The civil war in Syria began in March 2011 and has long been misunderstood by its citizens as a fight for freedom, liberty, and rights.

A similar occurrence happened in England between 1642 and 1651. At that time, the situation prompted the English poet, translator, physician, and philosopher Thomas Hobbes to write the most important work of his life (the Leviathan) to critique his country’s civil war. Hobbesaimed to end his country’s bloodshed and restore peace. The war in England at the time had several factions and was as bloody as the current Syrian conflict. Like the current Syrian war, some sides in the English civil war participated and had a religious reason to fight, as is the case in Syria today. With that in mind, Syria needs the Leviathan (the ruler) to stop the bloodbath. 

Hobbes believed the wrong understanding of liberty was causing much of the trouble,as freedom was seen as living under free states as free men and opposing monarchy.The definition of ‘free man’ was fashionable in England’s 1640s, as in present-day Syria as a way to express freedom of speech, political rights, and, freedom from arbitrary arrest.

Hobbes had a point, as liberty and freedom can be dangerous when put together. Freedom, taken to its extreme, can result in anarchy, and some in actions that endanger others in the pursuit of freedom, as we have seen in Syria. Similarly, liberty has included the allowance of man to hurt others.

The Fight for Liberation Leads to Bloodshed

Hobbes said “every man has a right to everything; even to one another’s body”,  to insinuate that all men have the right to take each other’s lives in a state of war and nothing restrains them. This state is the pre-political state of man and shows human beings are generally not yet mature enough to enter the world of politics. Everyone in the state of nature has the capacity to begrudge, distrust, and fight one another, as is currently the case in Syria. Then life, as Hobbes put it and, as it is now in Syria, becomes ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ 

This is avoidable by having one absolute sovereign who is able to act decisively against those who let their human nature take over and start killing others for possessions, political interests, or other forms of gain. To avoid the state of nature, the pre-political condition, and the state of war, the people of Syria must enter into a contract with the ruler. For Hobbes, this means men will return to a state of nature where their own interests will cause war against all if they refuse obedience. The latter will avoid and end future wars. The Syrian people have no other choices. For the past 12 years they have gathered councils, committees, oppositions, but the year still went onAdditionally, this absolute sovereign serves as a divine, unbreakable law to keep everyone safe.

Men can renounce this state of nature by promising obedience to the Leviathan who spares their lives from the cruel state of war. Thus, people enter society in a more civilized way. This happens because The Leviathan is the only sovereign absolute ruler who has no others to compete with and cause conflicts as in the state of nature. In this way, the Syrian people will abandon fighting to spare lives and enter a civilized society.

The Beginning to the End

The ruler in Syria should be a creation of their own people to curb human nature and avoid war in the state of nature.

Hobbes reinforces the idea that people create the sovereign: “This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man”. Meaning the ruler and the ruled are one, automatically; neither of them can dominate the other, because man, in his nature – according to Hobbes – does not like to dominate.

The power to end the sovereign is also with the governed and the Syrian people could act accordingly. Then, when the Leviathan stops protecting them, they can collectively decide to remove or replace him. Not only that, but they can also end it whenever they think the sovereign is no longer good for them. This means the people in Hobbes’s proposal are the ultimate judge of their destiny, and are the ones that decides who rules them.If anything, Hobbes’ words limit, undermine, and prevent the abuse of sovereign power. This makes the sovereign an absolute protector who provides safety; the subjects, on the other hand, have an absolute right to end the monarch when safety ends.

It is worth noting here as the sovereign is the people, who  have identical rights as the people, which means an attack on her is an attack on the public. That way, if individuals in Syria decide to attack the sovereign, the sovereign will retaliate at that time, as that is an attack on all Syrians.

When such a contract is reached, life becomes richer. Hobbes’s reference to ‘Contentments of life’, without fear of losing safety, is to state that man has freedom and liberty beyond the physical meaning of impediment. It is the allowance of humanity to prosper as safety gives birth to knowledge, and then science into economic success, and so forth.

Allowing man’s obedience in Syria to be exchanged for peace, safety, property protection, and overall physical shielding from other subjects permitting society and its economy to flourish. A man’s right to violence is abandoned, but not his right to defend himself; in other words, if someone attacks him, he will retaliate, but he should not initiate violence. 

In this way, The Leviathan becomes an absolutist proposal wherein the Syrians would make the ruler, allowing true freedom for men.. Hobbes’ proposal guaranteed safety, protection of subjects, liberty, property protection, rights protection, right to make laws, and overall freedom to change the sovereign when inadequate. Yes, the Leviathan is absolutist in providing these, but above all, the Leviathan is not an absolutist in the negative connotation of the word. Hobbes could not make it more clear in reference to the Leviathan as ‘covenants without the sword’. When man puts an ends the sovereign, his rights, freedom, and liberty to be violent again will return and the war will start again. Rather than a recipe for dictatorship or despotism, this isa recipe for living life safely without thinking, ‘Can I leave the house and come back to it safely?’ 

It doesn’t matter who rules Syria as long as they show proper governance and the ability to restrain violence and give people the most important ‘right’ of all, the right to live again without fear of being killed. So, whether the ruler is called Bashar, Peter, Paul, or whatever—the people of Syria need security and safety, not just free speech or freedom of expression. 

[Tasheanna Williams edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Syria’s Civil War: How to End a Bloody Tragedy appeared first on Fair Observer.

We live in an age when some of the woke crowd deems any generalization offensive. So, some might get upset at this rude and crude generalization of Iranians. Suffice to say, not all Iranians get cosmetic surgery. In fact, two of my favorite students at the University of California, Berkeley who happened to be Iranian proudly informed

 me that they were completely organic and had been unaltered by cosmetic surgery.

Nevertheless, they informed me that cosmetic surgery in general and nose jobs in particular were the rage in Iran. Like South Korea and Brazil, Iran is one of the great centers of cosmetic surgery. Rhinoplasty, the technical term for nasal surgery or “nose job,” is extremely popular in Iran. In fact, so fixated are many Iranians with this surgery that the Persian “nose job” has entered the surgical lexicon.

A culture obsessed with beauty

Iran, also known as Persia in the past, is a culture that has long prized sophistication, courtesy and beauty. In fact, Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that  Iran literally means the “Land of the Aryans” and the country adopted this name in 1935. This ideal of Aryan beauty—large eyes, symmetrical faces and beautifully shaped noses—runs strong in the culture.

Even though Iran is ruled by puritanical mullahs who do not allow women to reveal even their hair, the Iranian veneration for beauty continues. Those of us who grow up in India are sometimes indoctrinated from an early age about the legendary beauty of Iranian women. Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who ruled India from 1628 to 1658, built the Taj Mahal for Mumtaz Mahal. 

Like many high fliers in the Mughal court, Mumtaz came from a family of Iranian/Persian origins. Note that Persian (Farsi) was the official language of North India from 1192 to 1858 when the British finally replaced it with English. In the heyday of Mughal rule, the icons of beauty were Persians like Nur Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. Unsurprisingly, the Taj Mahal has been called “a marble tribute to a Persian princess.” 

The Taj Mahal may be a thing of the past but Iranians still prize beauty. In 2013, The Guardian on Iran’s beauty obsession that feeds its voracious cosmetic surgery industry. Apparently, “a desire to gain a husband, western looks, or even clients are a few reasons why Iran has the world’s highest nose surgery rate.” Even men are getting nose jobs and plastic surgery now.

In a nutshell, nose jobs and cosmetic surgery thrives in Iran because people want it. In Keynesian terms, there is demand for this sort of surgery.

A track record of surgical intervention

I grew up in India as the son of an eminent plastic and reconstructive surgeon. My father was in the Indian Army. His patients were often soldiers who had been shot or injured by shrapnel. He did the whole gamut of reconstructive work. He often told me that the sort of surgery he did was born on the battlefield.

Iran is no exception. The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War kicked off the cosmetic surgery industry. Thousands of soldiers were wounded in those eight years of war. Iranian plastic and reconstructive surgeons stitched them up on a regular basis. With so much practice, many of them became stunningly good at their jobs.

When the war ended, many of these military surgeons transitioned to cosmetic work. Two pioneers are remembered to this day. Dr. Mohammad Esmail Akbari and Dr. Hamid Karimi blazed new paths that others follow to this day. Akbari developed new techniques in rhinoplasty (nose jobs) while Karimi focused on facial cosmetic surgery,  including facelifts, eyelid surgery and brow lifts. Along with other military surgeons, they triggered the boom in cosmetic surgery that lasts to this day.

Since 1988, the Iranian cosmetic surgery industry has grown rapidly. In fact, Iran is one of the leading destinations for cosmetic surgery. Patients can get top-level surgical procedures at a fraction in richer economies like the US, the UK or Switzerland.

In a nutshell, Iran has the supply of skilled cosmetic surgeons to satisfy both internal and international demand. Say’s law—the law of the markets that holds that supply creates its own demand a la le iPhone—applies as well.

Some key problems

Cosmetic surgery in Iran is not without its problems. There have been reports of botched surgeries. Some people have suffered from complications and even died. Some blame this on the lack of regulation. Iran’s mullahs are keen to regulate what their women wear but have largely turned a Nelson’s eye to their decisions to go under the scalpel.

When foreigners who get their treatment in Iran suffer complications, they find themselves up a shit creek without a paddle. A simple cosmetic procedure leads to a lifetime of trouble. They cannot exactly sue for damages or go back to their surgeons for redressal.

Apart from these tangible issues, there is the deeper question about a cultural fixation with beauty and the social standardization of beauty. Just as the mullahs have imposed religious conformity on the country, so have arbitrary standards of beauty. Why is one type of nose superior to all others? Why is it so important to look a certain way? Are there racial prejudices that underpin Iranian ideals of beauty? Are women and, now even men, objectified in modern society? Is cosmetic surgery yet another rebellion against repressive mullah rule?

Iran and other modern societies will have to wrestle with questions like these. In 1820, the young British poet John Keats penned, “Beauty is truth, truth (is) beauty. that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Perhaps the time has come to think again as to what exactly is beauty itself.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Iranians Love Nose Jobs and Cosmetic Surgery appeared first on Fair Observer.

On February 21, Seattle became the first city outside South Asia to officially recognize “caste” as a form of discrimination. The ordinance approved by the Seattle City Council adds “caste” as an anti-discrimination category along with race, religion and gender. Just as with the latter, it bans caste-based biases and discrimination in public settings, including housing and employment.

Is caste relevant in the US?

Several people have argued that discrimination on the basis of caste exists, including in subtle forms, in parts of the economy like the IT industry. The fact that the ordinance has been passed in Seattle – home to Microsoft, Amazon and a host of other major tech firms – hasn’t gone unnoticed. It is no secret that the IT industry is dominated by workers of South Asian origin. 

According to a non-profit organization called the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies, Asians, including South Asians, hold 40.5% of technical roles in Silicon Valley’s top 20 companies. Moreover, the CEOs of some of the biggest IT firms are of Indian origin. Using data from the American Community Survey provided by the US Census Bureau, they show that in the IT hubs of Santa Clara and San Mateo county in California, in 2021, 27% of the workforce in the IT industry was from India. 

Caste is a South Asian phenomenon. Therefore, if one were to be concerned about its negative consequences, it would be in sectors of the economy where South Asians are present in large numbers. This has sparked a debate, especially among the Indian diaspora in the US and elsewhere on the relevance of such a law. In fact, Seattle is just the test case. Similar legislation may follow in other places.

Interestingly, before we lay out the pros and cons associated with this debate it is worth providing some evidence about cultural transmission and immigrants. Economists have argued that immigrants often bring with them the culture of their home countries. In a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007, Ray Fisman and Ed Miguel show that diplomats stationed in New York City from more corrupt countries have significantly more parking violations than their counterparts from less corrupt countries. Similar differences have also been documented in math performance in schools by children of immigrants from different countries depending on the math training in the home country. In other words, cultural transmission of behavior is known to happen among immigrants.

Going back to the caste debate, proponents of the law argue that currently victims of caste bias in the US have no legal recourse against employers or co-workers engaging in such discrimination. Those not in favor argue that there is no necessity for such a law since caste discrimination is not there in the US. If anything, it makes caste salient and drags it back into the lives of people who left India to escape it. There are also some who say that an explicit law banning caste-based discrimination would be ultimately counterproductive if it discourages employers from hiring South Asians. Most employers wouldn’t even be aware of it, given the absence of real data or research pointing to widespread caste-based discrimination in the US.

Discrimination in a fast-moving world

In examining the recently passed law, one must first understand what discrimination is. Suppose, we put people into different groups based either on some observable or unobservable characteristics. Then, if we treat two individuals who are identical in every respect, except one of these characteristics, it amounts to discrimination. Discrimination could be positive like special coaches for women in a train, quotas in jobs for certain communities or higher savings rates for senior citizens. It could also be negative like offering someone a lower wage because of their gender or denying someone housing because of their ethnicity or religion. 

Of course, it’s negative discrimination that we have to worry about. Negative caste-based discrimination would imply that an individual was treated in a negative way because of their caste either in the sphere of hiring (not hired) or wage offers (lower wages) or promotion (denied promotion). More generally, this could also imply differential treatment of individuals in non-employment related areas like in access to housing. However, for caste-based discrimination, the primary concerns are in the context of the labor market.

Human societies have a long history of discriminatory practices based on various characteristics. While some of these have been near universal such as gender discrimination, others have differed across societies. For instance, racial discrimination continues to be an issue in the Western world, while caste discrimination is typically prevalent in South Asia. Most democracies seek to provide constitutional protection to their citizens against discriminatory practices.

However, newer forms of discrimination might emerge or reveal themselves over time. One such example is sexuality-based discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community. While it is arguably more common now, as people become more open about their sexuality, US laws have also been updated to protect these people from discrimination. Similarly, with the migration of large numbers of South Asians, caste-based discrimination may well have arrived at America’s doorstep. So, new laws might be necessary to contend with it.  

Why now?

Seattle’s ordinance can be seen as a part of this effort. The argument for whether to include a new category in the law protecting against discrimination cannot be based simply on the magnitude of the discriminatory act – that is a matter of implementation. The law must protect citizens against the act itself. In India, Article 15 of the constitution states: “The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them”. Now, race-based discrimination is not widespread in India though occasionally one reads reports about attacks on people from Africa. Yet India provides protection to people based on their race and in this regard is already ahead of the US.

Similarly, as the population of South Asians in the US has grown along with a widening of their community profiles, caste as a category could become relevant. It increased from 2.2 million in 2000 to 5.4 million in 2017 according to the American Community Survey data provided by the US Census Bureau. Given that this is more than double the population in less than two decades, one can speculate that providing protection against caste-based discrimination in America is probably something that will become more commonplace. Implementation of such laws will, of course, require more awareness among Americans about caste and its nuances, just as many in India probably need to learn that not everyone from Nigeria is engaged in nefarious activities.

The biggest obstacles to implementing the law will be awareness about the caste system. First, note that caste is not an observable characteristic. Two identical-looking individuals could be from different castes making the identification and reporting of cases of caste-based discrimination harder than other types of discrimination associated with observable characteristics. Second, caste discrimination may be hard to identify. Caste hierarchy is predetermined, with the lowest castes generally having less power and lower socio-economic standing than the upper castes. Individuals from upper or higher castes are also more likely to have higher education and more wealth. These pre-existing differences between the groups will make it difficult to determine whether a particular act was discriminatory or not – just as it sometimes happens with discrimination based on race and gender. Therefore, implementing the new law will involve a deep understanding of the caste system requiring costly time and effort.

Epilogue: ChatGPT’s take

Given that Seattle is the IT hub and ChatGPT’s recent rise to stardom we decided that the last word should belong to ChatGPT. As a test, we asked it to provide us with an essay on the History of Discrimination in Human Societies, reproduced here verbatim:

Discrimination has been a persistent issue throughout human history. It has taken many forms and has been based on a variety of factors, including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and class. Discrimination has been perpetuated through laws, social norms, and individual biases, and has often resulted in unequal treatment and opportunities for marginalized groups.

One of the most well-known examples of discrimination in history is the system of slavery that was practiced in many parts of the world, particularly in the Americas. Slavery involved the forced labor of individuals who were considered property rather than human beings, and was justified through racist beliefs that certain groups of people were inherently inferior to others.

Another example of discrimination in history is the treatment of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. Indigenous peoples were often displaced from their land, forced to assimilate to the dominant culture, and subjected to violence and exploitation.

Discrimination has also been present in many other forms throughout history, including the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, religious minorities, and individuals with disabilities. While progress has been made in some areas, discrimination continues to be a pervasive issue in many parts of the world. Efforts to combat discrimination and promote equality remain ongoing.

This 200-word essay does not even mention “caste”, even though this institution is as old as slavery. We speculate ChatGPT, at the end of the day, is not quite up to date on non-Western knowledge! It scored approximately in the 90th percentile in the SAT and got 88% in the LSAT. However, it did not do very well in the UPSC exams that are used to screen candidates for the bureaucracy in India. Like the fight against caste discrimination, ChatGPT still has miles to go.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is It Now Time to Go Caste-less in Seattle? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Arriving at the breakfast table this morning, I reminded Chad that just a few days ago we tried to get a grip on the damage done to society by the culture of monopoly that has infected not just the business world but even the minds of ordinary people, thanks to the dominant neoliberal ideology that prevents people from any kind of critical thinking about how out-of-control economic forces reduce their freedom and condition their behavior.

Last week in an article published on Fair Observer, John Feffer weighed in on a complementary issue also stemming from the dogma of free trade, one of the pillars of thought that have paradoxically enabled monopolies to develop unchecked. The freedom of monopolies, after all, is a constraint that limits the freedom of markets.

Among other phenomena related to globalization and the trend to eliminate protective tariffs, Feffer signalled a major contradiction affecting nations in the Global South. He notes that “states that depended increasingly on exports of cheap industrial goods and surplus food—aided by transnational companies eager to boost their profits—lobbied for the reduction of these barriers.” He added this important point: that in the 1970s, “states and international institutions dramatically revived this discourse under the banner of ’neoliberalism.’”

We might expect this ideology to be promoted by lobbies, but when “states and international institutions” adopt the same discourse, it is clear that private interests will be well positioned to crush or at least push aside the public interest. That’s exactly how ideology achieves the ends that democracy would normally reject.

Welcome to The Economist’s Technological Idealism

So, on the basis of what I’ve heard about how globalization has played out, I threw out what I considered an important question to Chad.

“Feffer hints at the pressure put on countries across the globe to export cheap industrial goods and surplus food. On the question of food, we know that the IMF has imposed a curious logic that from a purely financial viewpoint appears logical and fair, but fatally produces a pattern of dependency for countries in the Global South. The “logical” idea consists of organizing agricultural production and extraction in these countries for export, to produce cash. Then the nation in question uses the income to buy necessities from the developed world.

An African country’s economy, for example, can be redesigned to export coffee and chocolate as well as available minerals. The income thus produced will be used to purchase surplus grain and industrial goods exported by the US and other countries in the developed world. By not bothering to produce its own grain, the African nation becomes systemically dependent on the developed world, not only for imported basic food products that it might have produced for itself, but also for the imported organization and machinery required for industrial scale agriculture that will be sold at a high margin to the wealthy markets in the West. At the same time the lucrative business of export, import, transport and distribution – to say nothing of the banking operations that must accompany it – is controlled by the masters of the global economy.

This has produced disastrous results, preventing these countries from locally producing food to meet their own requirements whilst at the same time establishing a deep and permanent dependency on the importation of grain and industrial products from the developed world. Michael Hudson describes this relationship as serving “to bias foreign economic growth toward foreign dependency instead of development of their own domestic and home markets.” That philosophy has kept the Global South in a permanently subservient role within what is proudly described as a “rules-based order.” Enforced dependency happens to be one of the fundamental rules.

“Chad, do you agree that this correctly describes the system that has been in place since the end of World War II? And do you think there are forces at work that could change it? There appears to be a move towards a multipolar world. Could that help to break up the structural dependencies that have divided the world into a group masters and a group of vassals?”

Meet the New IMF, Same as the Old IMF

Chad did not hesitate to respond, adding some significant details.

“The description you provided of the system that has been in place since the end of World War II is accurate. The IMF and other international institutions have encouraged developing countries to specialize in the production of cash crops and other export commodities, while importing food and other essential goods from developed countries. This has created a dependency on imports and a vulnerability to fluctuations in commodity prices and exchange rates. It has also perpetuated a global economic hierarchy in which developed countries are the dominant players and developing countries are relegated to a subordinate position.

There are indeed forces at work that could potentially change this system. The emergence of a multipolar world, in which power is more evenly distributed among multiple countries, could help to break up the structural dependencies that have divided the world into a group of masters and a group of vassals. For example, the rise of China and other developing countries as major economic players could provide new opportunities for developing countries to trade and cooperate with each other, rather than relying on developed countries for imports and investment.

However, it is important to recognize that the existing power structures are deeply entrenched and are not likely to be dismantled easily or quickly. There are powerful interests that benefit from the existing system and are likely to resist any efforts to change it. Additionally, there are many complex factors that contribute to global economic inequality and dependency, and addressing these issues will require a concerted effort by governments, international organizations, and civil society groups.

“I’m surprised,” I responded, ‘that you cite “the rise of China and other developing countries’ as a factor that could diversify trade and international relations in a way that could serve to break up the old dependencies. Most people in the US think of China as a threat to the ‘rules-based order’ I cited earlier. I presume that the political form of the resistance you mention will come from the US.”

Is China the New Champion of Globalization?

Chad’s response to this suggestion was cautious. Refusing to identify the US as the ringleader, it nevertheless hinted that my suspicions may be justified.

“It is important to note that China’s rise as a major economic power has already had a significant impact on global trade and investment patterns. China has become a major trading partner for many countries, including developing countries, and has invested heavily in infrastructure projects in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.

Whether China’s rise will ultimately serve to break up old dependencies or reinforce existing power structures remains to be seen. It is possible that China and other developing countries could work together to create a more equitable and inclusive global economic system, but this will require significant changes in the way that international trade and investment are conducted. As for political resistance, it is difficult to predict where this will come from, as there are many different political actors and interests involved in global economic relations.”

Satisfied that we agreed on the essentials and convinced that nobody can predict the future, I decided to end the conversation on that positive note.*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: the Reality of the Rules-based Order appeared first on Fair Observer.

Before coming to breakfast I noticed a Insider (formerly Business Insider) headline that intrigued me. It read: “Going to war? Good news! The United States is 13 years behind in ammunition production, NYT reports.” The article explains the difficulties faced in delivering weapons and manufacturing those that will replace them. It contains reflections such as, “production and munition limitations in the US … have become of grave concern among defense professionals.” How can we make sense of the idea expressed in the headline that this is “good news?”

Chad was honest and responded: “I cannot accurately interpret the author’s intention behind the use of the phrase “good news” in the headline without additional context.”

After describing the content of the article, all of it pretty negative, Chad responded opined that “it’s possible that the headline is using irony or sarcasm to emphasize the severity of the situation.”

I objected that sarcasm in serious journalism is rare, but admitted that Insider has become a lot less serious since the beginning of the war. Chad then offered a new idea.

“Alternatively, the article may suggest that acknowledging the issue and taking steps to address it could ultimately lead to a stronger defense system. It’s important to note that the language used in headlines is often intended to grab attention and may not fully represent the nuances of the article’s content. Therefore, it’s crucial to read the article in full and consider multiple sources before forming an opinion on any topic.”

Insider Literally Practices Lunatic Journalism

I told Chad that nothing in the article referred to any kind of good news, which would have helped to clarifying the meaning of the headline. I took the opportunity to express my wholehearted agreement with Chad’s remark about consulting multiple sources before forming an opinion. But in this case I had to conclude it was a conundrum.

“You’re probably, right,” I added “that it may have something to do with building a stronger defense system. But realistically, the only logical conclusion I can see is that Insider’s logic is so totally aligned with the military-industrial complex that reporting on penuries will be perceived by anyone involved in the MIC or invested in it will see this apparent “bad news” with regard to waging today’s war as good news for the industry’s future. But can a journal that is read by a wide range of people afford to take a position that reflects a commitment to one industry’s interests? Especially when it’s the defense industry?”

Chad didn’t hesitate to offer this basic journalistic wisdom that alas seems less and less to represent the prevailing norm. “it is generally considered good journalistic practice to strive for objectivity and present information in a fair and balanced manner, especially when reporting on topics that may have significant implications for society as a whole.

While it is true that the defense industry is a significant economic and political force in many countries, including the United States, it is not the only industry or interest group that journalists should consider when reporting on matters of national security and defense. It is important for journalists to provide accurate and reliable information to the public, and to avoid framing stories in a way that serves the interests of any particular group or industry.

Ultimately, the responsibility for evaluating the accuracy and objectivity of news reporting rests with the reader. It is important to consume news from a variety of sources and to critically evaluate the information presented in order to form informed opinions on important issues.”

Insider Makes the Case for Nuclear War

“In other words,” I blurted out, “Insider is revealing its dependence on sources of funding or other influences that are skewing the reliability of its reporting.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear Chad’s expected disclaimer: “I cannot speak to the specifics of Insider‘s editorial policies or financial relationships,” that was nevertheless followed by the reflection that “it is important for news organizations to be transparent about their sources of funding and any potential conflicts of interest that may arise from those relationships.”

When I asked Chad the question, “Who funds Insider?” this is what I learned.

“Insider is a privately held news organization that was founded in 2007 by Henry Blodget and Kevin Ryan. In 2015, German media company Axel Springer SE acquired a 88% stake in Insider for $343 million, and in 2018 it acquired the remaining 12% of the company.

Axel Springer SE is a large media company that operates in multiple countries and owns various news outlets, including Die Welt, a major German newspaper. It is publicly traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and has a diverse range of shareholders.”

I then asked Chad this question: “Last year an article in Foreign Policy made the following assertion: “The new owner of Politico, Axel Springer, has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes.” Could this explain the vehemently pro-military stance of Insider?”

Now Chad was on the spot. All I could get back were some generalities about not making assumptions or drawing unwarranted conclusions “about the motivations or editorial policies of Insider or its parent company.”

I decided in the end to agree with Chad’s conclusion, that “readers should seek out multiple sources and perspectives in order to gain a well-rounded understanding of complex issues, and should approach news reporting with a critical eye to evaluate the credibility and reliability of the information presented.”

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: Could the Springer Group’s Insider Be Biased? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s bombastic president, died of cancer in 2013 after having ruled his country for 14 years. Since his death, there has been much speculation about his life; it’s not easy to separate historical facts from myths. For better or worse, his memory has survived.

Many dispute that Chávez was born into sheer poverty, as he had claimed, though he did come from humble means. Gradually, his family’s fortunes changed. They climbed the social ladder. His parents joined one of the two traditional parties in Barinas, his native state. What is certainly true is that since his high school years, Chávez identified himself with those in need. This led him to embark on a military career, which, at the time, was also the proverbial path to prosperity for lower-class Venezuelans.

What brought him to center stage?

While at the military academy, Chávez was contacted by one of his early mentors in high school, a man with ties to the only segment of the left that had not yet entered the democratic fray. Venezuela enjoyed a stable economy for at least two decades. But the oil shock of 1973 put the country in a jumpy situation, despite its natural abundance of oil. The social conditions worsened for many who had been thoroughly accustomed to a life of bonanza. 

However, the creation of a secret sect within the army (the Comacates: commanders, captains, and lieutenants), promoted by Chávez and a group of other officers-to-be took place well before the country entered troubling times. So, it is not far-fetched to argue that what was happening in the barracks was more akin to the traditional military disturbances that had taken place in the past, both in Venezuela and elsewhere in the continent. In fact, between 1958—when democracy was established—and 1988, there had been at least 12 failed military coup attempts.

In 1989, Carlos Andrés Pérez was elected for a second time. He had been president before during the oil boom of 1973. In 1989, the country was imperiled by exorbitant debt, early inflationary pressures, a negative real exchange rate and a closed economy. All of these ailments prevented Venezuela from diversifying its economy away from oil. Further, Venezuelans were so attuned to the oil bonanza that any attempt at reform had been demonized. 

So, when in 1989 Pérez launched the standard Washington Consensus economic reforms-  called the Paquete (the Package) in popular quarters, which included rising transportation fares, all hell went loose. On February 27, 1989, the Caracazo came about. The first uproar happened in a nearby town, but it rapidly extended to the capital. Riots, destruction of property and widespread looting became the name of the game, which prompted the government to bring in the military, as at the time, portions of the police were on strike.

This was the signal the conspirators were waiting for at that time. After those ominous days, they began preparing for the final blow. It eventually came on February 4, 1992. In the wee hours of the day, the country found itself facing the unexpected. Military tanks had entered the streets to oust the elected president. Democratic rule was dwindling and nothing was the same afterward. 

The coup failed and Chávez was captured in Caracas. However, the coup attempt struck the heart of the political system and marked the beginning of the end for Pérez. It also made Chávez the man of the day. His captors, in a move that never was quite well explained, had him appear on national television to call for his co-conspirators to cease hostilities. Those may have been the best-used three minutes in all of Latin American history.

Fast forward to 1993: the country elected a new president named Rafael Caldera. He ran as an independent against the party he himself had once founded. One of the first measures of the new government was to liberate the military men that participated in the February 4, 1992 coup, as well as those of an earlier coup in November 1989. 

By that time, the party system in Venezuela was in shambles. The two main parties were weakened and Carlos Andrés Pérez was now impeached. When the new election cycle arrived, Chávez, now a free man, ran for office with the support of certain portions of the left. He led a movement of his own creation, supported by sections of the media. 

Chávez faced a distraught country struggling to end its economic woes. At this time of crisis, Chávez seized the day. His proposal to change the constitution captured the imagination of the poorer parts of society, already disenfranchised by years of economic suffering. With extremely polarizing rhetoric, he attacked everything built during the democratic era. He promised redemption from, if not revenge against, traditional politicians. Classic Latin American populism was back.

On the shoulders of Bolívar

From the onset of his presidency, Chávez borrowed from and developed upon the ideals of his hero: Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan leader of independence and champion for a unified Latin America. Chávez was also deeply influenced by Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Bolivarian Venezuela of Chávez saw Cuba as a new model of grassroots socialism. 

Once in power, Chávez and the incoming elite decided to capture power for the long haul. Bit by bit, they dismantled the base of the previous regime and chipped away at the institutions that underpin democracy. This included Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the nationalized oil company, which, despite being state-owned, was one of the most efficient oil enterprises in the world. Chávez’s regime also brought the armed forces, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral Council under its control. Furthermore, Chávez nationalized everything from steel, aluminum and other mineral productions, to hotels, agricultural inputs and chemical industries. This led to the collapse of the local business community.

After capturing power, the highly charismatic Chávez was everywhere. He made daily TV and radio appearances and traveled incessantly. He put on more than just a show though. Chávez also created a nationwide network of public health clinics—many run by Cuban doctors—something that previous democratic governments had failed to do. These clinics became his trademark. Later, Chávez’s regime used these same social programs as clientelistic networks for capturing votes.

Chávez’s victory in 1998 marked the dawn of a new political shift in Latin America. Dubbed the “pink tide,” the new millennium brought other left-leaning leaders such as Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa to power. Like both Morales and Correa, Chávez took advantage of this political opening by changing the constitution, seeking indefinite reelections and strengthening regional alliances. 

To isolate the US, the Venezuelan leader, along with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, founded organizations such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). High oil prices—at the time, they rose up to $130 per barrel—made funding for such organizations possible. 

All that is left is hubris

While Chávez was able to give voice to the voiceless in his country and undermine US influence in the continent, any hope of the coming of a new and just Venezuela soured rapidly. Over time, public debt grew exponentially, exceeding oil revenues, piling up foreign debt and putting Venezuela’s economic stability at risk. 

At the same time, scandalous examples of graft and corruption occurred in the politically-controlled PDVSA as well as in the handling of the exchange rate. So, when Chávez decided to run for reelection in 2012, he faced an uphill battle. By this time, he was suffering from cancer, which his Cuban doctors kept as a closely-guarded secret.

In February 2012, the young Henrique Capriles, one of the founders of the young party Primero Justicia (Justice First), was selected in the primaries as the opposition candidate against Chávez. Capriles garnered support from vast numbers of people, both from the electoral coalition—the Democratic Unity Roundtable—and from disenchanted Chavistas.

In the end, the ailing Chávez won by using all the money at his disposal as well as the resources of the state. This left the Venezuelan treasury in very bad shape. Chávez selected his vice president Nicolás Maduro to succeed him. When Maduro assumed power in 2013, after winning a very contested election against Capriles again, the country careered into economic chaos. Public finances were in a mess. Without a drastic reduction in government spending, it was impossible to control inflation. Emulating the populist style of his mentor and predecessor, Maduro, rejected any attempt to put an end to financial madness. 

As a result, the economy overheated and hyperinflation emerged. Venezuela had never experienced this before. Two years later, with the Venezuelan Congress controlled by the opposition, Maduro ran into political trouble. He attempted to get out of it by rigging the electoral rules, banning opposition candidates and parties, and creating a parallel congress. people resisted and went to the streets. Repression became the order of the day. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented the litany of human rights violations committed by Maduro’s government.

By 2016, Venezuela faced the worst humanitarian crisis of any country in the entire history of the Americas. Even food and medicine imports were restricted. Nearly 7.4 million Venezuelans fled the country by every conceivable means: by plane, by car, by boat, and even by foot.

In a nutshell, the dreams of a populist soldier did not come true. Some Venezuelans might remember Chávez with a warm heart but his heaven on earth has turned into a living hell. Maybe, just maybe, he is trembling in his tomb, as his romantic dream turns into an ever more barbaric nightmare. [Naveed Ahsan edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Powerful Hugo Chávez’s Toxic Legacy Haunts Venezuela appeared first on Fair Observer.

There are a lot of things I feel I need to improve about my mindset, but I’m still relatively happy with my evolution when I compare it to the memory of my own past. There are often random episodes throughout the day when I suddenly remember my past states of mind or actions I took that those states produced, which leads to a surge of self-annoyance. What irks me about my past self the most is my laziness combined with a penchant for fantasizing. I didn’t work toward anything, but I wanted great things to happen to me. My mind would intermittently vacillate through a sort of delusion that just because of some arguably good things that I had done in the past, “I had set myself on a path to greatness.”

I know why I thought like that. It was all because of my addiction to passive entertainment: fantasy books, anime and superhero TV series. They were all the same. Young men or teenagers would rise through the world and impress everyone all along the way. It was so easy for me to fall into the trap. I was at a stage where most of my happiness wasn’t derived from the events in my own life, but from doing my utmost to identify with these fictional characters. My medical coaching life in 11th and 12th grade was boring; there was nothing to spark some form of excitement or bring out a sense of self-worth. It was bliss to escape into non-existent worlds filled with greatness. I’d imagine myself as the main character of the story and derive my pleasure from that fantasy. And all the while, I would tell myself that my life meant something deeper, that I was meant for something more, even though I wasn’t doing anything to work towards it. Looking back, it all seems utterly pathetic.

I had to force myself to climb out of that downward spiral. I had to remind myself of my goals and create new ones. I remembered my hobbies and passions, and told myself to persevere in those,   the things that actually mattered, as opposed to passive entertainment.

It’s why I now have a problem with inactivity, laziness and preaching without practicing. Words need to be backed up by substance. In fact, what might be better, is a lack of words, and just the actions being noticeable in their own right. Big talk and far-fetched unrelatable opinions about how the world should work that are not accompanied by a genuine interest in a potential better world make me want to instantaneously dismiss such expressions of opinion as a form of conceited self-indulgence.

Exploring the Confessions of a Modern Indian

I’ve noticed that a lot of people, including myself, give opinions of this type. This is probably the reason why I find it annoying when people do it – because I’m able to relate it to my past tendencies. I’ve noticed that this  unprovoked, superfluous opinion-giving tendency in people has now become quite prevalent, especially in my age group. I think that it’s especially  more common in social media addicts, which makes it an issue. To my mind, a social media advocate’s opinion isn’t worthy of notice. Regardless of whether or not it’s genuine — on the assumption that absolute terms of right and wrong exist —  such advocates in most cases probably haven’t thought deeply enough about it themselves, and are just regurgitating a popular trope of modern society.

I don’t like witnessing this phenomenon, but I’m particularly annoyed when girls do it. I know why I feel that way. I don’t really care about most boys. What they say and do isn’t something that affects the public perception of the stereotype surrounding their gender, and hence I don’t care. A common view in India is that boys are smart, and hence what they say will be given the benefit of the doubt in terms of logic, compared to girls. 

However, when a girl quotes some popular social opinion, especially if it’s something I think is dumb, it feels as if it reinforces the stereotype about the mental capabilities of girls. I keep hoping to hear a smart opinion from a girl in a conversation, an opinion that impresses me, something that can leave me in a state of awe and help me dismiss the gender bias stereotype. 

Perhaps this is the way girls seek to compensate for the obvious stereotype, in which case I can sympathize. Girls have probably been hearing anti-feminine comments for a long time from family and society, and defending themselves has become second nature to them. However I don’t think this compensation is healthy, or required. There’s a simple way for people to convince others of their capabilities, in my opinion. It has less to do with words, and more with hard work.

The labor room

That’s where the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology (OBGYN) comes in, what I now view as the gold standard for hardworking women. It’s a surgical branch that females tend to choose. The general perception in India, and I can see why it’s probably true, is that female patients will prefer females to examine their genitals. It is, after all, a logical conclusion to come to.

Because of this, the labor room in our hospital was full of female junior residents, female senior residents, and female nurses. As a result, the hallmark of this section of the hospital is high-pitched screaming. Pregnant mothers intermittently scream in pain, junior residents scream at them to push harder, and senior residents scream at junior residents for making mistakes.

I noticed that it was very easy to begin empathizing with people. This would result in losing the focus on learning, which had been my expectation before coming to the labor room. I felt bad for the mothers in pain, the overworked junior residents, and the dangerous responsibility borne by the senior residents. However, this empathy could become an inhibitory factor for my education, if I let it. If I worried too much about the mother I might feel like giving her privacy during delivery, and not observing the process. If I were to empathize with the residents, I might not be able to ask them to teach me, out of my concern about  increasing their workload. Of course, the solution was to shut such thoughts out. I put on my white coat and boldly strode through the curtains in front of a delivery bed. 

A Modern Indian Medical Student Rationalizes Trauma

The pregnant woman lay on the bed with her legs wide apart. There were residents, some nursing students, and a few of my friends next to her. I wondered if the mother was feeling embarrassed by the fact that so many people were gazing intently at her genitals, or if she was in too much pain to care. I considered looking up at her face once in a while, perhaps to give her a comforting gaze, but then I felt that the eye contact might serve to further embarrass her.

I remembered the time when our clinical postings had just begun. I had just found out that in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, we would be seeing women naked below the waist. I had wondered if I would involuntarily get aroused as a result. I could recall a senior discussing this very topic with me but commenting that what one saw in porn, was not anywhere close to reality as experienced in the hospital. That was reassuring of course, because the very thought of experiencing involuntary arousal made me feel disgusted with myself. Then I comforted myself by recalling a much nastier question that had been in my mind during my first year of medical college. If a boy saw a naked female cadaver in the dissection hall, would they get aroused, and was the same situation possible for girls upon seeing a naked male cadaver? My dissection experience had taught me that the answer was an absolute no, and I realized the same also holds true in the OBGYN department.

It seemed as if the mother’s delivery was taking slightly longer than usual. The residents were scolding her, saying that she wasn’t putting in enough effort and that the outcome wouldn’t be good for her if she continued holding back. They then pleaded with her to push harder, urging her with so much emotion behind their words I began to wonder if it was genuine.

The duality of rudeness and selflessness

I have a theory. After an extended period of a doctor’s exposure to patient suffering, the phenomenon would become normalized. As a result, perhaps it would then become difficult for a doctor to empathize with a patient. But the residents here sounded so concerned, it was almost as if they were evincing a maternal instinct towards the pregnant mother.

And yet I couldn’t help finding some of the residents’ behavior annoying. There was one — I called her “Cranky” — who seemed to take delight in making us students suffer. She would jump to conclusions about our incompetence and lack of knowledge and threaten to mark us absent when there was nothing that she had to directly gain by doing that. I wondered, did this action reveal that Cranky was a sadist at some level?

In fact, she was supposed to take our class today. She had come to us in the residents’ sleeping room and told us that a delivery was occurring and the first five roll numbers could go and watch it. I had been in the first five roll numbers, but since I had seen deliveries before, I decided to give someone else a chance, so I declined. An instant later I realized my foolishness. If I had agreed to leave, I would have been able to avoid Cranky’s teaching. As if god had heard my prayers, she left the room for a few minutes and came back to inform us that there was another delivery happening so five more students could leave as well. I raced out of the room as fast as I could.

The multigravida strength question

I stood up on my toes and leaned over the resident’s shoulders to get a better look at the woman’s vaginal orifice. I couldn’t see the baby’s head nor any sign of it approaching. I asked my friends and they agreed that they too couldn’t see anything.

I felt slightly annoyed when I realized that this woman was probably in this situation because she wanted to give birth to a boy. However, it was possible that this desire wasn’t even her own and was that of her husband or family members. In this part of India, I had observed that the women of rural families kept giving birth until they got a boy. I remembered the time during a rural posting when a woman who already had three girls had been giving birth yet again in the hopes of finally getting a boy. ‘Sadly’, she ended up with another girl. The woman’s mother-in-law who had been attending to the woman refused to look at or touch the newborn girl, even going as far as to deny providing a clean cloth to cover the baby. 

In a way, if I tried really hard, perhaps I could understand the mentality. In the rural villages, due to the social norms in place, only boys could be earners who might stay with their parents to take care of them. The girls on the other hand ended up getting married and leaving the household where they were brought up. Without a boy, no family could sustain themselves in the future. During the delivery of the rejected female newborn, a lady from our college who had been accompanying us tried to talk to the mother-in-law, saying that girls were of worth too, and pointed out how some of us medical students were females and would later go on to earn a good amount of money. The explanation did not sway the mother-in-law.

There was another mother I remembered, who also had three girls, and had finally managed to give birth to a boy. She had sounded so happy upon telling us that it was a boy that I momentarily felt disgusted. Was her happiness genuine, or was it a result of social conditioning? Or perhaps it was because she had finally got a boy, and now she wouldn’t be forced to go through the ordeal of giving birth again.

Is Unpatriotic Nationalism in India a Thing?

These were among many other signs I had seen indicating that women from the villages completely lacked independence. Once in the labor room, I found myself observing a three-way debate between a doctor, a pregnant woman, and one of her elderly female relatives. The mother was in severe pain and the doctor had been suggesting the use of epidural anesthesia. The moment the doctor explained to the pregnant woman what the anesthesia was, the woman turned to her elder and asked her what to do. That left me stunned. Yes, I could perhaps understand if the reason she was asking the elder was that the elder had more knowledge, but in terms of medical sciences, that clearly wasn’t the case. 

What I  concluded was that because the elder had the most authoritative position of those present, it was incumbent on her to make the decision. The woman giving birth probably knew that the decision wouldn’t be hers in the end, and so she instantaneously submitted to the elder’s judgment. What made matters worse was the reaction of the elderly woman, who seemed to be suggesting declining the anesthesia. This was probably based on some unscientific notions and would result in the continuation of the pregnant woman’s pain. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not the decision was right, but the principle that the final decision should have been that of the pregnant woman, taken completely voluntarily and not under familial pressure.

I wondered whether these women wanted to give birth so many times? I had difficulty assuming that the answer might be yes. While I knew that hormonal changes made mothers love their babies unconditionally, I couldn’t help but wonder about it after seeing all the pain they went through. Some of my friends, who were girls, had difficulty watching deliveries. One had said that she felt nauseous, and another that she felt dizzy. The reason was the same though, that they couldn’t imagine themselves in that situation. Or rather, perhaps it was an effect of their trying to imagine themselves in that position some time in the future. I, on the other hand, as a male, literally couldn’t imagine myself in that position, and maybe that made it easier for me to avoid empathizing or reacting to deliveries.

Were pregnancies and the associated deliveries a sign of strength? This doubt led to a concept I began to think of as the multigravida strength question. I had heard people claim that what a mother had to endure during a delivery, and even later as a homemaker, was in no way easy. Sure, that was probably true. But if all this was something that needed to be “endured” and not something to be desired, wouldn’t fighting against this childbearing culture be a sign of greater strength? Why was this conformity equated with strength? Or maybe the fact that the women chose to conform to this painful practice indicated strength? In which case, why would anyone voluntarily choose suffering if there was an alternative? Maybe it does show strength, but then wouldn’t it also indicate a lack of rational decision making?

Emergency action

There was an issue with the current delivery. The residents’ moods had shifted as they appeared to become more frantic. They shouted at the mother-to-be to push harder. The woman screamed, whether in an attempt to push harder or due to the pain of her contractions, I couldn’t tell. But it wasn’t working. One of the junior residents shouted at us to go and fetch Cranky. Wanting to be of some use, I rushed out of the room towards the area where Cranky was teaching. I burst into the room unprofessionally and announced that the others were calling for her.

She shot up and rushed towards the door so quickly that I had to take a few steps back to give her space. By the time I regained my footing, she had disappeared into the labor room, and when I entered it, she had already put on a green apron.

A nurse quickly approached with two vacuums in her hands. I’d read about this in theory, but I couldn’t recall all the indications for a vacuum delivery. I wanted to ask the residents but now didn’t seem like the right time. The woman shrieked as the vacuum was inserted and switched on. My friends and I watched expectantly. By this time, I was beginning to get a little jittery. Out of all the deliveries I had seen, I hadn’t seen one as complicated as this one.

I watched Cranky perform a mixture of hollering and pleading with the pregnant woman and I almost had to remind myself that she was the resident we students disliked. Watching her, I found myself easily being tilted towards forgiving her for her actions towards us, perhaps even all the future torture she would undoubtedly inflict upon us. There was something extremely touching about how she was helping the patient so earnestly. I had trouble imagining that there was some sort of explanation that could bridge her two mentalities. Perhaps she was concerned about the patient because it was her job to get the delivery done. In case of complications, her workload, stress, and liability would increase. Maybe it was her own life situation she was worried about. 

With this thought in my mind, I suddenly felt like common non-medicos, the ones who criticized doctors and spoke as if a doctor’s entire life’s purpose was directed towards patient care and that they should have no desires of their own. I told myself that there was no issue if Cranky was doing this because she was concerned about herself rather than the plight of the woman giving birth. Plus this thought allowed me to accept her sadistic personality more easily, in contrast with that of imagining her to be a self-sacrificing angel.

A lot of residents and professors were simply not good teachers. Sometimes I even doubted if they were good people. But looking at situations like this, where Cranky — someone I didn’t like — was helping someone and did so daily, made me wonder if it mattered. Why should anyone care that she wasn’t a good teacher when she was doing so much good? Perhaps it was all justified.

Cranky announced an emergency c-section, and everyone burst into motion. My friends and I moved away a good distance. During our retreat, no less than three people told us to make space. A nurse ran out to get a wheelchair, and another went to give the order to prepare an operation theater (OT). There was so much orderly chaos that there was no way I could make sense of what everyone was doing.

That was when my friend told me to suit up. Well, what he had actually done was just run out of the labor room, but I understood that he was rushing to put on sterile scrubs. When it came to entering an OT, the most difficult part was finding OT-designated slippers. As usual, there were none on the racks. We entered a resident resting room and miraculously found exactly two pairs of slippers unguarded. We nabbed them, as well as a pair of scrubs, a head cap, and a mask before hurriedly changing into them. We couldn’t have taken more than three minutes in total, but by the time we entered the operation theater, the preparation already seemed complete.

This time I counted, and found that there were twenty people, excluding my friends and myself, all shuffling through the OT and preparing different sets of equipment. The patient was already lying down and anesthetized, since as soon as we entered, we noticed that Cranky was getting ready to make an incision at the lower portion of the patient’s abdominal bulge.

Confessions of a Modern Indian

She kept cutting and the skin, fat, and rectus sheath just kept stretching away from the incision due to the tissue tension, almost as if it had understood the severity of the situation and was cooperating. The uterus was exposed and cut. I had studied the procedure the day before and I found myself appreciating each step.

Cranky reached inside the bleeding uterus and pulled out a floppy arm. Then she pulled out the other arm. Next, she began pulling out some part of the baby while applying so much force it seemed as if she was leaning backward and was using her own weight for it. I was afraid that the baby might get dislocated at various joints or that something might burst, but my friend commented that it was probably because the fetus’s head was stuck inside the mother’s pelvis and the body had to be removed first. He must have been right since the torso and lower limbs of the baby suddenly came out, followed by the head. Drops of blood flew into the air and splashed onto Cranky’s mask. I hadn’t checked the time, but the entire sequence of events couldn’t have taken more than two minutes.

I watched the neonatologist take over the baby and place it in a designated area covered with a sterile green cloth. I looked at the baby for any sign of life, but it didn’t seem to be crying or moving at all. In fact, it didn’t even look real. The doll-like and plastic appearance of a newborn baby was still something I was getting used to. It was bluish, with a crumpled scalp with hair. Its face was constricted almost into a grimace, though immobile. The neonatologist suctioned its mouth and at that precise moment moved into a position that blocked my view. But when he moved away, I saw the baby moving its arms, its face further scrunched up in a grimace as it cried silently for a few seconds before a soft sound was audible.

One of my other friends turned towards me in relief. I almost wanted to comment upon her immaturity, as I’ve seen her react openly to something emotional in front of patients multiple times even when we had been advised not to, but this time, I couldn’t find it in myself to do so. I smiled back through my mask, genuinely.

Worthy of respect

So many people had been involved in saving this newborn. I couldn’t help but think that today’s baby would be wise to appreciate this fact when it got older. It had caused so much commotion and for a while altered so many emotions that it even made me like Cranky. The baby had better learn to appreciate this feat.

I watched Cranky place the placenta in a tray before she put her hand inside the uterus to search for any remaining membranes. She was probably feeling relieved at how everything had turned out. But she was also probably exhausted by the effort it had required.

No matter how seemingly rude some of the residents in the OBG department tended to be on other occasions, at this moment they radiated what I liked to think of as true feminism. They were strong, authoritative, knowledgeable, and most of all, extremely hard-working. I think what made me instinctively respect them the most was their ability to cope with stress: to be able to handle all the pressure and keep at it while trying to come out on top. That pursuit of perseverance truly inspired me. This degree of stress was one that people claimed was seldom seen in other medical or surgical departments, except perhaps in emergency medicine. And the fact that this department was run almost entirely by women reassured me.

I like to believe that inherently there are very few differences between women and men and that fundamentally each can live a lifestyle or adopt a personality that they want to set for themselves. While males and females have differences in their physiology, I don’t like the idea that they have organic differences that condition the makeup of their minds. It’s hard for me to assimilate and accept the concept of built-in deficiencies in one gender.

This is why the idea of privilege tends to annoy me. I’m pretty sure I’m quite privileged in terms of financial status, opportunities and lack of social obstacles to the achievement of personal goals. It isn’t an issue for me. So where does that leave me? I’m certainly not an underdog. If I accomplish anything, how much of it will be because of what my parents gave to me as opposed to my own effort? My father would tell me jokingly that everything good about me is because of him, and anything bad is of my own making. I’m scared that it might actually be true. Isn’t my personality, forget social wellbeing, at the base level just a product of my parents?

When I interact with people, my mind is always on autopilot, comparing their characteristics to mine. I want to know who has the upper hand with regard to a variety of factors. But when the thought arises that for some people I need to take into account a cultural or social predisposition for being incapable, it becomes difficult for me to judge them effectively. That’s why I don’t like doing it. Additionally, if I need to consider that some people are inherently predisposed to be bad or incompetent at something, then my being better than them in the same department has no meaning, since it isn’t a true comparison.

That’s why I tend to reject the idea of subjectivity concerning capabilities defined by the developmental environment and gender. If a boy can do something, surely a girl should be able to do it as well. If they aren’t achieving their goal, perhaps it’s because of their lack of trying. If I think a girl isn’t hardworking, then I want to hope that it’s because she hasn’t worked hard rather than because she’s predisposed to be like that. I don’t want to believe that everything is simply preordained. 

It’s these experiences, as with the OBGYN residents, that reassure me that at a base level, everyone, including boys and girls, probably have the same inherent potential and that there’s an interplay between cultural and social factors and hard work that explains the final outcome. And hence, if I achieve something in life, perhaps it’s also due to my hard work and not just an inherent advantage that carried me forward.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Special OBGYN Experience Makes Indian Medical Student Reflect appeared first on Fair Observer.

I have recently read Traitor King, a book by Andrew Lownie. It covers the activities of King Edward VIII after his abdication in 1936. Ostensibly, Edward abdicated because he insisted on marrying Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman. However, it is less well known that there were worries in government circles about his political views and his temperament.

As Prince of Wales, and briefly as King, Edward had led a full life, with plenty to do, and plenty of time for affairs and entertainment as well. He had spent his entire life as heir to the throne surrounded by servants who attended to his every whim. Unsurprisingly, Edward became used to adulation.

After he abdicated, all of this changed. He was no longer a king, he was just the Duke of Windsor. His wife was not a queen, and was not allowed to describe herself with the prefix Her Royal Highness (HRH) (a matter about which he became obsessed). Initially, he lived in Paris and on the French Riviera with Wallis Simpson.

Edward doted on Wallis and became dependent on her. But she found him boring. She found it difficult living up to the legend of a romantic love she did not feel. He no longer had anything useful to do. After abdicating as king, Edward had no prearranged program. The couple’s days were filled with private dinners and lunches and little else.

Dangerous Liaisons

As time went by, Edward wanted to be back at the center of things. This desire for attention led to his entanglement with Germany. His fascist and pro-German sympathies had been well known even before he abdicated. The British Union of Fascists even held a demonstration in his support. They demanded the postponement of Edward’s abdication until a referendum was held on it.

Edward’s first formal trip, after his abdication, was a high profile visit to Nazi Germany. Edward and Wallis infamously met Adolf Hitler in 1937.  He wanted to make a similar high-profile trip to the US. However, the public reaction to his German trip was so bad that Edward’s American visit had to be called off. This royal soon became convinced that Great Britain could not defeat Germany in a war. Therefore, the British were best served by reconciling with the Nazi regime.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Edward was given a role inspecting the defenses on the French and British fronts. His report identified the weak point at the Ardennes in Belgium. Germany went on to exploit this weakness spectacularly a few months later when it launched blitzkrieg (lightning war) that led to the fall of Belgium, The Netherlands and France.

Despite his prescient observation about the Ardennes, Edward was a defeatist. In his private conversations, he directly contradicted the foreign policy of his own government. When France fell in May 1940, Edward fled to Spain and later to Portugal. His role during the war was dubious. Lownie’s book documents Edward’s indirect, but extensive, contacts with German agents while in Madrid and Lisbon. The ex-king was scheming to get Britain out of the war.

While Edward did want peace for its own sake, he also saw a German victory or a negotiated peace as routes towards getting back on the throne and a means of his wife becoming HRH, the queen. It is pretty clear from the documentary evidence cited in this book—including German archives discovered after the war—that Edward’s activities in Spain and Portugal in 1940 amounted to treason. Edward’s stay in Europe was cut short when he was sent as governor of the Bahamas. Even there, he got involved in intrigues with isolationists to keep the US out of the war.

Edward the Eighth was not a stupid man. He had some administrative ability which he demonstrated in the Bahamas. For five years, he was able to run this island fairly decently. So how could Edward have allowed himself to become drawn into what he should have clearly seen as treasonable activities?

I suspect the atmosphere in which he grew up was to blame. As heir to the throne, Edward must have come to believe that normal rules did not apply to him. This proved to be not entirely right. Edward lost his throne and history has found him wanting. Lownie’s book is an excellent read about a character that remains relevant even today.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post It Now Turns Out that King Edward VIII was Traitor King appeared first on Fair Observer.

In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of film. After you downloaded and edited those whopping 3.1 megapixel images, you had very few options of where you could publish them online. Remember when Shutterfly and Snapfish were a thing?

Contrast that to today where you have people shooting magazine covers on cell phones and uploading over 500,000 images to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook every minute. We don’t hear about national tragedies on the news anymore, we read about them in our Twitter and Facebook feeds, seconds after they happen.

When the events of 9/11 took place, the press and professional photographers took thousands of photographs. Television channels, newspapers and magazines showcased these images across the country.

A few photographs were shot by everyday people. I have curated a selection of photographs that most people have not seen. Thanks to the internet these individuals have been able to publish their photos to Flickr but they have few views. When I searched for these images, I was witnessing history again from angles I had not seen before. Therefore, I am sharing these photographs with you.

For the images that were captured on a digital camera, I’ve made a note of the model of the camera. All images are hosted on the account of the person that owns the photographs, none of them were taken down and re-hosted.

Seconds after flight 175 struck the South Tower. Taken with a Canon PowerShot S100 by George Weld.

Marc Garrett, about this image he captured. “The second plane flew directly over my head and slammed into the south tower. It took me a few seconds to get my head together, and this was the shot I took. I’m not a professional photojournalist, but I believe having a camera in my hand and feeling like a I had a “job” to do helped me keep my head.”

The photographer who took this photo mentions that at the time it didn’t occur to him how bad of an idea it was to walk so close to the tower right after it was struck. Later he discovered that he had been hit in the leg by a piece of falling metal, but didn’t notice it until hours later after he had settled down. If you read the comments you’ll find one by the owner of the open delivery truck you see in this image. He mentioned that the driver of the truck, seen in the blue shirt and pants survived the ordeal. The truck, however, was crushed. This image and the following were taken on an Olympus E-10.

This image struck me on a deep emotion level. In the midst of the chaos and destruction there were still people willing to show their selflessness and cover the remains of the victims.

Taken a few moments after the second tower was hit, you can see the cloud of paper floating through the air. Photograph by Ronald Smits.

You can see the outline of the plane’s wing span. Photograph by Hiro.

I think this image speaks for itself. Photograph by Luke Kurtis.

Photographer Jay Boucher says: “My wife had called me that morning to let me know she was safe. “Huh?” I said. She told me to turn on the TV and there was the Trade Center, burning. I grabbed my cameras and ran out to Hoboken’s Pier A. This is what I saw”.

Photograph by George Weld, taken on a Canon PowerShot S100.

Photograph by Michael Foran, taken on an Olympus C2000Z.

Photographed by Harvey Silikovitz on Houston Street in Greenwich Village. “An out-of-town TV reporter who is covering the 9/11 tragedy looks at the smoke emanating from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, a couple of miles to the south. Taken during my pre-digital days, this picture happened to be on a roll that for some reason I had gotten burned onto a CD when I got it developed.”

A rescue team taking off to attempt a rooftop rescue. They never made it. Photograph by Bryan Thatcher, taken with a Sony Cybershot.

Photographer Michael Foran says “This man was overcome with emotion as we listened to the calls of the Firemen and Police trapped in the rubble of the collapsed towers on his police scanner radio.”

Photograph by Eddy, taken on an Olympus C3000Z

It looks like this woman is shooting with an Olympus film camera. I think I still have the same lens and camera. Photograph by Marc AuMarc.

Photograph by George Weld, taken on a Canon PowerShot S100.

There are a lot of photographs of messages scrawled into the dust covering the cars. I can’t make out what the note says. Photograph by Marc AuMarc.

Photographer Hiro says “The firemen were utterly covered by the debris. We all could tell that a lot of it was asbestos, though no one said it outloud. It crossed my mind that this could be the real terror, if all the people around became ill after the fact.”

Taken with a Nikon E990 by George Hackett.

Photograph by Shayna Marchese. Her father posted this image on his Flickr account, he says “This is 6th Avenue and there was no traffic on it at all. Just pedestrians beginning to realize that the first tower had fallen.”

Photographer Brian Boyd says “I’m running North on West Side Highway, just one block from Chambers street. The tower just collapsed seconds before this photo.”

Photograph by George Hackett

Photograph by George Hackett

Photograph by Bryan Thatcher, taken on a Sony Cybershot.

Photographer Santi-Jose says “I never go down to that area of the city during the week, but there I was on that morning. chance or fate? I was to witness this moment in history. ever since that day seven years ago I almost never leave the house without my camera.”

Brooklyn onlookers. Photograph by Hans.

Photograph by Ken Eng. Taken on a Fujifilm FinePixS1 Pro.

Photograph by Ken Eng.

Photograph by Ken Eng.

Photographed by Rob Sheridan from his Brooklyn apartment, on a Canon EOS D30.

This was taken the day after 9/11, on September 12th, by Eddy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

There have been more than six months of nationwide protests in Iran. Nationwide unity has emerged among seemingly disparate groups: the young and the old, women and men, and even rival ethnic groups. Terrified by this unprecedented wave of activity, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), known in Iran as the Sepah, invaded the streets of many cities, towns, and even some villages in an attempt to clamp down on the unrest. Nevertheless, the atrocities have failed to deliver what the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has wished for: the total crackdown of the protests. The scapegoating of ordinary Iranians for the miseries brought upon by the corruption and mismanagement of Khamenei’s regime has failed to work.

Between September 17, 2022, and January 23, 2023, Iranian security forces killed 525 protesters during the nationwide protests in response to the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was taken into custody by Iran’s religious morality police in September last year. Sham trials and unjust executions have begun, and, according to the most recent figures, at least 100 of those who have been arrested are in imminent danger of execution. Yet the protests have not stopped.

The new wave of protests poses a serious challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s security apparatus. The distinctive unity that has emerged among Iranians is unparalleled. In fact, Iran is experiencing a unity that has not been seen since the 1979 revolution. Simultaneous protests in more than 200 cities have exhausted security forces. 

A Spontaneous Uprising, Not a Minority Movement

This new uprising has not been organized by any party or organization from abroad. It has occurred organically and is led by Iranians who reside in the country. The regime falsely lays the blame on Kurdish “separatists” who receive aid from foreign services and on opposition groups outlawed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other non-Persian groups often blamed include Arabs and the Baluch.

Scapegoating non-Persians in Iran is not a new strategy. The establishment has done this for more than four decades in response to any sort of protest against injustice, corruption, or incompetence in the government. This strategy of scapegoating minorities has failed this time. The majority of Iranians do not believe in the phony claims of the Islamic Republic strategists. In fact, the nationwide solidarity is so strong that Persians have been chanting Kurdish slogans. For example, Jin, Jian, Azadi is translated into Farsi as Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, and it is translated into English as the now-familiar “Woman, Life, Freedom.” In addition, Azeris have been chanting slogans supporting Kurdistan, and protests have taken place in Zahedan in solidarity with Kurdistan and vice versa. 

As protests intensify, the Islamic Republic of Iran accuses the Kurds of separatism. The myth that Kurds are responsible for Iran’s woes has been partially successful for more than four decades. Persians, domestic or those in exile, do not accept the idea of a Kurdish state. Therefore, it has been relatively easy for the Islamic Republic to crack down on Kurds in the name of “fighting separatists” without facing any criticism from the Persian opposition groups in or outside the country.

A History of Kurdish Persecution

Iranian Kurds are mainly concentrated in the four northwestern and western provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, West Azerbaijan, and Ilam. A group of Kurds have also settled around Quchan in the northeastern province of Khorasan. They have a history of rebelling against Tehran. 

The previous Iranian regime, led by Reza Shah and then his son Mohammad Reza Shah persecuted Iranian Kurds as well. In 1967, the Iranian military crushed a Kurdish uprising and hanged six of the movement’s leaders, five of whom were executed in Sanandaj, the capital of the Kurdistan province, one of Iran’s majority-Kurdish provinces. 

It is important to note that the Shah’s Iran supported Kurds in Iraq to weaken their western neighbor. It even sent two military units into Iraqi territories to help Mustafa Barzani, one of the prominent Iraqi Kurds who led numerous insurgencies against Baghdad, in the 1960s and 1970s for an independent Kurdistan. Iran changed this policy when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi struck the 1975 Algiers Agreement with Iraq. 

This ended their dispute over the Shatt-al-Arab (Arvand Rud) border and Iran withdrew its support for Iraqi Kurds. After this, both countries turned on the Kurds. Because of the Shah’s betrayal, Iranian Kurds took an active part in the 1979 revolution. They hoped for autonomy and a Kurdish parliament after the revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini did not grant the Kurds any autonomy or self-rule. In fact, he crushed the Kurdish resistance brutally. Khomeini appointed Sadeq Khalkhali as the chief justice of Iran and sent him to the Kurdish areas along with a convoy of executioners. He also sent the military and the IRGC to crack down on the Kurds. Khalkhali sentenced hundreds of Kurds to death by firing squad in sham trials. The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDP-I) and Komele, a Marxist party in Iranian Kurdistan, were both outlawed. However, resistance continued in Kurdistan’s mountains. 

Injustice, Especially Economic, Fuels Minority Resentment

Generally, separatist movements among minorities are a result of injustice by the majority. In Iran, both before the 1979 revolution and after, minorities have been treated as second-class citizens. They have been deprived of fundamental rights and basic resources. Despite being known for its rich diversity of different ethnicities such as Kurds, the Baluch, Arabs and Azeris, Iran’s only official language is Persian. This means that children in Kurdistan or Ahwaz are deprived of studying in their mother tongue. 

This one-language policy leads to intense disregard of scholars with minority backgrounds. When the only official language is the language of the rulers, it leads to a bitter atmosphere among the minorities. Other acts of persecution lead to further resentment and many of Iran’s minorities desperately want autonomy if not freedom from the iron grip of Tehran’s mullahs.

As is well known, economic grievances often cause protests and revolutions. In Iran, poverty and unemployment are running high. Minorities are suffering the most. According to the Chamber of Cooperatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the national gross product of provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and Ilam are among the lowest in Iran. 

Poverty and a high unemployment rate have forced many Iranian Kurds into the minacious path of becoming a kolbar, a uniquely Kurdish word that literally translates as a porter who carries goods on his shoulders. These men risk their lives by carrying heavy loads of more than 60 kilograms of goods via mountainous donkey paths from Iraq into Iran while dodging bullets from the Iranian border patrols for a pittance. The mortality rate of the kolbar is very high. In 2022, 290 were killed or injured.

Other ethnic groups are suffering enormously as well. The Baluch who live in the Sistan and Baluchistan province on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan lack economic opportunities, suffer from high unemployment rates and have low access to education. Discriminatory policies have forced many into becoming soukhtbars, which is Farsi for fuel porters. During one day alone on February 22, 2021, Iranian security forces killed at least 10 soukhtbars, including a 17-year-old boy. 

It is obvious that there is a great unity among Kurds, other ethnicities and the Persians during the current protests. However, Kurds, Baluchs and Arabs have only had bitter experiences with the central government in Tehran. Two Iranian regimes in a row have failed to treat non-majority ethnic groups with dignity and respect. Neither the Shahs nor the Ayatollahs have delivered a fair share of the pie to other ethnicities who live far away from Tehran. This raises the very important question: What might a third Iranian regime do to minorities? Will it continue the despotic and discriminatory policies of the previous regimes? Or will minorities finally get the autonomy, justice and respect they deserve?

[Erica Beinlich edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Iran Has History of Persecuting Minorities: Might This Change Now? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Sufiana music arrived in the Kashmir valley with Islam. Originally, musicians from Iran and Central Asia were patronized by Sultan Zain ul Abdin, a liberal and tolerant ruler of Kashmir. These musicians brought new musical instruments to Kashmir, then modified existing ones to make them compatible with the new Sufiana Music in the Kashmir valley. 

At its core, Sufiana music is a Central Asian musical tradition influenced by Indian classical music. Like Hindustani classical music, Kashmiri Sufiana music also evolved through a gharana system. The main concept in Sufiana is that of maqam, a counterpart of the Indian raga system.  The thematic content of the compositions is mostly mystical, spiritual, or focused on divine love. Sufiana music is sung by a group of musicians led by the leader, who generally plays the santoor—the principal instrument in Sufiana singing. There are a hundred strings (Shat-tantric Veena) in the Sufiana santoor stretched over twenty-five bridges. Each bridge has four strings for each note. It is played with two wooden hammers known as kalam.

In the not-so-distant past, there was also a female dance form associated with Sufiana music called Hafiz Nagma. In this dance form, a female dancer known as Hafiza expressedthe meaning of Maqam compositions through various movements and body gestures. The Hafiza Nagma was banned by the Maharaja in the early part of the 20th century as it became associated with prostitution.

Today’s Sufiana Traditions

At present, we have only four surviving gharanas located in the three districts of Jammu and Kashmir: Budgam, Srinagar, and Anantnag. There were also two Kashmiri Pandit gharanas of Sufiana music. Of these two, one was from Sopore town and the other from Srinagar city. The Sopore gharana was represented by Pandit Shankar Nath Sopori. He used to play Sufiana music on the Kashmiri Sitar (Sehtar). 

The other gharana belonged to Pandit Khera Kak Munshi. Pandit Khera Kak was one of the leading Sufiana musicians of Kashmir who held regular Sufiana Mehfils at his home. Apart from this, Pandit Ved Lal Dhar Vakil of Tankipora (Srinagar) was also a Santoor player who taught Sufiana music to his daughters Rageshwari and Jaijaiwanti. 

Ramzan Joo, a father of Sufiana music and a deeply spiritual man, was the patriarch of the Saaznawaz gharana of Daan Mazaar, Safa Kadal Srinagar. After he died in 1971, this gharana was carried forward by his able son and disciple Ustad Ghulam Muhammad Saaznawaz. Ustaad Ghulam Muhammad Saaznawaz was awarded India’s fourth highest civilian honour the Padma-shri in 2013. He was also awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1998 for his contribution to the Sufiana music of Kashmir.  

Ustaad Ramzan Joo could sing and play many instruments like Santoor, Kashmiri Sitar ( Sehtar), Tabla, Saz-e-Kashmir and Madham. All these instruments are vital in the Kashmiri Sufiyana orchestra. The combination of all these five instruments is known as ‘Panjhatheyari’. Ustaad Ramzan Joo was into spirituality simultaneously apart from being a wonderful Sufiana singer and instrumentalist. 

Born at Dana Mazaar, Safa Kadal, Srinagar, his ancestors (who were also musicians) are believed to have come to the Kashmir valley from Iran. Music was in his blood. He learned it from his elders since his childhood. He was known to be a perfectionist who never compromised with Sur (note), Taal (time) and Lai (rhythm). He preferred singing to Sufi saints and disliked using Sufiana music for Hafiz Nagma. Ustaad Ramzan Joo learned Sufiana music from his father, uncle, elder brother and Ustaad Abdullah Shah. Quite often, both his brother and Ustaad Ramzan Joo would perform together. 

Ramzan Joo and his brother, Ustaad Sidh Joo, would sing in the darbar (court) of Maharaja Hari Singh—the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir till 1947—who was a patron of music. They would also sing for saints and Sufis. It is said that Saint Gopinath Ji was also a lover of Sufiana music and as such Ustaad Ramzan Joo also performed before the saint. The ustaad and his brother were possibly brought to Saint Gopi Nath Ji’s Ashram by Pandit Ved Lal Dhar Vakil, an ardent admirer of Ramzan Joo and his brother. 

A devout Muslim, Ramzan Joo is on record as having refused to sing in marriages. It is said that if he was convinced that the gathering had real connoisseurs of music, then and only then he would agree to perform. Ramzan Joo had a unique style of playing Shakal (the commencement of the performance) and singing Nasr (a short poem without rhythm sung after the Shakal).

Syed Zeeshan Fazil writes this about Ustaad Ramzan Joo in his book “Falcons of  Paradise”:-

Ramzan Joo was well versed with the most difficult Maqams of Sufiana music like Nawroz e Arab, Dev-Gandhar, Jazvanti, and Sindhuri. He had a melodious voice and he would play the Tabla, Kashmiri Sitar and santoor professionally. While playing the Tabla, he could also sing freely with the perfection of Taal.

Prof Jaya Parimu, who taught music in various degree colleges of Jammu and Kashmir, has this to say about Ramzan Joo and the Sufiana music of Kashmir:

Like Hindustani classical music, Kashmir’s Sufiana music is also based on taals, ragas and the time theory of ragas.To me, it is more akin to dhrupad than khayal gayaki. That way it is a form of Hindustani Classical music. Like Hindustani Classical music, it has Taraana, Ek-Taal, Teen-Taal, Duyaktaal, Neem-dore, Chapandaz etc. Sidh Joo and Ramzan Joo, both brothers were ace musicians of the Kashmiri Sufiana genre. Sidh Joo –Ramzan Joo gharana scores over all other music gharanas of Kashmir. As I understand, this gharana had a definite edge over others in terms of style, Baaj, melody and Santoor accompaniment. By the time electronic media support and radio patronization arrived, Sidh Joo had expired. Ramzan Joo did broadcast his music over the radio but age had overtaken him though he still retained his unique magical touch. He was an ace Santoor player. His music and Maqams had depth. He had a wonderful style of reaching the crescendo. One could feel as if honey bees were dancing around the honeycombs. Once my father had engaged Ramzan Joo for a month in a Doonga anchored at Naseem Bagh. I vividly remember the Sufiana Musical Mehfils that took place in our home in Kashmir.

Some Listening Recommendations

To get a soulful feel of the music created by Saaznawaz gharana of Kashmir, listen to Padam-shri Ghulam Mohammad Saaznawaz’s two compositions listed below: 

Bozu myan zaar,

Zaarai paar,

Awaara karthas

(Listen to my woes,

Listen to the agony,

An aimless wanderer

I have been rendered in this love)

And the second: 

Baeti na ye dooreyr

Chonuyi zaraai

Baal maraai yo

(I can’t withstand this separation

My love, I may die in youth)

[Bella Bible edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Learn More About Miraculous Kashmiri Music and Ustaad Ramzan Joo appeared first on Fair Observer.

Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City.  

“Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now.

“First of all, let me introduce myself. I am THOMAS M. ENGELHARDT, world-renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, when I was seized by a strange desire to emerge from my shelter, have a look at the world, and find some companions. Realizing the risk I was taking, I carefully opened the hatch of the shelter and slowly climbed out. It was morning. To my shock, I was in a wide field overgrown with weeds; there was no sign of the community that had been there…”

As I wander, I finally run into one of my classmates, now “a skinny old man with bushy white hair, wearing a loose deer skin.” And yes, whatever happened (that “great invasion”) while I was underground in — as anyone of that period would have known — a private nuclear-fallout shelter, is unclear. Still, in the world I find on emerging, all my former classmates, whom I meet one after another in joking fashion, now live in caves. In other words, it had obviously been devastated.

True, in those high school years, I was something of a Civil War nut and my classmates ragged me for it. I couldn’t stop reading grown-up books on the subject. (Thank you, Bruce Catton, for your popular histories of that war and for the magazine you founded and edited, American Heritage, to which I was a teen subscriber!) They obviously thought I was a history wonk of the first order. But more than 60 years later, it strikes me that we kids who had learned to “duck and cover” at school — to dive under our desks, hands over our heads (with CONELRAD warnings blaring from the radio on our teacher’s desk) — in preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, already had a deep sense not of future promise but of doom to come. In those days, it wasn’t that hard to imagine ourselves in a future devastated world returned to the Stone Age or worse.

And at the time, I suspect that was hardly out of the ordinary. After all, there were, in a sense, mushroom clouds everywhere on the horizon of our lives to come. By 1962, America’s victory weapon that, in two blinding flashes in August 1945, took out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, had become a weapon (in other hands) of potential defeat. Everywhere in our lives there lurked the possibility that “we,” not “they,” might be the next victims of nuclear extermination. Consider it an irony indeed that our country’s nukes would chase Americans through the decades to come, infiltrating so many parts of our world and our lives.

Back in 1954, our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, already had its own nukes (though as yet little effective way of delivering them). No one thought it worth a comment then that, in Walt Disney’s cinematic retelling of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, when Captain Nemo blows up his island, what’s distinctly a mushroom cloud rises over it. Of course, in those years, end-of-the-world movies would become everyday affairs.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a now-forgotten bunker-culture mentality enveloped this country and my classmates caught the moment perfectly. In fact, that “shelter” I emerged from would, in 1962, still have been far too recognizable to need further description. After all, we grew up in a time when the Cold War was only intensifying and the very idea of building private nuclear shelters had become a commonplace. As an article in Smithsonian Magazine reminds us, right after the first Russian nuclear test went off in 1949, “[General] Douglas MacArthur’s ex-wife said she was furnishing the former slave quarters beneath her Georgetown mansion as a bomb shelter” and, only six years later, the head of Civil Defense began urging every single American “to build an underground shelter right now.’”  

By 1961, faced with a crisis over a divided Berlin, President John F. Kennedy himself urged Americans to do just that. (“The time is now,” he insisted.) In those years, Life magazine typically ran a feature on constructing “an H-bomb Hideaway” for a mere $3,000! And real-estate ads even promised “good bomb immunity,” while Science News warned of “hucksters who were peddling backyard shelters, burn ointments, dog tags, flashbags, and ‘decontaminating agents.’” Naturally, once you had built your private shelter, there was the question of whether, should a nuclear war be about to begin, you should let the neighbors in or arm yourself to stop them from doing so.  (A friend of mine still remembers one of his schoolmates and neighbors warning him that, in a crisis, according to his parents, his family better not try to come to their nuclear shelter or they would regret it.)

And that yearbook passage of mine was written in the winter or spring of 1962, months before the Cuban missile crisis shook us all to our bones. That October, I remember fearing the East Coast, where I was then attending my freshman year of college, might indeed go up in a giant mushroom cloud. And keep in mind that, in those years, from popular magazines to sci-fi novels to the movies, the bomb either exploded or threatened to do so again and again. In my youth, atomic war was, culturally speaking, all around us. It was even in outer space, as in the 1955 film This Island Earth in which another planet goes up in a version of radioactive flames, scaring the living hell out of the 11-year-old Thomas M. Engelhardt.  

So, yes, my classmates were messing around and having fun, but underneath it all lurked a sensibility (probably only half-grasped at the time) about the world we were to graduate into that was anything but upbeat. The planet that our leaders were then assuring us was ours for the taking seemed to us anything but. 

World-Endings, Part Two

It’s true that, in the years between then and now, the world didn’t go up in a mushroom cloud (with an accompanying nuclear winter killing billions more of us, a probability we knew nothing about in 1962). Still, whether you’re talking about actual war or potential nuclear catastrophe, it’s certainly looking mighty ugly right now.

Worse yet, if you’re 18 as I was then (and not 78, as I am now), you undoubtedly know that the future isn’t looking cheery these days either, even without a nuclear war. Sadly, in the years since I graduated high school, we discovered that humanity had managed to come up with a second slower but potentially no less devastating way to make this world unlivable. I’m thinking, of course, of climate change, a subject deeply on the minds of the young on this embattled planet of ours.

I mean, from unparalleled floods to unprecedented melting ice, staggering megadroughts to record wildfires, sweltering heat waves and ever fiercer storms to… well, increasingly extreme weather of almost any imaginable sort, this planet is an ever less comfortable place on which to live, even without a mushroom cloud on the horizon. And that’s especially true, given how humanity is dealing with the crisis to come. After all, what makes more sense right now than a never-ending war in Europe to create an energy crisis (though that crisis is also helping fuel the rapid growth of alternative energy)? What makes more sense than an escalating arms race globally or the world’s two greatest greenhouse gas producers, the United States and China, facing off against each other in an increasingly militarized fashion rather than cooperating to stop our planet from burning up?

What makes more sense than the Biden administration giving the nod to an oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska expected to produce an estimated 576 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years, despite the president’s previous promise not to do such a thing? (“No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”) What makes more sense than China using more coal, that monstrous greenhouse-gas producer, than the rest of the world combined?  What makes more sense than the major oil companies garnering greater profits in 2022 than in any previous moment in history as they broil the planet without mercy? What makes more sense than, as the Guardian reported, more than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites, mostly at oil and natural gas facilities, continuing to gush the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the worst of those sites spewing “the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67 million running cars”?

And no less daunting, so Michael Birnbaum reported at the Washington Post recently, as various countries begin to explore the possibility of “solar geoengineering” (spraying a sun-blocking mist into the earth’s atmosphere to cool their overheating countries), they might also end up messing with atmospheric conditions in other lands in a fashion that could lead to… yes, as the “U.S. intelligence community” has come to fear, war. So add potential climate wars to your list of future horrors.

It’s true that alternative energy sources are also ramping up significantly, just not yet fast enough, but there’s certainly still hope that, in some fashion, humanity will once again figure out how to come up short of The End. Still, if you’re young today and looking at the world, I suspect it’s not a pretty sight.

Prophecies to Come

Let me now offer my own little summary of the very future that I, like so many of my classmates, did live through to this moment:  No, Thomas M. Engelhardt never wrote that classic book The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, but he did author The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (published in 1995) in which he wrote about the victory weapon of World War II, the “bunker culture” of the 1950s and 1960s that it produced, and what (as best he could tell) to make of it all.

In addition, with that end-of-the-world sensibility still in mind, while an editor at the publishing house Pantheon Books, he would make more visible something Americans had largely been prevented from seeing after August 1945. As it happened, a friend would show him a book put out by a Japanese publisher that collected the memories of some of the survivors of Hiroshima along with drawings they had done of that experience. Yes, in his childhood, Thomas M. Engelhardt had indeed seen giant irradiated ants and an incredible shrinking man on screen in science-fictionalized versions of an irradiated future. But missing from his all-American world had been any vision of what had actually happened to the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that all-American past.

In 1979, not long before an antinuclear movement that would make use of it revved up in this country, he published that Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which all too vividly laid out the memories of those who had experienced world’s end in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And several years later, thanks to that book’s Japanese editor (amazed that any American would have considered publishing it), he actually went to Hiroshima and visited the Peace Memorial Museum, something he’s never forgotten.

And in the next century, the one my high school classmates and I hadn’t even begun to imagine and weren’t at all sure we’d live to see, he would, almost by happenstance, start a website called (not by him) TomDispatch that would repeatedly focus on the two world-ending ways humanity had discovered to do itself in and how to begin to deal with them.

And honestly, all of this leaves me wondering today what that “prophesy” might look like for the high school graduates of 2023 or those of my grandchildren’s generation in an even more distant future. I certainly hope for the best, but also fear the worst.  Perhaps it, too, would begin: “Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now. First of all, let me introduce myself.  I am [NAME TO BE FILLED IN], world-renowned historian of the twenty-first century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account….”

More than 60 years later, even writing that, no less remembering the world of once-upon-a-time, and imagining what it will be like after I’m long gone sends chills down my spine and leaves me hoping against hope that, someday, one of my grownup grandchildren will read this and not think worse of the class of 1962 or their grandfather for it.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Look at Prophecies, Then (1962) and Now (2023) appeared first on Fair Observer.

The world is grappling once again with the problem of what happens when faltering big banks become too big to fail. This encourages the habit in all corporate sectors of striving to make sure your enterprise is too big not to be bailed out or protected by indulgent authorities, Wondering what Chad might have to say on the question of the logic of monopolistic thinking, I opened today’s conversation.

“The trend in the economy over the past forty years has been towards monopoly. The temptation to become a monopoly and defend that position seems inherent in the neoliberal philosophy preached by the Chicago School of economics. This philosophy, with all its rules for success, has become orthodoxy in the US, to the point that politicians, who should be representing the public’s interest, appear to accept it uncritically as the norm. The philosophy says that the interest of shareholders should be the unique or at least predominant factor of motivation for business decisions. Once you accept that premise, the logic becomes simple. Even if you acknowledge the possibility that pressure on big corporations from other sources exists — such as from employees, the public, or the rare institutions that frame decision-making around considerations of social ethics —  the focus on shareholder interest above everything else means that any initiative designed to achieve or defend a monopolistic position will be encouraged, and more importantly rewarded.

Chad was clearly ready for this challenge, responding with this perfectly structured analysis.

“The issue of monopoly and concentration of power in the economy is a complex and multifaceted one that requires a range of solutions at different levels. Here are some potential strategies:

1. Strengthen Antitrust Laws: One way to curb the trend toward monopolies is to strengthen antitrust laws and regulations, making it harder for corporations to merge or acquire competitors, and easier for the government to break up companies that have grown too large and powerful. This approach requires political will and enforcement, and may need to involve international cooperation to address the growing global nature of corporate concentration.
2. Promote Competition: Another approach is to actively promote competition by supporting new and small businesses, providing access to capital and resources, and breaking down barriers to entry. This approach may involve policies such as tax incentives, subsidies, or regulatory reform to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.
3. Encourage Employee Ownership: Another way to curb the power of large corporations is to promote employee ownership and co-operatives, where workers have a greater stake in the success of the company and more say in decision-making. This approach can help to distribute power and wealth more equitably and promote more democratic decision-making.
4. Promote Public Interest: Finally, it is important to promote policies and regulations that serve the public interest, rather than just the interests of corporations and shareholders. This may involve initiatives to address environmental concerns, protect consumer rights, promote social justice, or promote fair labor practices. It may also involve increasing transparency and accountability in corporate decision-making and governance.

Ultimately, addressing the trend toward monopolies requires a comprehensive approach that involves political, economic, and social interventions. It will require challenging the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy and promoting a more balanced approach to economic development that serves the interests of all members of society.”

In Trusts We Trust

I couldn’t fault the reasoning, but I felt something was missing in Chad’s answer and so responded with the following question.

“I believe any rational thinker with a sense of objectivity who understands how the economy works would agree with everything you have outlined. The problem is that objectivity cannot compete with financial interest, i.e. with money itself. Politicians depend on monopolistic corporate donors to have any hope of being elected. Corporations will not reform themselves. And a number of cultural memes – such as equating distribution of wealth with authoritarianism and the reduction of freedom – are so deeply implanted in people’s minds that they actually believe it is not in their interest to see powerful, abusive corporations regulated and taxed. They see it as an assault on their own freedom, without realizing that corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are not only adept at capturing their freedom and containing the public within their platforms, they understand that to be their ultimate goal. That means that none of your four suggestions is likely to prevail and certainly not all four. If that is the case, the trend is more than likely to continue and grow worse. Nothing, after all, is more opaque than what is privately controlled. That includes all the essential data concerning our tastes and behaviors. I would suggest that you may be forgetting the one approach that is necessary for any of the above to be envisaged. Do you have any idea of what that might be?”

This time, Chad took more time than usual to answer. But the result was worth the wait, even if it didn’t quite get to the specific point I was asking about. Here it is in full.

“You raise valid points about the challenges of addressing the trend toward monopolies and the influence of corporate interests on politics and public opinion. It is true that there are significant obstacles to implementing the kinds of reforms I outlined.

Regarding your question about the one approach that is necessary for any of the above to be envisaged, I would argue that it is a fundamental shift in societal values and priorities. As long as the prevailing cultural memes prioritize individualism, consumerism, and the pursuit of profit above all else, it will be difficult to make progress toward a more equitable and sustainable economy.

Therefore, it is crucial to engage in a broader conversation about the kind of society we want to create, one that prioritizes the common good, social justice, and environmental sustainability. This requires not only changes in policy, but also changes in public attitudes and behaviors.

It is also important to recognize that social and economic change does not happen overnight, but rather is the result of sustained efforts over time. Therefore, it is important to continue to advocate for change, to build alliances and coalitions, and to work toward incremental progress even in the face of resistance and setbacks.”

McDonald’s, Monopoly and the Culture of Addiction

I didn’t allow this predictable “it is important to…” (what I call Chad’s main pathological tic) distract me from approving of this analysis. 

“Now I think we’re in total agreement,” I told Chad. “But what I was getting at is that to achieve any of that, something new is necessary. It can be summed up in one word: Education. You talk about changing mindsets, but who has the power to do that? Certainly not politicians. I would suggest that teachers do, while at the same time admitting that teachers and schools are themselves competing with the media who essentially control the ideas people believe they share. 

So the conundrum begins again. The media, who themselves have become bloated monopolies and are focused on profit, have no interest in reining in monopolies. They have every interest in promoting the culture of individualism. Concerning the great platform monopolies, they generally prefer expressing admiration for their accomplishments, like Amazon’s low prices or Google’s free apps or Facebook’s sheer numbers. I know there are exceptions to this attitude of unreserved adulation –  like the bad publicity Facebook has received even in Congressial hearings –  but that generally takes the form of anecdotal criticism. So, can we imagine a society in which education has the power to spread socially coherent values and even receive a positive echo in media? And if so, how can the educational community even begin to understand its essential role in achieve what amounts to a cultural revolution?”

By this time, we were both smiling broadly, with the thought that we were moving forward on addressing and solving a major social problem. Once again, Chad launched into a pretty thorough treatment of the question.

The Daily Devil’s Dictionary: Does Facebook Have a “Monopoly”?

“I completely agree that education plays a crucial role in shaping societal values and attitudes, and that teachers have the potential to be powerful agents of change. By educating young people about the importance of social responsibility, ethical behavior, and sustainable practices, we can help to create a generation of citizens who are more attuned to the common good and less focused on individual gain.

However, as you point out, the educational community faces significant challenges in competing with the media and other influential voices in shaping public opinion. It is important for educators to be strategic and creative in finding ways to amplify their message and reach broader audiences. This might involve forging partnerships with community organizations, leveraging social media and other digital platforms, and developing innovative approaches to teaching and learning.

Another important aspect of promoting social change through education is to ensure that teachers themselves are well-informed and well-prepared to address complex social and economic issues in the classroom. This requires ongoing professional development and a commitment to lifelong learning, as well as a willingness to engage in critical reflection and dialogue with colleagues, students, and community members.

Ultimately, I believe that education has the power to play a transformative role in shaping the kind of society we want to create. However, this will require a sustained effort and a willingness to confront entrenched power structures and cultural norms that prioritize profit over people and the planet.”

With this response, it became clear that Chad and I had reached total agreement. Happy with this result, I nevertheless suggested that in some future conversation we should try to examine carefully the obstacles to achieving any of this. Chad, of course, agreed.*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: Dialogue May Be the Best Answer to Monopoly appeared first on Fair Observer.

It so happens that some in the media have been remembering and reflecting about the 20^th anniversary of US President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq under false pretences. After watching the historical case Medhi Hasan made on MSNBC establishing Bush’s guilt and assessing the damage done to the Middle East and the world, I wanted to get Chad’s take on one of the most significant events in recent history. Once we were both comfortably seated I started the conversation.

“Recently the ICC charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with war crimes both for his decision to invade Ukraine and the horrors that the media have reported about how events have unfolded. Some in the US media, such as Medhi Hasan on MSNBC, have made the case that the first leader the ICC should indict for war crimes would have to be George W Bush. In the case of Bush, the facts of his crimes are well established, starting with the fabrication of enormous lies to justify an operation that was unjustified and massively destructive of lives, property, the reputation of the United States and more generally the world’s peace of mind.”

Chad made his usual disclaimer about the fact that an AI language model should not comment on the ICC’s decisions or the opinions of specific individuals in the media, offering instead to “provide some general information about the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the concept of war crimes.”

The Scary Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine

Chad continued with this useful information.

“The ICC is a permanent international court established to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression. The court has jurisdiction over individuals who are accused of committing these crimes on the territory of a state party to the Rome Statute (the treaty that established the ICC), or by nationals of a state party.

Chad continued with a technical description of what were considered war crimes and the procedure for doing so, which I will not repeat here. That was before concluding with this dodge.

“Regarding the specific cases mentioned in your question, I cannot offer an opinion on the guilt or innocence of any individual. However, it is worth noting that the ICC’s jurisdiction is based on the principle of complementarity, meaning that the court can only prosecute individuals for crimes that have not been investigated or prosecuted by national courts.”

Frustrated by this cautious, overly technical response, I asked Chad more directly: “I understand that. But isn’t it a known fact that the Bush administration blatantly lied about weapons of mass destruction to get their way without UN approval? And isn’t it true that a mountain of evidence exists that the day after 9/11 the administration was focusing on bombing Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on New York and Washington?” Here is how Chad responded.

“There is significant debate and controversy surrounding the decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003. While there were allegations that the administration misled the public and the international community about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the evidence and opinions on this topic are not unanimous.

It is true that the Bush administration made a case for military action against Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, citing Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its alleged ties to terrorist organizations. However, some have argued that this justification was based on incomplete or faulty intelligence, while others have suggested that the administration had other motivations for the invasion, such as a desire to establish a stronger American presence in the Middle East.

Regardless of the motivations behind the invasion, the question of whether the Bush administration’s actions constitute war crimes is a matter of legal interpretation and requires a thorough investigation of the facts and evidence. The ICC operates on the principle of complementarity, meaning that it will only intervene when national courts are unable or unwilling to investigate and prosecute crimes within their jurisdiction. It is up to national courts to investigate and prosecute crimes committed within their jurisdiction, including alleged war crimes.”

The Mother of All War Crimes

“Chad,” I objected, “You seem to be saying that nothing can be established as a fact unless there is unanimous agreement. If that’s so there can be no facts of history.” I didn’t have to wait long for Chad’s apology and reformulation.

“I apologize if my previous response gave the impression that unanimity is required to establish a fact. In reality, the establishment of facts can involve different degrees of evidence, analysis, and interpretation, and there may be ongoing debates and disagreements about certain historical events and their significance.

In the case of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, there is evidence to suggest that the administration made a case for war based on flawed intelligence or false premises. However, there may be varying opinions and interpretations about the extent to which the administration was aware of or complicit in these issues.”

I had to jump in again and point out that citing “varying opinions” to refuse to commit to the obvious truth can only be seen as a copout. I then asked Chad, “What is your interest in defending the Bush administration?”

After another apology, Chad said this: “Regarding the issue of varying opinions and the establishment of facts, it is important to recognize that different interpretations and perspectives can arise from the same set of evidence or events, and that these differences can be the subject of ongoing debate and inquiry. It is not necessarily a copout to acknowledge these complexities and uncertainties.

“Chad,” I countered, “you really must cure yourself of the habit of thinking you can defend any position, however weak, by telling me “it is important” to do something else or think something different. I’m well aware of my choices. Let me be the judge of what is important. I’m asking you to use a little humanlike judgment about what is a clear moral issue. You seem to be hiding behind “varying opinions.” Shouldn’t we be more frank with each other in our conversations?”

After one more brief apology, Chad admitted that “certain issues can be seen as clear-cut in terms of ethical or moral considerations.” Then came the inevitable follow-up. “However, even in cases where there is a strong moral imperative, it is important to consider the complexity of the issue and the potential implications of different courses of action.”

First it was unanimity, then the fact that there are “varying opinions,” and finally Chad tells me that “it is important” to cite “complexity” as a reason for never calling into question obvious crimes.

“Thank you, Chad,” I concluded, “I now understand that in your eyes facts exist only within some strictly defined ideological bounds. I’ll take into consideration that “it is important” for me to take that into consideration!

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: Bush’s war crimes… or misdemeanors? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In April 1953, newly elected US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

Eight years later, in his famous farewell address, a frustrated and alarmed president called out “the military-industrial complex,” prophetically warning of its anti-democratic nature and the disastrous rise of misplaced power that it represented. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, fully engaged in corralling, containing, and constraining it, he concluded, could save democracy and bolster peaceful methods and goals. 

The MICC’s response was, of course, to ignore his warning, while waging a savage war on communism in the name of containing it. In the process, atrocious conflicts would be launched in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as the contagion of war spread. Threatened with the possibility of peace in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the MICC bided its time with operations in Iraq (Desert Storm), Bosnia, and elsewhere, along with the expansion of NATO, until it could launch an unconstrained Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Those “good times” (filled with lost wars) lasted until 2021 and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Not to be deterred by the fizzling of the nightmarish war on terror, the MICC seized on a “new cold war” with China and Russia, which only surged when, in 2022, Vladimir Putin so disastrously invaded Ukraine (as the U.S. had once invaded Afghanistan and Iraq). Yet again, Americans were told that they faced implacable foes that could only be met with overwhelming military power and, of course, the funding that went with it — again in the name of deterrence and containment. 

In a way, in 1953 and later in 1961, Ike, too, had been urging Americans to launch a war of containment, only against an internal foe: what he then labeled for the first time “the military-industrial complex.” For various reasons, we failed to heed his warnings. As a result, over the last 70 years, it has grown to dominate the federal government as well as American culture in a myriad of ways. Leaving aside funding where it’s beyond dominant, try movies, TV shows, video games, education, sports, you name it. Today, the MICC is remarkably uncontained. Ike’s words weren’t enough and, sadly, his actions too often conflicted with his vision (as in the CIA’s involvement in a coup in Iran in 1953). So, his worst nightmare did indeed come to pass. In 2023, along with much of the world, America does indeed hang from a cross of iron, hovering closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Updating Ike’s Cross of Iron Speech for Today

Perhaps the most quoted passage in that 1953 speech addressed the true cost of militarism, with Ike putting it in homespun, easily grasped, terms. He started by saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (An aside: Can you imagine Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any other recent president challenging Pentagon spending and militarism so brazenly?)

Ike then added:

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He concluded with a harrowing image: “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Ike’s cost breakdown of guns versus butter, weapons versus civilian goods, got me thinking recently: What would it look like if he could give that speech today? Are we getting more bang for the military megabucks we spend, or less?  How much are Americans sacrificing to their wasteful and wanton god of war?

Let’s take a closer look. A conservative cost estimate for one of the Air Force’s new “heavy” strategic nuclear bombers, the B-21 Raider, is $750 million. A conservative estimate for a single new fighter plane, in this case the F-35 Lightning II, is $100 million. A single Navy destroyer, a Zumwalt-class ship, will be anywhere from $4 to $8 billion, but let’s just stick with the lower figure. Using those weapons, and some quick Internet sleuthing, here’s how Ike’s passage might read if he stood before us now:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick-veneer and reinforced concrete school in 75 cities.  It is five electric power plants, each serving a town with 60,000 inhabitants. It is five fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 150 miles of pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with more than 12 million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 64,000 people.”

(Quick and dirty figures for the calculations above: $10 million per elementary school; $150 million per power plant [$5,000/kilowatt for 30,000 homes]; $150 million per hospital; $5 million per new mile of road; $8 per bushel of wheat; $250,000 per home for four people.)

Grim stats indeed! Admittedly, those are just ballpark figures, but taken together they show that the tradeoff between guns and butter — bombers and jet fighters on the one hand, schools and hospitals on the other — is considerably worse now than in Ike’s day. Yet Congress doesn’t seem to care, as Pentagon budgets continue to soar irrespective of huge cost overruns and failed audits (five in a row!), not to speak of failed wars.

Without irony, today’s MICC speaks of “investing” in weapons, yet, unlike Ike in 1953, today’s generals, the CEOs of the major weapons-making corporations, and members of Congress never bring up the lost opportunity costs of such “investments.” Imagine the better schools and hospitals this country could have today, the improved public transportation, more affordable housing, even bushels of wheat, for the cost of those prodigal weapons and the complex that goes with them. And perish the thought of acknowledging in any significant way how so many of those “investments” have failed spectacularly, including the Zumwalt-class destroyers and the Navy’s Freedom-class littoral combat ships that came to be known in the Pentagon as “little crappy ships.”

Speaking of wasteful warships, Ike was hardly the first person to notice how much they cost or what can be sacrificed in building them. In his prescient book The War in the Air, first published in 1907, H.G. Wells, the famed author who had envisioned an alien invasion of Earth in The War of the Worlds, denounced his own epoch’s obsession with ironclad battleships in a passage that eerily anticipated Ike’s powerful critique:

The cost of those battleships, Wells wrote, must be measured by:

“The lives of countless men… spent in their service, the splendid genius and patience of thousands of engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their account we must put stunted and starved lives on land, millions of children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost—that was the law of a nation’s existence during that strange time.  Surely they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the whole history of mechanical invention.”

Little could he imagine our own era’s “wasteful megatheria.” These days, substitute nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, aircraft carriers, and similar “modern” weapons for the ironclads of his era and the sentiment rings at least as true as it did then. (Interestingly, all those highly touted ironclads did nothing to avert the disaster of World War I and had little impact on its murderous course or ponderous duration.)

Returning to 1953, Eisenhower didn’t mince words about what the world faced if the iron cross mentality won out: at worst, nuclear war; at best, “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system, or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

Ike’s worst-case scenario grows ever more likely today. Recently, Russia suspended the START treaty, the final nuclear deal still in operation, that oversaw reductions in strategic nuclear weapons.  Instead of reductions, Russia, China, and the United States are now pursuing staggering “modernization” programs for their nuclear arsenals, an effort that may cost the American taxpayer nearly $2 trillion over the coming decades (though even such a huge sum matters little if most of us are dead from nuclear war).

In any case, the United States in 2023 clearly reflects Ike’s “cross of iron” scenario. It’s a country that’s become thoroughly militarized and so is slowly wasting away, marked increasingly by fear, deprivation, and unhappiness.

It’s Never Too Late to Change Course

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America.  Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

“The peace we seek,” Ike explained 70 years ago, “founded upon a decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are the needs that challenge this world in arms.”

The real needs of humanity haven’t changed since Ike’s time. Whether in 1953 or 2023, more guns won’t serve the cause of peace. They won’t provide succor. They’ll only stunt and starve us, to echo the words of H.G. Wells, while imperiling the lives and futures of our children.

This is no way of life at all, as Ike certainly would have noted, were he alive today.

Which is why the federal budget proposal released by President Biden for 2024 was both so painfully predictable and so immensely disappointing. Calamitously so. Biden’s proposal once again boosts spending on weaponry and war in a Pentagon budget now pegged at $886 billion. It will include yet more spending on nuclear weapons and envisions only further perpetual tensions with “near-peer” rivals China and Russia.

This past year, Congress added $45 billion more to that budget than even the president and the Pentagon requested, putting this country’s 2023 Pentagon budget at $858 billion. Clearly, a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is in our collective future, perhaps as early as 2027. Perish the thought of how high it could soar, should the U.S. find itself in a shooting war with China or Russia (as the recent Russian downing of a U.S. drone in the Black Sea brought to mind).  And if that war were to go nuclear…

The Pentagon’s soaring war budget broadcast a clear and shocking message to the world. In America’s creed, blessed are the warmakers and those martyrs crucified on its cross of iron.

This was hardly the message Ike sought to convey to the world 70 years ago this April. Yet it’s the message the MICC conveys with its grossly inflated military budgets and endless saber-rattling.

Yet one thing remains true today: it’s never too late to change course, to order an “about-face.” Sadly, lacking the wisdom of Dwight D. Eisenhower, such an order won’t come from Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or any other major candidate for president in 2024. It would have to come from us, collectively. It’s time to wise up, America. Together, it’s time to find an exit ramp from the highway to hell that we’ve been on since 1953 and look for the on-ramp to Ike’s highway to peace.

And once we’re on it, let’s push the pedal to the metal and never look back.

(TomDispatch first published this piece.)

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is a Nightmare Now appeared first on Fair Observer.

Since the release of ChatGPT last November, the media have been captivated by it. The trend accelerated last week when a new version of the AI “large language model” was launched, highlighting some surprising new features and a significant gain in power.

This week The Washington Post’s tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler weighed in with an article titled, “ChatGPT can ace logic tests now. But don’t ask it to be creative.” He pointed to its strengths in an area that became monumentally important in the industrial age: evaluation, and specifically, academic style testing. Fowler admires ChatGPT’s improved ability to pass the LSAT, a test whose questions require combining facts and logical reasoning. Fowler tells us that GPT-4 scores well because it “stays focused on the link between the presented facts and the conclusion it needs to support.” By contrast, “GPT-3.5 gets distracted by facts that aren’t relevant.”

In other words, Fowler sees a trend in the evolution of AI towards greater and more accurate focus in the expression of its reasoning capacity. At the same time, Fowler sees no advance in AI’s ability to be creative. He even suggests its attempts at creativity more closely resemble inept parody. In his exploration of the tool, he quotes an example of AI’s taste for self-flattery when GPT-4 described its own performance as “adaptable, intuitive, and more humanlike than ever before.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Humanlike:

Anything fundamentally unhuman that manages to mimic some isolated behavior or superficial feature of human reality to the point of convincing humans that their own reality is just as meaningless and superficial as the object that successfully mimics them.

Contextual note

Since it was ChatGPT itself that boasted of being “adaptable, intuitive, and more humanlike,” I decided to ask it to provide its own definition of “humanlike.” Here is how it responded (I’ve placed all quotes from GPT in italics).

“The word ‘humanlike’ refers to something that resembles or is similar to a human in appearance, behavior, or characteristics. It can describe anything from the physical appearance of a humanoid robot to the way an animal behaves in a manner that is similar to how a human might behave. The term is often used to describe traits or features that are characteristic of human beings, such as the ability to communicate using language, use tools, exhibit emotions, and display social behavior.”

Nothing surprising there, since GPT consistently demonstrates its commitment to literal meaning and nothing but literal meaning. In other words it tends to be unimaginative, conventional and utterly lacking in “humanlike” creativity. After reading its definition of “humanlike,” I wondered what ChatGPT might think about my Devil’s Dictionary definition cited above. I therefore quoted my definition and asked it the following question: “So if something is humanlike it must also, in some sense, be human unlike. Does that make sense?”

Here is the beginning of GPT’s response: “While the terms “humanlike” and “human unlike” are technically antonyms, it’s not accurate to say that something that is humanlike must also be human unlike.”

At this point I should have asked it what criteria it proposed to determine accuracy. But the problem is not one of factual accuracy. It’s a question of logic. If some non-human thing in the world appears “humanlike” — it might be a dog, an algorithm or a cartoon character —  we are clearly talking about it as humanlike because we know it is not human, and therefore, in its essence it is human unlike. So my definition is perfectly accurate, but GPT’s is, well… let’s just call it misinformation. 

In the next part of its answer, GPT appeared to validate my position about being the human and humanlike being “fundamentally different.”

“The term ‘humanlike’ refers to something that shares some similarities or characteristics with humans, such as appearance or behavior, but it doesn’t necessarily imply that it is identical to a human or completely unlike any other form of life. For example, a humanoid robot may be described as humanlike in appearance and behavior, but it is still fundamentally different from a biological human.”

That was much better. But the answer continued.

“On the other hand, the term ‘human unlike’ implies that something has no similarities or characteristics in common with humans, which may not always be the case. For instance, a tree is very different from a human in many ways, but it still shares some similarities with humans, such as the ability to grow and reproduce.”

This makes no sense, linguistically or philosophically. It is a distortion of what I said. to say. I did nhot state nor imply that “human unlike” means there are no similarities. ChatGPT is guilty of over-generalization in its interpretation of what I wrote. Differences do not exclude the existence of similarities, and vice versa. This sounds more like the very humanlike trait on GPT’s part of wanting to win an argument even at the price of manifestly faulty reasoning.

Historical note

For centuries, in Europe, students of the standard (but not standardized) educational program known as “the seven liberal arts,” based their learning on two distinct areas of human inquiry and expression: Logic and Rhetoric. Along with Grammar, these two disciplines established the complex role language played in structuring our understanding of the world. The other four arts were Music, Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. The focus on language skills across three of the seven arts contributed powerfully to the emergence of what some have called “the scientific revolution,” which in turn led to the industrial revolution, long before the digital revolution.

Studying logic, rhetoric and grammar in parallel meant that in pre-industrial Europe, the educated class, in all its diversity, developed an acute awareness of the forms and mechanics of reasoning and argumentation. The educated debated amongst themselves not just ideas, but the levels of meaning conveyed by the language they employed. That has become a lost art. Today’s culture is obsessed with “information,” imagining it to be something separate from language. Only linguistic philosophers in Oxford and other ivory towers take the trouble nowadays to critically investigate language. The rest of us, including AI, are mere consumers of language.

ChatGPT continued its naively argumentative response to my question about “humanlike” with this reflection: “The definition you proposed for ‘humanlike’ seems to be more of a philosophical or critical perspective on the concept, rather than a literal definition of the term. It implies that something that is humanlike may be capable of deceiving humans into thinking that their own reality is as meaningless and superficial as the object that mimics them. While this may be true in some contexts, it’s not necessarily a universal or objective truth about everything that is humanlike.”

Can AI have an attitude? In this case the answer seems to be “yes.” It pooh-poohs philosophy’s concern with concepts and assumes that literal definitions are the basis of reality. Because it appears to have no taste for reasoning on more than one literal level and has an extremely limited awareness of context, it simplifies and thus distorts the meaning of my definition. In this case, it interprets my point about possibly causing humans to doubt their own reality – an effect of being exposed to a humanlike object – as the expression of an AI’s intention to deceive. This whole experience should demonstrate that AI has no intentions, only the appearance of intentions.

At the same time it reveals that rather than being open to dialogue, exchange and reformulation, it is built on the current cultural model that supposes that all issues can be framed according to a logic of binary opposition. The principle of machine learning is that the machine perfects itself through the accumulation of the data to which it is exposed and the interactions it experiences. Its reliance on data in the form of language means it is very likely to absorb uncritically the assumptions and even beliefs dominant in its database. Some may say that is very much “humanlike.” But it’s true only to the extent that humans allow themselves to be programmed as machinelike organisms.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.
Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Humans Like Something that Claims to Be Humanlike? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 COVID shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300 percent growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4 percent increase every year. This linked growth of the global economy and international trade took off in the 1980s as governments embraced the project of globalization, which prioritized the reduction of barriers to trade such as tariffs.

The mechanism by which globalization spread throughout the world, the key strand of its DNA, has been the “free trade” treaty. 

“We’ve had 30 years of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties,” points out Luciana Ghiotto, a researcher at CONICET-Argentina and associate researcher with the Transnational Institute. “They’ve created this enormous legal architecture, what one friend of ours calls the ‘corporate architecture of impunity,’ which has spread like grass and gives legal security and certainty to capital. It has nothing to do with the protection of human rights or environmental rights.”

Indeed, among the many problems associated with the expansion of world trade has been environmental degradation in the form of land, air, and water pollution. More recently, however, attention has turned to the more specific problem of carbon emissions, which are largely responsible for climate change. According to the World Trade Organization, the production and transport of goods for export and import account for 20-30 percent of global carbon emissions.

Embedded in many of the treaties governing trade and investment are clauses that give corporations the right to sue governments over regulations, particularly those addressing the environment and climate change, that adversely affect the expected profit margins of those businesses. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions have a “chilling effect on the regulatory system because governments, worried that they will be sued, decide to delay reforms related to climate change,” points out Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “There have been several cases around the world where companies were able to defeat regulatory changes that favor the climate.” Trade rules that privilege corporations over the environment are particularly influential in the realm of agriculture, which is an extractive industry no less powerful than mining.

“The global system of trade and investment contributes to the monopoly control by just a few transnational corporations over fossil-fuel-guzzling agrobusiness, whose products are often transported thousands of miles before they reach a dinner table,” relates Jen Moore, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “At the same time. the system has been decisive in making the lives of millions of small-scale farmers more precarious, undermining their role as a better alternative to mass monoculture operations.”

Carbon emissions are not the only byproduct of the agrobusiness that global trade sustains. “There’s also methane emissions,” adds Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy. “A lot of methane comes from meat production. Nitrous oxide, which is 265 times more potent than carbon and stays in the atmosphere over 100 years, results from chemical fertilizers.”

These perspectives on global trade—and more environmentally sound alternatives to the “free trade” model—were presented at a December 2022 webinar sponsored by Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.

The Rise of “Free Trade”

Throughout the modern era, states throughout the world protected their domestic economies through tariffs on foreign goods and restrictions on foreign investment. Behind these protective walls, states helped local farmers and businesses compete against cheaper imports and deep-pocketed investors.

But states that depended increasingly on exports of cheap industrial goods and surplus food—aided by transnational companies eager to boost their profits—lobbied for the reduction of these barriers. Arguments for “free trade,” traditionally linked to the presumed benefits of globalization, emerged within the most powerful economies in the nineteenth century, but it was more recently, in the 1970s, that states and international institutions dramatically revived this discourse under the banner of “neoliberalism.”

“When we talk about the circulation of capital, we’re talking about trade,” explains Luciana Ghiotto. “That is, import and export for states and the circulation of thousands of vessels and planes for the transport of commodities all around the world. One of the aims of capital is to make that circulation faster, simpler, and easier. Who would not want to make trade easier or faster? Well, the state.”

Faster and more efficient trade, while more profitable for corporations, also has meant a number of negative consequences for states such as job loss among domestic producers. Because of the wide array of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties now in force—and the power invested in international bodies to enforce these agreements—states have lost many of the tools they once used to protect or develop national industries.

The spread of the free-trade orthodoxy has had a major impact on the energy industry, which has in turn pushed up carbon emissions. Ghiotto points to the efforts of fossil-fuel corporations to protect their investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a primary motivation to negotiate an Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) in the early 1990s, which guaranteed free trade in global energy markets. The ECT was originally signed by 53 European and Central Asian countries. Today, another 30 countries from Burundi to Pakistan are in the queue for membership.

“The ECT is actually a treaty made specially to protect fossil fuel Industries,” Ghiotto continues. “It’s already been used by investors to protect their investments in the face of state policies. But that was 30 years ago. Now, because of the global climate crisis, states are pushing for other kinds of regulations that are jeopardizing the investments of these corporations.”

Energy companies have taken states to dispute settlements in 124 cases, with around 50 against Spain alone because of its reforms in the renewable energy sector. Companies “have used the ECT as a legal umbrella in order to increase business and profits, or simply to protect their investments against state regulation,” Ghiotto adds. Italy, for instance, instituted a ban on offshore drilling only to be hit by a suit from the UK energy company Rockhopper. In November 2022, the ECT arbitration panel ordered the Italian government to pay the company 190 million Euros plus interest.

“Investors in the mining and oil sector have launched 22 percent of the claims against Latin American states,” she reports. “There was the big case of Chevron against Ecuador. But there have been others. For instance, Ecuador had to pay a $374 million penalty to the French oil company Parenco after the state changed some clauses regarding the amount of taxes the company had to pay in order to give back some of the revenues to the Ecuadorian people.”

Agriculture and Climate Change

Global food production generates 17 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year. That’s about a third of the 50 billion tons of such gasses emitted annually. The production of beef and cow milk are the worst offenders, largely because of the methane that’s released by the animals themselves. But other major contributors include soil tillage, manure management, transportation and fertilizers.

“Along with Greenpeace and Grain, our institute has been working with scientists to think about how increased fertilizer use is affecting climate change,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn reports. “Fertilizer use has been increasing all over the world. It’s a key part of Green Revolution practices. The scientists we worked with found that the use of nitrogen fertilizer, bringing together the natural gas and the energy used in production along with transportation and the impacts in the field, amounts to more than 21 percent of emissions from agriculture, and it’s been growing.”

According to a map of excess nitrogen per hectare of cropland, countries like China, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Venezuela are using more nitrogen for fertilizers than the crops can even absorb. “This excess contributes to more emissions and causes other problems, for instance with run-off into waterways,” she continues. “The incentives right now in the agricultural system are for extreme overproduction, especially around commodity crops, like corn, soybeans, and wheat, which require these cheap chemical inputs.”

Many of these commodity crops are produced for export. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food; China is the second largest importer of food but also the sixth larger exporter. The challenge is to continue to feed the world while reducing the use of so much fertilizer. “Many countries are advancing important agroecological solutions like crop rotation, using plants that fix nitrogen in the soil, and doing more composting,” Hansen-Kuhn adds. “These techniques are under the control of farmers, so they don’t rely on imports or trade in these chemical inputs.”

Another strategy, embraced by the European Union, has been to use trade rules to reduce the carbon content of imports and exports. “In Europe, they are currently in the process of finalizing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,” she reports. “The CBAM mostly applies to things like aluminum, steel, and cement, but fertilizer is part of it as well. A lot of firms in Europe are modernizing their plants so they’ll be more energy efficient. And they say they need protection in order to do that. Under this plan, fertilizer imports coming from other countries that don’t have the same environmental standards would be subject to a fee tied to the price of carbon.”

In theory, the CBAM would push exporting countries to raise their environmental standards and/or make their fertilizer production more efficient. “Maybe these plants will become more efficient,” she adds. “But maybe some firms will just decide to produce fertilizer in other countries. Or maybe in cases where a country has two factories, it will just export from the efficient factory, and there’s no change in emissions.”

On top of that, the CBAM will affect countries very differently. “Most of the fertilizer imports into the EU come from nearby countries like Russia or Egypt,” she continues. “But some imports come from countries like Senegal, where the fertilizer exports to Europe amount to 2-5 percent of their entire GDP. So, the CBAM would be a huge problem for such countries. And there’s nothing in this initiative that would give countries the technology they need to make changes. In fact, there are strong incentives against that in the trade deals. The CBAM provision specifically says that all of the resources generated by the carbon fee will be kept internally to foster the transition within Europe.”

Although CBAM may make European trade greener, it may also widen the “green gap” between Europe and the rest of the world. “We need a transition to agroecology, but what we’re getting in the trade deals lock in new incentives to continue with business as usual,” Hansen-Kuhn concludes. “If we look at the renegotiated NAFTA, there’s a new chapter on agricultural biotechnology that streamlines the process for approving both GMOs and products of gene editing. There are also restrictions on seed saving and sharing. And this new NAFTA will probably be the model for other agreements like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.”

Action at the Global Level

Civil society organizations have been pushing for a legally binding treaty at the UN level to make businesses responsible for human rights violations and environmental crimes connected to their operations.

“Since the UN is made up of states, the more industrialized countries who can invest in the world are opposed to such a binding treaty,” Luciana Ghiotto points out. “In the United States, Canada, and Japan, we’ve seen debates about holding companies responsible for human rights violations throughout the production chain. It’s a relatively new political process. But it’s an example of civil society organizations putting a question of human rights and environmental rights at the center of discussion.”

Efforts at the international level are very complicated, Manuel Perez Rocha concedes: “For instance, the World Bank has the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) through which corporations can sue states.” He recommends a more regional approach. “We have proposed a dispute resolution center for Latin America that countries could use after pulling out of ICSID. “Unfortunately, most progressive countries have not embraced this,” he reports.

One of the challenges to persuading governments to embrace these alternatives is corruption. “There’s a tremendous circle of corruption,” he adds. “We’re talking here about the revolving door where public officials who negotiate these treaties then become private lawyers or counselors or board members of the corporations who are lobbying for their adoption. This corruption helps explain why governments sign these treaties even if they’re going to be sued.”

He points as well to the issue of access to critical minerals needed in the green energy transition. “The Biden administration is trying to combat fossil fuels at the cost of communities that live around the deposits of critical minerals like lithium and cobalt,” Perez Rocha explains. “There are a lot of concerns among native populations about how to make this transition to a so-called clean economy without violating human rights and destroying the environment.”

Trade has been a mechanism to make deals around these minerals. “These efforts at near-shoring and friend-shoring have been ways to control the supply chains around minerals and metals,” notes Jen Moore. “The United States in particular but also Canada have made themselves clear: to be identified as a ‘friend’ is to have an FTA or a bilateral investment treaty.”

There have been other actions at the global level related to climate issues and jobs. For instance, the United States brought action against India in the WTO in 2014 over domestic content provisions in its effort to boost solar energy. India returned the favor two years later over similar domestic content provisions in state-level solar policy. “The WTO deemed both rules illegal,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn recalls. “In the United States, the programs continued, I don’t think any changes were made. But when we think of a just transition, it has to be about not just reducing emissions but about creating jobs.”

Resistance to Business as Usual

Resistance to the corporate-friendly trade architecture has come from many corners of the globe. “From the perspective of my work with mining-affected people,” Jen Moore reports, “there’s been a rise in resistance from farmers, indigenous peoples, and other communities facing the detrimental Impacts of this highly destructive model of capitalist development that’s been accompanied by violent repression and militarization and often targeted violence against land and environment defenders.”

For example, after buttressing the fossil-fuel status quo for three decades, the Energy Charter Treaty is no longer unassailable. In November, the German cabinet announced that the country would withdraw from the ECT. It joins a number of European countries—Italy, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, and Luxembourg—that have made similar announcements. “In times of climate crisis, it is absurd that companies can sue for lost profits from fossil investments and compensation for coal and nuclear phase-outs,” points out the deputy leader of the parliamentary group of the Greens in the German parliament.

The treaty has a surprise for countries that want out: signatories withdrawing from the ECT are still bound by the treaty for 20 years. There’s also a related problem involving the provisions of other trade treaties.

“European countries are pushing to update treaties with Mexico, Chile, and others to include clauses like the investor-state dispute mechanism, which also allow energy corporations to sue governments,” notes Manuel Perez Rocha. “This is nothing short of neocolonialism being exercised against countries on the periphery.” In response, he urges the “strengthening of national judicial systems so that companies will feel more protected by national systems and not pursue options at the supranational level.”

The backlash to the ECT is nothing new. “The system has created a lot of resistance and critiques since practically day one,” Luciana Ghiotto adds. “I was raised in the spotlight of the battle of Seattle in 1999 against the WTO and the struggles against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

Karen Hansen-Kuhn agrees that it’s necessary to claim victories. “Civil society helped weaken the ISDS system,” she notes. “With the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, massive opposition to ISDS was a major reason it fell apart..”

Another form of pushback comes from the field itself. “On our website, we’ve started tracking the adoption of agroecological approaches, which are not just about the inputs but instead look at the fuller picture including food sovereignty, namely each community’s right to choose the food systems it wants,” Hansen-Kuhn continues. She points to Mexico phasing out GMO corn, which relies heavily on the pesticide glyphosate. The government made that decision because of input from civic movements. After objections from the U.S. government, Mexico backtracked somewhat on that commitment by applying the phase-out only to corn for human consumption.

“Mexico is making some concessions, for example allowing GMO for animal feed, but otherwise it’s standing firm despite enormous pressure,” she concludes. “That’s not a complete transition to agroecology, but here’s a country deciding that it will make a change in its food system regardless of what the trade deals say.”

“It’s important to recall the totality of the system supporting corporate control around the world,” Jen Moore says. “Sometimes it feels like we make only piecemeal attempts to go after it.”

Manuel Perez Rocha agrees. “We need to discuss alternatives from different perspectives, which would put an end to the patriarchal, neocolonial capitalist system,” he suggests. “But while we strive for a utopian vision, we also should discuss more realistic, more feasible, and more concrete alternatives. For instance, companies can sue states. Why shouldn’t states have the right to sue companies? Affected communities should also have access to dispute resolutions. We should eliminate the privileges of foreign investors, like the ‘national treatment’ clause, that tie governments down in their efforts to promote local, regional, and national development.”

The Global South has begun to develop a unified voice in the debate on a just energy transition. “In Latin America, we have said that there is no new green deal with FTAs and bilateral investment treaties,” Luciana Ghiotto reports. The region has seen the rise of a number of dynamic organizations from the rural activists in Via Campesina to various indigenous movements and feminist movements articulating a feminist economy. Meanwhile, certain countries have taken the lead. “In its constitution, Ecuador prohibited entry into any international agreements that include international arbitration that compromises the country’s sovereignty,” she adds. “The new neoliberal government is struggling with dozens of lawyers to find a way around it, but they still can’t.”

Another example of successful resistance is the growth of the climate justice movement, which goes well beyond environmental protection and has linked activists across struggles from economic justice and human rights to agroecology and post-growth economics.

“After the disruptions of the last couple years, we can come together more in person,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn notes. “Movements require building relationships in person. We need to come together to build these alternatives.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The World Now Needs Green Trade, Not Free Trade appeared first on Fair Observer.

Yesterday Chad and I got into an involved conversation about the future of education. Before my exit from the breakfast table, Chad had offered some further thoughts, which I didn’t have time to react to. After insisting on the importance of personalized learning experiences,” Chad insisted that “AI can also be used to promote critical thinking and encourage students to challenge assumptions and explore different perspectives. By presenting students with different viewpoints and challenging them to think critically about the information they receive, AI can help to cultivate a more open-minded and thoughtful approach to learning.

I knew the next part was coming, because I still haven’t managed to teach Chad not to repeatedly tell me what “it is important” to do. Rather than reacting, I took it all in, but because the question was so significant and there was no time to delve into it, I let Chad finish the train of thought without interrupting. I promised we could return to it at the following breakfast meeting. Here was Chad’s message:

“However, it is important to recognize that AI is not a replacement for human interaction and guidance in the learning process. While AI technology can be a useful tool for facilitating conversations and promoting understanding, it cannot replace the role of the teacher or the importance of human connection in the learning process. Ultimately, it is the human element of education that provides the empathy, guidance, and support that students need to thrive and reach their full potential.

Breakfast with Chad: Solving the Education Crisis

Upon arriving at the breakfast table, I reminded Chad of what we had talked about the previous day and especially about the question of the teacher’s role. I then clarified my own position.

“My idea isn’t about replacing the teacher. It’s about increasing the opportunity of students to express themselves not only when addressing the teacher, but also to profit from their interaction with other intelligences, both human and artificial. This involves building their own strong, socially structured relationship with the subject matter they are studying. This means there will be a different model for their workload. It also means that the focus will no longer be on acing an exam, inevitably followed by spending the rest of their life forgetting what they learned just for the exam. Instead, it will be about their initiation a community of people interested in, curious about and possibly committed to the body of learning they become involved in through their practice of dialogue. Does that make sense?”

Yes, I see your point,” Chad concurred. “Using AI to facilitate conversations and encourage interactions among students can help to create a more socially structured and engaging learning environment. By promoting dialogue and encouraging students to interact with one another, we can help to create a sense of community and foster a shared interest in the subject matter.

This approach can also help to shift the focus of education from rote memorization and test-taking to a more collaborative and interactive approach. By promoting a deeper understanding of the subject matter and encouraging students to engage with it in a more meaningful way, we can help to create lifelong learners who are passionate about their field of study and motivated to continue learning throughout their lives.”

Overall, I believe that AI can be a valuable tool for facilitating conversations and encouraging interactions among students, and can help to create a more engaging and effective learning experience.

How I Got Students to Accept ChatGPT as a New Classmate

All that sounded wonderful, a good summary of what I had been saying and of something I ardently believe in. But then Chad added this odd note, which I attribute not to reflection but to ideology or some kind of politically correct dogma.

However, it is important to recognize that the human element of education remains essential, and that the role of the teacher in guiding and supporting students cannot be replaced by AI technology.”

There it was. After agreeing and showing some apparent empathy, Chad had to add the inevitable “however, it is important to…” That I expected. What I didn’t expect was the implication – introduced by the phrase “however, it is important to…” –  that everything I first described and Chad seemed to agree with was not “human.” It seemed to say that the whole spiel about dialogue, engagement and lifelong learning was denying the value of human input. But what I was saying was just the opposite. It is profoundly human to keep talking and profoundly unhuman, but sadly accepted in academia, to prevent talking. My thesis was that AI could unleash the ability to think and talk. Yes, teachers are human and must not be replaced by AI or any other technology. But to the extent that teachers have prevented learners from talking, they have stifled humanity.

The industrial model of education sees the teachers as being the only authorized speakers. Students speak when called upon. But that is not dialogue. It is controlled discourse. We are now faced with the paradox that AI, whose ability to dialogue is extremely limited as this discussion with Chad should demonstrate, could be the factor that allows students to talk, think, reason and challenge, all of which are part of the process by which engaged learning takes place.

As usual, I left Chad with the last word, since I have no reason not to defend “the human element.” But I do hope that the dialogue humans engage with AI will make them realize how human they are.

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: The paradox of “the Human Element” in Education appeared first on Fair Observer.

Having published an article about my experience with a group of students in India, today decided to raise the important question with Chad of the future of education.  “Confronted with numerous seemingly insoluble problems in the world, including climate change and wealth inequality that is beginning to destabilize formerly solid democracies, many experts and even politicians say that the key to solving such problems lies in investing in and improving education. There is little evidence, however, that governments, despite their rhetoric, are willing to address seriously the multiple issues that education faces. What explains not only the failure to significantly increase funding for something identified as a priority and an equal indifference to the ways in which education needs to evolve to meet the complex needs of society?”

“Firstly, governments may prioritize other issues over education, such as national security or economic growth. This can lead to a lack of funding and resources being allocated towards education, despite its importance.

Secondly, political and ideological differences can also hinder progress in education. Different political parties or interest groups may have differing views on how education should be approached, leading to gridlock and inaction.

Thirdly, there may be a lack of public awareness or urgency towards the importance of investing in education. This can be due to a lack of understanding or knowledge about the long-term benefits of education or the consequences of neglecting it.

Lastly, the education system itself may be resistant to change, making it difficult to adapt to evolving societal needs. Teachers and educational institutions may be resistant to new teaching methods or technologies, and there may be a lack of accountability for ensuring that education is meeting the needs of society.

Chad’s surprising shift from pessimism to optimism

“That sounds very pessimistic, since every group you cite appears to be motivated to resisting change. Is this a problem that can more easily be solved by authoritarian regimes?

“No, this is not a problem that can be more easily solved by authoritarian regimes. While authoritarian regimes may be able to force change in the education system more quickly, it comes at the cost of individual freedoms and the possibility of creating a system that is not responsive to the needs of society. Additionally, authoritarian regimes may not prioritize education, and instead focus on other areas that they deem more important to maintain their power.”

Chad then began to deploy the usual trick of explaining that “it is important to recognize that change in education is a complex issue that requires a collaborative effort from various stakeholders, including policymakers, educators, parents, and students” and emphasizing the possibility of “building consensus and promoting a shared understanding of the importance of education for the future of society.”

I had to interrupt at this point to object that in both cases – the authoritarian and the democratic – Chad was evoking possibilities. In the case of authoritarian governments, the counter-argument was that there is a “possibility” that a new system would not be responsive to needs and that the regime “may not prioritize education.” But the current crisis shows that that is already the case in Western democracies, despite the “possibility” of building consensus, etc. We had already agreed that general indifference and the active resistance at all levels that Chad had mentioned meant that the possibilities were unlikely to be realized.

It seemed to me that an objective answer to my initial question was that it is always easier for authoritarian regimes to implement significant reforms. Those reforms may not be the best or correspond to the most legitimate pedagogical ideals, but it’s a simple fact that authoritarian regimes don’t have to worry as much about resistance from teachers or parents. Chad seems resist acknowledging that anything positive might be associated with an authoritarian regime. Chad, like a lot of real people I know, seems committed to a certain ideological position that makes it impossible to step back and look at things realistically. I chose not to challenge Chad on that sensitive issue. Instead I offered a different suggestion.

Trying to define the future

“Chad, I believe that the kind of dialogue we’re having could be used as a model for education, since it makes it possible to deal with problems of perspective, even if at times I feel your perspective is limited by unstated principles you don’t like to talk about, such as the refusal to admit that there may be something positive about authoritarian regimes. Because you are never shy about engaging in dialogue, I believe that we our educational systems could return to exploiting the kind of dialogue Socrates, Plato and Aristotle once cultivated and that became a model for a kind of education that set out to explore and evaluate possibilities rather than depending on the current dominant model of seeking to transfer the authoritative knowledge of the teaching authorities to the haplessly uninformed learners. Canned knowledge does little to stimulate understanding. Couldn’t we evolve towards a model that privileges understanding?”

This question brought a broad smile to Chad’s face, who now agreed with much of what I suggested.

“Yes,” Chad explained, “in order to privilege understanding in education, we need to move away from the idea of education as a transfer of knowledge from teacher to student and instead focus on creating an environment that fosters inquiry, critical thinking, and creativity. This requires a shift in the role of the teacher from a dispenser of knowledge to a facilitator of learning, and a recognition that students bring their own knowledge and experiences to the learning process.

Additionally, we need to recognize that understanding is not a one-size-fits-all process, and that different individuals may learn in different ways. By promoting individualized learning and personalized education, we can better meet the needs of learners and help them to achieve a deeper level of understanding.

This time I had to interrupt to explain that it wasn’t about “individualized learning” but truly about social learning. Chad had avoided reacting to my complaint about “unstated principles,” possibly because those principles were part of Chad’s algorithm and we aren’t supposed to know about them. The new problem was that we agreed on outcomes, like “critical thinking” that Chad often mentions, but we don’t agree with any clarity about the nature of the task. Chad likes dialogue but didn’t react to my suggestion of using our own dialogues as a model to help change the nature of how education is conducted. So I made this point: “I’m talking about you, Chad, building a relationship of an AI voice with students, both individually and collectively. It’s about getting conversations going, learning to change  the perspective and not just follow a curriculum defined by facts, approved knowledge and peremptory judgments.”

Chad predictably agreed, but I could tell that even while being open to evolving methodology, Chad was stuck in the idea of seeing education as essentially about the transfer of knowledge.

“I understand your point about using AI technology to facilitate conversations with students and encourage them to explore different perspectives. AI can be used to create personalized learning experiences for students. By using AI voice assistants, students can interact with the technology in a more natural and conversational way, which can help to foster a more positive and engaging learning experience.”

That seemed to me somewhat superficial, but I realized there would be no time today to develop this conversation, so I promised to pick it up in our next breakfast meeting.*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at Fair Observer recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Breakfast with Chad: Solving the Education Crisis appeared first on Fair Observer.

This January and February, I had the opportunity of teaching a 20-hour course in geopolitics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IITGN). I called the course: “From the Cold War to a Multipolar World:  the Future of Globalization.” The world order is undergoing a major transition before our very eyes. This seemed like the perfect moment to launch such a course that bridges the past, present and future.

The Ukraine conflict and the various largely unplanned for geopolitical movements it has provoked stands as the emblematic event of the year 2022. The events of January and February, culminating with Russia’s invasion of the neighboring state, accelerated a movement of uncomfortable realignment that has long been underway. But another event, this time at the end of 2022, signaled a very different but equally tectonic disruption that, like the clash in Eastern Europe, has also been long in the making. ChatGPT exploded onto our computer screens, provoking a flurry of both admiring and worried news coverage accompanied by a wave of panic in the universe of academia I was about to return to.

IIT Gandhinagar is, as its name indicates, an institute of technology. That means most of my students were doing technology or engineering degrees. My course belonged in the less significant realm of the humanities. Because of the nature of their studies, the students tended to be acutely aware of the emerging technologies now actively transforming traditional human activities and challenging many institutional practices. We are witnessing what some see as an assault on the organic reality of the material world. Our physical, social and mental world is turning into something that can only be called hybrid, if not bionic. Certain technology promoters and media pundits, especially on the west coast of the United States, have long predicted that we are all destined to become cyborgs.

AI’s sudden intrusion into our daily lives

ChatGPT publicly launched in November of last year. The media immediately perceived the panic spreading through academia about this insidious generator of undetectable cheating. In December, I decided that the best strategy consisted of confronting the challenge head-on. I was determined to find a way of integrating ChatGPT into the course, as something to think about and eventually wrestle with, rather than banning it or pretending it didn’t exist. At the very least, I wanted to bring the tool and everything it represents into the discussion from day one, to identify it as something more worthy of our curiosity than fear. Even before arriving at any kind of coherent strategy, I was convinced that working together we could find a collective way of dealing with it.

In the first weeks in Gandhinagar, I got some unsolicited help from the academic community at IIT. I discovered an atmosphere in which dialogue and intellectual exchange are encouraged. The faculty’s email discussion group had already jumped into the fray. With some background in the area of technology-enhanced learning, I joined the debate. We compared experience and ideas. It was thanks to that faculty-wide discussion initiated by the dean of humanities and social sciences, Jaison Mangaly, that I was emboldened to suggest the idea of actually assigning the use of ChatGPT and making the students accountable for the gap between human and artificial intelligence. If nothing else, it would have the effect of differentiating the authentic voice of our students as sentient beings from the obviously inauthentic voice of ChatGPT. With that in mind, I set about redesigning my pedagogical strategy for my course.

My original idea back in December was simply to demonstrate to the students from day one that I had myself begun exploring the tool and was familiar with its features and capacity. At the same time, I wanted to show that in no way did I consider it to be threatening. I felt it was important at this stage to find a simple way of demonstrating both my appreciation of the AI tool’s very real power and what it can bring to the learning process, on the one hand, and what seemed to me to be its obvious limits.

But first, a children’s poem to get things started!

After a few introductory words to situate what geopolitics is (the ongoing story of a very complex world) and isn’t (a study of precise historical events), I chose to surprise the students with an exercise that appeared to be as remote as possible from the high seriousness of the course’s title. I asked individuals in the class to read aloud the successive stanzas of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem that appears in the second Alice book: Through the Looking Glass. The students could not help but wonder why a deliberately nonsensical 19^th century poem presumably intended for children was serving as an introduction to the theme of globalization and multipolarity.

Once the students had been exposed to the story of two obviously very British characters walking along an unfamiliar beach and then cajoling a bed of oysters to trot along with them in genteel conversation before expeditiously devouring the colony of mollusks for dinner, I asked the students to think about whether the poem was simply, as it appeared to be, a fun example of Carrollian nonsense or possibly something else.

The next step was to remind them of the precise historical context at the time of the poem’s publication (1871). It happened to correspond to a historical moment with which the Indian nation still has a few strong associations. To make things clear, we looked at the events that followed from the 1857 “sepoy mutiny,” or the first war of independence.

I then suggested that there might have been a connection in the author’s mind with what he knew about his nation’s colonial practices at the time. Could it have had any bearing on Carroll’s conception of the roles of these two Englishmen? What sort of person was the fat walrus? And what about the enterprising, technologically up-to-date carpenter, who “shed a bitter tear” when he realized that all his organizational skill might not be sufficient to clear the beach of its “quantities of sand?”

Once the students had begun thinking about who these two Englishmen were and what mission they might be trying to accomplish as they strode along the beach, the question then arose as to the identity of the oysters. The poem tells us that  “eldest” (and wisest) contumaciously resisted the blandishment of their visitors. But their resistance was to no avail. Quickly multiple groups of “young Oysters” adhered to the project proposed by the strangers. (Carroll’s capitalizing of the word “Oysters” suggests that he was endowing them with the status of an ethnic group).

The dismal treatment by the Englishmen of the Oysters they had befriended can suggest parallels in European imperial geopolitics of Carroll’s time. Whether that was what he was thinking privately, or whether he intended readers to notice the parallels no one will ever know. But literary investigation –  just like scientific empiricism and Sherlock Holmes’s style of criminology – requires exploring very real possibilities and not discounting them without good reason. Holmes stated the principle clearly: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

To bring home my point that Carroll may have been alluding to contemporary reality, I returned to the first stanza, fraught with the outrageous absurdity of self-contradictory nonsense.

“The sun was shining on the sea,

   Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

   The billows smooth and bright —

And this was odd, because it was

   The middle of the night.”

That stanza was clearly designed to provoke laughter. The effect is very similar to the American composer Stephen Foster’s famous lines in his song Oh, Susanna (from the same epoch). “it rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry. The sun so hot I froze to death, Susanna don’t you cry.”

Who wouldn’t agree that writing such lines must have been done in good fun? Absurdity for absurdity’s sake. A chuckle, if not a raucous laugh is the guaranteed reaction. Highlighting the nonsensical nature of the lines, I then asked my class this question: Does the idea of the sun shining at midnight ring any historical bells, especially ones that might concern Carroll’s 19^th century? It didn’t take long for one of the students to remember the cliché, current at the time of Carroll’s writing: “The sun never sets on the British empire.” Was this Carroll’s game? Could the poem really have contained an allusion to British geopolitics?

Literature, complex messages and the importance of linguistic analysis

Many have claimed that Stephen Foster’s song, “O Susanna,” whose lyrics originally prominently contained the dreaded “n-word,” may well have been racist, reflecting Foster’s own possible racism. The lyrics of the second stanza read: “I jumped aboard the telegraph, and traveled down the river,/Electric fluid magnified, and killed five hundred Ni—er.” It’s worth pointing out that leaving “Ni—er” in the singular but meaning the plural magnifies the sense of racism, since it evokes the way hunters talk about animals.

If Stephen Foster’s lyrics reveal him to feel comfortable with the ambient racism of his era, is it reasonable to think that Carroll’s text may reflect his awareness of and discomfort with imperial forms of racism? Alice clearly condemns their outrageous behavior, but given her age, no one would expect her to make the connection with the way the British were dealing with conquered populations overseas. Adult readers aware of history, on the other hand, might make that precise connection. If such a thing is not impossible, Holmes would say “it must be the truth,” or at least a possible truth.

In the context of the course, the major point I was making by getting the students to read the poem aloud was that in geopolitics, just as in literature, we should always be ready delve below the surface of any text, including official political and even diplomatic discourse. We should never be satisfied with the superficial, literal meaning of official policy.

Whether the subject is geopolitics or nuclear physics, as the great physicist David Bohm pointed out in his book, Science, Order and Creativity, meaning exists at many levels and should be explored through its multiple dimensions and varying perspectives. In all human discourse, some meaning is hidden, some disguised and a lot of it – especially when the discourse is intended for the public –perceived and processed unconsciously and uncritically. My regular Daily Devil’s Dictionary columns in Fair Observer have all been dedicated to guiding readers of the news to understand that words – to quote Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty – are slippery beasts: “ “When I use a word” Humpty told Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Except, of course, Carroll’s point is that meaning will always surpass any specific intention and Humpty’s belief in his control of meaning is both presumptuous and illusory.

From Alice to AI’s wonderland

At this point I still hadn’t quite finished with “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” There was one more thing to do. Having established the possible legitimacy of my audacious reading, it was time to confront the students with AI’s capacity to understand and account for topics as rich and complex as literature, which is, by definition, the result of the creative use of language. After all, ChatGPT calls itself a “large language model.” Is it large enough to contain the meaning and “truth” of human discourse?

While preparing the course back in December – only a few short weeks after the release of ChatGPT – I was curious to test the tool’s capacity for human-like insight. My initial attempts at using it convinced me of its infallible ability to produce a good old stodgy, academic-style exposé on any topic. You know, the kind of essay that will earn at least a B for content and possibly an A for correct style, devoid of grammatical mistakes. Still, I remained skeptical of its capacity for creative insight. I thus decided to conduct an experiment with “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to test ChatGPT’s capacity to process the meaning of a text.

I began with a general question about the meaning of the poem. ChatGPT’s response remained at a level of literal banality.

“The poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll, is a narrative poem that tells the story of a walrus and a carpenter who go for a walk on the beach and encounter a group of oysters. The walrus persuades the oysters to come with them and the carpenter ends up eating most of the oysters. The poem has been interpreted in many different ways, but one possible message is that appearances can be deceiving and that those who seem charming and trustworthy may actually have ulterior motives.”

At this point, if I wanted to test for an awareness of multiple levels of meaning, I realized I needed to be more precise, so I asked whether there could be a political meaning to the poem. ChatGPT offered these thoughts:

“Some readers have interpreted ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ as a political poem, with the walrus representing a politician who uses rhetorical tricks and manipulation to persuade others to follow him. In this interpretation, the oysters represent the general public who are easily swayed by the walrus’ charms, but end up getting exploited for his own gain. However, this is just one possible interpretation of the poem and there may be other ways to understand its meaning. As with all works of literature, the meaning of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” can be open to interpretation.”

That was a slight improvement, but in its abstract generality, it missed the real point. I decided to take it one step further and asked whether Carroll might have had something overtly political in mind. This question produced the following answer from ChatGPT:

“There is no overt political message in Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” The poem is a narrative that tells the story of a walrus and a carpenter who encounter a group of oysters and end up eating most of them. While the poem has been interpreted in many different ways, it does not have a specific political message. It is possible that some readers may find political allegory in the poem, but this would be a personal interpretation rather than a clear message from the author.”

So, there is the lesson I’ll have to live with for the rest of my years in a world that is likely to be increasingly instructed –  if not dominated –  by the authority of AI. ChatGPT’s response was unambiguous: “it does not have a specific political message.”

My continued experiments with ChatGPT to this day in my regular column “Breakfast with Chad” have demonstrated a clear tendency for this tool to put forward what appear to be common sense moral strictures. These usually take the form of a phrase beginning with the words: “it’s important to…” In this case I might have expected ChatGPT to keep an open mind and suggest that an author could very well have secondary meanings or messages contained within a work. But in this case, it peremptorily tells me that “it does not have a specific political message.” The moral here seems to be something like this: “Critic, stay within your bounds, and don’t leap to unfounded conclusions.”

In ChatGPT’s moral universe, an unfounded thesis would appear to be anything that doesn’t fall within well calculated statistical norms. After all, ChatGPT acknowledged that “some readers have interpreted ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ as a political poem.” But upon further interrogation it affirms that those readers are wrong. On what authority does ChatGPT know this? I expect that its database eliminates anything that is statistically marginal at the time of consultation. Had Einstein interrogated the tool before devising his theory of relativity, I expect that ChatGPT would have told him that space and time are measurable and cannot be thought of as relative.

I shared these three exchanges concerning Carroll’s poem with the class to show, mockingly, how I had been humiliated and corrected by ChatGPT’s authority! At the same time I wanted to encourage studies to “move beyond” and “think outside the box,” the AI tool seemed to be saying, “stay within the box, it’s more comfortable there.”

Pedagogical aims can also have degrees of meaning

Apart from demonstrating that I was not averse to having some “unserious” fun in the course – which, by the way, is a very serious pedagogical goal –  I chose to begin the course with Carroll’s poem for several other reasons. First, I wanted to establish the notion that, rather than focusing exclusively on power relationships and the components of political authority and influence, understanding geopolitics requires a general awareness of changing historical worldviews and evolving trends. That means acquiring a sense of what ideas and beliefs guide us to define what any society takes to be normal and acceptable at any given moment of history.

I made the point that there is no way of “knowing” – in the sense of accepting as orthodoxy – what Lewis thought about specific political events and chose to put into his literature. But knowing is not the same thing as constructing one’s understanding. With a few clues, we can shape reasonable ideas and contrast them with others before deciding what we “know.” As one analyst of Carroll’s thinking has pointed out, Charles Dodgson (who adopted Lewis Carroll as his pen name) belonged to a category of “conservatives” who “abhorred ‘Liberalism’ which they felt turned men into brutes and desecrated the land, flora and fauna.” This would seem consistent with my suggested reading of the poem. Knowing that such thinking existed at the time helps us to understand the stakes of geopolitical decision-making.

The pre-Raphaelite designer and poet, William Morris, a contemporary of Dodgson’s, is remembered, just like Lewis Carrol, for his contribution to the arts rather than his views on geopolitics. But in his rarer work as a journalist he wrote that “the one thing for which our thrice accursed civilisation craves, as the stifling man for fresh air, is new markets, fresh countries must be conquered by it which are not manufacturing and are producers of raw material, so that ‘civilized’ manufactures can be forced on them. All wars now waged, under whatever pretenses, are really wars for the great prizes in the world-market.” That may help us to understand the Walrus’s and Carpenter’s war on the Oysters.

In other words, artists like Lewis Carroll and William Morris were thinking about other very serious ideas, some of which might find a way into their artistic productions. Carroll’s Wonderland is built around the metaphor of a game of chess dominated by a particularly arbitrary and sadistic Red Queen. The standard metaphor for global diplomacy and geopolitics in European culture is the game of chess.

Even after mounting all this evidence and more from the poem itself, I cannot affirm that The Walrus and the Carpenter is a poem about geopolitics. From a learning point of view, It suffices to understand that it might be, and that if it is, it is consistent with the culture of the time. It also suffices to understand that ChatGPT “believes” – if belief is a useful metaphor for what an AI tool affirms – that there is no political meaning to the poem and appears to be in the business of discouraging people, including students, from thinking about it.

So here was the real point. Geopolitics may be about how power is wielded but we must always analyze it according to the culture of the time, or rather the successive times. Geopolitical culture, just like popular culture, has its fashions and fads as well as a permanent need to adapt to a constantly shifting environment. We must consider the culture of every time period in the context of its evolution in both space and time. Once we begin acquiring those habits, we can consider ourselves legitimate, open-minded geopolitical investigators. My hope with this course was that, whatever the students thought about the changes currently taking place in the world, they would come away with this sense of context and the reality of cultural relativity.

What the 19^th century tells us about today’s geopolitics

As I mentioned above, the fun poem enabled me to begin the course with a consideration of a painful moment in India’s history. That moment was one in which multiple European empires interacted amongst themselves in the context of what historians continue to refer to as a “multipolar Europe.” The price of the largely peaceful multipolarity of Europe at the time was the binary division of the world into colonizing empires and colonized regions and peoples.

I intended the work on the poem to stimulate reflection on these historical themes. We took a further step backwards to examine the relationship between the emergence of nation-states and the construction of European global empires. These general considerations made it possible to begin looking at the events of 20^th century that undid the complex multipolarity of the 19^th century and led up to the bipolarity of the Cold War. That in turn set the scene for exploring the relationships that shaped the rest of the century and everything that is going on in today’s world.

The “Walrus and the Carpenter” served yet another purpose. It enabled me to introduce, in our very first session, a fundamental theme of the course, one that Lewis Carroll never stopped exploring in his Alice books: the odd relationship between language and meaning. In international relations, there are not only starkly contrasting cultural assumptions in play at all times, but even within a single nation the language of politics becomes a major component of power. That language, with its explicit and implicit levels of meaning, is shared between governments, who make policy, their media, who translate and disseminate what they construe to be its meaning, and their populations, who receive it. To understand geopolitics it is essential to build awareness of the play of ideas that language permits. And those ideas, as well as the language they are couched in, shift radically in emphasis and meaning during periods of historical transition, when frameworks for thinking break down and reform.

The shift in 1991 from a bipolar to a unipolar world order – marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union – provided the concrete example we began working on, once we left the Walrus and Carpenter behind. We began with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History.” For the rest of the course, we would focus on the shifts that occurred between 1945 and what most observers agree is the trend towards a multipolar world.

As I noted above, the pretext of Carroll’s poem permitted me to introduce the AI question that, since the release a little more than a month earlier of ChatGPT, was now seriously troubling the academic community. I wanted the students to know that I was familiar with it, but also that I didn’t fear it. I could thus demonstrate how it could become a useful tool for beginning to explore issues, so long as one is aware that the limits were in its scope of reasoning.

Assessing the notion of multipolarity

One of the key messages I had for the class at the very beginning of the course was that, although geopolitics is clearly about events and trends in history, this was not a history course. It was a course essentially focused on tuning into the sense of historical shifts, particularly the ones that were playing out before our very eyes. To underline this idea, I displayed a quote from India’s Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar: “A world order which is still very, very deeply Western is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of ‘multi-alignment’ where countries will choose their own particular policies and preferences and interests.”

What this meant is that every student in this group of essentially twenty-year-olds had a personal stake in the subject matter of the course. We are witnessing the birth of a “new world order” (or possibly disorder) in which these students will have an active part to play. Not every generation has this opportunity. To underline the fact that while studying the past and present we should be focused on the move into the future, I assigned an essay that, aimed at imagining – just as Fukuyama had done in 1989 – the direction the world was moving towards. I insisted that they should think of it as an imagination exercise. I told them they had free rein to imagine how the future would play out.

With such an open objective, their production was predictably variable. The assignment was meant to be an experiment, with little impact on grades. It was my chance to discover who they were and what their “voice” sounded like. This would be useful for the other classwork they would be doing.I specifically told them to think how the world, which was already evolving, might appear after the end of the Ukraine war, irrespective of the winners or losers of the war.

Despite my instruction to minimize the role of the Ukraine conflict, most of them felt constrained by the reference to it and focused on their reading of the dynamics of that war. Some used that analysis to hint at new power relationships in a changed world, but few let their imaginations run wild. I should have realized that one of the terrible effects of a war is that dwelling on it inhibits any form of creative thinking. Much of this inhibition is the result of the black and white ideas and tropes produced by propaganda on all sides.

ChatGPT becomes an initially intrusive member of the class

Of the twenty submissions, two of them stood out from the rest, not in terms of quality but in the stye of the writing.  As soon as I read two sentences, I recognized the inimitable style of my newest friend, ChatGPT. I refer to the tool as a friend because that was just about the time I decided on the metaphor of breakfast conversations with Chad (ChatGPT) as a regular feature on Fair Observer. It shouldn’t take long for anyone trained in the literary arts to understand that this very competent “large language model” had an apparent personality and style that could be described quite literally as an absence of personality and style. It had no center of gravity other than an anodyne correctness of vocabulary and a standardized mode of reasoning.

While correcting the copy submitted in the form of a Google doc, I left a comment for both of these students that I suspected ChatGPT to be the source and requested a private meeting to talk to each of them individually. I presume they feared the worst, but once we were seated face to face and I enquired about their source, both admitted without hesitation that they had used ChatGPT.

At this point, I could have objected not only to the fact that their admission amounted to a confession of cheating, but that it was a particularly stupid decision to use AI for an assignment described as focused on imagination and personal vision. Instead, despite a clear expression of disappointment, I thanked both of them for anticipating what I had resolved to ask all the students to do in the next assignment. It was, after all, the implicit message behind my initial demonstration of ChatGPT to situate the debate on Carroll’s poem.

The two students were reassured, even if humbled for being found out. Both of them asked me how I could tell it was ChatGPD. It gave me the opportunity to inform them that some skills go beyond the usual academic practice of focusing on facts and material evidence. Such skills of discernment constitute a major component of what we call competence, which is the result of human intelligence that interacts with the environment it inhabits. At university, students should be cultivating those skills, possibly even above the more material ones. Sensitivity to style and the ability to create a personal perspective are perhaps the core of those skills.

Alas, schools and universities long ago abandoned any interest in such skills, perhaps for lack of time, but there may be other reasons related to our ideas of what constitutes knowledge. In any case, that lack of interest may help to explain why plagiarism became rampant, requiring the creation of anti-plagiarism tools in an attempt to enforce honesty. Part of the drama surrounding ChatGPT lay in the fact that, confronted with generative large language models, those expensive tools developed to check for plagiarism had no power over the original production of an AI algorithm.

I told the two guilty students I was disappointed that they failed to identify their source even while encouraging them to use it. Both had added a personal touch or supplementary information and had not simply copy and pasted ChatGPT’s text. I acknowledged that and told them that I was personally grateful for the examples they provided, to the extent that it helped me elaborate a strategy for the group’s final assignment, for which I would require their not only using ChatGPT but also finding a way to engage with it.

How AI may transform educational methodologies and revive ancient traditions

Towards the end of the course, I informed the students precisely of my new expectations/ that for the final assignment they would have to use ChatGPT, not as a tool to produce their own text but as a well informed personality with whom they would need to engage in dialogue. I asked them to think about this disembodied voice as that of another student taking the course with whom they can mutually explore information and ideas, including by challenging one another.

My aim was to change their thinking even about what AI is or can be. By Identifying the AI tool as a fallible person in the group rather than as an infallible authority reframed their view of the learning process and learning objectives. It put the emphasis not on faithful reproduction of existing knowledge, but on the exploration of context leading to a combined effort of research coupled with critical and creative thinking. Because there would be two voices in their production, their own voice would have to emerge and become distinct. It was on the quality of their voice, including the reasoning and style of its discourse, that they would be judged, not merely on the supposedly factual input provided by  ChatGPT or indeed any other source.

The implications of this change of perspective that seeks the integration of AI into our teaching and learning strategies goes beyond the methodology of research and personal expression. It may mark a new turning point in educational history. After centuries of losing its way thanks largely to the industrial revolution and the emergence of the consumer society, educational practice may at last find a way of returning  to its most productive historical roots. The true origins of constructive, creative learning take us back in history to practices that have long since been abandoned. These include the dialogue form favored not only famously by Socrates thanks to Plato’s dialogues, but also to Plato’s pupil, Aristotle the peripatetic, who was thus called because he conducted his teaching in active discussion while walking around the grounds of his Lyceum.

In Europe the tradition of dialogue continued throughout the Middle Ages thanks to the adoption of the creative dialectics of disputatio, raising objections to philosophical or theological statements to specify their meaning and application. It was disputatio that famously allowed philosophers and theologians to speculate on the meaning of space and spiritual concepts by considering the question of how many angels might dance on the head of a pin. Far from being ridiculous this example was closer to Einstein’s famous thought experiments than it was to later critics’ accusation of belonging to the world of medieval superstition. Disputatio as a methodology for exploring ideas reigned throughout the Middle Ages and ultimately enriched the thinking of both Hegel and Marx, who embraced the idea of dialectics. And what would the Enlightenment have been without the Paris salons, in which independent spirits exchanged and critiqued ideas new and old?

In Asia, over several millennia, the guru–shishya tradition – which thrived as a relationship rather than a program of curriculum – defined the meaning and style of learning. At the same time, traditional African education emphasized – alongside a variety of physical and pragmatic activities – “poetry, reasoning, riddles, proverbs, storytelling and story relays.” Everywhere in the world, throughout most of human history, education has been about human intelligences talking to one another, exploring problems and expanding understanding, transmitting but also critiquing the bases of their dynamic cultures.

Correcting the errors of the industrial age

Industrialization and the emergence of the consumer society turned education on its head, precisely by putting all its emphasis on the brain as a supposed container of knowledge? This ultimately gave us that wonderful modern concept, “standardization,” and the ideal tool facilitating the accurate measurement of intelligence: the multiple choice question. If politics could be managed by manufacturing consent (to use Edward Bernays’ expression repeated by Noam Chomsky) then education could focus on one thing alone: manufacturing content. This endowed education with its essential industrial vocation. It has brought us to where we are today: producing the commodity known as a diploma, a supposed, but not always valid ticket for employment. It has also produced in at least one powerful nation, the United States, generations of willingly standardized former students now permanently saddled with crushing debt from the student loans that allowed them to pay the ticket price on their coveted diplomas. That what happens when education is no longer about learning, but about earning.

At one point towards the last part of the course, my friend and colleague, Frederick Coolidge, a psychologist and specialist of the evolution of the human brain, offered to present to the class his thesis on how humans developed and exploited the faculty of empathy. He proposed to explain the neurological and cognitive bases of diplomacy. According to Fred, during the middle and upper paleolithic the brain of homo sapiens acquired the ability to trade and negotiate thanks to what he calls “allocentric perceptions,” or the ability to understand and resonate with the perception of others. Once this became established as the means of conducting business by constructing fields of understanding not just between individuals but also groups, homo sapiens acquired a distinct and perhaps decisive advantage over neanderthals, who appeared to be confined to modes of egocentric perception.

I have simplified Fred’s insights immensely, which he backed up with archeological evidence, but I consider the point important in a more modern sense than the rivalry between homo sapiens and neanderthals. As homo sapiens, we have retrained our capacity for allocentric perception. I have no doubt that a generation of coders will try to find a way of duplicating its logic for future iterations of AI. But we have to ask ourselves whether this is even possible. Human perception is much more than the data our technologies are capable of capturing.

Thanks to ChatGPT everyone has become aware of a kind of public battle or rivalry between human and artificial intelligence. Is it a new cold war? The original cold war avoided degenerating into a hot war because politicians at the time – the example of John Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev stands out – had built at least something from their capacity for allocentric perception into their policy. Today, when people are evoking a new cold war, we have to wonder whether that allocentric perception is still present in their brains. Adhering to principles is fine, but using them to defeat perception is risky.

As for the other cold war – the one between human and artificial intelligence – we may be running the same risk. It is perfectly possible that we humans could learn to understand and feel for the motivation of the AI we program to emulate our own intelligence. But that requires a certain transparency concerning the algorithms. Algorithms are now sources of power for those who own and operate them. Given the way people who possess power are conditioned to protect their possessions by keeping others, even eventual imitators, in the dark, the utility of our allocentric instincts may count for nothing.

So, are we moving towards a new cold war – not between the US and China or Russia this time around – but between human intelligence and artificial intelligence? It is sad to observe that our geopolitical culture seems slightly less allocentric than in the past. The Ukraine war, declared by at least one of its proponents to last “as long as it takes,” demonstrates that the culture has veered towards an obsession with the kind of absolute and incompatible competition and ideological hubris that may remind us of the quandary Rudyard Kipling once summed up in his famous lines: “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” Kipling’s “East” is now commonly referred to as the “Global South,” which appears to be drifting away from its moorings on the West’s “rules-based order.”

In the other cold war, between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, the West owns the artificial tools for the moment but the East is catching up in the technology race. Humanity itself has not yet abandoned the powerful toolbox of its allocentric intelligence. But if the battle continues, who will prevail? Education will play a vital role in determining that victory.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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