Undergound aliens in Lithuania and biolabs in Ukraine – why do conspiracies trend? 

Jurga Bakaitė, LRT.lt

2022.08.13 

The Kremlin of Moscow / Vida Press


Wild conspiracy theories – from biolabs to super-soldiers – are being spread by marginals and Russian officials alike. The question is – why? In an interview with LRT.lt, Algredas Buiko, researcher of conspiracy theories, walks us through their logic.

Conspiracy theories have long seemed to be on the margins of society. But during the pandemic, they made their way into politics, and we saw the importance and power of this phenomenon. Is it also relevant to talk about conspiracy theories in times of war?

It is still relevant, but an important element is that war is more localised than a pandemic. This means that it is possible to see where conspiracy theories are more prevalent and where they are less so. Pandemic conspiracy theories have spread far and wide, and many countries have been affected.

The war in Ukraine is something that Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, the US, Canada, and the UK have focused on. If you talk to the French or the Spanish, you realise that people there look at [the war] quite casually, as something that is happening elsewhere.

Russia has always used conspiracy theories as a kind of weapon, and culturally they have been quite popular. Conspiracy theories stem from a general sense of anxiety and helplessness, a feeling of insecurity and a desire to be able to explain and control the world.

Vladimir Putin / AP


In the Russian media today, one can read stories on a parliamentary group that has been set up to investigate alleged biological laboratories that carry out scientific experiments on Ukrainian soldiers. Why do we hear such statements from senior Russian officials?

Two conspiracy theories have emerged during the war in Ukraine. One is about pathogens designed to kill the honest Russian people who live on the border with Ukraine. There was a panic in Belgorod – the inhabitants were frightened that pigeons flying in from Ukraine would bring bacteria that could kill them.

There is also a Ukrainian bat centre. [...] It was one of the so-called secret laboratories that Russia decided to accuse of developing and spreading biological weapons. [...]

There are conspiracy theories about doping, about special drugs for Ukrainian soldiers. The best conspiracy theories have a grain of truth, and, indeed, various drugs were often distributed to soldiers, including the amphetamine chocolate given to Wehrmacht troops during the Second World War.

We have also seen posts on social media by Ukrainian soldiers about Russian troops using drugs. But this could also be propaganda – there is a lot of information that is difficult to verify.


Russian conspiracy theories about doping and experimentation on Ukrainians are used to explain why Russia is not winning. Conspiracy theories about biological weapons are aimed at Russia’s domestic audience and countries that are still friendly to Russia – Iran, [some] African countries, and China.

Russia's war in Ukraine / AP

There was a need for a qualitative explanation as to why the war started. All the people, even those who are friendly to Russia, needed to be told why there was a siege of Kyiv. That is why the rumour about the biological weapons laboratories was spread. It is supposed to be very scary, and there is still a pandemic going on. That explains it, it sounds logical.

Everyone remembers the Russian propaganda at the beginning of the war – the plan was to take Kyiv in three days, and achieve a very quick victory because the Ukrainians would not want to fight and would surrender themselves to the “glorious Russian Empire”. But this was not what happened.

Then, there is a need to modify the previous conspiracy theory narratives that have been fed to the Russian population for the last few years that the Ukrainians are weak, peasants, and uneducated. Now, they need to explain why things are not going according to plan.

It is hard to believe that panic can be sown over pigeons from other countries. But we see that people believe it. Is it difficult to spread conspiracy theories and cause panic?

It is not difficult, but you must have the right soil. For a long time, conspiracy theories seemed to be a fringe issue. For example, the 1990s were when the most interesting conspiracy theories were born in Lithuania. At that time, everybody was talking about underground alien bases, warehouses with rulers of other galaxies. It was more like science fiction, while today’s conspiracy theories are soap operas. [...]

I would say conspiracy theories became part of the normal narrative after 9/11 because then, even serious scientists and researchers started to say that, for example, President George Bush might have been involved.

Pigeons sit on stautues of soldiers at a monument for Soviet soldiers in Kolpino, outside St. Petersburg, Russia / AP

The spread of conspiracy theories is influenced by public anxiety, and the Internet makes it easy to spread anxiety. A couple of hundred years ago, it needed much more effort – printing newspapers, books. It was done, [...] but it was usually a serious operation, where one conspiracy theory was spread as much as possible.

And now, we are surrounded by general anxiety. Conspiracy theories are just born, they don’t even need to be created – they emerge and develop unhindered. There are a lot of people who feel bad, who are filled with anxiety, who do not trust the official narrative, and so they will choose anything that looks like an alternative.

How is this atmosphere being exploited by political forces or so-called political technologists in Russia?

It has always been used. It used to be called black propaganda, and it usually involved the dissemination of specific information or modified facts.

Conspiracy theories work by reducing the public’s desire to do something and change. Many of them are aimed, especially in Russia, at the domestic audience. In Russia, their role is to create more apoliticism and convince people that nothing can be changed, that voting is pointless.

It is very interesting how Russians feel about their country. They think they are living in a dystopia, like Oceania in [George Orwell’s] 1984, when in fact they are living in a kleptocracy with a kind of powerlessness and a perception that this is the way it should be.

This notion continues to be fed by conspiracy theories, saying that a horrible world would destroy the whole of Russia if it could. Therefore, it is necessary to suffer, and it is impossible to even think that it could be otherwise.

Residents of Luhansk listen to Putin's speech / AP

This is important because most of the time, especially in the 21st century, dictators are overthrown not so much by other countries but by their own people, as in the case of [the Libyan dictator] Muammar Gaddafi. This is one of the reasons why successful states, even those that are somewhat authoritarian or totalitarian, such as China, can maintain a certain calmness.

However, Russia is not such an economic giant, it is not as rich as, say, Saudi Arabia, where there is a hyper-totalitarian theocracy that manages to make the population happy by bribing them. Russia does not have that, so it has to bribe the population with an ideology, with the conviction that they belong to a big and special Russian state because the thinking in Russia is that individuals are not valuable. [...]

We often hear that Russian propaganda is based on dehumanisation, that Ukraine is portrayed as a country that is not worthy of existence. Why, then, portray them as cyborgs, as creators of secret experiments? Is this the same dehumanisation or something else?

These are related. Umberto Eco wrote an article called “Ur-Fascism” in which he talks about common forms of fascism, for example, the cult of the martyr and the hero. Elsewhere, the martyr is something that appears occasionally, whereas, in Russian fascism, there is a constant belief that the best thing to do is to die for a great cause. Then, there is the cult of machismo, the disrespect for femininity.

The third element is the perception of the enemy. The enemy is always depicted as dehumanised, so there is talk of cyborgs, people who take drugs. But this is a recurring theme in war. After all, Russian soldiers are not called orcs for no reason. It is an element of dehumanisation so that one could look at all the horrors without losing one’s mind. [...]

Russia is imbued with Ur-Fascism. Putin was photographed shirtless on a horse to show masculinity, power, and the cult of the leader so that every Russian could look up to him, identify with him, and feel that he is better off than the weak, feminine people of the West.

Vladimir Putin on a horse / AP

The enemy is therefore portrayed as extremely weak and extremely strong at the same time. It seems that this should be very difficult to show, but it has always been a recurring theme in homophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Homosexuals are often portrayed as feminine, physically weak, but at the same time, as controlling medical institutions, universities, IT, Hollywood. Also, Jews are portrayed as very talkative, greedy, but also as taking over the whole world. There is no logical way to reconcile this. But conspiracy theories are not about logic, they are about an emotional element.

The enemy must be extremely strong to explain the anxiety and why you need to be afraid of that enemy. But at the same time, it must be weak in order for you to perceive yourself as better and more special, which is why there is a constant process of dehumanisation. [...]

In Russia, the authorities use the Ur-Fascist narratives as opium for the people so that they do not think about how bad their lives are and put themselves above the rest of the world. Psychoanalysis says that many people in therapy cannot get rid of anger because if anger disappeared, sadness would take its place. In the case of Russia, it is the same – if the population got rid of chauvinism, they would have to face an unpleasant reality.

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The Tragedy and Triumph of an Organizing Campaign

Daisy Pitkin’s memoir “On the Line” documents acts of heroism and solidarity, as well as the grueling personal toll of a life in organizing.

CARLOS SPOTTORNO/PANOS PICTURE​S/REDUX
Workers in an industrial laund​ry facility


Micah Uetricht/August 4, 2022

THE NEW REPUBLIC

CRITICAL MASS

My first job out of college was as a cashier selling snacks and magazines at a Chicago airport. My coworkers and I—about two hundred of us, mostly African Americans and Filipino immigrants—made long commutes from all over the city, earning less than nine dollars an hour and constant disrespect from our bosses. Our general manager, a man I’ll call Richard, was known for scrutinizing workers’ uniforms as we punched in to find minor infractions, or sneaking up on us at the register to catch us texting when no customers were around, then writing us up. Our jobs were miserable, and he made them more miserable.

So like millions of other workers before us, we began to organize a union—talking endlessly to coworkers on our breaks and the train ride home, mapping out with staff organizers who was a leader on which shift and which of their coworkers they could convince to vote for the union, figuring out how to overcome divisions between workers across barriers of race and personality, crafting an effective pitch for Filipino workers to make in Tagalog to coworkers on the fence, and a million more tiny details that all had to line up to win the vote. I took the job with the intention of helping organize a union but wasn’t prepared for the pushback that Richard spearheaded. The day we announced the union drive, union supporters on the early shift wore union buttons to work. Management took the buttons as declarations of war, and Richard sent all the union supporters home. The call quickly went out from organizers to union supporters: management had attacked us. We had to strike back.


On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union
by Daisy Pitkin
Algonquin Books, 288 pp., $27.95

Richard sent so many of us home that the company no longer had enough workers to run the stores, so he left the main office deep in the bowels of the airport to do our jobs in the terminals himself. Near the security checkpoint, we rehearsed how we would confront him. My conflict-avoidant heart raced. Growing giddy, we passed through security and roved the airport, racing around the never-ending stream of travelers to look for him. We eventually tracked him down at a store in Terminal 3, ringing up customers for four-dollar bottles of water. Richard, visibly sweating, refused to speak with us. “As you can see,” he said, fussing with a display case of Chicago-themed tchotchke key chains, “I’m very busy here.”

We were forging ahead, shouting our demands, when Richard—this man who had inflicted so many petty indignities upon so many of us, had made us feel so small in exchange wages just above the least he could get away with paying us—suddenly halted his pretense of working and took off at a near sprint down the terminal, abandoning the store with no one at the register. We watched him run, astonished.

“Whatcha runnin’ from?” one of my second-shift coworkers called after him down the terminal, cackling. Just a day earlier, he had terrorized us, his subordinates. Now, he couldn’t even look us in the eyes—he was afraid of us. I’ve done a lot in my life since that day, but never have I felt as exhilarated and as shocked at my own sense of power as I did among a whooping group of cashiers and stockers, watching our boss shrivel in the face of the collective power we had built together.

The labor movement isn’t just the best means for workers to win better wages and benefits; it’s also a generator of genuine heroism in average people.

My experience wasn’t out of the ordinary. Every time workers grow fed up with their jobs and start talking to coworkers about forming a union to change it, such scenes of human drama play out—often with not just paychecks but life and limb at stake in the face of strikebreakers and police. The labor movement isn’t just the best means for workers to win better wages and benefits and end their managers’ on-the-job dictatorship; it’s also a generator of genuine heroism in average people. Every union fight is a David-versus-Goliath battle—the epic stuff of Biblical narratives, of Greek myths, of Hollywood blockbusters.

There’s a rich history of labor documentary and feature filmmaking in America, as well as excellent labor journalistic and historical writing, and fictionalized labor organizing narratives pop up occasionally in film and TV. Yet few twenty-first century labor fights ever receive mainstream narrativization (and those that do can see their politics watered down). In the labor movement’s recent decades of decline, few tales from the frontlines of the class war have turned into character-driven, compulsively readable books or watchable movies. Daisy Pitkin’s On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union is an exception. A working union organizer in the trenches for nearly two decades, in her memoir she depicts what organizing a union actually looks like: the newfound capacity for heroism and solidarity among workers and the boundless rapacity and cruelty of bosses, the steadfast dedication and stupidity of labor leadership, and the grueling personal toll of throwing one’s life into organizing only to be rewarded with half-victories or outright defeat. Few writers have captured the triumph and tragedy of organizing a union in America in prose as intimate or compelling.

Pitkin tells the story of a five-year union organizing campaign, begun in 2003, at an industrial laundry owned by Sodexho in Phoenix, Arizona, where wages were low and working conditions were brutal, unsafe, and unsanitary. Workers sorted and washed bags of linens from major institutions like hospitals, working at breakneck pace while operating massive, dangerous industrial laundry machines. “Sometimes there are syringes and scalpels, sometimes body parts, wrapped in the linens,” a worker named Alma tells Pitkin. Safety gear is absent or insufficient, and “there is a lot of blood and puke and feces.” Alma’s coworkers have stories of limbs crushed while working the machines.

Pitkin begins as a rookie organizer, new to the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), a scrappy union launching an organizing drive among low-wage, immigrant, many undocumented, mostly women workers in a red state. “We both laughed a little,” she writes of her initial job interview with an organizing director, “and shook our heads at how fucking hard it would be, how much of a war.”

War it was. The campaign starts in secret, with organizers pulling trash bags out of the laundry’s dumpsters to search for workers’ contact information. They make contact with workers in the middle of the night after shift changes and organize a secret union committee, which then carries out a stealth campaign to convince a super majority to sign union cards. After painstaking organizing, workers call for a union election. As they so often do, management immediately goes scorched earth, intimidating workers and targeting key union supporters. When workers walk off the job in response to health and safety concerns, Alma is fired in retaliation, then hired by the union to continue the fight. She grows close to Pitkin, and the book is written in a series of second-person letters to her.

At every step, Alma and her coworkers, alongside Pitkin and the other organizers, face constant attacks from the boss. Their task is to figure out how to keep the group of low-wage immigrant workers bound together in a sense of solidarity that is strong enough to withstand those attacks, despite the obscenely pro-management bias of US labor law—“a situation in which the level of unfairness and volatility is often so extreme it is difficult to capture through language,” Pitkin writes. Plant management’s abuses were, in fact, so numerous and so egregious that Human Rights Watch would release a 2010 report on them.

Throughout, Pitkin weaves in labor history, telling the story of the mostly female, immigrant workers that made up UNITE’s predecessor union a century earlier—and of the 146 who burned or jumped to their deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and the bosses who faced almost no repercussions for the incident of mass worker death. That history isn’t ancient for the workers, who know of another Arizona laundry where a manager tried to block an exit and force workers to continue working during a fire. For Pitkin, the history serves “as a reminder of the urgency and high stakes of organizing, of what can happen if we lose.”

The campaign confronts a new set of difficulties when Pitkin and her team learn of a merger between her union, UNITE, and another, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), to create UNITE HERE. As labor’s membership roles have dwindled in recent decades, such mergers have become common survival strategies. Like many others, this merger was executed from the top, with little input from workers or lower-level staff.

Problems immediately become evident once HERE arrives in Phoenix. The unions’ two cultures differ wildly—principally, from Pitkin’s perspective, around HERE staff’s cultlike fealty to their leadership and personally intrusive organizing tactic called “pink-sheeting,” in which organizers obtain intimate personal information from both workers and other organizers, then use that information to lean hard on workers and organizers to carry out the union’s organizing program. In 2009, Steven Greenhouse reported on these tactics in the New York Times, with one worker telling him, “I quit the union because I felt this was psychological abuse.” Pitkin calls them “a minefield of manipulation.”

Soon, the two sides are waging pitched battles that are every bit as rancorous as their fight with the boss. Pitkin’s new HERE supervisor orders her to submit to the pink-sheeting; she refuses. They put Alma in the “hot seat,” subjecting her to a group interrogation searching for intimate life details; she sobs. Meanwhile, the laundry’s management takes advantage of the chaos in the union and ratchets up their counter-offensive. The HERE staff seem unbothered.

One night, the battle between the two sides reaches a breaking point: HERE tries to storm the union office. Pitkin stands inside behind a barricaded door; the strain of both the doomed union merger and the unceasing attacks from the boss seem to have culminated in her seeing Alma through the glass, taking orders from a HERE organizer.

Pitkin’s narrative is not a tidy narrative of the noble workers defeating their ignoble bosses. As is often in the case in American unions, labor’s internal dysfunction becomes a major stumbling block on the way to action. The campaign’s brutal demands wreck her personal life. Workers get fired and and betray each other. The law helps no one but the boss. Union organizers nearly come to blows. And even when workers eke out a victory in the form of a contract, it’s so desiccated that Pitkin seems to view it more like a defeat.

On the Line is not a tale of simple optimism in service of class struggle. Pitkin, her fellow organizers, and the workers like Alma throw everything they possibly can at Sodexho, but Sodexho has the money and the power and the freedom to squash much of those efforts. In many ways, Pitkin’s story isn’t particularly unique. The boss’s brutality goes beyond that seen in a typical union drive, but only in degree, not in kind.

But Pitkin’s book features innumerable scenes of both the wrenching traumas and the unparalleled triumphs and wide-ranging personal transformations that union organizing entails. Even before they have won union recognition, for example, the plant’s female workers use their newfound power to organize to support their coworkers facing instances of domestic violence. Alma organizes a brigade of workers to leap into action when a coworker has been hit. When one calls, “three women showed up at her house with baseball bats” just after the abuser boyfriend flees.

The workers hadn’t yet won their union. “But on the way back to your house that night,” she writes to Alma, “you were wired, your eyes burnished with the adrenaline of the missed confrontation. You said, ‘The company can do what they want with their recognition. We already have our union.’”

Later, when the union and the company are duking it out in court, Alma testifies. After days of witnessing management’s lawyers bully workers, a court interpreter (Alma speaks no English) mistranslates a key phrase of her testimony. Pitkin, who speaks Spanish, hits a breaking point: “That is not what she said,” Pitkin yells in the middle of the court proceedings. The judge immediately orders her removed. Alma is unsure of what is transpiring because of the language barrier, but Pitkin writes, “You started chanting into the witness microphone: ‘Union, union, union’ in your best American-accented English. You were still chanting as the courtroom door closed behind me.”

Nearly every page of On the Line features staggeringly dramatic scenes like this. It’s these scenes, featuring some of society’s most exploited and oppressed members, that make the reader realize why a person as talented and driven as Pitkin would continue banging her head against the wall to try to organize unions. Even in a country as hostile to workers’ rights to organize as the United States, while fighting under labor’s banner, she has witnessed innumerable miracles.Workers have defied the message that working-class people hear every day in this country: that they should take their meager, stagnant wages and continual on-the-job assaults on their sense of self-respect and be grateful.

We’re currently in the midst of a fledgling but significant uptick in worker organizing and militancy throughout the United States. At the time of writing this piece, almost 200 Starbucks stores have unionized, in the face of vicious union-busting. (Pitkin currently works as an organizer on the campaign.) Amazon, one of the most powerful companies in history, suffered an astonishing defeat on Staten Island at the hands of an unlikely group of workplace militants. Just a few years ago, a teachers strike wave swept Trump country and shut down public school systems across multiple states.

All of these struggles have not just wrested power and money from corporations’ and governments’ hands. The workers who carried them out have summoned courage never summoned before; they’ve risked their livelihoods for the possibility of more dignified lives; they’ve stared down tyrannical managers and insisted they’re not scared. They have defied the message that working-class people hear every day in this country: that they should take their meager, stagnant wages and continual on-the-job assaults on their sense of self-respect and be grateful.

Pitkin’s book captures the drama and transformative power of labor organizing better than any book published in the United States in years. With so many powerful narratives generated by similar union campaigns in American history—so many Richards chased down airport terminals, so many Almas metamorphosing into fearless fighters—we should have many more books like hers.

Micah Uetricht @micahuetricht  is the editor of Jacobin. He is author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity, and coauthor with Meagan Day of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.

HORRIFIC

The Appalling Attack on Salman Rushdie Is An Attack on Free Speech

Salman Rushdie has spent decades campaigning for free speech. The attempt on his life came amid a crack down on freedom of expression around the world.

DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGES
Salman Rushdie at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England in October 2019

Aryeh Neier/August 14, 2022

THE NEW REPUBLIC

CRITICAL MASS

The appalling knife attack on Salman Rushdie while he was speaking in Chautauqua, New York is a throwback to the violence that followed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses, in 1989. Rushdie was attacked and severely injured by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Little is publicly known about the assailant at this writing except that he was not even born until several years after the issuance of the fatwa. At that time, many people died in communal violence in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; bookstores in Britain and the United States were bombed and burned; and Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times and survived, as did his Italian translator, who was stabbed. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was also stabbed, in 1991. He died.

Intimidated by the violence, the leading bookstore chains in the United States stopped carrying Rushdie’s book. The Satanic Verses is a comic novel that had been enthusiastically reviewed when it was first published in Britain in the fall of 1988. Some leading critics called it a masterpiece. On the other hand, the book caused offense among many groups. 7000 Muslims in Bolton in England staged a protest, followed by a book burning. They objected particularly to the use of the names of two of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives to identify two prostitutes and to Rushdie’s depiction of the removal of verses from the Koran because the Prophet considered that they came from the devil. Several countries, from India to Venezuela, banned the book over the following year. And in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini, denouncing the book as blasphemous, issued the fatwa. Calling for the murder of Rushdie and others associated with publication of the book, the fatwa was accompanied by the offer of a multimillion dollar reward by a government-connected Iranian foundation.

Proponents of freedom of speech and the press were horrified. The fatwa threatened not only Rushdie and those associated with The Satanic Verses, but freedom of expression more broadly. If Khomeini and the government of Iran could suppress a book by threatening and carrying out violence against an author, publishers, translators and bookstores, what was to stop repressive regimes in different parts of the world from blocking more publications that offended them? Many leading authors took part in protests against the fatwa. I recall speaking at an event sponsored by PEN in New York a few days after issuance of the fatwa in which the other speakers included Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer and E.L. Doctorow. Many prominent writers in other parts of the world, including Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, and Wole Soyinka, also denounced the fatwa. Christopher Hitchens, who became a friend of Rushdie, denounced Islamic fundamentalism and made that an important theme of his writing in his later years.

Not everyone criticized the fatwa. Roald Dahl attacked Rushdie for insulting Muslims. John Le Carré at first criticized Rushdie and then thought better of the matter. Former President Jimmy Carter, who had been known during his presidency as a champion of human rights, did not support the fatwa but berated Rushdie for his insensitiity.

I got a glimpse of the way that the fatwa affected Rushdie himself. He lived in London under heavy police guard for nine years until changes in the Iranian government, indicating that it was no longer so intent on carrying out the fatwa, enabled him to travel and to mingle with others more or less freely. During the period that he was guarded closely by the British police, one of those with whom he kept in contact was Frances D’Souza, then the Executive Director of Article 19—a London-based organization that promotes freedom of speech worldwide (it is named for the provision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is intended to protect freedom of speech). Frances, now Baroness D’Souza, also created and directed the Rushdie Defence Committee. The location and configuration of her London home made it one of the few places in the city that Rushdie’s police protectors thought he could visit safely. As a friend of Frances D’Souza, and as the Vice Chair of Article 19, I sometimes went there for dinner when I was in London. On two occasions that I remember, Rushdie was also a dinner guest. I recall that on one of the occasions that I went there, it seemed that the entire neighborhood was under close police guard. When we were having dinner, I was aware that there was a large police presence in the next room as we ate and there were probably also police outside the house. Salman Rushdie had no possibility of living anything like a normal life during that period. As the attack on him in Chautauqua indicates, of course, the danger to him has never gone away.

Globally, autocratic and authoritarian governments have been on the rise; the longer they stay in power, the more they crack down on freedom of speech.

When the threat to Rushdie’s life seemed to ebb, he relocated to the United States, became an American citizen and has lived here without visible protection. He has published several additional books and has been an active campaigner for freedom of speech. He served for a period as President of American PEN and, in that role, enhanced the reputation of the century-old writers’ organization as a defender of freedom of expression. In Chautauqua, he was to speak on providing refuge and support for exiled writers.

This is a bad time for advocates of freedom of speech, both globally and in the United States. Globally, autocratic and authoritarian governments have been on the rise; the longer they stay in power, the more they crack down on freedom of speech. An example is the recently adopted law in Russia providing prison sentences of up to 15 years for those who call the “special military operation” in Ukraine a war or an invasion. The country’s best known peaceful dissenter, Alexei Navalny, is serving a harsh prison sentence. And the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Dimitry Muratov, has had to shut down his newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

Unfortunately, Russia is far from alone among important governments that have become increasingly authoritarian. Here in the United States, many states and localities have adopted measures that limit what may be said in classrooms, and what publications may appear in school libraries. Discussion of race discrimination or of gender and sexuality are the main targets. Any suggestion that the country’s history is flawed is under attack in more than half the states.

The attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie is an ominous development. It will be difficult for him to recover from the ghastly wounds inflicted upon him. It will also be difficult for the rest of us to recover from this attack on a writer who has become the leading symbol and champion of freedom of expression.

Aryeh Neier is president emeritus of the Open Society Foundations. His most recent book is The International Human Rights Movement: A History.

Writers, Publishers Condemn Attack On Salman Rushdie, Stress On Upholding Freedom Of Speech

Since the 1980s, Rushdie's writing has led to death threats from Iran, which has offered a USD 3 million reward for anyone who kills him. 

India, under the Rajiv Gandhi-led government, had banned the book.

Shocked over the attack on Salman Rushdie, the literary world spoke in unison against the violence Getty Images

Outlook Web Desk
UPDATED: 14 AUG 2022 

Shocked over the attack on Salman Rushdie, the literary world on Saturday spoke in unison against the violence and stressed upholding freedom of speech while wishing a speedy recovery to the Booker Prize-winning author. The Mumbai-born controversial author, who faced Islamist death threats for years after writing 'The Satanic Verses', was stabbed by a 24-year-old man on Friday while he was being introduced at an event in New York in the US.

Geetanjali Shree, the first Indian to join the esteemed club of International Booker-winning authors, described the attack on Rushdie as an "inexcusable and inhuman" act. "Where is humanity going? A day of such distress, such shame. We pray for the fast recovery of this votary of democracy and freedom of speech. Violence must not be allowed to become the way of dealing with difference of opinion," Shree told PTI.

Shree was in news last month when an event to honour her in Agra was cancelled following a controversy over the content of her award-winning novel "Ret Samadhi" which was translated into English as "Tomb of Sand". Though the motive behind the attack on Rushdie is yet to be ascertained, it is widely suspected that it has got to do with his controversial novel "The Satanic Verses".

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The 1988 novel, which earned Rushdie a Whitbread Book Award, forced him into hiding for nine years as a massive controversy erupted after the release of the book with several Muslims seeing it as blasphemous. A year after the book's publication, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's execution for publishing the book for its blasphemous content.

Since the 1980s, Rushdie's writing has led to death threats from Iran, which has offered a USD 3 million reward for anyone who kills him. India, under the Rajiv Gandhi-led government, had banned the book. Put under police protection in Britain after the issuance of the fatwa, Rushdie spent the most part of the next decade in hiding before the government of Iran in 1998 declared that it no longer backed the fatwa.

He has recounted the experience in his 2012 memoir "Joseph Anton", named after his alias while in hiding. But the fear of living under constant threat, as felt by Rushdie, can be possibly understood by exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen. The 59-year-old author, who has been living in exile for the last 27 years after the ban of her book "Lajja" and subsequent fatwa for allegedly offending religious sentiments, posted a string of tweets condemning the attack on Rushdie.

She expressed fear for the life of anyone critical of Isalm across the world. "I just learned that Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York. I am really shocked. I never thought it would happen. He has been living in the West, and he has been protected since 1989. If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked. I am worried," she tweeted.

Sanjoy K Roy, the producer of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) that grabbed headlines in 2012 for the proposed visit of Rushdie and the subsequent protests, said, "It is not an attack on a writer but on a civilization and shows the vulnerability of anybody who presents a different narrative from the one that's acceptable".

"Violence has become acceptable, be it in America, Europe or wherever, and that is sad," Roy told PTI. Recalling how "politics, violence and mob mentality" made it impossible for them to host Rushdie at JLF in 2012, the festival co-director and noted author Namita Gokhale said his books remain a seminal influence on contemporary South Asian writing and "this barbaric act cannot silence his creative voice".

Rushdie, who visited the JLF in 2007, and was set to attend the festival in 2012 as well, eventually had to pull back citing protests from Muslim organisations and intelligence inputs by the host state Rajasthan. Even his scheduled video address had to be cancelled following threats to the festival.

"His presence at the JLF was thwarted by politics, and the violent mob mentality of those who had perhaps not even read the book made it impossible for us to host him. We salute his courage and literary genius," she told PTI. The who's who of the literati world, including eminent authors Neil Gaiman, Amitav Ghosh, Stephen King, and Jean Guerrero took to Twitter showing solidarity with Rushdie and wishing him a speedy recovery.

"I fervently hope that Salman Rushdie pulls through. He's funny, brilliant, and dry, he has written beautiful wise books and I wish the people who think they hate him would read his words. (You don't hate Salman, who is a real person. You hate someone in your mind who has never existed.)," tweeted English author Neil Gaiman.

Even those in the publishing industry, be it Chiki Sarkar of Juggernaut Books, who worked with Rushdie briefly, and Meru Gokhale of Penguin Random House India (PRHI) said they are deeply upset with this "terrible act" -- one that they did fear about but never thought would happen in reality.

"We are very much thinking of Salman's well-being as he recovers from this terrible attack, which took place while he was doing what writers do, engaging with readers in the public sphere. We are honoured to have been his publishers over many years," Gokhale told PTI.

Rushdie's next novel "Victory City", is scheduled to release next year. He has authored 14 novels, including 'Midnight's Children' (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), and four non-fiction works so far.

(With PTI inputs)

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo slams Rushdie stabbing

Magazine wryly speculates motive spurred by global warming; says ‘nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence’

By AFP13 August 2022, 8:39 pm   

1

Illustrative: Employees checking the arrival of the then forthcoming edition of the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, on January 13, 2015, Paris, France. (AFP/Martin Bureau)

PARIS, France — French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose 12 staff members were gunned down in 2015 over cartoons about Prophet Mohammed considered blasphemous by many Muslims, said Saturday that nothing justified the stabbing of Salman Rushdie.

The British author, who spent years in hiding after an Iranian fatwa ordered his killing, was on a ventilator following a stabbing attack at a literary event in New York state Friday.

“Nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence,” Charlie Hebdo said.

“At the time we are writing these lines we do not know the motives” of the attacker, it said, speculating ironically whether it was spurred by global warming, the decline in purchasing power, or a ban on watering potted plants during the current heatwave.

The magazine’s managing editor, known as Riss and a survivor of the 2015 attack, said Rushdie’s assailant was probably a practicing Muslim and slammed the “little and mediocre spiritual heads who are intellectually nil and culturally ignorant.”

Rushdie’s 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” transformed his life when Iran’s first supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious decree, ordering his killing.

Author Salman Rushdie speaks during the Mississippi Book Festival, in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The novel was considered by some Muslims as disrespectful of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

Hezbollah Official Says Group Does Not

Know Anything about Attack on

Rushdie

by Reuters and Algemeiner Staff

AUGUST 13, 2022 

Author Salman Rushdie is transported to a helicopter after he was stabbed on stage before his scheduled speech at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York, U.S., August 12, 2022, in this screengrab taken from a social media video.

 Photo: TWITTER @HoratioGates3 /via REUTERS

An official from Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said on Saturday the group had no additional information on the stabbing attack against novelist Salman Rushdie.

“We don’t know anything about this subject so we will not comment,” the official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hezbollah is backed by Iran, whose previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1988 pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill Rushdie for blasphemy.

The suspected attacker was identified by police as 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey. Matar is originally Lebanese and his family hails from the south Lebanon town of Yaroun, Yaroun mayor Ali Tehfe told Reuters.

Tehfe said the parents emigrated to the United States and Matar was born and raised there.

When asked if Matar or his parents were affiliated with or supported Hezbollah, Tehfe said he had “no information at all” on the political views of the parents or Matar as they lived abroad.

The climate bill looks to expand carbon capture. That means lots of construction—and pipelines

The Inflation Reduction Act includes many provisions designed to jump-start the carbon-removal sector—but the industry could face a few challenges as it scales.


BY WIL BURNS

THE CONVERSATION

08-13-22

The sweeping climate, energy, and healthcare bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act contains about $370 billion to foster clean-energy development and combat climate change, constituting the largest federal climate investment in history.

Several studies project that its climate and energy provisions could enable the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by around 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. That would be a significant improvement over the current projections of 27%, and it could put the U.S. within hailing range of its pledge under the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions by at least 50% by 2030.

Notably, one linchpin of the bill’s climate provisions is a set of incentives to substantially expand technologies that capture carbon dioxide and either store it underground or ship it for reuse.

So far, the uptake of carbon-capture technologies has been slow. The costs are high, and these technologies can require miles of pipeline and vast amounts of underground storage, both of which can trigger local backlash. A recent study projected that the U.S. would have to construct 65,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines to achieve net-zero emissions in 2050, a whopping 13 times the current capacity.

I’m the former founding codirector of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University. While the Inflation Reduction Act bill has many provisions designed to jump-start the carbon-removal sector, it’s far from certain that the industry will be able to move quickly.

ONE-SIXTH OF ALL EMISSIONS CUTS

The bill includes two primary types of carbon capture.

Carbon capture and storage entails capturing carbon dioxide generated during power generation and industrial processes, such as steel and concrete production, and transporting it for storage or use. The most common use to date has been for enhanced oil recovery—injecting the gas into oil and gas reservoirs to extract more fossil fuels.

The bill also seeks to drive deployment of direct air-capture technologies, which can pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

A Princeton University analysis estimated that pertinent provisions of the bill “would increase the use of carbon capture 13-fold by 2030 relative to current policy,” with only a modest amount projected to come from carbon dioxide removal. This could translate into about one-sixth to one-fifth of the projected carbon dioxide emissions reductions from the new bill.

Consistent with most of its other energy and climate provisions, the bill seeks to drive widespread deployment of carbon-removal technologies through incentives. Most importantly, it substantially amends a provision of the U.S. tax code referred to as 45Q, which is designed to drive corporate investments in carbon capture.

Under the bill, tax credits for capturing carbon dioxide at industrial facilities and power plants would increase from $50 per ton today to up to $85 per ton if the carbon is stored. If the carbon is used instead for oil drilling, the credit would go from $30 today to $60 per ton.

Credits for capturing carbon from air via direct air capture would also dramatically jump, from $50 to $180 per ton if the carbon dioxide is stored, and from $35 currently to $130 per ton if it is used.

The bill would also move back the deadline for starting construction of carbon capture facilities that qualify from 2026 to 2033, reduce the minimum capture requirements for obtaining credits, and permit direct payments for the full value of credits for the first five years of a project’s operation in lieu of tax credits.

MISSING PIECES

Currently, there are only a dozen carbon capture and storage facilities in the U.S. and a couple of direct air capture facilities removing a small amount of carbon from the air.

There’s a reason the uptake of carbon capture, particularly direct air capture, has been slow. Direct air capture cost estimates vary from $250 to $600 per ton, according to one analysis, while experts have estimated that a price under $100 and closer to $50 could create a market.

Some experts believe that the bill sufficiently ratchets up 45Q credits to start driving widespread construction of carbon capture and storage facilities in the power and industrial sectors. Others believe that the direct pay provision is “the fundamental missing piece” for carbon capture and storage because project developers and sponsors can avoid the often onerous and costly process of raising tax equity to qualify to use the credits.

There’s hope that the increase in credit values for direct air capture will help to foster “synthetic economics” for this nascent market, infusing sufficient capital to develop technologies at scales that are profitable.

PIPELINE CHALLENGES AHEAD

However, while the bill may appear helpful on a theoretical basis, both carbon capture and storage and direct air capture could face some serious headwinds over the course of the next decade and beyond.

One major challenge could be resistance to the construction of pipelines to transport carbon dioxide to storage sites. In recent years, counties and private landowners in Iowa have voiced opposition to such projects, particularly the idea that the state might allow pipeline builders to seize private land for their projects.

Pipeline construction is also a point of contention for environmental groups, especially environmental justice organizations, and could lead to protracted litigation. This stems in part from a carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, which hospitalized 45 people.

If public opposition delays construction, projects could be pushed past the window for the incentives, leaving developers with expensive projects. While some studies argue that enhanced oil recovery results in a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, this may ultimately be a hard political sell for local communities.

The bill may ultimately brighten the prospects for carbon removal in America, but this is by no means assured, especially in the optimistic time frame of the next decade.

Wil Burns is professor of research in environmental policy, American University School of International Service.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

[Photo: imaginima/Getty Images Plus]

It’s time for a meat tax. Here’s how to make it work

To meet our climate goals, we need to stop eating so much meat. More expensive burgers could change behavior, protect the planet—and even make other food more affordable.

BY CAMERON HEPBURN AND FRANZISKA FUNKE

THE CONVERSATION

08-14-22

Rearing livestock and growing crops to feed them has destroyed more tropical forest and killed more wildlife than any other industry. Animal agriculture also produces vast quantities of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.

The environmental consequences are so profound that the world cannot meet climate goals and keep ecosystems intact without rich countries reducing their consumption of beef, pork, and chicken.

To slash emissions, slow the loss of biodiversity, and secure food for a growing world population, there must be a change in the way meat and dairy are made and consumed.

A rapidly evolving market for novel alternatives, such as plant-based burgers, has made the switch from meat easier. Yet in countries such as Britain, meat consumption has not fallen fast enough in recent years to sufficiently rein in agricultural emissions.

Instead, prices on meat and other animal products will eventually need to reflect all this damage. There are several ways to do this, but each intervention poses its own difficulties.

In our view, the most likely result will be simple—direct taxes on meat and animal products. Our latest research, published in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, considered how an environmental tax on meat could work.

Our calculations suggest that the average retail price for meat in high-income countries would need to increase by 35% to 56% for beef, 25% for poultry, and 19% for lamb and pork to reflect the environmental costs of their production. In the U.K., where the average price for a 200g beef steak (or about a quarter pound) is around 2.80 pounds (or about $3.40), consumers would pay between 3.80 pounds and 4.30 pounds (or, about $4.60 and $5.20) at the checkout instead.

Fortunately, our research found that a meat tax, if implemented correctly, need not increase the pressure on poorer households—or the farming industry.

FAIRER, HEALTHIER, AND GREENER FOOD

Before food prices soared in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the idea of a meat tax was already being mulled by agricultural ministers in countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Even if a meat tax is currently unthinkable in the current political environment, higher taxes on meat and dairy may become inevitable to decarbonize agriculture at the necessary pace for limiting global heating to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius, as ascribed in the Paris Agreement.

Our analysis showed that by redistributing revenue from a tax on the sale of meat and animal products evenly across the population, in the form of uniform lump-sum payments at the end of each year perhaps, most people on low incomes would have more money than before the tax reform.

Would people spend this compensation on meat or other products tied to high levels of pollution? Research from British Columbia in Canada showed that returning the proceeds from a carbon tax to citizens had no significant effect on how much the province cut emissions (between 5% and 15%). Making meat relatively more expensive would most likely encourage people to spend their money elsewhere.

Part of the tax revenue could finance subsidies for growing vegetables, grains, and alternative proteins, or help low-income households meet their food bills on a more regular basis.

Just as meat and dairy must become more expensive, healthy and sustainable plant-based foods should become more affordable. Using revenue from a meat tax to cut value-added taxes on fruit, vegetables, and grains, for example, could provide much-needed relief to poorer households during a cost of living crisis, while encouraging everyone to reduce their intake of animal products.

LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD

Other types of regulation, such as stricter rules on managing animal feed or manure more sustainably, run the risk of putting domestic livestock farmers at a disadvantage compared to competitors from abroad who are not burdened with the additional costs of complying with these rules. This is why a form of “border adjustment”, as economists call it, is also necessary to include products from overseas.

A tax levied on any firm selling meat—including restaurants and cafes as well as supermarkets—in a given country would capture all meat producers. Other research indicates that consumers are typically more supportive of environmental taxes of this nature if they are phased in with a lower tax rate, initially.

Some of the revenue raised by the tax could be given directly to farmers, leaving them with higher profits than before. This could be paid according to their work stewarding the land, restoring habitats like peat bogs. Or, it could help them invest in the transition to new income streams, such as producing high-quality, organic meat from low-density herds, which, when consumed in much lower quantities, may still be compatible with emissions targets.

Taking steps to make plant-based foods more affordable and meat substitutes more attractive will pave the way for a future in which it’s possible to make meat and dairy much more expensive. The good news is that—once their time has come—meat taxes could actually help us eat better, at lower cost.

If implemented correctly, a meat tax could protect the environment while helping secure a sustainable future for livestock farmers, as well as affordable and sustainable food for all.

Cameron Hepburn is professor of environmental economics, University of Oxford. Franziska Funke is associate doctoral researcher in environmental economics, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

OPINION

Op-Ed: American history is a parade of horrors — and also heroes

John Brown, an evangelical militia leader who was hanged for trying to arm enslaved people for an uprising, is depicted in a detail from the mural “Tragic Prelude” by John Steuart Curry.
(Photo Researchers / Getty Images)

BY STEPHANIE COONTZ

AUG. 14, 2022 3 AM PT

As a historian in the age of the 1619 Project and the debates over “critical race theory,” I find many of the audiences I address fall into one of two camps. Some celebrate American exceptionalism and resist dwelling on horrors like slavery or settler colonialism. Others primarily see a centuries-long saga of white supremacism and oppression.

The shameful institution of slavery must loom large in any honest account of American history. But so should the struggle of both Black and white abolitionists to end that institution. Recognizing those who fought from the very beginning to extend the ideal of equality beyond white men is essential to understanding the American story. We shouldn’t be afraid of schoolchildren learning why our nation needed those heroic reformers.

And yet, since January, legislators in more than half the states have introduced bills forbidding schools from teaching that America’s founding documents had anything to do with defending slavery or from discussing any other “divisive concepts.” Typical is the wording of the Florida and South Dakota bills, which prohibit use of material that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of “actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”

This is a new twist on old efforts by political demagogues to stoke white racial anxieties. Over the past 100 years we have heard that “they” are coming to rape “our” wives and daughters, take “our” jobs, waste “our” tax money, steal “our” wallets, and murder us at random. Now, it appears, they’re coming to hurt our feelings!

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery and became an icon of equality, fighting for women’s rights as well as racial justice.
(National Portrait Gallery)

But although studying the history of slavery and settler colonialism ought to be disturbing, it doesn’t have to be demoralizing. We need to tell the full story of slavery because without doing so there is no way to understand the heroism of those who fought for equal rights. The only people who should feel “discomfort” in learning American history are individuals who refuse to build upon the efforts of those early visionaries. A case in point is the difference between today’s White evangelical leaders and their forbears, who actually did believe that Black Lives Matter.

In the era when our nation was founded, it truly was revolutionary to claim that all human beings had the right to be treated humanely and equally. For most of history the morality of slavery was never questioned. People resisted being enslaved, but they did not condemn the existence of slavery. And because people believed it was perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave those they conquered, they felt little need to claim their victims were inherently inferior. Subordination was the way of the world, with citizens subject to kings, wives to husbands and slaves to masters.

Profit, not racism, was the primary impetus for the expansion of the African slave trade and the establishment of an African labor force in the Americas. But racism gradually became the primary defense of slavery.

Slave owners responded to an emerging global market by combining the ruthlessly impersonal profit calculations of mass production with the cruel intimidation required to extract maximum effort on exhausting tasks while forestalling resistance by enslaved people, who vastly outnumbered overseers and owners.

But at the same time, the rise of capitalism and the overthrow of autocratic rulers challenged traditional justifications of social hierarchy. More and more people asserted that “the whole human race is born equal.” Some would go on, for the first time in history, to build a movement to abolish slavery, not merely to emancipate an individual or a specific group.

When American revolutionaries claimed an “inalienable” right to liberty without demanding an end to slavery, many people pointed out the contradiction. In 1774, an anonymous “Son of Africa” challenged the rebel colonists to “pull the beam out of thine own eyes.” Caesar Sarter, who was once enslaved, urged the revolutionaries to liberate all slaves as “the first step” toward freeing themselves.

Some white Americans rose to the challenge. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, giving Black men the vote. In 1781, two Massachusetts slaves, Elizabeth Freeman and Quok Walker, sued their masters for freedom. Both managed to convince white jurists that slavery violated the state’s constitution, which stated that “all men are born free and equal.” Anti-slavery sentiment became widespread during and after the American Revolution.
But there was an ironic backlash. Once revolutionaries articulated mankind’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” those who supported — or just tolerated — the subjugation of other human beings were put on the defensive.

Very few people like to admit it when we put selfish interests ahead of moral convictions. Patrick Henry, the famous orator who supposedly once declared “Give me liberty, or give me death,” strikes me as an exception that reveals something important about the psychology that helped create American racism.

In 1773, a Quaker abolitionist sent Henry an antislavery pamphlet. When I first began reading Henry’s answer, I thought the pamphlet had done its trick. In line after line, he describes slavery as an “Abominable Practice … a Principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty.”

So I was shocked when Henry goes on to admit that he himself owns slaves and has no intention of freeing them, due to the “general inconvenience of living without them.” He labels his conduct “culpable,” saying “I will not, I cannot justify it.” At his death in 1799, he still owned 67 slaves, whom he bequeathed to his wife and sons.

Very few people can live with that level of cognitive dissonance. Racism offered one way to resolve it.

In the late 18th century, and especially in the first half of the 19th, a sustained campaign was launched to explain away the contradiction between the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of a Constitution that tolerated slavery. Black people, Indians and other non-European groups began to be described as less than fully human, incapable of exercising the responsibilities of liberty.

So even as abolitionism gained momentum, racist invective, which historian Van Gosse notes had been “episodic prior to the 1810s,” became far more common and considerably more vicious. In the South, free Black people faced increasing restrictions. Violent riots against them flared up in the North, reaching a high point in 1863, when demonstrators against the Civil War draft vented their fury on Black neighborhoods.

But to my mind these terrible trends make the resistance to such behavior by a courageous minority of Americans all the more inspiring. And resistance there was. Two recent books, “The Slave’s Cause” by Manisha Sinha and “Standard-Bearers of Equality” by Paul J. Polgar, describe how a “radical, interracial movement” consistently advocated for racial equality from the 18th century onward, gaining support even as racism hardened and slaveholders pushed their interests more aggressively.

Frederick Douglass inspired an interracial coalition for abolition and equality.
(Library of Congress)

Black social reformers like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Sarah Parker Remond rallied huge followings of white and Black Americans in support of racial equality. By the 1840s, legislators in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire were routinely defying racially-exclusionary federal regulations. In the free states, interracial crowds spontaneously formed to rescue men and women caught up by slave catchers. The 1840s and 1850s saw interracial rescues in nearly every free state, with dramatically large turnouts in Chicago, Syracuse, Detroit and Buffalo. When a fugitive captured in Boston in 1854 was returned to slavery, 50,000 protesters lined the streets shouting “Shame! Shame!”

Then the war itself turned many skeptical white Northerners into strong supporters of abolition and equality. Union soldiers’ diaries and letters show this transformation occurring as young Northern men saw slavery up close, while fighting alongside Black comrades.

Legislators who worry that schoolchildren who learn an unexpurgated version of history will “denigrate” our founders are probably right to fear that youths who discover Patrick Henry’s choice of convenience over conscience will be unimpressed by his “liberty or death” oratory. But there are plenty of other heroes — Black, brown and white — to take his place. In fact, many young white people will find some groups of their ancestors more worthy of admiration than their modern-day counterparts.

During the first half of the 19th century, for example, many white evangelicals were ardent abolitionists who would have been horrified by the recent migration of prominent white evangelicals into the camp of white Christian nationalism.

Jonathan Blanchard, founder of Wheaton College, the pre-eminent Christian evangelical college in America, spent a year in Pennsylvania working as a full-time “agitator” for the American Anti-Slavery Society. He called slave-holding “a social sin” that could be addressed only by immediate abolition.

And then, of course, there was John Brown, the devout Reformed Evangelical whose militia battled slavery proponents in the Kansas territory and who led an attack on a federal armory in Virginia in 1859 in an attempt to arm slaves for an uprising. He was tried for insurrection and hanged. Yet his stand against slavery inspired later Union troops to march into battle singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

Evangelical abolitionists opposed other injustices as well. In 1838 several white Baptist and Methodist preachers not only protested the forced relocation of the Cherokees but also marched with them along the Trail of Tears. Others joined the Liberty Party, which opposed the war with Mexico and condemned the exploitation of Native Americans and Chinese, Mexican and Irish laborers. Many evangelicals were early supporters of female equality.

If our histories refuse to acknowledge the extent and brutality of the injustices that accompanied our nation’s founding, how can we or our children honor the idealism and courage of those who struggled to implement and enlarge the revolutionary demands for equal rights? And if we don’t understand the way people’s belief systems can change, how can we hope to build on the best parts of our heritage and rise above the worst? That’s why an unflinching account of American history can actually give us hope for the future.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor emerita of history at Evergreen State College in Washington, is the author of the forthcoming book “For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage.” This piece is adapted from the essay “Why Learning the History of Slavery in America Doesn’t Have to Be Depressing.”

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