How One Family is Being Impacted by the Texas Law Targeting Transgender Students

Victoria Rossi, El Paso Matters
Mon, November 29, 2021, 

When Lori Edwards told her transgender teenage daughter that Texas’ House Bill 25 had passed, the 14-year-old turned away and started flipping through her phone.

“Oh that sucks,” Emily said, and went silent.

During the regular Texas legislative session this spring, a rash of anti-trans bills filed by Republican state lawmakers had sent Emily’s mental health, along with her grades, spiraling downward. What was the point of studying, reasoned Emily, who was assigned male at birth but identifies as a girl, if they would just have to leave El Paso for a different state?

When Texas’ regular legislative session ended in late May without any anti-trans measures becoming law, the Edwards family breathed a sigh of relief. But then in July, Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session.

Then another, and another. And with each special session, Abbott pushed lawmakers to ban transgender kids from playing on sports teams that fit their gender identity. HB 25 was Texas Republicans’ fourth attempt to enact the ban this year. At home, Edwards turned off the news.

Emily Edwards, right, and her brother Emilio played soccer when they were younger, but both have felt pushed away from sports. They are shown with their father, Tyler. (Photo courtesy of the Edwards family)

On Oct. 15, two months into Emily’s first semester at Coronado High School, HB 25 cleared its final legislative hurdle in the Texas statehouse. It was signed by the governor Monday.

“Did you hear what I said?” Edwards asked her daughter. “It passed.”

Emily hid her face behind her hair, a telltale sign she did not want to talk. “What difference does it make, Mom. I’m not going to be able to do any of that stuff anyway.”

The Edwards are not a sports family, but they used to be. Growing up, Edwards competed in volleyball and cross country; she studied kinesiology in high school and for a brief period majored in sports medicine. “I loved being around the football players and helping and being a trainer,” Edwards said.

Emily was in a youth running club, took karate and played soccer.

But well before lawmakers took aim at trans student athletes, years of discrimination and bullying based on Emily’s growing sense of her gender identity led Edwards to pull her daughter from sports.

“My child doesn’t play sports (anymore) because it was never given as an option,” Edwards said. “It wasn’t given as an option because we had to protect her.”

Five years earlier, from the sidelines of a youth soccer game, other parents would heckle her child right in front of her. “Why is that little boy like a little girl?” they would say in Spanish, thinking that she couldn’t understand. “He’s just being sissy. He can’t even kick very hard.” And why, they wondered, was the boy’s hair so long?

Edwards said nothing, comforted by the fact that the comments never reached Emily — who loved soccer, and loved having long, gleaming blond hair. It was one of the few ways that Emily, who then presented as a boy and used “he” pronouns, could outwardly express what he’d soon come to realize was his true gender identity.

At 8 years old, Emily had begun to say: maybe I could be a girl someday.

Soon, however, the insults of the parents reached their children. At Emily’s elementary school in Phoenix, kids taunted with “you suck at being a boy,” and wouldn’t let Emily into the boys’ bathroom.

Emily Edwards participated in Kids Excel El Paso, an extracurricular program that uses dance to teach children determination, discipline and excellence. (Photo courtesy of the Edwards family)

The family left Phoenix for El Paso. There, in gym class, another sport gave Emily a word for the question that had been around for years. The 9-year-old came home from school to say the boys in PE football wouldn’t let Emily play football with them, saying, “This is for boys only. No transgenders.”

Emily asked her mother what the word meant.

Edwards pulled up a series of YouTube videos from transgender girls in their teens who explained the term’s meaning — someone whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth — and how they’d felt growing up in boys’ bodies, knowing they were girls.

“Oh,” Emily said. “That’s me.”

“I hate that the first time she heard that word, it was an insult,” Edwards said. “As if it’s a bad thing.”

As soon as Emily had that word, Edwards saw her daughter become a new person. When someone told her she sucked at being a boy, she’d respond, “Well obviously. I’m transgender. I’m a girl. Thanks for noticing.”

Like many parents, Edwards has agonized over past parenting choices. And while she’d been determined to let Emily arrive at her gender identity at her own time, on her own terms, she now believes she should have given her daughter the vocabulary sooner; maybe knowing the word “transgender” could have avoided some suffering.

Edwards is sometimes struck with guilt for the decision that she and her husband came to about sports. The last day of fifth grade was the last time Emily went to school dressed as a boy. From that time on, “we very, very, very much discouraged sports,” Edwards said.

She and her husband worried about the uniforms; they worried about the locker rooms.

“It’s a fine line between being able to pursue things that are extracurricular, like volleyball or track or soccer, and continually outing herself every single time and having to fight for every single thing. Like it doesn’t necessarily prove to be worth it at that point.”

More than anything, they worried about the other kids’ parents.

“Parents can be crazy as it is already, when it comes to sports,” Edwards said. “Just in general, you go and you’re like, ‘wow, this person is gonna have an aneurysm right here next to me,’ because they’re just so pumped, right? But when you throw the added context of their child also competing against someone who’s transgender, and then throw in the fear mongering. … These parents can be absolutely vile and abusive.”

Family football-watching nights became rare. Emily’s younger brother joined band and “now has this opinion that all athletes are jerks,” Edwards said. “It makes me so sad that he thinks that, but he definitely formed that opinion by watching them bully his sister.”

Emily didn’t push back.

“The love that she had for sports was clouded and very much destroyed by that machismo thing,” her mother said.

And at that age, Emily trusted her parents’ choices. “Whether or not sports would have been a big part of her life, we’ll never know. Because I took it,” Edwards said. “I had to.”

Emily Edwards wore a dress in public for the first time in 2018, when she saw a performance of “The Lion King” at the Plaza Theatre. (Photo courtesy of the Edwards family)

Emily has stayed active through dance, and has found other interests “that absolutely enrich her life,” Edwards said, like choir and gaming and theater and anime. She volunteers at the Borderland Rainbow Center, the LGBTQ+ rights nonprofit where her mother works, and is studying to be a veterinarian.

“We really pushed her wholeheartedly into things that were co-ed where it wouldn’t be made such a big issue. … But the fact that she doesn’t have sports as an option breaks my heart.”

As a mother, Edwards has tried to look at least five, 10 years ahead. Planning the family’s move to El Paso while Emily was still in elementary school, Edwards chose their new neighborhood based on what middle and high schools it would feed into. She wasn’t looking for the best schools, necessarily. She was looking for schools that would keep Emily safe — and found them, she said, in Hornedo Middle School and Coronado High School.

But even as Edwards tried to predict the future, she never imagined that the social issues they’d encountered in sports would draw the attention of state legislators.

“I really just thought it was going to be a social issue,” Edwards said. “I never thought there would be bills that would be passed that would give these people fuel for their social issues. That’s the difference, right. When they have legal backing, that gives them power — more power than they need, is what I’m saying — to discriminate, and to put her safety at risk.”

Both mother and daughter spent much of last spring fighting against the onslaught of Texas bills that targeted trans youth, triple the number introduced by any other state. Trans children and their families flocked from across Texas, including El Paso, to deliver passionate testimonies against the bill.


But as the fight continued into the summer, Emily grew wary. Adri Perez, an ACLU policy and advocacy strategist who lobbies against bills targeting Texas’ LGBTQ+ community, saw the same effect play out with the kids who came to the Capitol.

“They get up there and talk into a podium and a microphone that’s taller than they are,” Perez said. “It’s heartbreaking to see, to know that these kids’ spirits are effectively being broken every time these hearings come up.”

Edwards still doesn’t know what to make of Emily’s seemingly calm reaction to the new law. Maybe the reaction she’d expected from Emily was something closer to her own: “This bill passing here in Texas has absolutely devastated my ability to believe that we can affect change,” she said. She worries that the sports ban is just the beginning.

Edwards hoped that, after months of bracing herself for the worst, Emily really was OK. But the other day, in the drive-thru line at Dutch Bros, a construction cone blocked their way and Emily exploded.

“Everybody wants to tell you what you can do,” Emily said, far angrier than Edwards would have expected. “Now they tell you that you can’t play sports, you can’t get married, you can’t have kids — now you can’t even drive your car.”

It was Emily’s way, her mother said, of “communicating something that hurts so much.”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Syrian Women Navigate the Patriarchy of War and Women’s Rights


by Ishtar Al Shami
Oct 20, 2021
Ishtar Al Shami is a Syrian writer and activist.

Brief Analysis

Despite Syrian women’s significant contributions in coordinating anti-Assad activity during the 2011 revolution, Syrian women now face exacerbated obstacles against participating in civil society.

While women’s roles in Syrian civil society have expanded in the wake of the 2011 revolution, a heated debate about the role and rights of women is taking up a large portion of Syrian revolutionary media, be it press, television programs, or social media—including Clubhouse rooms dedicated to the issue. Today, one can read, watch, and listen extensively to dialogues about the female and feminist presence in community work inside Syria.

Syrian women stress the recency of their presence and credit it to the beginning of peaceful, organized revolutionary action against the Assad regime in 2011. During the revolution, women took on much more active roles than those previously available to them under a regime that claimed to be a secular state that ensures social justice—but failed to reflect this in personal status laws, which can significantly limit the rights of women. Moreover, the regime exercised a continuous violation of public liberties and designed a system dedicated to eliminating the role of civil society, monopolizing public space, and cementing the ideology of a single party leading all aspects of society and state. Additionally, the regime categorized any political, civil, or cultural movement outside its control as a treacherous activity hostile to the state, and accused it of collaboration with global imperialism.

In contrast, women participated in popular protests from the beginning of the revolution, and played a major role in establishing Local Coordination Committees, community networks that organized demonstrations throughout the country. This enabled women to effectively participate in the peace, media, and relief movements throughout Syria, especially in besieged and conflict-stricken areas. Women have also been active in various political activities, and continue to work to prove the importance of their involvement in opposition institutions.

However, these efforts have not quelled the stigma against women in civil leadership roles. Female activists still encounter great resistance to their participation in decision-making, despite international institutions’ insistence on women’s representation. Moreover, feminists do not want to become mere numbers in the quotas often required by the international community. They continue to strive for substantive participation in political work due to increased social awareness regarding women’s contributions , not as a symbolic response to an external dictate.

Internal Pushback Against the Syrian Feminist Movement

However, these women face significant internal pressures against their involvement. Islamists consider the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and other international rights conventions to be contrary to Islamic law, classifying them as a major danger to society and rejecting their applicability in Syria. Therefore, Syrian women find themselves on fragile ground given the marked absence of appropriate legal frameworks to protect them from violence and marginalization.



Images of a post by National Coalition Member Mohammad Ayman Aljamal, and the Syrian Feminist Lobby’s response to it:
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Even those women working with international organizations or leading internationally funded projects in opposition areas have faced a marked increase in inflammatory rhetoric against their work. Specifically, they face allegations that they are merely tools of the West carrying out schemes hostile to Sharia and social norms. These accusations put Syrian female activists and employees of international institutions, along with their colleagues, at risk of ideologically-motivated violence.

Images from publications by Saeed Nahhas about the CEDAW convention and anti-feminism being equivalent to antisemitism:
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The situation escalated after a Friday sermon delivered by the President of the Syrian Islamic Council, Sheikh Osama al-Rifai, on August 6 in the area of Azaz, near Aleppo. In the sermon, he addressed the local community, warning against women’s work in international organizations in the area, and describing them as having broken with religion and traditions. He stated that women are recruited by the West and the United Nations with the goal of destroying the stability of the family and social system in Syria by propagating alien thought forbidden under the rules of Islamic law.

Al-Rifai’s statement has prompted impassioned responses, including by women who wear hijab and are outwardly committed to Islam. Many took to social media to express their rejection of his implicitly inflammatory and unfair rhetoric against women.

Images of activist Bayan Rehan’s August 11 Facebook post in response to Sheikh Osama al-Rifai’s sermon:

Battle for Marib: Why is it crucial in Yemen war?

Intense fighting for the Yemeni city of Marib has killed thousands of combatants and forced large numbers of people to flee their homes for makeshift desert camps.

© - The months-long battle for Marib, the last northern bastion of the Yemeni government, has killed thousands of Huthi rebels and pro-government forces and forced civilians to flee their homes

The northern city is a key front between the Yemeni government -- supported by a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition -- and the Iran-backed Huthi rebel fighters.

Here are four important points about the battle for the strategic and oil-rich province, which is considered pivotal in Yemen's seven-year civil war.

- Why Marib? -

The city is the last northern bastion of the internationally-recognised government, which was driven from the capital Sanaa by the Huthis in 2014.

© Sophie RAMIS Map of Yemen locating the province and city of Marib.

Just 120 kilometres (75 miles) east of Sanaa, Marib sits at a crossroads between Yemen's southern and northern regions, commanding a highway to Saudi Arabia.

© - Yemeni pro-government forces are pictured during fighting with Huthi rebels near Marib on November 10, 2021

The surrounding province boasts oil and gas reserves, making it a major economic prize. The Safer oil refinery is only one of two in Yemen, with a capacity to produce 10,000 to 20,000 barrels per day.

Marib is considered one of the most significant historic sites on the Arabian Peninsula, according to UNESCO, and surrounded by rugged mountains and valleys.

It is said to have been the capital of the ancient Saba kingdom, best known for the legendary Queen of Sheba.

- How close are the rebels? -

The Huthis have previously claimed they were on the outskirts of the city, but two pro-government military officials said the rebels were still 30 kilometres west and north of the city, and 50 kilometres to the south.

© MOHAMMED HUWAIS A Yemeni man attends the mass funeral of Huthi rebel fighters killed in battles with Saudi-backed government troops in the Marib region on October 28, 2021

The rebels began a major push to seize the city in February and, after a lull, they renewed their offensive in September.


Thousands of rebels and pro-government fighters have been killed, according to reports from both sides.

Military officials say Huthi fighters are launching daily attacks from the west, north and south.

"They are sending thousands of fighters on armed trucks -- and sometimes motorcycles -- and using their drones to try to capture one village after another, until they reach the city," one official said.

The Saudi-led coalition, which has propped up the government since 2015, has reported carrying out frequent air strikes on the Huthis in recent weeks, boasting of casualties in the thousands.

The Huthis rarely comment on their losses, and AFP cannot independently verify the tolls.

- Will Marib fall? -

Despite the Huthis' advances, the government claims it is certain that the city won't fall into rebel hands.

Government troops have been digging tunnels around the city to give it further protection, military officials said.

"Marib has resisted and will keep on resisting," the province's governor Sultan al-Arada told local media.

"Marib, with the help of the coalition, will counter this assault."

But if the Huthis do take Marib, they would control the north -- and could push on and capture other provinces.

It would also give them significant leverage in any negotiations with the government.

Huthis have military reasons to capture Marib but it is also a matter of "pride and image", said one of the two military officials.

© - A boy stands outside a tent at a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Yemen's northeastern city of Marib on November 3, 2021

"They will continue no matter how many fighters they lose," the official said.

- Thousands flee conflict -

As the fighting rages, civilians are caught in the crossfire, suffering heavy casualties. Thousands have also been forced to flee their homes.

In October, at least 22 people were killed when a Huthi missile hit a mosque south of the city, and 13 others died when a missile demolished a tribal leader's home in the same area.

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has warned that "escalating hostilities since early September" have caused "civilian casualties, renewed displacements and further restricted civilians' movements."

Some 40,000 people have been forced to flee since September, UN refugee agency spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo said.

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The Battle of Marib: the Challenge of Ending a Stalemate War
by Nabil Hetari
Jul 9, 2021


ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nabil Hetari
Nabil Hetari is a Yemeni writer and human rights activist. His research and work focuses on Yemen and Gulf politics. Hetari is a contributor to Fikra Forum.


Brief Analysis


Without an exerted international peace effort, the siege on Marib could destroy the possibility of a unified Yemen.

Since February 6, 2021, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and the internationally recognized Hadi government, along with local popular resistance forces, have been locked in a battle for the city of Marib. Despite months of violence, the battle has not yielded clear results on the ground, and the Houthis have neither retreated nor ceased direct attacks on the city. Continuous Houthi escalation in Marib, including attacks with ballistic missiles and drone strikes, has resulted in the killing and wounding tens of civilians, including children. As a result, the battle for Marib may have become the bloodiest in the past seven years of the Yemeni conflict.

The reasons for such sustained, desperate combat are clear. For the Hadi government, the battle for Marib may be a matter of existential survival. For the Houthis, Marib represents a potentially critical strategic point if they want to negotiate favorable terms with foreign powers in the future and impose control over northern Yemen. The results of the battle for Marib could therefore dictate the end of the Yemeni conflict. Furthermore, a Houthi victory over Marib could mean added humanitarian catastrophe on top of the existing humanitarian crises throughout Yemen. As such, looking forward, Marib may be the most important episode in the trajectory of Yemen’s civil war.


The Role of Marib

The Houthis initiated the battle for Marib with a direct attack on the city, the last stronghold of the legitimate Hadi government in the north and the main headquarters of Yemen’s Ministry of Defense. In addition to the strategic importance of eliminating the Hadi government’s presence in northern Yemen, the Houthis see that a victory in Yemen could bring them to political negotiations with the Saudi-led coalition. These factors explain why Houthi leadership did not respond to UN Envoy Martin Griffith's call for dialogue in Oman. Instead, the Houthis continued to directly attack the city on several fronts, demonstrating that they do not want to engage in peace talks until they have acquired the maximum leverage possible, for which Marib is critical.

Of course, on the other side, Marib is important to the Hadi government for the same reasons, though the Hadi government is currently lacking the resources to effectively prevent Houthi attacks. The Hadi government and the Islah Party, its fighting partner in Marib, recognize that the city is their last main stronghold in the north, and they therefore consider it to be immensely important. Consequently, all the parties involved in the battle are focused on Marib as a potential decider in the nature of their exit from this war. Furthermore, retaining control over Marib is important for public appearances, and failure to do so may convince Yemenis that the Houthis are practically invincible in this conflict.

In fact, the battle has been so critical to the two sides that both forces have suffered immense casualties, including the deaths of major leadership figures. According to reports from both sides, the Hadi government has seen the death of its director of the officers’ affairs department, the chief of the military judiciary, the attorney general, the sixth district commander, and three commanders of the special forces, not to mention hundreds of other casualties. Likewise, the Houthis have suffered 3,000 casualties in the battle.

Geographic Significance

Beyond its status as the Hadi government’s final stronghold in the north, Marib is also geographically significant because it lies on the easiest road that runs from northern Yemen to Shabwa Governorate in the south (a seafront on the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea) and Al-Mahra Governorate, where the Saudi-led coalition forces are located.

In addition, facing north, Marib directly borders Houthi-controlled Sanaa, and it is therefore a major concern for the Houthis if the Hadi forces and popular resistance forces continue to be stationed there. If Houthis want to keep their control of Sanaa, getting rid of any opposition forces on its borders is critical.

Marib is likewise bordered on the south by territory where the increasing activities of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) have made the area unwelcoming to the Hadi government. As such, the government forces realize that its failure to defend Marib will cause them to retreat into unfriendly terrain.

And finally, Marib is one of Yemen’s most productive oil regions. Though the conflict has caused frequent interruptions to production of oil and gas there, consistent control of the region's resources could mean a steady, substantial source of income.

The Humanitarian Dimension

Beyond the strategic importance of Marib, there is also a humanitarian dimension that underscores the consequences of a Hadi government defeat there. With thousands of internally displaced persons living in the city, a Houthi victory could drive vulnerable populations into dangerous situations.

After years of war, Marib has become a major host for internally displaced persons in Yemen. The city has been welcoming displaced people since the fall of Sanaa in 2014, and in recent years, according to the Executive Unit for IDP Camps, the population of displaced persons has exceeded 2.5 million people. Supporters of the Islah party constitute the majority of displaced people from areas which have fallen under Houthi control or influence.

Thus, the battle for Marib could create major issues for the displaced civilians living in the city, especially since many of them support the Islah Party, a political identity that is not desirable in the southern regions. The STC, which controls much of southern Yemen, still dislikes Islah, which it considers the main player of the 1994 war against the south in which the STC has accused Islah of providing Sanaa government the religious approval and militia support to reclaim the unification of Yemen. This antagonism between the STC and Islah is particularly concerning because, in the event of a Houthi victory in Marib, those southern regions will be the immediate destinations for displaced persons as they flee the city.

More immediately concerning than the prospects of retreat, the violence of the battle itself could pose major threats to civilian populations. Currently, the battle is taking place in deadly confrontations on the city walls, and the Houthis’ suicide attacks on Marib prove that they are set on expanding into the city. If the battle reaches into the city itself, the Hadi forces and the popular resistance forces seem unlikely to retreat immediately. Instead, the battle could continue inside the neighborhoods and the streets of the city, and such violence could be life-threatening for civilians. In fact, drone strikes and missile attacks have already killed civilians, and there is no reason to believe they will stop.

Given these risks, foreign countries and international organizations have issued constant warnings about the humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the raging battle in Marib, but it seems that those warnings are not resonating with forces on the ground.

Prospects for Peace

To understand the prospects for peace, and an end to the fighting in Marib, one must consider the agendas of Saudi Arabia and Iran, the conflict’s two major international stakeholders. To a large extent, the civil war in Yemen can be described as a proxy war between the Saudi-led coalition and Iran, and both sides have contributed to continued humanitarian problems while making a peace process elusive. The total lockdown of the country, a result of this proxy war, makes the choice of joining the any of the fighting forces in Marib a favorable choice for unbiased civilians to earn a monthly salary and keep their families one step further from famine, perpetuating the conflict and contributing to more violence.

On one hand, Saudi Arabia’s continued airstrikes have damaged local Yemeni industries and endangered the local population, with some strikes killing civilians. Moreover, the Saudi-led coalition’s closure of Yemen's air and seaports can be seen as a direct cause for the increasing famine in many areas of Yemen. 

On the other side, Iranian support for the Houthis increases the Houthis’ motivation to create new battlefronts and to refrain from engaging in any prospective peace process. This trend was evident in late March, 2021 when the Houthis turned down a ceasefire offer from the Saudi-led coalition. At that time, a Houthi negotiator told a FRANCE24 reporter, “Marib is essential for us because of the blockade which stops the impoverished Yemeni population from buying petrol and gas at market prices… As long as this blockade is imposed on northern Yemen, preventing access to these much-needed goods, we will have to try and lift it by force.”

Generally, as seen through the past seven years of the Yemeni conflict, external military support for any of the parties to this war can be described as disastrous for local society, and such support has created an obstacle for the international attempts for peace and negotiation. In the end, the cost of peace could be much cheaper than the cost of war if the Yemenis took another path other than the path of conflict.

A Critical Moment for Yemen

Given the strategic significance and humanitarian ramifications of the battle for Marib, the coming developments in this battle could decide the fate of Yemen’s civil war. If the Houthis are able to take the city, remove the Hadi government from the north, and begin a process of negotiations with the Saudi-led coalition, it would seem unlikely for the Hadi government forces to make any kind of resurgence.

In that event, as the Hadi government struggles to find a foothold in increasingly hostile territory, Yemen would start to resemble its old north-south divide, with the STC controlling territory in the southern provinces, and the Houthis controlling territory in the north. As a result, the battle for Marib could be a final stand for the possibility of a unified Yemen.

In his special briefing, the U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking summarized what critical times Yemen is going through. Lenderking also pointed out that the international community holds a responsibility in solving the Yemeni issue. In fact, it seems very difficult for Yemenis to come together by themselves. As such, an exerted approach by the international community is perhaps the only way to resolve the disastrous Houthi siege on Marib.

Finland's secret school for children of ISIS fighters

Al Hol is a sprawling tent city in Syria housing around 60,000 people, mainly women and children

 

Kurdish fighter stand guard as Syrian child, suspected of being related to Islamic State (IS) group fighters, waits at the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp, before being released along with women and children to return to their homes, in the al-Hasakeh governorate in northeastern Syria. AFP

AFP

Nov 29, 2021

At home in Helsinki, Ilona Taimela scrolls through hundreds of WhatsApp chats with her former pupils — pictures of animals, maths sums and simple sentences in English and Finnish.

Last year, the teacher gave lessons to Finnish children imprisoned about 3,000 kilometres away in Syria's Al Hol displacement camp — using only the messaging app.

Al Hol is a sprawling tent city housing around 60,000 people, mainly women and children displaced by the US-backed battle to expel the ISIS militant group from war-torn Syria

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Teacher Ilona Taimela in Helsinki. AFP

Among them are thousands of children of foreign mothers who travelled to Syria to be the wives of ISIS fighters.

“Some of the children didn't know what a building is, what a house is, because they've always been in a tent,” Ms Taimela told AFP.


“There was so much that they needed to learn.”

Rights observers warn the camp's children are under constant threat from violence, poor sanitation and fires.

“It's a miserable place, it's out of control,” said Jussi Tanner, Finland's special envoy charged with ensuring the fundamental rights of the Finnish children in Al Hol, including access to healthcare and schooling, and eventual repatriation.

Extremist propaganda “is free to roam with no counter-messaging,” he said.

Mr Tanner had the idea of offering lessons by phone to Al Hol's Finnish children when pupils everywhere moved to distance learning at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.


A girl at the new Children's Rehabilitation Centre for relatives of ISIS fighters in Al Hasakah, Syria. AFP

With the help of Finland's Lifelong Learning Foundation, officials engaged Ms Taimela, a specialist in teaching Finnish children abroad, and another teacher, to design and teach a curriculum.

With phones banned in the camp, the lessons would have to be in secret, and the politically sensitive project was also to be kept hidden from the Finnish public.

Mr Tanner forwarded details about the voluntary classes to the mothers.

“That same day … we got maybe eight children,” Ms Taimela said.

Soon 23 of around 35 Finnish children in the camp had signed up.


“Good morning! Today is Thursday May 7, 2020. The first day of distance school!”

Children at the new centre hosting ISIS fighters' relatives in northeastern Syria. AFP

Ms Taimela's first message to the children included a smiling selfie.

“The sun is shining here in Finland. What kind of weather is it there?”

Soon Ms Taimela and her colleague were exchanging hundreds of text and voice messages a day with the children, who were taught one or two subjects a day.

“The little ones would always get Finnish, and the older ones would get geography or history, and some of them also wanted to learn English.”


Sending photos used too much data, so the teachers relied on emojis, but soon realised there were no symbols for mathematical fractions or the ubiquitous Finnish blueberry.

Children play at the centre for relatives of ISIS fighters. AFP

“During the year the blueberry [emoji] arrived, so we were happy,” Ms Taimela says, laughing.

Despite knowing only scant details about the children, Ms Taimela said she and her colleague were “worried all the time about their welfare — especially when we heard that they were sick, or there was a storm and the tent had collapsed”.

Communication with some families would stop periodically.

“Some of them escaped the camp,” Mr Tanner says, “so they were actually taking part in the school while on the run in northwestern Syria in an active conflict zone.”


Others were suddenly repatriated and left the group for good.


After months of lessons, the mother of one six-year-old revealed her daughter could now read.

“Not all six-year-olds in Finland can do that,” Ms Taimela says, smiling. “It was a eureka moment.”

ISIS fighters declared a “caliphate” in large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, three years into Syria's civil war.

Ms Taimela says she feels “sadness rather than anger” towards the mothers who led their children into the conflict.


Many were vulnerable and believed the promises of jihadists that they would live in some “kind of paradise".

But several military offensives whittled away at the brutal ISIS proto-state, until in 2019 Syrian Kurdish forces declared it defeated.

Pupils learn at the newly inaugurated Children's Rehabilitation Centre in Al Hasakah. AFP

Reluctant Western nations have since brought home handfuls of their ISIS-linked nationals, mostly children.

Ms Taimela had accepted that she would never know what happened to the repatriated children she had taught, but one day she was called to a reception centre in Finland.

“It was an emotional few hours” meeting some of her pupils face to face for the first time, she said.

They “came very close” and Ms Taimela read to them.

“I just wanted to know, 'How is everything, what can I help with?'," she said.

Finland's foreign ministry has now repatriated 23 children and seven adults.

Mr Tanner told AFP that only around 15 “harder-to-reach” individuals, of whom 10 are children, remain in camps in Syria.

The issue originally proved divisive in Finland, but opposition has “become much more muted".

Ms Taimela's teaching drew to a natural close in mid-2021 and the ministry later made the project public.

She is now looking at how to use the innovative teaching model in other crisis zones or camps, and has received requests regarding Greece, Myanmar and Colombia.

“The Al-Hol teacher, that's my label now,” Ms Taimela smiles.

“But I'm proud of what we did”

'Gangotri wave' connecting two of Milky Way's spiral arms discovered

Figure 1. (Top) 13CO integrated intensity map from the SEDIGISM survey in the velocity 

range −95 to −75 km s−1 showing a wave-like feature. (Bottom) 12CO integrated intensity 

map from the ThrUMMS survey in the same velocity range as the top panel, smoothed to 

an angular resolution of 5'. Images are stretched along the y-axis for a better visualization.

A team of researchers from Germany, France and the U.K. has discovered a long thin filament of dense gas connecting two of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their work studying carbon monoxide gas in the galaxy.

Prior research has shown that other galaxies have features called feathers—long gas filaments with barbs that look from Earth like feathers. But because it is very difficult to study the Milky Way galaxy from an Earth perspective, no such features have been seen, until now.

In their work, the researchers were studying concentrations of carbon monoxide gas in data from the APEX telescope in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. They noticed concentrations that had not been seen before, and after taking a closer look, discovered that it was part of a large gas formation that extended from near the center of the galaxy outward, connecting two of the arms that give the galaxy its distinctive look.

The researchers named the formation the Gangotri wave—an homage to the massive glacier whose melting gives rise to the Ganges River. In India, the Milky Way galaxy is known as Akasha Ganga. The newly discovered feather spans approximately 5.6764e+16 to 1.22989e+17 kilometers in reaching between the two arms and is approximately 1.6083242e+17 kilometers from the rotational center of the galaxy. They have also estimated its mass to be approximately equal to nine suns. Prior to the new discovery, all of the gas tendrils found in the Milky Way have aligned with the spiral arms.

The researchers found that the Gangotri wave has another unique and interesting feature in that it is not as straight as expected. Instead, it zig-zags back and forth along its length in a pattern similar to a sine wave. The researchers were not able to explain the strange phenomenon but note that some force must be at play—a force that is likely to be the focus of many upcoming research efforts. The team plans to continue their study of gases in the Milky Way, this time actively looking for new feathers.Video: Rotating galaxy disks in the early universe

More information: V. S. Veena et al, A Kiloparsec-scale Molecular Wave in the Inner Galaxy: Feather of the Milky Way?, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2021). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac341f

Journal information: Astrophysical Journal Letters 

 2021 Science X Network

ITS POSTMODERN AETHYR

The Missing Link: The Dark Matter Mystery – The Hidden Elephant of Cosmology

Abigail Anderson November 28, 2021 

What is the size of the universe? From what is it made? How did it happen and how did it become as we know it today? Cosmology, which is the study of the origin and development of the universe, deals with these topics. It is currently one of the most exciting disciplines in the natural sciences, spanning physics from the smallest to the largest structures we know. The new series of articles illustrates the current state of knowledge and explains why the vast majority of cosmologists seem to cling to absurd ideas such as empty space with repulsive gravity, the emergence of the universe from nothing and the invisible matter of which 95% of the universe exists. The first three parts will be about dark matter – the invisible elephant in cosmology.

The discovery of the cosmic foam

If you look at the sky in a dark place on a clear moonless night, you will find a dull glowing band stretching across the whole sky: through the constellation Sagittarius, the famous summer triangle of the eagle, harp, and swan, Cassiopeia, Gemini all the way to Orion, and the circle closing in the southern sky, Invisible to our latitudes all year round, above the ship and the southern cross to the bow. This is our Milky Way, our home galaxy, roughly disc-shaped with a flat outer area and a thick, balloon-shaped central region (which is a Balken Spiral Galaxy).

It measures about 185,000 light-years away, contains hundreds of billions of stars and at least many planets. When viewed from above, it shows 4 outward spiraling arms, which protrude from the starry disk evenly due to young blue stars. Our sun lies on the inner edge of a spiral arm about halfway from the center. It spins itself majestically; It takes the sun 240 million years to form one orbit. Before the last cruising, the first dinosaurs were just showing up. An island in the world, where the visible universe inhabits hundreds of billions. But it looks like this is just foam on much stronger ocean waves.

What’s missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often time to rearrange various news and wallpapers. On the weekend we want to take it, follow the side trails away from the stream, experiment with different perspectives and make the nuances heard.

Our concept of the universe looked very different 100 years ago: Until the 1920s, a large part of astronomers assumed that the Milky Way formed the entire universe and that the numerous small, often spiral-shaped nebulae in the sky were like large nebulae. In the constellation Andromeda they are nothing but gaseous clouds within the Milky Way – otherwise they would have to be millions of light-years away, which a lot seemed completely absurd. Others believe that galaxies like the Milky Way were galaxies and that the universe was much larger than expected.

When larger telescopes such as the 2.5-meter Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson made it possible to dissolve the Andromeda Nebula into individual stars, a dispute among cosmologists called the “Great Debate” was finally resolved in the 1920s: Edwin Hubble succeeded that it was possible to determine the distance of the nebula Andromeda for the first time is based on a specific type of variable star whose periodic pulsations duration allows inferences to be drawn about its luminosity. Because a certain luminosity results in a clear brightness for every distance. It has reached 900,000 light-years, because the relationship of the brightness of the period to Stars will benefit not properly calibrated; Today we know it is 2.5 million light-years away. But the result, in the right order of magnitude, was a gigantic leap in knowledge that degenerated the Milky Way from the rank of embodiment of the entire universe into a speck of dust in itself.

Crystals Efficiently Convert Light to More Useful Wavelengths – Paving Way for Better Solar Cells

By TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NOVEMBER 27, 2021

The sensitizer molecules (green) absorb low energy photons (long-wavelength light) and become excited into triplet states. These triplet states are then transferred to nearby annihilator molecules (blue), which then pass them around throughout the crystalline array of the annihilator. If two traveling triplet states meet at a single annihilator molecule, the combined excess energy produces a higher energy photon (shorter wavelength light). Credit: Yoichi Murakami from Tokyo Tech

Solid-solution organic crystals have been brought into the quest for superior photon upconversion materials, which transform presently wasted long-wavelength light into more useful shorter wavelength light. Scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology revisited a materials approach previously deemed lackluster—using a molecule originally developed for organic LEDs—achieving outstanding performance and efficiency. Their findings pave the way for many novel photonic technologies, such as better solar cells and photocatalysts for hydrogen and hydrocarbon productions.

Light is a powerful source of energy that can, if leveraged correctly, be used to drive stubborn chemical reactions, generate electricity, and run optoelectronic devices. However, in most applications, not all the wavelengths of light can be used. This is because the energy that each photon carries is inversely proportional to its wavelength, and chemical and physical processes are triggered by light only when the energy provided by individual photons exceeds a certain threshold.

This means that devices like solar cells cannot benefit from all the color contained in sunlight, as it comprises a mixture of photons with both high and low energies. Scientists worldwide are actively exploring materials to realize photon upconversion (PUC), by which photons with lower energies (longer wavelengths) are captured and re-emitted as photons with higher energies (shorter wavelengths). One promising way to realize this is through triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA). This process requires the combination of a sensitizer material and an annihilator material. The sensitizer absorbs low energy photons (long-wavelength light) and transfers its excited energy to the annihilator, which emits higher energy photons (light of shorter wavelength) as a result of TTA (Figure 1).

Finding good solid materials for PUC has proven challenging for a long time. Although liquid samples can achieve relatively high PUC efficiency, working with liquids, especially those comprising organic solvents, is inherently risky and cumbersome in many applications. However, previous trials to create PUC solids generally suffered from poor crystal quality and small crystal domains, which lead to short traveling distances of triplet excited states and thus, low PUC efficiency. Additionally, in most previous solid PUC samples, stability under continuous photoirradiation was not tested and experimental data were often acquired in inert gas atmospheres. Hence, the low efficiency and insufficient materials stability had been of concern for a long time.

Now, in a recent study led by Associate Professor Yoichi Murakami from Tokyo Tech, Japan, a team of researchers found the answer to this challenge. Published in Materials Horizon, their paper (open access) describes how they focused on van der Waals crystals, a classical materials class that has not been considered for the quest of high-efficiency PUC solids. After discovering that 9-(2-naphthyl)-10-[4-(1-naphthyl)phenyl]anthracene (ANNP), a hydrocarbon molecule originally developed for blue organic LEDs, was an excellent annihilator for embodying their concept, they tried mixing it with platinum octaethylporphyrin (PtOEP), a staple sensitizer that absorbs green light.

The team found that aggregation of the sensitizer molecules could be completely avoided by utilizing the crystalline phase of a van der Waals solid solution with a sufficiently low proportion of PtOEP to ANNP (around 1:50000). They proceeded to thoroughly characterize the obtained crystals and found some insight into why using the ANNP annihilator prevented the aggregation of the sensitizer when other existing annihilators had failed to do so in previous studies. Moreover, the solid crystals the team produced were highly stable and exhibited outstanding performance, as Dr. Murakami remarks: “The results of our experiments using simulated sunlight indicate that solar concentration optics such as lenses are no longer needed to efficiently upconvert terrestrial sunlight.”

Overall, this study brings van der Waals crystals back into the game of PUC as an effective way of creating outstanding solid materials using versatile hydrocarbon annihilators. “The proof-of-concept we presented in our paper is a major technical leap forward in the quest for high-performance PUC solids, which will open up diverse photonics technologies in the future,” concludes Dr. Murakami. Let us hope further research in this topic allows us to efficiently transform light into its most useful forms.

Reference: “van der Waals solid solution crystals for highly efficient in-air photon upconversion under subsolar irradiance” by Riku Enomoto, Megumi Hoshi, Hironaga Oyama, Hideki Agata, Shinichi Kurokawa, Hitoshi Kuma, Hidehiro Uekusa and Yoichi Murakami, 28 October 2021, Materials Horizons.
DOI: 10.1039/D1MH01542G

 

Caltech Researchers Read a Jellyfish’s Mind

By LORI DAJOSE, CALTECH NOVEMBER 27, 2021

Credit: B. Weissbourd

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors—such as moving our limbs, responding to fear and other emotions, and so on—is an incredibly complex puzzle for neuroscientists. But now, fundamental questions about the neuroscience of behavior may be answered through a new and much simpler model organism: tiny jellyfish.

With a new genetic toolbox, researchers can view jellyfish neurons as they light up in real time. Jellyfish do not have a centralized brain; rather, their brain cells (neurons) are distributed in a diffuse net throughout the body. As shown in this video, this study discovered that there is actually spatial organization to the way that neurons are activated when the animal is coordinating behavior. Credit: B. Weissbourd

Caltech researchers have now developed a kind of genetic toolbox tailored for tinkering with Clytia hemisphaerica, a type of jellyfish about 1 centimeter in diameter when fully grown. Using this toolkit, the tiny creatures have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated. Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal’s neural activity as it behaves naturally. In other words, the team can read a jellyfish’s mind as it feeds, swims, evades predators, and more, in order to understand how the animal’s relatively simple brain coordinates its behaviors.

A paper describing the new study appears in the journal Cell on November 24, 2021. The research was conducted primarily in the laboratory of David J. Anderson, Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience.

When it comes to model organisms used in laboratories, jellyfish are an extreme outlier. Worms, flies, fish, and mice—some of the most commonly used laboratory model organisms—are all more closely related, genetically speaking, to one another than any are to a jellyfish. In fact, worms are evolutionarily closer to humans than they are to jellyfish.

“Jellyfish are an important point of comparison because they’re so distantly related,” says Brady Weissbourd, postdoctoral scholar and first author on the study. “They let us ask questions like, are there principles of neuroscience shared across all nervous systems? Or, what might the first nervous systems have looked like? By exploring nature more broadly, we may also discover useful biological innovations. Importantly, many jellyfish are small and transparent, which makes them exciting platforms for systems neuroscience. That is because there are amazing new tools for imaging and manipulating neural activity using light, and you can put an entire living jellyfish under a microscope and have access to the whole nervous system at once.”

A jellyfish folds the right side of its body to bring a tiny brine shrimp to its mouth. Credit: B. Weissbourd

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body.

This decentralized body plan seems to be a highly successful evolutionary strategy, as jellyfish have persisted throughout the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?

After developing the genetic tools to work with Clytia, the researchers first examined the neural circuits underlying the animal’s feeding behaviors. When Clytia snags a brine shrimp in a tentacle, it folds its body in order to bring the tentacle to its mouth and bends its mouth toward the tentacle simultaneously. The team aimed to answer: How does the jellyfish brain, apparently unstructured and radially symmetric, coordinate this directional folding of the jellyfish body?

By examining the glowing chain reactions occurring in the animals’ neurons as they ate, the team determined that a subnetwork of neurons that produces a particular neuropeptide (a molecule produced by neurons) is responsible for the spatially localized inward folding of the body. Additionally, though the network of jellyfish neurons originally seemed diffuse and unstructured, the researchers found a surprising degree of organization that only became visible with their fluorescent system.

Clytia hemisphaerica from the side. Credit: B. Weissbourd

“Our experiments revealed that the seemingly diffuse network of neurons that underlies the circular jellyfish umbrella is actually subdivided into patches of active neurons, organized in wedges like slices of a pizza,” explains Anderson. “When a jellyfish snags a brine shrimp with a tentacle, the neurons in the ‘pizza slice’ nearest to that tentacle would first activate, which in turn caused that part of the umbrella to fold inward, bringing the shrimp to the mouth. Importantly, this level of neural organization is completely invisible if you look at the anatomy of a jellyfish, even with a microscope. You have to be able to visualize the active neurons in order to see it—which is what we can do with our new system.”

Weissbourd emphasizes that this is only scratching the surface of understanding the full repertoire of jellyfish behaviors. “In future work, we’d like to use this jellyfish as a tractable platform to understand precisely how behavior is generated by whole neural systems,” he says. “In the context of food passing, understanding how the tentacles, umbrella, and mouth all coordinate with each other lets us get at more general problems of the function of modularity within nervous systems and how such modules coordinate with each other. The ultimate goal is not only to understand the jellyfish nervous system but to use it as a springboard to understand more complex systems in the future.”

The new model system is straightforward for researchers anywhere to use. Jellyfish lineages can be maintained in artificial sea water in a lab environment and shipped to collaborators who are interested in answering questions using the little animals.

Reference: “A genetically tractable jellyfish model for systems and evolutionary neuroscience” by Brandon Weissbourd, Tsuyoshi Momose, Aditya Nair, Ann Kennedy, Bridgett Hunt and David J. Anderson, 24 November 2021, Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.10.021

In addition to Weissbourd and Anderson, additional co-authors are Tsuyoshi Momose of Sorbonne Université in France, graduate student Aditya Nair, former postdoctoral scholar Ann Kennedy (now an assistant professor at Northwestern University), and former research technician Bridgett Hunt. Funding was provided by the Caltech Center for Evolutionary Science, the Whitman Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Life Sciences Research Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The Hopeful Message of ‘The Dawn of Everything’

Ancient humans had a flexible knack for reorganizing societies that weren’t working. 

We can, too.

Crawford Kilian 22 Nov 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

Anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, co-author of The Dawn of Everything, speaks at a protest occupation at the University of Amsterdam, 2015. To his right, political theorist Enzo Rossi. Photo via Wikimedia.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By David Graeber and David Wengrow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2021)

This book is plain fun — an intellectual romp through 200,000 years of human history that overturns all the conventional wisdom about our ancestors. And it offers encouraging new directions for social change.

David Graeber, who died in 2020, was not only an anthropologist but an anarchist. Not a bomb-thrower, but a believer in people sorting out their problems, agreeing on the solutions, and carrying on — without coercion. He was a leading figure in the Occupy movement 10 years ago and is said to have coined the phrase “We are the 99 per cent.”

David Wengrow is an archaeologist, and the two created this book over a decade as a kind of hobby, swapping the manuscript back and forth as it gained more documentation, and realizing it would need at least three sequels to cover the material properly. I hope Wengrow can provide at least some of those sequels, but this book is a feast in itself.

First all, it’s full of surprising and fascinating information about the societies of the past, especially since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. The information may be well known to experts, but it hasn’t reached the general public yet.


I was amazed to learn that the people who built Stonehenge had experimented with farming and rejected it; they built a new economy based on gathering hazelnuts. Similarly, the vast Toltec city of Teotihuacán, near modern Mexico City, supported a population of 100,000 — most of them living in excellent social housing.

Second, and more important, Graeber and Wengrow use this information to overturn the whole myth of “progress” from hunting and gathering to farming to cities, kings and bureaucracies, and then to the modern industrial state. That myth assumes our ancient ancestors lived in small groups for 200,000 years, rarely interacting with others. Then they invented farming and began to live in larger communities. Only then did social complexity and surplus food supply permit the rise of social institutions like monarchs who commanded great projects built by obedient subjects, with literate bureaucrats to collect taxes and record events.

Resources for centuries-long projects

On the contrary — the peoples of the Stone Age, this book contends, were as intelligent and rational as we were, and quite capable of projects requiring hundreds or thousands of workers, over very long periods of time. When they felt the need, they experimented with social models. Instead of living in a brutal Hobbesian war of all against all, they travelled and traded safely over great distances.

They also had the resources to support projects like Poverty Point, a huge system of earthworks in Louisiana started 6,000 years ago and continued for 600 years. We have no idea what the system’s purpose was, but it required co-operation and logistical support on a grand scale for many generations. Thousands of years later, another civilization we call Cahokia rose on the Mississippi near St. Louis. Graeber and Wengrow suggest it collapsed when it became totalitarian:

“For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much between domestic life — lived under constant surveillance from above — and the awesome spectacle of the city itself. That spectacle could be terrifying. Along with games and feasts, in the early decades of Cahokia’s expansion there were mass executions and burials carried out in public.”

Graeber and Wengrow argue that Cahokia fell thanks to three freedoms enjoyed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors: the freedom to walk away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to choose new kinds of social organization. Moreover, the horror of Cahokia traumatized the peoples of eastern North America into ever considering such a “civilized” society again.

So when French settlers arrived in what is now Canada, they found Indigenous peoples living in small communities, farming and foraging. But they lacked the great structures and institutions that the French defined as civilization. That meant the Indigenous peoples were “savages.”

The Mi’kmaq and Huron-Wendat thought no better of the newcomers. They had some useful gadgets like firearms, but they were always quarrelling, and always obeying someone else’s orders.

French Jesuit missionaries got a shock from the people they had come to convert. The “savages” could argue them point for point, and defeat them. Thousands of years of Indigenous spoken discourse had made reasoned debate a valued skill, beating even the Jesuits’ training.

‘They brand us for slaves’


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Graeber and Wengrow even argue that the Enlightenment itself was the result of reports that scandalized Jesuits sent home, describing the Indigenous critique of European culture. Perhaps the most influential was a book by a French explorer and official, Lahontan, relating his conversations with the Wendat Chief Kondiaronk.

As Lahontan put it, Indigenous people who had been to Europe, like Kondiaronk, “… were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There is no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society; they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the differences in ranks which are observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.”

Europeans were both titillated and scandalized by this critique. They liked the new idea of invoking outsiders who could safely criticize the European status quo, and many similar books soon appeared, reporting the views of fictitious foreigners; Gulliver’s Travels turned the foreign-critique genre into outright satire.

But Indigenous “savages” in North America didn’t quite fit their concept of serious thinkers and social analysts. The French economist Turgot and Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, invented a whole new system of social evolution: hunter-gatherers lived in small, egalitarian groups and became farmers who could support kings, bureaucrats and priests living in cities, which in turn became kingdoms and empires; these had climaxed in the European nation-states, and would soon clinch their superiority by inventing the industrial revolution.

This tidy system relegated Kondiaronk and other non-Europeans to irrelevant relics of a lost Eden of freedom and equality. Obedience and inequality were just the price to be paid for being part of an advanced society. Imperialism now had an intellectual foundation as the engine of progress. Those who resisted would be defeated, exploited and perhaps eventually raised to civilization in some distant future.

Living like rentiers, sustainably

Graeber and Wengrow demolish this myth of social evolution, citing decades of recent findings about ancient societies around the world. Societies did not evolve and progress; they improvised and experimented, arguably with more success than we modern Canadians. As managers of productive ecosystems, Indigenous peoples could live like rentiers on the interest from their living wealth. Like our own billionaires, they could afford to spend their excess wealth and leisure time on projects like Poverty Point and Cahokia.


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And when supporters of such projects lost interest, they walked away, talked things over, and built new societies depending on their situation. When those new societies ran into trouble, their members worked out something else.

The authors argue that we have become stuck in societies that rule their members through three principles: a monopoly on violence, control of information and personal charisma. Earlier societies ran on none, or just one or two, of these elements. It took the Enlightenment to pull them all together and turn freedom and equality into Orwellian parodies. Even Marxist revolutionaries accepted the three principles, and governments around the world of all political stripes endorse them as well.

I have plenty of quibbles with this or that example of Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments, and advocates of Big History will have more. But the authors make their key point irrefutably. We’ve walked away from bad societies for tens of thousands of years, or just said no, and then built better societies after long debate.

We can do it again.