and forms of greeting. Symbols which are so similar as to be mistaken for those named in sentence 1 shall be deemed to be equivalent thereto.     (3) The exceptions from §86 subsection (3) and (4) apply accordingly. Symbols known to fall under the law are: • The Swastika as a symbol of the Nazi Party, prohibited in all variants, including mirrored, inverted, etc. • A stylized Celtic cross, prohibited as a symbol of the VSBD/PdA and in the variant used by the White Power movement. The legal status of the symbol used in nonpolitical contexts is uncertain, but nonpolitical use is not acted upon in practice. • The solar cross as a symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, the German Faith Movement, the Thule Society, and the 5th and 11th Waffen SS divisions, • The Sig rune as used by the SS.

3.32  Extremism and Electoral Politics

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• The Sturmabteilung emblem, • The legal status of the Othala rune is disputed; prohibited as a symbol of the Hitler-­Jugend/Wiking-­Jugend • The Wolfsangel as used by the 2nd, 4th, and 34th Waffen SS divisions, Hitlerjugend and Junge Front. • Gauwinkel badges (2002). • Reichskriegsflagge: prohibited in the Third Reich version including a Swastika; the 1867–1921 version without swastika is prohibited when it is the focal point of a display or disrupts political order. • The “Heil Hitler” greeting (1970), • The “Sieg Heil” greeting (1990), • Unsere/Meine Ehre heißt Treue, along with the Totenkopf symbol, as the motto of the Waffen-­SS and Mit deutschem Gruß as the verbal equivalent of the Hitler salute. • The Horst-­Wessel-­Lied (the anthem of the Nazi Party) and Unsre Fahne flattert uns voran (a song of the Hitler-­Jugend) (1991). • The Daesh/ISIL/ISIS/IS variant of the jihadi Black Standard flag. By the end of 2022, German police had issued warrants for several hundred right-wing extremists, as evidence of an established Nazi underground, although 82 per cent of the suspected criminal acts pertain not to political offenses, but to instances of theft, fraud, verbal insults, and traffic offenses. In some cases, suspects had multiple warrants out for their arrest. Some of the more notable arrests have been two dozen who attempted an armed coup (or so they said) at the Reichstag, the lower houses of the national parliament (“Diet of the Realm”), and at other places in the country during December of 2022. The group also had hoped to replace Germany’s government and install a new head of state known as Prince Heinrich XIII. The plot also called for executing the chancellor, Angela Merkel, at that time. Although the attempted coup was something of a joke, extremists rumored to have taken part were associated with the National Socialist Underground (NSU), who were responsible for the murders of ten immigrants and one policewoman between 2000 and 2007. Right-wing extremists also were suspected in 15 bank robberies and 2 bombings. Police reported that some organizations that had been banned and suppressed were expanding, including “Combat 18” and an associated group, “Blood and Honour.” “I find the high number of fugitive neo-Nazis who have evaded arrest for a long period of time extremely worrying,” said Ulla Jelpke, the Left Party’s spokeswoman on domestic policy (Staudenmaier, 2017).

3.32 Extremism and Electoral Politics Success of extremist views in German electoral politics has been limited—so much so that Germany’s highest court rejected a proposed ban because neo-Nazis posed only the slightest threat to the country’s established order. In May 2017, Germany’s

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Constitutional Court rejected a ban on the Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), finding that its campaign against “the liberal democratic order” was within its rights, but that “There is (currently) a lack of concrete evidence showing it is possible for these actions to lead to success” (Dearden, 2017). Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said the NPD has about 6000 members in a country of 82 million, causing judges to classify it as a “limited campaigning capacity and low impact on society” (Dearden, 2017). In a unanimous judgment, Germany’s highest court said that although the NPD seeks to replace German democracy with an authoritarian state structured by an ethnically defined “national community” (“Their political concept disregards human dignity and is incompatible with the principle of democracy”), it would not succeed. German constitutional law holds that “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” In this case, the court found that the state was not sufficiently endangered to prohibit the party (Dearden, 2017). The court’s ruling found that the NPD had an “essential affinity with national socialism [Nazism],” including using the phrase Volksgemeinschaft, with its strong anti-Semitic and Nazi connotations. The court also said that the NPD uses the vocabulary, songs, and symbolism of the Third Reich and that some of its supporters display “intimidating and criminal behavior.” A ban of the NPD had been sought by the government in 2013, the government’s second attempt to prohibit the NPD, which had been founded in 1964. The party has capitalized on the increasing number of immigrants into Germany, calling multiculturalist policies to integrate refugees into Germany’s society and economy genocide against ethnic Germans. The NPD also advocates Germany’s exit from the European Union and The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while also opposing same-sex marriage, and other equality legislation. It also calls for castration of convicted pedophiles. Some NPD members have been convicted of Holocaust denial. Even after Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that the NPD’s activities are legal, it was routinely monitored by the Bundesverfassungsschutz, the country’s security agency. In various reports, the Bundesverfassungschutz said that in 2017 or thereabouts, about 20,000 to 25,000 people in Germany identified with the extreme right (a fraction of 1 per cent of Germans) and that less than half of those are willing to engage in violence to promote their ideology. As of 2017, The NPD held one seat in the European Parliament but none in the German federal parliament. It won 1.3 per cent of Germany’s national vote during national elections in 2013. The NPD has never been able to draw the 5 per cent of the popular vote required to hold seats in the federal parliament, but it holds a variable number of seats in some state parliaments. The NPD is very unpopular with many Germans. In April 2014, a Berlin NPD march in Berlin was outnumbered and blockaded by several thousand counterprotesters. Polls have shown that the percentage of Germans admitting to extreme right sympathies declined from 9.7 per cent to 5.6 per cent between 2002 and 2014 (Rogers, 2014). By 2014, close to 20 per cent of Germans had immigrant

3.33  A Cultish Appeal

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backgrounds, and nearly all of them vehemently opposed white nationalist ideologies. The appeal of political extremism may be limited in today’s Germany not only because of the Nazis’ historical example but also because the country’s 82 million people enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world. In contrast, when Hitler’s Nazis rose in popularity and power in the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany was being crushed by post-World War I reparations, the effects of which were intensified by the worldwide effects of the Great Depression. In Berlin, it was said, residents were eating their horses. Today such abject poverty is very rare. Even though neo-Nazi parties have attracted only minimal support in Germany, the number of anti-immigrant hate crimes has been rising—473 in 2013, including, according to Thomas Rogers’ report in Rolling Stone (2014). In September 2014, for example, three suspected neo-Nazis brutally beat a 15-year-old in Saxony, allegedly because the boy was half Taiwanese. The same month, a Turkish immigrant, was nearly beaten to death by a group of nine alleged neo-Nazis in a train station in Saxony-Anhalt, and this February, a group of more than a dozen neo-Nazis walked into a community center in the town of Ballstaedt, in the state of Thuringia, and began assaulting the attendees at a party, sending two of them to hospital. A broader measure of extremist criminality published in 2023 showed an increase in Germany’s politically motivated crimes from 44,692 in 2020 to 55,048 in 2021. Politically motivated violence increased by almost 16 percent the year after that (Human Rights, 2023). Germany has probably been the most active nation in the world to suppress online hate speech, much of which involves anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant slander. In March 2022, about 100 homes across Germany were raided, with several people fined, their computers confiscated. Online hate speech is illegal and actively prosecuted, an outgrowth of Nazi hate campaigns.

3.33 A Cultish Appeal Neo-Nazism exercises a hard-core appeal to Some Germans, even a hobbyist or cultish ambience. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) described “Jamel in north-eastern Germany, [which] has become a “neo-Nazi town“ after far-right supporters moved in. Neighbors say they perform “Heil Hitler“ salutes and sing Nazi songs.” Opposition is often on display in Jamel as well, the BBC reported: “One couple in the village have set up an anti-fascist festival in their back garden; it now attracts hundreds every year” (“Inside,” 2017). The London Sunday Express described Jamel as a sort of Third Reich residential theme park, where “Dozens of dangerous neo-Nazis live side-by-side in a village where they salute Hitler and hold festivals praising the Third Reich…amid growing anti-migrant anger” (Smith, 2016). Journalists visited Jamel exuding an air of explorers in a wild jungle: “A BBC journalist travelled to Jamel to investigate the small north German village

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infamous for its sympathy to Nazi beliefs and adoration of Adolf Hitler. The village has become a magnet for far-right extremists, who are mostly members or voters of the National Democratic Party (NPD)” (Smith, 2016). Nothing that happens in or near Jamel escapes the eye of German police. “Everyone who enters the area is later subject to police questioning with a giant barricade currently blocking the village’s only entrance,” wrote Oli Smith of the London Sunday Express (2016). The theme-part ambience begins near the checkpoint: “The town includes a shocking sign-post which gives directions and the distance to Adolf Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau am Inn” (Smith, 2016). Residents in the town—described as a paradise for those with Nazi beliefs— have seen gatherings where locals “play Nazi music and give Hitler salutes,” according to the BBC reporter. A mural in the town center depicts an Ayran family, including a blond man with his wife and children, adorned with a slogan of Hitler’s regime. There is also a haunting playground for neo-Nazi children featuring a tree trunk engraved with words from the “Lebensborn program”—the Nazi’s manifesto to build a master race (Smith, 2016).

The settlement was founded by Sven Kruger, whose main credential was a jail sentence for harboring a machine gun and 200 rounds of ammunition. A report in the Sunday Express has it that in 2016 local elections, the anti-immigrant and anti-­ Islamic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party beat the ruling Christian Democratic party and the neo-Nazi NPD gain seats in the regional parliament. And: “Violence towards center-left politicians in the region has been described as “a form of terror” by a leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).” And, as well: “The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has warned that the NPD is becoming increasingly influential in  local municipalities and that the neo-Nazis are trying to entrench themselves in daily life.” One resident of Jamel, Birgit Lohmeyer, age 58, who is not a Nazi, said: “The mood in Germany now is similar to the 1930s when the Nazis came to power.” “Along with her husband, the pair have witnessed small school children in the village sieg-heiling while they have received death threats and had their barn torched to ashes” (Smith, 2016).

3.34 Making Fascism Trendy A reporter for the ever-trendy Rolling Stone described the German right-wing revival, focusing on the Bavarian town of Weiden, and Patrick Schroeder, age 30 in 2014, whom some in the German media have dubbed the “Nazi-hipster.” He appeared on webcam (FSN.tv, Germany’s only neo-Nazi Internet TV show) with a bandana around his mouth and a map of Germany in 1937 as a backdrop. He greets

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his audience, a few hundred people, his right arm raised high above his well-­muscled chest in an ersatz, rather limp, Nazi salute. The real thing could be prosecuted in German courts. No one seems to have told him (or other neo-Nazis who complain about “Americanization,” that Hitler, a fan of American college football, adapted his sieg heil salute from a cheerleading move—or so reported US intelligence after World War II, when they found newsreels that had been flown into Hitler’s various command posts and bunkers so that he could watch the games. Cross-cultural communication takes some unusual directions. While his rhetoric may be German nationalist, Schroeder, who told Rolling Stone’s Thomas Rogers (2014) that his act borrows from the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Schroeder was described in Rolling Stone’s report as about 6 feet tall, with the boxy musculature of an MMA [mixed martial arts] fighter, his blond hair shaved except for a jaunty Mohawk war strip along the top of his head. He was dressed all in black, wearing armbands slightly reminiscent of those favored by vintage Avril LaVigne [A Canadian singer, songwriter, and actress] and speaks quickly and loudly, with a strong Bavarian accent. When he laughs, wrote Thomas, Schroeder’s his upper right lip rises up, making him look both threatening and insecure. “If the Third Reich was so bad, it would have been toppled,” he argues, before the filming begins. “Every half-intelligent person knows there is no system where everything was bad.” What was bad, to Schroeder (in 2014), was Barack Obama, whom he described as America’s “neger president” (Thomas, 2014). Schroeder also has a low opinion of American Neo-Nazis, whom he described as looking like refugees from a costume party. He imitates them with no apparent sense of irony. To Schroeder, looks are very important. Largely because of his showmanship, the German media coined a term, “nipster,” for people “dressing like Brooklyn hipsters at Nazi events” (Thomas, 2016). Neo-Nazis also have been known to host vegan cooking shows (Hitler was a vegetarian). “Industrial meat production is incompatible with our nationalist and socialist world views,” viewers of the cooking show are told. The show, which is titled “Balaclava Kueche,” comes with a dollop of friendly endorsement of Hitler as role model, “in terms of aesthetics and discipline and brotherhood, [he] was a model for today” (Thomas, 2014). So considerate are they of animals’ rights for a group whose members slaughtered millions of human beings during World War II. Andy Knape, 28, whose office is in the Saxony state parliament in eastern Germany, has been the head of the Junge Nationaldemokraten (JN), the youth wing of the NPD. Knape sees his role as preserving German culture, not discriminating against Jews, Muslims, or other non-Aryan Germans. Knape wants to give “nationalism” (a label that the NPD prefers to “Nazi”) a friendlier, more user-friendly face. “I see rap and hip-hop, for example, as a way of transporting our message,” said Knape. In recent years, Germany has become home to several extreme-right hip-­ hop acts, as well as neo-Nazi reggae. One video, called “Harlem Shake” (no reference is made to the fact that Harlem is a mainly black neighborhood in New York City) brags: “Have more sex with Nazis, unprotected” (Thomas, 2014). Hitler probably would have had them shot as embarrassments to the Reich. Rolling Stone

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commented that Knape had problems defining the German traditions that he trying to preserve, as he borrows African-American hip-hop moves but objects to mixing English and German words. The NPD officially opposes “Americanization” of German culture, but that can be difficult. Knape admitted, at the time, that no German word exists for “hashtag.” Knape and Schroeder have broadened German neo-Nazi appeal by relaxing instructions on how their cadre should dress. As long as adherents profess anti-­ immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic ideas, how they dress no longer matters. This lack of dress codes also makes neo-Nazis more difficult to spot and follow in a country where they are subject to constant state surveillance. “Now the neo-Nazi youth culture is really broad,” said Christoph Schulze, a left-wing activist who is part of a group who assemble a yearly report called “Versteckspiel” (“Hide and Seek”) that describes supposedly secret codes and symbols used by right-wing German extremists. In an era of “nipsters,” neo-Nazis may be wearing skinny jeans, long Duck Dynasty-style beards, and plugs in their ears. Hypermasculine poses, black boots, and skinhead hairstyles are no longer sure ways to identify them (Thomas, 2014). “In recent years,” wrote Rogers (2014), “a growing number of neo-Nazi groups have staged savvy viral campaigns, including one where they dressed up as the Sesame Street Cookie Monster and distributed pamphlets to schoolchildren, and another involving a man in a bear costume calling himself the ‘deportation bear’ and posing in front of Hanover Turkish shops. ‘They can easily produce something that has the appearance of looking hip,’ says Koehler….They understand how to package their political ideology.’” Such attempts to make racism modern and “hip” can present considerable cultural confusion. Aren’t hip-hop and reggae rooted in the musical cultures of African peoples whom Nazi doctrine says are subhuman? And insistence that everyone move back to their countries of origin? That one begs the question of who has been colonizing whom for the last five-plus centuries. The “new” hip neo-Nazis have a talent for eye-catching stunts (such as dumping coal rubble on Green Party activists), always with a video crew in tow. The new, hip, vegan “ethnopluralists” make a point of engaging young people on subjects such as globalism and animal protection and then move them slowly to core right-wing values. Said one neo-Nazi activist:“[We] use subjects like globalization and animal protection as entry points, and then offer a very simple worldview that makes complex subjects very easy to understand….Of course, in the end, it’s always about racism and anti-Semitism and nationalism” (Thomas, 2014). The game seems to be: normalize white supremacy to a hip-hop beat. When the values that defined the ideology under which millions of people died in death camps are being pedaled like mental ice cream to young people anxious over their futures with very little knowledge of history’s consequences, it can taste pretty good, at least until real history rears its nasty but realistic head. Ultranationalism can hurt when it busts the misconceptions of the ice cream Klan. In more than one instance, neo-Nazis have gathered outside public buildings to exercise their “free speech, yelling “Germany for the Germans“ and “foreigners out

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“before attacking other people with broken bottles and pepper spray. They then complain that employers fire them when they sound off about their political obsessions. “We’re the new Jews in Germany,” one sniveled, “except we don’t wear stars,” the Stars of David that Jews were force to wear during the Nazi years so that the storm troopers knew who to send away on death’s railway (Thomas, 2014). Such comments miss a great deal of historical nuance regarding who did what to whom in the service of the Third Reich.

3.35 Hitler’s Birth House as Historical Metaphor Hitler was born April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a town on Austria’s border with Germany in an apartment rented by his parents above a ground-level tavern. Under the Nazi regime, the building was used as a shrine to him, drawing many tourists. Present-day neo-Nazis wanted to restore it to that role, but no one else agreed. After 1944, when the Nazis lost control of the area, it was emptied and shuttered. It continued to draw tourists, however. “I’ve even witnessed people from France coming here… for adoration purposes,” Josef Kogler, a teacher in Braunau, told the BBC. “One Frenchman, a history teacher I think it was, came and asked me for Hitler’s birthplace… It’s hard to understand” (Adolf Hitler’s, 2016). The building was seized by authorities after it had become a shire for growing numbers of neo-Nazis and other Führer und Reichskanzler-inclined tourists. Facing widespread demands that the house be demolished, the government instead decided to remodel its façade and use the property for offices of a charity that aids disabled people. Before the remodeling, a flat, polished stone was erected in front of the site reading (translated from the German): “For peace, freedom and democracy, never again fascism, millions of dead are a warning” (Hitler’s Birth House, 2016). The Associated Press reported that the decision came a day after lawmakers overwhelmingly approved an Interior Ministry bill to dispossess the owner, who had refused to sell the empty building. Provincial governor Josef Puehringer said, according to the Associated Press, “Destroying the structure would have fueled accusations of ‘tearing down a piece of burdensome history.’” The property would have faced a sort of martyrdom for the Hitler admirers who had been using it as a shrine (Hitler’s Birth House, 2016). The Austrian government took over the main lease on the property in 1972, to keep it from being purchased by neo-Nazis who might have glorified it. In 1984, Gerlinde Pommer, who had inherited the building, received an offer to buy it from the government. She refused to sell. After negotiations collapsed in 2016, the Austrian national government in Vienna submitted a bill to Parliament to expropriate the building in the national interest, given that “no other historical property exists in Austria that holds such a special, global and political meaning” (Smale, 2017). Following enactment of the law in January 2017, Pommer sued in Austria’s Constitutional Court to overturn the expropriation. Gerhard Lebitsch, a lawyer for

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Pommer, said the law was an unconstitutional abridgement of his client’s property rights. The suit will delay changes in the property, but only for several months. According to the government, Pommer had been receiving 50,023 euros, or about $54,000 per year in rent at the time, from the Austrian government. The place had been empty since 2011 when, according to a report in The New York Times, “The last tenants left…after a dispute with Ms. Pommer, who refused to allow renovation” (Smale, 2017). An intense debate followed the government’s acquisition of the building. While Austria’s interior minister, Wolfgang Sobotka, said the structure should be demolished and replaced with a new structure that having no connection to Hitler, an Austrian government historical commission recommended “a thorough architectural remodeling.” The mayor of Braunau, Johannes Waidbacher, supported the remodeling and urged that the site “be used by a social or municipal institution to underscore the rejection of Nazi ideology” (Smale, 2017). Some community people suggested its use as a refugee center, as others wanted a museum dedicated to Austria’s liberation from Nazi rule. Cultural organizations opposed its demolition because of the building’s age, as part of an historic city center, which would have been it a protected heritage site. By June 2017, as the owner of the house sued to keep it, challenging an Austrian law allowing the government to seize ownership, its eventual fate remained unclear, until 2020, when plans were announced to turn it into a local police station, as a way of discouraging neo-Nazi “tourists.”

3.36 Empires and Worldviews The worldview behind Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises about the geopolitical landscape of today’s world: The West (e.g., Europe west of Russia) and the United States are declining, decaying, and internally divided. Russia is emerging toward rebirth of its worldwide influence during the times of the czars and the Soviet Union. Under this doctrine, Russia has a right to reassert its historical dominance of at least one quarter of its land base that declared independence after the USSR collapsed, from the Baltic States to Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and several smaller nations to the southeast, as well as larger states to the east and south of Russia’s heart, centered in Moscow. For a time, before the Berlin Wall fell, the USSR even tried to muscle into Afghanistan and failed (the United States, exercising its own geopolitical ignorance there, intervened and also had to withdraw about 40 years later). The word “empire” has gone out of fashion in modern statecraft, but in the world of bombs and bullets, this word-that-will-not-be-mentioned is very much alive. Our globalized world is becoming multipolar, with large nationalistic empires jostling to enlarge their spheres of influence. China deserves more attention than it gets as an reemerging empire, spreading westward from its Han heartland into adjacent nations (now provinces) with at least 5000  years of civilization, widening and shrinking borders, behind an incredibly complex and fascinating culture that includes epochs

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as an imperial state. China, however, has been expanding during the last several decades, wresting its own independence, then quickly moving into Tibet, Uighur homelands, and Hong Kong. Taiwan may be next. Russia has had a considerable number of centuries to expand and contract, as briefly described above. Putin’s insistence on a new period of Russian glory notwithstanding, it is not a very vibrant empire in our time. Between a third and a quarter of its claimed territory exited, the USSR as soon as it all but collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The health of its people is generally miserable, and its population is slowly declining. Its gross national product is hardly larger than Germany’s, a tiny fraction of Russia’s size, having lost two world wars. Putin’s attempts to expand Russia’s borders have met with hardy resistance. He had expected to put Ukraine in his trophy case in a couple of weeks. A year and counting as of this writing, and Putin is in trouble, although his missiles and drones have been demolishing large parts of Ukraine’s urban areas and important urban infrastructure, meanwhile committing the worst string of war crimes since Hitler’s time, as Putin’s woefully unfit ground troops pillage and sack their way through Ukraine. I have heard it said that Russia’s claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into Ukraine’s bloody mud. In the meantime, Russia has been reaping a whirlwind of censure from most of the world, as many of its best educated and most creative young people line up at its expansive borders waiting in huge lines to bail out. Anyone who dares protest this state of affairs may be sent to a squalid prison for holding up an empty sheet of paper on a public sidewalk. These are hardly signs of a world-scope geopolitical power.

3.37 The United States’ “Manifest Destiny” Now, let us consider the United States of America, the youngest of our present-day imperial powers, and my homeland which, in less than half a millennium, has rolled over its indigenous peoples; in two centuries, it has become a world-girdling empire. Don’t, however, call it that. Even the imperialists won’t like it. Even these residents of a city on a hill with an abiding belief in “manifest destiny,” both inherited from the “winning of the west,” this country with a hundred military bases “overseas,” as we say it, home of Hollywood, and the planet’s best-known basketball shoes, movies with the biggest audiences, and some of its longest wars (see Vietnam); English, as the language of the professional world. Try being an airplane pilot or a diplomat without it. The United States also thrives on a spirit of innovative invention which reinvents computers and cell phones every few years. It’s the home to horrid differences in wealth in which we assume, quoting Jefferson, that we are all created equal, and, until 1865, the world’s largest population of slaves, but also often home to freedom fighters of many ethnicities (Ho Chi Minh quoted Jefferson, too); a place where, it seems, to which everyone wants to migrate, but the most popular campaign blast from the worst of politicians involves fencing out foreigners; a place where everyone (except the indigenous peoples) came from elsewhere, often within living

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memory (even Donald Trump’s family came from Europe). The United States has a lot of geniuses and too many other people who insist that the sun rises from the west and that Trump is some sort of god. The United States is still the richest country of large size in the world, but not without signs of urban decay and the world’s newest and cruelest killer street drugs. One may recall Jefferson again, giving thanks that the United States, for its own good, in his age when the fastest mode of transport over an open ocean was a ship under several sails, had been endowed by the Creator with wide oceans on each side, east and west. He was lucky to have never heard of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—or, in a time when the fastest land transport was the horse, global warming. Fascist nationalism is hardly new to today’s world. As Jill Lepore noted, “By the 1930s, the infant democracies were under siege, Mussolini could boast [that] the liberal states would fail, and Hitler declared that he had achieved “a beautiful democracy” [for non-Jews who were Nazi party members of course]. As democratic governments fell around the world, the victors fortified each other in the language and policies that othered the vulnerable (and often murdered) those deemed threats to the nation. The institutions of democracy were gutted” (Elcott et  al., 2021, 4, 20–21). Does this sound like Vladimir Putin (whom Elcott calls a fascist and a terrorist) whose missiles bomb their apartment blocks, schools, and much more to ashes? Or Maximum Leader Xi Jinping of China, giving the orders that have condemned many Tibetans to early deaths and incarceration of Uighurs in “reeducation” camps by the hundreds of thousands?

3.38 The US Wages a “War” Over Immigration and “White Replacement Anxiety” Politically motivated restrictions on immigration into the United States have been used for many years. During the 1920s, immigration was shut down nearly to zero except for Northwestern Europe. President Woodrow Wilson fired nearly all Black federal government employees. Southern churches invoked segregation as a Christian mandate (Elcott et al., 2021, 81). A relatively recent right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., recalled the 1920s revival of a virulent KKK with themes of often lethal lynchings, an expression of white nationalism. Trump said that there were some “good people” on both sides at that rally. The crowd was incensed by rumors that Muslims were building “training camps” for Mexican immigrants. Trump himself recommended banning Muslim immigration and closing all mosques. The crowd in Charlottesville chanted “We will not be replaced,” a call from the alt-right who protested that their country is being taken over by non-white, non-Christian immigrants. Such points of view are complex; a large majority of Latinos who migrate into the United States, legal and illegal, are Christians, mainly Catholics.

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Whites who have been worried about “replacement anxiety” to the point of wanting to seal the United States’ southern border ought to know that the “war” is over— and they lost. In 2010, Latino/Latina/Latinx peoples made up a fifth of US population, a proportion that was growing rapidly. If Latinos and Latinas in the United States were a country, with output of $2.8 trillion a year in 2020, they would be producing more than the United Kingdom, India, and France, according to a Wells Fargo and Latino Donor Collaborative’s study of Latinos’ and Latinas’ economic impact. Latinos’ personal consumption in the United States was roughly $1.84 trillion a year by 2020. More than 600,000 Latinos entered the US workforce on average each year between 2010 and 2020, according to this study. During the same decade, non-Latinos added 225,00 workers a year (Martin, 2022, D-3). By 2014, Latinos and Latinas in the United States, legal and not, collectively produced economic output the size of a medium-sized industrial country. One might believe, under such conditions, that “Those who promoted the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in America, for example, [who] grounded that doctrine in the ‘white man’s burden,’ advocating a strong Christian American nation” would find such a view outdated. However, debates in the “Land of the free” as an “extension of the history of salvation,” still rage, even in some “mainline” Protestant churches, where members are “convinced that God must have providentially intervened in that conflict on the side of ‘his people,’ the Americans….[as] an ‘anointed land,’ set apart [as] a divine land for an extraordinary existence as a nation and an extraordinary mission to the world” (Elcott et al., 2021, 119). In this atmosphere, the Presbyterian church in the United States relatively recently acknowledged its complicity with segregation—separating worshipers by race, barring blacks from membership, defending white supremacist organizations that kept black churches out of presbyteries, and taught that The Bible sanctioned segregation (Elcott et al., 2021, 119). “Many Christians have forgotten that their first allegiance is to God and not the nation-state” commented David M. Elcott, et al. Yes, perhaps, for those who believe in a particular deity, although in the United States public servants are sworn to defend the Constitution, not God, as Elcott argued in Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy (2021, 120). The attorney general of the United States cited the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chap. 13, to defend the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, leaving them in filthy conditions where children have died (Elcott et  al., 2021, 128–129).

3.39 The United States’ White Man’s Manifest Destiny in Our Time The political assumptions of Donald Trump and his Republican Party anticipate that America will be great again as a white Christian patriots’ enclave would once again determine the law of the land. As Elcott et al. wrote (2021, 86): “The triumph of

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Donald Trump and the political forces unleashed reflect as a fundamental shift— perhaps a battle no less significant than the Civil War—that threatens to render asunder a consensus about and confidence in liberal democracy as the political system of the United States. Religious identity also plays a major role in this conflict. The America espoused by Christian populist nationalists is a limited democracy, dedicated to retaining control by disenfranchising whole segments of the population while actively discriminating against people of color, other religious groups, and anyone who does not conform federal government employees. Southern image of the authentic American,” as they define it (Elcott et al., 2021, 86). Among self-professed Christian political mavens in the United States, little comes to pass without a poached phrase or two from The Bible. For example: Jeff Sessions, attorney general of the United States under Trump, at one point cited the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chap. 13, to defend the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, leaving them in filthy conditions where some children have died (Elcott et al., 2021, 128–129). The statement caused such a public-relations furor that Trump was forced to reverse it. Historically, one may be left gasping at such a sick misuse of the Holy Bible. If we could bring Jesus back to life, what would he have said about how Trump and his cohort tortured our Christian heritage in their own service? The Bible also has long been poached by promoters of Manifest Destiny in the United States, for example, grounding that doctrine in the “white man’s burden,” advocating a strong military (quoting Christ, of course, although it is very, very unlikely that Christ ever said “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Not even Jeff Sessions has put those words in Jesus’s mouth. Slightly toned-down versions have been used, such as a declaration (in the final verse of “My Country ‘Tis of thee,’” that Our Father God to Thee, author of liberty To Thee I sing My country 'tis of Thee Sweet land of liberty For all eternity Let freedom ring Let freedom ring My country 'tis, my country 'tis of Thee

“The American Nation has often been hailed as an extension of the history of salvation,’ convinced that God must have providentially intervened in that conflict on the side of ‘his people,’ the Americans. America is often said to be an “anointed land,” set apart by a divine land for an extraordinary existence as a nation and an extraordinary mission to the world (Elcott et al., 2021, 119). One astute observer has said that “Many Christians have forgotten that their first allegiance is to God and not the nation-state.” Yes, but in the United States, public servants are sworn to defend the Constitution, not God (Elcott et al., 2021, 120). Whites who worry about “replacement anxiety” to the point of wanting to seal the United States’ southern border may never reconcile their racism with the reality that the “war” to preserve the country’s whiteness is over—and that they have lost

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(Harper’s Index, 2023). In fact, we have losing America’s political virginity for a very long time, since Patrick Henry’s declaration that the races will mix, and Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the immigrants (nearly everyone from Europe or Africa, at that time) will spawn a new mixed race. That’s the same Thomas Jefferson who practiced what he preached by going to bed with Sally Hemmings and possibly other slaves, mixing genes under the noses of his more straight-laced cohort. In 2022, 80 per cent of the United States’ population increase was attributable to migration (Harper’s Index, 2023, 9). Thus, while constant immigration and ethnic mixing has been part of the “American experience” since its beginnings, so has pressure toward exclusivity, fear of the “other,” and white “replacement” anxiety. As the country becomes more diverse, the fear of the “other” among the receding, fading no-longer majority does, too. Elcott et  al., 119, 120–121 also gave a nod to Manifest Destiny: “Those who promoted the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in America, for example, grounded that doctrine in the ‘white man’s burden,’ advocating a strong Christian American nation as an ‘extension of the history of salvation,’ and convinced that God must have providentially intervened in that conflict on the side of ‘his people,’ the Americans. America is an ‘anointed land, set apart by a divine plan for an extraordinary existence as a nation and an extraordinary mission to the world. The public relations of “an extraordinary mission to the world” can very easily become a lethal commodity when applied by force in another unwilling jurisdiction. Alexander Gauland, coleader of the [German] AfD, for example, described the 12-year Hitler regime as a brief stain on Germany’s grand history. “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history…(Elcott et al., 2021, 124).” Some bird turd that was!

3.40 Right-Wing Nationalism’s Worldwide Spread In 2022, Italy elected a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, who has a long record of severely criticizing international bankers, the European Union, and thousands of migrants, most of whom had crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge in Italy. Meloni, leader of the country’s nationalist Brothers of Italy, which formed from antecedents descended from the remnants of fascism under Mussolini, led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament. She also became Italy’s first female prime minister. Meloni has been “a strong supporter of Ukraine,” but members of her coalition partners have expressed admiration of Putin and have expressed opposition to sanctions against Russia. This was one of several European elections in which “formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or fascist heritages are entering the mainstream—and winning elections— across Europe” (Horowitz, 2022). The New York Times’ Jason Horowitz, at roughly the same time, in 2022, reported that followers of a hard-right party started by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the

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largest single party in Sweden’s governing coalition. In France, also in 2022, Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader, reached the final round of presidential elections for the second straight year. Also, in Spain, the hard-right Vox, aligned Ms. Meloni, has been gaining a larger share of the vote (Horowitz, 2022). “But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union,” wrote Horowitz (2022) “that has sent the strongest shock wave across the continent after a period of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia.” All of these right-wing parties have been strong advocates of nationalism. Meloni’s coalition in Italy at the time of the election was split between support for Ukraine and Putin’s Russia. “Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners—Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda,” wrote Horowitz (2022). The split between Italian parties could cause the coalition to fall apart, or so reports early in 2023 indicated. On the other hand, a solid position against sanctions on Russia could bring other European countries with it. Meloni spent considerable time during the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that her support of Ukraine was unwavering. Meloni also spent considerable time during the election defending herself against memories of Mussolini, for whom she had expressed admiration in the past. She also fundamentally criticized France’s Le Pen and Viktor Orban, nationalist prime minister of Hungary, after having expressed admiration for him. During the campaign, Meloni, became known “for her rhetorical crescendos, thundering timbre and ferocious speeches slamming gay-rights lobbies, European bureaucrats and illegal migrants….But she was suddenly soft-spoken,” wrote Horowitz, “when asked on a recent evening if she agreed, all caveats aside, with the historical consensus that the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini—whom she admired in her youth as a “good politician”—had been evil and bad for Italy. “Yeah,” she said, almost inaudibly (Horowitz, 2022). Back in Ukraine, in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, some Ukrainian men broke their own arms so that the Russians would not force them into military service on their side. For people of a certain age in the United States (70 to 75 or thereabouts), Russia’s uninvited assault on Ukraine had a certain resonance: Old men sent younger men to war in Vietnam on the excuse of imagined foreign aggression—an empire’s familiar complaint. They could hear its resonance in Ukrainian young men’s favorite song: Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” or in old videotapes of General Curtis LeMay telling the North Vietnamese that the United States would “bomb them back into the Stone Age.” The old men of desired empire wondering how the young men of another nation on the other side of the world could put up such a fight without many weapons; at home, inside (as the Cuban poet Jose Marti put it, “the belly of the beast”) being dragged off to a police van for protesting the war—and the draft, for a war that wasn’t worth dying for:

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One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ war; Two, four, six, eight; organize and smash the state.

That was 1970. And in 2022, 52 years later: My, oh, my: look at all those young Russian men heading for the borders!—until they were closed on a line of 2500 cars reported to be backed up in Russia’s many time zones, waiting for a way out, waiting to escape Putin’s war in 2022. A Potemkin village, figuratively or literally, is anything with a fake front that provides an external façade over something (even a country) that is not doing well. It is a Russian concept, and people in service to the czar (later the Soviets and the rest) seemed to get very good at it. The term stems from a fake-front village built by Grigory Potemkin, a one-time lover of Empress Catherine II (or so he imagined), to impress her while she was on her way to Crimea in 1787. Catherine II (a.k.a. Catherine the Great) infused Russia with ideas of the Enlightenment between 1762 and 1796, making the country a continental capital of learning and culture. Even in our time, when President Putin wanted the world to believe that the war in Ukraine was going better than it was (for him), he decided to hold referenda in four relatively small provinces of Ukraine (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizka) that Russia claimed for its own. The Potemkin villages in this case were made of ballots, said to have been cast by the people of the three provinces fervently expressing fealty toward the Russian Federation. Many people were literally dragged to the polls (i.e., prodded at rifle point) to cast their “yes” votes. When voting day had ended, Putin declared that the four provinces had embraced the Bear; he even held a large rally in Moscow to welcome them. That all of this was all a badly concealed fraud didn’t seem to trouble a man who called Ukrainians “Nazis,” even if their president is Jewish. Ah, sure. Hitler called the Third Reich a democracy, too. It was (and remains) a lethal concoction of wishful thinking, rancid falsehood, and Orwellian imagination.

3.41 Welcome to Today’s Sweden Our stereotypes of Sweden usually bring us mind pictures of people living well, but not ostentatiously, lakes and woods, progressive politics, and tolerance for those less fortunate, which fosters a liberal attitude toward immigration. This stereotype has been busted by stories such as this: STOCKHOLM—The best years were still ahead for Susanna Yakes and her 12-year-old daughter, Adriana. The two danced to music around the house and screamed together on roller coasters—still ahead were more adult milestones like travel and love. “I could see it on her face, you know, when the rose is almost ready to open,” Ms. Yakes said, adding that she was excited for the vibrant woman her daughter was becoming.

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That all changed one night in 2020 when Adriana went for a walk with her dog and got caught in the middle of a gang conflict outside a restaurant. “I didn’t know until I lost my daughter that there are different kind of tears,” said Ms. Yakes, 34, who 2 years later still visits Adriana’s grave twice a week. The killing of young Adriana, an innocent bystander, became a prominent part of a steadily swelling epidemic of gun violence in Sweden, which now has some of the highest rates of gun homicides in Europe (Kwai & Mahovic, 2022). Stockholm is now surrounded by suburbs that are home to many migrants who are out of work, have little education, and have not become integrated into general society. One-fifth of Sweden’s ten million people were not born there. Some are from other European countries, and many others have come from recent war zones: Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for example. “Too much migration and too weak integration has led to parallel societies where criminal gangs have been able to grow and gain a foothold,” Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said in August 2020, as she introduced measures expanding police powers and (Kwai & Mahovic, 2022). Nearly all of the parties in the 2020 election campaigned on longer penalties for serious weapons offenses. “In cities [such as] Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg—where a higher proportion of migrants have settled compared with the rest of the nation—the media and residents alike point to two separate worlds: a polished city center emblematic of the nation’s wealth, and poorer, ethnically diverse outer suburbs where police officers carry tourniquets to stem gunshot wounds” (Kwai & Mahovic, 2022). “The prime issue here is the schools and the ability to get to work,” Ms. Sinisalo said, adding that despite supporting harsher laws for gun violence, the tenor of the campaign had shocked her. “Nobody is born criminal,” she said (Kwai & Mahovic, 2022). Gangs? Immigrants? Gun Crimes? Far-right Political Reaction? Neo-Nazism? Hell Seger? Where are we? Some far-right dungeon in the third world? No, we are in Sweden, where “Helg Seger (“Weekend Victory”) which is very close to “Hell Seger,” which, in Swedish, means “Sieg Heil,” the Nazi salute. Welcome to today’s Sweden, where what looks like a simple typo can send shivers down the country’s political spine. The typo was committed by Rebecca Fallenkvist, an activist among the Sweden Democrats, who was describing her party’s 20 per cent of the vote in national elections during September of 2022. Fallenkvist quickly denied Nazi associations, but many people were reminded again that the Swedish Democrats had grown from a negligible faction to a major player on the country’s political equation. The Sweden Democrats are not to be confused with the moderate-to-left US Democrats. The Sweden Democrats emerged as a semi-moderate wing of the Swedish Nazis, who have been saluting “Hell Seger” for several decades. For most of those years, the Swedish Democrats had been a tiny minority in a country known for liberalism and a noticeable lack of political earthquakes. This far-right party received 20 per cent of the vote and, in a parliamentary system,

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became a major player in forming a new government. There’s no doubt about the party’s Nazi origins. The Sweden Democrats began in 1988 from the neo-Nazi BSS “Keep Sweden Swedish,” which capitalizes on increasing inequity, migration, and crime (Asbrink, 2022). According to Tony Gustaffson, a former SD member and historian, 18 of the party’s 30 founders had had Nazi affiliations. Some of them had served in Hitler’s elite Waffen SS. In 1995, the SD set out to change its more obvious markers; uniforms were doffed in 1995, but its basic ideology was not. Immigrants were “persuaded” to go home. Indigenous people (Samis) and Jews were not to be considered as “real Swedes,” although the SD lacked authority to eject them. Even Swedish celebrities who were “not Swedes” were rebuked by the SD.  One of them was Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the national soccer team’s leading scorer, who was born in Malmo, Sweden, but even then was not exempt from pressure from the SD to leave the country. The SD does not take easily to intercultural confusion, and Ibrahimović was born to a Muslim Bosnian father. He is also one of Sweden’s most avidly appreciated athletes in its history. The world, my friends, is a large place. These skirmishes over Sweden’s future cast doubt on appreciation of Sweden’s self-described image of “Swedish exceptionalism,” wherein it was believed to have had evaded most of the world’s economic and material problems. Linus Bylund, the SD’s chief of staff in Parliament, favored screening of journalists working for state radio and television for bias, as defined by the party, a policy that would have been illegal in the United States as a prima facie violation of the First Amendment. According to Jimmie Akesson, SD party leader, those found to be biased under SD’s definition would be labeled as enemies of the nation. Asked whether he preferred Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin, Akesson demurred, refusing to choose. When the SD entered national politics in an election for Parliament in 2010, it polled about 5 per cent. Its vote total rose to double that in 2014 and to 20.6 per cent in 2022, following Sweden’s admission of more than 160,000 Syrian refugees (Asbrink, 2022). By this time, the SD had become the country’s most influential right-wing party, surpassing Moderaterna, Sweden’s second most popular party for more than 40  years. By 2022, only the Social Democratic Party, Sweden’s long-­ dominant left-liberal political organization, outpolled the SD. The SD’s rise paralleled fundamental changes in Sweden’s economy and political landscape within about 30 years. Sweden had been among the most egalitarian nations on Earth. In recent years, however, wrote Elisabeth Asbrink in The New York Times (2022), “Sweden has seen the privatization of hospitals, schools and care homes, leading to a notable rise in inequality and a sense of profound loss. The idea of Sweden as a land of equal opportunity, safe from the plagues of extreme left and extreme right, is gone. This obscure collective feeling was waiting for a political response—and the Sweden Democrats have been the most successful at providing it. It was better in the good old days, they say, and people believe them. Back to red cottages and apple trees, to law and order, to women being women and men being men” (Asbrink, 2022).

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In the race for votes, the other parties have found themselves mimicking the Swedish Democrats, but this approach only increased the SD’s share of votes. “In a little more than 12 years, [the] Sweden Democrats have managed to compete with the Social Democrats for working-class voters, with Moderaterna for the support of entrepreneurs, and with the Centre Party among the rural population,” wrote Asbrink (2022). Some supporters of the older parties reacted by shunning the SD’s new supporters, which stiffened their backs (Asbrink, 2022). Long Sweden’s dominant party, The Social Democrats, in 2022, were unable to form a government without aid from the Swedish Democrats, making the party an essential and necessary ally in the math of parliamentary politics. Commented Asbrink (2020): “Effectively a kingmaker, the party is now one of the most successful far-right parties in Europe since World War II.” That is how the positions of the Swedish Democrats, with 20 per cent of the votes, play such an outsized role among Swedes who are looking for solutions to gang violence, drug trafficking, and rising murder rates (Asbrink, 2022). Steven Erlanger and Christina Anderson of The New York Times characterized the rise of the Swedish Democrats as “a slow-moving earthquake,” which while it “seemed inevitable, still had the ability to shock” (2022). After the mid-September elections, the commentators did not widely compare the rise of the SD to Donald J. Trump’s once-unexpected takeover of the United States’ Republican Party, but the elements of race and class, fears of immigration, gun violence, drugs, struggles over populism, etc. are very familiar in the United States, but in Sweden? Is it that “The world still regards Sweden as a bedrock of Nordic liberalism”? (Erlanger & Anderson, 2022). That’s one stereotype that has gone out of practice, and the Swedish Democrats trade in the wish and hope that it can be recaptured.

3.42 Right-Wing Nationalism Elsewhere in Europe This kind of political high drama is hardly new to Europe, even if raises blood pressure in Sweden. Norway has its Progress Party. Denmark has a People’s Party, France has Marine Le Pen, and Italy has Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy, which grew out of Mussolini’s Fascist Party. No one thus far has straight-up called any of these the rancid spawn of Hitler or Stalin’s holocausts. When the pieces of today’s political puzzles have been set, they will include Yladimir Putin’s bloody attempt to pry independence from the fingers of Ukrainians. Anna Wieslander, chairwoman of Sweden’s Institute for Security and Development, said of the far-right’s gains, “In a way, their success is not so surprising, given that no government dealt really with the migration issue, which has been there for years, affecting society more and more, and with the way crime has been tied to immigrant groups” (Erlanger & Anderson, 2022). The Social Democrats have moved further to the right to appeal to Swedish Democratic voters’ popular issues on immigration, relaxation of strict environmental regulations, immigration, and crime. To join a coalition, the Sweden Democrats

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wanted specific goals regarding schools, immigration, culture, and criminal-justice policy with “watchdogs” in lieu of ministers in every applicable department to ensure that popular right-wing policies will be followed.

3.43 Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum Given the fact that the United States (its 50 states and preceding colonies) has been expanding its national territories for more than four centuries (and become the wealthiest nation on Earth), we can’t let its birthing pass in the context of nationalism. For those who have lived here most of our lives (excepting, in my case, several years on some of the country’s several hundred military bases “overseas”), we know our own surroundings like a fish knows water. Is it remarkable that so many people in other countries speak English with our accent, wear our basketball shoes, buy them in shopping centers, watch our movies, and compose their work on keyboards designed in Silicon Valley? Are does anyone notice anymore? What compelled the United States of “America” to establish a worldwide empire around the world? Various interpretations combine business, military prowess, theology, and other elements. Early residents of the area that European immigrants came to call “New England” called their new home—“a city on a hill,” with theological overtones. The Puritans built an overtly religious colony from which Roger Williams and his associates escaped to begin Rhode Island (started as Providence Plantations). The first continent-wide term that captured a nearly religious aim to colonize the body of the “Lower 48” was “Manifest Destiny,” first coined in the mid-nineteenth century by John O’Sullivan. The “Americans” (the term was new then) were assumed to be so virtuous, and the continent was assumed to be their God-bestowed promised land. Expressions of these assumptions spun off in various specific ways (Brigham Young, e.g., declared Utah their Promised Land, on very religious grounds). For many immigrants, “Manifest Destiny” had no specific name; “Manifest Destiny” came later. If the place and the time had a name, it was “opportunity.” Despite some resistance, American Indians suffered greatly, and their population declined from bullets, alcoholism, and disease as they lost all but a tiny fraction of their pre-1492 land base, along with languages and other attributes of culture. President Andrew Jackson told non-Indian Americans that Removal would benefit Native Americans. A century later, as he set out to remove Slavs, Jews, and others from Europe, Adolph Hitler paraphrased Jackson, probably without realizing it. When he looked in a mirror, Adolph Hitler never said to himself: “There stands the murderer of millions.” Instead, he saw himself as a prophet of rejuvenation for Reich und Volk. Jackson told America that Removal of indigenous peoples lit the lamp of civilization. Hitler’s was one of several political ideologies that historian John C. Mohawk examines as motors of oppression in Utopian Legacies (2000). “Nazism was a revitalization movement, complete with its own vision of utopia, its

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rationalizations for conquest and plunder, and an ability to disarm ordinary people’s sense of morality and to plunge an entire nation...into an orgy of violence and murder,” wrote Mohawk in a masterfully written, wide-ranging historical account which analyzes why utopian dreams so often turn into searing, nasty realities. Vasily Grossman, a largely forgotten author who wrote in the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century, concisely dissected Hitler’s thought process: “In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that equality benefits only the weak, that progress in the world of nature is achieved solely through the destructive force of natural selection, and that the only possible basis for human progress is racial selection, the dictatorship of race” (Smith, 2019, 81)—the dictatorship of race, that is, assuming Aryan superiority. To learn how to erect the legal infrastructure for his dictatorship of race, Hitler’s legal scions looked to the United States’ treatment of American Indians and African Americans during the nineteenth century.

3.44 The Nazi Manifest Destiny Some may find calling on Hitler’s writings in an American context far-fetched. Serious consideration of such parallels is, at the very least, painful for Americans’ self-image, especially considering that the United States went to war, at great human cost, to defeat Nazism. Why pull out the Nazi “card?” The comparison is necessary because it springs from Hitler’s own writings. Also, any honest student of history must recognize that comparisons with Hitler and Stalin suffuse some Native American minds when Andrew Jackson’s name is mentioned in the context of Removal because the coercion their ancestors endured resembled the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the assignment of many people to prison camps under the Nazi regime. In addition, Hitler subscribed to the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands (2010), describes how Hitler compared the twentieth-­century German thrust eastward across Europe to US expansion westward during the nineteenth century. “The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny,” Snyder wrote. Hitler phrased it as lebensraum—literally, in German, room to live, or territory into which to expand—that is, as O’Sullivan had framed it in 1839, “Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (Hietala, 2003, 255). As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the American Indians. Hitler, as he went about killing the Jews, was supposed to have said: “Who, after all, speaks of the Armenians?” It was, however, also “the world’s proven indifference to the fate of the Apaches [and other Native Americans] that gave him the confidence that he would get away with it” (Gopnik, 2012, 115). And, one might add, to pursue this policy with a horrid Teutonic efficiency. Snyder (2012, 160) described how Hitler compared the twentieth-­ century German thrust eastward across Europe to US expansion

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westward during the nineteenth century. Hitler himself said that the Volga [River], in Russia, would become Germany’s Mississippi River. James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, makes a case in Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017) that US racial law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany, given that Jim Crow laws were in place as the Nazi doctrine evolved, shaping the Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. According to Princeton University Press, publisher of the book, “Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies” (Princeton, 2017; Whitman, 2017). In 1928, less than two generations after the massacre at Wounded Knee closed the US frontier (1890), Whitman (2017, 9) finds Hitler admiring how the Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the United States as nothing less than “the one state” that has made progress toward the creation of a “healthy” racist order worthy of emulation in Germany’s own Nuremberg laws (Whitman, 2017, 2). Roland Freisler, who was known as the “hanging judge” of the National Socialist People’s Court, said that as a model, US jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly” (Whitman, 2017,160). “Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and perhaps even eager interest in the American example in race law.” It constituted their “classic example,” wrote Whitman (2017, 4). Mass-circulation Nazi magazines carried detailed articles (with maps) describing US miscegenation laws forbidding mixed-race marriage and intercourse, state by state. Some of the same magazines endorsed lynching of blacks to limit any increase of their population, as “the natural resistance of the Volk to an alien race that is attempting to gain the upper hand” (Whitman, 2017, 62, 65). Nazi authors drew parallels between the US “Negro problem” and their “Jewish problem,” and, rather commonly, the Ku Klux Klan was recognized as “the fascists of America” (Whitman, 2017, 66, 69). The National Socialist Handbook on Law and Legislation closed its chapter on how to build a race-based state with a salute to the United States as being alone in the world as the one nation that had achieved the “fundamental recognition” of racism’s truths (Whitman, 2017,160). Whitman argues that the Nazis believed that the United States offered “the model of miscegenation legislation” (2017, 78), with 30 states legally forbidding interracial marriage and other forms of sexual liaison during the time of the Nazi regime. Very few other societies criminalized interracial marriage. The United States, in various jurisdictions, not only deemed such acts as criminal, but required prison terms as long as 10 years upon conviction. German jurists became eager students of the United States’ racial-sexual landscape through the studies of Heinrich Krieger, a young Nazi lawyer, who assembled a compendium of US miscegenation laws by state that eventually was published in the National Socialist Handbook on Law and Legislation. Krieger spent two semesters as an exchange student (1933–1934) at the University of Arkansas Law School. Whitman develops this connection, which includes a detailed description of Krieger’s book, Race Law in the United States,

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and its influence on Nazi jurists as they formulated a new German legal code (2017, 113–123). In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “As the ‘Aryans’ of the American continent cleared the ‘wild soil and made a stand against the natives, ‘more and more [white] settlements sprang up in the land….Germanic inhabitants of North America rose to be masters of the continent” (Hitler, 1925–1927, 139, 286, 304, 646). Hitler paid detailed attention to the “Nordic” character of the pioneers to the point where he imagined covered wagons—prairie schooners!—conveying large numbers of land-­ hungry German yeoman farmers to new homes across the broad expanse of rich Polish, Baltic, Ukrainian, and Russian farmland, having exercised their Aryan “right” to kill or imprison its indigenous Slavs, just as European immigrants had done less than a century before on the American prairies and plains (Kakel, 2011, 35). Hitler admired the ease of logical justification implied by the assumed racial superiority of Manifest Destiny and applied it to the doctrine of Lebensraum, at the expense of Jews and Slavs. “Before and during the Third Reich,” wrote Carroll P. Kakel, “The Mystique of the American ‘frontier’ would become an avocation of many other National Socialist ‘true believers.’ In their view, the Eastern Lebensraum would be to Germany what the ‘frontier’ was to America: the foundation of future global power” (Kakel, 2011, 35). Hitler’s American frontier fetish permeated Nazi propaganda generally. Wendy Lower wrote in Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine: “Nazi propaganda compared the European ‘East’ to the United States West of the nineteenth century[,] containing frequent laudatory references to the North American ‘frontier,’ and Nazi propaganda, songs, photos, and films featured ethnic German settlers driving covered wagons eastward decorated with portraits of the Fuhrer” (Lower, 2005, 19). The SS planner Conrad Meyer authored a General Plan East that described cleansing the Slavs’ homelands’ native populations to make way for German immigrants in this “alien wilderness,” the “Wild East…for Germany, lies in Eastern Europe (Blackbourn, 2007, 296). In Der Untermensch (The Subhumans), under the signature of Heinrich Himmler, the East was touted as a land of rich black earth that rivaled California, a paradise (Lower, 2005, 19). Paraphrasing Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man,” a German newspaper headlined “Go East, Young Man,” echoing Nazi race-based fantasies” (Mazower, 2008, 583).

References Adolf Hitler’s birthplace may be seized by Austria and Torn down to prevent Neo-Nazi pilgrimage. ABC News. Retrieved July 12, 2016., from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-­07-­13/ austria-­moves-­to-­seize-­hitlers-­birthplace/762354 Alexander, D. (2022, April 5). Trump’s net worth has jumped an estimated $600 million since he left office. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/04/05/trumps-­ net-­worth-­has-­jumped-­an-­estimated-­600-­million-­since-­he-­left-­office/?sh=6f19d4154227

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Gopnik, A. (2012, October 29 and November 5). Faces, places, spaces: The renaissance of geographic history. The New Yorker, 108, 115. Grafton, A. (2008, December). Mein Buch. The New Republic. Griswold, E. (2022, November 7). State of denial. The New Yorker, 20–26. Hamman, B. (1999). Hitler’s Vienna: A dictator’s apprenticeship. Oxford University Press. Harper’s Index. (2023, May 9). Hietala, T. R. (2003). American exceptionalism and empire. Cornell University Press. Hitler, A. Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944. Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens. H.R. Trevor-­ Roper, eds. New York: Enigma Books; October 17, 1941 and August, 1942, 55, 469. Hitler, A.. (1999). Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim. Mariner Books Edition. Houghton-Mifflin [1925-1927]. Hitler House in Austria to be Demolished after Long Row. (2016, October 17). BBC.com. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-­europe-­37682298 Hitler’s birth house to host charity rather than face demolition. (2016, December 15). Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.haaretz.com/world-­news/europe/1.759339 Horowitz, J. (2022, September 25). Italy live updates: Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right party leads in voting. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/25/world/ italy-­elections Human Rights Watch. (2023). World report 2023. Germany: Events of 2022. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/world-­report/2023/country-­chapters/germany Inside the ‘Neo-Nazi Village’ of Jamel. (2017). BBC News. Retrieved September 6, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-­europe-­37280504/inside-­the-­neo-­nazi-­village-­of-­jamel Jackson, A. (1830). Second Annual Message to Congress, 1830. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved from https://www.presidency.ucsb/?pid=67087 Jackson, A. (1837). Farewell Address. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved from https:// www.presidency.ucsb/?pid=67087 Jefferson, T. (1809, April 27). Letter to James Madison. In The papers of Thomas Jefferson, retirement series (5 vols). Princeton University Press, 2004-2008, 169. Jones, R. E. (2016). Emancipation of the Russian nobility, 1762-1785 (p. 293). Princeton University Press, 1973. Kakel, C. P., III. (2011). The American west and the Nazi east: A comparative and interpretive perspective. Palgrave/MacMillan. Katell, A. (2023, February 27). Putin: Russia can’t ignore NATO countries’ nuclear capability. In Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, A-7. Kaufman, A.. (2022, October 31). Xi Jinping cements control after 20th party Congress. China Digital Times. Retrieved from https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/10/ xi-­jinping-­cements-­control-­after-­20th-­party-­congress/ Kershaw, I. (2007). Fateful choices: Ten decisions that changed the world, 1940-1941: The American west and the Nazi east. The Penguin Press. Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A biography. W. W. Norton. Khromeychuk, O. (2022, November 1). Putin says Ukraine doesn’t exist. That’s why he’s trying to destroy it. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ ukraine-­war-­national-­identity.html Klein, E. (2022, November 9). A powerful theory of why the far right is thriving. Across the country. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ezra-­ klein-­podcast-­pippa-­norris.html Koppel, T. (1998, January 13). Hate web sites and the issue of free speech. ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/dblack/nightline011398.htm Kwai, I., & Mahovic, A. (2022, September 10). Gun violence epidemic looms large over a Swedish election. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/ sweden-­election.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article Lederer, E. (2022, September 8). US: Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians forced to Russia. Associated Press. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/article/russia-­ukraine-­ united-­s tates-­n ations-­l inda-­t homas-­g reenfield-­9 fda3a35846a332f593ca50882c47 2ea?

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Chapter 4

Ultranationalism as a Form of Mass Insanity

“…step[ping] the short distance from nationalism to fascism.” —Shaw, Helen. “Georgia on Our Mind.” The New Yorker, March 27, 2023.

Invocation of “nationalism” or “God”(or both at once) as a justification for using guns to maul babies (even if the rationale is wholly phony) can elicit the kind of behavior and justification that would be legally and sociably inexcusable, or at least a felony in any other context. I often thought about such ideas back when I was 18 years old; the war du jour was in Vietnam. I was prime draft age, and the Port Angeles, Washington, draft board was looking at my file. The draft was being run as a lottery back then, according to birthdays, at a national level. My birthday was ranked at 155 that year, and I was relieved when the call-up reached 151 and stopped. Fewer than half a dozen more birthdays, and I might have been facing some existential changes in my life. One 20-mile ferry ride, and I could have dodged the draft in Victoria, British Columbia. Fortunately, I didn’t have to flee, nor explain my move to my two-star admiral father or my three-star general uncle. I was lucky. I really had no interest in deciding whether to shoot (or be shot at) by Vietnamese people in their own native land, even if some of Richard Nixon’s advisors thought that the Vietnamese were fronting for the Communist Chinese and the Soviet Union. For that, we were being told, the Commies might invade our country, something that most of my 18-year-old high school cohort just did not believe. More than 60 years later, I watched Russia’s president Vladimir Putin order his troops into war with Ukraine for some equally fallacious reasons. The contemplation of war can cause some conquest-minded warmongers to spout off some supremely ridiculous lies. Putin justified his troops’ invasion of Ukraine with his belief that they were fascists and Nazis. Never mind that their president, Volodymyr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_4

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Zelenskyy, is Jewish, which indicates just how inept a liar Putin had become when he sought a rationale for war.

4.1 Excuses for War In fact, the only reason for invading Ukraine, in Putin’s imagination, was to extend Russia’s borders back to the last days of the czars’ imperium, before their fall to Lenin’s aborning Soviet Union. Putin argued that Ukraine was a fake nation. The Ukrainians, not surprisingly, did not agree, citing a long history of distinct language, culture, history, and battles to defend their right to sovereignty, usually these self-same Russians. The Poles had a similar history, one very large reason why they opened their borders to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The Russians initiated what became known outside the Kremlin as “Putin’s War” began during the first week of February 2022 with waves of ground troops and aircraft. Many of the ground troops, like my friends in 1968, had no reason to kill “the enemy.” The aircraft pilots and those who pummeled Ukrainian cities with missiles didn’t seem to have any idea that under international law, “targets” that had nothing to do with making war (such as elementary schools, shopping centers, apartment blocks, and others) were illegal under international law, as war crimes. The problem was enforcement. Nearly all of the Russians’ targets were civilian, and the Ukrainians had a nation to protect. The Russians fought like unwilling conscripts in someone else’s home, which they were. After a few months of slow-motion defeat, Putin called up 300,000 more draftees and made any dissent, even holding a blank sheet of paper in public subject to a 10-year prison sentence. Even calling a war (instead of a “special military operation”) was deemed a punishable offense. Some of the Russian conscripts were sent into battle without uniforms, food, functioning weapons, or even combat boots. Cars containing young men lined up for miles at border crossings to get out of Putin’s autocracy. It all reminded me again of Vietnam, when classmates in Port Angeles with lower draft-lottery numbers than mine were eyeing the shores of immigrantfriendly Canada, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Russians also seemed to be nastier, shooting and looting their way into Ukraine, stealing historically precious artwork and then falling back in the face of very motivated Ukrainian armed forces. Russians also were detaining Ukrainian civilians and military personnel in “Filtration” camps, where captives were subjected to “widespread practice of torture [and other] cruel treatment[s]….including beatings, sleep deprivation, forced labor…mock executions, unprovoked shooting, and threats to bring harm to detainees families.” Some of the prisoners told investigators ex post facto that the captors “touched my head and genitalia with a metal rod charged with electricity.” In addition, captors hit prisoners with ramrods and held them against ceilings, pouring cold water over their bodies head to toe in freezing temperatures. Captors’ heads were placed inside gas masks with air vents blocked,

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bringing them close to suffocation—close enough to hurt, but not to kill. Two captives were shot as others were forced to watch (Kortava, 2022, 32).

4.2 The Monstrosity of Evil Enhanced by Ultranationalism War always has been an excuse to engage in the world’s most inexcusable behavior—conduct bereft of reason, decency, or humanity, a sort of mass insanity. The monstrosity of evil enhanced by ultranationalism enabled Vladimir Putin’s Russia to invade Ukraine for no reason except Putin’s red-hot lust for empire, which is how he justified pounding the people of a sovereign republic into a world of suffering in bombed-out homes, continuing conquest in broken homes and lives, their dying moans music to his ears. Let the Ukrainians set a foot (or a missile) into Russian territory, and Putin would at least rattle his pile of nukes. Ultranationalism is never fair. Putin pounds Ukraine into splinters and ashes, but let Ukraine step on a roach in Russia and Putin will whine like an offended baby. Likewise, the United States, so virtuous at defending Ukraine in our times, reached its present proportions by expanding over much of a continent, killing about 90 per cent of its indigenous inhabitants over more than four centuries, behind nationalistic banner of “manifest destiny,” playing a major role in winning two world wars while assembling the largest world empire in human history. Many Americans do not call it that, but the “land of the free and the home of the brave” has about 100 military bases sea-to-shining sea, and for thousands of miles beyond, much of it is composed of Hollywood movies, Nikes, computer soft and hardware, Big Macs, and KFC, baseball teams, and shopping centers (as well copious stores of weapons, nuclear and otherwise. America is also a dream for improved lives for millions of people who wish to immigrate, a desire that, in its numbers, exceeds any in world history. These desires for improved lives have never stripped the United States of its imperial tendencies. The country has its own ultranationalist tendencies (take a penetrating look at its Republican right-wing ideology). The United States also has all sorts of other nationalistic tentacles. Who wears Russian basketball shoes, or watches Russian blockbuster movies? American popular culture enhances the intensity of American nationalism as much as its armed forces. The media are American and, if one wishes to take part in international conversation, virtual or personal communication is usually done these days in English, on computers first developed (but not assembled) in the United States. Putin can only dream of such an empire, so smoothly and seamlessly spread across its continent, and the world. In the history of planet-girding nationalism, much has been said recently about the ascendancy of China, with its billion and a half people, burgeoning industrial sector, and tendency to expand into its neighbors’ spheres of influence, from Tibet to the Muslim Uyghurs (and other peoples) west of the Han Chinese coastline, to Hong Kong, and maybe Taiwan. For centuries, the coastal Han have coveted Taiwan, but the United States Navy patrols commercial sea lanes near Japan and Taiwan.

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War gamers in the Pentagon eyeball models of the Chinese pushing through US lines along Chinese coastlines. In a world where nationalism rides the high saddle, and war is its clarion (despite the urgency of such crises as climate change, the United States Defense Department is still spending billions of dollars preparing for war. So are the military establishments of many other countries. It all seems so ordinary, even at a time when nature tells us more and more often, with greater intensity, that bigger crises await everyone. Still, even now, our war planners are still mainly concerned with the “tyranny of distance,” of the Pacific Ocean between the US West Coast and China’s east coast. The fact that the United States maintains defenses within sight of Han China, with allies in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, tells us something about who holds the cards in the nationalistic world. Another fact that only rarely has been mentioned is that trade in food is a wellspring of nationalism. China’s 1.4 billion people need to eat every day, and, thus, China is by far the world’s largest importer of food. The world’s biggest exporter of food is the United States. Thus, according to one author, “Peter Zeihan, a demographer, who has written extensively about China, told me that a cessation of imports would likely result in famine. A war with the U.S. would be the end of China as a modern state” (Filkins, 2022, 44). The prospect of war makes any distortion of reality and any infliction of cruelty just another nationalistic war game. When Putin called the Ukrainians “Nazis,” they tossed it back at him. In this name game, he became “Putler,” push-broom moustache, and all. Putin tended to turn reality on its head in ways that might surprise even George Orwell. In a speech preparing the ideological context for the Russian invasion of Ukraine February 2022, he warmed up the Nazi card by calling Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, a “radical and a nationalist” (Gessen, 2022, 34). He said that Ukraine had no right to exist as a state and that it was practicing genocide against Russian speakers within its borders—a finely fitting Orwellian excuse for killing thousands of Ukrainian civilians during the upcoming months. Putin’s delivery “sounded like warmed-over segments from Hitler’s 1938 Sudetenland speech delivered in the run-up to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia” wrote Masha Gessen in The New Yorker (2022, 35). That’s it: accuse enemies of being Nazis and then rationalize it all by paraphrasing Hitler. “Unlike the last war this war will leave ample visual evidence” wrote Gessen—which is to say, inert bodies and a crumbling urban infrastructure, none of which should have occurred in the first place. Extreme ultranationalism can twist individuals’ perception of their world in astounding ways, from blind attachment to abject rejection, as illustrated briefly here by two reactions to the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich. One comes from formerly affluent people who had been close to der Führer as the allies closed in on Berlin during May of 1945. A letter was sent by Magda Goebbels to her son Harald Quandt, who was being held in an Allied prison camp; his mother was about swallow cyanide with Hitler and several other prominent Nazis in a private bunker in Berlin. My beloved son!

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By now we have been in the Führerbunker for six days already—papa, your six little siblings, and I, to give our national socialistic lives the only way possible, [for an] honorable end….Our glorious idea is perishing—and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, which is why I brought the children here as well. They are too good for the life that will come after us, and a merciful God will understand when I give them deliverance myself [death in a drugged state by cyanide]. You will live on, and I have only one request for you: Never forget that you are a German, never act dishonorably, and make sure that through your life, our deaths will not have been in vain (de Jong, 2022, 181–182). Within days of the suicides at the Führerbunker, concentration camp inmates were being shuttled from camp to camp as slave labor for war-material factories, some of them too sick and weak to travel. Regardless, they were forced to walk in what became death marches. Anyone who fell by the wayside was shot to death on the spot. The marches soon became too large to leave hundreds of bodies at trackside as obvious proof of war crimes, so when one train was blocked by several others that had been bombed out. The local Nazi leader decided to lock the captives in a barn on the edge of town [Gardelegen] and set it on fire. SS forces threw hand grenades onto the burning structure and gunned down prisoners who tried to flee. On April 15, 1945, American soldiers discovered the charred bodies of 1016 people. Many had been burned alive (de Jong, 2022, 189).

Utter disgust (and there was a great deal of it by this time) may be represented by US Army Col. George Lynch, who addressed Gardelegen’s residents 10 days after the massacre:

“Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither—it is the responsibility of the German people…your so-called Master Race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty, and sadism. You have lost the respect of the civilized world” (de Jong, 2022, 189). And so died the Nazis’ fever dreams of ultranationalistic empire.

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4.3 Speaking of Forced Marches Late in 2022, speaking on the Cable News Network’s (CNN’s) “State of the Union,” Liz Cheney, a member of the U.S.  House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, pushed for more aggressive actions, hopefully to halt the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including European embargoes on Russian oil and gas imports and the United States’ delivery of advanced weaponry to Ukraine. From former U.S. President Donald Trump, titular head of the U.S. Republican Party, these proposals were met with stone-faced silence. Before the war, he had characterized Putin as a close friend. While he was president, Trump hung a large portrait of Andrew Jackson in his Oval Office, in full view of television cameras while he worked at his desk or signed bills into law. Trump borrowed liberally from Jackson, the United States’ sixth president, who thought that the forced migrations of Native Americans (such as the Trail of Tears and many more) were good for them. We have no evidence that Putin had studied Jackson, but both seemed to think that lethal oppression was good for whomever his state directed it. Putin, like Trump, invented his own reality and then forced people who wanted nothing to do with him into it. So it was with Jackson and the Cherokees, and many other indigenous tribes and nations, who were forced on their own death marches. Putin seemed to think the same of the Ukrainians. Two things about the United States should have been obvious to Putin: 1) Despite obvious internal conflicts, its population as a whole supports the US Constitution, including its First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech. Secondly, it is strong enough internally and externally to let debate run its course. In another country, the sizzling spew of Fox News might have a harder time surviving if the “wrong” party was in power. As it is, Fox lies robustly and has been utilized countless times by Russian commentators (Thompson, 2022). As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, one of several Fox News hosts, and a master of the Big Lie, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far. “No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said. Fox’s memory has been conveniently short, having forgotten not only Vietnam but many more expropriations of life and property from perceived enemies, foreign and domestic. While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s screaming ultranationalistic audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the average U.S. citizen is simply horrified by what is happening.” Where did Fox and Vovosti get their opinion polls on this one? Three generations ago, such a smoochfest between a capitalistic company such as Fox and the rabid Commies at a Russian media corporation would have been a kiss of death for the former. These days, right-wing narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of the ultranationalistic American media, “reinforc[ed] and [fed] each other” (Gessen, 2022). Along the way, Russian media had increasingly seized on Fox News’s

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prime-­time targets, its wildly opinionated propaganda and even the network’s active online comments section—all of which often found fault with the Biden administration—to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests. “Mr. [Tucker] Carlson was a frequent reference for Russian media, but other Fox News personalities—and the occasional news update from the network—were also included” (Thompson, 2022).

4.4 The World Between Putin’s Ears Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who made several false claims about Putin’s war on Ukraine (including that Russia never attacked it), singled out Fox News for praise. “We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media,” Lavrov told the state television station RT, adding that “only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view” (Thompson, 2022). By the same standards, the Russian media that so avidly quote Fox have been repeating the Kremlin line. These are not my words, but they bear repeating here: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” The Russians, during much of the same time, had built an empire under the guise of a fake international workers’ paradise under the ideological umbrella of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). When the USSR cracked apart, the Russians were left with their former Oligarchy. Under billionaire Putin, the Russians, in a trail of war-crime blood, were trying to wrench Ukraine into its empire. “It’s like I can see a headline, ‘How could people kill thirty-four thousand other humans in the space of two days?’” asked Oleh Shovenko, a Ukrainian, describing one of many Nazi massacres in his homeland. “I guess I’ve learned that social progress is like a house of cards. If you have no running water, no heat, and no electricity, it’s easy to spread xenophobia” (Gessen, 2022, 30). Roughly 80 years later, “bombs began to fall on Kyiv again. In Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson, and other cities, people struggled to survive without heat or running water, and with dwindling supplies of food. Millions of refugees, almost all of them women and children, streamed into Europe. Bodies piled up in bombed-out buildings, and in the streets. The dead numbered in the many of thousands. In the first days of April [2020], when Russian troops, they left behind mass graves, streets strewn with bodies of civilians, with their hands tied behind their backs, executed at close range; and bodies they had attempted to burn” (Gessen, 2022, 131). Hate is often someone else’s good cause. When Hitler looked in a mirror, he didn’t imagine a bloodthirsty killer. He saw the savior of the Aryan race. He saw the conservator of that race in the face of its destruction by genetic pollution. Hitler did not look in the mirror and see the murderer of six million Jews and millions more living, breathing human beings. He saw a good and necessary preservation of his party and his people.

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Likewise, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his ill-trained and equipped ground troops into Ukraine early in 2022, he did not see a sovereign nation of people with rights to their own homes, food, hot water, and happiness. He saw collateral damage in the path of his duty to restore Russia to the borders of its former empire—a good and necessary thing to him and his fellow oligarchs, an urge so powerful that he would kill many thousands of Ukrainians and as many of his fellow Russians, suffocate their freedom until any spoken word contrary to his own could land the speaker into prison for as many as 15 years. Putin’s drive, like Hitler’s, was for lands to subjugate and dominate—lebensraum—and his drive was so powerful that his forces committed war crimes more gruesome and numerous than anyone since Hitler and Pol Pot. When his soldiers shot civilian Ukrainians in the head and left their dying bodies on muddy roads, Putin’s associates fabricated stories about how Westerners who were not even present had killed them. He sent out “independent” polltakers who supposedly asked whether people approved of his conduct. Faced with as many as 15 years in prison for voicing even the faintest peep of opposition, shut off from any contrary opinion in the mass media, of course they said they agreed with the aggression. Calling the incursion a “war” in public was a violation of Putin’s war protocol. Contrary public opinion has been completely shut down by edict of the Kremlin. All of this and more fed Putin’s drive of self-righteous nationality to the point where his air force on April 8, 2022, bombed a rail station full of civilian refugees in Bucha and left their bodies—collateral damage in the way of Tsar Putin’s self-­ supposed march into Russia’s imperial history. There existed no war crimes in Putin’s rationalization, as he dreamt of glory, nor in Hitler’s. War is nothing but sheer abject terror launched and maintained, in Hitler’s case, with slave labor, murder, and seizure of Jewish (and others’) assets. The only war crimes, in their eyes, were committed by their enemies, the now-silent dead, killed by the signatories of murderers, the slave masters involved in a self-justifying harvest of hate. Even as Ukrainians fled the new war zone by any means possible, Russian forces attacked civilian areas in eastern Ukraine on Sunday April 10, Palm Sunday, as terrified residents joined an exodus of Ukrainians in the tens of thousands fleeing westward, heeding warnings by authorities that Russian troops were massing for a major assault. If Putin’s Russia could crush Ukraine with missile-inflicted winter starvation, whose country comes next? Putin has long insisted that Ukraine, to him, is just a first step in a bigger program to advance Russia’s imperial plan; Belarus, as a close neighbor, could be next, if not for its Putin-compliant dictatorial ruler. Poland, perhaps? It has a centuries-old target as Russian casus belli, and an especially vibrant, but cautious, fear, and hatred of its eastern neighbor, which caused Poland to jump into NATO soon as possible after the Russian boot was removed from its neck about 1990. By mid-April 2022, Russians had bombed the small city of Mariupol into rubble and killed 10,000 to 20,000 people, according to city administrators. The Russians moved several portable crematoria to the ruins of a shopping center to burn the bodies without any attempt at identification.

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Not all of the victims were Ukrainians. Despite warnings from their superiors, Russian soldiers camped in the still-hot ruins around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and became very ill from radiation poisoning. Their commanders never told them that the soil was still poisoned from a much earlier nuclear accident. The effects of radiation poisoning can worsen and cause damage long after initial, sustained exposure.

4.5 In War Crimes, I See Wounded Knee In 2022, via satellites, allies were able to see at least 57 Ukrainians dead at a train station near Kyiv, all civilian refugees, victims of Russian missiles, as many more war crimes are committed in Ukraine. We are not alone in mourning; I see Kyiv; I see Wounded Knee, where frozen bodies were left to repose in frozen trenches of what is now known as South Dakota in 1890, which remind me of Syria, where Putin may be known to infamy for his scorched-earth tactics, where he became known as “the Butcher,” who commits war crimes with pride. In Vietnam, the peoples whose straw villages had been torched were dehumanized as “gooks” only about four generations after the indigenous peoples of America had been sacrificed to Manifest Destiny. Three generations after that, Putin was calling Ukrainians “Nazis,” as a stereotypical excuse for his invasion. The lies that support war do not change much. The faces and the names change, from Wounded Knee to Da Nang, to Izium, Dnipro, and many others, targets of Russians in eastern Ukraine (What Happened, 2022). The self- justifications of Uber-nationalistic war take strange ideological twists and turns, as always.

4.6 American Domestic “Barbarians at the Door” In the United States, meanwhile, most members of the political class had long forgotten the indigenous peoples and Black slaves on whose backs our own empire has been built. Charles M. Blow, a columnist at the New York Times, reviewed the fragile nature of US politics, the narrow margins of victory and defeat, and the systemic quirks which often provide disputable results. “This is all to say that we are always a cat’s whisker away from calamity,” Blow wrote. “The same dilemma has plagued this year’s [2022s] midterms as control of Congress hung in the balance, with the anti-democracy barbarians at the door,” he wrote (Blow, 2022). The Republicans were developing a strategy of disputing the legitimacy of any election that they had lost into a “test of faith,” a crucible through which the Trump-­ loyal must pass to be regarded by them as modern Republicans in good standing. “You are true only if you swallow the lie….For many Trump followers, the lie is gospel….This mass delusion will not be easy to dislodge,” in a situation in which one side acts on data and the other on dogma, wrote Blow. The same could be said

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of mass political delusions in other times and places. “And that is precisely what is happening” wrote Blow. “America is one bad election away from being a memory” (Blow, 2022). Erza Klein, another Times columnist, described the same situation, on the same day, with what had become familiar foreboding: “Not all crises begin with a political showdown. Some could come from a virus mutating toward greater lethality. Some could come from a planet warming outside the narrow band that has fostered human civilization. Some could come from the expansionary ambitions of dictators and autocrats” (Klein, 2022). On battlefields in Ukraine during September and October 2022, Russian front lines receded substantially, with Ukrainian ground troops making good use of weaponry, including artillery, supplied by the US and Western European counties. Russia continued to pour missiles into civilian infrastructure near Ukraine’s cities, crippling power, water, and other infrastructure of daily, civilized life, with the aim of making people suffer as winter set in. Russian soldiers-turned-hooligans stole artwork, raped and tortured men and women in small towns that they had captured, hardening Ukrainian attitudes toward them. So why was Putin so avidly ordering the destruction of Ukraine, its people, and infrastructure? Putin’s reasons sounded like farcical history to most people in the “West,” where annexation sounded like the US annexing, say, Ontario, supported by a line of history turned on its head, such as, for example, justifying the invasion of Ontario on an assertion that Justin Trudeau is a Nazi. Ukraine belonged to Russia according to a number of historical falsehoods. One was that Ukraine was swarming with fascists and Nazis (the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.) Putin made these comments in public, televised across the 11 time zones that comprise Russia. Contradicting him in public was defined as a crime.

4.7 Russians Destroy Infrastructure: Attempt to Make Ukrainian Cities Unlivable Moscow kept up its campaign to destroy civilian infrastructure, in a continuing bid—thus far unsuccessful—to break Ukrainian morale by making homes and cities unlivable. Most Ukrainians struck a defiant posture, as did the English, led by Winston Churchill, under bombardment by Nazi Germany’s rockets during World War II. By early November, as winter descended, Ukraine’s army was still making slow progress in many places, but the Russians’ relentless assault with cheap Iranian drones and missiles had left Kyiv and many smaller cities without power, water, sewer (including toilets), or heat. About 14 million Ukrainians had fled their homes (a third of the country’s population), according to the United Nations (Santora & Nechepurenko, 2022). A major battle was setting up around Kherson, with Ukraine advancing on the city while Russians fled, or dug in for combat. The Russians were reported to be seizing private homes, then evicting residents, and pillaging. The

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movement of heavy artillery suggested that the Russians were preparing to “lay the city to waste” rather than permit Ukrainian troops from occupying it (Santora & Nechepurenko, 2022). With Putin rattling Russian nukes, meanwhile accusing the Ukrainians of building a “dirty bomb,” with a cover of conventional explosive material on the outside and a radioactive center in small bits that could be sprayed over a targeted area. No one admitted to having one, but too much nuke-talk had German diplomats contacting their peers in China, and asking them to lean on the Russians to cut their incendiary talk. Instead, the Russians bombed Ukraine’s drinking water, another piece of necessary civilian infrastructure. Eighty percent of the city was without water…after Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles at Ukraine, though that outage figure was cut in half by evening, officials said. The barrage—like many recently—appeared aimed largely at depriving people not just of fresh water but also of electricity and heat. Hundreds of thousands of people in Kyiv lost power, as did many residents in other cities. Maksym Khaurat, 31, said he and his wife, who have a newborn baby, Miroslava, had already been enduring rolling blackouts, a lack of heat in their apartment and a failing internet connection. The loss of water was different. For the first time, they were unable to fill a glass of water from the tap, take a shower or flush a toilet (Santora & Mpoke Bigg, 2022a, b).

Instead of admitting destruction of civilian infrastructure necessary to maintain life for millions of people, Russia’s Ministry of Defense exercised its sense of alternative reality (e.g., lied) that it had “taken aim at ‘the military control and energy systems of Ukraine.’” In recent weeks, as Russian forces have lost ground in the south and east, they have sharply increased attacks on civilian infrastructure across the country, in an apparent attempt to break Ukrainians’ will by making their cities and towns unlivable. Before those missile and drone barrages began, many people who had fled Kyiv early in the war returned, along with much of the city’s daily activity and energy” (Santora & Mpoke, Bigg 2022a, b). “The blows to the water system on Monday drove many people back to the age-­ old practice of trudging with their own containers to old communal wells or public taps. But Mr. Khaurat’s mood, like that of many of his compatriots, was one of defiance, not defeat, in the face of the war waged by President Vladimir V. Putin. “I am angry,” he said. “Angry at that man in Russia [Putin]. I hate him. Still, he said, many other Ukrainians have suffered far more than he and his family—and they endure. And, he added, “however bad this winter may be, it will be better than living under Russia” (Santora & Mpoke Bigg, 2022a, b). The Russians aimed to blockade Ukrainian grain exports as well, not only to deprive Ukrainians of foreign exchange but also to increase hunger and eventually starvation, hunger among such people as Somalis, a drought-stricken nation that had been obtaining 70 per cent of its grain imports from Ukraine. “Instead of fighting on

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the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter. “Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response’. Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians.” In Ukraine, the air war was widely known as “The Russian energy terror” (Santora & Mpoke Bigg, 2022a, b).

4.8 Context: The “Right” Resurges at the Wrong Time In a world beset by existential questions regarding climate change, the use of nationalism as a to support widespread war could not have come at a worse time. It presaged more conflict over dwindling resources at a time when cooperation must be in order to forestall the steady rise in greenhouse gas levels. It also spurs conflict in a resource-short world overwhelmed by increasing population. Nationalism has been used to justify behavior that no one would otherwise allow in civilized society. It can be used, in fact, to justify behavior that otherwise would be illegal, unnecessary, and counterproductive. Sometimes, nationalistic behavior turns into cultish appeal that defines “in” and “out” groups. One wonders where hate and racism would ever have gotten without definitions of who is contained within a certain group and who is not. Nationalism can give way to political cults that twist minds and start wars. Where would Adolph Hitler have been if he had not had cultish mass appeal to enough Germans to support a mass movement and then establish and maintain a system that massacred Jews and other non-Aryans as scapegoats that took an ill-led nation to begin and maintain the bloodiest war in human history? Visiting Auschwitz, I came away horrified at what kind of cult would support behavior that amounted to a lethal, mass-homicidal mental illness, a murderous crime with millions of victims? Hitler and his supporters shared a view of the world that enshrined racism and hate of “out” groups of many kinds and sought to eradicate them all. The Nazis were addicted to racism and other forms of irrational hatred. They paid a great deal of attention to making members of out-groups suffer under cover of racist nationalism. I recall, at Auschwitz, accounts of prisoners being packed into prison cells sealed tight—so tight that the cells could be drained of oxygen, condemning their occupants to agonizing deaths. The Nazis built prison cells with floors of manure and ceilings 3 feet high, forcing prisoners to run around the inside walls bent at the waist until their spines cracked. In addition, they built their all-too-familiar gas chambers. When the war ended, the Nazis were working on prisons with electrified floors—electric shocks were very painful, as well as fatal, and left no messy gas residues. Nationalism at an innocent stage can involve enjoying one’s own culture and inviting other people to do the same. Nationalism also may morph into a drive for dominance through conquest, compelled by hatred and a lust for power, as well as a quest for power over other peoples by means of torture that may become addicting to a state that defines members of out-groups as subhuman. At its worst, nationalism blinds people as justification of war crimes that no sane person would otherwise

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condone at the cost of lives in the millions. It becomes a form of mass insanity that blocks all rational thought, including international cooperation to confront a shared existential threat such as climate change.

4.9 War Crimes in Ukraine Within 3 months of Russia’s invasion, the United Nations had established a three-­ person Commission of Inquiry to collect reports of torture by Russian forces in Ukraine. “The commission has been documenting cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined,” the panel’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the Commission. “Children have also been killed and injured in indiscriminate attacks with explosive weapons. The exposure to repeated explosions, crimes, forced displacement, and separation from family members has deeply affected their well-being and mental health” (Cumming-Bruce, 2022). Within 4 months of the war’s onset, the UN commission compiled evidence that Russian troops had committed copious crimes, including sexual violence against victims aged 4 to 82 years of age. “We were struck by the large numbers of executions in areas that we had visited,” Mose told the Council. He also said that common features of such killings included “prior detention, hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head, and slit throats” (Cumming-Bruce, 2022). In this war, Russia engaged in some of the worst war crimes known to humankind as its armies raped women and pillaged their homes on their way out of war zones that its forces had previously held. The Russians set up staged referenda in which surviving Ukrainians were forced to endorse the transfer of their lands to the Russian state. Previous polls carried out in Crimea after the Russian seizure in 2014 reported 97 per cent favorable votes with a turnout of more than 80 per cent—a pure sham (Cumming-Bruce, 2022). In the 2022 case, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling the referenda invalid, which didn’t stop any of the Russians’ contorted lies. In the case of Crimea, Russia began to conscript local men into its military by force. Anyone who refused was charged with draft evasion, carrying a prison sentence of 10 to 15  years. As the war continued, the Russians’ strategy evolved into an ever-more intensive campaign to make civilians’ lives untenable by using missiles and drones to destroy apartment blocks and all manner of nonmilitary life, as well as disabling civilian sources of electricity, water, heat, etc. Meanwhile, Russians on the battlefield were losing ground as they shot civilians, raped, and pillaged. Early in the war, finding that its conscript army was unable to stop Ukrainian advances, Russia initiated a draft of more than 300,000 men, whose forced enlistment provoked nationwide resistance in Russia. Protests of the Russian draft spread to more than 100 cities, as September ended. One draft office was shot up and a person killed. About 54 offices were ransacked and then set on fire. Ethnic minorities across the country asserted that they were being drafted in numbers disproportionate to the size of their populations. The

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Crimean Tartars, living on Ukrainian land seized by Russia in 2014, were particularly outspoken. Their land in Crimea had been seized in 2014 by Russia, a land grab “confirmed” by a fraudulent election, of the same sort that were being staged in several eastern Ukraine provinces in September 2022. The Tartars were being drafted in large numbers and told that they would be sent to fight against their fellow Ukrainians. Putin really did not seem to understand that the easiest way to lose a war is to load an army with conscripts who hate the war. The United States poured troops and vast amounts of money into Vietnam for more than a decade before discovering, once again, that war without any sort of commitment is a losing strategy. According to Russian government sources, almost 300,000 young Russian men had evaded the draft by leaving the country by the end of September, including a large number of its most talented workers in many advanced technological fields. At the same time, the Ukrainians who had moved into areas previously held by Russian armed forces were finding hundreds of bodies, mostly civilians, in mass graves. Many were mutilated beyond recognition, far beyond war-crimes standards by any legal measure. By the end of October, according to Ukraine’s Economy Ministry, as many as 130,000 buildings had been destroyed by Russian air attacks in 8 months, including 2400 schools (Stephens, 2022).

4.10 Uber-Nationalism as an Invitation to Torture Torture is not restricted to our time, of course. Most powerful, expanding nations have engaged in it. Examples include ways in which America’s indigenous peoples were treated during the nineteenth century—sexual organs of the dead cut off and paraded along streets (then displayed in theaters), for example. Most scalping was done by the immigrants, not the Native peoples, although popular, publicized images suggested the opposite. Native peoples were lynched, an agonizing form of torture, as well as execution, often after unproven allegations. Stalin’s henchmen took pride in tortures that were uniquely painful. Wrap a prisoner in a wet sheepskin coat and seat him on top of a burning wood stove, for example, as the torturers enjoying watching sizzling flesh and hearing screams for mercy. Men were tortured in front of their wives and children as “eyes were gouged out and his eardrums perforated” before execution (Homans, 2022a, b, 26). The wife and daughter were then sent to the gulags on specious charges. Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin’s major torture supervisors (there were many) specialized in especially painful tortures, sometimes overseeing hundreds of “enemies” slow painful deaths in in one night. One could fall out of Stalin’s favor in an instant. Devotion to torture in pursuit of an ultranationalistic ideology has become a widespread and cruel form of insanity, intensifying as time has passed and the rule of torturing tyrants intensifies, an especially lurid form of massive mental illness. How can nationalism breed such things? I use “nationalism” here as an acceptable word for what before War II might have been called “fascism,” which can be briefly described (from an amalgamation of dictionary and encyclopedia definitions) as a far-right ideology that may begin as a

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nationalist movement in one or more nations. Because most of us live in “nations,” which are defined broadly as places of common birth (although very few “nations” are 100 per cent monocultural in our time), the word has acquired a rather innocent connotation. Fascism, on the other hand, has come to be regarded as a political dirty word in large part because it was used before and during World War II to describe the political behavior of authoritarian dictators such as Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were both described as fascists. “Nationalist,” according to the Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, refers to a person who “strongly identifies with their own nation and vigorously supports its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.” This definition omits any reference to political affiliation or belief, or any tendency for nations that evolve into fascism. History can take some strange turns. Witness: Question—if a political leader keeps a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf at his bedside and consulted it on how to address a political audience; if this person reads very few other books, magazines, or newspapers; if the author of his reading material became known as the murderer of millions of people; and if a number of people are still devoted to his work and historical “accomplishments” today? (NAZI = National German Workers’ Party). So why did Hitler call his party “National[ist]?” Was he a nationalist or a fascist (or both?) Or a mass murderer without a single political inclination? Donald Trump, our bedside reader, has a vocabulary that has been estimated at roughly fourth-grade level, with verbal performance to match. Trump may be using a simplistic speaking style for several reasons. One, of course, is that he is incapable of speaking or reading at a higher level. Another possible line of logic, delineated by Dale Ruff, an independent scholar, in Quora, an Internet forum on the use of language, is that: 1. He usually does not read books, according to his friends. Those who do not read books have a stunted vocabulary picked up from their limited inventory of verbal discourse. 2. He has studied the propaganda-strewn style of Hitler. His ex-wife said the speeches of Hitler were his bedside reading. Trump, in a 1999 Vanity Fair interview, said that a friend gave him Mein Kampf (the friend says it was The New Order by Hitler, a collection of his speeches). 3. According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler learned his propaganda techniques from the American inventor of public relations (then called “commercial propaganda”), Edward Bernays. His major reasoning was: keep it simple and repeat it over and over. A lie, he said, repeated often enough will in time be accepted as the truth. “There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology. (Ruff, 2022).

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4.11 The War That No One Wants When the outcomes of even the most violent of nationalism-infused human wars were limited to the effects of rifle fire by men on horseback and muskets (three human lifetimes ago), the environmental effects on noncombatants and the Earth as a whole were minimal. All of that began to change in the early twentieth century with the invention of tanks and aircraft capable of dropping bombs. Such inventions combined with Albert Einstein’s description of nuclear fission (His famous equation E = mc2 explains the energy released in an atomic bomb but doesn’t explain how to build one). His work and that of other nuclear physicists made possible the most malign outcome of raging nationalism in world history, a weapon that surpassed all others in terms of destructive and ultimately fatal radioactive side effects. These discoveries opened the possibility, augmented by the hydrogen bomb, of a worldwide nuclear war. The invention of the ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) allowed worldwide use of these horrifying weapons in a war that no sane person could want. In fact, Nazi Germany’s scientists were racing to construct an atomic bomb when the United States’ Manhattan Project beat them to it. Given a careful reading of political history and the evolution of war’s weapons, who can argue that leaders of human beings have been sane even most of the time? World War II ended after two uses of these weapons over Japan, as scientists began to estimate the outcome of a massive-scale, worldwide nuclear war. It would truly be the war to end all wars, in which the living would envy the dead because several million people would probably die on the spot or afterward by the torture of radioactive illness. The second most common source of death would be a planet-­ wide “nuclear winter,” because debris would be ejected into the atmosphere by nuclear explosion, blocking much of the sun’s warmth. Ironic, wouldn’t it be, that global warming would be extinguished by a nuclear winter? How many people would starve to death because lack of sunshine would make growth of food crops impossible? We don’t know. We have been living with nuclear weapons for about 80 years now, and perhaps we could get used to it, if a “balance of terror” is an acceptable status quo, as MAD (mutual assured destruction). We are running out of living people who have conducted their lives any other way. Glancing around the world, we see three giga-nations loaded with nukes and ready to use them, or at least rattle them. These three are Russia, China, and the United States, each of which spends considerable time pursuing imperial goals. Russia, under an increasingly repressive Vladimir Putin, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (during which roughly a quarter of its land area seceded as independent nations), reestablished Russia still was the biggest nationalistic empire on the planet (judging by land area), although it has been losing population, now down to about 145 million, which just about equals Bangladesh or half of Indonesia, or less than half that of the United States. China, having not so long ago annexed Tibet and Hong Kong, as well as the land base of the Uyghurs, with an eye on Taiwan, also has been building a surveillance

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state. The United States’ surveillance state is less impressive because the First Amendment of the US Constitution gets in the way, but its imperial reach is larger in extent than anyone else’s, with about 100 military bases worldwide. In its sloppy political way, one of the United States’ two major political parties, the Republicans, was for a time subsumed by a form of ignorant, sloppy quasi-fascism slapped together by Donald J. Trump, who already has served as president for one term and, as this book is being written, has announced a run for a second, even after he falsely claims having won in 2020; lack of creditable support for his assertions has become a mainstay, for Trump, but his full-throated lies resonate with almost a third of the US electorate.

4.12 The War to End All Wars A worldwide nuclear war involving less than 3 per cent of the planet’s nuclear weapon stockpiles may kill as many as a third of Earth’s population within 2 years of its initiation, according to a study at Rutgers University. Scale up the size of a war between Russia and the United States, and the estimated death toll could be three quarters of Earth’s population within 2 years, according to the same study’s estimates. The study was published in Nature Food (Xia et al., 2022). [This study is] “really a cautionary tale that any use of nuclear weapons could be a catastrophe for the world,” said climate scientist and study author Alan Robock, a professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences (Wigglesworth, 2022). “A cautionary tale” is certainly a genteel way of characterizing humankind’s expanding ability to destroy itself less than a century after Albert Einstein discovered how to initiate a nuclear reaction. The timeline is not much different than that estimated for making the planet uninhabitable through climate change. Both have been initiated by human ingenuity as blueprints for self-destruction that are being laid before us as the planet’s major nuclear powers (Russia, the United States) are honing plans for such a war. United Kingdom National Security Advisor Stephen Lovegrove has argued that “The breakdown in dialogue between nations, as well as the loss of safeguards that were created between nuclear superpowers decades ago, have plunged the world into ‘a dangerous new age’” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who also has also has warned that “the prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility” (Wigglesworth, 2022). This “cautionary tale” (how smoothly and plausibly the words roll off the tongue), which “would spark massive firestorms that would rapidly inject sun-blocking soot into the atmosphere, touching off a sudden cooling of the climate,” the researchers theorized, to a range of a possible ice age. Guterres also has been outspoken about getting off fossil fuels within two decades (as of 2023) to stem Earth’s descent into catastrophe via global warming.

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Researchers used climate models to calculate how much smoke would reach the stratosphere—where no precipitation occurs to wash it away—and how this would change temperatures, precipitation, and sunlight. Then they calculated how these changes would affect the production of various crops, as well as how fish would respond to changes in the ocean. As a result, they projected tens of millions of immediate fatalities in the war zone would be followed by hundreds of millions of starvation deaths around the globe.

That’s without taking into account the effects of increased ultraviolet radiation on crops due to the destruction of the ozone layer caused by the heating of the stratosphere, Robock said. Such an effect, which researchers hope to quantify in future studies, would likely worsen the results, he said. “In my opinion, our work is an existential threat [because of] nuclear weapons—it shows you can’t use nuclear weapons,” Robock said. “If you use them, you’re like a suicide bomber. You’re trying to attack somebody else but you’ll die of starvation” (Wigglesworth, 2022). One may add: A suicide bomber on a vast scale.

4.13  Really the War to End All Wars This would surely be (as some commentators said erroneously about World War I as it ended) would not only the “war to end all wars” but also the authors of all wars, if climate change does not end it all first. Ira Helfand, past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, elaborated: “The general public needs to understand the enormity of the danger we face, the immediacy of the threat and the urgency of eliminating these weapons before they eliminate us,” he said (Wigglesworth, 2022). About 127 million people in South Asia would be killed by explosions, fires, and radiation, the study estimated. An estimated 37 million metric tons of soot would be injected into the atmosphere, sending temperatures across the planet plunging by more than 5 °C, a range last experienced during planet-wide ice ages, according to earlier research by Robock and others. Food production would consequently collapse, with the number of calories available from major crops and fisheries falling by up to 42 per cent as the resulting famine kills more than 2 billion people worldwide, according to this study. The study then estimates the extent of worldwide misery with a precision that may not be possible, such as anticipating that a full-scale war between the United States and Russia (which together hold 90 per cent of the thermonuclear bombs on

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Earth). Five billion of Earth’s 8-plus billion people could die, some almost instantly, and many others after prolonged battles with radiation-induced cancers. With nine nuclear-armed nations (the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan, and the United Kingdom), this toll, by any measure, would be a disaster unlike any in humankind’s history. Bear in mind that not even the best study can predict the future exactly, but the totality of suffering produced by a massive nuclear war would easily be the worst human-initiated catastrophe (perhaps any catastrophe) in human residency on the planet Earth.

4.14 Stopping the Steal? After considering catastrophes inflicted by a possible nuclear war, a transition to social and political decay induced by Donald Trump is almost a relief. The dangers of Trumpism pale beside climate change plus potential nuclear war, of course. Another way to address Trumpism may be to observe that his beliefs and overall state of mind advance the clock on more dangerous existential threats. Trump loves to rattle nukes, and his position on climate change is quite simple and may be expressed in one word: “HOAX!” No matter what the evidence, it’s a hoax—as simple as he is. The United States has been facing a steady decline of political civility in recent years, a steady erosion of public trust that has led to corruption of belief in government, instilled by Donald J. Trump, who seems to have convinced roughly one-third of the voting public that whatever he says is true, despite excellent external evidence that he has been falsifying evidence on this own behalf. Following the presidential election of 2020, within a few hours of growing evidence that Democrat Joe Biden had won, Trump and allies, including a number of attorneys he had enlisted, began a “stop the steal” movement, aimed at several states where the difference in votes between Trump and Biden had been small, as “swing states.” The campaign began outside polling places and spread to areas where votes were being counted, with ready-made signs carried by Trump partisans and threats to election officials who were accused without evidence of being in league with fraud and theft of votes. Attorneys during the next few months filed about 60 lawsuits with a paucity of evidence, asserting the same thing, and lost all of them. The entire “stop the steal” campaign had a very slim record of fraud on which to build any sort of case. The entire system has been remarkably free of corruption for many years. However, perhaps Trump and his supporters were waging a long game to break down support for the system, then infiltrate it and take over—a theft of governmental infrastructure under the guise of stopping the Democrats’ “steal.” Despite the lack of evidence, the challenges reached a crescendo during the January 6, 2021, trashing of the US Capitol when several thousand Trump partisans sought to stop the final certification of Electoral College tallies. That tactic failed as well.

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Almost without pause, “stop the steel” undertook a new tack: to infiltrate the vote-­ counting superstructure so it could be readied for the next election, in 2024.

4.15 Setting Up for Future Elections with False Premises According to Charles Homans, writing in The New York Times Magazine (July 19, 2022), “In 17 of the 27 states holding elections this year [2022] for secretary of state—the top elections officer in 24 states—at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization. In four of the eight Republican primaries held so far [by July 19, 2022], that candidate has won.” In addition, “Scores of groups had organized at state and local levels to conduct partisan audits of the 2020 election results, support officials and candidates who would do the same, and run or volunteer for local positions that operate or monitor elections. The thousands of obscure pressure points in a system that most Republicans profess to believe had turned against them in 2020. Providing the oxygen for these efforts, and often working to connect them are a cohort of national right-wing media figures and activists, many of them tied to the post-election efforts to stop the transfer of power” (Homans, 2022a, b). All of this soon lost its “stop the steal” sheen and came to be known to its partisans as “election integrity,” switching the spotlight to any and all elections to come. Trump demanded fealty from all Republicans as he tried to build a cult of personality with rhetoric embellishing white supremacy, an enduring monument to extreme nationalism and patriarchy. As well-known architects of ultranationalist thought control have bragged, truth doesn’t matter in ultranationalistic politics. It’s all about defining enemies and pummeling them. Enter the Trump Ballot Security Project, built on a single picture of Trump, a toll-free phone number and a stack of unproven (false or nonexistent) violations of election laws. “Six hundred complaints in six counties in Texas, 300 in Oklahoma, more in Kansas and Maine. Provide a credit-card number and “donate” to the Committee to “Restore America’s Greatness,” a new appeal for money and other forms of support modeled on the longer-enduring “Make America Great Again” [MAGA] campaign, a signature Trump brand. No nationalistic movement goes anywhere, for any length of time, without millions of often-shouted pieces of rancid political poetry. In the meantime, the political fact-checking organization PolitiFact was unable to find even a shred of truth in any of MAGA’s assertions. Fact nor fiction? No standard of veracity mattered. After Trump won the Electoral College vote in November 2016, he attacked the popular vote, which he had lost. There had been “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California,” Trump claimed in a tweet. In another tweet, he declared that “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Barely skipping a beat, Trump also retweeted this message: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” (Homans, 2022a,

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b), a regurgitation of a nineteenth-century quote urging murder of American Indians (“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) And please do not forget that the “millions of people who voted illegally” did not exist. Trump cited no evidence because there wasn’t any. All of this had something in common with the hundreds of communists that Senator Joe McCarthy alleged were crawling through the US government back about 1950—not one shred of evidence, anywhere.

4.16 Truth Does Not Matter Trump rallies went wild with blind passion at Trump’s unverified assertions, such as a claim that the election was stolen by “ballot harvesters” who deposited thousands of fake votes in drop boxes. The key (fabricated) number could go as high as one wished and was used as “evidence” of assertions that voting drop boxes should be eliminated. Fake “harvests” of Biden votes were thrown around as well. Where was that tractor-trailer full of ballots?—a reference to an alleged shipment of trucked-in absentee ballots was floated where none existed. Not even Trump’s Justice Department could find the would-be ballots. Officials had investigated at length and decided that it was baseless (Homans, 2022a, b). Mass tyranny in the past has been spread by government-owned media—witness Hitler’s ‘big lies,” etc., when the only mass medium was radio. In the United States, the brain-fog machine is nearly always maintained by private enterprise and advertising, even to a point that its owners are forced to cut it short—or off. Trump had 85 to 90 million people on Twitter before its executives cut his cord for spreading too many baseless lies. (Having 85 to 90 million people on your Twitter feed does not mean that all of them were supportive, or even reading your spew.) Up to a point, however, abject, bald-faced lying can be good for business. Past that point, once a large proportion of an audience realizes that a source has no credibility, the game is over, except for the substantial number who can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Manufactured falsehoods can become so ugly and embarrassing that they send sponsors running. Or we can hope. Living in a post-truth world (which is where Trump and his cohort spend much of their lives), can be downright confusing, even for unquestioning true believers. On-air host Tucker Carlson became notable for echoing Trump’s crusade against immigrants, despite the fact that much of Trump’s family had relatively recently come from Europe. Carlson set off a sponsor-scattering uproar in December 2018, by asserting on air that allowing mass immigration into the United States was making it “poor and dirtier” (Confessore, 2022). Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of Fox’s worldwide business operations, had let it pass as an expression of Carlson’s First Amendment rights, even as at least 26 other corporations silenced advertising on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show. These companies include CareerBuilder, Takeda Pharmaceuticals (makers of Entyvio, etc.), TD Ameritrade, IHOP, the United Explorer credit card, Just For Men, Jaguar Land Rover, Ancestry. com, SCOTTeVEST, Zenni Optical, and Voya Financial (Barr, 2018).

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Most of the time, however, not only was Carlson allowed to spread his noxious opinions; most advertisers gave him evident permission to amplify his them. When his show next aired, Carlson “play[ed] video of his earlier comments and cit[ed] a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crosser deposited as much as 8 pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, Carlson spoke directly with Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee who was told of the exchange. ‘We’re good,’ Carlson said, grinning triumphantly” (Confessore, 2022). Carlson continued to garner audience for years hence, as he “constructed what may have been the most racist show in the history of cable news—and also, by some measures, the most successful. In the nasty America of our time, rancid racism can be quite salable. Although he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice—“We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,”—Mr. Carlson [had] explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty—his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege—by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain….” He regularly disparages Black women as stupid or undeserving of their positions….” When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds per week, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies such as Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-­ rated cable news show in history (Confessore, 2022).

Carlson had found his niche, and a comfy one it has been, even with occasional advertising cancellations. Racial hatred sells. Big lies sell. Bigger lies sell faster to an audience pushed to frothing level by a loud, reality-twisting, master liar named Trump. Carlson also praised invaders of the US Capitol January 6, 2021, even as broad public opinion condemned them. He defended Russian president Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (even with US public opinion massively against him). His audience grew, and the majority of advertisers who had not bailed out continued to support him. Nationalism can assume strange forms in the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” courting white ultranationalist viewers who fear that Black and Brown

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immigrants are replacing them. Recasting American racism this way presents white Americans as an oppressed caste. He echoed white ultranationalist media such as The Daily Stormer, as his ratings rose, propelled by white grievance politics, the same audience demographic, if you will, that increased radio audiences for Hitler’s grievance politics for “good Germans.” Carlson also was known for vengeful vitriol spewed at critics, sometimes spurring threats of violence at them. At the same time, Murdoch told investors that Carlson had helped increase Fox Nation’s subscriptions by 40 percent (Confessore, 2022) for a performance that raises fears of “displacement” with sheer racist cant, mass bait that reliably draws more than 3 million like-minded, and otherwise curious viewers.

4.17 Incessant Lying as a Form of Mass Insanity Trump’s incessant lying as a form of crowd-maddening mass insanity absorbed the Republican Party, as Carlson, Trump, and others cast Mexican migrants as rapists and criminals, promising to bar Muslims from entering the United States. As usual, Trump said things that proper candidates weren’t supposed to say, tapping their fears, finding no proof of anything, except that what he said conformed to the prejudices of voters who were eager to listen. (Despite an audience of more than 3 million per show, Carlson’s incessant lying provoked Fox to relieve him of his post on April 24, 2023.) Trump’s scuzzy attempted little coup at the US Capitol January 6, 2021, did not succeed. But did he need it? The assault on the Capitol was a stunt, playtime for true believers. Trump and his associates had already deposited a ticking time bomb in the US Supreme Court, with three appointments that formed an indelible majority ready to roll back prior, relatively liberal decisions that were interpreting the US Constitution in ways congruent with the American experiment. By the spring of 2020, this trend was dissolving, with the rolling back of rights to abortion, restrictions on gun laws, environmental protection, and self-determination for Native Americans living on reservations. As of this writing, the crosshairs of reaction were trained on same-sex marriage, affirmative action, the First Amendment, and other legal protections for disregarded minorities. Often, such changes were not passed as limits on peoples at the margins but as representative of a smaller, more traditional government. Many of the Founders probably would have disagreed. Jefferson listed freedom of expression first on his Bill of Rights for reasons which displayed that to him nothing was more sacrosanct than freedom of expression. He refused to endorse the new Constitution without a Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment was placed at the top. A Google search of [Jefferson + freedom of expression] returned 21 million “hits” on November 3, 2022. One of Jefferson’s favorite quotes was “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” [See, for example, a Google search for “Jefferson + “freedom of expression.”]

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Single nations and single economic and political systems, even very large and entrenched ones, can be stretched to fit different sets of circumstances at different times, by vastly different people. Consider Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, and Vladimir Putin, the long-ruling neo-tsar of post-Soviet oligarchic Russia. Gorbachev was a relentless reformer, with a vision of post-Soviet Russia as a place of freedom, that was moving toward “release of dissidents from prison or exile; the policy of glasnost, which permitted unprecedented freedoms of the press, writers, artists, and scholars,…[as well as] criticism of Lenin….[and] the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe,” an end to the Cold War, and a diminished chance of nuclear war (Remnick, 2022, 14). Putin, who matured in the Soviet Union as a henchman for the KGB, held Gorbachev in contempt, believing that he was weak, that freedom for individuals below the ruling class was undeserved, and that he had come to rule Russia as “an imperialist reasserting Kremlin authority over Russian institutions, Russian citizens, and former Soviet republics” (Remnick, 2022, 13). Gorbachev had a grandfather who was tortured under Stalin on trumped-up charges. He recalled of one of them: “The interrogator blinded him with a bright lamp, broke his arms [by] pressing him against [a] door, and beat[ing] him brutally. When these ‘standard’ tortures didn’t work, they thought up new ones; they wrapped grandfather tightly in a wet sheepskin coat and placed him on a hot stove” (Remnick, 2022, 13). Johansen, Bruce E. “Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson: Part as Prologue. Connecticut News-Times, March 28, 2017. https://www.newstimes.com/opinion/ article/Bruce-­E-­Johansen-­Donald-­Trump-­and-­Andrew-­11031415.php

4.18 The Cruelties of Nationalism Over the years, with brief breaths of fresh air such as Gorbachev, the whip has been much in evidence in Russia, as in much of the twisted ideology of state socialism has been manipulated from the top to tell the ordinary people that Marx and Engels had made working-class ideology for them. As with many religions and other doctrines, the rewards were always in the future. This became the price of ultranationalism all over the world. By the fifth month of the Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, more than 70 million people around the world had fallen into poverty, according to the United Nations Development Program, because of rapidly rising food and energy prices provoked by such things as Russia’s blockade of Ukraine grain shipments. This was not Marxism in practice, of course. Russia had shed what was left of Marx and Engels back about 1990. Only the rhetorical shell remained, saved for official occasions. Putin himself was an extremely rich oligarch, with about $200 to $250 billion worth of assets in his or his family member’s individual names. One problem with ultranationalistic states is that over time they have a tendency to morph into the ugliest of tyrannies. This often occurs as a result of internal struggles that strip away democratic guardrails (or so they have been called), step by step.

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In our time, the closest model for this sort of change may be the Trump “regime” in the United States, with its attempt to grab the presidency on totally specious grounds after the 2020 election, followed by “stop the steal” agitation and a sloppy attempt to stage a show-coup at the US Capitol January 6, 2021. Actually, this event was never an “insurrection” nor an attempted coup. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had already told Trump that it would take much more than a piddly little riot to bring down the US government. The Joint Chiefs of Staff told Trump that their members had sworn to protect the Constitution, not an individual person, even the president. One other comic-book coup attempt that was discussed among Trump’s appointees was simply to refuse to vacate the White House on January 20, 2021. Like the January 6 riot, this one failed, as usual, but stood as a test, perhaps a staged rehearsal, for the future. Trump left the White House acting as if he still owned the place. In reality, however, Trump’s words failed the reality test. He left the White House, and the city, before Joe Biden’s inauguration, once more a very rare breach of protocol. Trump even evaded his own lie. He didn’t want to leave the White House after he had lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. “I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told an aide. “We’re never leaving,” he said to another. “How can you leave when you won an election?” (Herb, 2022). Trump’s delusion remained stubbornly in place for several years after the election, in fundamentally the same basic form: By January 2021, Trump had become utterly convinced—contrafacts—that he had, in fact, been robbed of a victory in the 2020 election. He repeated this lie thousands of times, in public and private, during the next several years. This was not only a public affect but also a position Trump held privately. He had seemingly no regard for democracy and the idea of a peaceful transfer of power that sits at the center of a representative governing system. Given an opportunity, he very possibly would have tried to reclaim the power of the presidency (Herb, 2022). Chris Cillizza, a commentator on CNN’s The Point drilled Trump on misuse of presidential power and image: Trump viewed the military as his personal plaything, regularly referring to “my generals” and “my military.” He openly wondered why the Justice Department wasn’t doing his bidding when it came to who they were investigating—and who they weren’t. He bullied, cajoled, and fired advisers who wouldn’t go along with his wishes. And so, Trump’s seeming blind spot to the damage done to American democracy if he had just refused to leave the White House at the end of his term fits into a broader pattern. For Trump, it’s always about Trump. What’s best for him? What is the path to looking like a winner, of emerging triumphant? For him, everything else paled in comparison to that. And I mean everything—up to and including undermining the American public’s belief that the country could conduct free and fair elections (Cillizza, 2022).

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4.19 Praise the Lord and Pass the Ballot Box The following piece has me thinking of the Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale: the idea of a fundamentalist/nationalist takeover of the United States by “Christians,” whom, at other times and places, would have easily passed as fascists, serving up a new national purpose for the country: “The true Christian identity of the nation, and how it was time, together, for Christians to reclaim political power” (Dias, 2022). The speaker here was Doug Mastriano, “a [Pennsylvania] state senator, retired Army colonel and prominent figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s futile efforts to overturn his state’s 2020 election results… addressing a far-right conference that mixed Christian beliefs with conspiracy theories, called “Patriots Arise.” The separation of church and state was a “myth,” he said. “In November we are going to take our state back, my God will make it so” (Dias, 2022). Mastriano and his political colleagues explicitly reject the tradition that separates church and state. In their design of political power, the church is supposed to direct the government. As reported by Elizabeth Dias in The New  York Times (2022): “Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican representing the western part of Colorado, said recently at Cornerstone Christian Center, a church near Aspen. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.’ Congregants rose to their feet in applause.” The Patriots Arise event, where Mastriano spoke, opened with a video of conspiracy theories related to QAnon that prophesied “control systems” including “media propaganda, child trafficking and the slave economy [that] would “crumble down.” A robotic voice-over forecast a “great awakening,” and an image of a guillotine blade accompanied the promise of “executions, justice, victory” (Dias, 2022). When Mastriano finished, a man in an American flag, cowboy hat, and shirt presented him with a long sword, inscribed with “For God and country.” “Because you’ve been cutting a lot of heads off,” explained Francine Fosdick, a social media influencer who organized the event and whose website has promoted a QAnon slogan. “You are fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus, and so we wanted to bless you with that sword of David” (Dias, 2022). Mastriano then raised the gold hilt in his right hand. “Where’s Goliath?” he asked. Mastriano’s ascension in Pennsylvania is a prominent example of right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to promote Christian power in America. The religious right has long supported conservative causes, but this current wave seeks more: a nation that actively prioritizes their particular set of Christian beliefs and far-right views and that more openly embraces Christianity as a bedrock identity, wrote Dias (2022). “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church,” Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican representing the western part of Colorado, said at Cornerstone Christian Center, a church near Aspen. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk” (Dias, 2022). “The ascension of these candidates comes amid a wave of action across the country that advances cultural priorities for many conservative Christians. The most significant was the Supreme Court’s decision to overturnRoe v. Wade and end the

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constitutional right to an abortion—on top of its recent series of decisions allowing for a larger role of religion in public life, such as school prayer and funding for religious education. States have also been taking action; many have instituted abortion bans. A Florida law prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, as Texas issued an order to investigate parents with transgender children for possible child abuse. Donald J. Trump may have been the first US President to address evangelical Christians as a distinct lobbying group. He frequently addressed rallies with a statement of faith: “I am a true believer!” (Sanneh, 2023, 22). The declaration paid off for him. The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh reported that “according to one poll, he won 84 per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020. However, these votes have been won in a rapidly secularizing country, even as Christian nationalism has become more popular. In 1999, profession of regular membership in a Christian church, a synagogue, or a mosque totaled 70 per cent, according to a Gallup Poll survey. In 2020, the same question produced a total of 47 percent. For the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling [by Gallup], worshippers were a minority of the population (Sanneh, 2023, 22)”. Within these groups are small contrary trends, such as the avid embrace of evangelical Christianity by many Blacks. These long-term trends seem to fly in the face of Christian nationalist demands that the federal government declare the United States a Christian nation; that the federal government should profess Christian values; that the United States should enforce strict separation of church; that the federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public places; adopt a belief that the United States’ material success is part of God’s plan; and that the federal government should allow prayer (to the Christian God, one assumes) in public schools (Sanneh, 2023, 22). Suddenly, about 2022, statehouses flush with new Republican majorities became hell-bent to race each other into a new era of dictated morals, only some of which could be ascribed to Christian Nationalists. This case was followed by a number of elections in which opponents of abortion had their careers as lawmakers abruptly shortened. The new morals police, some of which were being compared to devotees of the Comstock Act (now more than a century old) were not to be swayed. They went after school library books with any hint of lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-sexual-­­ queer, etc. (LGBTQ+) existence. Sex (actually gender) change operations were being condemned to the same legal hell as abortions, followed by male teenagers in eye shadow, high heels, and huge bouffant hairstyles parading across stages “in drag.” This had nothing to do with actual sex but was more an up-yours reply to the morals police who were trashing any hint of cross-gender messing around. Some of these new laws were being coughed up by statehouses that, a few years prior, had been weighing proposals approving of same-sex marriages (once also smiled upon by the pre-Trump US Supreme Court) and legal marijuana. That was, then, however. Decades ago, the Republican Party pointed with pride at an ideology that stayed out of people’s bedrooms. Imagine that, compared to today’s gender police.

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4.20  Roe v. Wade’s Demise: The Postabortion Future The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future was coming into view by late 2022, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy. The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed for more than half a century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and merely enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of gender oppression, which has become a worldwide obsession. A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the gender-police movement brought us by a radical-right majority on the Supreme (and other) courts is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this organization’s 2022 event, which took place in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominionism—that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society—from the statehouse to the bedroom, has now been explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Speakers at the conference vied to outdo one another in their denigration of the people whom Trump seemingly was talking about. Democrats, they said, are “evil,” “tyrannical,” and “the enemy within,” engaged in “a war against the truth.” “The backlash is coming,” warned Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back” (Stewart, 2022). A sitting US senator, once he gets riled up in front of a friendly audience, dresses up as if he is an armed warrior (circa 1870, perhaps), with repeated references to guns. Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor” (Stewart, 2022)—praise the Lord and pass the ammunition without respect for contrary points of view. It is not a stretch to link this rise in verbal aggression to the disinformation campaign to indoctrinate the Christian nationalist base in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, along with what we learned from the January 6 hearings. The movement is preparing “patriots” for a continuing assault on democracy defined as a nonbeliever’s right to live his or her own life outside of religious dictation. In a live stream on Rumble, a video site popular with the far right, US Representative Marjorie

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Taylor Greene, a Christian fascist Republican from Georgia, urged followers to be proud of “Christian nationalism” as a way to fight “globalists,” the “border crisis” and “lies about gender.” “While the media is going to lie about you and label Christian nationalism, and they are probably going to call it domestic terrorism, I’m going to tell you right now, they are the liars,” she said (Dias, 2022). The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism—the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government—was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. The 2021 Road to Majority conference, however, included a breakout session devoted to the topic. The 2022 conference included two sessions where the once-arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on many speakers’ lips.

4.21 A Hunger for Domination The hunger for domination that permeates the leadership of this movement is the essential context for its strategy and intentions in a post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights (or, more precisely, a war on certain peoples’ rights—women, nonwhite, non-Christians). And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns”—and neighbors who take pride in their eavesdropping skills—heroically taking on the nonconforming behavior of their fellow citizens. Damn men who play at “drag” in defiance of the morals police. Damn lipstick and high heels and freedom to choose one’s own bathroom. Among the principal battlefields are the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women. Life in the new America will become one enormous Bible study class. Christian movement leaders have also made it clear that the target of their ongoing offensive is not just in-state abortion providers, but what they call “abortion trafficking”—that is, women crossing state lines to access legal abortions, along with people who provide those women with services or support, even cars and taxis that abortion access. Mrs. Youman hailed the development of a new “long-arm jurisdiction” bill that offers a mechanism for targeting out-of-state abortion providers. “It creates a wrongful-death cause of action,” she said, “so we’re excited about that.” Gender-centered fascism was clamping down everywhere, The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation for the post-Roe era includes broad criminal enforcement as well as civil penalties. “The model law also reaches well beyond the actual performance of an illegal abortion,” according to text on the organization’s website. It also includes “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion,” targeting people who provide “instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication.” Do not even whisper what used to be

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regarded as a constitutional right. Mrs. Youman also made clear that Christian nationalists will target the pills used for medicated abortions. “Our next big bill is going to make the Heartbeat Act look tame, you guys; they’re going to freak out!” she said. “It’s designed specifically to siphon off these illegal pills” (Stewart, 2022). By the middle of 2023, the battle over abortion pills had reached full flower in the courts. Americans who spend their lives outside this movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism, which has been explicitly antidemocratic and anti-­ American for a long time. It is also a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t. This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money. They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us. Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rather ruthless rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in self-sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.

4.22 Christian Nationalism’s Chilling Political Amalgam The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal—from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election—attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the US electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original European-descended racial and religious foundation of America. Vis-a-vis the “original” roots of “American” culture: they seem to have no regard at all for the fact that the first slaves arrived (at Jamestown, in present-day Virginia) about the same time that the Mayflower reached today’s New England. America has always been a racially and culturally diverse place, even when a substantial proportion of the population was being held in chattel slavery, and indigenous peoples were being driven from their lands. The Christian nationalists ignore the occupation of the entire Western Hemisphere by Native American peoples for thousands of years before their European ancestors occupied their lands launched their first prayers to a European, Christian God in the Americas. Native civilizations and people in the millions, with faiths of their own populated the Western Hemisphere, before one whiff of Christianity or European notions of conquest-oriented nationalism arrived. That said, the way that today’s Christian nationalists interpret history tells us quite a bit about their inherent racism and ignorance of what actually happened in a hemisphere which their ancestors originally knew as “illegal” immigrants. “While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), wrote: “Donald Trump wove them

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together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula—the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right—could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning” (Edsall, 2022). Aside from the religious nationalists’ ignorance of the Americas’ actual history, according to some scholars, there are two versions of Christian nationalism, one more threatening to the social order than the other. Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” said that Christian nationalism can be described as adherence to a mythical vision of the United States as a “Christian nation” that must be protected and preserved. This mythology has two dimensions: it offers an account of American history that frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values, which defines a “real” or “good” America today as committed to these same values. Some of the United States’ founders, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, as Deists, questioned the Christian orthodoxy of their times, and not all of the Europeans who immigrated during the early 1600s were conventional Christians. Witness Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island after he was driven from Boston by Puritans who thought he was insufficiently Christian by their standards. Many of today’s religious nationalists’ version of American history fade to simplicity beside the richness and diversity of the real thing. Within this context, Braunstein continued: We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as ‘real’ Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of ‘real’ or ‘native born’ or ‘legacy’ Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites—often Jews, communists/socialists or globalists—who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power (Edsall, 2022). Braunstein distinguishes between two variants of Christian nationalism. One she calls “white Christian nationalism” and the other “colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.” The first, according to Braunstein, “explicitly fuses whiteness, Christianity and Americanness,” leading to the conclusion that “white Christians alone embody the values on which a healthy democracy rests and, as such, white Christians alone are suited to hold positions of social influence and political power” (Edsall, 2022). In contrast, she continued, colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism either “ignores race or uses colorblind language to describe ideal Americanness. This has become the predominant form of Christian nationalism among mainstream conservatives. And for many conservatives, like members of the Tea Party, the invocation of

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colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism is intended to distinguish them from ‘other’ groups on the racist right” (Edsall, 2022).

4.23 Why Has Christian Nationalism Developed so Quickly? Why have Christian nationalism and fear of a “replacement theory” moved so quickly to center stage in this debate? Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. I (the Public Religion Research Institute) suggested it was “twin shocks to the system” delivered during the first two decades of this century: “the election and re-election of our first Black president and the sea change of no longer being a majority-white Christian nation.” Both of these developments, Jones wrote, happened simultaneously between 2008 and 2016. White Christians went from 54 percent of the US population to 47 percent in that period, down to 44 percent today (2022). This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of full-throated white Christian nationalism. “Trump exchanged the dog whistle for the megaphone,” according to Braunstein, as the “white” former majority became a shrinking minority, sparking fear that the growing populations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia were inundating their imaginary “mandate from heaven” (Edsall, 2022). By 2100, according to some US Census projections, the United States will be what California is today: undoubtedly majority non-white. By then, Jesus may be portrayed as brown, which fits the ethnicity of his homeland. This fear has sparked a level of racial and ethnic resentment that has been turned into an organizing tactic by Trump et al. For those who cannot live with anyone who does not share their politics, ethnicity, or skin color, fear ties their stomachs into knots because their fears are coming true before their eyes. Levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling that agree with the statement: “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”—reflect the impact of such fears. Among all voters, according to Jones, 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 per cent; among Democrats, 11 per cent; among QAnon believers, 65 per cent; among white evangelicals, 50 per cent; and among white voters without a college education, 43 per cent (Edsall, 2022). In the United States, white Christians went from 54 per cent to 47 per cent in that period, down to 44 per cent today. This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of serious white Christian nationalism.

4.24 Empire-Building as a Psychological Disorder Throughout its history, the United States of America has been propelled across the North American continent (and around the world) by a powerful nationalistic animus that envisions a special mission from a “city on a hill,” exercising a “manifest destiny” to bring its political and economic systems to other peoples in other places.

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From the beginning, economic interests as well as religious motives have been an important animus first in the westward movement across North America and then around the world. This animus has become institutionalized in US foreign policy from the first Puritan landfall and the days of Andrew Jackson and his advocacy of American Indian removal to Donald Trump’s sense of American exceptionalism and his strenuous objections to non-white immigration. Today, the United States exercises its nationalistic agenda through a network of more than 100 military bases around the world. It is the largest empire in human history. Domestically, the engines of nationalism have maintained these similar ideological attributes from the days of Jackson’s presidency, through the Know Nothings, the Ku Klux Klan, to the present day. This history also has had some appreciative students in other lands. President Jackson’s is one species of nationalism that justifies the taking of other peoples’ lands in the mind of the aggressor. Its remnants survive today in Anglo-­ American real estate law under the doctrine of “highest and best use.” Much of the land that comprises the United States today was removed from the hands of its previous occupants by treaties, which provided legal cover for popular assumptions that the US citizens would make better use of the land. These assumptions formed the backbone of Jackson’s claim to much of today’s southeastern United States. Later, it was used as ideological support (and script material) for hundreds, if not thousands of “cowboy” movies. In our analysis of nationalism’s role as an inhibiter of amicable human relationships, we will find a long menu of reasons that a physically more powerful people use to justify conquest. The shift in ownership that nearly entirely replaced indigenous peoples with immigrants from Europe came with a galaxy of rationales, from the assumed superiority of culture, to blessings of a European god, to brute force, alcohol, and (before germ theories of disease were developed) divine intervention reflected in the spread of various physical maladies. Today, similar rationales may be found in the ashes left by barbarians’ bloody trails. The Russians had a self-justifying reason for their genocidal, attempted subjugation of Ukraine during 2022. According to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s version of history, Ukraine was theirs to begin with, and they were restoring its status as a subjugated corner of a greater (and, they assumed, in error, older) Russian empire. This entire chain of thought bristles with assumptions of nationalism meant to justify the displacement of one people by another, involving what US real-estate law calls the doctrine of “eminent domain,” the usurpation of land for “a higher and best use.” Sometimes, a more powerful group will incite fear among its members by asserting that barbarians at the gates will overwhelm them. Such is the case today among Neo-Nazis and other far-right European-American groups in the United States and Europe. Such thinking has become an intellectual staple among some supporters of former US President Donald Trump, under the name of “Replacement” theory. The idea centers upon increasing non-“white” populations and foreshadows a takeover by millions of non-white noncitizens.

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“Lebensraum,” a German word meaning “room in which to live,” was first used as an explicit term, by Adolph Hitler to rationalize German conquest of non-­ Germanic peoples and usurpation of their homelands for use of an expanding Reich [German] nation. Such expropriation required theft of land by military action and subjugation of civilian populations by intimidation and murder, the rawest form of terrorism. The use of terrorism to subjugate indigenous peoples was not a singular invention of the history’s most hideous political and ethnic murderer who justified his actions in the name of a self-serving ideology. He only provided it with a brand name appropriate to a distinctive time and place. The search for “lebensraum,” under many other names, in uncounted times and places, is probably the most common excuse for conquest in human history. What follows is an examination of these concepts, considering China’s recent treatment of the Tibetans, Hong Kongers, and Uighurs, as well as propaganda aimed at annexing Taiwan.

4.25 Reminders of Brutal Nationalism from Tibet Aboard an Air India flight on from Hyderabad to New Delhi in December 2015, I found myself sitting next to a young woman who was among the children born to a group who had accompanied the Dalai Lama (who was awarded a Nobel Peace prize in 1989), when he fled Tibet as Chinese communist forces invaded it in 1950. The passenger was returning home to Dharmsala, a settlement in the foothills of the Himalayas, in northernmost India. She asked me why I was in India, and I described a conference of several hundred Dalit (“Untouchable”) academics and overseas guests at Acharya Nagarjuna University, in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, north of Chennai. I had an extra copy of a book containing 258 abstracts of papers presented at the conference and gave it to her. I then asked about her family and history. She pulled out her smartphone and punched up a web page of indigenous territories acquired by China, of which Tibet is only one. In fact, the indigenous territories occupied most of the map, squeezing the Han Chinese along a thin strip of coastline between Beijing and Shanghai. The exercise of Chinese dominance has conquered a number of areas—Tibet, with its large dissident population; the Xinjiang region, to Tibet’s north, with a large proportion of several Muslim peoples; Hong Kong, with its hybrid Chinese and British culture and its demands for human and civil rights; and Taiwan, home mainly of families born to 2 million Chinese who escaped mainland China after its takeover by communists led by Mao Zedong in 1949. I realized that her map could have been one of the United States about 1776, when independence was declared by 13 mainly European-American colonies along another seacoast, on the edge of a continent flanked by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, the Cherokees (also a confederacy), Choctaws, Seminoles, reaching westward across the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota (Sioux), Nez Perce, Lummi, and hundreds of others. All sorts of events came into perspective as I looked at her map: Tibetan Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves to protest Chinese occupation;

4.26  White Supremacy, American Style: The Know Nothings’ Brief Surge

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the Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui (Muslims), as well as other ethnic Turkic Muslims, who were detained in secretive internment camps on lockdown by a surveillance state in the northwest, all under pressure from expanding Chinese nationalism, and Han Chinese identity politics. All of this was occurring within the context of growing surveillance capabilities within China itself. In May 2020, for example, tens of millions of Chinese men and boys were ordered to give blood samples to build a very large genetic database. Chinese policies have reflected expansive nationalism under President (and party chairman) Xi Jinping who in 2013 implemented more aggressive policies toward countries on its borders and nominally under its control. China under Xi also expanded trade and construction of infrastructure in many other countries around the world. Poor countries badly in need of such improvements as roads, bridges, pipelines, and power plants were allowed to finance them with Chinese loans, only to learn that they rarely had money to repay. In the meantime, China was becoming the second most powerful economy in the world, behind only the United States. China under Xi severely limited dissent at home and began a “social credit” system that (with a nationwide network of cameras) tracks everyone’s movements and purchases; tight control was maintained in Tibet, as debate also was suffocated in Xinjiang, especially against Muslim Uighurs, imprisoning at least a million of them in “reeducation” and labor camps. Severe riots broke out during 2019 in Hong Kong when China tightened control of its judicial and political systems. The mainland Chinese regarded Hong Kong, long a commercial and financial center, as a threat that could infuse Western values, such as free expression and representative democracy. Part of the Social Credit system, as proposed in 2020, involves credit subtracted for things that other people do. For example, parents earn negative credit for the actions of their children. According to a report by the International Council of Jurists that was delivered at the United Nations, “Torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment were inflicted on the Tibetans on a large scale” (Curry, 2019, 1390). The same report said that Chinese invaders were attacking Tibetan culture, including religion, in an attempt to eradicate it. During most of the 1950s, Tibet’s people engaged in revolt and passive resistance against Chinese oppression. The Chinese stepped up oppression by arresting Tibet’s official leadership, including many lamas (religious leaders).

4.26 White Supremacy, American Style: The Know Nothings’ Brief Surge The Know Nothings, founded as the Native American Party, later the American Party, by Lewis Charles Levin (a US congressman) during 1844, lasted 16 years promoting right-wing populism and anti-Catholicism as well as, by implication, anti-immigration policies, because many Catholics at the time were recent arrivals

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from Ireland and Germany. Know Nothings suffered from a lack of leadership and a split over the issue of slavery. Levin won a seat in the US House of Representatives from Philadelphia with abolition of slavery on its platform in 1844. The party also contained several secret societies (such as the Order of the Star-­ Spangled Banner, among others) and when a member was asked about it, the custom became to answer: “I know nothing.” Anti-Catholicism was fanned by rumors that the Vatican was seeking to control the United States through runaway immigration, which increased rapidly while the party was active, associated by the Know Nothings with increases in urban poverty and crime. The party peaked in 1854, electing several US representatives from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as well as mayors of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Party membership briefly rose to more than one million. In the 1854 elections, Know Nothings won 40 per cent of the statewide vote in Pennsylvania. The same year it won a near-monopoly in the Massachusetts state legislature, all but 3 of 400 seats. Only 35 of those elected there had any previous legislative experience. The novelist James Fennimore Cooper and Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph, were close friends, but they stopped talking with each other after Morse supported Know Nothing anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, according to Cooper scholar Barbara A. Mann (2017). Many Know Nothings surprised observers by advocating abolition of slavery at the same time that they supported women’s rights, giving wives access to property, and rights in divorce courts. It also displayed strong opposition to alcoholic beverages, closing bars and mandating 6 months in prison for serving a single glass of beer. It passed legislation to regulate railroads, insurance companies, and public utilities. Its reform agenda increased Massachusetts state spending by nearly 50 per cent, raising taxes, igniting a revolt that defeated many of the novice legislators within a term or two. Irish Catholics also reacted negatively to new laws restricting their civil rights. The state hounded convents, accusing nuns of having sex on the sly, provoking screaming headlines in the newspapers, especially when the instigator of the probe was himself found to have been using state money to engage in prostitution. Soon the whole crusade fell apart. Violence flared in Kentucky on August 6, 1855, when Know Nothings attempted to physically restrain Catholics from voting in a close governor’s race. Twenty-two people were killed, and many others injured in what came to be called the “Louisville Riot.” By 1855, a Know Nothing judge in San Francisco ruled that no Chinese immigrant could testify against a white man in court. The same year, Know Nothing Levi Boone was elected mayor of Chicago. Everywhere, support for Know Nothings was highest among the white working class. In Maine, a Catholic priest was tarred and feathered, and a church was torched. After that, the party declined rapidly. Extreme versions of this ideology also have emerged. While foreign imports (such as the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell) have never gained much of a foothold, the United States’s own brand of nativistic nationalism (e.g., expressed in the Ku Klux Klan) has flourished from time to time. While US neo-­ Nazism is but a fringe of the overall “white power” movement (and favoritism toward Whites generally in a European-deriverd country), it does attract adherents,

4.27  Ideological Affinities

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as described by Peter Simi and Robert Futrell in American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010). Beginning with his founding of the American Nazi Party in 1961, Rockwell adapted aspects of Hitler’s beliefs into his militant anti-communism, opposition to racial integration, anti-immigration populism, and anti-Semitism. A young David Duke expressed a liking for Rockwell’s message before he became a grand wizard in the KKK. Rockwell’s group mimicked Hitler’s movement, using the Nazi salute and wearing militaristic uniforms reflecting Third Reich motifs. A disaffected former party member assassinated Rockwell in 1967, and what was left of the ANP fizzled into an ill-defined cult called the New Order, which advanced a fantasy belief (following the works of Savitri Devi) that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. None of this ever gained any traction with a mass American audience, or anywhere else. In the meantime, neo-Nazis have played a role in free-speech (First Amendment) jurisprudence in cases such as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, in which neo-Nazis threatened to march in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. The march never took place in Skokie, but the court ruling allowed the neo-Nazis to stage a series of other demonstrations in Chicago on freedom of speech grounds.

4.27 Ideological Affinities Ideological affinity connects the Know Nothings (American Party) of the 1850s with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (which peaked in the 1920s) as well as several “alt-­ right” organizations today. Dylan Roof’s murders in an historic Charleston, South Carolina black church on June 25, 2015, before which he professed white supremacy, are cut from the same ideological cloth as ante-bellum rhetoric supporting slavery. Eugenic pseudoscience (which supported white supremacist assumptions) was very popular in the United States before the Nazis took it to extremes to justify the elimination of Jews and other non-Aryans. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was a dedicated eugenicist who all but eliminated black employment in the US federal government during his time in office. The KKK was very influential during the 1920s, controlling several local-level governments in the US South and nearby areas. It invaded black communities and drove out anyone who dared criticize them. One example of many involved the family of Malcolm Little (who would later take the name Malcolm X), when he was an infant in Omaha, Nebraska. The father of Malcolm Little, the Rev. Earl Little, “a big six-foot-four, very black man” (Malcolm & Haley, 1964, 1) had drawn the attention of whites as a public advocate of Marcus Garvey’s ideas, most notably that blacks should return to Africa (some did, founding Liberia). Rev. Little was out of town, preaching in Milwaukee, when white-hooded members of the KKK surrounded his family’s North Omaha home, at 3448 Evans St., on horseback, shouting threats, and breaking windows with their rifle butts. His wife was pregnant with Malcolm at the

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time, their seventh child. They resolved to move away as soon as possible after Malcolm was born on May 19, 1925. (Today the site is observed with a state historical marker and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) The house was demolished before its significance was widely appreciated. Malcolm X was elected for inclusion into the Nebraska Hall of Fame during 2022. A statue of him was erected in the lobby of the State Capitol in Lincoln after decades of intense debates.

4.28 Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump: Past as Prologue “One of President Donald J. Trump’s first interior decorating decisions in the Oval Office was installation of a large portrait of Andrew Jackson, who served between 1829 and 1837 as the United States’ seventh president, Bruce E. Johansen wrote in the Connecticut News-Times (2017). The portrait became a familiar fixture as President Trump showed off his executive orders for the cameras. A no-nonsense former U.S. Army general, Jackson led an insurgency by frontier farmers, miners, and traders (the “forgotten men” of the 1820s) against the East Coast elite, led by former President John Quincy Adams. Jackson was a self-made millionaire (worth much more today), gained by trading in the two most valuable commodities of his preindustrial time, real estate and human beings. Jackson had a temper and was generally intolerant of contrary opinion. He was accustomed to issuing orders, not seeking consensus. Jackson provided the Democratic Party with its iconic donkey, co-opting it after an opponent called him a “jackass” (Johansen, 2017). Jackson’s main campaign pledge involved his own deportation policy, called “Removal,” which required forced marches of southeastern Native American peoples (and others) westward to “Indian Territory,” now Oklahoma. The best-known of many forced marches involved about 16,000 Cherokees, of whom roughly a quarter died on the trail. An equal number died of starvation and disease within 2 years of arrival in what was, to them, a foreign land. Men, women, and children, deprived of sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, died by the thousands. Jackson had an inflated self-image, imagining himself as a friend of the Native peoples he was forcing into exile. Removal was an act of paternal kindness, and certainly preferable to extermination, Jackson argued. In today’s language, Jackson employed “alternative facts,” and his “base,” whose members stood to receive the lands that had belonged to the Native peoples, supported him fervently. “The safety and comfort of our citizens have been greatly promoted by their removal,” he said. “The remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length beyond the reach of injury or oppression….The paternal care of the Government will thereafter watch over them and protect them” (Jackson, 1837). Jackson imagined an idyllic post-Removal life, quoted by Philip Weeks in Farewell, My Nation: (2012:65): “Your father has provided a country large enough for all of you. There your white brother will not trouble you. They will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all

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of your children, as long as the grass grows, or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.” Jackson’s racism is raw to our ears—no “political correctness” here. He proclaimed that Native peoples were incapable of civilization, as he proclaimed: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms...filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion? The policy [of Removal] is not only liberal, but generous” (Jackson, 1830). President Jackson told American Indians that Removal would benefit them, a rhetorical exercise that Jason Edward Black called “the language of care” (2015, 25). The Cherokees did not relinquish their homeland without opposition. They sued the state of Georgia, and the US Supreme Court under its founding Chief Justice, John Marshall, largely upheld their position. President Jackson then ignored Marshall’s majority opinion. A constitutional scholar might argue that Jackson had engaged in contempt of the Supreme Court, an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor. There is no contemporary evidence that Jackson said “The chief justice has rendered his decision, now let him enforce it.” The outcome was the same, however. Jackson was no stickler for constitutional fine points. Despite considerable opposition to his stiffing of the Supreme Court, Jackson was not impeached by the House of Representatives. As today, the United States was deeply divided during the 1830s. One of the most divisive issues, especially among Jackson’s southern base, was states’ rights. When Jackson ignored the US Supreme Court in the Cherokee case, he was siding with the state of Georgia, which sought to seize their land and give it away to non-Indians in a lottery. Had Jackson sided with the Court (and Marshall’s ruling in favor of the Cherokees), the Civil War might have started during the 1830s rather than the early 1860s (Johansen, 2017). Al Cave’s Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians (2017) enters the mind of the man who was as preoccupied with Removal as President Donald Trump has been with his own attempts to screen out Muslims and build a “great, great wall” along the United States’ Mexican border, all part of the United States’ powerful nationalistic animus. This is the face into which President Trump chose to look when he walked into the Oval Office. In Sharp Knife, readers meet Jackson full-front, as he sought to (using current Trumpian political rhetoric) “Make America Great Again.” While many Anglo-Americans celebrate “Old Hickory” as the original Democrat, who broadened participation in the political system, many Native Americans regard him as author of a barbaric policy that victimized their ancestors. Was it “genocide”? Cave finds such an attempt at definition largely a semantic argument. The term was not invented until many generations after Jackson and the many trails of tears. The law of genocide requires stated intent (such as Hitler’s vow to wipe out the Jews and others) which is absent in Jackson’s case, except in his belief that Removal was doing the Cherokees a favor). Hitler in his way was less delusional than Jackson, who believed he was saving Native people from extermination. Regardless, the toll in human death and suffering was monumental.

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Nonetheless, Native American people survived Jackson and Removal, just as the Jews (and many others) outlived Hitler and his own deadly delusions. History can be bitterly surprising, even wrenching, when it collides with official myths that have been repeated so often that they are often confused with truth. Some courage may be required to look at history with an honest eye.

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Johansen, B.  E. (2017, March 28). Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson: Part as prologue. Connecticut News-Times. Retrieved from https://www.newstimes.com/opinion/article/Bruce-­ E-­Johansen-­Donald-­Trump-­and-­Andrew-­11031415.php Klein, E. (2022, November 6). Republicans have made it very clear what they want to do if they win congress. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/opinion/ republican-­congress-­agenda-­mccarthy.html Kortava, D. (2022, October 10). In the filtration camps. The New Yorker, 32–41. Malcolm, X., & Haley, A. (1964). The autobiography of Malcolm X. Grove Press. Mann, B. A. (2017, June 16). Personal communication. Remnick, D. (2022, September 12). “First and Last.” Talk of the town. The New Yorker, 13–14. Ruff, D. (2022). Why does Trump use such a simplified vocabulary? He Rarely uses words above a fourth-grade level. Is he unable to speak and write more eloquently, or is it a political strategy? Quora. Retrieved 29, 2022, from https://www.quora.com/What-­is-­Donald-­Trumps-­reading-­level Sanneh, K. (2023, April 3). Under god: How Christian is Christian nationalism? The New Yorker, 22–25. Santora, M., & Mpoke Bigg, M. (2022a, November 1). Russian missiles deliver new woe to Kyiv, knocking out tap water. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/ world/europe/russia-­ukraine-­kyiv-­water.html Santora, M., & Mpoke Bigg, M. (2022b, October 31). Russian missiles deliver new woe to Kyiv, knocking out tap water. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/ world/europe/russia-­ukraine-­kyiv-­water.html Santora, M., & Nechepurenko, I. (2022, November 3). Kherson braces for Battle as Russian administration evacuates. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/ world/europe/russia-­ukraine-­kherson-­battle.html Simi, P., & Futrell, R. (2010). American swastika: Inside the White power movement’s hidden spaces of hate. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Stephens, B. (2022, November 1). Putin is starting to do what won him a war 7 years ago. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ukraine-­war-­russia-­ putin.html Stewart, K. (2022, July 5). Christian nationalists are excited about what comes next. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/opinion/dobbs-­christian-­ nationalism.html Thompson, S. A. (2022, April 15). How Russia media uses fox news to make its case. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/technology/russia-­media-­fox-­ news.html What happened on day 46 of the war in Ukraine. New York Times. April 27, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/10/world/ukraine-­russia-­war-­news Wigglesworth, A. (2022, August 15). As risk of nuclear war grows, study warns even a limited exchange would doom billions. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes. com/nation-­world/as-­risk of-nuclear-war-grows-study-warns-even-a-limited-exchange-would-­­ doom-billions/. Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K., et al. (2022). Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nature Food, 3, 586–596. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-­022-­00573-­0

Chapter 5

Gun Fetish Nation

5.1 Live Update: All Victims in Michigan State Shooting Were Students, Police Say Three students were killed, and five others are in critical condition after the shooting on the university’s campus. The gunman, who the police said was unaffiliated with the university, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The border between the shocking and the ordinary has moved. We awaken so often these days to news such as this when the numbness has barely ebbed since the last one. By Valentine’s Day of 2023, the United States had endured 68 mass shootings in a month and a half. A “mass shooting” is usually defined as an event in which least four people have been killed or seriously wounded. Ownership of one (or an entire houseful) of firearms and ammunition capable of killing scores of people at the touch of a button has been elevated in the United States to a fetish and nearly an addiction, a vehicle of nationalistic personal domination, power, and control from shooters with grudges and trigger-taut hatreds, often comprising a nation of one, compelling obedience to hot lead fired in anger. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution is prized by them as an absolute right to build a personal arsenal in which one person may exercise power usually reserved for nations at war, invoking the law of the jungle as far as his bullets can reach. (Yes, his. Female mass shooters are very rare, but not unknown). Nearly half of US citizens own at least one gun and profess Second Amendment rights to carry and use any kind of personal armament, from small handguns, to hunting rifles, to AR-15 submachine guns of a kind usually taken into battle by troops of the US Army and Marine Corps. The gun is a symbol of nationalism, often reflective of Americans’ desire to enforce their will over large parts of the World. The United States also maintains more than 100 active military bases outside its

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_5

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own borders, many times more that of any other nation on Earth at any time in human history. If the United States has one accurate national symbol, it would not be the Stars and Stripes. It would be an AR-15 or an AK-47, locked and loaded. Not only have weapons in the hands of civilians become more numerous and powerful; they also are circulating between sellers and buyers (by sale, for potential use) more quickly in that grand shooting range that the United States has become. A federal report, the most expansive in more than 20 years, found that the “shrinking turnaround between the time it was [legally] purchased and when it was recovered from a crime scene…indicating that firearms bought legally are more quickly being used in crimes around the country (Whitehurst, 2023). The report indicated that “54 per cent of guns that police recovered on crime scenes in 2021 had been purchased within three years, a double-digit increase since 2019. …The increase has been driven by guns bought less than three years before” (Whitehurst, 2023, A-5). The report also indicates that legal purchasers of guns are selling them to underaged purchasers at increasing rates (2023, A-5).

5.2 A Uniquely American Plague By 2023, the national bloodbath had reached dimensions that were unimaginable even a few years earlier in their number and level of violence, covering a line of fire that had many of us thinking and believing that no place in our daily lives was exempt. On March 27, 28-year-old Audrey Hale walked into Covenant, a small Christian School in Nashville, Tennessee, and shot to death three adults and three very young students. The shooter, who was fatally shot by police, was female, an oddity for mass shooters. She had been carrying two assault weapons and a pistol, as she walked into Covenant School, with an enrollment of about 200 students in preschool through sixth grade. When police and reporters began asking about motives, they found no obvious answers. Hale had changed her sexual identity several times—she was born female—and was recalled by people who knew her as an agreeable person who wanted to be a child forever. She was said to have planned the shooting for months and had been treated for an undisclosed emotional disorder. The one thread that ran through most of her behavior before the shootings was loneliness and confusion. Hale entered the school’s unlocked doors with a military-style rifle, purchased legally, and opened fire as the nearby State Capitol was debating whether to weaken some of the United States’ most permissive gun laws. By the twisted logic of gun advocates, the answer to death by fire was more charcoal, lighter fluid, and matches. “No one in this firearm-besotted country is safe from gun violence,” wrote Margaret Renkl in the New York Times April 5, 2023.

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5.3 Blood on the Stars and Stripes Celebrations of the United States’ Independence Day have even been broken up by a downpour of lethal hot lead. “It is devastating that a celebration of America has to be torn apart by our uniquely American plague,” said Illinois Gov. J.B.  Pritzker, after six people had been fatally shot at a small-town celebration in his state. “I’m furious because it doesn’t have to be this way….While we celebrate the Fourth of July just once a year, mass shootings have become a weekly—yes, weekly—American tradition” (“Six People.” 2022). In the meantime, the death toll rises in America’s shooting gallery. In Highland Park, Illinois, about 50 miles north of Chicago, an affluent suburb, a shooter with a high-powered machine gun attacked a Fourth of July parade July 4, 2020, killing six people and injuring 24. The gun that he was using carried a caliber so powerful that its ammunition very nearly ripped some victims apart. Many other mass killings have occurred in most corners of the United States before and after this, but I am using this one for the symbolic poignancy of its symbols—a classic small town, a patriotic parade attended by parents and children, their ethnicity mainly European-American, the kind of place where no one would expect gun violence to break out. Isn’t there some place where we can evade the shooting range that the land of the free has become? Where can we watch floats and eat hotdogs in safety these days? Suddenly, however, the quiet streets came to resemble a war zone. Perhaps some of the adults watching the parade had guns at home, probably for hunting. Most of these probably were small-bore rifles, however, not assault weapons. In an interview with Cable News Network (CNN), David Baum, an obstetrician in Highland Park, described the “horrific scene” when the gunman sprayed gunshots into the Fourth of July parade through the community. The more precise word he used to describe some of the injuries was “unspeakable.” The people killed were “blown up by that gunfire,” he said—“blown up. The horrific scene of some of the bodies is unspeakable for the average person. This shooting—and Baum’s description—again, for a few days, reignited extended the roiling debate about whether media should show what rounds from high-powered rifles can do to the human body (Six people, 2022, A-1, A-5). Mass killings of imagined enemies—people unknown to the killer for no discernable reason—run like a bloody thread through an American history in which a shooter in many US states can purchase an AR-15, a weapon of mass murder, with the ease of a candy bar, except that the aggrieved shooter must show proof of age 18, at which he may also purchase cigarettes or a mildly pornographic movie. In some jurisdictions, one must be 21 to legally buy cigarettes, but only 18 to legally own an arsenal of guns. Grievances or other personal problems often figure large when a shooter is only a few days or weeks past his 18th birthday when an instrument of mass murder was purchased and used. Such was the case at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde,

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Texas, in June, 2022 (Cobb, 2022a, b, c). Most of the United States have no legal limit on the type or number of firearms allowed for personal ownership of individuals over the age of 18. After years of legalized calamity, these laws remain the same, all under the legal shield of the Second Amendment. With the United States’ astronomical number of mass shootings, research indicates that the problem is not that the country has some exotic, irreconcilable cultural malady. The problem is too many guns and too many people with very poor judgment using them. The problem, simply put, is attitudes toward the Second Amendment, which was sewn into the US Constitution shortly after the Revolution to prevent the British from easily invading and suppressing its former colonies. The British are no longer a problem, but gun-bred violence is. A super-charged gun lobby whose purpose is to sell its product has helped create a civil religion that has made a fetish of gun possession. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns. Who needs an assault rifle to shoot Bambi? As Max Fisher and Josh Keller explained: The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer. Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama (Fisher & Keller, 2017). Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people…. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

5.4 Gun Ownership and Use: Myths and Realities Nearly all shooters are less than 25 years of age. Are these macho men still reliving the Indian wars? Or the persistence of high ratings for old John Wayne movies? This nightmare seems very consistent; year after year, the United States scores very high (number-one, usually) in the rate of lethal shootings. Lax regulation of guns seems to play a role. A state law in Texas allowing carry of handguns without a license has led, usually, to more spontaneous shootings (Fisher & Keller, 2017). It’s been a long time since the nineteenth-century Indian wars. For example, we have air transportation. Some citizens of the United States still feel a necessity to carry firearms while moving from place to place on commercial aircraft. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) intercepted a record number of guns, (6542) at airport security checkpoints in 2022, according to the agency. Both gun sales and airline travel increased during the same year. Of the guns intercepted by the TSA, by December 16, 88 percent were loaded. This count was compiled before

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the year ended. By the end of the year, the TSA had intercepted 6,301 firearms, mostly in carry-on bags,10 percent more than the previous record of 5,972, set in 2021. At the end of 2022. The TSA increased the maximum fine for a firearms violation by nearly $1,000, to $14,950, in order to reduce the threat of firearms at checkpoints.

5.5 United States vs. the World’s Gun Deaths: The Numbers Gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. Countries with high suicide rates usually have low rates of mass shootings, however—the opposite of what one would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings. The United States, however, is the highest in the world, however, very likely because guns are so easy to get. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a total of 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries of all causes in the United States during 2021, the last year for which complete data were available. In late 2022, more than half were suicides. Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the United States were 13 times greater than in France in 2019 and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole. The United States has 23 times the rate of firearm homicide as Australia. The United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E.  Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of The Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Other stereotypes of shooter motivations fail to be true. “A 2015 study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley concluded that American crime is not usually more common, but it is more lethal, [emphasis added] which can be easily traced back to the international discrepancies in gun ownership.” A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. “The discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to rates of gun ownership (and use),” Fisher and Keller wrote (2017). They also said that “More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates.” And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis (Fisher & Keller, 2017) of 130 studies from ten countries. This suggests, they wrote, that “The [availability of] guns themselves cause the violence.” “There is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.” This point of view has infiltrated gun advertising. According to The New York Times:

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In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs—a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” (America’s Toxic Gun Culture, 2012) The message was aimed at the 82 million people who owned about 400 million firearms in the United States in 2022. The ad turned out to be more of a cultural artifact than a success at the polls. Greitens lost his race for office.

5.6 Guns and Deaths (Including Suicides) in International Context Placing United States’ gun violence in international context, in 2013, American gun-related deaths included 32,888 gun deaths (21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides, and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge). The same year in Japan, a country with one-third of the United States’ population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths. By contrast, although it has half the population of 22 other large nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the United States had 82 percent of gun deaths, including 90 percent of all women killed with guns. A US citizen thus was roughly 300 times as likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese man, woman, or child. The US gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different. The United States also has some of the weakest legal limits on who may buy a gun, as well as the types of these weapons that may be owned. The United States’ legal restrictions on ownership of handguns in many states allow unlimited purchases, enough to outfit a small army, as well as one long gun per month. Some limits are variable, and, it seems, written with a wry sense of humor, in the “free state of Texas,” for example, allows as many handguns as the buyer’s car trunk will hold. Countries with high rates of gun ownership often impose strict controls over who may purchase guns and what sorts of guns may be owned. Switzerland has the second-­highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people—unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States. Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that may be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. While US law implies a right to own as

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many guns as one wants, Guatemala, Mexico, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia display a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own. “The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.” wrote Fisher and Keller (2017). “In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun-control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school at Sandy Hook school, in Connecticut. “Once America decided [that] killing children was bearable, it was over” (Fisher & Keller, 2017). At one time (the 1960s, for example), mass shootings did occur in the United States, but they were relatively rare. I recall the grief that accompanied the shocking circumstances that accompanied shootings by a trained sniper from a bell tower at the University of Texas in Austin, or the horror that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. After the Austin shootings, in 1966, 18 years passed before its death toll was surpassed. Wikipedia posted the following succinct summary of the UT shootings: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University the of the Texas_tower_shooting] On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the previous night, Charles Whitman, a Marine veteran, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin and then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. During the next 96 minutes, he shot and killed 15 people, including an unborn child, and injured 31 other people. The incident ended when two policemen and a civilian reached Whitman and fatally shot him. At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in US history, being surpassed 18 years later by the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre.

In 2022, gun-murder bulletins seared the public consciousness much more often: [This] shooting at Walmart in Virginia adds to nation’s grim gun toll; six were killed, as well as the gunman, in the third recent high-profile mass shooting in the United States.

The following account appeared in the New York Times 59 years to the day after Kennedy’s assassination:

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By Chris Cameron, Jenny Gross, Eliza Fawcett, Nicholas Bogel-­Burroughs and J.  David Goodman. November 23, 2022. https://www.nytimes. com/2022/11/23/us/walmart-­shooting.html

Chesapeake, VA—as nighttime shoppers browsed for household items or Thanksgiving necessities, an employee of a Walmart in Chesapeake, VA, took out a pistol, and, without a word, a witness said, opened fire, killing five of his co-workers and a 16-year-old boy, wounding several others before turning the weapon on himself. The bodies of the gunman and two victims were found in an employee break room, the authorities said, and another near the front of the store. Three died after being taken to nearby hospitals. The burst of workplace violence, just after 10 p.m. on Tuesday, tore at the holiday cheer of a popular shopping center now cordoned off with yellow police tape. And it thrust the nation, again, for the third time in less than 2 weeks, into a familiar and increasingly frequent cycle of mourning and soul-searching, prayer-sending and finger-pointing, in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting (emphasis added). A few days earlier, an attacker had killed 5 people and wounded 18 others at a Colorado Springs nightclub that had been regarded as a haven of safety for the local LGBTQ community. Earlier, a student at the University of Virginia shot and killed three members of the school’s football team on a bus as they returned from a game. In May, 2021, a transit worker opened fire as workers gathered for a morning shift at a rail yard in San Jose, California, killing nine people. The month before, a former employee shot and killed eight people at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis. Both gunmen killed themselves shortly after their rampages. By the day before Thanksgiving in 2021, the number of mass shootings during the year in the United States had reached 608, with five killed the day before in a Chesapeake (Tidewater,) Virginia Walmart, by an unhappy employee. A day before that, six had been killed in the “Q” Colorado Springs gay bar. One witness to the “Q” shootings said “this in an American disease—unique to our country” (NBC Nightly News, November 23, 2022). The “Q” toll would have been higher except for a US Army veteran who threw himself over the shooter. Guns, in the United States, have become a form of personal nationalism that glorifies brutal use of national symbols, up to and including the imagery of the “gun-fighter nation,” the “wild west,” and hot lead used to push the frontier westward, felling one Native American nation after another. The promotion and manipulation of patriotic symbols by gun owners make it seem as if the Empire is cracking up because of its myriad shootings, but it is an extension of US history, including interracial violence and fear-based advertising campaigns aimed at minorities by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Why are nearly all of those killed Black and Brown? Why are almost all of the killers White? From the inside, the country already often seems like a prison for many non-White people.

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5.7 Shootouts at the “Home of the Brave” Corral So why do so many people in the United States believe that a gun (or several) is necessary to stay alive in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Is it about protection from all those other malign creatures “out there” with more, even bigger guns? We have all been told by the NRA from Day 1 that the only thing that is going to save us from bad guys with guns are more good guys with even bigger guns. And how do we easily find the good guys with guns? Hey, guy with a gun, may I bother to ask for your good-guy license? Are we to suppose that all those good guys with guns aren’t actually bad guys selling guns on commission, doubling down on fear? We do know, for example, that fear is a major draw for gun sales, so we have an arms race that accelerates after each mass killing. Likewise, this arms race is propelled by fear of being outmatched by the bad guys with guns. If it’s not about fear, what is it? In all sincerity, more often than not these days, US Republicans have been mixing caliber with prayer. It is, more often than ever, “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist, asked: “Are we ready for a pumped­up, pistol-packing [gun activist] Lauren Boebert? “How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert [asked] a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June [2022]: “How many guns would Jesus have?” “I’m going with none,” [Dowd wrote], but Boebert’s answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.” Boebert, serving in the US House of Representatives during her first term, seemed almost giddy, on the campaign trail, predicting “happily,” wrote Dowd, “’that we’re in the end times, ‘the last of the last days’” (Dowd, 2022). With so many long guns around, is it a surprise that some of us may soon be living our “last days”?

5.8 Save My Soul, Rev. DeSantis! Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” wrote Dowd, “How about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term [He later won by a wide margin], aired an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement” (Dowd, 2022). Describing an attempt to conflate fact and faith, Michael C. Bender and Patricia Mazzei wrote in the New York Times: [T]he governor’s [Ron DeSantis’] team released a video Friday [November 4, 2022] aimed at infusing his candidacy with a sense of the divine. “And on the eighth day,’ a deep-voiced narrator said in DeSantis’s video, ‘God looked down on his planned paradise and said: “I need a protector.” So God made a fighter. The video seemed aimed at turning Mr. DeSantis into an object of veneration, much as Mr. Trump has for some time been viewed by many Christian nationalists and other fervent supporters as an almost messianic figure” (Bender & Mazzei, 2022).

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So, along with fears of oligarchy and autocracy in our begotten political future, add theocracy. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are spinning in their graves at several times the speed of sound. Once upon a time, not so long ago, the United States had a separation of church and state. That was then. DeSantis’ victory of more than 20 percentage points did nothing to diminish his already monumental ego. His political ad mentioned “God” ten times in 90 seconds. DeSantis’ called his victory “a win for the ages!” One can almost see the manna falling from heaven over Tallahassee, Florida’s Capital city. He seems to have already hit the mega-millions jackpot for hubris as he pursues the 2024 presidential election, at which he most assuredly was aiming 2 full years away. We will see a thunderstorm of megalomania—(may I steal your phrase, Rev. DeSantis?)—for the ages! eras! epochs! I can see the angels turning cartwheels around his enormous skull. Save my soul, Rev. DeSantis! And, my oh my, the hippest thing to do during the 2022 mid-term elections November 8, 2022, was to run on a platform of aborning ruin for the US political system. Dowd (2022) counted almost 300 people on various ballots who were using completely fallacious grounds, more than 2 years after the fact, to deny that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election, “but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.” Beg my pardon, please, but isn’t arguing that an election is fraudulent even before it has even been held is a bit like maintaining that guns don’t kill people? Or, really, that people carrying guns don’t kill people? Good-guy shooters only, please. Picture IDs, COVID cards, and gun-carrying status will be checked at the door.

5.9 Fear of Crime Stocks the Arsenal With Trump leading the way, the Republicans always run a fear campaign. They pound fear of crime, even when crime, excluding the use of guns, actually has fallen in most areas of the United States since the 1970s. When Trump can’t find any other fear bait, he rants “crush the communists,” as if they are a threat in the United States. The last living, breathing, really dangerous communist in the land of the free croaked several decades ago. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is an amazingly rich oligarch in our time. Commies as authority figures have been smoldering on the ash heap of history for decades. The Soviet Union is past tense, and China is communist only when the Central Committee meets. Otherwise, Mr. Trump, rip-off capitalism is the name of the game in today’s world. Karl Marx wouldn’t recognize Kim Jon Un and his show-off nukes. Communists have been the least valid fear-­ mongering fake news in America since a few days after the Bolshevik Revolution. More Republicans get more of their big toes shot off by ill-maintained AR-15s than by communists. And Republicans are trying to scare us with them? So, let’s get back to the death toll of guns. Rev. DeSantis wouldn’t be caught naked on God’s right hand without at least one gun, in case a nearly dead commie stumbles by.

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Proponents of gun reform in the United States are not only competing with a powerful gun lobby; they are also up against our most durable myth, the exceptionalist notion that a man with a gun is a force powerful enough to defend us against any danger. These days, gun violence victims are more domestic than foreign. Nothing had improved by July 17, 2022, when the following rang into my inbox as I was taking notes for this chapter: Chief: 3 dead in Indiana mall shooting; witness kills gunman In that sense, those mass killings have something in common with most other gun violence in America—people tend to know their killers, according to FBI data. “Commonly, the victim and the perpetrator know each other or know about each other,” Richard Berk said (Cole, 2019). “They’re not total strangers. It makes it even more sad.”

Greenwood, Indiana (Associated Press)—Three people were fatally shot, and two were injured Sunday evening at an Indiana mall after a man with a rifle opened fire in a food court and an armed civilian shot and killed the shooter. Two days later, in New York City, during a shoot for an episode of Law & Order, a television program, someone performed a real hit on a crew member—blew him away in front of rolling cameras, an unwelcomed intrusion of reality into budding entertainment. Note the effect that the language of the shooting range has had on our everyday speech. Nothing, however, can prevent our impulse as storytellers to recount events and beliefs that compel them—a collection of big and little lies driven by the rich and infamous, a political comic book, or a towering, macabre voyage into an unknown— and definitely uncertain, a voyage to the future on the deck of the largest and perhaps strangest empire in human history, but also a place, with the help of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment, in which, I realize that I repeat, for emphasis, 40,000 people had been shot to death with real bullets, during the first 7 months of 2022 alone, in the United States, a definitely imperfect union, in which brilliant people of all races have sought new beginnings, e pluribus unum, out of many, one, where a sense of freedom with more than 300 million definitions elbow each other for prominence, as freedom of expression’s definitions and assumptions are tested every day. The right to bear arms and more often than ever before implies and compels their use. Mass media swimming in dripping blood do nothing but imply and allow audience members to assume that such behavior has become a baseline as everyday normal.

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5.10 The Legalities of Mass Murder As real-life shootings continued to occur across the United States with disconcerting regularity, the US Supreme Court was busy liberalizing laws regarding carrying and using of guns, a trend which former president Donald J.  Trump applauded heartily. Doubtless he had such a liberalization in mind when he played an important role in appointing three of the US Supreme Court’s nine justices, who joined in broadening the ways in which Americans could legally carry (and sometimes kill with) guns. The US Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on June 22, 2022, that US citizens have a firmly established right, under the Constitution’s Second Amendment, to carry firearms in public, soundly countermanding a New York state law that strictly limited legal rights to carry guns outside the home. The Court’s opinion provoked several other states to review laws similar to New York’s, including one-quarter of US citizens who live in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. The ruling was released a few weeks after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde. Texas. Ironically, the ruling came the same day that the US Senate passed gun controls to enhance background checks for applicants aged 18 to 21 to buy guns, endorsed “red flag” laws, and banned domestic abusers from buying them. These relatively lightweight limits were the most significant federal legal curtailments of gun ownership in almost 30 years, indicating how severely that NRA lobbying has choked gun-law reform in the United States. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Second Amendment protects “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home” (Liptak, 2022). Justice Thomas said that state governments may restrict guns in as few locations (government buildings and schools, for example). The surge in gun violence came as legal firearm purchases rose to record levels in 2020 and 2021, with more than 43 million guns estimated to have been legally purchased during each of those years. No one knows how many firearms were bought or sold illegally, ”on the street” during those 2 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that most suicides are self-inflicted with guns. The spiral of violence and deaths again has been augmented by easy access to guns. My surgeon, Jim Stothert, husband of Omaha’s mayor, Jean Stothert, blew up his brain with a shotgun in this very way March 21, 2021. For example, what would have begun and ended as a fistfight, with minimal injuries, may quickly escalate into a fatal gun battle. People who once carried knives now tote high-caliber firearms. Availability of guns creates fear of guns that equals more gun purchases. Gun sales rise after gun-related violence, giving gun sellers financial advantages to stoke fear of their merchandise. “What we’re seeing is a different type of violence here in Pittsburgh,” said the Rev. Eileen Smith, executive director of the South Pittsburgh Coalition for Peace, a nonprofit that includes violence interrupters. “They’re not fighting, at least not outside of school. They’re killing” (Berman et al., 2022).

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5.11 Guns, Fear, and Social Divisions Ample access to guns plays a significant role in social unrest, as people have been arming themselves in the face of deepening fears and divisions, frightening public incidents involving gunfire or violence, or simply because they know others may have guns. According to a Washington Post investigation (Berman et  al., 2022), “Large spikes [of gun purchases] occurred after the 2012 Sandy Hook [and other] school shooting[s]; amid coronavirus shutdowns, racial justice protests and the presidential election in 2020; as well as after the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol.” By 2022, residents of the United States collectively owned about 400 million firearms. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy of, “I need a gun because everyone else around me has a gun,” said Sasha Cotton, director of the Minneapolis Office of Violence Prevention. The agonizing frequency of nonfatal shootings and firearm deaths, experts said, has become a uniquely American phenomenon. “Many other countries have disadvantaged folks who are angry and alienated,” said Richard Berk, a professor emeritus of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania. “But guns aren’t there” (Berman et al., 2022). White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. Black men are 17 times as likely to be killed with a gun fired by someone else. About 60 percent of the gun deaths in the United States each year are suicides, according to CDC data spanning the past 20 years. Firearms accounted for about 8 percent of suicide attempts but slightly more than 50 percent of the 47,511 US suicide deaths in 2019, according to the American Association of Suicidology. Men are nearly four times as likely as women to succeed in a suicide attempt, mainly because they are much more likely to use a gun. In 2020, while the overall crime rate fell nationwide, “that was not true for shootings,” Cook said. That year, he said, there was an “unparalleled” surge in people killed by firearms compared with 2019 (Berman et al., 2022). Determining the precise number of guns sold in America each year is difficult. The data does not include weapon sales from private sellers at gun shows or online marketplaces because the law does not require them to submit background checks. Firearm sales estimates are based on methodology applied to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System data surveying handgun, long-gun, and multiple-­gun background checks leading to purchases. There is little consensus as to why gun sales and deaths have jumped so much over the past few years. The only clear thing, Cook said, is that “the increase in homicide was almost entirely an increase in gun homicide” (Cole, 2019). Beyond that, it is difficult to parse all the things happening at once. Even the theories that have been floated about the rise in violence have weaknesses, experts said, adding that there is a lack of good research about what is driving the increase. Most of America has probably never seen a fatal gunshot wound. Our mental image of a fatal gunshot wound has been created by cultural imagery through Hollywood movies and video games. What we don’t see is the reality of these rifles’ decapitating children in Uvalde, Texas; shredding organs until they look like “an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer” at a high school in Parkland, Fla; and

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leaving at least one person, according to Baum, with an “unspeakable head injury” in Highland Park (Blow, 2022a, b). Charles Blow, of the New York Times, asked whether the public should be forced to confront the truth of this carnage. Blow wrote: “Would these images shock the country out of its morbid malaise and into action to address an unconscionable—and fully preventable—public health crisis that guns have created? I now believe that the public’s need to know has overtaken its need to be shielded from horror. In fact, on some level, not allowing the public access to some version of the gore is extending a form of disinformation, permitting a warped, naive or incorrect impression to persist when it could be corrected” (Blow, 2022a, b). As he put it, “I’m of the camp that it’s about damn time that we do start publishing this stuff, with the caveat that we have to be sensitive to the relatives left behind.” It is important to understand that humans can become desensitized to anything, even extreme inhumanity. Look no further than the previously described postcards of lynched bodies.” “Like so many Americans, I have been called into relationships with guns since I was a child and have been made to understand, even long before I could articulate it, that guns represented something essential about what it means to become a fully realized American man,” wrote Francisco Cantú, journalist, author, agent, and translator, who served as agent of the United States Border Patrol between 2008 and 2012. “Guns have long been an integral part of our national mythology, woven deep into our most sacred lore about the winning of our independence, about manifest destiny and territorial expansion, about the defense of democracy and the spread of our empire across the globe,” wrote Cantú. At the center of this mythos is an abiding archetype—the lone man and his gun. This figure (usually white and positioned in opposition to people of color) has been represented throughout history in many familiar forms: the musket-toting militiaman with a revolutionary thirst for liberty, the cowboy chasing freedom with a six shooter across a frontier full of hostile natives, or the soldier with a rifle deployed to conquer or save a distant people inferior to his own. In each case, the gun is an essential counterpart—serving, like King Arthur’s sword or Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, as the one tool that makes possible the hero’s journey, wrote Cantú, who continued: Our stories have been steeped in guns for so long that they have become an inevitable-seeming element of our lives, saddling us with institutions resigned to their power. As a result, American politics has become dissociated from the reality of gun violence even as that violence creeps into more and more intimate public spaces. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of mass shootings are committed by men, and increasingly, these assailants are younger, often acquiring their arms as a coming-of-age ritual. The assault rifle used to murder 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, [were] purchased by the shooter in celebration of his 18th birthday; the gun used in last year’s shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School was a Christmas present given to the 15-year-old shooter by his parents; and the 20-year-old perpetrator of the

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2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn. reportedly grew up with a mother who often turned to guns as a way to bond with her difficult-to-reach son before he eventually murdered her at their home before slaughtering 20 young children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary. Ours is a country where civilian-­ owned guns outnumber people. Our national mythology has also clearly hampered our capacity to respond to gun violence—a favorite line of the NRA is that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This delusion, disproved in Uvalde and countless times before, flows directly from Hollywood fantasy (Cantú, 2022). Fictional depictions of America’s “Wild West” have helped solidify real-world attitudes of masculinity in the face of soul-numbing violence. In The End of the Myth, historian Greg Grandin argued that the presence of a frontier allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence. Even as America closed in upon its territorial edges at the end of the 1800s, Grandin wrote, our leaders continued to gesture toward new frontiers where the figure of the lone American could be thrust outward to defeat new enemies—across the ocean, into outer space or through clouds of terror oriented around a globalized axis of evil. In recent decades the figure of the lone gunman has proceeded to bring the once remote-seeming specter of public violence into more familiar public places—schools, churches, grocery stores, and hospitals—refiguring it into something that has become impossible to dismiss into the distance. That, in turn, has led to the increasing militarization of our day-to-day lives under the guise of police-enforced safety. America is not unique in its attempt to maintain a state monopoly on violence, but in a country where most adults can legally acquire an arsenal of weapons with destructive power unimaginable to our founding fathers, law enforcement has found pretext to engage in eternal escalation, acquiring more sophisticated means for waging war even within our most sacred spaces.

Every few weeks, America seems to reach new depths in its long downward spiral of gun violence. Sometimes these events occur back-to-back over a day or 2. There is always a drumbeat, a rat-tat-tat on our streets. Was that a rifle shot or a firecracker? If a shot, if someone is dead or seriously wounded, we hear sirens. In our neighborhood, sirens are a constant symphony of death: rat-tat-tat, police, aid cars, and helicopters heading for hospitals. We then repeat ritual words about a need to solve the problem and the next day resume what has come to be regarded as “normal.” The urgency of disentangling guns from our sense of individual and national identity has never been more clear. We can safely keep our exceptionalist myths, our

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cowboy archetypes, and our notions of gun-toting good guys holding evil at bay, only as long as we also recognize them as nostalgic delusions at odds with the reality of what it means to live in a community with other people. This statement takes us back to a major thesis of this chapter: to eliminate or at least begin to tame gun violence, we will have to change how we think about guns, sometimes unconsciously. We will need to tame a taste for violence that has been insidiously woven into our culture.

5.12 The Gun Fetish Dictionary. United States Edition, c. 2023 As one indication of just how deeply the roots of gun culture have penetrated daily language in the United States, please examine a partial list of gunpowder-stained figures of speech in everyday conversation. Armed to the Teeth: See “Locked and Loaded,” below. Big Shots: Bigger guns hold bigger bullets, which shoot bigger targets. Metaphorically, people with more power or influence are big guns, or Big Shots. Bite the Bullet. A soldier in combat may be issued a bullet to bite if injured, or facing very painful surgery with no painkillers. In other situations, a soldier may have been issued a bullet with a top infused with a top of cyanide or another quick-­ killing chemical to be taken to prevent live capture by an enemy, to prevent interrogation that might involve torture to extract secret information. Calls the shots: Usually a supervisor (or boss) who tells underlings what to do. “Cheap shot:” In mid-June, 2022, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa invited owners of AR-15s and other semiautomatics to suit up in their camouflage gear and do their civic duty by reducing an overpopulation of deer that have been inviting themselves into local cornfields. The image of Bambi being executed for eating an ear or two of plump Iowa corn—splat!—is too much a display of our anthropomorphic world to pass up. Don’t the offending deer know that farmers sell this stuff for real money? And don’t tell me that pigs also eat corn in Iowa. Iowans also complain that deer cross streets and highways wherever they please, impeding human-propelled motor vehicles. So if you’re Bambi, or look like Bambi, it’s time to migrate out of state. And don’t eat any corn on your way out (Reynolds, 2022). Dead aim: Having an idea regarding which action is best for a given situation. See also: On target Dodge a bullet: Escape from a difficult situation, usually an important or risky one. Don’t shoot the messenger: someone who is bringing bad news for which he or she may be punished or disliked as a result. Sophocles used it in “Antigone: ‘No man loves the messenger of ill.’” Double-barreled: to deliver an extra dose (or “shot” or “double shot”) of something, especially an alcoholic beverage.)

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Give it your best shot: In a difficult situation, choosing the best option. Go ballistic: explode with anger; lose self-control. Gun shy: a desire to avoid gun violence, or any conflict. Gunning an engine: to press the accelerator, usually while a car is stopped with brakes locked. Gunning for you: has it in for you; usually not a reference to an actual pursuit with a gun. Hit the bullseye: Quality work on a difficult task. Hit me with your best shot: See: “Give it your best shot:” High caliber: The best in a group. Hot shot: In an office, a young employee who is impressive, but also a show-off. In the crosshairs: Precisely located in the sight of a gun; about to be shot, physically or metaphorically. In the sights of usually refers to taking aim. “Good aim” means that you have a goal. jsmn (Just Shoot Me Now): Let’s get done with a task; get over with it; relieve my misery. Jump the gun: Take off to soon for a task, usually in a sporting event, especially in a track sprint. Locked and loaded: One’s equipment and frame of mind are ready for travel, often ready to get moving into a difficult and dangerous situation. As a gun metaphor, your ammunition is locked (to prevent accidents on a march or a road trip) and loaded with ammunition and reserve supplies. Long shot: A task with a low probability of success or a good payoff in case of success. Quick on the trigger: Making a decision too quickly, without thinking it out. Parting shot: Last words, as in a debate over options in a situation involving the prospect of risky confrontation. Photo shoot: as used in a movie, or in advertising. Pot shot: an easy target to hit, or a target not worth hitting. Pulling out the big guns: to summon knowledgeable, senior people to a task. Pull the trigger: make a move at the correct time. Riding shotgun: The passenger seat next to the driver of a car. The person most likely to fire a gun from a moving vehicle and to receive fire because of his or her exposed position. Scattershot approach: To fire wildly, missing intended targets. It can be used in business as suggesting talk without hitting any point, wasted energy that could be saved for necessary, intended discussion. A shotgun can disperse projectiles over a large area, notably if the shooter is nervous. Thus, scattershot refers to haphazard decision-making. Setting your sights (See: In the crosshairs). She’s a real pistol: Usually a complimentary reference by a man to or about a women about physical attributes or attractive clothing has nothing to do with pistols. Shoot the moon: to go after a long shot [yet another gun metaphor] with a low probability of achieving the desired result.

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Shoot first, aim later. A wild shot, often taken in anger. Shoot first, ask questions later: Aim carelessly or haphazardly. Act without having thought things over, an irrational action that will be followed by regret. Shoot! An expression of frustration at having failed at a minor task; (Another option: “Ah, Shit!”). Shoot it out to me: (e.g., send a draft of a statement or report.) Shoot it [a plan] down: Destroy support for a task. Shoot a photo; or with a slightly felonious intent, “take” one. Shoot for the stars: To have expectations above reasonable expectations. Shoot the moon: Same as above, but with more reasonable expectations. Shooting without aforethought: People who shoot first and aim later (or “ask questions later”) might end up killing someone whom they didn’t intend. It’s, of course, better to get a task “in the crosshairs” before you shoot! (complete a task). Today, we use this phrase when talking about someone who says and does things before thinking. For example, if a police officer arrested someone and then realized they had gotten the wrong person, you could accuse him or her of shooting without aforethought: Shot Down: Literally, to be injured or killed, or removed from a situation, as an airplane is shot from the sky. Metaphorically: to be embarrassed as part of a verbal exchange when one’s ideas are seen as ridiculous. Shooting the breeze: Aimless conversation, i.e., bullshit. “Shooting” for a given deadline: Usually a task with a serious deadline. Shoot from the hip: To make decisions rashly or impulsively. It refers to the idea of someone from old Westerns who pulls a gun from a holster and shoots at an enemy without even taking a pause to aim. These old Western cowboys were making some bad decisions! Today you might warn someone not to shoot from the hip if you see them getting mad or making assumptions without thinking things through. Shooting blanks: Insult against a man who are taken to be infertile. Shot off his (or her) mouth: Talking excessively, usually with lack of knowledge, wasting time. Shotgun shack; or, for the upscale, “shot-gun house”: A structure usually outside the main house, where friends can maintain their guns, tell stories, drink beer, watch football on TV, and generally goof off. Shotgun shacks are a style of housing in New Orleans. Silver bullet: In March 19, 2013, when then-Vice President Joe Biden concluded a week of meetings at the White House over how to curb gun violence, he chose the following words to describe its complexity: “We know that there is no silver bullet. The major supernatural creature of myth who was killed with a silver bullet was a werewolf.” Also: Silver bullets: Said in ancient folktales to be required to take down a vampire. Small bore: insignificant and trivial things, or people. Not worth worrying about. Smoking gun: Having found important evidence on a controversial subject that is undeniable. It comes from the idea that a detective who finds a gun that’s still got smoke coming out of it has found the murder weapon. Today, we will often use this

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phrase in political contexts when evidence of a bribe or misbehavior is found. A newspaper may read: “We’ve found the smoking gun.” The phrase also implies that someone has not only found the “perp” but also found him or her in time to reverse a situation. “Son of a gun.” This term refers to the nineteenth-century practice of firing a cannon when a woman on a ship was in labor, to push out the baby. Later, it also meant a rogue, or a sly person who bears watching. Also: worked up, enthusiastic. Stare down the barrel of a gun: A metaphor for directly facing an extremely dangerous situation that is potentially fatal. Taken literally (rare): A dare to blow one’s head off. “Sticking to your guns” refers to a ship’s gunner who keeps shooting during a battle. In the white collar world of today, it means defending ideas with good intentions after others have given up. Here comes another gun-ism: “shoot them (or it) down.” Used when a senior member of a group decides that the time for talk has ended, and action should be taken, sometimes going on as earlier planned on a task despite outside criticism. Straight-shooter. Someone who is honest, even in dangerous circumstances. Sweating bullets: Display of extreme nervousness in a situation facing one or more well-armed adversaries. This may involve an armed robbery, an abduction, or reprisal for an insult. Sometimes used in association with gang bang, also a gun metaphor. Take your best shot: a calculated risk with a decent chance of achieving a desired result. Top gun: A master in a line of work; a person who can be depended upon in the Line of Fire. [To] Set your sights on: As an idiom, to envision a goal and then set out to achieve it. As a gun metaphor, the phrase has roots in the act of pointing a gun at a target through its sights. Take a shot at, to: having tried something, usually with unsuccessful results. Young guns: Young but experienced people summoned to do a task. We’re under fire for that plan: Heavy criticism for work done that someone else doesn’t do. Troubleshooter: Someone with a talent for fixing things, usually used for as blue-collar expert who is very good at his or her trade.

5.13 Making Light of Our Gun Fetish Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for the US Senate in Missouri, led a group of who were armed to the teeth, as the cliché has it, looking for “Republicans in Name Only” (RINOs). “Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens, a former Missouri governor and Navy SEAL, declared in his advertising. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country” (Feur, 2022). Greitens and his fellow RINO hunters were armed with every piece of

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gun fetish nationalism imaginable—large assault rifles, incendiary language, hunting metaphors, and the Trump slogan to “take our country back.” Is this man running to represent a state in what we would like to call a representative democracy? “This style of campaign advertising is not unique to Greitens, as he “seeks to equate hard-core conservatism with the use of deadly weapons” said one commentator (Feur, 2022). His RINO-hunting campaign ad was posted on an Internet site within a week after the House of Representatives’ select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol heard testimony describing how ex-­ president Donald Trump helped to instigate the riot by verbally abusing his former vice president Mike Pence, because he had refused to stop the final ratification of electoral College votes, which was about to install Joe Biden. In this atmosphere, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, said that Trump et al. posed a “clear and present danger to American democracy” (Feur, 2022). Twitter removed Greitens’s ad, as his campaign manager fumed: “If anyone doesn’t get the metaphor, they are either lying or dumb,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager (Feur, 2022). Metaphor? Someone should check with an English teacher. By the way, Greitens’ standing in many polls declined after his ”metaphor” hit the airwaves. His standing was not helped by accusations of blackmail, sexual misconduct, and child abuse, all of which were false, against his opponents. Can we still believe that senators and governors were once expected to talk and behave with a modicum of decency and decorum? Was that in a universe far away? No, sir. It’s a world in which Greitens was so radioactive that Trump would not endorse him. However, his campaign chair was Kimberly Guilfoyle, fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. Our strange world just got a little weirder.

5.14 Failing a Test of Sufficient Conservatism “When individuals feel more confident and legitimate in voicing violent sentiments, it can encourage others to feel more confident in making actual violence easier,” said Robert Pape, who was studies political violence at the University of Chicago. “Unfortunately, this is a self-reinforcing spiral.” As if to reinforce this belief, at nearly the same time, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, published a letter addressed to his wife that threatened to execute both of them. “Every Republican should denounce this sick and dangerous ad from Eric Greitens,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “This is…a taste of… ‘clear and present danger’” (Feur, 2022). Republicans also criticized Greitens for aiming threats of violence at members of this own party because he found them failing his test of sufficient proto-fascism. “The growth in the number of firearms in the United States has been outpacing the country’s population, as an emboldened gun industry and its allies target buyers with rhetoric of fear, machismo and defiance, In the gun business, it’s all about males and sales. And in the gun-sales business, it’s all about machismo, fear, and racism” (McIntire et al., 2022).

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Last November, a few hours after a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of two shooting deaths during antiracism protests in 2020, a Florida gun dealer created an image of him brandishing an assault rifle, with the slogan: “BE A MAN AMONG MEN.” Rittenhouse was not yet a man when he killed two people and wounded another in Kenosha, Wisconsin—he was 17. The firearms industry, backed by years of research and focus groups, knows that other American boys want to “man up,” as well, and even more adults want to protect themselves from gun-slinging teenagers. Current events as sales agent works both ways.

5.15 Gun Anxiety Sells More Guns Gun companies have spent the last two decades scrutinizing their market and refocusing their message away from hunting defenseless animals and toward selling handguns for “personal safety,” as well as military-style weapons attractive mainly to young men who may use them for gang-banging their neighbors. The sales pitch—rooted in self-defense, machismo (for men and boys) and an overarching sense of fear (for women)—has been remarkably successful. Firearm sales have skyrocketed, with US background checks rising from 8.5 million in 2000 to 38.9 million in 2021. Women, spurred by appeals that play on fears of crime and being caught unprepared, have become the fastest-growing “demographic” in some areas. Using Madison Avenue advertising appeals to base instincts (most often fear appeals) sales methods, the firearms industry has sliced and diced consumer attributes to find pressure points—lack of self-esteem, lack of trust in others, and fear of losing control—all of which are usefully used to sell guns. The increasing number of mass shootings has provided reliable opportunities for the industry and its allies. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School more than a decade ago, gun sales have almost always risen sharply after major shootings—the grislier, the better, for the weapon sellers, as buyers snap up firearms that they worry will disappear from stores. Mass shootings are very good for business. The best-selling pitch against gun violence has become more gun violence. The closer shootings come to home, the more quickly sales rise. Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group that tracks firearms advertising and marketing, said the firearms industry became adept at exploiting disquieting developments to spur sales. “If you look back, it hasn’t just revolved around mass shootings. They [the gun industry] tailored their marketing… [using] pretty much everything,” he said. “Their goal is basically to induce a Pavlovian response: ‘If there’s a crisis, you must go get a gun’” (McIntire et al., 2022). Gun industry data shows that in 1990, an estimated 74,000 military-style rifles were manufactured for domestic sale in the United States. That figure began to climb after expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004 and reached 2.3 million in 2013, the year after Sandy Hook, when AR-15-style guns accounted for about a quarter of all sales revenue, according to the Firearms Retailer Survey, an annual report by the industry trade association Nick Suplina, a senior vice president

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at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, said that gun rights advocates tended to ignore data showing that firearms in homes often wound up hurting their owners instead of anyone threatening them. “While selling the notion that a gun may provide security for yourself and your family, which is very appealing, gun sellers don’t disclose that owning a gun makes it two times more likely that somebody in the house will die of gun homicide and three times the likelihood they die by gun suicide,” he said (McIntire et al., 2022). Let us offer a second look at a few numbers which illustrate that a lot of people in the United States have a uniquely harmful relationship with guns. The United States contains about 5 percent of the Earth’s population, who own 46 percent of the globe’s guns. Shall we call it a gun-fetishnation? Just about anyone (except, I would guess, those of us who are blind) can legally buy a gun of any kind at 18 years of age. Remember that another, slower way to die, cigarettes, often require a minimum age of 21.

5.16 Guns, Grievances, and a Sense of Personal Power The Second Amendment, written to protect citizens against assault by foreign armies, is now soaked in fresh blood hundreds of times per year by individuals with a galaxy of grievances, real and imaginary, in a nation that sometimes seems to have gone insane. In the United States, in the year 2020, gun violence became the most frequent cause of death for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. Blacks, who make up 14 percent of the population, became targets for half of homicides (Cobb, 2022a, b, c). Decade by decade, guns have become deadlier and more numerous, tightening their grip on Americans’ collective imagination, as more movie and TV scripts feature them. Like “hot” cars, firearms now possess a cultural and symbolic magnetism that makes them, for many Americans, the cornerstone of a way of life. “What Colt invented was a system of myths, symbols, stagecraft, and distribution,” the historian William Hosley wrote in Colt: The Making of an American Legend. His guns were sold not just as tools but as a way to access “the celebrity, glamour and dreams of its namesake.” Colt began advertising its products as ideal for “single individuals, traveling through a wild country.” Gun manufacturers, Haag writes, began to employ “predicament” advertising, in which lone travellers were portrayed as facing bears or outlaws. The only way out was through violence (Haag, 2016). The anthropologist Thomas McDade has observed that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the axe was “no less lethal a weapon” than the gun, but today otherwise ordinary Americans can unleash devastating firepower—as happened on May 14, 2022, when a White supremacist killed ten people in a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, and again on May 24th, when an 18-year-old gunman killed 21 people in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 19 of them children. These are only two examples of what has become a

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regular pattern in today’s United States. Anyone in my audience may remind me: “I know that!” Indeed, you do. “Like automobiles, firearms have grown increasingly advanced while becoming more than machines; they are both devices and symbols, possessing a cultural magnetism that makes them, for many people, the cornerstone of a way of life. They’re tools that kill efficiently while also promising power, respect, and equality—liberation from tyranny, from crime, from weakness” (Klay, 2022a, b), in other words, imagined vehicles for a sense of personal power. “They’re a heritage from an imagined past, and a fantasy about protecting our future. It’s taken nearly two hundred years for guns to become the problem they are today. The unromantic reality of increasingly industrialized war wasn’t likely to capture the public imagination, and so, in ads, dime-store novels, and movies, gun companies proposed a self-serving alternative history,” that of convenient, personal power, wrote Phil Klay in the New Yorker (2022a). “Winchester described its Model 73 repeating rifle—a specially promoted gun that had been used by Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill—as “the gun that won the West” (Klay, 2022a, b). “On a deeper level, the ads were political, recasting American ideals of freedom and equality in martial terms. In gun marketing, self-reliance, respect, and freedom of movement were tied to the capacity to kill: “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal,” one advertisement read. The mythology of the hyper-violent West became so embedded in American consciousness that Teddy Roosevelt could construct a notion of American identity around it. In “The Winning of the West,” he painted a portrait of hard life on the frontier marked by continual violence; the effect of this continual hardship was to “weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous and widely different races.” According to this view of history, “American identity was in large part a product of violence.” The AR-15 can fire a .223 round at more than 3200 feet per second—nearly three times the speed of sound. How dare anyone without some serious firepower start a political argument with someone sporting an AR-15 and an extremely bad attitude? The election of Barack Obama, the United States’ first Black president, coincided with what one gun industry newsletter called an “incessant consumer demand for high-capacity pistols and military-style rifles.” During the 2008 election, the NRA warned that never in its history had it “faced a presidential candidate—and hundreds of candidates running for other offices—with such a deep-rooted hatred of firearm freedoms.” In 2013, despite crime rates that generally were lower than they had been in several decades, the head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, claimed that, under President Barack Obama, “Latin American drug gangs” had “invaded every city of significant size in the United States.” Gun marketing and political messaging merged more deeply, and in the last year of Obama’s second term gun manufacturers produced a record 11,497,441 guns sold for domestic consumption (Klay, 2022a, b). In 1968, an NRA spokesman told Congress that American gun culture was the result of a “very special relationship between a man and his gun—atavistic, with its roots deep in history” (Klay, 2022a, b). In truth, he wrote, “Those roots are shallow,

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and the fantasies underlying the “very special relationship” are often threadbare. As the horror in Uvalde unfolded, there were plenty of armed police officers, but there was little willingness to charge into the school against a barricaded shooter. The police at Uvalde were frequently called cowards for their hesitancy, but their reaction is unsurprising: despite the often militaristic rhetoric of police unions, the average cop is not going to be ready for a situation most United States marines have never faced. When we arm our citizens with such lethal weapons, we can’t always expect uncommon valor (Klay, 2022a, b). Increasing gun sales have failed to counter increasing levels of gun violence: the Gun Violence Archive counted more than eight thousand gun deaths in the United States during the first half of 2022 alone. Perhaps the steady stream of death will eventually cause us to begin to reassess that “very special relationship” and open up new understandings of our own history. Until then, many Americans will keep living out 200-year-old drama—that, no matter what it is that frightens or enrages us in our complex, chaotic, and often unsettling world, guns are the answer. Guns can be as close as a bag at home. Many lethal shootings are accidental and leave families in grief. In one example—like many others: it is unclear how a boy managed to get a Glock 19, but his mother acknowledged that “any child in the room could have figured out how to get the gun out of the bag,” the authorities said. He found a gun in their home and accidentally shot his father in the back, killing him, the authorities said. The woman was charged with manslaughter. The father, Reggie Mabry, 26, had been playing a video game in their home in Orlando, Florida, when one of his three children managed to grab a Glock 19 and fire, according to an arrest report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Mr. Mabry and his wife, Marie Ayala, 28, were convicted felons and were not allowed by law to own guns, Sheriff John Mina of Orange County said at a news conference. They were placed on probation for child neglect and narcotics charges.

5.17 The More Who Die, The Less We Care In 2020, there were more than 45,000 gun deaths in the United States—the highest number on record in a steadily increasing toll, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there was no major push for gun safety legislation in Congress. Why? Last year, [2021] there were nearly 700 mass shootings in America—the highest number ever recorded by the Gun Violence Archive—and again, there was no major push for gun legislation. Why, or why not? Dr. Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has explored popular indifference to genocide and other mass atrocities, has advanced a possible answer. His work led him to the disturbing truths of “psychic numbing” and a “false feeling of hopelessness.” Basically, some people get overwhelmed by the scale of so much death and become convinced that there is very little they can do to change it. As Slovic has written, “Through my research, I’ve learned something disturbing—and that is, ‘The more who die, the less we care.’ ” In fact, as

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more people die, humans can experience a “compassion collapse” in which “as the number of lives in danger increases, we sometimes lose feeling and we value those additional lives even less” (Roundup, 2020). “This is happening with COVID-19, too. We recently marked 1,000,000 American deaths from the pandemic and America, collectively, sighed.” Said Slovic. In his research, this is part of the “arithmetic of compassion. “We care deeply about helping a person, but can feel overwhelmed and helpless when faced with masses of suffering people. Our feelings are sensitive to the numbers, and so in that sense the statistics of the deaths round off.” In his research, this is part of the “arithmetic of compassion.” In a way, said Slovic, “the abundance of evidence may actually work against the power of that evidence. Trump has broken so many traditions, rules and laws that the incessancy of it eventually becomes unremarkable and acceptable” (Blow, 2022a, b). Bill McKibben, whose usual beat is the climate crisis, chimed in on lock-stock-­ and-barrel murder in The New  Yorker: “The dangers of the mainstreaming of extremist ideology and conspiracy theories become more apparent with each passing month, as yesterday’s tease on Fox News [June 2, 2022] turns into today’s [June 3] manifesto.” Echoes of the so-called great replacement theory, which allegedly inspired the perpetrator of the horrific Buffalo massacre, can be found in anti-­ immigrant campaigns across the country. Those echoes also feature in the rhetoric of elected officials, some of whom seem to be aiming for high office. But there’s another price, apart from any terrible acts that might stem from such ideologies, and one we rarely think about. It involves what’s not getting done, and not even getting talked about, while we’re preoccupied with the ugliness. What’s not getting done (about what, can we guess?) is progress on the climate front and getting humankind off its aching attachment to violence and mass murder. The Republicans were in their usual state of denial about mass murders at grocery stores, elementary schools, hospitals, etc. even before the smoke had cleared over three such killing fields in ten days. Instead, the Republicans were building their rage over a whole new conspiracy theory spun from nothing. The GOP telling voters that the Democrats favor amnesty for “11 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS” that would create a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” (caps all theirs) and “create a permanent liberal majority in Washington” (McKibben, 2022). So here we have the great replacement theory writ large, and then larger, with a racist fear appeal as tall as the Washington Monument. All of this was being blown up to scare Republicans to the polls even before all of the victims of our most recent mass shootings had been laid to rest. One other problem with mass gun murders is that we can have several in a couple of weeks, followed by an eerie silence that holds people’s attention for a week, a month, or even more. Many times, the tears have barely dried off the victims’ caskets when the National Rifle Association pulls out its well-thumbed, dog-eared, playbook for rough patches such as these. They would turn to the pages that advise the value of having all hands on deck, wherever they may be. As days became weeks, and weeks became months after the massacres of late Spring, 2022, the entire mythology of guys with guns and bad guys with guns

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reappeared on our national TV screens and social media feeds, begging for our allegiance. “Not long ago, in New York City,” a paramedic was shot inside of a subway train that was transporting him to a hospital; a Goldman Sachs employee caught in a shoot-out screamed “Oh, shit!—that fucking HURTS!” So many guns pointed in too many directions on the gray streets of Manhattan that our .22 caliber morality play falls flat, due to combat fatigue. And all of this a few Amtrak miles from Washington, D.C.’s main train station, where the subject once again is gun violence. In a Texas town, fourth graders tell how they crouched below school desks and smeared blood over they bodies, faking death. They learned survival skills well (and quickly) in the fourth grade. And while you’re at it, don’t make jokes about gun culture in Texas. You may find yourself staring down the business end of an obsessed armed nationwannbabe. Suitably armed, our prized “good guys with guns” emerge from the NRA Dictionary. The NRA still has a very well-worn slogan: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Perhaps it was dumped after a more appropriate comeback was suggested: “People with Guns Kill People.” Or “People who know how to aim guns kill people.” The NRA had been through this ritual before. Innocent children die in a hail of hot lead. Talking heads wonder aloud how many times the United States must have a string of mass murders before the Nation rediscovers civility. The President addresses the Nation and implores Congress to “Do something!” A debate ensues on Capitol Hill, where nothing much happens. In the meantime, the debate winds down. The Sioux City Bandits, an “indoor football team” decides to postpone a half-time promotion of a gift AR-15 to observe Military Night. You read that correctly: postpone, not cancel (Hytrek, 2022, B-3). The NRA well knows that this deadly shower of blood will blow over. Wait until the powder dries a little and then back to the usual. In the meantime, gun sales rise, as they usually do after mass shootings. More bullets are sold, and all get ready for the next round at the Second Amendment Shooting Gallery. Along the way, no one will actually read the Second Amendment, which allows the government to raise a military force in case of an invasion. [The Second Amendment calls for “a well-regulated militia necessary to secure a free state,”]. It’s not at all about individuals taking machine guns out to the woods to kill Bambi, or eliminating urban thieving scum from our blazing, blood-­ running streets. The Second Amendment is a product of debates about the legal limits of US personal nationalism, an expression of individualism until a few years before World War II, a debate that went on endlessly, or so it seemed, over whether the United States ought to have a standing Army at all. We know how that one turned out. We are now the most heavily armed nation in human history. A mass shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killed four victims 9 days after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that took the lives of 19 elementary school children and 2 teachers. Ten days before that, ten Black people were gunned down in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The list, Mr. Biden said, goes on. “After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Las Vegas, after Parkland— nothing has been done,” he said, lamenting decades of inaction. Within his 17-­minute

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address, Mr. Biden abruptly shed the reluctance of his White House to engage in what could become yet another fruitless partisan confrontation, played out amid funerals in Uvalde, Buffalo, and Tulsa, and many other times and places. After weeks of carefully calibrating his calls for action, the president on Thursday did not hold back. “Enough, enough. It’s time for each of us to do our part,” Biden said. “For the children we’ve lost. For the children we can save. For the nation we love.” “Let’s hear the call and the cry,” he said, almost pleading with his fellow politicians in Washington, D.C. “Let’s meet the moment. Let us finally do something.” Whether and when something will be done remains Despite his forceful tone, Mr. Biden all but acknowledged in his speech the political realities that could make him just another in a long line of presidents to have demanded action on guns, only to fail. He called the fight “hard” and moments after urging a ban on assault weapons (Vander Ploeg et al., 2022). Within days of the carnage in Buffalo, Tulsa, and Uvalde, another wild weekend of gun violence blazed across the country, as described below in the New York Times. As with so many urban gunfights, what began with fistfights ended in trails of gun-blasted blood. “A brawl between at least two men turned a packed Philadelphia street into a scene of terror…after they pulled out guns and began firing wildly at each other. By the time the gunfire ended, three people were dead and 12 more were hurt. Just a few hours later, in Chattanooga, Tenn., a mass shooting outside a nightclub sent people fleeing in panic. Three people were killed there, too, including one who was struck by a vehicle, and 14 [who] were hurt, most of them with gunshot wounds. And at parties in Phoenix, Chester, Va., and Summerton, S.C., celebrations turned tragic in mass shootings that resulted in a total of at least three deaths and 22 people who were injured, many of them children. Although shootings across the country traditionally begin to rise with the approach of summer, the scenes of carnage over the weekend in the wake of massacres in Buffalo, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Okla., left cities shaken though, tellingly, not shocked” (Vander Ploeg et al., 2022). He has called on lawmakers to pass universal background checks for a decade, since 20 children were killed in a shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Within about a week of Biden’s speech, the scabs came off again with another rash of mass killings in the United States. All the same, negotiations in Congress also took a familiar path, which was nearly nowhere. The gun industrial complex had seen it all before: On the Streets, Pools of Blood; in Congress, a long, often-­ repeated Republican yawn. These are the same Republicans whose platform calls for defaulting on the National Debt. Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, there’s a reasonable chance that the US economy could crash and take the world with it, even without cheerleading from the Republicans. These are the same people who pass themselves off as business geniuses. They also run the accounting offices at the NRA, which requires that all of us stay scared enough to stay stocked to our eyeballs with guns and ammo, thus, the stock-and-barrel-state. The man charged in the killings, Payton Gendron, 18, described his attack on Discord, a chat app that emerged from the video game world in 2015, and streamed

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it live on Twitch, which Amazon.com owns. The company took down his video within 2 minutes, but many of the sources of disinformation he cited remain online even now. His paper trail provides a chilling glimpse into how he prepared a deadly assault online, culling tips on weaponry and tactics and finding inspiration in fellow racists and previous attacks that he largely mimicked with his own. Altogether, the content formed a twisted and racist view of reality. The gunman considered his ideas to be an alternative to mainstream views. The Internet, with its ability to gather people with similar interests, has served as bait for hate. The Internet itself is only a channel, but it all too often becomes a sewer where racist people can share their mental illnesses. He also spent considerable time on mainstream sites, according to his own record, especially YouTube, where he found graphic scenes from police cameras and videos describing gun tips and tricks. As the day of the attack neared, the gunman watched more YouTube videos about mass shootings and police officers engaged in gunfights. Despite YouTube’s firearms policy, which prohibits content intended to instruct viewers how to make or use firearms, manufacture accessories that convert a firearm to automatic fire, or livestreaming content that shows someone handling a firearm, according to Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesman. A lot of propaganda that arranges the mental furniture in the house of mass shootings comes off hate-filled Internet posts—the bastard offspring of our cherished belief in freedom of speech and thought. So: when does speech become action, and at what point does it become a punishable crime? Can some people not handle this kind of freedom? Is free access via such things as hate speech on the Internet killing our culture and people? Many White supremacists believe that at the center of this shooting sphere, like others before it, was a false conviction that an international Jewish conspiracy intends to supplant Whites with immigrants who will gradually take over political power in America The conspiracy, known as the “great replacement theory,” has roots reaching back at least to the czarist Russian antisemitic hoax called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to be a Jewish plot to overtake Christianity in Europe. It resurfaced more recently in the works of two French novelists, Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus, who, four decades apart, imagined waves of immigrants taking power in France. Camus, a socialist who became a far-right populist, popularized the term “le grand remplacement” [The Grand Replacement] in a work of fiction by the same name.

Gendron does not seem to have read any of Camus’ work. They are absent from his internet postings. He attributed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to the online writings by the gunman who murdered 51 Muslims in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

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After that attack, New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, formulated an agreement that came to be called “the Christchurch Call,” signed by several national governments and large technology companies that committed to eliminate online terrorist content. The United States under Donald Trump refused to sign, calling the whole thing a violation of free speech. Gendron exercised his own free speech rights by pumping various racist rants off the internet that helped him plan his actions. Gendron’s experience online indicate that writings and videos associated with the Christchurch shootings remained available long after Gendron’s examination, like seeds, ready to sprout whenever a new potential murderer comes along. The Anti-Defamation League asserted in 2021 that the “great replacement” conspiracy theory during the last decade had moved from isolated White supremacist beliefs toward a broader audience, including chants of an assortment of ultra-right wing protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during 2017 in which a person was killed amidst copious nonlethal violence, as commentaries by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who asserted that “the Democratic party is attempting to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters.” via massive illegal immigration (The Great Replacement, 2021). In several sessions of Congress, Republican opposition did its ritual dances as Republicans, who have historically stood in the way of any meaningful action on gun control, reenacted their usual mantra: control is good in theory, but not in practice, as lawmakers in both parties have said repeatedly that they did not believe there was enough bipartisan support to approve either approach. The smoke cleared. Hot muzzles cooled, and everyone went to lunch, or dinner, waiting for the next round in our Second Amendment Morality Play. As before, House Democrats advanced a wide-ranging package of gun control legislation that would have prohibited the sale of semiautomatic rifles to people under 21 and banned the sale of gun magazines that hold more than ten rounds of ammunition. But those measures, too, were all but certain to die in the Senate because of Republican opposition. Once more, the Republicans were good at talking the talk and miserable at walking the walk. Democrats put forward the legislation in response to the killings in Uvalde and the racist massacre in Buffalo—both, the police said, at the hands of 18-year-old gunmen using legally purchased AR-15-style weapons. Republicans derided such measures “as unconstitutional attempts to take guns from law-abiding Americans, robbing them of their right to defend themselves. Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina, expressed outrage that Democrats had painted Republicans as complicit in mass shootings, declaring, “You are not going to bully your way into stripping Americans of fundamental rights” (Shear, 2022). “How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” President Joe Biden asked. “How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say: Enough. Enough” (Shear, 2022). Biden’s approach was more like the former President Barack Obama in January 2013, just weeks after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

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On March 30, 2022, the young man accused of the mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo had surfed through a smorgasbord of racist and antisemitic websites online. On BitChute, a video site known for hosting right-­ wing extremism, he listened to a lecture on the decline of the American middle class by a Finnish extremist. On YouTube he found a lurid video of a car driving through Black neighborhoods in Detroit. Over the course of the week that followed, his online writing shows, he lingered in furtive chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan but also read articles on race in HuffPost and Medium. He also watched local television news reports of gruesome crimes. He toggled between “documentaries” on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube (Myers & Thompson, 2022). • https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/technology/fringe-­mainstream-­social-­ media.html As the number of mass shootings escalated, experts on the subject said that many of the disturbing ideas which fuel the atrocities are no longer relegated to a handful of hard-to-find dark corners of the Web. More and more outlets, both fringe and mainstream, host bigoted content, often in the name of free speech. And the inability—or unwillingness—of online services to contain violent content threatens to draw more people toward hateful postings. “Most of us don’t know the original story,” a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center said. “What we know is the narrative, and the narrative of the great replacement theory has been credentialized by elected officials and personalities to such an extent that the origins of the story no longer need to be told. People are beginning to just understand it as if they might understand conventional wisdom. And that’s what is frightening” (Myers & Thompson, 2022). Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a White man with a history of antisemitic Internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, as he blamed Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States. No doubt that many of their ancestors came to these shores from somewhere else, where they had been tortured and imprisoned. A year, later, another White man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead. Later, he told police that he had sought to kill Mexicans. No doubt that he had forgotten, or never knew, that the Mexicans had farmed that land before anyone else except Native Americans. Instead, the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo had been the work of a heavily armed White man who was accused of killing ten people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to ethnically replace his people, the last to arrive in a long line of immigrants. As a Latino friend of mine often said: “We didn’t roll over the border. The border rolled over us.” Three shootings, three different targets—but all linked by one sprawling, ever-­ mutating belief now commonly known as “replacement theory.” At the extremes of American life, replacement theory—the notion that Western elites, sometimes

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manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower White Americans—has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Replacement theory, like the gun boom itself, is spurred by fear of the “other,” namely, that in a future America, White people will be replaced by an allied majority of non-Whites. Nearly all of the shooters are young and White, however, and most are avid consumers of Internet misinformation in which Blacks and Latinos (as immigrants with large families) as stereotyped as “replacers” of White Americans, who are cast as victims who are rightfully reclaiming “their” country. Trump’s campaign rallies are full of flags and themes, where “replacement” that is usually not explicitly mentioned but is nonetheless in the air. The theory surfaces almost without fail in the Internet sewage that sloshes through the Internet. Shorn of direct racial references, the same message in 2020 and 2021 was filtering into many campaign pitches by radical right-wing Republicans, as well as media personalities. The best known of these has been the longest running super-mouth in FOX’s history, Tucker Carlson. During the last few decades, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws than during the previous 30 years. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent (Paul, 2022). This trend has continued despite a continuing rise of deaths from shootings.

5.18 Game-Changing Measures That May Actually Reverse the Gun Boom Game-changing measures might actually reverse the gun boom. Could we repeal the Second Amendment and convince the US Supreme Court to apply its supposed strict constructionism to the phrase “well-regulated militia,” and pass state laws to regulate production and sales of firearms? These measures have been rarely even mentioned. How could this be? Perhaps, this could be tied to lobbying based on the fear that government is going to expropriate everyone’s guns and deprive honest Americans of their guns and ammo. The NRA has a very potent lobby, and its fear-­ based appeals are very effective. Many people who live in strange places (say, Canada) don’t seem to have a problem living mainly without guns, except for hunting. South of the border with Canada, we should be so lucky. An effective campaign could movingly reduce the tally the of killings in a given time period as Gary Younge did in his book Another Day in the Death of America or in the vein of Jill Leovy’s blog “The Homicide Report,” which has attempted to track every murder in Los Angeles County during a year. Or it could use a personal appeal, such as a testimonial from a child who lost his or her sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at age 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.

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Or could we be exposed by Public Service advertising that shows exactly what a machine gun can do to a young boy or girl, as some PSAs have been graphically showing the effects of smoking? Could we treat gun ownership as an addiction and convince people to “quit? Susie Linfield, a journalism professor and the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, proposed following the mass shooting of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, social media and in the press, with others, some, including the former homeland security chief Jeh Johnson, that photographs of the slaughtered children, whose faces and bodies were mutilated beyond recognition, be released to the public in hopes of garnering support for gun control legislation. In the case of Uvalde, et  al., wrote Linfield wrote (2022). “The people of the United States should see exactly how an assault rifle pulverizes the body of a 10-year-old, just as we need to see (but rarely do) the injuries to our troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A violent society ought, at the very least, see its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on ‘ordinary’ crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms.” One might well wonder why the so-called Caesar images—a trove of 55,000 photographs depicting Syrians tortured to death in the prisons of President Bashar al-Assad—had zero political effect. The photographs, which were smuggled out of Syria in 2013 and depict victims of eye-gouging, strangulation, and starvation, were shown to the US Congress, at the United Nations, and to the US secretary of state at the time, John Kerry, as well as to other world leaders. Geoffrey Nice, a war crimes prosecutor, described them as akin to “getting the keys to the Nazi archive.” However, as this newspaper [The New York Times] reported,” “Syrian’s Photos Spur Outrage, but Not Action” (Linfield, 2022). The gun makers and promoters have a standard template for calming the roiling waters of mass angst who demand gun controls after mass shootings, an exercise that they have trucked out more frequently as the years have gone on. Part of it is the usual condolence, plus a fear-inspiring warning originally crafted by Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, and since repeated , and repeated, and repeated: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Since mass shootings tend to raise gun sales anyway, the gun guys may add a self-defending trailer, warning against “politicizing” the gun debate—as if that’s not exactly what they are doing. In 10 straight days of late May, 2022, 44 people were killed in mass shootings, so many that some television announcers were interrupting coverage of one shooting with news of the next. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker (2022a, b, c), “It was “a carnival of violence that confirmed, among other things, the political cowardice of a large portion of our elected leadership, the thin pretense of our moral credibility, and the sham of public displays of sympathy that translate into no actual changes in our laws, our culture, or our murderous propensities.” The deadliest of these was at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York; the other was at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas. In the interim, there were other mass shootings, in Indiana, Washington State, Florida, California, Louisiana,

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Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere (Cobb, 2022a, b, c). Bear in mind that fewer than 1 percent of gun deaths in the United States result from mass shootings. Incidents which involve fewer than four people don’t get much publicity anymore, except on the local news. After the Uvalde, Texas shootings, the gun barrels had barely cooled from the Buffalo shootings 10 days previously as everyone in the solutions debate took their previously self-assigned seats, all the way from the White, gun-toting rich who blamed it all on “wokeness,” whose solutions ranged from a dictatorship of the well-­ armed to those who want to solve the problem by making the well-armed better armed. Some solutions verged on making armed camps out of grocery stores, elementary schools, and churches. Shooting to kill in an elementary school is not the mark of a civilized place. Yet it has happened in the United States so often that I’ve lost count—at a post office, a factory, a military base, a rock concert, et al., al., al., and al. Trump gave a speech at an NRA convention and blamed it all on “evil.” Well, yes, shooting up a grade school with an AR-15 (the shooter often has two of them) is evil, but Satan didn’t pull the trigger. Human beings did that, with guns that are becoming more powerful, sold by firearms dealers who capitalize on fear and hate, telling us that having one or more guns handy at one time is The American Way. The idea of significantly reducing the amount of firepower in our everyday lives seems to have been shelved by the established interests. Take away someone’s guns? This is America, dude! So what is Donald Trump’s solution for mass shootings? More guns, of course. It should not come as a surprise that Trump endorses evil and can’t imagine that he’s encouraging it. It isn’t just 18-year-olds with bad attitudes who do these things. When Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson offered his theory to explain theory to explain the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead, he did so with such an abundance of pronouns that the meaning of what he meant to say was befogged beyond belief. Please take a listen, courtesy of Chris Cillizza. May 27, 2022, in “The Point.” “We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools,” said Johnson in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday. “Now we’re teaching wokeness, we’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, [Critical Race Theory], telling some children they’re not equal to others, and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.” To his credit, anchor Neil Cavuto pushed back, noting that “these shootings, Senator, were going on long before CRT and wokeness, right?”

Johnson would not concede the point. “I think CRT has been going on under the radar for quite some time as well. Wokeness has been. Liberal indoctrination has been. This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law is gonna—it’s not gonna solve it. It’s not gonna solve it.” That’s all? Wipe out CRT and “wokeness” and nobody would shoot anybody? Senator, please. You are flunking third-grade English.

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Or how about “Evil” as a culprit? To borrow from an old NRA slogan: Guns don’t kill people. “People kill people.” Does evil pull the trigger? Don’t people with guns kill people?

Even as the killings go on, the NRA continues its cant, sings its song, and rouses its obedient base: Houston (AP)—One by one, they took the stage at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston and denounced the massacre of 19 students and 2 teachers at an elementary school across the state [Uvalde]. And one by one, they insisted that further restricting access to firearms was not the answer to preventing future tragedies. “The existence of evil in our world is not a reason to disarm law-abiding citizens,” said former President Donald Trump, who was among the Republicans who lined up to speak before the gun rights lobbying group Friday as thousands of protesters angry about gun violence demonstrated outside. “The existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens,” Trump said. The gathering came just 3 days after the shooting in Uvalde and as the nation grappled with revelations that the students [were] trapped inside a classroom as [they]repeatedly called 911 during the attack—one pleading “Please send the police now”—as officers [stood] in the hallway for more than an hour and 45 minutes waiting for some direction. The NRA had said that convention attendees should “reflect on” the shooting and “pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members, and pledge to redouble our commitment to making our schools secure” (Lozano & Colvin, 2022). Back to Chris Cillizza, and “The Point:” Look. It’s absolutely worth discussing guns in a broader cultural context. But the idea that Johnson appears to be pushing that critical race theory and “wokeness” sit at the root of the problem badly misses the point. Rather than acknowledge—as the facts bear out—that this country has a gun violence problem, Johnson is instead riding a very old, misguided Trumpian hobbyhorse: that political correctness is somehow to blame. That it is evil, along with “wokeness,” which radical rightsters take to mean anything that deviates from their interpretation of history.

The Point: Debate the influence of “wokeness” on our culture. Fine. Just don’t do it as a way to explain what happened in Uvalde.

5.20  The Republican Solution: More Guns, Again

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5.19 Could This Problem Be Solved by a Gun Ownership Tax? By 2022, citizens of the United States owned roughly 400 million firearms. Seeking a unique solution, San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the United States, as of 2022 placed an annual fee on gun-owning residents and invested the revenues in violence prevention. On January 1, 2023, the same city began requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance on their firearms. The idea is to have ready funds to compensate victims harmed by the negligent or reckless use of firearms. “These initiatives reflect the recognition that we can’t make 400 million guns go away, but we can make gun ownership safer,” said Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California since 2015 (2022) Liccardo, a Democrat, continued: “The recent surge in pandemic-­era gun sales, the influx of ‘ghost guns’—privately made and untraceable—and the Supreme Court’s decision in June [2022] striking down a New York law that had placed strict limits on carrying a gun outside the home have exacerbated the challenges to keep guns out of dangerous hands.” “The mere presence of a gun in a home makes a host of perilous circumstances much more lethal. A domestic violence victim faces five times the risk of dying if the abuser has access to a gun,” said Liccardo.

5.20 The Republican Solution: More Guns, Again The GOP cannot afford to put much distance between itself and the gun lobby—and not simply because of the huge wads of cash that the NRA has stuffed into the party’s coffers over the years. Increasingly, the party of Trump is about nothing more than ginning up fear and paranoia among its members, of peddling apocalyptic notions that civilization is on the brink of destruction and that armed conflict is just over the horizon. The gun lobby’s message and agenda jibe perfectly with this vision and, indeed, nurture it. It is hard to think of a more suitable partner for Republicanism in its current sorry state. For Trump, who never misses a chance to be fawned over, the show must always go on. In his speech, the former president delivered precisely the kind of “leadership” he is famous for: divisive, snide, dishonest, and self-congratulatory. He spent time talking about how to turn schools into something resembling armed camps. But the bulk of his time was spent attacking “the radical left Democrats” for everything from COVID relief to funding for the Ukrainians’ war with Russia. Trump whacked particularly hard at what he called the Biden administration’s “war on police”—and at the many ways in which Democratic policies ostensibly have been making the United States more dangerous. In the category of Irony Is Not Dead in the Shooting Gallery: During Trump’s address, all guns, ammo, firearm accessories, knives, and other scary items— including laser pointers and selfie sticks—were prohibited.

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Some Democrats expressed outrage and dismay that the convention was proceeding, so painfully close to Uvalde in both time and distance. There were calls for the event to be canceled or moved and for political leaders not to participate. The president of the NAACP specifically urged Mr. Abbott to skip the gathering. So did Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who unsuccessfully had challenged Mr. Abbott for governor of Texas. “Governor Abbott, if you have any decency, you will immediately withdraw from this weekend’s NRA convention and urge them to hold it anywhere but Texas,” O’Rourke tweeted (de Avila, 2022). Back in 1999, in response to the Columbine school massacre, the NRA scaled back its convention, which took place a few days later in nearby Denver. But that meager concession was made during a different era, when the group and its political handmaidens still feared public backlash. There’s no way today’s NRA would bother disrupting its biggest party of the year—although it did vow to use the gathering to “reflect on these events, pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members and redouble our commitment to making our schools secure” (Cottle, 2022).

5.21 Thoughts and Prayers: They Do the Trick Every Time Practically speaking, the NRA desperately needed its extravaganza to roll on largely as planned. The group had had a rough few years. After breaking the bank getting Mr. Trump elected in 2016, it had been plagued by infighting, scandal, legal troubles, and the ongoing threat of financial ruin due to legal troubles. This convention had been on track to allow the NRA to regroup. With an unpopular Democratic president in the White House and public anxiety raging over violent crime and immigration, the climate was ideal for ginning up fear to new heights— for really selling folks on the idea that what every American needs is the protection of a good gun, or maybe several. The Uvalde tragedy made the convention trickier from a PR standpoint, but the political fundamentals remained promising for the gun lobby. To grasp the deep resonance of this American Carnage message in certain circles, the NRA needed them to understand what it’s like to grow up in the gun culture bubble—in families and communities whose members believe that more firearms equate more safety. People outside this world often cannot fathom such an equation. With frustration bordering on fury, they point to studies and data suggesting that owning a gun is more likely to result in the death of a loved one—or oneself—than in the successful defense against an assailant or intruder. “Facts and figures can’t compete with the gut-level craving for a sense of control over one’s surroundings and fate. Consider the difference between people’s attitudes toward flying and driving a car. Statistically, the latter is far more dangerous. However, air travel tends to unsettle or even terrify people more, in part because of the feeling that they have no control over the situation. With driving, by contrast, people tell themselves that they are masters of their surroundings, that they will

5.21  Thoughts and Prayers: They Do the Trick Every Time

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always have the skill, sense and panther-like reflexes to avoid a collision. Even really awful drivers believe in their skill behind the wheel” (Cottle, 2022). Cottle (2022) continued: “Plenty of gun owners operate with an even stronger delusion of being the exception to the rules that bind the rest of us—the singular driver in perfect control, if you will. They send friends and family members news stories about the rare instances in which an armed citizen took down an intruder or potential assailant. They tell themselves that, in a situation like Uvalde—or Buffalo or Parkland or Las Vegas or Pittsburgh or El Paso—they would be the one to beat the odds, to emerge not just unscathed but quite possibly a hero.” That, and prayers come in handy, too. The most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance” (Scully, 2022). Such a restriction could have lethal consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: in a nation that’s supposedly at peace, should we treat schools as “targets” that need to be “hardened.” What would that do to public education, which has for many generations been one of the defining experiences of growing up in America? Don’t worry, said a writer for The Federalist: families can keep their kids safe by resorting to home-­schooling. (The Federalist in this case is a contemporary internet web site, not The Federalist Papers, 85 essays penned by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison between October 1787 and May 1788). We got a jolting shock of what can happen to children’s learning when they stayed home and “attended” classes remotely during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. If you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick, and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp. There are around 130,000 K–12 schools in America; there are close to 40,000 supermarkets; there are many other venues that might offer prey for mass killers. So protecting all these public spaces Republican-style would require creating a heavily armed, effective military domestic defense force—heavily armed because it would face attackers with body armor and semiautomatic weapons—that would be at least as big as the Marine Corps. Why would such a thing be necessary? Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the US right wing, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons, ammunition, and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society” (Krugman, 2020). And I guess I should say for the record that I personally don’t believe that Americans, as individuals, are more or less coarse than anyone else. If anything, what has always struck me when returning from trips abroad is that Americans are (or were) on average exceptionally nice and pleasant to interact with. What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who have a gun fetish to arm themselves to the teeth. It is still possible to live for 73 years here and never touch a gun. I add to that string every day. In other words, we should think of vehement opposition to gun regulations as a phenomenon closely linked to vehement (and highly partisan) opposition to mask

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mandates and vaccination in the face of a deadly virus, vehement opposition to environmental rules like the ban on phosphates in detergent, and more, such as denying the reality of climate change is just as suicidal (if slower) than sticking gun in one’s mouth and pulling the trigger. Where does this hatred of the idea of civic duty come from? No doubt some of it, like almost everything in US politics, is related to race. One thing it doesn’t reflect, however, is our national tradition. When you hear talk of home-schooling, remember that the United States basically invented universal public education. Look at our public libraries, our free museums, and our parks. Environmental protection used to be a nonpartisan issue: The Clean Air Act of 1970 passed the Senate without a single “no” vote and was signed into law by Richard Nixon. Next to Trump, ”Tricky Dick” sometimes looks like a screaming wokester. Hollywood mythology aside, most towns in the Old West had stricter limits on the carrying of firearms than Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas today (Krugman, 2020). As I suggested, I don’t fully understand where this aversion to the basic rules of a civilized society is coming from. What’s clear, however, is that the very people who shout most about “freedom” are doing their best to turn America into a “Hunger Games”-style dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by nervous and fear-ridden men with loads of loaded guns and other implements of societal destruction. The “Hunger Games” is fictional. The following is nonfiction: an afternoon class begins at about 2 p.m. January 6, 2023, in Newport News, Virginia, near Norfolk: a 6-year-old, first-grade student in a classroom at Richneck Elementary School shot his teacher, who sustained life-threatening injuries, with a handgun. Curtis Bethany, a councilman for the city, said afterward that Newport News was dealing with “unchartered” territory. “I’ve never heard of a 6-year-old going to school with a loaded gun” (Albeck-Ripka & Medina, 2023). David Riedman, who has compiled a database of all shootings on school property, said that he had heretofore found only one instance of a 6-year old shooting a gun on school property that was not an accident. He has documented two others that were accidental. There was, however, a 5-year-old who shot a gun in a Memphis, Tennessee kindergarten school cafeteria in 2013. No one was hurt in any of these shootings before the one in Newport News (Albeck-Ripka & Medina, 2023). We do, indeed, start learning to duck and cover at a very young age in the Gun Fetish Nation. At any age, in fact, and of any race or ethnicity. I was editing this chapter as word came over local media that ten people had been killed and ten wounded by a shooter in Monterey Park, a majority Asian community of about 60,000 people east of Los Angeles, during a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration attended by more than 100,000 people, opening the Year of the Rabbit. The shooter entered a dance hall and began shooting with a long gun. Later the same evening, the same person entered another dance hall, but people mobbed him and removed the gun. The shooter fled. Later, a white van was found parked, matching descriptions of the vehicle that the shooter, an Asian man, had used. A dead man, the shooter, was found inside.

5.22  Words Fail

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Within 48 hours, another man with a gun killed two in Des Moines, Iowa, and yet another killed seven near Half Moon Bay, in California. Two other shootings occurred within days (six dead in Tulare County and one in Oakland); that was 25 people in 8 days, mostly immigrant Asians killed by other immigrant Asians in a state with strict gun laws, for the United States, among a usually peaceful ethnic group.

5.22 Words Fail Again! Again! Again! Rat-tat-tat. The long guns fire, kill, and wound so relentlessly now. Even here in the Gunfighter Nation, I can remember a time not so distant when such things did not happen with such frequency. The tears come so often now. The sirens wail. Flowers come out so quickly. People at a celebration think at first that they have heard firecrackers, not unusual at a Lunar New Year celebration. Blood flows. Tears follow quickly. Again! Again! Again! Rat-tat-tat! Ambulances’ sirens wail. Helicopters airlift dying bodies to hospitals. The bodies of friends apart under white sheets. TV reporters arrive, seeking familiar quotes, but words fail. After so many murders; so many words still freeze on a script written in hell. Thirty-three mass shootings (i.e., involving four or more victims) in the United States during the first 21 days of January, 2023. More than 11,000 hate crimes involving Asians in 2 years. Thousands of mass shootings after I started working on this book 4 years ago. Add another mass shooting near a youth center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and one at a subway restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. Another took place behind a beer hall in Oklahoma City and another at a strip club outside Columbus, Ohio. Two mass shootings ended parties in different Florida cities. And that was just on New Year’s Day, 2023. By the start of the 4th week in January, the tally had grown to include at least 69 separate shootings in which 4 or more people had been injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive, outlining a striking explosion of violence across a range of sites in nearly every corner of the United States. That was not an unusual month. By the time April was half over, the United States had 163 mass shootings on record for the year thus far, the latest April 15, in which 4 people were killed and 28 injured at a “Sweet 16” birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, a town of about 3000. Pausing briefly, President Joe Biden said: “What has our nation come to when children cannot attend a birthday party without fear?” This is outrageous and unacceptable”. Yes, and yes, even if the grief has become rather boilerplate.

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Holpuch, Amanda, and Claire Fahy. “Alabama Birthday Party Shooting Leaves 4 Dead and 28 Injured.” New York Times, April 16, 2023, https://www.nytimes. com/2023/04/16/us/birthday-­party-­shooting-­dadeville-­alabama.html. The trail of blood flowed into May, when this book went to Germany to be edited. So the toll grows in the Gun Fetish Nation. Words fail, again, and again.

References Albeck-Ripka, & Medina, E. (2023, January 6). 6-year-old shoots teacher at Virginia Elementary School, police say. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/ newport-­news-­school-­shooting-­virginia.html America’s Toxic Gun Culture. Editorial Board, New York Times, December 10, 2012. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/opinion/america-­gun-­violence.html Bender, M. C., & Mazzei, P. (2022, November 6). Trump-DeSantis rift grows, with dueling rallies in Florida. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/us/politics/ trump-­desantis-­republicans.html Berman, M., Bernstein, L., Keating, D., Tran, A. B., & Galocha, A. (2022, July 8). The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/gun-­deaths-­per-­year-­usa/?tid=ss_tw Blow, C.  M. (2022a, July 6). Show the carnage. New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/opinion/show-­p hotos-­m ass-­s hootings.html?campaign_ id=2&emc=edit_th_20220706&instance_id=65966&nl=todaysheadlines&re gi_id=35795487&segment_id=97803&user_id=8953ac8150496623ee2c782e2065b2e1 Blow, C.  M. (2022b, June 8). America’s ‘psychic numbing’ to gun violence. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/opinion/numbing-­gun-­violence.html Cantú, F. (2022, July 4). Our gun myths have held America hostage for too long. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/04/opinion/guns-­america-­western-­ outmythology.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220704&instance_id=65803&nl=tod aysheadlines®i_id=35795487&segment_id=97625&user_id=8953ac8150496623ee2c78 2e2065b2e1 Cillizza, C. (2022, May 27). This Republican senator thinks ‘Wokeness’ is the cause of mass shootings. The Point with Chris Cillizza. Retrieved from https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/mes sages/16536906998769c4657bf2397/raw?utm_ Cobb, J.. (2022a, June 4). Would showing graphic images of mass shootings spur action to stop them? Returning to an old debate after the horrific killings in Uvalde, Texas. The New  Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-­comment/ would-­showing-­graphic-­images-­of-­mass-­shootings-­spur-­action-­to-­stop-­them?utm Cobb, J. (2022b, June 6). “Gun fight.” The talk of the town. The New Yorker, 11–12. Cobb, J. (2022c, June 6). The atrocity of American Gun culture. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/the-­atrocity-­of-­american-­gun-­culture Cole, B. (2019, July 9). Preventable measures: “Richard Berk, Professor of Criminology and Statistics and Chair of the Department of Criminology, taps into perpetrator patterns to forecast mass violence. Omnia (Penn Arts and Sciences). Retrieved from https://omnia.sas. upenn.edu/story/preventative-­measures Cottle, M. (2022, May 27). Nothing is stopping the N.R.A.’s gun orgy in Texas. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opinion/nra-­trump-­texas-­guns.html

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De Avila, J. (2022, May 25). NRA annual meeting to host Trump in Texas after Uvalde School shooting. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/nra-­annual-­meeting-­in-­ texas-­to-­go-­on-­after-­uvalde-­school-­shooting-­11653501442?no_redirect=true&mod=mhp Dowd, M. (2022, November 5). The Marjorie Taylor Greene-ing of America. New York Times. Retrieved from https://headtopics.com/us/opinion-­the-­marjorie-­taylor-­greene-­ing-­of-­america-­31361250 Feur, A. (2022, June 20). In ad, shotgun-toting Greitens asks voters to go ‘RINO hunting’. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/us/politics/eric-­greitens-­ rino-­ad.html Fisher, M., & Keller, J. (2017, November 7). Why does the U.S. have so many mass shootings? Research is clear: Guns. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/ world/americas/mass-­shootings-­us-­international.html Haag, P. (2016). The gunning of America: Business and the making of American gun culture. Basic Books. Via Google Books. November 8, 2022. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books Hytrek, N. (2022, June 3). Football team shelves AR-15 giveaway plan. Sioux City Journal in Omaha World-Herald, 2022, B-7. Klay, P. (2022a, June 11). How did guns get so powerful? The New Yorker. Retrieved from https:// www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-­of-­technology/how-­did-­guns-­get-­so-­powerful Klay, P.. (2022b). Uncertain ground: Citizenship in an age of endless, invisible war. Penguin Press/Random House. A version of this essay appeared in Klay. Krugman, P. (2020, May 26). The G.O.P. war on civil virtue. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/opinion/republicans-­guns-­uvalde.html Liccardo, S. (2022, December 21). One city is trying a new approach to stem gun violence. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/opinion/guns-­violence-­ prevention.html Linfield, S. (2022, May 31). Should we be forced to see exactly what an AR-15 does to a 10-year-­ old? New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/uvalde-­ shooting-­photos.html? Liptak, A. (2022, June 23). Supreme Court strikes down New York Law limiting guns in public. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/supreme-­court-­ny-­ open-­carry-­gun-­law.html Lozano, J., & Colvin, J. (2022, May 27). NRA Speakers unshaken on gun rights after school massacre. Associated Press. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-­school-­shooting-­nra-­conv ention-­212dfd1b57474f1ab208d4a72521a010? McIntire, M., Thrush, G., & Lipton, E. (2022, June). Gun sellers’ message to Americans: Man up. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/firearm-­gun-­ sales.html. McKibben, B. (2022, June 3). Elsie Stefanik really doesn’t need to embrace Trumpism. The New  Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-­comment/ elise-­stefanik-­really-­doesnt-­need-­to-­embrace-­trumpism?utm Myers, S. L., & Thompson, S. A. (2022, June 1). Racist and violent ideas jump from web’s fringes to mainstream sites. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/ technology/fringe-­mainstream-­social-­media.html Paul, P. (2022, June 1). What to do about Americans who love their guns. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/us/replacement-­theory-­shooting-­tucker-­ carlson.html Reynolds expands deer hunting with semi-automatic weapons in Iowa. Omaha World-Herald, June 22, 2022, Associated Press, A-2. Scully, R. (2022, May 25). Texas Lieutenant Governor on School shooting: ‘We have to harden these targets.’ The Hill. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/homenews/state-­watch/3500837-­ texas-­lieutenant-­governor-­on-­school-­shooting-­we-­have-­to-­harden-­these-­targets/

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Shear, M. D. (2022, June 2). ‘Enough, enough’: Biden calls on lawmakers to pass gun legislation. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/us/politics/biden-­guns-­ speech.html Six people shot to death during a parade in Chicago. Omaha World-Herald, July 5, 2022, Associated Press, A-1, A-5. Slovic, P. (2020, June 17). Roundup: Psychic numbing, false feeling of hopelessness found behind U.S. gun violence. Xinhua News Agency. Retrieved from https://www.africannewsagency.com/ xinhua-­news-­agency/roundup-­psychic-­numbing-­false-­feeling-­of-­hopelessness-­found-­behind-­ u-­s-­gun-­violence-­529eec9f-­1d40-­57b8-­b9ee-­6f3e24e64a94/ The Anti-Defamation League. (2021, April 19). The great replacement: An explainer. Retrieved from https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/the-­great-­replacement-­an-­explainer Vander Ploeg, L., Chung, C., & Albeck-Ripka, L. (2022, June 5). Mass shooting in Philadelphia kills at least 3 on weekend of gun violence. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/2022/06/05/us/philadelphia-­shooting.html Whitehurst, L. (2023, February 5) Report: Quicker turnaround from gun purchase to crime. Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press.

Chapter 6

White Pride, Worldwide: The Nationalistic Roots of Racial Hatred

If you want your racism raw, the Web page to visit is Stormfront.org. No quotes from Martin Luther King or Chief Joseph here—just paeans to George Armstrong Custer the hero as oppressed white man and a philosophy that takes pride in no-­ regrets conquest. The message at Stormfront.org is simple: “We” are the superior race. We kicked your ass and took your continent. Tough shit. “Every Month is White History Month!” brags Stormfront.org’s main home page. To hell with anyone else’s political correctness. “White Pride—World Wide!” Inferior races, get used to it (Johansen, 2000). Stormfront.org is the place to go for interviews with David Duke, the complete published works of Adolph Hitler, and the latest in White Pride chic, including a bewildering variety of swastikas and Celtic-cross pendants, T-shirts, and flags. Don’t forget the hot-selling Stars and Bars, the Confederate Battle Flag, which is one of the American neo-Nazis’ favorite icons. Visit the graphics library and download your own swastikas, iron crosses, and SS insignia. And don’t pass up the archive of “Holo[caust] Hoax” comic strips (Johansen, 2000). Before you dismiss all this as someone’s idea of a joke in extremely bad taste, check the hit-meter on the Stormfront.org homepage, which said that (as of June 13, 2017) that I was visitor number 3,282,820, of them 2,272,671 unique (representing 13,602,579 page views) in the previous 3 months. White nationalists do some serious Web surfing. “We are the voice of the new, embattled white minority!” the page proclaims (Welcome, 2017). This is no joke. This is “White Pride—Worldwide: The White Nationalist Resource Page,” maintained by Don Black, “a 6-foot-3-inch man with the helmet of gently graying hair” (Abel, 1998). Black’s personal Internet page shows the Internet White Pride webmaster pecking away at his personal computer in West Palm Beach, Florida, backed by a large Confederate flag (Black, 2000). Stormfront.org’s resident sage is “Professor” Revilo P. Oliver, who is described on the Web page as “one of America’s greatest patriots.” Nearly 200 of Oliver’s commentaries have been reproduced at Stormfront.org. All of them, like the rest of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_6

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the site, are accessible through Stormfront.org’s own internal search engine. In these hundreds of thousands of words, Oliver has a few choice thoughts on Native Americans, although most of his tirades are directed against African-Americans (if you’re searching, try “niggers”), Jews, Latinos, Asians, homosexuals (see: “queers”), and just about anyone else without a very high quantum of Nordic (search: “Aryan”) blood (Johansen, 2000, 50). Here is Oliver’s take on Native American character: “The aborigines could be brave and exhibit an almost heroic superiority to pain and hardship, and that encouraged sentimentalists to forget that they were also cowardly and treacherous, filthy and squalid, innately cruel and savage, and incapable of the discipline that makes civilization possible” (Oliver, 1991).

6.1 Seize the Country of an Inferior People and Exterminate Them Oliver endorses “the right of a superior people to seize the country of an inferior people and exterminate them.” A superior race has a moral right, perhaps even a moral imperative, to displace an inferior race in desirable territory. Aryans were obviously greatly superior to Indians and therefore had a natural right to take North American for themselves. I do not say that our race’s superiority to the Indians was shown by our greater intelligence and our unique culture, for that would be only a tautology. Our superiority was conclusively demonstrated by the fact that we subjugated the Indians and conquered the country that was ours until we discarded it (Oliver, 1991).

Oliver sneers at suggestions that Native American confederacies, notably the Iroquois, may have shaped democracy: “How far our imbecility has gone may be seen from a recent instance in the state of New York, where the gang of racketeers who call themselves “educators” are ramming into the minds of their child victims the lie that the American Constitution was imitated from a confederation formed by savages” (Oliver, 1991). He is referring to the curriculum guide “Haudenosaunee: Past, Present, Future,” which was part of the New  York State Department of Education “Curriculum of Inclusion.”

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6.2 Protected by the First Amendment In another commentary, Oliver refers to George Armstrong Custer’s “efficient defeat of the Cheyenne at Washita in 1868” as “a brilliant victory.” “Liberal pests…whom Oliver endorses as having “the right of a superior people to seize the country of an inferior people and exterminate them.” A superior race has a moral right, perhaps even a moral imperative, to displace an inferior race in desirable territory. Aryans were obviously greatly superior to Indians and therefore had a natural right to take North America for themselves. I do not say that our race’s superiority to the Indians was shown by our greater intelligence and our unique culture, for that would be only a tautology. Our superiority was conclusively demonstrated by the fact that we subjugated the Indians and conquered the country that was ours until we discarded it [sic] (Oliver, 1991).

Black began his career as a white nationalist by handing out white power literature while a student at Athens High School, near Huntsville, Alabama. In college, as a political science major at the University of Alabama, Black joined the ROTC but was expelled for racism. Later, Black led local rallies of the Ku Klux Klan. Black had joined the KKK in 1975, the year after David Duke took over the group. Black then moved to Birmingham as the KKK’s Alabama organizer. Black’s career in the Klan culminated when he became a grand wizard, after Duke had stepped aside. Black resigned from the KKK in 1987. “I concluded the Klan could never be a viable political movement again,” he said. “It had a reputation for random and senseless violence which it could never overcome. There were several events around [at] that time that reinforced that opinion” (Faulk, 1997, 1). Black, who is divorced, moved to West Palm Beach, Fla. the same year and married Duke’s former wife. Black was among 59 individuals and 32 organizations profiled in the Anti-­ Defamation League’s report “The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far Right Fringe…” “a sort of who’s-who of such hate groups” (Faulk, 1997). The league also has issued another report which focuses on Black and Stormfront.org. “He [Black] was really the first white supremacist on the Internet,” said Rick Eaton, senior researcher with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (Faulk, 1997, 1). Twenty years after Eaton made that comment, Black and Stormfront were bigger and more combative than ever in the age of the alt-right, fake news, and President Donald Trump.

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6.3 A Supermarket of Online Hatred Stormfront’s Wikipedia page contains the following material, much of which has not been independently verified. One may believe its assertions or use them as illustrations of the group’s twisted state of mind. Black people, for example, have been described on his Web page as rabid beasts. Stormfront has been a neo-­Nazi Internet forum since its beginnings, as well as the Web‘s first major racial hate site. The site focuses on propagating white nationalism, anti-­semitism and Islamophobia, as well as anti-­feminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy. Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996. It received national attention in the United States in 2000 after being featured as the subject of a documentary, Hate.com. By 2009, Stormfront.org had about 120,000 Web participants. In the 5 years leading up to 2014, nearly 100 people were murdered by users of Stormfront. Of these, 77 were massacred by one Stormfront user, Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian terrorist who the 2011 Norway attacks. By 2022, Stormfront’s list of “registered users” had climbed to 300,000. (One also may browse it without registering, as I did.) The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes Stormfront as having “served as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of antiSemitism and racism.” It has been the subject of controversy after being removed from French, German, and Italian Google indices, for targeting an online Fox News poll on racial segregation, and for having political candidates as members. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from watchdog organizations that oppose racism and anti-­semitism. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Stormfront_(website)]. “Stormfront” stems from the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing. It began as support propaganda for David Duke’s political activities when he was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). By 1999, Stormfront claimed 120,000 active Internet members and a status as the first active cyber-site espousing white supremacy and associated causes. Thus, it keeps active tabs on many of them.

6.4 Racism as First Amendment Cover According to Wikipedia, Stormfront, protected by the First Amendment, wasted no time in poking red-hot irons into the US political system, while French, German, and other European sites (without direct freedom expression guarantees) banned it. Doug Hanks, a candidate for the city council of Charlotte, North Carolina, withdrew his nomination in August 2005 after he had posted on Stormfront more than 4000

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times over the previous 3 years. By 2005, according to Wikipedia’s account, Stormfront’s number of registered users had grown to more than 52,000. The group’s registration roll grew by 2000 new members a day after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008. Within a few years after that, spikes in Stormfront membership were related to racially tinged statements by Donald J. Trump. As it grew, Stormfront networked support groups with several other white supremacist sites and branched into other aspects of members’ lives, such as a dating service for “Heterosexual White Gentiles only.” The main feature of the site remained a bulletin board for ranters and ravers against everything and anything non-white, non-whiter, and non-whitest. Eloquence is not Stormfront’s forte. Whites can even get clobbered if they’re “marxist pissant academics…[and] little insects” (the lower-case “m” in “marxism” is not a grammatical error in Stormfrontese). White people who support non-white ideas (such as a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday) get an extra dollop of white-in-the-head venom. This is 1 piece of 140 posts by one Jack Boot, “Stormfront editor emeritus.” [https://www.stormfront.org/forum/ t134087/]. The posts are sprinkled with pearls of Nazi wisdom, such as “The Fylfot—also known as the Swastika—the millennia-old symbol of the Aryan race, “symbolizing our harmony with Nature [sic] and striking fear into the hearts of anyone with evil in their hearts.” The Wiesenthal Center by 1998 was spending 80 percent of its resources tracking so-called online hate (Koppel, 1998). The German Government has tried (and failed) to block Stormfront.org. Much of the site’s content is illegal under German law but protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Black makes the most of his First Amendment rights, riding the airwaves as well as Web links. At one point in 1998, Black appeared on ABC’s “Nightline” with Ted Koppel. When Black tried to enlist Thomas Jefferson in his cause as a supporter of free expression, Koppel leaned into the camera and replied: “If you’ll forgive me, most of us won’t have trouble distinguishing between you and Thomas Jefferson” (Koppel, 1998). Black was among 59 individuals and 32 organizations profiled in the Anti-­ Defamation League’s report “The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far Right Fringe”—“a sort of who’s-who of such hate groups” (Faulk, 1997, 1). The league also has issued another report which focuses on Black and Stormfront.org. “He [Black] was really the first white supremacist on the Internet,” said Rick Eaton, senior researcher with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (Faulk, 1997, 1). Twenty years after Eaton made that comment, Black and Stormfront were bigger and more combative than ever in the age of the alt-right, fake news, and President Donald Trump. Very few of us have paid much attention to Hitler’s tastes in American sports, probably fewer than have dwelled on what he said about cross-cultural US and Nazi history. Both, however, can be instructive. According to a 1942 psychological profile of Hitler assembled by the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) forerunners, while popular imagination indicates that he borrowed his “sieg heil” salute from Mussolini’s fascists, Hitler

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probably caged it from a move by American college football cheerleaders. Hitler was a fan of American football and had newsreels of games flown in. According to a report in The London Guardian (Borger, 2001), The profile relies heavily on the personal observations of one of Hitler’s best friends in the 1920s, Ernst Hanfstaengl, whom the future Führer knew as “Putzi.” Hanfstaengl observed in 1923 that “He adored American football marches and college songs. The ‘Sieg Heil!’ used in all political rallies is a direct copy of the technique used by American football cheerleaders. American college type of music was used to excite the German masses who had been used to very dry-as-dust political lectures” (Borger, 2001).

6.5 Kanye (“Ye”) West: Hitler’s Pseudo-Black Buddy Only in America can a multi-millionaire black man [Kanye (a.k.a. “Ye”) West] swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler and have dinner at a table of four with former President Donald J. Trump, along with an ardent white supremacist with a Latino name (Nick Fuentes), after which Trump told an attentive world that he had not known that either man was at the table? Just how lax is security at Mar-a-­ Lago, anyway? So, who are “Ye” and Fuentes? Members of a new American Nazi Party? a black Nazi and a motor-mouthed threat to the Republic? Kanye (“Ye”) West? Nick Fuentes? Publicity hounds goofing around? By the time this book hits the streets, will anyone remember having heard of either man? Maybe not, but this general principle probably will be recalled: In America, everything goes and nothing matters; in Russia and China, nothing goes and everything matters. Imagine being arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for holding up a blank sheet of paper on a public sidewalk. Or being caught in Moscow’s main airport carrying a smoking pipe encrusted with a trace or two of hash oil? It’s a crime worth a 10 to 15 year prison sentence in a labor camp if Neo Tsar Vladimir V. Putin says so.

6.6 Trump Stands with the Mob During late December, 2022, Trump, wrote that Peter Baker in The New York Times, “made clear…exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol [January 6, 2021] to stop the peaceful transfer of power….He stands with the mob.” The attackers of the Capitol, he said, “have been treated unconstitutionally…and very, very unfairly….The treatment of members of the mob was part of a conspiracy, said Trump.” “The country…is going communist” (Baker, 2022). These statements had become part of a pattern by which Trump figured he was rallying “patriots” who will deliver the presidency, which he insists he never lost in the 2020

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election. In the United States, please remember that one can lay down a stinking trail of absolute lies and end up in the White House.

6.7 Trump and His Small Army of Quasi-Brownshirts Trump’s invitation of West and Fuentes to a table of four at Mar-a-Lago, furthermore, was part of a pattern by which Trump, increasingly isolated among his self-­ chosen cohort, was planning early in 2023 to bend the United States to his will, with his small army of quasi-Brownshirts. The ideological basis of his beliefs was becoming clearer as the 2024 election grew closer, as the “spiritual heart of a seditious conspiracy to illegitimately keep power in a way that is unparalleled in American history” (Baker, 2022). Watch out for the First Amendment, Mr. ex-­President. It can make you famous and dump you in a political sewer at the same time. “Trump is doubling down on his extremist and cult leader profile,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present and a history professor at New  York University. “For someone of Trump’s temperament, being humiliated by people turning away from him will only make him more desperate and more inclined to support and associate with the most extremist elements of society. There is no other option for him” (Baker, 2022).

6.8 Watch It, “Ye,” the First Amendment Can Turn You into a Diddling Fool, Too “I like Hitler,” West enthused “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities….We [have] got to stop dissing Nazis all the time,” “Ye” yelped as he insisted that the Jewish Holocaust never happened. One wonders: in the Book of “Ye,” did slavery ever happen? Did men ever land on the moon? Hey, “Ye,” does the Sun come up in the West? The First Amendment gives each and every one of is the sovereign right to make fools of ourselves, and you exercise that right nearly every hour of your ridiculous life. While analysts and strategists of politics have long advised politicians seeking fading support to harvest it from the center of the political spectrum, Trump, at least in late 2022, was doing the opposite by flirting with the fascist fringe like no other notable officeholder in US political history. He may have been relying on his personal magnetism and command of a loyal political base to boost his fortunes. Students of German history c. 1925 through 1933 might note a similar past pivot. Trump, himself, has long made a political specialty out of smearing opponents with the most absurd of allegations to divert attention from his own problems. Does anyone recall when Trump spent nearly his entire political career insisting that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, even after Obama produced his birth

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certificate. Perhaps Trump was trying to divert attention from allegations that he had sexually abused several women, even as he denied all of it? It all seemed to carry the stench of rotten smear-laden politics. Trump spewed lies so frequently that it gets very tough to keep track. He often relied on the 24-hour news cycle to divert attention from his own problems. Were Mexican immigrants really rapists? Was David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, really a reliable political ally? Were neo-Nazis at an ultraright rally in Charlottesville, VA (2017) really among the “very fine people on both sides?” Was Trump really the hero among QAnon beliefs against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, baby blood-­ sucking pedophiliac elites? Should those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, be excused with an apology? All through Trump’s narrative lurked enemies of the wrong nationality, the wrong ideology, the wrong gender, the wrong political party, and, worse, a universe of enemies. Did Thomas Jefferson ever believe that the First Amendment would be subject to such abuse? White racism can be a very, very strange place where some of its enemies are black, as long as they mouth the correct political misconceptions. Kanye West has been a clothing designer, after all. How would he have looked outfitted in a white sheet and hood? Or posting swastikas on Twitter? On December 2, 2020, West’s account on Twitter was suspended indefinitely after he posted a swastika inside an image of the Star of David. Elon Musk, chief executive of Twitter, said that West (“Ye”) had violated a Twitter policy against inciting violence. (This action came shortly after Musk had restored accounts for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Trumps. Instagram account also had blocked West from posting there “after he suggested on the platform that Sean Combs, the rapper known as Diddy, was being controlled by Jewish people” (Yoon, 2022). West (Ye) also lashed out against Jewish people generally, as he “appeared on a podcast hosted by the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, during which he told Jones, “I like Hitler” (Yoon, 2022). How much history had “Ye” studied? Musk said that his approach to content moderation is: “If in doubt, let the speech exist.” He has also said that Twitter would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.” He has reinstated accounts that had been suspended for pushing misinformation, including those of former President Donald J. Trump. He has also said he would offer “amnesty” to accounts suspended by the company’s previous owners. For years, West’s music career included some very well-selling records, along with “a healthy dose of spectacle and theatrics, helping to redefine the modern concept of celebrity along the way” (Tumin, 2022). As long as West’s antics were mainly sterile of fringe, rightwing content, important figures in the music world marked them up as audience-catching career moves, Increasingly, however, as he was involved in politics (especially with Trump), “Ye’s” media path was strewn more and more with racist and anti-semitic cant, tainted by hero-worship of fascist-­ and-­worse figures such as Hitler. West was banned from a performance at the Grammy Awards in 2021 and abruptly withdrew from headlining an [October, 2022] Coachella festival .

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For a long time, those disruptions were widely welcomed by many promotors in the music and fashion industries as he “cut new creative paths” (Tumin, 2022).

6.9 “Ye’s” Fascist Fashions In October, 2022, West made a series of anti-­semitic remarks. For example, West said that Jews had perpetuated a “Holocaust” against black Americans, some belief for an admirer of Hitler. He also wore a T-shirt with a slogan [“White Lives Matter”] that some commentators said had been associated with white supremacists, including the KKK, although this particular shirt motto seemed rather tepid next to some of his other attention-grabbing antics. West (Ye) dressed several black models in the same shirt during an exhibition at Paris Fashion Week during 2022. The politics-­ showbiz tint of the whole thing gave off a whiff of fake gravitas that, when taken in the context of lollipops for Nazis, made Ye” seem like something of a snake-oil salesman fishing for headlines. Regarding that, many in the fashion press were present and accounted for during a sale of a “Ye” fashion line (label YZY, formerly known as Yeezy). When the Gap cancelled his fashion line, “Ye” announced he would start his own. The “white lives matter” shirt caused a fit of entirely useless publicity-flash outrage that dissipated after a few days. One wonders what der Führer would have thought, after “Ye” said he would start his own line of retail stores, a promise (or a threat) which vaporized within a few days. This was the context within which “Ye” and Fuentes’ names appeared on Trump’s dinner list at Mar-a-Lago. Bear in mind, please, that it was a table for four, which must have made Trump’s initial disclaimer that he did not know “Ye” and Fuentes were present about as credible as anything else that serial liar Trump did or would say on this comic strip that we have come to call “American politics.” The fourth person at Trump’s table was Karen Giorno, “a veteran political operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida— [who] also confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there” (Haberman & Feuer, 2022). No one except Trump could have missed Fuentes, who was described by the New York Times as “an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists” (Haberman & Feuer, 2022).

6.10 Sterling Credentials as an Aborning Young American Fascist Fuentes, age 24, has sterling credentials as an aborning young American fascist, with his snug ties to “Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual

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white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference” (Haberman & Feuer, 2022). Fuentes makes no secret of his racism and anti-­ semitism—had Trump thumbed through his FBI file? In addition to his Holocaust denial, Fuentes fills his podcast with demands that the military be sent to patrol black neighborhoods. If Fuentes had his way, Jews would have no neighborhoods, not in the United States, at any rate. He believes that they ought to be kicked out of the United States. Now there’s a nod to the Nazis, whose Führer gave Jews two options: get out (while they still could) or, after all their assets had been ripped off, to a death camp. How cozy, Mr. Fuentes. Will you be buying a ticket on a cattle car to Auschwitz any time soon? One close ally of Trump “castigated him over meeting with both Fuentes and West. “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” said David M. Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and appointee as ambassador to Israel, who wrote on Twitter: “Even a social visit from antisemites like West and Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong” (Haberman & Feuer, 2022). I couldn’t have said it better myself.

6.11 American History’s Fascistic False Starts The doings of Trump and his cohort’s hijinks notwithstanding, they are not the roots of United States white supremacism—far from it. The pose that today’s white racists strike tells us more about their ignorance than about American history. In addition to the horrors (not to mention the lethal racism) of slavery, American history contains many fascistic false starts. Even though extreme versions of white supremacism have emerged within the United States on a very small scale, these foreign imports (such as the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell) have never gained much of a foothold. The country’s own brand of nativistic nationalism (expressed in the KKK, for example) has flourished from time to time. While US neo-Nazism is but a fringe of the overall “white power” movement, it does attract adherents, as described by Peter Simi and Robert Futrell in American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010). Beginning with his founding of the American Nazi Party in 1961, Rockwell adapted aspects of Hitler’s beliefs into his militant anti-communism, opposition to racial integration, anti-immigration populism, and anti-semitism. A young David Duke expressed an affinity for Rockwell’s message before he became a grand wizard of the KKK.  Rockwell’s group mimicked Hitler’s movement, using the Nazi salute and wearing militaristic uniforms reflecting Third Reich motifs. A disaffected former party member assassinated Rockwell in 1967, and what was left of the ANP fizzled into an ill-defined cult called the New Order, which advanced a fantasy (following the works of Savitri Devi) that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. None of this ever gained any traction with a mass American audience.

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Ideological affinity connects the Know Nothings (American Party) of the 1850s with the KKK (which peaked in the 1920s) and several “alt-right” organizations today. Dylan Roof’s murders in an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina (June 25, 2015), before which he professed white supremacy, are cut from the same ideological cloth as ante-bellum rhetoric supporting slavery. Eugenic pseudoscience (which supported white supremacist assumptions) was very popular in the United States before some Europeans took it to extremes to justify the elimination of Jews and other non-Aryans. US President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was a dedicated eugenicist who all but eliminated black employment in the US federal government’s civil surface before his term in office ended.

6.12 “White Extinction Anxiety,” False Walls, and a Common Destiny Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times that reaction to migration in the United States is rooted in white race anxiety over being overwhelmed, which also propels support for Donald Trump. Through the lens of racism. That’s part of it. In the longer run, however, it’s not just “white” people who may need to worry about going extinct. There’s the matter of a sustainable future for every animate creature on this Earth that ought to be bothering all of us. Unfortunately, many people are too deeply obsessed with racial, religious, and nationalistic biases to even imagine what nature has in store for all of us via climate change. If we don’t pay more attention to what we share than what divides us, we’ll all eventually go extinct. “Strip all the other rationales away from this [Trump] draconian immigration policy,” wrote Blow.” This is at the core: white extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, and white minority anxiety. White people have been the majority of people considered US citizens since this country was founded, but that period is rapidly drawing to a close, First, for the first time since the Census Bureau has released these annual statistics, they show an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population—accelerating a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until the next decade” (Blow, 2018). The same report added that, for the first time, more children are now being born in the United States who are minorities than who are white, at every age from birth to 9. Another report, authored by the University of Wisconsin’s Applied Population Lab, said at about the same time that during 2016, more European-Americans died than were born in 26 of the 50 United States (2018), more than at any previous period in US history. Blow commented that: “All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigration policy, voter suppression, Trump economic isolationist impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social justice protests. Everything.” Much the same can be said of nationalist movements in much of Europe, including “Brexit” in Great Britain, neo-fascism in Italy, neo-Nazism in Germany, a

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right-­wing surge in Poland, and similar movements that now play an important role in Hungary and Austria. Germany alone has absorbed more than 800,000 migrants within a few years.

6.13 Race, Religion, and Nationalism In a century, perhaps, historians may ask why obsessions regarding race, religion, and nationalism played such an important role in our thinking (and conflict) today. All are preventing us from forging real solutions to the existential threat to everyone’s survival: preservation of a sustainable habitat. Perhaps future historians may muse that some of us experienced fear of the wrong people for the wrong reasons, along lines of conflict that endure from a time when human beings were not the overwhelming influence of the planet’s destiny that we are today—that is, before fossil fuels provided unprecedented power, prosperity, and peril. Some of us still do not realize that we all share the same atmosphere, the same problems, and the same destiny—even those who deny that a problem exists. A gated community will not keep it out. No wall will screen it out—unless, as in the movie Elysium, the uber-privileged migrate off-planet. More people are sharing less arable land that is more often being devastated by nature brutalized by rising levels of greenhouse gases. At the same time, inequity of wealth is accelerating, creating more political, economic, and climate refugees. By 2022, more than 65 million people were ranging the world homeless, whether escaping gangs in Central America or parched former farmlands in Syria. Climate change is often a “trigger mechanism” that makes everything else worse, as migration increases, in a vicious cycle.

6.14 Common Destiny or Common Demise For example, drought and rising temperatures in Guatemala are making it more difficult for people to survive, most notably as coffee rust (la roya) becomes more widespread. “We can’t make a living purely off coffee anymore,” one young farmer told Lauren Markham in the New York Times. Young people either move to the cities amid the gang violence, or to the United States. A third of the world’s refugees (a record high) have been forced from their homes because of environmental degradation or climate change, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. According to Markham, “This includes tragedies like the widespread famine in Darfur, monsoons and flooding in Bangladesh and the catastrophic hurricane [Maria] in Puerto Rico. The more out of whack our climate becomes, the more people…leave their homes. As our world heats up and sea levels rise, the problem of forced migration around the world is projected to become far worse” (Markham, 2018a, b). Thus, denying climate

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change, Trump and Company are aggravating illegal immigration, just as they wage a war against immigrants. El Salvador, one of the world’s most murderous countries has been experiencing drought that has devastated its agricultural infrastructure, even as an expanding Sahel in Africa prompts thousands of people to seek new homes in Europe. Yemen, Syria, and other countries also are suffering drought, with similar effects on out-migration. “If President Trump really wants to cut illegal migration to the United States for the long haul, he’d better get serious about climate change,” wrote Lauren Markham (2018a, b). “The Trump administration can continue to eviscerate the E.P.A. and thumb its nose at global efforts to protect the climate. Or he can work responsibly to try to curb international migration by addressing the challenges of a warming planet.” We will realize and deal with our common destiny, or meet a common demise.

6.15 Street Fighting for White Pride Donald Trump’s election as US president was accompanied by a surge in celebratory right-wing extremist zealotry, including bomb threats to Jewish synagogues across the country, as well as an increasing number of street-fighting fascist youth gangs that may remind a student of Hitler’s Brownshirts, except for the Americans’ lack of uniform color coordination and general military discipline. A number of young, white men verbally abused and beat men and women whom they believed were Muslim (one, in Omaha, was a Hindu). A man on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon, hurled insults at a young woman wearing a hijab (head scarf) and then stabbed to death two white men who came to her aid. Gangs of right-wing vigilantes with names like the Fraternal Order of Alt-­ Knights injected an element of violence into street demonstrations across the United States beginning in the first few months of the Trump presidency. Kyle Chapman, founder of the Alt-Knights, who is 6-foot-2 and 240 muscular pounds made a specialty of leading his cadre into anti-Trump marches and ripping signs out of the hands of protesters. He and his compatriots then sought fights and when they got them, as they shouted: “Assaulting our people? Your days are numbered, Commie! The American people are rising up against you!” (Feuer & Peters, 2017). Chapman, who was 46 years of age in 2022, coached his compatriots: “I have a question!” Mr. Chapman shouted at one point, commanding the attention of the room. “What do we stand for?” “Freedom!” people yelled. “And what do we bleed for?” Mr. Chapman shouted. “Freedom!” they yelled again. He suddenly grabbed the man beside him. “Are you ready to bleed?” Mr. Chapman shouted at the man. “I’m ready to bleed!” he yelled (Feuer & Peters, 2017). Chapman calls himself an “American nationalist.” He had three felony arrests and often watched demonstrations from the sidelines, lest he be tempted to augment his rap sheet (Feuer & Peters, 2017).

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“Part fight club, part Western-pride fraternity, the Alt-Knights and similar groups [with names such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers] recruit battalions of mainly young white men for one-off confrontations with their ideological enemies—the black-clad left-wing militants who disrupted President Trump’s inauguration and have protested against the appearances of conservative speakers on college campuses,” wrote Alan Feuer and Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times (2017). They mobilize against removal of Confederate monuments in places such as New Orleans and at rallies by Trump opponents who have protested alt-right speakers on college campuses. Their activities often are promoted on social media, endorsing Trump priorities such as restrictions on Muslim immigration. “It’s almost like a street fight, like a rumble, the way it’s being advertised,” said Sgt. Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the New York Police Department (Feuer & Peters, 2017). The Proud Boys also use violent hazing during initiation rituals, as well as an oath to act in support of Western (European) culture and values. “Their followers thrive on hyper-masculinity and celebrate when one of their brethren hits a leftist agitator,” reported the New York Times, “They mock Islam and purport to be soldiers against a ‘war on Whites.’ …to spout Islamophobic and anti-immigrant speech…while being mindful not to embrace overt white supremacy. Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump’s, has taken the Proud Boys’ oath” (Feuer & Peters, 2017). They express “white pride” as they bait feminists, gays, and transgender people. The Proud Boys, along with a number of other neo-fascist supporters of Trump, plays a prominent role in the deadly January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, said “I love being white….We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but aboriginals keep using them as a bed” McInnes oversaw Proud Boys initiations in which he instructed new members to “announce yourself as a white, proud Western chauvinist, make sure everyone knows it, and don’t be ashamed” (Feuer & Peters, 2017). Would “American “chauvinists” be happy or ticked off at a reader who reminds them that their militaristic feeding habits resemble standards of pride and shame in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia? The following described exchanges in Moscow, Russia, from Emmanuel Carrere, [backslant accent over first e] in “Fear and Loathing in Moscow” (Harper’s, June, 2022, 11–17). “Her mother called her, terrified her, most of her friends unfriended her. ‘The entire world, us Russians, says Irina, and I try to comfort her tell her that people, well, people like me, are perfectly capable of telling the difference, first between the Russians, and the Russians who support their insane president, and those who are terrified by his insanity….’The Ukranians, I envy them. They are the heroes, They are ready to fight and to die. They’re taking action. Us, we’re living in fear. And a little bit in hope. A little bit.’ She starts to cry” (Carrere, 2022, 11).

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She continued: In a few days, we have reached the level of paranoia close to that of Stalin’s Great Purge. Everything is listened to, no means of communication can be considered secure, and if there was any doubt about the real risk, a law has just been passed this Friday, March 4 [2022], which represses the so-called fake news concerning Ukraine on the following scale. To write or say the word ‘war’ instead of ‘special operation’ up to three years in prison.” Five to ten years if published by an organization. Ten to fifteen years if the act results in ‘grave consequences’—who knows what ‘grave consequences’ are. This law applies not just to Russians but to foreigners as well. Press correspondents are leaving in a hurry, one after the other.” (Carrere, 2022, 12)

Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine is that Russia created it in the first place, so, ipso facto, it is without form and substance, without sovereignty unless Putin granted it. This is similar to the rationale of the US European “settlers” under Manifest Destiny. The land is ours by God’s word—our God—Marx and Engels having been sent to the trash heap of history. Putin also replays the Great War with Russians as victors and Ukrainians as faschists and neo-Nazis—quite a feat for a nation with a Jewish president, as Putin plays the Nazi card by invoking Hitler’s use of “prior ownership,” as in the “Sudetenland” or “Lebensraum” for a Reich that he supposed would reach past the Urals and last a thousand years, instead producing rotten, stinking, lethal fruit in 12 very long years. Empires are shaped by different traditions. I cannot imagine, for example, a president of the United States, backed by a rubber-stamp Congress, making mention of a US military force’s intervention in another country a “war, “punishable by 15 years in prison. Whatever its contradictions and other failures, the United States does have a Constitution that is generally enforced by professionals judges. It also has a clause in that Constitution that guarantees freedom of expression, backed by more than two centuries of precedents plus other precedents before that. All of this may change, but our fear of change also may be a form of protection. Russia has a vastly different historical record vis-à-vis freedom of speech. It also has as Constitution and a tepid guarantee of free expression that is regularly and thoroughly squashed by autocrats in their own self-interest. However, except for a few short periods of regime change (1915–1920 and 1990–1992), this “right” has meant what the Communist Party or Tsars said it meant. Thus, when Putin was supported by very weak legislative and judicial branches of his totalitarian government, he made any assembly to protest the Ukraine “war” (a forbidden word), a crime. Any public assembly, even a whisper of one, could involve state prosecution. Perhaps Putin and Trump should have a contest to measure the number and caliber of their lies—big, bigger, biggest. Putin called Ukraine not even a nation, perhaps reliving the years when it was a “peoples ‘republic’” ruled by self-serving agents of the now-dissolved Soviet Union. The Ukrainians dropped out of the USSR

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because they have their own language, social culture, education system, etc., as well as (as the Russians have learned after their invasion), armed forces, and plans to use them when necessary. Ukraine, like most sizeable nations on the planet, also has a community of its own within the United States ready to rally support all the way up a chain of leadership, which has worked very well thus far in this war. “Tyranny and masculinity are tightly allied,” noted Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. The typical strongmen use 3Ps—“popularizing, polarizing, post-truth” (2020, 56). Just as not many women join gangs, very few (can you name any?) become tyrants “Post-truth should get some special emphasis,” wrote Gopnik. All of them use it; it creates confusion with anyone who still believes that there is any such thing as “truth.” It equalizes modest truth with fire-breathing, baseless falsehood. “Oh, so what, it’s just your opinion that the sun comes up in the west.” Gopnik remarked (2022, 56) that the new authoritarians are following a similar (and to Americans), depressingly familiar route: after improbable success as loudmouthed entertainers, creating a world where style is substance (Gopnik, 2022, 58) “Rather than cancel elections, they rig them” (with Trump being a specialist at rigging the big lies with by insisting that he won elections that he lost. “The cynical erosion of what we still call exasperatingly call norms [suggesting that the very forces that authoritarian power can accelerate its ascension” (Gopnik, 2020, 59). Then comes a war, perhaps fomented by the invasion such as that of Ukraine by Russia, in February 2022, followed by a swift and empathic crackdown on any contrary exercise of free speech at home. Two years before that, Putin’s gumshoes had tried to kill his major domestic opponent, Alexei Navalny, and then submitted him to a kangaroo court that issued an extendable prison sentence, all the better to scatter his supporters who earlier had stormed the streets through all of the Russian federation’s 11 time zones.

6.16 The Ukraine War at a Bloody Street Level Turning repressive politics into entertainment for supporters of the regime is another often-successful gambit. Emanuel Marx pointed out in his book State Violence in Nazi Germany (2019) that Kristallnacht (1938), prepared as a violence-strewn night of killing Jews and destroying their businesses, was scheduled during a traditional Catholic holiday when some rowdiness was expected, so as to hide, for a while that anti-semitic violence was rising and rolling throughout Germany. “The invasion of Ukraine has been characterised as the first social-media war, and a key aspect of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s leadership has been his ability to rally his country, and much of the world, via Facebook, Telegram, tactic, and Twitter” (Remnick, 2020). The photographer James Nachtwey brings an older art (detailed, large-format, black and white portrait photography) to new standards: a man pushing a beaten bicycle strung with his worldly goods along a highway, his face grimacing as a missile explodes behind him (28–29); Valery, squeezing his hands across the top railing of an old hospital bed and biting the top of his striped

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T-shirt as a doctor works to staunch bleeding from his legs, recently amputated at the knees (30–31); an elderly woman lying dead under her kitchen table (26–27) the awesome pain of war at a very personal level (Remnick, 2022, 28); a trail of blood running down the dirty hallway of a former hospital turned into a morgue (32–33); and the photographer’s eyes unite with yours, penetrating the faces of the dead or about to die in very painful, personal corners of a withering hell. “After an exhausting day in Ukraine recently, he [the photographer] sent this text before getting some sleep: “The barbarity and the senselessness of the Russian onslaught are hard to believe even as I witness them with my own eyes. Bombing and shelling of civilian residences, firing tank rounds point-blank into homes and hospitals. Murdering noncombatants in militarily occupied areas are all tactics being employed by the Russians in a war that was inflicted on a non-threatening, neighboring sovereign state….’Ordinary’ people are displaying extraordinary courage and determinization, if not downright stubbornness, in the face of tremendous destruction and loss of life.” His (Nachwey’s] refusal to avert his gaze from the true costs conflict reflects a larger mission: to keep the world from doing so” (Remnick, 2022, 28). “In the weeks ahead, Russian forces nearly obliterated Mariupol. The indiscriminate bombing would raze most of the city and kill thousands of civilians. Other residents would starve to death. Corpses would contaminate streams, and stray dogs would feed off dead Ukrainians left to rot in the streets….The blast and shrapnel wounded a woman who , bleeding from her abdomen, was quickly loaded into an ambulance. Such ‘double-tap’ strikes had been common in Russia , where Russia and the Assad regime had systematically targeted first responders to demoralize the population and terrorize it into submission” (Mogelson, 2020, 53). “The same strategy was clearly employed in Ukraine….The Russians also bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering. “CHILDREN” had been painted in Russian in huge white letters over a parking lot. Hundreds reportedly died” (Mogelson, 2020, 53).

6.17 The Growth of Anti-Semitism The Anti-Defamation League in April, 2022 released a report showing that in 2021, there were more anti-semitic incidents in the United States than in any other year since the group had started keeping track more than 40 years previously. “We’ve never seen data like this before, ever,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the ADL (Goldberg, 2022). The rapid growth of Jew hatred wasn’t limited to the United States, of course. According to a new report from the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, anti-semitic incidents have been rising in such countries as Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and Germany, as well as the United States. Comparisons to 2020 might be misleading, because pandemic lockdowns probably reduced the numbers of anti-semitic assaults and in-person harassment.

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However, in several countries, including the United States, there were more anti-­ semitic incidents in 2021 than in the pre-pandemic year of 2019 (Goldberg, 2022). As the Tel Aviv University report pointed out, there are countless conferences, training programs, and legislative panels devoted to fighting anti-semitism. “There is no shortage of organizations dedicated to the cause, which gained the commitment of world leaders,” it said. “The data presented in this report suggest that, despite all these efforts, something has gone terribly wrong.” Something has obviously gone wrong. The question is, what? (Goldberg, 2022). Conservatives might be tempted to blame strident anti-Zionism, and that’s part of the story. Both the ADL and researchers in Tel Aviv use a definition of anti-semitism that can be confused with anti-Zionism, concepts I think should be kept separate. It’s clearly anti-semitic, however, when Israel’s enemies blame all Jews for the country’s treatment of Palestinians. According to the ADL report, of 2717 anti-­ semitic incidents in the United States in 2021, 345 involved references to Israel and Zionism. The examples detailed in the report aren’t ambiguous; they include Palestinian supporters pushing a man in a yarmulke into a glass window and yelling, “Die, Zionist!” Said Goldberg (2022): “The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Anti-semitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right…Trump is now gone, [as of 2020, at any rate] but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Green. and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.” The anti-semitism of QAnon conspiracy theories—always latent in its fantasies of elite blood-drinking cabals—has also become much more open. As the ADL has reported, one of the most popular QAnon influencers, GhostEzra, “is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews” (Goldberg, 2022).

6.18 The Word “Caste’s” Roots “A low rumble had been churning beneath the surface, neurons excited by the prospect of a cocksure champion for the dominant caste , a mouthpiece for their anxieties,” wrote Isabel Wilkerson (2020, 6). “Some people grew bolder because of it.” Reaching back to the presidency of Barack Obama, bumper stickers blossomed that bragged: “My dog is smarter than Obama.” One smart dog, I thought. Did your dog edit the Harvard Law Review? Obama was the 104th president of that journal and the first who was black. Here, as elsewhere, Obama has been a wizard at breaking caste barriers, even at a time when class (caste) barriers were becoming more rigid in many countries, most notably in the United States, with its vast differences between its extremely poor and uber-rich, even though the country’s official ideology rejects caste differences.

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The word “caste” comes not from India, but from the Portuguese casta, a now-­ archaic word for “race” or “breed.” The caste system in India has been compared with slavery in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Sidney Verba, et al., “Both have been particularly singled out from other groups” (Wilkerson, 2020, 75). Social norms in both countries also made it very difficult for a member of a subordinate class (caste) to work his or her way out of it, especially until civil rights work at least partly opened avenues of mobility. India’s caste system was outlawed in its Constitution of 1947, which followed independence from Britain, a product of intense work by Gandhi and associates. This action may be compared to the US civil rights acts of the 1960s. In both cases, discriminatory actions continued de facto even though they were now illegal. To help “even the playing field,” the United States enacted “affirmative action” systems, which various challengers have been trying to legally squash. Thousands of years-old myths foretold the formation of castes in India and anchored them in place as traditions, from the many sub-levels of Dalit at the bottom to the Brahmins’ castes at the top. Each caste had (we may say still has) prescribed forms of work and every other type of behavior, including, of course, relationships with members of other castes. All of this corresponds to racist behavior and religious standards. The Brahmin, for example, is said to be the priest, sage, the head of society’s body, the part of this body closest to Hinduism’s many gods. No one would challenge the status of the Brahmin any more than he or she would exchange head for feet, which are reserved for the many sub-castes of the Dalits. They are living out the wretched condemnation of past bad karma, sometimes below the caste system, in the realm of the outcastes (a word that has migrated into English), for a person who has been dropped out of even the lowest castes. They were often not to be seen, nor to be touched (thus, untouchable). Their shadows even are held to be a form of visual pollution, and not to be seen. Dismantling the castes in India may be compared to resisting Jim Crow or slavery in the United States but even harder to escape, given its complexity and endurance over thousands of years. Both countries have affirmative action programs (or “have had,” after the US Supreme Court bowed to right-­ wing demands to kill those in the United States). Working one’s way out of such a designated hell has long been impossible. Today, it is merely very, very difficult. I do know one person who was born in a lower caste, Raja Sekhar, who has worked his way to a university vice-­chancellorship. Given the obstacles, this was something like climbing the stairs of World Trade Center backward without stopping—backward (Wilkerson, 2020, 101). To escape caste and then devote one’s life to helping students make the same transition through education is most unusual. In the United States, segregation, which had sealed former slaves into lower classes could take some cruel turns. On a day in the 1930s, in Memphis, Tenn., a switchman who was a black fell under a switch engine. His right arm and leg were severed as ambulances checked the scene and then refused to treat the man as he bled to death (Wilkerson, 2020, 101–117). Futhermore, Wilkerson wrote (2020, 8) “Once Trump was sworn in, the swarming of the superior, white…caste began in earnest.” It was not as if the United States

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had not before seen mass violence, of course, but such behavior in 2017 became the deadliest in modern US history. “In Las Vegas [Nevada] there occurred the country’s largest such massacre, followed by one mass shooting after another in public schools, parking lots, city streets, and superstores….In the fall of 2018, eleven worshippers were slain at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst anti-Semitic attack on U. S. soil…” It was like a plague, wrote Wilkerson. Once-imagined United States historical ideology tells us that we have a classless society, open to all who are willing to work their way up, but practice indicates anything except that. How many mass shootings have been carried out by women, white, black, or brown? How many white women engage in such behavior? Many white, male shooters express some variation of “white extinction anxiety” which put a psychological sheen on their thoughts and actions. Such is the basis and justification of race-based hatred, fused into an economic system, especially in the United States’ South, sustained by its very strict black/white caste system, which has only partially crumbled under onslaught of legal, political, and social actions during the last roughly 250 years. In 1959, Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, his wife, spent several weeks in India, becoming familiar with its caste system that had hundreds of categories and had lasted for thousands of years, built and maintained by the fear and hatred of groups classified as inferior to others. The Kings spent several hours with Mohandas Gandhi. King had just finished leading the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that was initiated by Rosa Parks’ refusal to surrender her front seat on a public bus. King arrived as a hero to many, even as Gandhi called him an “untouchable,” an invented English word for “Dalit,” India’s lowest caste. He meant it as an honor. At first, Dr. King was put off by the word as applied to him, but then he realized Gandhi’s logic. “Dalit” was variously translated as “broken people” or “the gentle ones.” Many Indians, Brahmin to Dalit alike, had closely watched the evolution of the US castes. However, such knowledge seemed fleeting in 2016 when, invited to speak in India, I became fond of asking students of my hosts if they knew of King and the US civil rights movement and what they recalled about him. Senior professors knew, but most of the students did not. “Our Gandhi,” I said, “Please look him up on your cell phones.” In the United States, members of the subordinate classes were sealed within them by their physical features and access to monetary resources, as well, before 1865, slavery. For slaves, emancipation was followed by more than 150 years of struggle for equality, which is by no means finished as of this writing. These class markers where ruthlessly enforced by their owners, who defined them solely as cash assets who were bought, sold, and traded and even used to settle debts or chits in card games. As the US Census became organized, a debate was taking place over whether slaves ought to be listed as fully human, 3/5 of one, or not at all. Regardless of their legal and political caste assignment, this debate was ongoing when Andrew Jackson, as a US general before he was president of the United States, used the lives of slaves that he owned as chits in poker games.

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In the United States, white immigrants (e.g., Europeans) had created “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere [else] in the world,” wrote legal historian Ariela Gross (Wilkerson, 2020, 45). Any slave who dared attempt escape was “subject to whatever atrocities the enslaver could devise as a lesson to others” (Wilkerson, 2020, 45). Fear and hatred held this horrid system in place, which Isabel Wilkerson called (2020, 45) “a living death passed down for twelve generations.” The slave was allowed no legal avenue to challenge the privileges of the master. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life,” wrote James Baldwin, “There has been almost no language” (Wilkerson, 2020, 147). Can anyone blame the slaves for viscerally hating their assigned roles in a caste that was effectively subhuman? The chains that maintained the United States’ lowest caste were held in place by whites’ fears that the blacks might escape and enforce on the whites the kind of subjugation that they had used to keep the system in place that maintained the South’s economic system. Without slaves, who was going to pick all of that cotton? After the Civil War, slaves were freed from their role as property and into uncertain lives as sharecroppers, urban factory workers, and others, who had to struggle for the most rudimentary education and the worst of jobs. After a few years of progress under Reconstruction (under federal troops’ occupation), most blacks were wrenched back into the subordinate class (or caste) by Jim Crow laws, which lasted into World War II. During much of this time, from the Civil War, the discipline of the upper caste was enforced not only by the power to withhold wages but also by the bullwhip, the lynching rope, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Grasping for one’s freedom was defined in the “land of the free” as a felony. Repression was maintained in small ways. For example, in the United States under Jim Crow and Germany under Hitler, blacks and Jews were forced to walk in gutters, while members of superior castes used sidewalks (Wilkerson, 2020, 160). Lynchings were horrid shows spewing hatred meant to prove empathically and sadistically to blacks who were even slightly suspected of violating the assumptions of caste dominance could be subject to excruciatingly painful deaths. Blacks, with no proof of any kind, could be set upon by mobs of whites numbering in the thousands and pushed to the gallows, or to the larger branches of trees. In other instances they were spared the gallows and burned alive, tied to a wooden stake. Any pretense of legal proceeding on so-called charges (such as touching a white woman) was never mentioned. A white girl was said to have been assaulted in the village of Leesburg in East Texas (Wilkerson, 2020, 91); 500 whites crushed Wylie McNeely as he protested his innocence. A car’s axle was mounted on a pile of kindling. The fire climbed up McNeely’s body as he screamed. The organizers then debated which one ought to get the choicest parts of McNeely’s seared carcass as souvenirs (Wilkinson, 2020, 91). “Lynchings were part carnival, [and] part torture chamber” wrote Isabel Wilkerson in Caste (2020, 94–96). Photographers took and sold pictures of severed blacks’ heads. Severed heads were passed around in Cairo, Illinois. The events were recalled as “BBQs.” Lynchings were not confined to the South nor to blacks. An especially large mob (perhaps 10,000) hung Will Smith in Omaha, Nebraska, in

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1919 after he was rumored to have molested a white girl. Whites also were resentful of blacks taking meatpacking jobs, and Brown had one of them. The mob torched a courthouse and killed two whites. Some of the others expressed their desire to inhale the smell of burning black flesh. The mob stripped Brown naked, “and beat him until blood flowed out of his head.” He was hung on a lamppost as members of the mob cheered and killed Brown, whose body was by now dangling from the lamppost, in a hail of bullets. Brown’s body was then burned in a bonfire, after which his corpse was dragged though Omaha tied to the back bumper of a stolen police car. Pieces of the bloody rope used to hang Smith were sold as souvenirs (Wilkerson, 2020, 94–96). The mob torched a courthouse and killed two whites. Some of the others expressed their desire to inhale the smell of burning flesh. The mob stripped Brown naked, “and beat him until blood flowed out of his head.” He was hung on a lamppost as members of the mob cheered and killed Brown, whose body was by now dangling from the lamppost, in a hail of bullets. Brown’s body was then burned in a bonfire, after which his corpse was dragged though Omaha tied to the back bumper of a stolen police car. Pieces of the bloody rope used to hang Smith were sold as souvenirs (Wilkerson, 2020, 94–96). Witnessing Brown’s gruesome death, Henry Fonda, age 14, whose family lived in Omaha, was helping his father in a printing business across a street from the courthouse during the riot, grew up with his sister Jane as Omaha’s most famous movie stars. In 1943, Henry starred in The Oxbow Incident, a commentary on which included these script lines in which Fonda warns a bloodthirsty mob: “Man naturally just can’t take the law into his own hands, and hang people, without hurting everybody in the world” (Wilkerson, 2020, 96). About two decades after Will Brown was sadistically murdered in Omaha, Nazis raised the level of both hate and fear in their concentration camps, with specially designated lynching rooms where captive prisoners were assembled to watch prisoners selected from their numbers be tortured to death, with none of the carnival atmosphere among whites that accompanied some US lynchings.

6.19 She Didn’t Die Anyone breaking caste barriers anywhere in the world faced cruel retribution. For example, members of the SS caught a Jewish woman wearing a very fancy fur coat and, out of hatred (not to mention envy), “forced her into the [concentration] camp pigsty and rolled her in her fur coat, over and over, leaving her to die in the icy muck” (Wilkerson, 2020, 161). She didn’t die, however. At first she huddled with the warmer pigs as passersby threw her food scraps. After a few days, Allied forces liberated the camp and pulled her out of the sty. East Indians kept a close eye on US Black civil rights movements, as well as Latino farmworkers’ strikes and Native Americans’ fishing rights protests. In one case, they formed the Dalit Panthers akin to the Black Panthers. Hundreds of Dalits

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from the lowest sub-caste, hosted a delegation from the United States, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

6.20 Taking Notes on Eugenics Third Reich legal authorities met under Franz Gürtner, Reich Minister of Justice, between 1932 and 1941 in Adolf Hitler’s first Cabinet, to discuss how the United States handled its marginalized groups and “guarded its ruling White citizenry” (Wilkinson, 2020, 79). Most discussions began by asking how the Americans used their laws, especially regarding racial purity, the illegality of miscegenation, and other matters. Alexis de Tocqueville of France also toured the United States during the 1830s, while writing his landmark Democracy in America, and noted that “only the surface of American society is painted is covered with a layer of democratic paint” (Wilkerson, 2020, 79). The German Nazis looked at some Americans’ attachment to eugenics, meshing it with their devotion to the Nazis evolving theory of Aryan superiority. Both were cast as “science” in support of white racial superiority. Early eugenists in the United States included Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and Charles E. Elliot, president of Harvard University. President Woodrow Wilson dabbled in eugenics to the point that he fired every black member of the US Civil Service. Harvard sociologist David R.  Williams found ways to measure subconscious cues indicating that by adulthood most non-blacks had developed cues indicating negative associations with blacks. What is more, about one-third of blacks harbored unconscious biases against themselves, as a group. Many people (as many as 80 percent) did not realize their own biases and could honestly state that they were not discriminated against when applying for jobs or selling or buying housing (Wilkerson, 2020, 186–187).

6.21 The Unique Cruelty of Lynchings The professional architects of Nazi race law sometimes found that what they observed in the US South was ugly to their eyes. While the Nazis praised “the American commitment of legislating racial purity,” they could not abide “the unforgiving hardness” under which “an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins [would be] counted as Blacks,” Whitman wrote. “The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.” One difference here may have been that the Nazis were not framing their law within the context of such a large subclass (Wilkerson, 2020, 188).

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The inventors of mass death by poisoning found that lynchings are practiced in the US South were horrid shows spewing hatred meant to prove empathically and sadistically to blacks who were even slightly suspected of violating the assumptions of caste dominance that they could be subject to excruciatingly painful deaths. Myths thousands of years old foretold the formation of castes in India and anchored them in place as traditions, from the many sub-levels of Dalit at the bottom to the Brahmins’ castes at the top. Each caste had prescribed forms of work and every other type of behavior, including, of course, relationships with members of other castes. All of this corresponds to racist behavior and religious standards. The Brahmin, for example, is said to be the priest, sage, and the head of society’s body, the part of this body closest to Hinduism’s many gods. The United States periodically tightened immigration restrictions as various interest groups took power in Washington, D.C. Many naturalized citizens, especially Asians who had immigrated from the West Coast, out of fear that the “yellow plague” would overrun the country. Vaishno Das Bagai, from India, had been in the United States for 8 years when the US Supreme Court ruled that only whites were eligible for citizenship. Bagai, who had built a family with a wife and three children, and owned a store in San Francisco, was stripped of the store under a swiftly enacted state law seizing assets of noncitizens. The family then attempted to return to India but was refused entry there. Bagai then rented a room in San Jose, turned up the volume of cooking gas, and killed himself. His suicide note read, in part: “Obstacles this way, blockages that way, and bridges burned behind” (Wilkerson, 2020, 127). Blacks in the United States, Dalits in India, and Jews in parts of Europe controlled by Nazis all were targeted by fear-instilling hate-filled contempt as a way of instilling fear in members of other castes or classes. During slavery, many runaway slaves were whipped, branded on their faces with red-hot irons, and, when captured, sometimes castrated. Low value placed on black lives even into the twenty-first century played a major role in the largest demonstrations in US history following the crushing of George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis. Sometimes killed by police and at other times by police, as well as fatal shootings by vigilantes, reminded everyone of how cheap black lives were regarded—again and again. A Black Lives Matter movement called for changes, and a few were made. To many, little had changed except that the lynching rope had been replaced by the service revolver, as more blacks were shot than hanged. Blacks’ attempts to improve their lives during Reconstruction may have played a role in the anti-black backlash of hate that propelled Jim Crow. The subcast was stepping out of the “box” constructed for blacks during slavery. Attempts to better their lives were interpreted as a challenge by the dominant (white) class. Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, built a vibrant alternative downtown that they called Little Wall Street that was largely burnt and bulldozed in 1921. A white mob massacred about 60 people in Oconee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, as black homes and businesses were burned. Many black men were castrated and all blacks were driven out of town. This was but one measure of a KKK revival. That peaked in the 1920s, across the country, mainly in the South.

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After thousands of years of struggle against the cruelties of the caste system’s inequalities, as well as many other instances in which peoples who differed in class, race, and place’s attempts to enforce structures supporting the separation of peoples and the inculcation of hatred, a student deserves to ask: “what does any of this have to do with global climate change? Under the rubric of necessary social, political, and economic changes required for peoples around the world to accept the degree of mutual respect required for acceptance of common goals pertaining to the atmosphere will be rejection of the class and caste differences which impede agreement on steps required to build a survivable world. No doubt many people will assume that such changes are not possible, given humankind’s propensity for disagreement and maintenance of class barriers. This may well be true, in which case we, the eight-plus billion people of the planet Earth, must be prepared to endure the other option, which will, eventually, be obliteration at the hands of an increasingly intolerable climate aggravated by a propensity for war at an increasing level of violence. If we are not ready to face these dual existential problems, we face a growing chance that human society and other forms of Earthly life will collapse. We may have a hundred years to defuse the climate bomb. For the other bombs of human creation, the final deadline may be sooner or later.

6.22 A Euphoria of Hate As well as a beacon of hope for millions, the United States has been an indecent place to the unfavored for a long time. Dissidents to Puritan orthodoxy had holes drilled in their tongues as punishment for speaking contrary to the wishes of the ruling class. About 90 percent of Native Americans died due to white violence between the Puritans’ first landfall in 1620 and the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Slaves were held against their will and sometimes lynched for insubordination after having been taken from their families and homelands between 1619 (the first slave ship landing in Jamestown) and 1863 (the Emancipation Proclamation). (Wilkerson, 2020, 228–229.) The term of Donald Trump paralleled a switch in moods: more shootings, more intense racial hatred, more invasions, and fatal shootings in Jewish synagogues. Trump’s campaign rallies were cesspools of organized hatred—baiting the press, ridiculing the handicapped in wheelchairs, bragging about squeezing women’s genitalia, mocking the Muslim parents of a son who had been decorated as a war hero; belittling Senator John McCain, also a decorated Vietnam veteran who had served time in North Vietnamese cells drilled into the muddy earth. Trump bragged that his war heroes didn’t get captured.  Hitler’s spew of hate was uglier; next to him. Trump seemed like more like Andrew Jackson (one of his heroes). (Having said that, let it be known that Jackson had a whiplash temper.) Anyone who watches Hitler shouting on a newsreel during

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the 1930s need not know how to speak any German to realize what he was saying, as his face contorted, where he was aiming his hatred. Trump, by comparison, looks and sounds like a salesman having a bad day, but the emotive power, as well as the intensity of audience response radiating hatred is there. Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste, describes the “Euphoria of Hate…the smiling, shining faces in this carpet of exuberant humanity—this massive number of people who could not all be what we would consider evil” (2020, 265). She is describing a Hitlerian Nazi rally, making Germany Great Again, not America. The people at these rallies at least suspected that the freight trains rumbling in the distance were not carrying merchandise. These rallies were being held the same time as Kristallnacht. “Regular” Germans had to look away with some effort to miss the broken glass and blood of Jews being shot. Some of them cheered, just as lynchings of blacks had had a wretched air of gaiety—wicked and weird—less than a century prior. Racism breeds hatred in any place, at any time. Isabel Wilkerson (2020, 335) contrasts the treatment of national, hateful incursions into imperfect democracies. In Germany, as might be expected, there are no memorials to Hitler, or his associates. In the United States, as of the time that Wilkerson was composing her book (2018–2020), more than 1700 monuments existed in the Confederate states, and their well-known figures, most notably Robert E. Lee. Jefferson Davis, has a presidential library, and Richmond, Virginia, has a Confederates’ eye view of the Civil War in a row of prominent citizens of Dixie. It also has a museum of the Confederacy. When my wife, a granddaughter, and I visited, this museum, it was brimming with white tourists, without a black person in sight. The United States has a very energetic “the South will rise again” movement. Germany and other countries, including the United States, also have experienced an angry anti-Jewish resurgence. In Germany, most their work is done in hidden “safe houses” far from governmental agencies, since what they do is illegal. Flashing of the Nazi salute is also illegal. Public memorials, without fail, pay homage to Hitler’s victims, not to him. In the United States, because of the First Amendment, expression of almost any idea is legal, but action based on such beliefs may be legally forbidden. The expression of bad taste is a matter of social custom. For example, the Ku Klux Klan, which has been revived, might publicize the following, attributed to Alexander Stephens, as vice president of the Confederacy: “Its foundations are laid….Its cornerstone rests on the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that… subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition…This, our new government is the first in the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…With all the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place. [emphasis added]. He, by nature, or the curse upon Canaan, is fitted for that condition. Hitler could not, himself, have phrased this spiel adamantly supporting white supremacy any more directly—race-based hatred based on unstated appeals to “moral truth,” among other so-called non-existent religious interpretations.

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The United States and several railroad companies imported several thousand workers from China to help complete the first transcontinental railroad which reached its half-way point 70  miles from Promontory Point near the Great Salt Lake. The workers were met with a variety of receptions as they built their own towns with such things as movie theatres, grocery stores, and even a library. They were paid much less than white workers, who nonetheless became concerned about competition for jobs. Racism was rampant in the entire Southwestern United States. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese Workers were lynched in 1 day, including one child. Their settlements were sometimes burned to the ground. Reno, Nevada’s “Chinatown” burned twice in 30 years. In Rock Spring’s, Wyoming 28 Asians were murdered in a few days. By 1880 105,465 Chinese immigrants lived in the United States (Stirn, April–May, 2022, 70–71).

6.23 Burning Bodies By mid-April, 2022, Russians had bombed the small Ukrainian city of Mariupol into rubble and killed 10,000 to 20,000 people, according to city administrators. The Russians brought in several portable crematoria to the ruins of a shopping center to burn the bodies without any attempt at identification. Russia’s economy was already in a deep recession and expected to fall by roughly 11.2 percent, the bank reported. The war is only 6 weeks old at that time. Not all of the victims were Ukrainians. Without caution from their superiors, Russian soldiers camped in the still-hot ruins around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and became very ill from radiation poisoning. Their commanders never told them that the soil was poisoned. War has become so much more brutal since then, to the point where using the most lethal of them all, even in war, would constitute the worst of war crimes. It has been said that the living, sentenced to a agonizingly short remaining life due to radiation poisoning, would envy the dead, all pursued to death by someone else’s ideological dreams. Vladimir Solovyov has been Putin’s right-hand man when it comes to  Kremlin  affairs. Six nights a week, he gathers the crème of Putin’s best pitchmen for more than 2 hours of mocking Ukraine, the United States, President Joe Biden, and the possibility of a Russian- initiated nuclear war. “Should we just turn the world to dust?” Solovyov asked during his show on April 29, 2022 (Gessen, 2022). The seven middle-aged men at the table “laughed heartily” (Gessen, 2022). The mood in the room quieted as Solovyov recounted a conversation that he had with President Putin. “I’d like to remind the West of two statements of historic significance,” he said.

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“The President of the Russian Federation has asked, ‘What is the point of a world in which there is no Russia?...If they start a nuclear war, we will respond. But we, being righteous people, will go straight to Heaven, while they will just croak.” Solovyov quote[s] this one a lot, sometimes as a sort of call-and-response with his guests (Gessen, 2022). “The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term ‘schizo-fascism’ to describe actual fascists who call their enemies ‘fascists.’” Masha Gessen wrote The New Yorker (2022). “Snyder has said that the tactic follows Hitler’s recommendation to tell a lie so big and outrageous that the psychological cost of resisting it is too much for most people—in the case of Ukraine, an autocrat wages a genocidal war against a democratic nation with a Jewish President, and calls the victims Nazis” (Gessen, 2022). This kind of ideological double-talk is not unknown in the United States. The rise of violence associated with the election of Donald Trump, who treats women as a lower caste, as he devalues the non-white, poor, and migrants, which he also treats as less than human. Trump, playing the dominant white male, “stalked the female candidate [Hilary Clinton] from behind during a debate seen all over the world. He boasted of grabbing several women by their genitals, mocking the disabled, encouraging violence against the press, and against those who disagreed with him. His followers jeered the female candidate, chanting “Lock her up!” At mass rallies, over which a billionaire [Trump] presided. His comments and activities were deemed so course that some news reports were preceded by parental advisories. Here was a candidate so transparently unqualified for the job, wrote The Guardian in 2016, “that his candidacy seemed for like a prank than a serious bid for the White House” (Wilkerson, 2020, 4–5, 8). Once Trump was sworn in, the swarming of the self-assured superior, white males began in earnest. It was not as if the United States had not seen mass violence, of course, but such behavior in 2017 became the deadliest in modern US history. “In Las Vegas [Nevada] there occurred the country’s largest such massacre, followed by one mass shooting after another in public schools, parking lots, city streets, and superstores….In the fall of 2018, eleven worshippers were slain at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst anti-Semitic attack on U.S. soil…” And so forth. It was like a plague. No words of condolence or comfort came from Trump. Who was expecting any?

6.24 Reminders of Stations in Life Lower classes in India were subjected to similar denials that reminded them of their stations in life. Dalits were not allowed to drink from the same cup as persons of higher castes as blacks in the United States (most notably in the South) by law could

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be charged with drinking at public water fountains out if fear of contamination. The same went for public swimming pools (Wilkerson, 2020, 128). Blacks in the United States, Dalits in India, and Jews in parts of Europe controlled by Nazis all were targeted by fear-instilling hate-filled contempt as a way of in stilling fear in members of other castes. During slavery, many runaway slaves were whipped, branded on their faces with red-hot irons, and sometimes castrated when captured. Low value placed on black lives even into the early years of the twenty-first century played a major role in the largest demonstrations in US history following the crushing of George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis during 2020. Sometimes killed by police and at other times by police, as well as fatal shootings by vigilantes reminded everyone of how cheap black lives had become—again and again. A Black Lives Matter movement called for changes, and a few were made. The Indian in the Mutual of Omaha’s Plains Indian trademark was changed, but violence continued. To many, little had changed except that the lynching rope had been replaced by the service revolver. Blacks’ attempts to improve themselves during Reconstruction may have set in motion the backlash of hate that propelled Jim Crow. The subcast was stepping out of the “box” constructed for it during slavery. Attempts to better their lives were interpreted as a challenge by the dominant (usually white) class. Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, built a vibrant alternative downtown that they called Little Wall Street that was largely burnt and bulldozed in 1921. A white mob massacred about 60 people in Oconee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, as black homes and businesses were burned. Many black men were castrated, and all blacks were driven out of town (Wilkinson, 228–229). The KKK revived across the country during this time, mainly (but hardly solely) in the South, during the 1920s. The United States has been an indecent place to the unfavored for a long time, dissidents to Puritan orthodoxy, who had holes drilled in their tongues. Ask the Native Americans, 90 percent of whom died between the Puritans’ first landfall and the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Ask the slaves who were held against their wills and sometimes lynched for insubordination after having been ripped out of their families and homelands between 1619 (the first slave ship landing in Jamestown) and 1863 (the Emancipation Proclamation). The United States has always been “the Gunfighter Nation,” but beginning after the year 2000, the amount of violence in the culture seemed to have swollen (Potok, 2013). A month before Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, Albert  Einstein and his wife Elsa in December 1932 escaped Germany to the United States, taking up residence in Princeton, N.J.,, having accepted  an appointment at Princeton University. In the United States, wrote Isabel Wilkerson in Caste (2020, 378–379), Einstein “was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system [vis a vis treatment of Jews], one with a different scapegoat caste and a different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had just fled. “The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro” (Jerome and Taylor, Einstein on Race, 144–45). A few years later, the esteemed contralto opera singer Marian Anderson captivated a large audience at Princeton with her beautiful voice. There developed a problem, however. No one would rent a room to Anderson, who was

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black. The era of Jim Crow still survived in Princeton’s hotel industry. Hearing of this rejection, Einstein and Elsa invited Anderson to stay in their home. Einstein explained that, as a Jew, he had felt the sting of racism’s hatred. From that point on, whenever Anderson came to Princeton, she stayed at the Einsteins’. Einstein also went on to become a civil rights activist. Wilkerson (2020, 378); Jerome and Taylor, Einstein on Race, p. 151; Matthew Francis, “How Albert Einstein Used His Fame to Denounce American Racism. Smithsonian Magazine, March 3, 2017. We, in the “land of the free,” see inert bodies laid in open graves, where the “good” cause was Manifest Destiny, guided by the Christian God, and the victims were Native American. We see the 90 percent of first Americans who died in that holocaust, one of many, worldwide, when and where we, the entire, rarely cooperative human race, are failing an existential test of survival on this, our one and only Earth.

References Abel, D.  S. (1998). The racist next door: Don Black fills the internet with hate and calls for a revolution to Split the country along racial lines. New Times. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/ Baker, P. (2022, December 1). Trump embraces extremism as he seeks to reclaim office. The New  York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/trump-­ extremism-­candidacy.html Black, D. (2000, January 20). Personal home page. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront. org/dblack Black, J. E. B. (2015). American Indians and the rhetoric of removal and allotment. University Press of Mississippi. Blackbourn, D. (2007). The conquest of nature: Water, landscape, and the making of modern Germany (p. 296). W.W. Norton. Blow, C. M. (2018, June 24). White extinction anxiety. New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/america-­white-­extinction.html Borger, J. (2001, July 28). How cheerleaders gave birth to ‘Sieg Heil.’ The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/28/humanities.highereducation Carrere, E. (2022, June). Fear and loathing in Moscow. Harper’s, pp. 11–17. Delay, B. (2008). War of a thousand deserts: Indian raids and the U.S.-Mexican war (p. 3). Yale University Press. Faulk, K. (1997, October 19). White supremacist spreads views on net. Birmingham [Alabama] News, 1. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/dblack/press101997.htm Feuer, A., & Peters, J. W. (2017, June 2). Fringe groups revel as protests turn violent. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/politics/white-­nationalists-­alt-­ knights-­protests-­colleges.html Francis, M. (2017, March 3). How Albert Einstein used his fame to denounce American racism. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-­nature/ how-­celebrity-­scientist-­albert-­einstein-­used-­fame-­denounce-­american-­racism-­180962356/ Gessen, M. (2022, May 18). Inside Putin’s propaganda machine. The New  Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-­of-­communications/ inside-­putins-­propaganda-­machine

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Goldberg, M. (2022, April 29). Antisemitism increased under Trump. Then it got even worse. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/29/opinion/antisemitism-­post-­ trump.html? Gopnik, A. (2012, October 29 and November 5). Faces, places, spaces: The renaissance of geographic history. The New Yorker, 108, 115. Grafton, A. (2008, December 24). Mein Buch. The New Republic, 32–35. Retrieved from https:// www.academia.edu/37571483/Anthony_Grafton_Mein_Buch_The_New_Republic_24_ December_2008_32_35 Haberman, M., & Feuer, A. (2022, November 25). Trump’s latest dinner guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/ politics/trump-­nick-­fuentes-­dinner.html Hamman, B. (1999). Hitler’s Vienna: A dictator’s apprenticeship (pp.  382–385). Oxford University Press. Hietala, T. R. (2003). American exceptionalism and empire. Cornell University Press. Jackson, A. (1830). Second annual message to Congress. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved from https://www.presidency.ucsb/?pid=67087 Jackson, A. (1837). Farewell address. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved from https:// www.presidency.ucsb/?pid=67087 Jefferson. (2004). Thomas Letter to James Madison, April 27, 1809. In J. J. Looney (Ed.), The papers of Thomas Jefferson, retirement series (Vol. I, p. 169). Princeton University Press. Johansen, B. E. (2000, Fall). White Pride – Worldwide. Native Americas, 17(3), 50. Kershaw, I. (2000). Hitler 1936-194: Nemesis (pp. 434–435). W.W. Norton. Koppel, T. (1998, January 13). Hate web sites and the issue of free speech. ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/dblack/nightline011398.htm Lower, W. (2005). Nazi empire-building and the holocaust in the Ukraine (p. 19). University of North Carolina Press. Markham, L. (2018a, June 29). A warming world creates desperate people. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/opinion/sunday/immigration-­climate-­ change-­trump.html Markham, L. (2018b, June 29). If you really want to curb migration, get serious about climate change. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/opinion/sunday/immigration-­climate-­change-­trump.html Martin, A. (2022, October 9). Latinos’ economic power is growing. Dallas Morning News in Omaha World-Herald, D-3. Mogelson, L. (2020, May 9). The wound-dressers. The New Yorker, 46–61. Mohawk, J.  C. (2000). Utopian legacies: A history of conquest and oppression in the Western world. Clear Light. Oliver, R. P. (1990, November). Hero a la Mode. Stormfront: White Pride Worldwide. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/ Oliver, R.  P. (1991, July). Scalping the unwary. Stormfront: White Pride Worldwide. Retrieved from http://www.stormfront.org/ Potok, M. (2013, March 4). The year in hate and extremism. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-­hate/intelligence-­report/2013/ year-­hate-­and-­extremism Princeton University Press. (2017, June 7). Homepage. Retrieved from http://press.princeton.edu/ titles/10925.html Remnick, D. (2022, May 9). Photographs by James Nachtwey. Portfolio: A harrowed land. The costs of an onslaught in Bucha, Kharkiv, Irpin, and elsewhere. The New Yorker, 25–45. Ruff, D. (2021, January). Why does Trump tell so many outrageous and blatant lies that are easily fact-checked? Quora. Retrieved August 25, 2022, from https://www.quora.com/ Why-­does-­Trump-­tell-­so-­many-­outrageous-­and-­blatant-­lies-­that-­are-­easily-­fact-­checked Simi, P., & Futrell, R. (2010). American swastika: Inside the white power movement’s hidden spaces of hate by Pete Simi, Robert Futrell. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Snyder, T. (2012). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. Stephens, A. H. (1886). Cornerstone speech. In I. H. Cleveland & A. H. Stephens (Eds.), Public and private: With letters and speeches (pp. 717–719) Retrieved from https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-­corner-­stone-­speech/ Stirn, M. (2022, April–May 20). Making the connection. Smithsonian, 62–72, 122. Tales of the grand Teutons: Karl May among the Indians. New York Times, January 4, 1987. Tumin, R. (2022). Kanye West faces costly fallout: A timeline. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/article/kanye-­west-­timeline.html Waite, R.  G. L. (1952). Vanguard of Nazism: The free corps movement in postwar Germany, 1918-1923 (p. 165). W.W. Norton. Weeks, P. (2016). “Farewell, my nation”: American Indians and the United States in the nineteenth century. Wiley. Welcome to Stormfront. (2017, June 13). Home page. Retrieved August 10, 2017, from https:// www.stormfront.org/forum/ Whose heritage? Public symbols of the confederacy. Southern Poverty Law Center. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-­heritage-­public-­symbols-­confederacy Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House. Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Karl May’s Imaginary America. The American West in the American Imagination. Independent Broadcast Associates. (2002). Retrieved from http://www. ibaradio.org/Europe/winnetou/may/may17.htm World/Ukraine World News. New York Times, April 10, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/live/2022/04/10/world/ukraine-­russia-­war-­news Yoon, J. (2022, December 2). Kanye West is suspended from Twitter after posting a Swastika. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/business/media/kanye-­west-­ twitter-­suspension.html

Chapter 7

How High? How Soon? How Hot, How Long? Climatic Changes to Come

How hot does it have to get, and how high must the flood waters in oceans have to be before a large enough proportion of the human race gets a clue that something is very wrong with our habitat, and that an overload of greenhouse gases is the major cause? How far, then, does awareness of these problems have to spread beyond the pages of the New York Times and scientific journals to have a measurable effect on human behavior? If one reads and appreciates the right sources, he or she already has a powerful inkling of where were we are headed. For example: During the last week of September 2022, Hurricane Fiona, having maintained much of its strength over the Gulf Stream, rolled into Nova Scotia as the most powerful such storm ever to hit Canada, a category 3. By the winter of 2022–2023, in the United States, tornadoes in January—powerful ones—have ceased to be news novelties. With surprising speed, what used to be side dishes in a political and natural freak shows have become a new, risky, and often deadly, reality.

7.1 How Does the Melting of the Thwaites Glacier Fit into This Scenario? That West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier has been melting is not new to glaciologists. I remember reading reports of this possibility in The New York Times a quarter century ago, one of several reports that nudged me toward changing my research and writing emphasis to climate change. The difference then was that this was a theory—if the Thwaites (a glacier roughly the size of Florida), were to break up, it would open a gap reaching from the ocean to the entire West Antarctic Sheet, and suck it out, portending a sea-level rise of about a projected at one to 3 feet. The difference now is that scientific research ships are sitting at the edge of this huge ice mass as their occupants watch it break up. A quarter century ago, the Thwaites was likened to a cork and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_7

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West Antarctic Ice Sheet to a bottle. Now, the cork is edging out of the bottle, and once it squeezes out, effects will be noticeable worldwide. No one really knows when the ice in the “bottle” will spill out, but best guesses involve a catastrophe for many oceanfront cities. The difference between now and 25 years ago is that these estimates are now not prefaced with “if” but with “when.” Or, as Elizabeth Rush wrote in The New York Times in the late summer of 2022: If Antarctica is going to lose a lot of ice this century, it will likely come from Thwaites. If it disintegrated, it would be responsible for over two feet of sea level rise. [Eventually], its collapse could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to rise gradually 10 feet or more. In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown, the pile of coins that could tip the scales one way or another. Will Miami Beach even exist in 100  years? Thwaites will decide.

Rush (2022) wrote from the deck of a research vehicles as it “surveyed the troughs where relatively warm water pushes beneath the ice, eating away at it from below,” speculating “When I read about the collapse of Antarctica’s great glaciers, I feel I am being encouraged to jump to a conclusion: that no matter what we do now, what lies ahead is bound to be worse than what came before…. Antarctica has the power to rewrite all our maps.” Thwaites has been written up as the “doomsday glacier,” but that seems short-sighted. On the road that the world’s ecosphere is traveling, there will be many such declarations in years, decades, and centuries to come. “But many of our predictions about just how much ice will enter the ocean from Thwaites and just how quickly this will occur are just that: predictions,” she wrote. The word “prediction” carries a cognitive certainty that no one with accurate data yet asserts. “Predict” has Latin roots that indicate (pre = before; dict = say). What we have now is “anticipations.” What we do not yet know is when informed anticipation will turn into bona fide “prediction.” As Rush wrote: “That’s because before our mission, we had next to no observational data from this part of the planet, very few bits of raw information on which to base models….This kind of thinking not only undermines our ability to imagine a climate-changed world that is more equitable than the one we currently live in; it also turns Antarctica into a passive symbol of the coming apocalypse” (Rush, 2022). “Passive” is a role that glaciers have been assigned in our language. In other languages, especially in the Arctic, glaciers and other masses of ice have been granted movement and even spiritual aegis. In ours, a “glacial pace” is to be moving hardly at all. Our language has not yet absorbed the movements of ice that in many places have been accelerated by rapidly changing climates. Recent research suggests, however, that glaciers’ speed of movement forward and backward from a given line may be influenced by factors other than water and air temperature. In other words, changes in the sea bottom can advance or impede glacial movement at

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the surface. This sounds reasonable on its own, but what does this added information do to assumptions that ice retreats when air and sea temperatures are warmer and does the reverse when it is cooler? Hint: the climate in and near the Thwaites glacier was cooler 200 years ago than it is today. Are we confused yet? Can we agree that glacier movement is more complicated than a one-to-one relationship with temperature? Antarctica is unique among Earth’s continents in that the weight of considerable snow and ice has created a bowl into which warming salt water has been flowing, thawing ice from below. The Thwaites’ adjoining ice shelf—“a large floating expanse of ice, which extends from the glacier out over the water—acts like a cork in a wine bottle, holding much of the rest of the glacier in place. If the cork decays and gives way, the glacier could begin to flow rapidly, and eventually it and a larger stretch of surrounding ice in West Antarctica might slide or calve into the ocean” (Brown, 2022, 24). Should this occur, the ice melting from this melting mass could raise world sea levels by several feet, inundating low-lying coastlines around the world. The worldwide damage could be enormous. Because of this possibility, Thwaites has come to be called “The Doomsday Glacier” by scientists. Recent tests by explorative voyages which place probes under the glacier indicate that water warms more quickly under the glacier than had been expected, portending extended decay of the ice mass from below (Brown, 2022, 28–29). “There the ice was crushed…with slabs surrounded by slush. Icebergs trapped by frozen ocean surfaces had piled up, and flat features the size of stadiums jutted from the landscape. Grounded ice has been sliding into the sea, creating a chaos of lumpy alabaster mountains, valleys, canyons, foothills, and ice-sealed lakes. There were cliffs and outcroppings, chasms, and ice-sealed lakes. There were cliffs and outcroppings, chasms with shimmering blue interiors. It was a science-fiction wasteland, alien and appalling.” “Climate scientists often feel a mixture of pride and foreboding. Pride because they can shed light on our collective future; foreboding because it’s a future they fear” (Brown, 2022, 29).

7.2 How Far?: Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Continue to Rise By 2022, scientists and political figures were holding worldwide meetings looking for measures to curtail the climate crisis within 30 years. When the first such meeting , the “Earth Summit,” was held in 1982, in Rio de Janeiro, the world was emitting CO2 at an annual rate of about 22 billion metric tons a year. Fifteen years later, in 1997, another such meeting was held at Kyoto, Japan, with an agenda not much different from Rio’s. Voluntary emissions targets were set, with global emissions at 24 metric tons a year. By 2009, global emissions had risen to 32 billion tons a year. Along the way, successive US presidents—George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama—had showered optimism over the conferences. In 2015, however, emissions had risen to 35 billion tons a year, still amidst flowery rhetoric by important people

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proclaiming the importance of it all. Countries began to pledge “net zero” targets for emissions far off in the future, usually 2050 to 2070, from the biggest polluters— China, the United States, India, Russia, the European Union, et  al., all of which became the latest way to kick the proverbial can down a very familiar road. At the same time that these moving targets have been set, various emergencies have provoked the biggest polluters to open (or restart) coal-powered power plants. Kolbert (2020, 43) notes that at the same time, costs of solar and wind power have plummeted—solar by 80 percent in a dozen years (Kolbert, 2020, 36). The fossil-­ fuel industry also has been setting profit records. In the first quarter of 2022, 25 of the world’s largest oil and gas producers announced collective profits close to $100 billion (Kolbert, 2020, 36). In a century, Kolbert reported (2020, 45), “humans have burned through coal and gas deposits that took tens of millions of years [to form].” All the while, global fossil-fuel emissions continued to rise. If carbon dioxide had a sense of humor, it would be laughing itself senseless. Commented Elizabeth Kolbert: one of our most acute critics of this passing scene (2020, 35) “In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO2 to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand….Climate change had ceased to be a prospective problem and become a clear and present danger. The Arctic ice cap had shrunk by two-fifths; Greenland has shed some four trillion tons of ice, and mountain glaciers have lost six trillion tons. Heat waves are now hotter, droughts deeper, and storms more intense. In some parts of the world, the wildfire season never ends.” The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the Earth. The geophysical upshot is that no matter how many worldwide meetings are held and no matter how inexpensive sun and wind power become, the danger posed by rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have not declined enough to make a difference that matters. Watch the graphs. When they fall in a definitive manner and keep the decline going for several decades, then we have a chance at turning this crisis around. Until then, don’t fool yourself. The bending of the carbon dioxide and methane graphs downward has not even begun.

7.3 How Strong and Numerous Do Hurricanes Have to Get? Another indicator of damage wrought by warming weather is the number and strength of tropical storms (hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, typhoons in the Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean). These do not increase or decrease in a manner that fits a single, well-defined pattern, such as the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The frequency and strength of such storms depends on other factors, such as the behavior of jet streams. Generally, however, warmer water increases the power of cyclonic storms over the tropics. Over a long period of time, these patterns continue to change. In 2022, for example, the recent record provides many examples. Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida between September 2 and October 2, 2022, in water averaging 80–86 °F. It became the deadliest hurricane to hit that state since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which hit the Florida Keys before modern warning systems (such as satellites or even aircraft) had been invented.

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On shorelines studded with expensive condos, a storm does not have to be unusually strong to wreak enormous damage. During mid-November, 2022, unusually late for a hurricane in the Atlantic Basin, Hurricane Nicole skirted the eastern coast of Florida moving north-northwesterly, with winds often below hurricane strength, or about 65 miles an hour, laying down an unusual trail of damage, a combination of a strong storm surge from the east with usually high (“king”) tides. What had seemed like a minor-league storm washed out dunes that were supposed to protect houses, leaving some of them precariously balanced atop eroding dunes. Several condos were evacuated as unsafe as sand was sucked from under them. Within a week, conversations in Florida turned to how many such strikes might make insurance so expensive that it would become unaffordable, even for affluent condo owners, one important way in which stronger and more erratic storms were affecting peoples’ everyday lives. So how do we solve such problems? The answer, course, is to reduce the level of greenhouse gases in and over water and land and then hold on patiently for a century while thermal inertia quits adding warmth to the equation: in other words, until the “curve” has been broken for a generation or more and then continues to fall steadily after that.

7.4 How Much Do Fossil-Fuel Companies’ Profits Have to Rise? With all the talk about ditching fossil fuels, the biggest oil and gas companies were doing very well as of the second quarter of 2022. Oil and natural gas from Russia were being restricted by sanctions involving the war in Ukraine, so they became scarce goods, and oil’s price per barrel reached $120, as inflation in the United States was pushing about 8 percent per annum. Profits for the largest international fossil-fuel companies during the first quarter of 2022: Shell, $9.1 billion; ExxonMobil, $8.8 billion; Chevron, $6.5 billion; BP, $6.2 billion; ConocoPhillips, $4.3 billion. (Bastarche, 2022, A-7)

7.5 How Many Disasters Can the Earth Withstand? That global warming is pushing all of us over the edge of an environmental cliff has become such a commonplace in our time that it has become dangerously easy to dismiss the entire argument with a facile yawn. In the meantime, however, in May,

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2022, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels broke through 420 parts per million, the highest in recorded history—and very likely the highest since the Pliocene, 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago, when temperatures were about 7 °F (3.9 °C) higher and sea levels several dozens of feet higher than today. “These are conditions that human civilization has never known,” said Associated Press senior science writer Seth Borenstien (2022). Even with conservation efforts and accelerating use of wind and solar power, impacts of global warming and resulting climate change are appearing more quickly than expected just a few years ago. These changes may become much harder to cope with. The dangers could soon overwhelm the ability of nature and humanity to adapt, portending a future in which floods, fires, and famine displace millions of people, as a spiral of species go extinct, and the Earth is irreversibly damaged. The steady drumbeat of such reports may leave people with a lasting case of disaster-­ warning fatigue. The report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), provided the most intense examination to date about threats posed by rising levels of greenhouse gases and how the world’s nations continue to lag in measures to protect coastline, cities, and agricultural areas from the problems that climate change already has affected and those to come from record droughts, rising seas, and extinctions of plants and animals if intensive remedies are not pursued. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already has high as it has been for two to three million years, when surface ice had melted all over the world and temperatures (along with sea levels) were much higher than today. The difference is mainly due to thermal inertia (i.e., warming already “in the pipeline”). Written by 270 researchers from 67 countries, the report is “An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” said António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change” (IPCC Adaptation Report, 2022). In the coming decades, as temperatures continue to rise, people in the hundreds of millions will endure floods, severe heat waves, and droughts, according to the report. Mosquitoes carrying diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread to areas of the Earth that are too cold for them now. Crop failures will spread, placing parts of Africa and Asia at much greater risk of hunger and associated problems, such as malnutrition. People who are unable to adapt to these enormous environmental shifts will be forced to flee their homes in many parts of the world. “To avert the most catastrophic impacts, nations need to quickly and sharply [to] reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet, the report said. Even so, the world’s poorest nations are increasingly struggling with climate shocks and will likely require hundreds of billions of dollars per year in financial support over the next few decades to protect themselves—support that wealthier nations have so far have been slow to provide, the IPPC report said” (Adaptation, 2022). “This report is terrifying; there is no other way of saying it,” said Simon Stiell, the environment minister of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. “We need to see enhanced action and increased climate finance provision for adaptation. The scale

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of this crisis requires nothing less” (Adaptation, 2022). The level of carbon dioxide has increased from a cycle of about 180 to about 280 before the industrial age began with use of coal in the early nineteenth century. The lower level coincided with ice ages; a level of 280 signified the peak of an interglacial warm spell. Human use of oil and natural gas wad added later. By 1950, the level was 310 ppm and by 2022, 420 ppm. A level of about 420 was reached on Earth 4.1 to 4.8 million years ago, during the Pliocene. If this level were to be replicated today, people would suffer seriously not only because of our bodies’ intolerance to heat that this level would generate but also because of sea-level rises droughts, etc., outlined in the 2022 IPCC report. A child born in 2022 will see the beginnings of these effects on land in about 75 years. In addition, as ice melts, as in Greenland, Antarctica, and the Himalayas, reflective white surfaces are replaced by darker ground, which compounds heating. It is very important to realize that even without added carbon dioxide, temperatures will react at the 420 ppm level in 50 to 100 years. We are already at a level where a tolerable environment is becoming “yesterday’s news.” The only way to avoid catastrophic heating is to severely reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the curve descends in a major way from today’s levels. Achieving this goal would require all nations to eliminate fossil-­fuel emissions by 2050. This includes the emissions from fossil fuels used to construct weapons of war and war itself, which is going to require a new definition. Today most nations are very far from this level of thinking, not to mention implementation. Permission to wage war and to use fossil fuels both lead to an end of human tenancy on this Earth. “If average warming passes 1.5 °C, even humanity’s best efforts to adapt could falter,” the report warns. The cost of defending coastal communities against rising seas could exceed what many nations can afford. In some regions, including parts of North America, livestock and outdoor workers could face rising levels of heat stress that make farming increasingly difficult. The UN estimates that temperatures will rise 2–3  °C.  We (on the Earth as a whole) have already reached a 1.1  °C rise. “Beyond 1.5, we’re not going to manage on a lot of fronts,” said Maarten van Aalst, the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, one of the report’s several authors. “If we don’t implement changes now in terms of how we deal with physical infrastructure, but also how we organize our societies, it’s going to be bad…. The report, which was approved by 195 governments, makes clear that risks to humans and nature accelerate with every additional fraction of a degree of warming” (Adaptation, 2022). Furthermore, according to the IPCC report, “measures that are effective today may no longer be feasible in the years ahead, said Debora Ley, an energy specialist based in Guatemala, who contributed to the report. Between rising seas, droughts, and mudslides worsened by deforestation, Dr. Ley worries that some communities in the region may face collapse. “You can live somewhere, but if you’re prone to floods for six months out of 12 in a year, then can you really consider that habitable?” she asked. At 3 degrees of warming, the risk of extreme weather events could increase fivefold by century’s end. Flooding from sea-level rise and heavier rainstorms could cause four times as much economic damage worldwide as they do

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today. As many as 29 percent of known plant and animal species on land could face a high risk of extinction. To address climate-fueled flooding, “A decade ago (2012) wealthy nations pledged to deliver $100 billion per year to the developing world by 2020 to shift to cleaner sources of energy and adapt to climate change. They have fallen short by tens of billions of dollars” (Adaptation, 2022).

7.6 How Much Glacial Ice Must Melt Before Humanity Realizes That We Have a Problem?

7.7 Ice Loss in Greenland Hits New Record In addition to substantial l ice melt in Antarctica (described above), annual tallies of ice melt from Greenland show a massive and accelerating flow, according to NASA reports. In 2019, following a record warm 2018, Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than 4 feet (1.25 meters) of water. The summer of 2019 broke all records with 586 billion tons (532 billion metric tons) of ice melt, according to NASA satellite measurements. That was more than 140 trillion gallons (532 trillion liters) of water. That’s far more than the yearly average loss of 259 billion tons (235 billion metric tons) since 2003 and easily surpassed the old record of 511 billion tons (464 billion metric tons) in 2012, said a study in Communications Earth & Environment. The study showed that in the twentieth century, there were many years when Greenland gained ice. This one way ice melt is a change from the twentieth century, when some annual ice tallies showed gains as well as losses (Borenstein, 2022). By 2022, ice mass on and around Antarctica continued to fall to record lows, a very familiar pattern to those who study the history of ice masses in Antarctica. In other parts of the world, increasing amounts of moisture were playing an important role in record snowfalls. Around November 20, 2022: Western New York State was blasted by as much as 7 feet of very wet snow, by far a record depth in an area that is known for lake-effect snows. The unusual depth came as a result of unusually warm water for the season in Lake Ontario, transversed by unusually cold air temperatures over the unfrozen lake. The deepest snow occurred where the patterns converged, in this instance, in and near downtown Buffalo. This is an example of a warming atmosphere playing a role in a record snowfall. The lake’s water was warmer than usual, causing increased condensation, and more snowfall than had ever been recorded in mountains around Los Angeles also received several feet of snow as part of an “atmospheric river” that battered the California repeatedly with very heavy rains and wind gusts of hurricane strength. At nearly the same time, a tornado ripped through densely populated areas of metropolitan Los Angeles.

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7.8 How Many Times Can We “Surrender to Oil” Before a Problem Becomes a Catastrophe? So, here [in 2022] we have a world conference whose declared purpose is to confront the climate crisis with no mention of reducing fossil fuels Please roll these words around your brain again, and then ask why COP 27 was held at all. Was it a franchise on the part of the Saudis and other oil producers to burn as much jet fuel as possible to assemble thousands of people in one place at one time to tell us that this sounds as if the world has surrendered to oil. Period. Full stop. Or, as the New York Times report continued: The kingdom’s plan for keeping oil at the center of the global economy is playing out around the world in Saudi financial and diplomatic activities, as well as in the realms of research, technology and even education. It is a strategy at odds with the scientific consensus that the world must swiftly move away from fossil fuels, including oil and gas, to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. The dissonance cuts to the heart of the world’s future. The government-controlled oil company, Saudi Aramco, already produces one out of every 10 of the world’s barrels of oil and envisions a world where it will be selling even more. Yet climate change and rising temperatures are already threatening life in the desert kingdom like few other places in the world. (Tabuchi, 2022)

Aramco also has been studying how to keep gas-powered automobiles competitive and how to capture the carbon emitted from tailpipes before it reaches the atmosphere. Saudi Arabia has funneled $2.5 billion into US universities in 10 years. What Aramco gets for oil is sometimes spent on image-burnishing. Saudi interests spent almost $140 million between 2016 and 2022 for lobbyists seeking to influence policy and public opinion in the United States, making Saudi Arabia one of the top countries spending on US lobbying, according to disclosures to the Department of Justice tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics (Tabuchi, 2022). While the Saudis have funded research that benefits the continued use of fossil fuels, it also has used closed-door meetings at COP 27 to “obstruct climate action and research, in particular objecting to calls for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels” (Tabuchi, 2022). Allied with Russia, the Saudis also lobby against many climate scientists in opposition to the very idea that “human-induced climate change” results from burning of fossil fuels—running against the idea that emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, etc.—have any important effect on changes in weather or climate, running against the very idea that greenhouse gasses have any important effect on climate at all, “in effect disputing the scientifically established fact that the burning of fossil fuels by humans is the main driver of the climate crisis” (Tabuchi, 2022). At meetings devoted to combatting climate change, the use of such doctrines

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comes very close to Orwellian notions that 2 + 2 = 5, and the sun rises in the west. In the service of money-making, however, some people will believe anything. Along that line, the Saudi fossil-fuel energy cohort at COP 27, as at other climate-­control meetings, has argued that “People would like us to give up on investment in hydrocarbons,” said Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive, because such a move would only wreak havoc with oil markets. The bigger threat was the “lack of investment in oil and gas,” he said. The Saudi Ministry of Energy said it expected that hydrocarbons such as oil, gas, and coal would “continue to be an essential part of the global energy mix for decades,” but at the same time the kingdom had “made significant investments in measures to combat climate change.” The statement added, “Far from blocking progress at climate change talks, “Saudi Arabia has long played a major role” in negotiations as well as in oil and gas industry groups working to lower emissions. The Saudis have long maintained that they support the Paris Climate Accords that seeks to limit global temperature rises past 1.5 °C. The Saudis also contend that they support renewable energy, as well as electric cars. How will the Saudis advance energy conservation in an area that, with expected temperature rises, will require round-the-clock air conditioning? Ask the specialists at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, “a space station-like compound powered by 20,000 solar panels where discussion focuses on solar and wind projects or technologies such as carbon capture.” The Saudis never call such rhetoric brain-fogging propaganda. The Saudis also pump copious amounts of money into a research center near Detroit which seeks to perpetuate the use of gasoline-powered automobiles. One device concocted by the Saudis, mounted to a car’s tailpipe, was pitched as a way to capture at least some of oil’s emissions before they become world-warming carbon dioxide emissions. In June of 2020, the US Department of Energy concluded a 6-year initiative to research cleaner gasoline engines and fuels, which said that gasoline cars “will dominate new vehicle sales for decades.” Aramco and the US Energy Department also have been researching on the assumption that oil will remain a major energy source for many years into the future on the flow of oil from wells with a belief that oil and gasoline will continue to provide a major market for gasoline for decades into the future. The Saudis have criticized ideas advanced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that the world should immediately cease approval of new oil and gas wells and quickly phase out manufacture of gas-powered vehicles. All of this is staunchly opposed by the Saudis, who can produce crude oil for the rock-bottom price of $7.50 a gallon. The Saudis endorse a belief that too quick a change to electric vehicles would sow the seeds of economic chaos, including inflation and rising unemployment. Saudi Arabia and Russia consistently advance this line of thinking at international climate and energy talks among people who are charged with formulating policy in both areas. One front in this ideological battle field is steadfast denial that human-­ induced climate change has no role in consumption of oil, or vice versa. Are you

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confused? That may be the point. The Saudis advance their line of “reasoning,” and scientists state the geophysical facts, after which the Saudis reply that it’s all a simple disagreement, which it most assuredly is not. In March, 2022, Saudi Arabia and Russia pressed to advance their line to delete such references from documents at the United Nations, as Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist, fought back. “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the climate,” she said later. The Saudis were participating in a well-honed strategy to contort the issue, she said (Tabuchi, 2022). Once in a while, drafts of Saudi plans take leave of geophysical reality. The idea of growing trees by the millions in places with frequent droughts ignores the fact that cultivating trees in one of the world’s hottest, driest regions would be a fool’s errand at best. Outside the world of anything-goes mass propaganda, the Saudis’ platform seems very confusing, even in the upside-down world of mass advertising.

7.9 How Many Extremes Will Inflict Enough Pain to Represent a Real Problem? Drought stretched across three continents during the summer of 2022, drying out large parts of Europe, the United States and China—now made 20 times more likely to experience such droughts because of climate change, according to a study from World Weather Attribution. Drought dried up major rivers, destroyed crops, fed wildfires, threatened aquatic species, and required water restrictions in Europe. Drought struck places already intensely affected by it, such the US West, but also places where drought usually rare, such as the Northeast United States. China also had its driest summer in 60 years, leaving the Yangtze River at half of its usual width. Researchers from World Weather Attribution, a worldwide group of scientists that spans the world to study connections between extreme weather and climate change, said that under previous conditions this type of drought would have occurred approximately once every 400  years across the Northern Hemisphere without human-caused climate change. Scientists at WWA expect these conditions to take place roughly every 20 years because of climactic warming. Ecological disasters such as widespread drought may be followed quickly by catastrophic flooding in Pakistan the “fingerprints of climate change,” said Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist at Columbia University and a co-author of the study. “The impacts are very clear to people and are hitting hard,” he said, “not just in poor countries, like the flooding [in] Pakistan .... but also in some of the richest parts of the world, such as western central Europe” (Costley, 2022). The Pakistani floods were made more severe by heavy rain, as well as melting glaciers, which, when combined, displaced almost 8 million people during summer, 2022.

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7.10 How Are Russian Politics Intertwined with the Climate Crisis? President Vladimir Putin’s attitude toward global warming is typically Russian— that is, the warmer his part of the globe is, compared to average, the better, especially in northern Siberia, where weather has been very cold (until now). Putin is no meteorologist and probably doesn’t know that an occasional three-digit (F.) temperature has been recorded recently in Siberia, even north of the Arctic Circle. He would be more interested in the use of Siberian oil and gas as a weapon of war. How, he may ask, may Russia’s plentiful deposits of oil and gas be utilized as instruments of world power. Most recently, that is, how might they be used as weapons in an ongoing war against former Soviet provinces, such as Ukraine, vis-­ à-­vis Putin’s “nationalist or authoritarian leanings…who, have swept in to buy his coal, oil, and gas and enabled him to finance his war” Sengupta et  al., 2022). Generally, climate science has not come within Putin’s purview except, in the words of the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta, et al., as He has been abetted by powerful world leaders who share his motivations…vary widely—driven largely by pressures they face at home—[as] collectively they have bedeviled global climate cooperation at a time when the warming planet is wreaking havoc on Earth’s seven-[plus] billion people[Eight billion by 2020]….The war on Ukraine…cast a dark shadow over global climate summit[s] ….predicated on a willingness among nations to work together to slow climate change. The resurgence of nationalism far and wide—of which Mr. Putin’s invasion of a neighbor represents an apex—clashes with that ideal. The war in Ukraine is putting climate action on the back burner while our planet itself is burning,” Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, has said… Mr. Putin’s supporters hail from some of the most powerful and polluting nations….Xi Jinping of China and India’s Narendra Modi stepped up after the attack on Ukraine to buy immense volumes of Russian coal and oil at bargain prices, cushioning their own economies from a global energy crisis while allowing Putin to keep profiting from energy exports, despite Western sanctions. (Sengupta et al., 2022)

At that time, Putin counted among his most powerful allies the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who had overseen the stripping of large parts of Amazon rainforest that has been replaced by gold mines and beef feedlots. Part of Putin’s alliance against solution of the climate crisis has been his long-term “friend,” Donald J. Trump, former US twice-impeached president who also has again been seeking the same office. Trump glorified in the United States’ role as the world’s largest atmospheric polluter, as he pulled the United States out of the World 2015 Paris Accord on climate change (which President Joe Biden rejoined).

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Putin put himself on a self-defined path to restore the Russian empire to its tsarist borders on the first day of the third millennium. He took government control of energy companies and placed his selected allies in leading positions. When one such oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, refused to surrender his oil empire (Yukos), he was arrested, and his assets were impounded, then broken up, and turned into a state company (Rosneft). Putin was on the way to establishing himself as an energy emperor, in 2007, when he commissioned Russian state-controlled enterprises to build a gas line into Germany. By early 2022, however, this pipeline was sabotaged and shut off for a time as part of sanctions against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and war crimes there. Many Europeans suffered a cold winter, as did a majority of Ukrainians, whose entire utility and energy infrastructure (oil, gas, electricity, water, etc.) was repeatedly disabled by Russian bombings and missile strikes. The destruction of Ukraine’s energy resources, housing, schools, offices, and more was Putin’s revenge for Ukraine’s refusal to go quietly into Putin’s designs for an imperial Russia. Soon, about 40 percent of Western Europe was using Russian natural gas for heat and electricity. As of this writing, both Ukraine and Western Europe were working to free themselves from dependence on Russian energy, which now was looking like a trap prepared by Putin over several years. Putin has been expanding his empire since he swore to restore Russia’s imperial authority, bombing Chechnya nearly to splinters and ashes and then annexing Crimea, formerly part of Ukraine, in violation of international law during 2004, while most of the world looked the other way. After the attack on mainland Ukraine in February 2022, the country had raised a sizable standing army as assistance flowed in from the United States and much of Europe. As of this writing, Ukrainians were mounting a spirited resistance to Russia’s larger armed forces and stocks of missiles and bombs. Russia’s mainly conscript army committed uncounted war crimes (thus far), including murders in the thousands, thievery, and pillaging. As Ukraine was burning and crumbling at the behest of Putin’s empire-building Russians, he was hosted in Shanghai by China’s president Xi Jinping. After preliminary talks, the two oligarchs announced what amounted to a dual energy provision treaty that tied the Russian arctic and China’s industrial Han heartland. The deal included a 1864-mile gas pipeline to be completed during 30 years, at a cost of about $400 billion. Thus, Russia planned to gain access to China, largest energy market on Earth, as Xi satisfied a long-range plan that will use gas to replace dirty coal that toxifies much of China’s urban air and has been a target of a burgeoning anti-coal environmental movement. Meanwhile China, which long had the world’s worst air quality, had been replaced by New Delhi, where India’s Supreme Court had labelled the air and water quality along the Ganges as equivalent to an open-air gas chamber. Xi also set China on a course to develop more wind and solar power than any country in the world. He secured the world’s cobalt and lithium supplies—key minerals for the renewable energy economy. He turned China into the leading exporter of everything from solar photovoltaic cells to electric buses. His call for an “ecological civilization” became enshrined by Chinese officials as part of “Xi Jinping Thought.”

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“He sees climate as an area for staking China’s global leadership,” said Cecilia Han Springer, who tracks China’s energy consumption and climate policy at Boston University. Xi was forming the basis of world environmental leadership that combined an autocratic governmental structure with more than a 1.4 billion people who have been applying pressure for a better environmental living standard. When the state fell behind its targets for retiring toxic coal plants, people in China let the Party know their unhappiness when blackouts rolled through large cities. When China was unable to meet Xi’s pledges of clean air, most of it was scuttled, as coal imports rose to equal the rest of the world combined. When it comes to again soared to as much as the r energy, China does nothing in a small way. The country added electricity-generating coal capacity in 2021—33 gigawatts—than the rest of the world combined. China’s infrastructure was simply pummeling any possible growth targets.

7.11 How Did Donald Trump’s and Xi Jinping’s Energy Policies Fit into This Problem? The United States, on the other hand, was under the leadership (if one could call it that) of Donald J. Trump, whose idea of environmental leadership was a race to the bottom in annulling US environmental laws, which he ordered pillaged. In the meantime, Xi and Putin formed a union of convenience. Xi and Putin forged a buddy-buddy friendship: “They….met nearly 40 times, sometimes celebrating birthdays together. In 2018, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Mr. Xi draped a golden medal around Mr. Putin’s neck, China’s first-ever friendship medal. Mr. Xi called Mr. Putin his “best friend.” He was returning the favor from a year earlier, when Mr. Putin hosted Mr. Xi at the Grand Kremlin Palace and awarded him one of Russia’s highest medals for foreign dignitaries.

“Putin’s expansion of interests into Asia was impossible without India’s compliance”. Its energy demands are projected to grow faster than any other country over the next 20 years. (Modi has played that role to his advantage.) India needs energy at low prices. India is also home to some very big refineries. The war in Ukraine has given India new opportunities. Modi has what he calls a “special chemistry” with Putin. He sees him as trustworthy, he said, and shares with him an affinity for wildlife and physical fitness. “I know that physically he is a very well-­built person, he leads an active lifestyle, keeps himself in shape. I love it,” Modi said in an interview with Tass, the Russian news agency. “He is also interested in the environment, wildlife, the underwater world, especially in the conservation of tigers, and so on. I’m

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the same by nature.” Modi can be a figure of contradictions. A charismatic probusiness, Hindu-nationalist politician, he won landslide elections at home in 2014 and 2019.

7.12 How Long Will It Be Before the “Curves” for CO2 and Methane “Bend” Down? Six years after nations of the world set definite targets for highest greenhouse gas levels before catastrophic conditions set in, measures in 2022 indicated that most of the 193 countries that had agreed to the limits were falling behind. The “curves” for carbon dioxide and methane were rising more quickly than had been expected. The United Nations, keepers of the tallies, warned that odds—that is, expectations— were rising, soon to cause more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinctions, and more. The world’s two most prolific polluters, China and the United States, have taken some actions, although minimal compared with earlier pledges, as their willingness to go further has waned. Comparative negotiations measuring which country should be responsible for specific emissions were at a standstill for much of 2022. The upshot is this: the speed of attainment of goals that may help the world dodge the bullet of excessive, damaging heat has slowed to under levels considered safe, or even close to safe, on a world scale. “Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” the report said, “The planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1–2.9 °C, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.” Max Bearak reported in the New York Times (2022) that these figures are “far higher than the goal of 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) set during the landmark Paris agreement in 2015, as it crosses the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts significantly increase.” That is, “With each fraction of a degree of warming,” according to Bearak’s report (2022), “tens of millions more people worldwide would be exposed to life-threatening heat waves, food and water scarcity, and coastal flooding while millions more mammals, insects, birds and plants would disappear.” Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a research organization, called the current trajectory of global temperature increase “dangerously high.” An analysis by the World Resource Institute found that current promises by nations would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by around 7 percent from 2019 levels, even though six times that, a reduction of 43 percent, would be necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. “In the face of such a situation, add a war provoked by Russia in Ukraine, as well as an international energy crisis, global inflation and political turmoil in countries such as Britain and Brazil that have distracted leaders and complicated cooperative efforts to tackle climate change,” the New York Times reported (Bearak, 2022). That delay is “hugely disappointing” said Niklas Höhne, founder of the New Climate Institute in Cologne, Germany. “This

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year we’ve seen little of the climate action governments promised at the end of [the] Glasgow [climate summit], amid a deluge of new science telling us that we have to move faster, and that limiting warming to 1.5 °C is still entirely possible. We need governments to set strong targets that drive emissions down, and decarbonize their economies” (Bearak, 2022). At the climate summit in Glasgow, a majority of countries pledged increase efforts to cut emissions from burning oil, gas, and coal that threaten the future climatic equilibrium planet but without setting specific goals as had been done in the Paris Accord. Thus, the international willingness to squeeze hard enough to make an apprehensible, global, difference seemed to be waning as time passed. Attending national delegates also have agreed several times to increase funding for technologies that will help developing economies move from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and other renewable, and less “dirty” energy sources. The United States, in its Inflation Reduction Act, earmarked hundreds of billions of dollars for cleaner technologies, that (if the money is spent prudently) will make good on its promise to cut emissions by between 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of 2030. Even so, the new law will get the United States only to about 80 percent of the way to its current pledge to cut emissions. One observer said that the United States’ new law was the strongest by a major greenhouse gas emitter in 2022 but was “30 years overdue” (Bearak, 2022).

7.13 How Long Will It Be Before Daily Weather Reports Indicate Severe Problems? As national leaders quibble over details and pledges go unfulfilled, daily weather has been building a wall of evidence, whether it be floods (in Pakistan and many other places, enduring drought (in the Western United States and elsewhere), strength of hurricanes and other cyclonic storms, heat waves, and even depth of snowstorms. During November, 2022, Western New York State was inundated by its largest lake-effect snowstorm on record. Extra warm water in the Great Lakes passed through very cold air on adjacent land and set up a situation favorable for atmospheric condensation that dumped as much as 7 feet (84 inches) of wet snow on and near Buffalo, New York. Human health has become more precarious due to warming, according to The Lancet, a leading worldwide health journal, published a report highlighting the threat of fossil fuels to human health. The report described direct effects of rising temperatures, such as mortality, pregnancy complications, and cardiovascular disease, as well as indirect costs, including “the effects that drier soil could have on malnutrition and how a changing climate can expand habitats suitable to mosquitoes that carry dengue fever or malaria, ticks that carry Lyme disease, and the pathogens that cause diseases like cholera and Valley fever.” (Bearak, 2022). “We see how climate change is driving severe health impacts all around the world, while the persistent global fossil fuel dependence compounds these health harms amidst

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multiple global crises,” said Marina Romanello, executive director of The Lancet Countdown (Bearak, 2022). Regarding the effects of war, especially unprovoked battles on the world’s environment, witness Thomas Friedman’s commentary in the New York Times: (2022) “There was no good time for Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked, idiotic invasion of Ukraine. But this is a uniquely bad time because it’s diverting worldwide attention and resources needed to mitigate climate change—during what may be the last decade when we still have a chance to manage the climate extremes that are now unavoidable and avoid those that could become unmanageable.” Unfortunately, some greedy leaders, such as ex-President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, resent the fact that Indigenous peoples control precious resources—in the case of Brazil, over 13 percent of its territory, much of it intact forest. Brazil bought $3.5 billion worth of fertilizer from Russia in 2021, a flow that was quickly constricted by Western sanctions. So as soon as the [Russian, on Ukraine] war started creating fertilizer shortages, Bolsonaro blurted out: “This crisis is a good opportunity for us,” Thomas Friedman of the New York Times quoted in a commentary (2022) that was republished in the Washington Post “Where there’s Indigenous land, there are riches beneath it.”

7.14 What Is the Role of Ukraine in the World Climate Crisis? Then there is Ukraine itself. Before the war, it had significant ancient forests, “which have been left untouched by human impact,” according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. Since the invasion, Russian military activity has damaged “900 protected natural areas,” according to an O.E.C.D. report issued in July, 2022, “and an estimated 1.2 million hectares, or about 30 percent of all protected areas of Ukraine” (Friedman, 2022). On top of that, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine accounted for a quarter of the worldwide timber trade in 2021. Because of the war and sanctions on Russia, other timber-producing and exporting nations are doubling down to make up the shortfall by loosening environmental protections, the Financial Times reported: “Soon after February’s invasion, Kyiv lifted a regulation that prohibits logging in protected forests during spring and early summer” to help raise money for the war. “Environmental groups fear the decision could lead to large-scale losses in areas where illegal logging and forest mismanagement are already rife” (Friedman, 2022). Over the past half century, noted Reid, “countries have taken big collaborative leaps in protecting the environment and its stewards—whether it is the Clean Air Act of 1970 in America or Brazil’s 1988 Constitution recognizing the rights of its indigenous peoples to control the lands they have protected for millenniums. Protected land has more than doubled worldwide since 1990.” And now, out of nowhere, one man launches a murderous war in the heart of the world’s breadbasket, and suddenly all the progress on norms and laws risks going up in smoke, right

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along with the forests, which is why Putin’s war is not just a crime against Ukraine and humanity. It’s also a crime against the home we all share: planet Earth.

7.15 When Will We Link the Connections Between War and Habitat? How many human beings must die in increasingly violent wars to get a clue that such behavior is also destroying our habitat? Or that willful ignorance of these converging trends is compounding each other? We have come a long way from the days of sticks, stones, and cave paintings, when human behavior had next to no effect on habitat. Technology has changed much more quickly than our knowledge of how it affects us and our habitat. No matter how sophisticated our carbon-­ producing activity becomes, human behavior at its base hasn’t changed much—in fact, increasing populations and the Earth-wide scramble for diminishing resources may be making behavior vis-à-vis survival more acute. Fascist or near-fascist governments muscling each other for advantages may be increasing. Notable revolutionaries of recent centuries have become nationalists in the name of whatever people they are said to represent—for example, Lenin, Stalin (Russian, self-described as communists), Putin (Russia—oligarchical), and Mao/Xi (Chinese partial communist to Han nationalist. Ask a Tibetan or a Uyghur just how “communist” the national government of China has been with them. One wonders whether the United States also will follow an ultra-nationalist/fascist track. The nation is already a far-flung empire that casts a long shadow with more than 100 military bases in other countries. English, much of which has been borrowed from the British, is now the world’s language. The United States has interests all over the Earth, such as in Ukraine and many other places. What could or would Russia do if the United States annexed the northern half of Mexico (as it did, beginning in 1846), without any obvious provocation (other than the usual lebensraum, natural resources, and “manifest destiny,”), an exercise of nationalism every bit as compelling to its devotees as Putin’s reimagining of Mother Russia, including Ukraine. Putin’s imagination is dangerous to the rest of us. Climate change does not care whose flag we wave, of course. It merely holds heat.

7.16 How Long Will It Take to Connect Heat Events in Different Parts of the World? During the summer of, 2022, much of eastern and central China was trapped under the same kind of “heat dome” that a year earlier had afflicted much of California, the Pacific Northwest, and other adjacent areas of the United States, sparking

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searing wildfires. Matthew Bossons, managing editor of Radii, a Shanghai-based online site that describes Chinese youth culture, wrote in the New York Times that “Last month [August, 2022] , I traveled with my wife and 5-year-old daughter from our home here [Shanghai]….to a region of Sichuan Province where clear rivers [heretofore] tumble[d] from the Himalayas through steep valleys before watering fertile lowlands….We ran a gantlet of climate change effects caused by China’s historic heat wave this summer—ravaged landscapes, paralyzed cities and populations pushed to extremes.” It had been a year of global climate alarm even before China began heating up in July. Millions of people in the United States, Europe, South Asia, and elsewhere had been enduring extreme temperatures. Even famously cool and damp England roasted. London reached a record high of 104 °F. The Chinese heat wave probably was that country’s worst in recorded history for its scale, duration, and intensity. Large rivers completely dried to a trickle. Crops needed to feed 1.5 billion people died across mile after mile of fields were sucked dry of moisture. Wildfires devoured large forests, and uncounted numbers of people died of heatstroke, trapped in high-rise apartment buildings without air conditioning or working elevators, as power grids failed for many millions of people. The most wicked summer known to anyone began early in July and extended well into September. The rivers that had ceased to flow in wetter, cooler times stopped supplying hydroelectric power as temperatures reached 115  °F. in several urban areas. Without hydropower, coal was being burned at record rates, pumping ever-­ more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as “hundreds of millions people switched on air conditioners. It was a postcard from a sizzling future. “The heat wave had created a vicious cycle that, if replicated across the globe during future extreme weather events, will deeply complicate efforts to combat some of the worst effects of climate change,” wrote Bossons (2022). “With hydropower output crippled, the authorities had imposed power-­saving blackouts that closed businesses and rendered air-conditioners useless….A city of more than 20 million people had become practically unlivable. Major rivers that had dropped 20 feet or more were unable to carry cargo, and rivers that are important arteries for shipping and transportation became unnavigable. Water levels in the Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river, hit record lows, dropping as much as 20 feet” (Bossons, 2022).

7.17 How Long Will Habitats Be Destroyed by Wildfires Before People Tame Them? Bossons (2022) observed that during China’s searing heat wave “Chickens died or struggled to lay eggs; pigs were hosed down by fire trucks to keep them cool, and Sichuan’s famed pandas laid on blocks of ice. People hoisted food to their apartments using buckets and ropes because the power blackouts had left elevators idled. Some simply fled to underground tunnels to stay cool…. Half of China turned into a giant

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oven….I’ve lived in China for several years, and each summer has seemed worse than the last.” Anyone who has heard these descriptions of heat waves in China will recognize them in scenes from much of the Western United States for much of the past two decades: SACRAMENTO—Wildfires raged at both ends of California. Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, warned of “unprecedented” heat. The power grid teetered on the brink of outages into the evening. But as California endured its sixth day under a ferocious heat dome, the nation’s most populous state narrowly managed to avert rolling blackouts, even as temperature and energy use records shattered on Tuesday and power grid officials begged homeowners to turn down their air conditioning. The mere maintenance of electricity in most of the state was celebrated as a minor triumph after California’s Independent System Operator, which manages most of the state’s grid, issued a “Level 3” emergency alert earlier in the evening, a sign that outages were imminent. By then Sacramento, the state capital, had reached a suffocating 116 degrees, its highest-ever recorded temperature, prompting soccer leagues to cancel practices, gardeners to stop working at noon and schools to keep students indoors during recess. (Hubler et al., 2022)

7.18 How Long Will It Be Until Most People Believe: “This is Definitely Global Warming?” “I’ve been here for 30 years, and I can’t remember it ever being this hot this many days in a row,” said Jeff Williamson, 53, a commercial roofing contractor who was standing outside a Sacramento coffee shop as a blinding sun drove the morning air toward 90 degrees before breakfast. The sky was so blue that the very atmosphere seemed stripped of a layer. “You can taste it,” Mr. Williamson said. “People say it’s a dry heat. Well, so’s an open flame” (Hubler et al., 2022). After a scorching Labor Day weekend that fueled deadly wildfires and freakish desert downpours, temperatures soared even higher on Tuesday. About 42 million Americans were under excessive heat warnings, including those in parts of Nevada and Arizona, with red-flag fire conditions covering the Pacific Northwest, Montana and Idaho. Fresno broke a century-old record for the day, hitting 114 degrees. Santa Rosa, in Wine Country, hit 115 degrees, another record. Livermore hit 116 degrees, matching a record set Monday. To the north, the city of Ukiah shattered its record, reaching 117 degrees. Even some neighborhoods in reliably cool San Francisco flirted with triple digits. Throughout the day, state officials pleaded desperately for conservation. Strategic blackouts are integral to managing the grid, allowing the state to preserve energy supplies when demand soars. Utilities cut power to designated neighborhoods and

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regions for a set period of time, trying to spread the pain as evenly as possible in an era when power outlets drive more aspects of American living than ever before (Hubler et al., 2022). Blackouts can have severe health consequences for the most vulnerable residents, particularly older people who cannot handle high temperatures or who rely on lifesaving devices. And politically, outages have loomed perilously over California leaders ever since Gray Davis was recalled as governor in 2003 and was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that the heat that had settled over much of the West had been “extraordinary in almost every dimension except humidity. “The danger,” he added, was “not just in the exceptional heat, but also its ‘mind-blowing’ duration.” “Sacramento has rarely seen temperatures of 110 degrees plus for three, four days on end,” he said (Hubler et  al., 2022). The cumulative impact, Swain said, has not only superheated air masses during the day but has also made nights warmer, worsening drought, turning trees and brush into tinder and intensifying fire risks. “We’re going on a week now in a lot of the state where the temperatures, even at night, don’t go below 85 degrees, right before the autumn wind season,” Mr. Swain said. “What do you think that’s doing to vegetation? Nothing good.” The most intense heat was concentrated on Tuesday in Northern California and the Central Valley, where government agencies turned up office thermostats to save energy and outdoor workers were sent home early. In Livermore—where more than 5800 Pacific Gas and Electric customers lost power Monday evening for several hours because of equipment failures related to 116-degree heat and high demand, PG&E [Pacific Gas and Electric] [said that] some families brought their children downtown to splash in public fountains, seeking relief. “This is definitely global warming,” Tami Vusia said as her 4-year-old daughter Zella played in the water. Worried about heat exhaustion, she said she had brought her child from nearby Fremont because she does not have air conditioning (Hubler et al., 2022). Observers expected even more record-setting heat. Meteorologists said the heat was unlikely to dissipate any time soon. In the longer term, it is a harbinger of a new normal, Mr. Swain of UCLA said. “The number of heat events that would have been impossible to fathom in the 20th century that have happened in the last three months is astonishing,” Mr. Swain said. “Wildfires burning rowhouses in London. The heat wave for weeks on end in China. Now this. The extraordinary has become ordinary when it comes to extreme heat.” From above, neighborhoods appeared [to have been] reduced to rubble, with only the outlines of homes left to mark where they once had stood. Trees lay bare, and scorched cars sat covered in ash. Just days after the Mill Fire engulfed parts of Weed, Calif., aerial photography showed in stark detail the devastating aftermath of the wildfires (Hubler et al., 2022). A New York Times headline September 7 caught the scope of the heat: “Climate Change has Made Extreme Weather Increasingly Normal….Heat waves in the U.S., wildfires across Europe, floods in Asia: This summer has shown how the climate crisis has made extreme weather a part of everyday life. Some of the worst recent damage has taken place in Pakistan. Floods have submerged more than a third of the country and killed at least 1300 people.” Scientists can’t say yet with

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certainty that climate change caused the flooding, but experts told me that it was most likely a contributor. As The Times explained, climate change is making severe floods likelier and more intense. “These off-the-charts events are going to happen more often, and this is just one of those examples,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. The floods followed a brutal heat wave in Pakistan earlier this year that led to temperatures above 120 °F. Scientists have already concluded that global warming made that heat wave much likelier (Lopez, 2022). Climate disasters also hit many other parts of the world this year. In the United States, a heat wave on the West Coast has sent temperatures soaring above 110  °F.  About 100 million Americans across the country suffered another heat wave earlier this summer. And floods have ravaged parts of the United States, including Kentucky and Missouri. The earlier heat wave that hit Pakistan reached India, too. A severe drought also struck parts of India during the same summer, reducing the country’s food exports. And floods in Bengaluru, India’s technology capital, forced workers to ride boats and tractors to get to their offices. A heat wave and drought in China dried up rivers, disabling hydroelectric dams and cutting off ships carrying supplies. Another heat wave in Europe sent temperatures in Britain to a record 104 °F in London. Droughts across the continent dried up rivers, exposing sunken ships from World War II and nearly stopped the river cruise industry. Wildfires in Europe burned nearly three times as much land as the 2006–2021 average. In April, heavy rainfall caused floods and mudslides in South Africa that killed at least 45 people. “Some of these events have no historical precedents from 200 years ago,” Raymond Zhong, who covers climate change, said (Lopez, 2022). Why? Rising temperatures create the circumstances for more frequent and more intense heat waves. Prolonged heat causes more frequent and more intense droughts and wildfires. And as it gets warmer, more water evaporates from the oceans—leading to more moisture in the air and then heavier rainfall, floods, and mudslides. Once more, this is a basic issue. Humans pumped 36 billion tons of the planet-­ warming gas into the atmosphere in 2021, more than in any previous year, from burning oil, gas, and coal. Emissions reached 421 parts per million, higher, 50 percent more than the preindustrial average, when humans began widespread burning of oil, gas, and coal in the late nineteenth century. Scientists at NASA confirmed that atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached levels at least as high as the Pliocene, 2 to 3 million years ago, when all of the planet’s surface ice had melted and sea levels were 100 to 200 feet higher. The difference between their time and ours is thermal inertia, which delays the effects of rises in greenhouse gases, power plants, vehicles, farms, and other sources around the world. Rising carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly. They are “a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said (Fountain, 2022). Most importantly, “the ‘curves,’ longer-range historical movements in greenhouse gases’ atmospheric proportions,

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had come nowhere close to bending downward.” Even a 2- to 3-year pause in world economic activity attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic had evidenced no long-­ term effects on atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Henry Fountain of the New York Times (2020) explained what must happen for the “Keeling Curve” to flatten out and eventually begin to fall: To reach the Paris Agreement target of 1.5  °C, emissions must reach “net zero” by 2050, meaning sharp cuts, with any remaining emissions balanced out by absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans and vegetation. If the world approached that target, the rate of increase in carbon dioxide levels would slow down and the Keeling Curve would flatten. If emissions were completely eliminated… the Keeling Curve would start to fall, as the oceans and vegetation continued to absorb the existing carbon dioxide from the air. The decline in atmospheric concentration would continue for hundreds of years, although progressively more slowly, he said. At some point an equilibrium would be reached, he said, but carbon dioxide concentrations in both the atmosphere and oceans would be higher than preindustrial levels and would remain that way for thousands of years….Over such a long time scale, sea levels could rise significantly as polar ice melts and other changes could take place, like the conversion of Arctic tundra to forests.

7.19 How Long Will It Be Until Enough People Realize That We Are Living on Borrowed Time? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of experts convened by the United Nations, said that if a very sharp cut in greenhouse emissions does not accelerate, very quickly, the world should be prepared for a harrowing future. Every day of waiting increases the odds; every year of a rising Keeling Curve makes the harrowing future sketched by the IPCC more likely. The entire Earth and all of its resident human beings, animals, and plants are thus living on borrowed time. “This report is terrifying; there is no other way of saying it,” said Simon Stiell, the environment minister of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. “We need to see enhanced action” (Plumer et al., 2022). Many national leaders have vowed to limit total global warming to no more than 1.5 °C compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists believe that the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts increases significantly. Achieving this goal will require all nations to all but eliminate their fossil-­fuel emissions by 2050, and most are not even close [emphasis added]. The world is currently on pace to warm somewhere between 2 °C and 3 °C during this century. The poorest of nations are far more exposed to climate risks than richer ones. According to the IPCC, between 2010 and 2020, droughts, floods, and storms killed 15 times as many people in the most highly vulnerable countries as in the most

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affluent. Because of such differences, much of the debate at the COP27 meetings in Egypt during 2022 was aimed at designing plans to aid the least affluent nations. Even if temperatures are limited to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, as much as 8 percent of global farmland may lose its ability to grow food by 2100, according to the IPCC report. Coral reefs will face more frequent bleaching from ocean heat waves. Even today (2023), 70 to 90 percent of corals are dying because of overheating. Severe coastal flooding, without new protections, may increase by more than 20 percent. At a 2 °C warming level, the amount of land burned by wildfires will rise by at least percent. Land globally burned by wildfires is expected to rise by more than one-third; as between 800 million and 3 billion people globally could face chronic water scarcity because of drought, including more than one-third of the population in southern Europe. Crop yields and fish harvests in many places could decline sharply. At 3 °C of warming, extreme weather could increase rise fivefold by 2100. Flooding from sea-level rise and heavier rainstorms could cause four times as much economic damage worldwide as they do today; As many as 29 percent of known plant and animal species on land probably will face a high risk of extinction. Some nations have been able to partly limit damage by spending billions of dollars each year on adaptation measures such as flood barriers, air conditioning, or early warning systems for tropical cyclones. A decade ago [2012], wealthy nations pledged to deliver $100 billion per year to the developing world by 2020 for cleaner sources of energy, in an effort to partially adapt to climate change. These nations have since fallen short by tens of billions of dollars, with only a fraction of the funds spent on adaptation. • John Kerry, President Biden’s special envoy for climate change [in 2020], acknowledged that wealthy, heavily polluting nations were not doing enough. “Every country needs to do more in terms of mitigation and they need to do more in terms of addressing both adaptation and resilience, no question about it,” he said (Plumer et al., 2022). • At the same time, many communities were still increasing their vulnerability. Flood risk is growing along the many coasts around the world not only because of rising seas but because large numbers of people are still moving to these areas. Some adaptation measures also have had unforeseen results. Sea walls that may protect some areas can also redirect flooding into other populated areas. Irrigation may help protect crops against drought but at the same time deplete groundwater. • The IPCC report also suggested far-sighted, coping strategies. As oceans rise, vulnerable coastal communities should move inland if possible, as later development along the same shorelines is banned. Improvements in basic services such as health, roads, electricity, and water could help make poor and rural communities more resilient against climate shocks. • “If we act now, we have a lot of choices,” said Edward R. Carr, a professor of international development at Clark University and an author of the report. “Ten years from now, [or] a hell of a lot less. Thirty years from now, I don’t know.” He added, “We’ll always have choices. But they’ll be worse choices, and they’ll be much harder choices to make” (Plumer et al., 2022).

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• The IPCC report short-listed its most important points (Zhong, 2022) and how they are affecting peoples’ homes, health, livelihoods and infrastructure, as well as the natural systems upon which they all depend. The central points of the IPCC report, much condensed, are: “The picture is not a cheery one. The report, which was approved by 195 governments, shows how widespread and severe the impacts of human-caused global warming are becoming worldwide—and how hard it will be for societies and ecosystems to manage if nations do not bring greenhouse gas emissions down sharply. “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action,” the report said, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” (Mandel & Worland, 2022).

Here are five main findings of the IPCC report: Climate hazards have worsened significantly in the past decade. The IPCC published its last major survey of probable climate change impacts in 2014, which said there was “limited evidence” that nations needed more money to cope with the dangers than was being allocated. Global warming was having a “relatively small” effect on human health, the panel’s report said, compared with other stressors. Eight years later, it is a different story. The new report finds that climate change is not only adding to ecological threats such as wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, but it is also displacing people from their homes and jeopardizing food and water supplies. It is harming people’s physical and mental health, with increasing incidences of food and waterborne illness, respiratory distress from wildfire smoke, and trauma from natural disasters. Moreover, the funding shortfall for dealing with all this is “widening,” the new report said. (Emphasis added). • If warming isn’t slowed, the dangers will multiply. • Not so long ago, scientists thought the planet might be spared the most damaging effects of climate change if global warming didn’t exceed 2 °C or 3.6 °F above nineteenth-century temperatures. Now it is clear that many of those harms will appear if warming surpasses 1.5  C, as is likely within the next few decades. (We’re at roughly 1.1 degrees now.) Even if we cross 1.5 degrees but temperatures are brought back down later, severe and irreversible damage could still result. • At more than 1.5 degrees of warming, coastal, mountain, and Arctic regions could suffer irreparably. Increased wildfires, mass die-offs of trees, drying of bogs and thawing of permafrost could release more carbon dioxide into the air, making it even more difficult to arrest global warming. • If temperatures continue rising beyond that, all of these dangers intensify, and the economic damage worldwide increases “nonlinearly,” according to the report. Many more animal species become likely to go extinct. Mosquitoes would expand their range northward, putting additional billions of people at risk for dengue fever by the end of the century. • Societies have not done enough to adapt and stay safe.

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• The report acknowledges some success in adjusting to these new hazards, such as better early warning systems for disasters. Mostly, though, humanity’s efforts have been “fragmented” and “incremental” and sometimes counterproductive. • Some societies have built sea walls to defend against rising tides, but that often just pushes flood risks downshore to coastlines without walls. Efforts have been expended to extinguish wildfires, even though some of those blazes have ecological benefits. • “Transformational” changes are needed to safeguard human well-being, including stronger health and sanitation systems, more robust food supply chains, more resilient electricity grids, and more forward-looking urban planning. • As warming continues, it will become more difficult to cope. • As global temperatures have risen, ecosystems such as coral reefs, wetlands, rainforests, and polar regions are running up against limits to how much they can adjust, according to the report. • For some nations, the costs of maintaining people’s health, safety, and well-­ being are already prohibitive. As warming continues, measures that are effective today for protecting water supplies, boosting agriculture and defending against climate-related harms may lose their potency. New crop varieties can be developed to withstand heat and drought, for instance, but only by a limited amount compared to the need. • The report suggests that communities try to work with nature rather than against it—reviving wetlands to defend against catastrophic floods, increasing tree cover in cities to cool them—though even this is effective only to a point. • “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action,” the report says, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” • Even within rich countries, there are huge disparities in exposure to these risks among different groups of people. In all, 3.3 billion to 3.6 billion people— nearly half of humankind—are “highly vulnerable” to climate change today (Emphasis added). This is the state of the world—today and tomorrow.

References Bastarche, R. (2022, June 4). Drowning in profits. Omaha World-Herald, A-7. Bearak, M. Climate pledges are falling short, and a chaotic future looks more like reality. New York Times, October 26, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/climate/ un-­climate-­pledges-­warming.html Borenstein, S. (2022, June 5). Sky high: Carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere spike past milestone. In Omaha World-Herald. Associated Press, A-5. Bossons, M. (2022, September 9). What my family and I saw when we were trapped in China’s heat wave. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/opinion/ international-­world/china-­heat-­climate.html

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Brown, D. W. (2022, September 28). Journey to doomsday: How soon could a Florida-size glacier slide into the sea? The New Yorker, pp. 24–31. Costley, D. (2022, October 6). Climate change made summer drought 20 times more likely. Chattanooga Times Free Press. Associated Press. Retrieved from https://www.timesfreepress. com/news/2022/oct/06/climate-­change-­made-­summer-­drought-­20-­times-­more-­likely/ Fountain, H. (2022, June 3). Carbon dioxide levels are highest in human history. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/climate/carbon-­dioxide-­record.html Friedman, T. L. (2022, September 27). Putin’s war is a crime against the planet. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/opinion/ukraine-­war-­environment.html Hubler, S., Browning, K., Penn, I., & Cowan, J. (2022, September 6). California narrowly averts electricity crisis as it sets records for energy use amid scorching heat. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/06/us/weather-­forecast-­news-­ summer?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220907&instance_id=71254&nl Kolbert, E. (2020, November 28). A vast experiment: The climate crisis from A to Z. The New Yorker, pp. 32–47. Lopez, G. (2022, September 7). A summer of climate disasters. New York Times. Mandel, K., & Worland, J. (2022, February 28). The window to adapt to climate change is ‘rapidly closing,’ warns the IPCC. TIME. Retrieved from https://time.com/6152183/ ipcc-­report-­climate-­change-­adaptation Plumer, B., Zhong, R., & Friedman, L. (2022, February 28). Time is running out to avert a harrowing future, climate panel warns. The impacts of global warming are appearing faster than expected, according to a major new scientific report. It could soon become much harder to cope. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/climate/climate-­ change-­ipcc-­un-­report.html Rush, E. (2022, September 8). What Antarctica’s disintegration asks of us. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/environment/antarctica-­ice-­ sheet-­climate-­change.html Sengupta, S., Myers, S. L., Andreoni, M., & Raj, S. (2022, November 5). How Putin and friends stalled climate Progress. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/05/climate/putin-­russia-­climate-­change-­progress.html Tabuchi, H. (2022, November 21). Inside the Saudi strategy to keep the world hooked on oil. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/climate/saudi-­arabia-­ aramco-­oil-­solar-­climate.html United Nations. (2022, February 28). IPCC adaptation report ‘a damning indictment of failed global leadership on climate.’ United Nations News. Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/ story/2022/02/1112852 Zhong, R. (2022, February 28). 5 takeaways from the U.N. report on climate hazards. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/climate/climate-­change-­ipcc-­ report-­takeaways.html

Chapter 8

The Carbon Footprint of War

While we eliminate greenhouse gases from our way of life, we also must somehow eliminate humankind’s desire or compulsion to subdivide itself into various religious and nationalistic groups that go to war with each other. That will be another very tall but very necessary order for a species that has been finding reasons to go to war, on and off (as the faces and races of enemies change) since human beings discovered hatred and learned how to express it with ever-more-destructive weapons. The technological efficacy of these weapons has evolved from sticks and stones to hydrogen bombs delivered by missiles with more or less accurate targeting over thousands of miles. Given humans’ ability to refine our missiles and other weapons while ignoring existential threats such as pollution of land and oceans, global warming, etc., our ingenuity at creating and “improving,” weapons may be our downfall. If we can’t correct our course, in more than one way, the other option will not be pleasant.

8.1 United States’ Off-Shore Wars A thesis of this chapter examines the relationship of global warming as a driving force of human poverty and misery and as a threat multiplier (a phrase popular in reports from the US military) for war. We will look at the relationship of climatic catastrophe and war. One case study will be the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan, followed by its expulsion by the Taliban. The United States, as tends to be its habit in many off-shore wars, leaves the countries that it pillages in horrible environmental shape—the road to US exultations of self-righteousness in Vietnam was paved with Agent Orange and huge trails of bombs. In Afghanistan, the Taliban (and others) have been left with a land of several million native peoples who are destitute of water, decent soil, and infrastructure.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_8

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The war which Vladimir V. Putin has created in Ukraine has been discussed elsewhere in this book. As I write this, Ukraine is defending itself against Russia, with the United States and several allies waging a proxy war, aiding the Ukrainians. There is no such thing as a civilized war, of course. The Russians are showing everyone that they know the book on death and pillage and they bomb much of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure into splinters and ashes, committing enough war crimes to keep the international courts very busy for a long time. The Ukrainians have been supplied with tanks by Germany and the United States. To make the war a bit more equal, the Ukrainians are asking for fighter jets. All of these weapons (and many more) are prodigious producers of greenhouse gases. This is war, after all, where environmental consequences are usually regarded as collateral damage, even as all of us destroy our habitat in the process.

8.2 War, Profits, and Greenhouse Gases The main profiteers in this war, as in all, have been the usual crew of US (and in some cases multinational) companies that make money from the implements of war, from bombs and bombers and helicopters to jeeps, tents, weapons, and Meals Ready to Eat, all of which must be transported, mainly by air, which are our most profligate source of greenhouse gases. While that the Afghan emits about 0.2 ton of carbon dioxide per year, the average US citizen is responsible for about 16 tons, a factor of about 80 times. Humankind’s desire to dominate each other in large groups through large nation-­ states using ever-more-destructive weapons has created massive amounts of greenhouse gases that accelerate warming of the Earth’s lower atmosphere. The greenhouse load begins with the creation of various components for weapons, followed by their assembly, testing, and transport to the (so-called) “theater” of carnage. When large weapons are blown apart, the process begins once more, with the consequent use of fossil fuels Manufacture of the implements of war is probably the world’s leader in conspicuous consumption of Earth’s resources. The amount of greenhouse gases in production of such things as aircraft, tanks, missiles, munitions, et  al. consumes resources and produces many tons of greenhouse gases. Many implements of mass destruction are expected to have short lives, as enemies blow them up, creating a need for replacements, so that resources will be exploited and greenhouse gases produced to fly tanks, etc. to war zones, for one recent example, from the United States to Ukraine (or, in an earlier time, from the United States to Vietnam) and back. A really large weapon, such as a Sherman Tank, may get 2 or 3 miles per gallon once it is used in a war zone. The United States, China, and India, together, make up half the world’s CO2 emissions. Afghanistan’s proportion of world carbon dioxide emissions was 0.03 percent in 2018. China, the world’s emissions leader, had 28 percent; the rest of the

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world was responsible for 21 percent. Alone, the United States’ proportion of the world total was about 15 percent. The Russian-initiated war in Ukraine, begun in 2022, may have had one of the most multinational weapons bases of any regional conflict in human history. For all intents, it was a proxy World War III, without nuclear weapons (as of this writing, in April, 2023, that is). Through the years, and especially during and after World War I, the potency of weapons has grown with each conflict, and so has their emissions of carbon dioxide. Before 1900 C.E., most wars were fought with platoons of men, cannons, and guns. In 50 frightening years, the assaults of armed forces on each other (and on the atmosphere) grew at a pace heretofore unknown to human beings, introducing tanks (modeled on automobiles), airplanes (with an ability to drop bombs from the air), missiles bearing bombs, and thermonuclear weapons.

War as a Major Multiplier of Technological Innovation

War has become a major multiplier of technological innovation, as well as environmental devastation. Later in this chapter, I will describe the use of wartime technology to kill both human soldiers and poison to strip away large swaths of forest so that other armed forces may not hide in them. This included in the infamous agent Orange campaigns of the Vietnam War, where chemicals also inculcated cancers and deformation of babies (before birth), as well as older people. The effects of some weapons long after their use are so hideous that they are outlawed by international agreements. Agent Orange is one of them.

Ukrainian officers said the Russians are making use of a new and frighteningly effective weapon: Iranian-­made Shahed-­136 attack drones. For the first time in war, bombs can now be precisely aimed and exploded with the use of small targeting devices. The weapon explodes on impact, carrying a warhead of about 80 pounds. The appearance of the so-called kamikaze drone in Ukraine marks the first time it has been deployed outside of the Middle East.

After US-provided weapons and intelligence proved instrumental to Ukraine’s gains in the northeastern part of the country, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pressed President Joe Biden for a new and more powerful weapon: the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a range of 190 miles and could reach into Russian territory.

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8.3 The United States’ Position as Military Polluter The United States’ military burns more oil-based products than twice the number of cars and trucks on the nation’s roadways (Lewis, 2021). “The Department of Defense is the largest institutional contributor to global warming on planet Earth,” said David Vine, a professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington D. C. (Iffah, 2022). If the US Department of Defense were a country, it would be larger than the economies of all but 47 countries in the world. In 2019, a report released by Lancaster University (United Kingdom) found that the US military was “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most [entire] countries.” The report stated that if the US military was a nation-state, it would be the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world. These figures took into account the emissions from fuel usage alone. Some estimates are higher than 47th. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, when compared with the consumption per country, the Department of Defense ranked itself as 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind the total economies of Iraq and Sweden (Lewis, 2021; Kitchlew, 2022). Compared to the all-too-obvious death and environmental mayhem caused by warfare, the long-range toll of war’s carbon footprint is less visible but hardly harmless. Modern war waged at long distances is hugely carbon dioxide intensive. The US armed forces, which maintain as many as 1000 bases in other countries, consume about 2 million gallons of oil per day, half of it in jet fuel. Fuel economy has not been a priority in modern fossil-fueled warfare. Humvees average 4 miles per gallon, while an Apache helicopter gets about half a mile per gallon. Consumption of fossil fuels has increased over time, with great waste. The Air Force alone uses half of the oil consumed by the Department of Defense. For example, it burned through 2.6 billion gallons of fuel during one 6-month period in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2006. At that time, the US armed forces consumed as much fuel per month in limited wars as they did during all of World War II between 1941 and 1945.

8.4 Growing Carbon Production in World Wars I and II At the beginning of World War I in Europe, just over a hundred years ago, the main motive force in battle was the horse and shoe leather, as troops in Europe marched off to battle on foot or horseback. The advent of aerial bombardment and increasing use of tanks caused a dramatic escalation in war’s carbon dioxide production. War is often a powerful technological motor and carbon-consumption innovator. World War II began with quarter-century-old biplanes and ended with fighter jets, resulting in a massive increase in fuel consumption.

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The mechanization of the military provided many more opportunities to ramp up carbon dioxide production throughout both world wars of the twentieth century’s first half. World War II’s Sherman tank, for example, got 0.8  miles per gallon. Seventy-five years later, tank mileage had not improved: the 68-ton Abrams tank, used during the Vietnam War, got about 0.5 miles per gallon. Typical fuel consumption of a fighter jet was 300 to 400 gallons per hour at full thrust, or 100 gallons per hour at cruising speed during hundreds of hours of training and combat missions. Blasting to supersonic speed on its afterburners, an F-15 fighter can burn as much as four gallons of fuel per second. According to Gar Smith in Earth Island Journal, the B-52 Stratocruiser, with 8 jet engines, consumes 86 barrels of fuel per hour. Individuals are told to reduce our “carbon footprint,” and we should. How many years of riding a bike to work would it take to offset one F-15 flying for an hour? Assuming that this bike replaced a car that gets 25 miles per gallon, a daily commute of 5 miles would use a gallon per week. That’s 350 weeks, roughly 7 years, to fuel a fighter jet at full thrust for 1 hour. During the 1950s and 1960s, the US military flew B-52s at all times, on the theory that an airborne fleet would prevent the Soviet Union from obliterating the entire US nuclear-armed armada on the ground. Each of these B-52s burned thousands of gallons of fossil fuel per hour while aloft. That’s 73 bike commuters’ annual fuel savings for every hour a B-52 is in the air. By the end of 2007, according to a report from Oil Change International, the Iraq war had put at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the air—as much as adding 25 million cars to US roads. The Iraq war added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world’s nations.

8.5 Sketching the Carbon Footprint of a Small War So, how would one begin to sketch the carbon footprint of a small war? Here is a preliminary sketch. First, add all the energy used to produce the weapons, transport, and other provisions consumed in the war. Add the emissions produced getting soldiers, supplies, and civilian contractors to the theater of war and home again—in the case of a war pursued thousands of miles from home, often by air transport. Add the cost of running armed personnel carriers, constructing, heating and cooling soldiers’ lodgings, preparing their food, and so forth, as well as the greenhouse gases produced by conduct of combat itself: • Add the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases ejected into the atmosphere from fires initiated by bombings and other explosions. In Iraq, pay special attention to intentional sabotage of oil pipelines and suicide bombings, as well as improvised explosive devices. Today we know the carbon footprint of a bag of potato chips from a Safeway grocery store in California, but war—that elephant in the greenhouse—remains unmeasured.

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Add the carbon cost, as well, of tending the wounded. The Iraq war’s emergency room spanned nearly half the world, from airborne surgery to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and hospitals in the United States. Add the carbon and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by fires initiated by bombings and other explosions. In Iraq, for example, pay special attention to intentional sabotage of oil pipelines and suicide bombings, as well as improvised explosive devices. Today we know the carbon footprint of a bag of potato chips from a grocery store, but war—that elephant in the greenhouse—remains unmeasured.

8.6 Size, Scope, and Complexity The carbon footprint of war is important and intriguing but impossible to calculate precisely because of its size, scope, and complexity. The carbon footprint for a bag of potato chips, a carton of milk, or a pair of athletic shoes may be calculated by adding up each unit’s proportion of manufacturing and transportation energy inputs along the entire lifecycle of the product. Calculating the carbon footprint of a single consumer product is complex, but we can do it. When we become really serious about carbon footprint of war, we will know the amount of greenhouse gases generated by each platoon sent to war, each bomb dropped, each tank deployed. However, today we know the carbon footprint of a bag of potato chips from a grocery store, but war—that elephant in the greenhouse— remains unmeasured. If the Pentagon has ever done such a thing, no one seems to be bragging about it to civilians. The United States launched the Iraq war on the pretext of protecting vital oil supplies, even as it consumed oil at a phenomenal rate. At the start of the Iraq war, in 2003, the United Kingdom Green Party estimated that the United States, Britain, and the minor parties of the “coalition of the willing” were burning the same amount of fuel in the Iraq war (40,000 barrels a day) as all 1.1 billion people (now 1.3 billion) living in India. The US Air Force uses 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, 10 percent of the US domestic market. Peacemakers in our time are often assumed to be naive dreamers. Given the environmental crisis, however, a timely end to war is not naive, but necessary. Armies of the future must study the best ways to solve international conflicts without armed intervention and the monumental pollution that accompanies war’s death and destruction. The greenhouse gas emissions of war should be measured and regulated on a worldwide basis, and the United States, the world’s premier military power, should take the lead in decarbonizing international relations. With the carbon footprint of war adding to its cost in blood and treasure, this tally of greenhouse gas emissions should convince us that the Earth can no longer afford fossil-­fueled war.

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8.7 Environmental Effects of the Ukrainian War The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began during February 2022 brought war’s impact on the environment into sharp focus. Most of Europe and the United States sanctioned Russia by reducing reliance on imports of oil and natural gas. Environmental pressure to reduce reliance on fossil fuels was taking these countries down this road anyway, but not at the speed that the goals of the war now demanded. Joe McCarthy (2022a, b) wrote under the aegis of Global Citizen: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused catastrophic loss of life, widespread displacement, and a growing global food crisis. The conflict has also extensively harmed Ukraine’s natural environment, highlighting the many ways in which war devastates biodiversity and contributes to the climate crisis. Advocates and organizers within Ukraine have documented hundreds of environmental crimes that together… warrant the charge of ecocide by international courts. These crimes include attacks on industrial facilities that contaminate groundwater supplies and airways and the deliberate bombing of wildlife refuges and other important ecosystems. With each additional day of warfare, Ukraine’s ability to recover its vibrant society and environment wanes, and its capacity for transitioning to an economy that excludes fossil fuels shrinks” (McCarthy, 2022a, b). War is a mighty engine of technological change. Air forces, as previously described, entered World War II with wobbly biplanes and ended it with jet fighters; the war also began with “ordinary” bombs and ended with atomic weapons. The war in Ukraine presented some unusual challenges. For one, Russia, the invading force, felt free to trespass on Ukrainian territory with troops and very destructive urban air attacks almost exclusively against civilian targets. Ukraine’s allies felt constrained from replying in kind, fearing expansion of the war. The United States and its allies, however, sent Ukraine all manner of new and technologically advanced weapons. When the Ukrainians needed help operating or repairing these weapons, they used computer links familiar to civilians as Zoom technology turning to “virtual chat rooms” to operate “remote maintenance teams” operating via encrypted chat lines” that also expanded across Europe. The forces also made use of Google, capable of translating languages, from English to Ukrainian and vice versa, for example (Baldor, 2023, A-11).

8.8 War as an Adjunct to Nationalism is Obsolete At the same time, voices are being raised with increasing urgency that the use of war as an adjunct to aid nationalism’s bids to conquer and suppress other countries and cultures is outmoded given the existential threat of climate change. The accelerating pace of this crisis is an historical fact that the combatants have not been forced to reckon with. The increasingly lethal nature of weapons also raises the ante on death and destruction that urgently must be faced if life on Earth is to persevere. The next

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century will be crucial. If all of Earth’s competing interests can cooperate in solution of these two converging crises, generations to come may survive and even flourish. If not, it is likely that our great grandchildren will probably inherit a planet crushed to possibly radioactive cinders in an atmosphere that is too hot to sustain most life, after a series of increasingly desperate wars over diminishing resources. “Few things fuel the [climate] crisis quite like war,’ wrote McCarthy (2022a, b); [war] which props up the global fossil fuel industry by locking in oil, gas, and coal demand, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS). War also inevitably entails destruction, resulting in widespread toxic substances, dead wildlife, and an atmosphere choked with fumes. Citing one example of many, the approximately 60,000 HUMVES in the US Army fleet get between 4 to 8 miles per gallon of diesel fuel (Crawford, 2019). “U.S. defense spending includes 560,000 facilities…275,000 buildings at 800 bases located on about 27 million acres of land in the U.S. and across the globe. In fiscal year 2017, the DOD spent $3.5 billion to heat, cool, and provide electricity to its facilities, down from the previous year, when it spent $3.7 billion.” Each installation, of course, can produce greenhouse gas emissions. The Pentagon building itself, located in Arlington, Virginia emitted 24,620.55 metric tons of CO2 in 2013 (Crawford, 2019). Crawford also compiled statistics on Department of Defense (DOD) greenhouse-­ gas emissions: “Fuel is a major component of US military fuel use and therefore of greenhouse-gas emissions. During each air mission, aircraft puts hundreds of tons of CO2 into the air, not to mention the support activities of naval and ground- based assets for these air missions. Moreover, in each case, material was flown to the war zones and bases were set up to prosecute the wars and occupations. Similarly, the US war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which began in August 2014, has entailed tens of thousands of aircraft sorties for various missions—from reconnaissance, to airlift, refueling, and weapons strikes. (Salomon, 1999; Associated Press, 2017) Crawford (2021) continued “The military is concerned that climate change will lead to a more chaotic and dangerous world. They are concerned, for instance, that the Arctic Sea is now open, leading to questions about the need to patrol it. National security analysts sometimes suggest that drought in Syria from 2007 to 2010, and the subsequent mass migration to cities, created the conditions that contributed to the emergence of the civil war there in 2011.” Indeed, she wrote: “Some strategists paint nightmare scenarios where climate change leads to armed conflict—such as when crop failures produce famine and drought leads to conflicts over water and other natural resources. The White House said in 2016 that ‘The national security implications of climate change impacts are far-reaching, as they may exacerbate existing stressors, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and political instability, providing enabling environments for terrorist activity abroad. For example, the impacts of climate change on key economic sectors, such as agriculture and water, can have profound effects on food security, posing threats to overall stability.” Similarly, in September 2016, the National Intelligence Council listed a range of concerns from increased migration,

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to food shortages, to greater conflict and war caused by shortages of fresh water and access to arable land” (White House, 2015).

8.9 Key Facts About How War Impacts the Climate Crisis and the Environment Bombings and other methods of modern warfare directly harm wildlife and biodiversity. The collateral damage of conflict can kill up to 90 percent of large animals in a given area. Advocates and organizers within Ukraine have documented hundreds of environmental crimes that together, they argue, warrant the charge of ecocide in international courts. These crimes include attacks on industrial facilities that contaminate groundwater supplies and airways and deliberate bombing of wildlife refuges and other important ecosystems. With each additional day of warfare, Ukraine’s ability to recover its vibrant society and environment wanes, and its capacity for transitioning to an economy that excludes fossil fuels shrinks. In recent years, a growing narrative has asserted that the climate crisis is a national security threat that requires military investments. However, while a deteriorating environment does, in fact, threaten people, few things rival the crisis quite like war, which props up the global fossil fuel industry by locking in oil, gas, and coal demand, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS). War also inevitably entails destruction, resulting in widespread toxic substances, dead wildlife, and an atmosphere choked with fumes.

8.10 Key Facts About How War Impacts the Climate Crisis and the Environment Bombings and other methods of modern warfare directly harm wildlife and biodiversity. The collateral damage of conflict can kill up to 90 percent of large animals in any given area. Pollution from war also contaminates bodies of water, soil, and air, making areas unsafe for people to inhabit. Joe McCarthy wrote, referring to the haphazard bombing of Ukraine by Russians: “ The environmental impact of a single bomb falling in a field is disastrous—the crater opened up in the earth, the wildlife destroyed, the ensuing immolation, the explosive release of heavy metals and toxic chemicals spreading throughout the landscape and atmosphere.” • Now imagine thousands of bombs across one of the most industrialized countries in the world, exploding in towns and cities, in manufacturing zones, and in wildlife refuges. This environmental nightmare is happening in Ukraine, where the Russian military is routinely targeting critical infrastructure and hazardous sites.

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Russia’s command is deliberately focusing not on a rival armed force but on civilian targets and infrastructure, with the idea of crippling morale because Russia’s ground forces often have been unable to capture and hold territory. As efforts to stop the war rightly focus on minimizing the death toll and ongoing displacement of citizens, an environmental catastrophe is unfolding that will last long after the final Russian troops leave the country. It could harm Ukrainian communities for years to come (McCarthy, 2022a, b). • Environmental advocates have labeled the situation an “ecocide” and are trying to bring international criminal charges against Russia for the environmental destruction its military has already caused. • “Russia should pay for these crimes,” said Evgenia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department at Ecoaction, a Ukrainian environmental advocacy organization. “This war is also…against the environment. Acknowledging this is the first step toward bringing Russia to justice.” “Not only for the people who have been killed and harmed, not only for the infrastructure and cities, but also for the damage to the environment.” “My worst fear is that the damage will be so huge that we won’t be able to rebuild,” Zasiadko, said (An Ecocide, 2022). Several scientists in 2019 asked the United Nations to create statutes of international law for war crimes that harm the environment during conflict. “to protect the environment in regions of armed conflict (Durant & Brito, 2019). In a letter to Nature, the scientists said, in part: “We call on governments to incorporate explicit safeguards for biodiversity, and to use the commission’s recommendations to finally deliver a Geneva Convention to uphold environmental protection during such confrontations. “Despite calls for a convention two decades ago, military conflict continues to destroy megafauna, push species to extinction, and poison water resources,” the petition continues. The uncontrolled circulation of arms exacerbates the situation, for instance by driving unsustainable hunting of wildlife” (Durant & Brito, 2019). “For example,” wrote Gralki et  al. (2019) “the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 led to rampant deforestation, polluted water sources, and widespread air pollution. In addition to the air pollution created by bombs, the U.S. military regularly burn[ed] garbage in open pits, releasing harmful toxins into the air, as well as heavy machinery that causes more dust to circulate in the atmosphere. When the U.S. attacked Iraq in 1991, bombs containing depleted uranium led to radiation contamination in the soil and water sources. The U.S. military also destroyed millions of acres of forest during the Vietnam war with toxic Agent Orange. The environmental effects of that bombing campaign are still felt today.” Agent Orange and other munitions rained down on Vietnam in greater numbers than Germany was bombed in World War II, with the horrors of dioxin added. The Vietnamese received deforming and sometimes lethal doses of Agent Orange not only from barrels rained on them by U.S. aircraft but also from the crops that they tilled and the fish and wildlife that they ate. Their world at become saturated with it, every drop manufactured for profit under strict controls by Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and other companies, under the US Defense Production Act of 1950. The government strictly controlled the transport, storage, and use of it.

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“Ultimately,” concluded by Gralki et al. (2019), “if harming the environment was [made] a war crime, then most acts of modern warfare would essentially be forbidden. After all, there’s no way to drop a bomb without harming the ground it falls on.” The environmental impact of war has emerged as an area of study and activism with modernization of war and its intensification of its effects on environmental damage. Some of these effects, such as “scorched Earth” tactics, have been parts of militaristic strategy for hundreds of years, but by the twentieth century, abuse of the environment has become an essential part of a multifront effort that attacks the infrastructure of civilian populations so that they cannot provide aid to troops and air attacks at all. Nuclear and chemical weapons, in particular, extend the battle front beyond military lines, creating a total war environment. This type of “total” war also has been taking an increasing toll on the environment. As weapons become more damaging, environmental effects have become part of both sides’ strategy. In World War I, for example, wars often were fought behind fixed battle lines with troops often isolated in trenches far from population centers. By the end of that war, the first small, slow airplanes loaded with small bombs began to appear, with the size, speed, and damage potential of air war increasing, along with environmental damage along and behind the war fronts of ground armies. By the end of World War II, a single bomb could irradiate a middle-sized city (e.g., Nagasaki and Hiroshima) in one trip, leaving its environment lifeless and poisoned with deadly radiation for decades to come. With the exception of the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, nuclear weapons have been retired from actual battle for about 80 years and used mainly as threats, as the number of countries possessing them has grown. That statistic is more horrid than it sounds when one realizes that—oh! The cruel ironies of human ingenuity!—roughly within a decade of the pulverization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the “average” thermonuclear device was 1000 times more powerful. Is there any doubt that the next world war, if any world leader is crazy and stupid enough to start it, will most assuredly be the “war to end all wars,” and the tenure on Earth of most living things. Humanity will get no more second chances.

8.11 Agent Orange Deforms Generations The use of poisoning weapons on civilians has also entered the realm of the biological but still murderously effective “Agent Orange” that not only defoliates potential battle sites but also spreads horrible bodily deformations to coming generations. The onset of the Anthropocene can be measured, perhaps, by human manipulation and eventual control of the environment. One very indicative measure of such manipulation comes to us from the theater of war. The development of the super-­ herbicide “Agent Orange” was meant to strip cover from North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong) who were infiltrating the South. That it did, but Agent Orange also killed people who were not involved in the war and

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caused birth defects which have now been passed down through several generations. Seeking to control nature in one way, the chemists had produced a monster, which was banned in 1971. This is one of several ways in which nature has shown humankind that rearranging chemistry can produce disasters. During the early Spring of 1970, as environmental activists in the United States held their first Earth Day, few of them expressed horror at a deadly chemical threat nearly half a world away was deforming hundreds of uncounted Vietnamese babies. At that time, the United States armed forces were pouring dioxin (commonly called Agent Orange) on the fields and jungles of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in an attempt to defoliate the countryside and deny Viet Cong insurgents’ places to hide from aerial bombing. The guerrillas were said to have been “fish” in a verdant “sea” that could be stripped bare of vegetative cover by defoliants. Between 1962 and 1971, at least 12 percent of southern Vietnam’s land area was doused liberally with about 18 million gallons of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, the most potent of dioxin’s many varieties (Schecter et al., 2001, 435). This herbicide stripped ground cover and changed the weather, making villages, rice paddies, and other sources of food uninhabitable for generations. The Agent Orange disaster combines the damage of war aimed not only on human beings but also at the environment itself. The Earth usually becomes collateral damage in war, but this campaign was targeted, intentional, and damming for both trees and human beings who were cursed with intergenerational toxicity that cursed several generations. Agent Orange was not the only poison that was dumped on the Vietnamese. Napalm also streamed out of US bombers, catching people outside, producing fires that burned uncounted numbers of people to death. Photographers captured some of these raids, showing newspaper and magazine readers, as well as viewers of television news images young children screaming as they ran from US aircraft spreading the noxious, deadly Napalm. Public outrage over the United States’ use of napalm became a major factor in the eventual withdrawal of its troops. The US armed forces are the Earth’s largest single polluter, creating about 750,000 tons of toxic waste in an average year (most often depleted uranium, oil, jet fuels, pesticides, defoliants, lead, and other chemicals (Folzer, 2020). At times, the United States exposed its own personnel to toxic chemicals out of ignorance of their effects. During wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on US bases, human waste was burned in open pits with munitions, plastic, electronics, paint, and other chemicals. The carcinogenic smoke is suspected to have injured some soldiers exposed to it. Production of Agent Orange ended in 1971 and is no longer in use. Less potent forms of similar chemicals still are used as lawn herbicides that kill any weed in a yard except common grass. Such brands as “RoundUp” produce healthy-looking, weed-free lawns, but they also drain into water tables and have become the object of several lawsuits. The poison of dioxin is still causing birth defects more than half a century after it was last manufactured, or used. Dioxin contamination is still having harmful effects today in the bodies of many US Vietnam-era veterans, as well as children and grandchildren of Vietnamese men and women exposed to it mainly in the 1960s.

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Dioxin is so highly toxic and persistent an organic pollutant that it can produce several types of cancer, as well as diabetes, birth defects, and other disabilities; even generations after it has afflicted individuals, their children and grandchildren may develop maladies similar to those which have afflicted the veterans. The problems experienced by progeny up the food chain may even be worse than the first exposure because these toxins tend to “biomagnify” at each stage up the food chain. For example, when a bigger fish eats a smaller one that contains PCBs (another persistent organic pollutant), the power at the second rung is two times that of the first exposure. By the time an angler on a fishing trip or a Native American fishing to feed his or her family snares the next infected fish, its potency is several times higher than the levels of the first fish in this particular food chain. The next fish is four times as potent as the first, and so forth.

8.12 The Nightmare Continues: “Monster Babies” Agent Orange was applied haphazardly by troops taking part in Operations Hades and Ranch Hand, whose participants offhandedly proclaimed that “only we can prevent forests,” an allusion to the US Forest Service’s Smokey the Bear’s slogan, “Only you can prevent forest fires” (Johansen, 1972, 4). Samples collected between 1970 and 1973 documented elevated levels of TCDD in milk samples, as well as in fish and shrimp. Nursing mothers who were heavier than usual consumers of fish were soon found to have the highest levels in their blood (Schecter et al., 2001, 435). Reports increased of deformed births in unusually large numbers. Areas sprayed with Agent Orange later reported very high incidences of certain birth defects: anencephaly (absence of all or parts of the brain), spina bifida (a malformed spinal column), and hydrocephaly (swelling of the skull). Tin Sang, a Saigon newspaper, published descriptions of “monster babies” born to mothers in areas that had been repeatedly sprayed. Tin Sang described one woman who said that “her newly pregnant daughter was caught in an Agent Orange strike, after which she fainted, as blood flowed from her mouth, nostrils, and vulva. She was taken to a hospital where she delivered a deformed fetus” (Johansen, 1972, 4). The same day (October 26, 1969), Dong Nai, another Saigon newspaper, published a photograph showing a stillborn fetus with a face distorted like that of a duck as well as a twisted stomach. A day later, the same newspaper described a woman in the Tan An district of South Vietnam who had been soaked with Agent Orange. She later gave birth to a child with 2 heads, 20 fingers, and 3 arms. (Johansen, 1972, 4). Many similar accounts also were published before the South Vietnamese government shut down the newspapers for “interfering with the war effort” (Johansen, 1972, 4). The South Vietnam health ministry also began to classify accounts of deformed births as state secrets. Cutting off the sources of information, of course, did nothing to stem the births of deformed babies, and word spread orally anyway.

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An estimated 21,136,000 gallons (80,000  m3) of Agent Orange were sprayed across South Vietnam, exposing 4.8 million Vietnamese, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities of adults, and at least 500,000 children born with birth defects. Many British Commonwealth personnel who handled and/or used Agent Orange during and decades after the 1948–1960 Malayan conflict also suffered from serious exposure to dioxin. Agent Orange also caused major soil erosion in areas of Malaya as heavy rains eroded areas where trees had been killed. An estimated 10,000 civilians and probably many insurgents in Malaya also suffered intensely from defoliant effects that many more than the figure of 10,000 was too low, given that Agent Orange was used on a large scale in the Malayan conflict. Unlike the United States in Vietnam, the British government, fearing negative world public opinion, manipulated the numbers and kept the real numbers secret.

8.13 Bloodshed on a Historically Unprecedented Scale The United States used so much fossil fuel during the Iraq war that it provoked a spike in emissions worldwide. “The environment became so toxic in some places that it has led to elevated rates of cancer, as well as crippling birth defects—terrible individual punishments inflicted on innocent future generations. A British doctor who co-authored two studies on the environmental impact of U.S. military operations in Fallujah said that the city’s population suffered “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied,” according to Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept (2019). Much of this damage resulted from use of depleted uranium munitions by US forces, with no regard for damage to civilians, military forces, or the environment. These forces continued to use these lethal materials even after warnings of their damage across the Middle East by the independent monitoring group Airwars and Foreign Policy (Hussain, 2019). “The fact that fossil fuel emissions have been the major driver of climate change adds another grim irony to these wars. For decades, the heavy U.S. military footprint in the Middle East has been justified by the need to preserve access to the region’s oil reserves. The industrial extraction of those same reserves has been one of the major drivers of global carbon dioxide emissions,” wrote Hussain. (2019). The 20th century gave us bloodshed on a historically unprecedented scale. The power of modern science was finally wedded to the primordial dark side of human nature. The result was the most savagely violent period in human history. World War II killed over 70 million people. The war inflicted types of environmental harm never seen before. The nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave us our first realistic glimpses of how civilization itself could end. We eventually staggered out of that catastrophe. We may now be walking into a far greater one [global warming] (Hussain, 2019).

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Nature is, however, a story with a very complex plot. Image sweating our way to the end of time because of a hot and wild climate when a frustrated humanity starts the last world war? At that point, given enough nuclear artillery, the snow of irradiated ash will bring us a “nuclear winter,” as one worldwide catastrophe collides with another. Depending on factors such as the number, yield, height, and location of atomic bombs exploded, smoke and debris injection into the atmosphere could be of such volume, thickness, and aerial extent and length of time, as to engender a nuclear winter, that is, an atmospheric debris cover leading within days to dramatic and prolonged surface temperature drops as sunlight is blocked. A fall in primary activity among sun energy-dependent autotrophs (i.e., plants and algae) and subsequent food shortages and large-scale privation and starvation (Brauer, 2009, 5).

Add, perhaps, the possibility that we could starve and freeze with a chaser of death by irradiation.

8.14 The Tally of Human Damage Long ignored by the US public was an extensive program by the US military to test nuclear weapons close to the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific Ocean, mainly during from the 1940s into the early 1960s. Limited nuclear testing in some cases was not completely ended until 1992. The United States conducted 67 nuclear explosive tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. In 1962, the United States halted atmospheric nuclear explosive tests, like those conducted in the Marshall Islands. The superintendents of these tests probably knew that these islands were inhabited by more than 100,000 people but assured the US government that the tests were being conducted far enough away from the islands to spare the people damaging radiation poisoning. Many of these explosive devices were much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; people on the islands described a fall of dirty-white “snow” around them which was tested and turned out to be radioactive. A hydrogen bomb test on March 1, 1954, code-named Castle Bravo, far exceeded the size expected by scientists. This factor, combined with shifting wind patterns, sent some of the radioactive fallout over the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and Utrik. Within 52 hours, the 86 people on Rongelap and 167 on Utrik were evacuated to Kwajalein for medical care. The Marshallese living on Utrik returned permanently a few months later, while those on Rongelap returned in 1957 but chose to leave again in 1985.

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Many of them reported cancers and other lethal maladies. The US Congress investigated and found widespread radioactive damage and awarded most of the plaintiffs $25,000 to $75,000.

8.15 The Future: Eliminate War and Environmental Catastrophe The long-range, worldwide effects of even isolated wars on a worldwide scale are astounding. “Mind you, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the possibility of preventing the world’s temperature from rising more than 1.5  °C (2.7  °F) above its preindustrial average seemed to be slipping away,” wrote Michael Klare in The Nation. After all, as a recent study by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear, without a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures are likely to exceed that target long before this century ends—with terrifying consequences. “In concrete terms,” as UN Secretary General António Guterres pointed out when releasing the report, “This means major cities under water, unprecedented heat waves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of one million species of plants and animals”…. “War kick-starts that reaction to a much higher level. Humankind suffused with the smell of blood will shred the future of the Planet to dominate enemies…. We are, after all, at war, where reason ends, even with the future of the Earth in the crosshairs” (Klare, 2022).

War “turns all of us into gravediggers, and our planetary home into an enormous cemetery,” wrote Klare. The human race may, by that time, have met its illogical end, inherited only by its toughest weeds and insects. The most intelligent species “our” world has ever known may be mainly past tense. “I sincerely hope that I am massively wrong, wote Klare (2022). I agree; I would accept a mistake of excess pessimism for an end in a suicidal world” (Klare, 2022). The sane goal of slowing the speed of climate change demands unified action by all nations; in a world beset with lethal international conflicts, who is in the mood for solving slow-motion crises which as the climate crisis? Can the human race handle one existential crisis at once, much less two? Taming war requires a test that humanity has failed even as its science has made such an outcome increasingly necessary. Dealing with the climate crisis also involves taming outcomes of human ingenuity which intensify as the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our shared atmosphere continue to increase. The climate crisis requires bending the carbon dioxide and methane curves down—quickly. For all the good wishes expressed at Earth Day rallies, all the solar

References

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panels built and used, and all the wind turbines twirling, the carbon dioxide and methane curves continue to rise. Given this scorecard, the “game” of surviving climate change has barely begun. We are, sad to say, at war with our own ingenuity at creating comfort, convenience, and profit (how most of us define “happiness” and, we ought to add), also taking part in ancient human mental habits that employ the pride and fear that constitute nationalism to justify slaughtering each other. Even warnings that we are ruining our habitat have not forced us to change old habits that have now become self-destructive. This leaves responsible human beings only one course, concluded Klare: (2022): “to contest the very idea that great-power competition itself should be accorded such a priority on a planet in such mortal danger….Or else…we can kiss Planet Earth goodbye.” The act of such kissing already has begun: drought, fire, flooding, and temperature extremes leading to displacement and death. The effects of climate change, including extremely powerful storms, famine, and diminished access to fresh water, will likely make regions of the world unstable—feeding political tensions and fueling mass migrations and refugee crises. In response, even the military has added the national security implications of climate change to its long list of national security concerns. The intelligence community examined climate change outcomes even as President Donald Trump was calling global warming a “hoax.” In January 2019, Daniel R. Coats, Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.” (Mach et al., 2019, 193–194). The role of greenhouse gases is hardly a “hoax” in terms of war’s damage to our shared environment. Therefore, the US military, like the rest of the world, is going to have to rearrange its ways of thinking and doing if the human race, other animals, and plants, indeed, whether we, the human race, will survive in the world that we have made. The longer we wait, the tougher the necessary transition will be.

References An ecocide: How the conflict in Ukraine is bombarding the environment. TRT World. April 28, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/ an-­ecocide-­how-­the-­conflict-­in-­ukraine-­is-­bombarding-­the-­environment-­56730

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Associated Press. The military is getting greener, but that clashes with Trump’s promises. Fortune, 14 January 2017. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2017/01/14/military-­oil-­trump-­green-­power/ Austin, J. E., & Bruch, C. E. (Eds.). (2000). The environmental consequences of war: Legal, economic, and scientific perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Baldor, L. Omaha World-Herald, February 5, 2023. Associated Press, A-11. Brauer, J. (2009). War and nature: The environmental consequences of war in a globalized world. AltaMira Press. Crawford, N. C. (2021, September). Costs of war. Watson Institute, Brown University. Retrieved from https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/ClimateChangeandCostofWar DeWeerdt, S. (2008, January). Environmentalists against war. In War and the environment (Vol. 21, p.  1). World Wide Watch. Retrieved from http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/2015/04/09/ war-­and-­the-­environment-­3/ Durant, S. M., & Brito, J. C. (2019, July 23). Stop military conflicts from trashing environment. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-­019-­02248-­6 Folzer, S. (2020, April). U.S. military is world leader in pollution and wasteful use of fossil fuels. Weavers Way Co-op. Retrieved from https://weaversway.coop/shuttle-­online/2020/04/ us-­military-­world-­leader-­pollution-­and-­wasteful-­use-­fossil-­fuels Gralki, P., McCarthy, J., & Sánchez, E. (2019, July 24). Scientists want to make harming the environment a war crime. Global Citizen. Retrieved from https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/ content/harming-­environment-­war-­crime/ Greenwash? The Guardian, March 10, 2022. Hussain, M. (2019, September 15). War on the world: Industrial militaries are a bigger part of the climate emergency than you know. The Intercept. Retrieved from https://theintercept. com/2019/09/15/Climate-­Change-­US-­military-­war/ Johansen, B. (1972, May 24). Ecomania at home; ecocide abroad. University of Washington Daily, 4. Johansen, B. E. (2009). The carbon footprint of war. The Progressive. Retrieved from https://studylib.net/doc/18195364/“remember-­the-­carbon-­footprint-­of-­war”-­by-­bruce-­e.-­johansen King, J. (2006, 8 July). Vietnamese wildlife still paying a high price for chemical warfare. The Independent. Kitchlew, I. (2022, March 10). Is super-polluting Pentagon’s climate plan just ‘military-grade greenwash?’ The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-­news/2022/mar/10/ pentagon-­us-­military-­emissions-­climate-­crisis Klare, M. (2022, May 24). We need international co-operation to fight climate change, not war. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-­climate-­change-­war/ Lewis, J. (2021, November 12). U.S. military pollution: The world’s biggest climate change enabler. Earth.Org. Retrieved from https://earth.org/us-­military-­pollution/ Mach, K. J., et al. (2019, July 21). Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict. Nature, 571, 193–197. McCarthy, J. (2022a, April 6). How war impacts climate change and the environment; few things fuel the climate crisis quite like war. Global Citizen. Retrieved from https://www.globalcitizen. org/en/content/how-­war-­impacts-­the-­environment-­and-­climate-­change/ McCarthy, J. (2022b, April 1). How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is harming water, air, soil, and wildlife. My worst fear is that the damage will be so huge that we won’t be able to rebuild. Global Citizen. Retrieved from https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ environmental-­impact-­of-­war-­in-­ukraine/ Salomon, R.  K. (1999). Global climate change and U.S. military readiness. Federal Facilities Environmental Journal, 10(2), 133–142. Schecter, A., Dai, L.  C., Papke, O., Prange, J., Constable, J.  D., Matsuda, M., Thao, V.  D., & Piskac, A. L. (May 2001). Recent dioxin contamination from agent orange in residents of a Southern Vietnamese City. JOEM [Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine], 43(5), 435–443. United States Senate. (2005). “Nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands:” Hearing before the committee on energy and natural resources. United States Senate. One Hundred Ninth Congress. First Session on Effects of Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands. 19 July 2005. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Chapter 9

Conclusion: A Future to Love—Or Loathe?

At this stage, at the end of a book, every publisher for whom I have written an environmentally themed work asks for a happy ending. In fact, we all do—busting carbon dioxide and ridding the human race of its war-making propensities should make everyone happy, especially when the other option is obliteration of the world as we know it. Well, yes, maybe, in a world without manufacturers of armaments and the fossil-fuel industry, gasoline, and so forth. Yes, in a world where ExxonMobil et al. have found a way to make money selling motor fuel that does not produce carbon dioxide. A world, perhaps, where we have found a way to cut the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in half, from verging on 450 parts per million to about 250 ppm, which would squelch fears that most or all of our standing ice would melt. A world in which all of our nuclear swords have been beaten into poetic plowshares. Well, there went our happy ending, especially when we discover that it requires that all eight billion of us achieve two things that the human race has never done before: make durable, lasting worldwide peace, and bring the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down, to about s we learn that making peace is damnably hard work, and so is running a world without fossil fuels. As of this writing, the United Nations has given us 8 years to get our affairs in order, as described in this book’s Introduction. Otherwise, we are on track, literally, to a geophysical hell on Earth. Anyone who can make a happy ending out of this, please get moving

9.1 Reframing Human Nature To bend the carbon dioxide curve and bring it down to a sustainable and survivable level will be only a beginning. Any plan to solve the warming of the atmosphere must address the consistently rising levels of carbon dioxide. No excuses. Nothing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. E. Johansen, Nationalism vs. Nature, Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36056-5_9

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will change until the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere declines substantially and steadily for several decades, at least. Today, we have just broached 425 parts per million. The top of the cycle in the usual pre-industrial cycle was 280 ppm. We cannot maintain a livable world with a CO2 level of the Pliocene, with no sea ice and oceans perhaps 40 feet higher than today, with land temperatures that would kill most flora and fauna, including human beings. Such prospects stand in sharp contrast to today’s resource reality. Fossil fuels are not surrendering their grip on the human energy infrastructure. ExxonMobil, the United States’ largest oil product company, collected profits of $55.7 billion in 2022, as gasoline prices rose to between $4 and $5 a gallon, even as electric cars set all-time sales records. Even with resource shifts, old-fashioned fossil fuels were still paying off. A few days later, BP deported record annual earnings of $27.7 billion, also for 2022, compared to $12.8 billion in 2021. The former record was $26.8 billion in 2008. A lot of work will be required to reframe human nature. Is this utopian? Yes, assuredly, it is, but it beats the other option, which is, literally, the end of the world as we know it, with all of its natural wonders and wretched wickedness, in addition to making every possible effort to replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other sources, some of which we haven’t even thought of yet. Take yourself back to a century and a half ago, and try to describe solar power, smart phones, the Internet, and desktop computers, space travel, and then tell your curious audience who have arrived on horses that you are just getting started. That is, if the carbon curve has receded to a survivable level by then.

9.2 Changes in the Built Environment Changes in our built environment must be engineered, including construction of more resilient homes and buildings from affordable, lighter materials such as cross-­ laminated timber, the printing of 3D sea walls that mimic natural barriers and sending out real-time alerts to guide drivers around inundated roads in flood-prone places like Norfolk, VA. Other approaches will rely on nature, such as protecting or replenishing mangrove swamps in Southwest Florida and an the effort (now underway) to build back the oyster reefs in the waters off New York City to protect against storm surges like an especially destructive storms such as Hurricane Sandy. Still other innovations will be legal and financial, such as insurance that links homeowners’ rates to their preparedness for storms and provides immediate payouts based on the intensity of winds or storm surge. Successful efforts will bring together people in threatened communities to chart their own futures, like those who live along the Little River in Miami Florida. Residents there are working closely with local officials to improve drainage and convert flood-prone septic systems to sanitary sewerage so they can remain there more safely. One promising testing ground is expected to be on Governors Island in New York City, where a city-­created trust is evaluating proposals to create a global Center for

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Climate Solutions. Because the trust owns most of the infrastructure on the island, it can avoid lengthy permitting processes and resident resistance, which often thwart new ideas, as it experiments with fresh approaches to the climate threat. These so-­ called sandboxes for innovation are where we can take risks, rapidly learn what options work and commercialize and scale them up. Many, many challenges remain. How South Florida continues to thrive on its low-lying porous bedrock, for example, is unclear. The same existential question applies in many other regions, including in California’s rolling fire-prone hills and along Alaska’s melting glacial shorelines. Getting serious about trying new approaches is essential. Otherwise, the transformations we experience will be driven by compounding disasters rather than the efforts we make to create vibrant, connected communities even as climate change alters how we live, according to Katharine Mach, a professor of environmental science and policy at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami and Galen Treuer, who leads climate tech and economic innovation in Miami-Dade County’s Office of Economic Development (Mach & Treuer, 2022). Dealing with this crisis requires millions of individual choices all over the world, but they all come down to the two outcomes that we have been stressing in the foregoing pages: changing human nature to stress the worldwide propensity for international conflict, and reducing, then eliminating fossil fuels as the worldwide, major basis of our energy supply. You have heard these words before, and you will hear them again. We need a combination of psychology on a massive scale, understanding of why quick action is so necessary, construction and engineering to make such things physically possible, and imagination to concoct plans for what is already turning out to be a new future. During planning for this book with editors at Springer Nature, I heard this: “The most often received idea that I receive in pre-publication suggestions for my books on chemicals and environment (including greenhouse gasses) goes like this: One suggestion would be a final chapter on what this alternative global state would look like if the issues of nationalism and climate change were favorably addressed. It would be of great interest to the readers if they could visualize an alternative to the dystopian state of inevitable human sufferance if current pathways persist. This may be indeed an interesting outlook, even though, maybe, a bit speculative and utopian. Still, it would possibly draw up a potential better future, if we could overcome the current state of nationalism and natural devastation. Do you think it would be feasible for you to include such a piece into your book? Yes. Double Yes. A thousand thank yous: “maybe a bit utopian and speculative,” yes, because we can’t dream without these; we can’t invent or implement what we need. So here it is: an incomplete, world-wary, attempt to throw a few fantasy bombs into a stale environment that needs some work: a few words for the weary, and the whacky, and the wishful. By all means. I love making people happy, and after many words of glooming and dooming it (within the parameters of ideas that are shared by quite a few

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thinking people these days), I am trying to try to pose a case for necessary, shared survival. Utopian, hell yes. Start feeling, start dreaming, pick up your shovel and your computer, join sensible common bonds with other people in other organizations, in other countries, appreciate each other, go to work with common goals, and bend that carbon dioxide graph down. Apropos to that, the idea for a chapter on positive reconciliation is a light in the darkness. It is going to be a tall wall to climb, so I have been speculating at times. Facing a problematic future involves speculation, as well as the concrete work of change. Every day that we wait places more bricks on the wall. Beware, however, necessary steps to a necessary future may seem like wisps of dreams to those all of us who live in 2023. As I write, the New York Times and the Associated Press lead with these: A new report says it is still possible to hold global warming to relatively safe levels, but doing so will require global cooperation, billions of dollars, and big changes.

Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level, according to a major new report.

Delays of even a few years would most likely guarantee… a hotter, more perilous future. “The pace and scale of what has been done so far and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change,” said Hoesung Lee, the chair of the climate panel. “We are walking when we should be sprinting” (Plumber, 2023).

Doing so requires quickly slashing nearly two-thirds of carbon pollution by 2035. “Humanity is on thin ice, and the ice is melting quickly,” said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once,” By that, he meant getting off of fossil fuels completely between 2035 and 2050, depending on a country’s wealth level (Borenstein & Jordans, 2023, A-4).

So, readers, having journeyed with me through this swamp of gloomy prognoses, is there a chance that a real solution may squirm out of our quicksand of doom?

9.3  Our Climate Goose May Be Seriously Cooked

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Having given considerable thought and study to the twin existential issues that the human race faces on behalf of itself and every living thing on this planet, malign climate change and our tendency to “improve” our weapons of massive destructive to the point where the push of a few buttons in a fit of nationalistic pique plus a reply in kind could kill millions of people in irradiated agony, I can’t honestly bet happy odds on our survival on our present trajectory. That is a very sad admission because just about everyone I know would like to hear a well-informed reader say “Sure! We will survive all of this!” Maybe I can say: “Sure! We can do this if a very large majority of the human race decides that if we do not take some serious actions, maybe, oh maybe, we could survive.” After all, both of these problems that we have examined (global warming and proliferation of ever-more dangerous armaments) are matters of human ingenuity—that is, inventions by our own hands—so we ought to be able to ameliorate them. That’s not how human nature seems to work, however, and that is too bad for all of us. However, there is still a chance that our ingenuity may bail us out. We hear whispers of fusion power, for example, with bounteous promise, but time is required to develop any new energy system, and time is now in very short supply. The promise of fusion also does not heal our propensity to invent ever more-damaging weapons, cure hate, or blow each other up. However, in the matter of climate change, I can’t say that we are not trying. I read the scientific journals, newspapers, and more, and I see some movement in the right direction. However: speaking fully and honestly, this is a race that we are losing. A lack of time and human inability to disarm and trust each other, as well as get off fossil fuels without freezing and starving, is our culprit.

9.3 Our Climate Goose May Be Seriously Cooked For several thousand years before the human race put fossil fuels at our command to supply us comfort and convenience—possessing several dozen horses (as in horsepower) at our instant command—we cycled between about 180 parts per million CO2 during ice ages and 280 ppm during warm interglacial periods. Now, the curve has shot up to 425 ppm. Our knowledge of natural history tells us that such a level (after thermal inertia reaches limits appropriate for it) will melt all of our ocean and glacial ice, cause heat-related maladies to multiply, and generally ruin life for most living things that remain on the surface of the Earth. So given all of this, if our actions do not bend the CO2 curve down substantially, our climatic goose has no doubts been well-cooked already. Our planet is in the emergency room with a serious fever. Squabbling nationalities at future worldwide climate conferences will not provide much help. In the past, progressive wishes have been floated at such conferences, but most have not been implemented. World climate conferences have mainly been very large

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burners of jet fuel, as experts and politicians gather to squabble. Similarly, the odds for a friendly resolution of the arms race that has taken us from sticks and stones to nuclear bombs in a few thousand years present us with a gigantic quandary of human nature. As long as the standards of this bout were 6-inch sticks and 6-pound hand-chucked stones, 8-foot sticks might have provided some sort of security to someone. Today, we get restless when someone else’s pile of megatonnage is heavier than ours.

9.4 We Are Capable of a Reversal in the CO2 Curve There are, as hinted above, hopeful whispers from the world of energy that we can escape the hold that fossil fuels have on our economy. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA), in late 2022, said that solar, wind, and other renewable sources will expand much more swiftly than forecast last year [2021]. Worldwide, growth in renewable power capacity is set to double by 2027, adding as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the previous two decades.”

9.5 So, Can We Help the Scientists and Diplomats Find Solutions? Here, I’ll engage in a fair amount of wishful utopian goofing around, unlike most of this book, in which we have at least been playing some attention to reality’s tune. To begin, spending on armaments (i.e., weapons usually presented to us as defense against nationalistic aggression) should shrink (best case, disappear). Once we trust each other (How utopian that sounds!), could we use weapons of war as museum pieces describing the bad old days? How much money is spent annually worldwide on implements of war? How much would it cost to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone who needs it at a basic but adequate level? Someone with a lot of money will complain that this is socialistic. Well, one can call it anything. One thing it is: just and decent and an incentive against declaring your neighbors’ property as your own. Maybe. Perhaps those who are seriously addicted to large amounts of money could compete for chits in a worldwide videogame or an Earth-wide game of Monopoly. We need to get away from models of society that declare unnecessary wealth as a positive attribute. When will this occur? If old notions of human behavior remain in the high saddle, probably never, which will be a nasty impediment to the utopian ideas that I am working with here. The other option is a world in which approval of unchecked accumulation of wealth of could produce a small class of unimaginable wealth and a huge majority living in abject squalor. While we are dreaming of a utopian world to come if we can solve questions of nature/nationalism and war/environment, we need to address geophysical questions.

9.7  Necessary Steps

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This wonderful new world will not just happen. How do we bend the carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide curves downward and keep them there? We can dream all we want, but in the end, this is a question of how to reduce the amounts of heat-­retaining gases in the atmosphere. Without this, our utopian vision has no substance. It’s a plaything, a wish, a puff of foolish vapor.

9.6 Real Solutions Require Major Changes (and Some Satire) Real solutions to the climate crisis will involve major changes in how privileged people live and work. For example, we will need to reduce airline travel substantially. Book vacations close to home. Reduce business travel. Use Zoom for ordinary classes and annual meetings. For travel that requires automobiles, use electric. Raise the price of gasoline or patronize airlines that use chicken-fat as fuel (this has been tested, and it works). Make travel that requires oil-based fuel a matter of shame. Outlaw gas-driven vehicles after a short transition period. If you have stock in major airlines, sell it. Stop sniveling. The Earth is on the docket here. No one is going to elect me to anything on this platform: Do as I say, or the Earth as we know it, ends.

9.7 Necessary Steps In 2022, human activity on Earth emitted about 36 billion tons of greenhouse gases, an all-time high for 1 year of human tenure on this planet. Scientists estimate that world greenhouse emissions will need to drop to net zero by about 2050 to avert ecosystem collapse. This, my friends, is about one-third of an ordinary human lifetime. With every year of rising emissions, that deadline will be more difficult to reach. Since the first lump of coal was burned to provide heat or motive power in a massive, organized way, about 200 years ago, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, except for a few very brief interruptions (such as intensive pandemics), has not gone down at all. If we are talking about the destructive power and potential harm of weapons, we have gone from horses to tanks and cannonballs to immense use of fossil fuels and nuclear bombs. Now who out there can tell me that we can reverse all of these trends by 2050, 27 years from now (2023), even if I raise the ante to non-carbon energy and eliminate our weapons down to hunting rifles at vastly inflated prices so that slaves of the Second Amendment can still satisfy their blood lust in a socially acceptable way (i.e., not using our common ground as a shooting gallery, as it seems to have become in our time in the United States.) There will be opposition, of course. Think of the wailing from all those QAnon jerks who now know that the Deep State is really after their guns? Think of all the cries of “hoax” from the climate deniers who believe in all earnestness that all of this is being faked by greedy scientists raking in grant money?

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Now, I really hate to ruin your day, but, in all seriousness, we need to reduce sharply income into and size of estates and share these monies more equally. Frugality among the ultrarich must become a virtue. Accumulation of private wealth will need to become a vice, curable only with a 95 percent tax to support the poor. Anyone who objects will be allowed to go to ground with a spear carved from bamboo and two pair of underwear, plus a pen and a diary to be used to describe how she or she has reduced his or her carbon footprint. And, please, no more whimpering by the mega-rich about how unfair all of this is and how everyone could be ultrarich if he or she worked as hard as we ultrarich do. With all due respect to the oligarchs among us, that is not how the world usually works. This kind of leveling will no doubt be attacked as counterproductive socialism, especially among people who will be required to surrender some of their wealth for the viability of a sustainable Earth. This is everyone’s Earth. We all live on the same planet, where we all will die. Get used to it. Vladimir V. Putin, this means you. No one needs $200 billion and an empire that reaches into 11 or 12 time zones to cover his character flaws. Increase production of solar and wind power quickly. Then speed it up. Raise the price of gasoline to $100 a gallon, indexed for inflation, and rebate profits to people too poor to own electric cars. Be as tolerant of each other as possible as we undertake this rigorous program. If you are being asked to surrender wealth, be generous. All of this will not make everyone equal at once. We must value development of skills and talents over acquisition of wealth that enhances production of greenhouse gases. We can utilize prizes for activities that decrease use of greenhouse gas with increases in production and pleasure. I hope that human beings will not let our ingenuity kill us. In both of this book’s main threads, we deal with roots of technology that, taken to extremes (which is where we are going) will, in the future, make many peoples’ lives much more difficult, if not minimally survivable. Human use of fossil fuels that raise atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases to levels that can, if not arrested, make our everyday lives very difficult. At the beginning of their use, coal and oil were hailed as boons to human and world development. We have had less two centuries to learn just how malign their side effects can be. I’ll bet you one planet that finding other energy sources will be easier and more pleasant than going extinct on a heat-ravaged planet. Likewise, outlaw the use of uranium as a weapon of war, which is so dangerous both for its conventional destructiveness and radiation that only national leaders insanely alienated from their fellow human beings would dare to even consider. This includes “tactical,” nuclear weapons. Taken too far by leaders and nations agitated by others’ behavior, use of uranium as a weapon could be lethal to millions of people. Once more, remember that nuclear weapons also are a product of human ingenuity taken too far. Albert Einstein, whose theories made it possible, wrestled with (and was haunted by this idea until his death) what the human race should not possess.

9.9  Back to the Climate

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One of the major points of my analysis is that human ingenuity can be damningly counterproductive, especially when it is developed for use in war. War strips away the inhibitions of decency and respect for fellow human beings and other living creatures. Patriotism in war to the death is a celebrated virtue in many cultures today. Weapons that kill are regarded as the very purpose of the paramount practice of human endeavor. So how do we convince a planet full of blood-spitting nation-­ states that the same chain of events and thoughts that lead to armed combat really is going to help kill us—all of us, friend and foe. In fact, the language of war is murder. Everyone wants solutions. What would such a world look like?

9.8 What of Equality? Wealth distribution could be much closer to equal, but not totally equal, of course. Some people need to compete for money. Quit whining about the lack of individual freedom in this world. This is true in some ways, yes, but survival in a sustainable  world is not free. For anyone who wants to compete, athletics is a wonderful outlet. Try professiona lU.S. football as an excuse to smash your neighbor, or yourself. While we are dispensing with well-known chemicals that wrack humankind with ailments that we have invented, don’t take our fingers out of the toxic cookie jar until we have sampled a few others. For example, bless our drinking water, please. It’s survival. Never mix it with anything that is lethal in the short or long run. For example, rainwater almost everywhere on Earth contains unsafe levels of “forever” chemicals. “Per-and poly-fluoroalkyl” substances (PFAS) are a large family of artificially fabricated chemicals that do not occur in nature, known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. They turn life-­sustaining water into a fatal poison that permits large companies an opportunity to make profits from nonstick or stain-repellent properties that can be found in household items such as food packaging, electronics, cosmetics, and cookware. Researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet, even Antarctica. There exists no safe space to escape them (Frost, 2022). Whose world are we living in, anyway? In a sane world, such things would be illegal.

9.9 Back to the Climate “We face an enormous challenge—and a vital necessity—of urgent, fast action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global temperatures rising even further in the future,” said Petteri Taalas, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) secretary-general (Chow, 2022).

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As Chow reported: “The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 2020 to 2021 (and, now, 2023 as well) was larger than the average annual growth rate over the past decade, according to WMO reports.” The WMO also said last year’s [2022] rise in methane levels was the biggest year-1-year jump since such measurements began 40 years ago. The report also found that concentrations of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, were 1908 parts per billion last year [2022] and that concentrations of nitrous oxide hit 334.5 parts per billion. All of these, plus the aforementioned CO2 level of 425 ppm (and rising) is going to turn the Earth into a graveyard of extinctions no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels we build, until those numbers come down quickly and by a large amount. That’s how the geophysics works. There is no escape from this reality.

References Borenstein, S., & Jordans, F. (2023, March 21). Report: World is on ‘thin ice’. In Omaha World-­ Herald. Associated Press, A-4. Chow, D. (2022, October 26). Greenhouse gases in earth’s atmosphere hit record high in 2021. U.S.  National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/ science/environment/greenhouses-­gases-­earths-­atmosphere-­hit-­record-­high-­2021-­rcna53900 Cousins, I. (2022, August 4). Rainwater everywhere on earth is unsafe to drink. Euronews Green. Retrieved from https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/ rainwater-­everywhere-­on-­earth-­unsafe-­to-­drink-­due-­to-­forever-­chemicals-­study-­finds Frost, R. (2022). Rainwater everywhere on earth unsafe to drink due to ‘forever chemicals’, study finds. euronews.green. Retrieved from https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/ rainwater-­everywhere-­on-­earth-­unsafe-­to-­drink-­due-­to-­forever-­chemicals-­study-­finds Mach, K., & Treuer, G. (2022, October 30). We need to rethink how to adapt to the climate crisis. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/opinion/hurricanes-­ climate-­adaptation.html Plumber, B. (2023, March 21). World has less than a decade to stop catastrophic warming, U.N. panel says. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/climate/global-warming-ipcc-earth.html Shao, E. (2022, December 6). Renewables will overtake coal by early 2025, energy agency says. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/climate/iea-­renewable-­ energy-­coal.html