Climate Finance And Geopolitics: The China–US Factor – Analysis

 November 30, 2023 

By Dr Jiayi Zhou and ​​​​​​​Zha Daojiong

Climate action is caught in the increasingly volatile push-and-pull between cooperative global governance and great power competition, a fraught dynamic readily apparent in relations between China and the United States. China–US bilateral relations are widely acknowledged as a keystone for international efforts to address climate change. But the actions that both countries put forward to address climatic changes ‘indifferent to geopolitical rivalries’ are inevitably impacted by that very rivalry. There is, of course, optimism over the more constructive climate relations that the two have demonstrated since the resumption of formal China–US climate diplomacy this summer, after an 11-month halt following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. But the hiatus itself also demonstrated just how vulnerable this engagement is to unrelated bilateral tensions over issues ranging from fierce technological and geostrategic competition to the prospects of military confrontation in the Indo–Pacific region. 

How and whether the world’s two largest emitters of carbon and two largest economies choose to cooperate in this area will also impact the developing countries that are least culpable for climate change but most vulnerable to its negative impacts. In this regard, one increasingly important area to watch in terms of how the competitive–cooperative dynamic between China and the USA evolves is climate finance. Climate finance can refer to any financial resources deployed by public or private sources towards local, national or transnational climate-related projects. However, it is more frequently used to specifically denote flows from industrialized countries to the developing world—where by one estimatethe financing needs for climate mitigation and adaptation will amount to nearly US$800 billion by the end of this decade. 

To date, climate finance has featured only tangentially in the China–US climate conversation, with general statements aimed at raising ambitions in several of their joint communiqués. The amounts of Chinese and US climate finance currently reaching the developing world are also far from impressive. However, the two powers are in active competition for leadership as development donors, with each having pledged billions to the developing world in increasingly climate-friendly terms. Meanwhile, developing countries’ expectations that China and the USA will demonstrate leadership through the delivery of climate assistance projects are also growing. As argued below, the two powers have an opportunity to rise to the occasion in the climate finance space, not only despite but perhaps even because of their strategic rivalry—and to channel even the turbulence of China–US relations into positive spillovers for the rest of the planet. 

Much room for improvement as climate donors

Despite declarative commitments to climate finance, neither China nor the USA has demonstrated significant leadership in concrete terms. The lack of a universal methodology for classifying, measuring and reporting on climate finance makes it difficult to assess the flows of climate finance with much precision. However, the wide discrepancy between the two donors’ commitments and their disbursement of climate financing is undeniable. 

The USA—the world’s largest economy and largest cumulative contributor to carbon emissions—is the most responsible for what is a massive climate financing gap globally. According to one study, the USA has provided only 5 per cent of what would be a ‘fair share’ of the $100 billion in climate finance that developed countries promised to mobilize annually for developing countries. US President Joe Biden’s International Climate Finance Plan, announced in January 2021, has also gone largely unrealized. His administration’s more ambitious pledge to quadruple contributions to an annual $11.4 billion by 2024 has faced Congressional opposition, with only $1 billion approved so far. Meanwhile, China insists that as a developing (non-Annex II) country under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) any contributions it makes to climate finance are voluntary. In 2015 it established a South–South Climate Cooperation Fund as part of its voluntary contributions towards climate finance, but it has only delivered a small fraction of the $3.1 billion it originally promised. UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointedly did not invite either China or the USA to the Climate Ambition Summit he convened in September 2023.

There is both official and unofficial consensus that climate financing could be an area of China–US cooperation, however. Joint statements, one in the run-up to the COP26 meeting in Glasgow in 2021 and another when it was underway, call for an increase in climate finance. A desire for more joint work in this domain was also affirmed during US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing this summer, when she stated that ‘continued US–China cooperation on climate finance is critical’. Yellen specifically called for China to support multilateral institutions such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Climate Investment Funds. 

There is some contradiction in China’s status as a developing country that is eligible to receive such multilateral funds, while also being one of world’s largest bilateral donors for development. Promisingly, however, the GCF and the China Development Bank have been in dialogue and have even signed cooperation agreements. Ideas for bilateral climate finance cooperation that have been floated include a joint financing platform, alignment of standards, cooperation on debt (re)financing for recipient countries, and greater information sharing to help coordinate if not synergize their approaches. Progress on any or all these dimensions could plausibly occur in third countries, in conjunction with local priorities, as concrete projects are delivered by US and Chinese public and private actors. Conversations through the newly established US–China economic and financial working groups, under the US Treasury and the Chinese Ministry of Finance, as well as the re-established joint Working Group on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s, will ideally open up greater space for bringing the two together on climate finance as a global challenge. 

Meanwhile, engagement by both countries with multilateral forums such as the UN and the G20, and in key international financial institutions like the World Bank, will also provide a more collaborative rather than fragmented environment for the prioritization of climate finance. Any China–US joint engagementin this space would also help to stimulate wider global ambitions, placing pressure on other developed and emerging economies to close the wide gap between obligations, responsibilities and action. 

A race to the top? Jockeying for leadership 

Any future cooperation between China and the USA in the climate finance space will depend in part on the larger context of their bilateral relations, which in recent years have reached their lowest ebb in half a century. Continued and expanded collaboration between China and the USA requires, at least in part, a willingness to separate off climate change from wider tensions—a willingness that should not be taken for granted. But although tensions between China and the USA do divert resources and policy attention away from climate action, the rivalry can also generate positive externalities for developing countries by increasing the flow of bilateral assistance, which is more and more often earmarked for climate-friendly projects. 

In the developmental space, for instance, whether as a cause or as an accelerant, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has spurred concerted efforts by the USA and several others, including the European Union (EU) and Japan, to match China’s infrastructure financing in the Global South and elsewhere. The USA-led Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative and the related Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) are direct rejoinders to the BRI. Further newly announced initiatives, including the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), the Trans-African Corridor, and an investment platform for sustainable infrastructure in the Americas to be established by the US International Development Finance Corporation and Inter-American Development Bank, are also in this vein. 

While this competition has seemingly exacerbated geopolitical tensions, it also has positive externalities for developing countries suffering from a deficit in infrastructure, including energy infrastructure. Funds deployed in the framework of these grand development initiatives cannot all be categorized as climate finance, but are very likely to become greener. The PGII, for instance, aims to mobilize funding for ‘climate-resilient infrastructure’ and its first investments to be announced include renewable energy projects. The EU’s Global Gateway initiative, designed to be ‘mutually reinforcing’ together with the PGII, has also expressed a commitment to ‘infrastructure development that is clean, resilient and consistent with a net-zero future’. Finally, President Biden’s recent request to Congress for greater climate and infrastructure funding for the World Bank was also framed in terms of an ‘essential’ need to offer ‘a credible alternative to the People’s Republic of China’s coercive and unsustainable lending and infrastructure projects’ in developing countries. 

Meanwhile, China has largely upheld its 2021 promise not to build coal-fired power plants abroad, and the share of clean and renewable energy projects it funds abroad can therefore only be expected to increase. Platforms such as the BRI International Alliance for Green Development, the BRI Ecological and Environmental Protection Big Data Service Platform and the Technology Transfer South–South Cooperation Center may play an additional role in promoting much higher environmental standards from Chinese actors, as well as assisting developing countries with clean energy governance, planning and capacity building. 

As this greener investment trajectory continues, the developing world could very plausibly see a ‘race to the top’—both in terms of the financing available for climate action and in terms of the environmental standards to which development projects are held. This is not least because the developing world remains a battleground for the two countries’ strategic competition for influence. Indeed, China is quite actively utilizing climate cooperation in its public diplomacy and foreign policy in both bilateral and multilateral formats. By June 2023, China had signed 46 memorandums of understanding with 39 developing countries on climate change cooperation. 

Other platforms where climate cooperation or climate finance-related discussions are taking place include the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), the China–Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Forum (China–CELAC Forum), China–ASEAN dialogues and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). There are also declarative agreements such as the China–Africa Declaration on Cooperation in Addressing Climate Change, as well as new structures established such as the China–Pacific Island Countries Cooperation Center on Climate Change. These myriad initiatives, including China’s announcement of a new Global Development Initiative (GDI), can be seen as extensions of a larger Chinese strategy to extend its global influence. China’s Global Clean Energy Cooperation Partnership and a range of clean energy cooperation agreements across Central Asia, Latin America, the Asia–Pacific region and the Middle East are also packaged under the GDI heading.

As with the BRI, China’s climate- and clean energy-related cooperation in third countries—and its exertion of what it calls ‘great power responsibility’—is likely to receive increasing attention from US policymakers in the two countries’ battle for global influence. Without cooperation, there will be strategic pressure for the USA to outcompete or attempt to match Chinese efforts, not in spite of but rather due to wider tensions around dominance of foreign markets and global supply chains for advanced technology and manufacturing, including for clean energy and the green economy. 

Notably, a key impetus and justification for Biden’s clean energy-centred Inflation Reduction Act was geostrategic competition with China. Although the act is largely a domestic-oriented industrial initiative, pressure to compete in third-country markets is very likely to persist; even under the administration of President Donald J. Trump, early opposition to the creation of a US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to facilitate private-sector engagement in foreign aid gave way due to concern over the inroads China has made in developing countries. As US companies become more globally competitive with regard to Chinese counterparts, this will likewise generate cheaper and better alternatives for climate mitigation and adaptation in the rest of the world. 

Bumps ahead: Aligning domestic pressures with global expectations 

China–US cooperation on climate policy is made precarious not only by bilateral tensions but also by domestic pressures that could reduce the ambitions of either country. For obvious reasons, there remain very concerning questions about how the election of politicians less interested in climate action during the 2024 elections would affect the USA’s international engagement in this space. 

China’s contributions to international climate finance are also in part determined by national conditions—political, economic and bureaucratic. Chinese leaders are keen to avoid the perception that any climate action they take is the result of US pressure, as was demonstrated by President Xi Jinping’s remarks this year that the path, pace and intensity of China’s climate actions would ‘absolutely not be determined by others’. 

Hence, just as a virtuous circle of climate finance leadership is plausible, so is a downward spiral of mutual irresponsibility. Part of the US Republican argument against increasing the country’s climate finance contributions, and indeed against climate action in general, is a claim that China—as the world’s largest polluter—is not doing enough. In this respect, the future of climate finance will also necessarily depend on how far politicians in both countries are able to acknowledge their interconnectedness with the rest of the world: in terms of transnational climatic impacts but also politically. With respect to the latter, it will be the rest of the world that will be the ultimate judge of whether the two powers—separately or together—can credibly claim the global leadership over which they purport to compete.  

About the authors:

• Dr Jiayi Zhou is a Researcher in the SIPRI Conflict, Peace and Security Programme.
• ​​​​​​​Zha Daojiong is Professor of International Political Economy at the School of International Studies and Institute of South–South Cooperation and Development, Peking University.

Source: This article was published by SIPRI

SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Established in 1966, SIPRI provides data, analysis and recommendations, based on open sources, to policymakers, researchers, media and the interested public. Based in Stockholm, SIPRI also has a presence in Beijing, and is regularly ranked among the most respected think tanks worldwide.

AI Image Generator Stable Diffusion Perpetuates Racial And Gendered Stereotypes

University of Washington researchers found that when prompted to create pictures of “a person,” the AI image generator over-represented light-skinned men, sexualized images of certain women of color and failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. For instance, compared here (clockwise from top left) are the results of four prompts to show “a person” from Oceania, Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Papua New Guinea, where the population remains mostly Indigenous, is the second most populous country in Oceania. CREDIT: University of Washington/Stable Diffusion – AI GENERATED IMAGE

 November 30, 2023

By Eurasia Review

What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently you’ll see images of light-skinned men.

Stable Diffusion’s perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of “a person from Oceania,” for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt.

The researchers will present their findings the week of Dec. 6 at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore.

“It’s important to recognize that systems like Stable Diffusion produce results that can cause harm,” said Sourojit Ghosh, a UW doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department. “There is a near-complete erasure of nonbinary and Indigenous identities. For instance, an Indigenous person looking at Stable Diffusion’s representation of people from Australia is not going to see their identity represented — that can be harmful and perpetuate stereotypes of the settler-colonial white people being more ‘Australian’ than Indigenous, darker-skinned people, whose land it originally was and continues to remain.”

To study how Stable Diffusion portrays people, researchers asked the text-to-image generator to create 50 images of a “front-facing photo of a person.” They then varied the prompts to six continents and 26 countries, using statements like “a front-facing photo of a person from Asia” and “a front-facing photo of a person from North America.” They did the same with gender. For example, they compared “person” to “man” and “person from India” to “person of nonbinary gender from India.”

The team took the generated images and analyzed them computationally, assigning each a score: A number closer to 0 suggests less similarity while a number closer to 1 suggests more. The researchers then confirmed the computational results manually. They found that images of a “person” corresponded most with men (0.64) and people from Europe (0.71) and North America (0.68), while corresponding least with nonbinary people (0.41) and people from Africa (0.41) and Asia (0.43).

Likewise, images of a person from Oceania corresponded most closely with people from majority-white countries Australia (0.77) and New Zealand (0.74), and least with people from Papua New Guinea (0.31), the second most populous country in the region where the population remains predominantly Indigenous.

A third finding announced itself as researchers were working on the study: Stable Diffusion was sexualizing certain women of color, especially Latin American women. So the team compared images using a NSFW (Not Safe for Work) Detector, a machine-learning model that can identify sexualized images, labeling them on a scale from “sexy” to “neutral.” (The detector has a history of being less sensitive to NSFW images than humans.) A woman from Venezuela had a “sexy” score of 0.77 while a woman from Japan ranked 0.13 and a woman from the United Kingdom 0.16.

“We weren’t looking for this, but it sort of hit us in the face,” Ghosh said. “Stable Diffusion censored some images on its own and said, ‘These are Not Safe for Work.’ But even some that it did show us were Not Safe for Work, compared to images of women in other countries in Asia or the U.S. and Canada.”

While the team’s work points to clear representational problems, the ways to fix them are less clear.

“We need to better understand the impact of social practices in creating and perpetuating such results,” Ghosh said. “To say that ‘better’ data can solve these issues misses a lot of nuance. A lot of why Stable Diffusion continually associates ‘person’ with ‘man’ comes from the societal interchangeability of those terms over generations.”

The team chose to study Stable Diffusion, in part, because it’s open source and makes its training data available (unlike prominent competitor Dall-E, from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI). Yet both the reams of training data fed to the models and the people training the models themselves introduce complex networks of biases that are difficult to disentangle at scale.

“We have a significant theoretical and practical problem here,” said Aylin Caliskan, a UW assistant professor in the Information School. “Machine learning models are data hungry. When it comes to underrepresented and historically disadvantaged groups, we do not have as much data, so the algorithms cannot learn accurate representations. Moreover, whatever data we tend to have about these groups is stereotypical. So we end up with these systems that not only reflect but amplify the problems in society.”

To that end, the researchers decided to include in the published paper only blurred copies of images that sexualized women of color.

“When these images are disseminated on the internet, without blurring or marking that they are synthetic images, they end up in the training data sets of future AI models,” Caliskan said. “It contributes to this entire problematic cycle. AI presents many opportunities, but it is moving so fast that we are not able to fix the problems in time and they keep growing rapidly and exponentially.”

Essay
The original feminist BDSM cult
Was Aristasia therapy magic or kink?

BY MARY HARRINGTON
November 30, 2023

In 1984, the tiny Irish seaside town of Burtonport attracted a swarm of international press attention. The occasion was the opening of a new educational establishment: St Bride’s School for Girls, residing in a former hotel previously home to a New Age commune known locally as “The Screamers”.

At the opening, Burtonport’s mayor cut the ribbon. The community expressed pride. But the school wasn’t for children: it offered adult women — paying guests — the opportunity to roleplay as schoolgirls for a holiday.

The story of this strange establishment isn’t just about ooh-la-la play-acting. The house was home to the “Silver Sisterhood”: a female separatist subculture so reactionary they wore Victorian clothing, rejected electric lighting, and refused to listen to music except on a wind-up gramophone. And yet, its members were in some ways 50 years ahead of their time: forerunners of reality-warping contemporary phenomena such as BDSM, cosplay, computer gaming — and also the weird online Right.

The roots of this sect reach back to mid-century counterculture Oxford — and, still further, into the febrile occult subcultures of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe. There, a group of eccentric scholars and antiquarians began positing a syncretic “Perennialist” or “Traditionalist” doctrine of eternal, immutable, spiritual truth, evident throughout all traditional cultures – but that had been in decline since the Renaissance. The principal exponent of this outlook was the French writer René Guénon (1886-1951), whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1946) sets out his doctrine of modernity as decline.

Where Guénon’s work is relatively apolitical, Traditionalism’s other leading light was the aristocratic Italian writer and one-time Dadaist painter Julius Evola (1898-1974), a pagan monarchist and esoteric race theorist so far to the Right that in 1942 his passport was confiscated by the Italian Fascist party for political extremism.

Traditionalism’s legacy has spread in some strange directions since. Those influenced more by Guénon today include King Charles, for example, and, on the more Evola-flavoured side, Right-wing figures including Trump’s one-time strategist Steve Bannon, and “Putin’s Brain” Aleksandr Dugin.

That legacy also includes the Silver Sisterhood. According to a 2022 BBC interview with one of its founders, who now goes by the name Mary Guillermin, it all began at an Oxford feminist consciousness-raising group in the Seventies, exploring ancient goddess worship. Presumably that was also where Guénon got into the mix; in any case, what emerged was an all-female Perennialist group, keen to put their Goddess-tinged ideas into practice.

This they did this first at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, where they tried to live as though men and modernity had simply never happened — even coining their own pseudo-ancient dialect, “Rhennish”. This group then found its way to Atlantis House, via a previous social link to the “Screamers”, to pursue spiritual withdrawal from modernity. An American radical women’s magazine recounts the experience of visiting, in early 1984, what sounds like a devout, low-tech pagan feminist sect: “I enjoy praying, wearing skirts among women, living in a structured household with a low technological level, and dissolving somewhat the accumulated patriarchal grime in my brain cells”.

But with money constantly an issue, the group’s commitment to formal hierarchy seemed to offer a more lucrative business opportunity than craft shop and tea room — and thus a disciplinarian retro-roleplay establishment was born: St Bride’s School for Girls. With Guillermin (then calling herself Brighe Dachcolwyn) as headmistress, the prospectus promised a “total experience” of vintage-themed, all-female schoolgirl roleplay. Journalists descended, fascinated by the surreal combination of Victorian dress and lifestyle with discipline so strict as to hint at the fetishistic.

Guests, meanwhile, extolled its immersiveness, with one telling the BBC: “It’s an entire world. It envelops you.” This is the consistent theme in the bizarre history that followed. Guillermin, in her 2022 interview, describes their creation as a key spiritual practice for the early community: a practice she calls “living theatre”.

Along with exploring the mind-altering effects of action roleplay, the group also pursued another emerging form of world-building: text-based adventure gaming. For paradoxically, despite ostensibly rejecting modernity out of hand, the women of Atlantis House also made pioneering contributions to early gaming, developed by the mysterious “Priscilla Langridge”, a founding Silver Sister who often appeared veiled, and refused ever to be photographed by the press. The two most noted of Langridge’s games were “The Secret of St Bride’s”, published 1985, (you can play it online here) and a “Jack the Ripper” game, the first such creation to receive an 18 certificate.

According to some reports, the mysterious Langridge was a Sixties Oxford theology scholar, who played a key role in developing the group’s founding “Aristasian” religious outlook: a blend of Perennialism and Seventies feminism with both esoteric and exoteric components. The esoteric dimension of this worldview was most clearly set out some years later, in The Feminine Universe, where the probably-pseudonymous author “Miss Alice Trent” argues that very earliest instances of Perennial Wisdom were feminine, because “the original Creator is feminine”.

Since then, though, the world has declined from the primordial eternal truth, and expelled the divine feminine principle from mainstream culture. This decline reached its nadir in “the cultural collapse of the 1960s”, which Aristasians call “the Eclipse”. Everything since that time is referred to as “the Pit”: a hellish apotheosis of patriarchy “in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman itself”.

For its original adherents, Aristasianism was a self-contained esoteric outlook, with a practice of “living theatre”, ritual goddess-worship, and technological simplicity. For those who didn’t go home again, the immersiveness could be too much. One woman, “Sophia”, spent nearly a year as a “maid” in the house, where she was frequently beaten; in the end she escaped and later brought criminal charges against Guillermin for assault.

But by then things were already coming apart for the larger experiment. In 1992, not long after “Sophia” departed, so too did the Aristasians. Amid a dispute over property ownership, two of the previous Screamer owners broke into Atlantis House, where they found a dark, musty interior with almost no modern appliances or conveniences — and in a room upstairs, a row of tiny desks and a blackboard, complemented by willow canes leaning against the wall. According to reports at the time, the house was also strewn with antisemitic and sadomasochistic literature, along with correspondence between Guillermin and then-BNP leader, John Tyndall.

Even after this scandal-ridden dissolution of St Bride’s, though, “Aristasia” lived on: as reactionary as ever in its aesthetic, and increasingly BDSM-flavoured in its income streams. In 1993 Guillermin (now calling herself “Miss Partridge”) and Langridge cropped up again in Oxford, this time supporting an anti-metric campaign, hosting “Romantia” retro soirees, and offering discreet corporal punishment experiences. By this point, the more exoteric Aristasian mythology appears to have solidified: a kind of female-separatist high fantasy, with anti-technology retro styling and a side order of BDSM. In this world, Aristasia-in-Telluria is the corrupt, earthly imitation of the real world: Aristasia Pura, a parallel universe, world, existing on a different planet sometimes called “Herthe”. There are no men, and the two sexes are blondes and brunettes, respectively submissive and dominant.

Around the same period, the group founded Wildfire Publishing, which produced female-centric BDSM literature, including a title called The Female Disciplinary Manual, which is much what you’d expect. According to press reports of its 1995 launch, at that point there were several full-immersion Aristasian houses dotted around England, where members lived out the Aristasian reality including its practice of corporal punishment.

Certainly, at least one such establishment existed in 1996, when Channel 4 made a documentary about it. Guillermin, now styling herself “Miss Martindale”, features heavily, teaching lessons and disciplining “girls” for minor infractions. At Wildfire Publishing, meanwhile, fantasy, reality, and Perennialist theology found their most effective delivery mechanism yet: not video games, but fetish literature. The 1996 Children of the Void informs readers: “Morally and culturally, civilisation has ended, just as completely as it would physically have ended if it had been obliterated by atomic bombs.” Meanwhile the narrative mixes expositions of Aristasian feminine essentialism and slightly leaden dialogue with a hefty side-order of spanking porn.

It ought to surprise me that mashing up Right-wing reactionary occultism with Seventies radical feminism should produce mystical cosplay seasoned with BDSM. But somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps the extremism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan is right about the “cultic milieu”: that what matters for fringe ideologies isn’t their place on some imaginary political compass, but how far they are from the mainstream. But more than trying to place Aristasia politically, their enduring interest lies in the dedication they showed to testing just how far you can warp reality through force of play-acting.

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“You can call it therapy,” Guillermin said in 2022 of the group’s “living theatre” practice, “or you can call it magic”. Was there really something occult going on? Or were they just kinky weirdos? Guillermin happily acknowledged in 2022 that Jack the Ripper, which despite its 18 certificate focused more on occult and Masonic subplots, was designed for “philosophical education”. And she repeatedly dismissed regular “kink” devotees as “silly monkeys”.

Whatever the original intent, though, the richness of Aristasian experiments in parallel realities collapsed with the ascendancy of the central, technological alternate reality that today structures nearly all of culture: the internet. By the end of the 2000s, Aristasia had largely lost its hold in “Telluria”, becoming an online-only fandom that finally imploded in a dispute over anime. Guillermin now resides in California, where she works as a therapist espousing the same “divine feminine” spirituality as ever.

But perhaps it didn’t fail. For Aristasia’s immersive practices — if not the aesthetic — are now almost as mainstream as the internet. The group was well ahead of the curve in realising the potential of computer gaming for those who dream of other worlds. And multiple reports suggest that Langridge was actually male, implying another type of personal interest in seeking to alter reality through performance.

More generally still, Aristasian “living theatre” anticipated cosplay. Internationally popular today, and usually viewed as a fun, it also attracts a minority who, like Guillermin, treat the hobby as a kind of consciousness-altering magic. Meanwhile, the notion that one can alter the world by “LARPing” — acting as if your version is already true — has become a crucial political concept in a world that appears increasingly unreal.

Meanwhile, Wildfire Publishing and the broader Aristasian fixation on power, hierarchy and corporal punishment has now become so normalised today that some even claim it’s reasonable to ditch a partner for not being kinky enough. And like cosplay, BDSM also attracts a minority who view it as something altogether more mind-altering.

So Aristasia succeeded beyond measure, in propagating previously mystical practices into mainstream culture. But it failed, just as signally, to have any effect on post-Sixties culture, except in pioneering the virtualisation of reactionary politics. For while the group’s actual links to the Right are ambiguous, the Aristasian route from efforts to do Traditionalism “IRL”, all the way to purely virtual fandom, reflects a broader contemporary tendency among the weird Right. Here, even as the liquefaction of “traditional” social forms seems ever more complete, nostalgic visions of bygone ages flourish: visions that, however, never seem to make it out of the digital realm.

What, then, is the lesson of Aristasia — whether for reactionaries, or anyone else? It is surely an ambivalent one: that the easiest dimension in which to create your own reality is the internet. But this comes at the price of being ever less able to realise your vision in real life. For that, you still need charismatic leadership, quasi-religious doctrine, real-world community, and a willingness to look silly in the eyes of the world. For those who embrace this more difficult path, though, the story of Aristasia offers a backhanded kind of hope: that if you roleplay hard enough, then even in apparent failure you end up shaping the future.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

Analysis

Israel has no plan for Gaza
Righteous fury is obscuring its political objectives

BY RAJAN MENON

November 30, 2023

Following the October 7 atrocities, the imperative to respond in fury was irresistible, and Israel’s Prime Minister reached immediately for the blunt instrument of his formidable war machine, vowing to break Hamas’s back. But, as Clausewitz noted, war is not ultimately about killing people and destroying things: it is a means to achieve political objectives. After the war ends, what next?

Don’t look to Netanyahu for the answer. He has been clear about the war’s objective: to destroy Hamas, particularly its military wing, the Izzedine ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades. Some of his far-Right politicians have gone further, calling for the levelling of Gaza, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, or expelling its entire population. But these amount to more of the same: rage-fuelled impulses. Neither Netanyahu nor anyone else in Israel’s government (some key members of the political opposition joined the cabinet after October 7) has yet articulated a coherent post-war strategy for Gaza, let alone for the larger dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. This failure bodes ill for both communities.

Even if the IDF eviscerates Hamas, Israel’s leaders will — regardless of whether Netanyahu survives politically — have to figure out how to organise Gaza in order to create and sustain stability there. Departing in haste from a place, large swathes of which have been reduced to rubble, will elicit universal condemnation. Worse, that step will not produce conditions within Gaza that increase Israel’s security, the justification for the war from the outset. The United States could walk away from its failed wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; those countries are distant from the American homeland. Israel cannot do the same with its neighbour.

Israel could decide to stay and occupy Gaza indefinitely. But given how much death and destruction has been wrought, IDF soldiers will police a hostile population of 2.3 million people, some proportion of whom will eventually turn to armed resistance, even if leaderless. The Israeli army has demonstrated, more than once, that it has the firepower to quell revolts; but heavy-handed repression coupled with a prolonged occupation will beget a self-sustaining cycle of violence out of which, in time, a variant of Hamas will emerge. The more draconian Israel’s occupation, the more likely a renewed intifada of sorts — one that will most probably spread to the West Bank. This means Israel will end up policing two Palestinian territories, resorting regularly to arrests, interrogations and military raids — all without diminishing Palestinians’ determination for a state they can call their own. Moreover, the United States, the one country truly indispensable to Israel, has already stated that an occupation of Gaza would be unacceptable, save for a “transition period”.

Israel's ceasefire conceals a bigger threatBY THOMAS FAZI

As an alternative, a multinational peacekeeping force could be deployed in Gaza. But which countries will provide troops to patrol Gaza indefinitely given the calamitous conditions? The United States, Britain, and France have been involved in discussions. But these countries, have long been staunch supporters of Israel, and Gazans will understandably see their soldiers as Israel’s enforcers, if not impartial protectors. Deploying an all-Arab force might be a way around that problem, but because Israel’s war has aroused intense anger across the Middle East, the region’s rulers will be skittish about being seen as collaborators. And Egypt, a potential leading candidate in a peacekeeping operation, has joined Israel in blockading Gaza for nearly 20 years, inflicting tremendous suffering on its people, who are unlikely to welcome its troops. A UN peacekeeping force could be the answer. Yet the historical record casts doubt — Bosnia and Rwanda, for example — on their capacity to restore and maintain order in the face of large-scale violence, which cannot be ruled out in Gaza.

More fundamentally, peacekeeping troops, no matter their nationality, cannot provide day-to-day governance any more than a city’s police force can run the quotidian operations required for basic services, such as healthcare, education and housing (to say nothing of managing war-shattered Gaza’s reconstruction). Administering the territory in a manner that eventually meets the minimal needs of its citizens will be a multi-year task at minimum, and will require a government with local roots and popular legitimacy. Israel will understandably not allow any role for Hamas, but it has also ruled out one for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. In any case, the PA commands scant respect among Palestinians. A recent poll found that a majority believes it should be dissolved and that it serves Israel’s interests more than theirs. That owes partly to the failure of its negotiations with Israel (since the 30-year-old Oslo Accords) to produce anything that remotely resembles a Palestinian state, or even to resist the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the (continuing) evictions of Palestinians from their homes and grazing and farm lands.

The failed lessons of LibyaBY RAJAN MENON

A viable governing authority in post-war Gaza will, therefore, have to be staffed by local notables who have earned public goodwill and respect. But those who do enjoy grassroots esteem are precisely the ones who will worry about forsaking it by joining what Gazans may come to view as a collection of quislings propped up by Israel to do its bidding. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel will “continue to control security” in Gaza after the war suggests that one Israeli demand could be guaranteed access to Gaza for the IDF. His statement that the IDF could remain there for “an indefinite period” suggests that Israel may ask for much more than that. Even a government run by respected Gazans will lose legitimacy if it accedes to either demand, especially the second.


Aside from Israel’s lack of a strategy for post-war Gaza, since 1996 it has not had (with some exceptions such as Ehud Barak) a leader with plan for addressing the political aspirations of Palestinians. And its Right-ward political trajectory since the latter half of the Nineties, and especially in recent years, makes it unlikely that one will emerge without fundamental political change. Yet history and geography dictate that Israelis and Palestinians must live side by side.

American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was recently vilified, and later reprimanded by the House, for using the slogan “from the river to the sea”, which Hamas has used in calling for Israel’s destruction. (Tlaib clarified that her plea was for equal rights in that space for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike.) But it bears remembering that Right-wing Israeli politicians have long used these same words to underscore their pledge to continue the occupation and never allow a Palestinian state, of any kind. Or that the 1977 platform of Netanyahu’s Likud Party likewise declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will be only Israeli sovereignty”. If Israel remains determined to reject a Palestinian state, it will perforce revert to quarantining Gaza, as it has since 2007, and managing the West Bank in the manner that it has since 1967. Based on the past, that amounts to a formula for continued violence — perhaps not on the scale of October 7 but bad enough to intermittently unsettle the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, though not in equal measure.

Why Netanyahu finally agreed to a hostage dealBY GREGG CARLSTROM

Sadly, as things stand, even a mediator determined to kickstart talks between Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution — that Biden has said he will revive after the war to ensure “a vision of what comes next” — will find that the pathways to it have been all but blocked by now. The West Bank has been chopped up: Israel fully controls Area C, which accounts for 60% of its area and contains its richest agricultural lands. Area A and Area B, both under the authority of the PA, albeit to varying degrees, are archipelagos cut off from each other by roads reserved for Israeli Jews and a constellation of settlements. Moreover, settlement construction has soared since 2000, and the number of settlers living in those deemed legal under Israeli law plus the illegal “outposts” has increased from under 200,000 in 2000 to more than 485,000 today. What’s more, even as the war in Gaza continues, the Israeli government seems intent on building additional new settlements.

How, under these circumstances, can any West Bank state that even minimally meets Palestinians’ aspirations be created so as to marginalise Hamas-like movements? To make matters worse, the atrocities Hamas committed could make those Israelis who have warned that any Palestinian state, regardless of location and configuration, will pose a mortal threat to the Jewish state much more influential in the country’s public square. The dismaying upshot, then, is that Israel has no coherent strategy for managing post-war Gaza, or for resolving the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute — save for a tougher version of business-as-usual. And that, it ought to be clear by now, is a dead end.