Sunday, June 02, 2024

 

East or West? West is Best

Konstantin Kisin: An immigrant's love letter to the West, 2022

Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, free education, economic equality. His paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted, as reviewed by Peter Boghossian, is self parody. Kisin is also a stand-up comic, a would-be enfant terrible, so he’s comfortable with over-the-top. We learn from the book blurb that ‘he experienced both untold wealth and grinding poverty.’ Not.

There are two more slots for Konstantin. Jewish. Probably 1/4. His grandfather was a gynaecologist who in 1980 protested openly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, promptly became a nonperson, and his family blacklisted. The fall from Soviet grace was hard (sorry, no ‘grinding poverty’) and grandpa emigrated to Britain.

The real story on grandpa is most likely the following. His Jewish great-grandpa was falsely arrested in the 1920s. However, as an engineer, he was still of use to the new socialism, so he lived out his 10 years in the Gulag with three more years added for the hell of it and exile in Siberia till Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin and sent everyone home. He had been a devoted communist at the start and seems to have left his prison years behind, welcomed back into the socialist fold, allowing his son (Konstantin’s father) to become the celebrated doctor with fancy car and prestige apartment. Thank you, Nikita.

The family quickly became part of the nomenklatura and things looked rosy until 1980. Clearly, the gynaecologist had become a dissident, foolishly poking his finger at the bear at a very delicate time. Being a dissident Jew in 1980 in Russia, with Israel and world Jewry hysterically shouting down naive Soviet calls for peace and socialism, demanding the mass emigration of half the Soviet elite NOW, was not a happy vocation. Unless you planned to leave. Again the story is muddled, but Konstantin’s story is that his parents decided he should join grandfather in England and go to a private school. Many Russians gave up hope in the 1990s and looked to the West for a good future. So at 11, he was put on a plane unaccompanied, and began his long march to fame and fortune at the heart of Russia’s traditional enemy.

His other moniker is dissident. While Konstantin never suffered directly in Moscow and became a devoted anglophile, he seems to have inherited the smart-ass, rabblerouser Jewish gene, and he prides himself in his tussles with political correctness [critical race theory (CRT)], occasionally being banned and censored, which of course only adds to his cachet, provides grist for his podcast and more ‘untold wealth’.

That is how I stumbled upon Kisin. What a puzzle: Jewish Russian emigre, smart, young, anglophile … but ‘alt-right’, as he gleefully admits he’s been called? ‘All very, very Soviet.’ Disser of CRT, trans, lgbtqaetc. And bestselling author at 40. I wanted to piece together this puzzle.

An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West starts with an earnest quote from Solzhenitsyn about the decline of the spiritual life leading to social collapse: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand. Hmm. Kisin as a footnote to Solzhenitsyn’s Jeremiad about the decline of both the Soviet Union and the West, but no. Kisin was referring only to the Soviet Union, still hoping the West will recover its soul. It is more interesting as a picture of the confused attempt to justify abandoning his homeland and embrace its enemy. You feel sorry for him at the end, with no sense of where he belongs.

He starts with the anecdote about opening Tamerlane’s tomb on June 21, 1941, inscribed Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I. Tamerlane was given a proper Muslim burial on December 20, 1942, in time for the Battle of Stalingrad, ensuring the defeat of Hitler, so that had a happy ending. He sees CRT as the equivalent of Tamerlane. ‘Today, the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance once again. The tomb of discord and division has been forced open by a small group of ideological zealots. Retreat is no longer an option.’

True, the world around us is indeed changing at unprecedented speed. People are indeed afraid to express their viewers, men and women are opponents, mention of race separates us. He’s right about CRT, but wrong about just about everything else.

Trust me: West is best

His first two chapter are great but for the wrong reasons. The social legacy of the Soviet Union which morphs into black Americans’ ‘the talk’, advice to children about how to act if they’re stopped by police. He had the same lecture as a child in the Soviet Union (SU), except he was instructed ‘how to keep our private conversations secret from the State.’ Cool. The US is becoming like the SU. He trots out Pavlik Morozov (a Stalin-era story of a boy betraying his ‘wrecker’ father), comparing him to Bernie Sanders (?) as a ‘useful idiot’. ‘They are generally the sort of college-educated westerner who embraces this bankrupt ideology [communism] without having any understanding of its real-world implications.’

He then boldly admits that there was optimal income distribution in the Soviet Union (the elite earned 4x what workers earned) vs the 1000+x difference in the West). This was in fact the secret as to why the SU survived so long (and the reason it is mourned by the vast majority of Russians today). Free health, university education (students actually paid a stipend to study!), no racism, no ‘white privilege’, women’s rights, abortion, child care … Things he is disappointed not to see in the West, which he can’t understand. But there’s a catch in all this. Equality, but where everyone is poor, i.e., the Soviet solution to inequality is to cut off people’s legs, though he doesn’t specify that it’s the rich people’s legs that are cut off, so to speak.

Okay, the SU never managed to ‘catch up’ to the West in money income, consumerism, but that’s not the point. At the Muslim Association of Canada 2024 conference ‘Seizing the moment’, Hussein Elkazzaz addressed this false comparison of the West with the Islamic world, which is really just the other ‘other’ for us in the West, like communism.

It assumes you are western, interested only in money and things, so if, say, Egypt is poor, then it is bad, a failure. But, Elkazzaz asks, can you worship freely? Observer the holy days in a vibrant spiritual community? Bring your children up in a safe environment, without the Hollywood-driven culture undermining morality? Some Muslim Canadians go back when they start a family, as that is what’s really important to them, not money and fancier things.

For communism too, money and commodities were not considered as important as good education, health, holidays, camps for children, culture that was moral. Muslims, more than communists, are caught between the two worlds, spiritual growth or economic growth. And they are never really compatible. The SU was operating under the handicap of state-legislated atheism, officially replacing religion with communist ideology, a bad fit as it turned out, as ideological as capitalist America or Muslim Egypt but without the latter’s spirituality.

study of East Germany and Bulgaria revealed that women had twice as many orgasms in the socialist bloc than in the West. The men were better husbands, the women weren’t stressed by money worries, everyone was equally ‘poor’. Which is nonsense as people didn’t starve. They lived comfortably. The Soviet Union was widely respected in the global south. That’s why I liked communism. It was people-oriented, a friend of the postcolonial world, not $-oriented (to a fault). I liked that workers were honored vs our capitalists feted and treated like kings.

Re universal health care, Kisin is blissfully unaware, by his own admission, as to why Trump, ‘even the almighty Clintons and Barack Obama, couldn’t figure that one out.’ Really? How about capitalism? But no, Kisin loves capitalism. And let’s not forget sunny Cuba and its woes. Sanctions and subversion for 60+ years. The SU endured the same treatment from 1917 till it finally collapsed 74 years later, bringing down most of the socialist world with all its many advantages.

As for freedom, again Kisin admits his parents, and anyone else who cared, had lively debates at home. Everyone was literate and all the pre-Soviet-era classics of world literature and science were available to all. Yes, you had to watch your tongue in public. The SU was never really at peace with a hostile West, so it was naturally paranoid. If you paid any attention to world affairs, that would have been abundantly clear. Nice Cuba also has to restrain its frustrated population to preserve socialism.

Socialism is not easy to build and is easily destroyed, as the whirlwind collapse of the SU showed. And what comes after it is the nasty what-came-before, only worse, as vengeance must be enacted. So empty shelves are a drag, but as long as no one suffers malnutrition, there is definitely a good case to keep socialism alive in the face of unremitting hostility.

Magical sky men

Kisin identifies the underlying problem being the Russian revolution itself, inspired by ideology rejecting real world capitalism. ‘Instead of wasting time trying to create a perfection, which can’t be achieved, the best we can do is deal with reality as we find it.’ Presumably that goes for all revolutions. Kisin excepts the American revolution and its ideology of liberalism, free speech and consumerism.

Kisin compares the modern West to the cargo cults that sprung up among the Melanesian islanders during and after WWII. The trinkets, guns, SPAM were all magical things these nice sky men brought. The Melanesians are skilled carvers so they fashioned mock guns and headphones of wood and sat in makeshift control towers, even flapping their arms on pretend runways. Lesson? ‘We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They have stood the test of time.’ Oh, really?

His analogy with Melanesians is flawed. They saw the sky men as gods with nice miraculous things, and they wanted the things. They didn’t care about western ideology, which indeed is flimsy and is collapsing before our eyes, much like the Soviet ideology of ‘real existing socialism’ collapsed before his eyes. And the magical things we get from Chinese sky men are ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, leaving us high and dry, much like the Melanesians.

As he described the Melanesians, I was thinking ‘what an apt analogy for the mindless consumerism of the late Soviet period, when anything western, from bubble gum to sleek cars, was worshipped and coveted as if it could magically make Soviets feel happy.

Kisin and his fellow Russians view westerners as naive and ‘drunk on decadence, so accustomed to liberty and prosperity that they take it for granted and appear to be throwing it away, completely unaware of its inherent value and fragility.’ They are replacing it with postmodern ideologies culminating in transgenderism, and the cancelling/ destruction of western culture as racist etc.

Kisin is a mirror image to Dmitry Orlov, a hard-nosed Russian American whose Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2011) compare the collapse-preparedness of the US and the SU, arguing that the SU was a mild collapse compared to what’s in store for a totally unprepared, over-the-top arrogant US. Like Orlov, Kisin sees the weakness underlying western society, but can’t see the bankruptcy of both the ideology and reality of the West. His hopes for a miraculous renewal of western society are doomed, much like Gorbachev’s hopes of renewing ‘real existing socialism’ with hasty market reforms, still trapped in the materialist ideology.

I can sympathize with Kisin’s naivete, as I became a communist and lived in hope of a Soviet renewal, reaffirming the ideology of universal brotherhood, real equality, state-funded health and education. It turned out that that ideology-reality was doomed too. Too far apart there. They are equally far apart in the West now too. How about a reality check? Prosperity? Safety? Life expectancy? Stability? Freedoms? Peace? No comment.

Apologist Kisin and Polyanna Pinker

Kisin is an acolyte of Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) seriously claims the world has never been in such a wonderful state, prosperous, blessed with ‘knowledge, mobilized to improve human welfare’.1

Kisin is a hard-nosed Russian Brit, with no use for ‘pathological altruism’ or any of the ‘wacky, postmodernist, semi-Soviet viruses’. He chastises the West for too much freedom, e.g., Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson, ‘as if their success was their undoing.’ Well, yes, they did have too much material success. Soviet artists lived the high life but a very modest one. I don’t know of any tragedies of the scale of Michael Jackson there.

When capitalism takes control of culture, it encourages the image of freedom, while poisoning the actual lives being lived. We need constraints, especially artists, something to fight against in the interests of Truth. If there is no truth, only ‘drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll’, of course, overnight success becomes the road to infamy, culture degenerates. Kisin sneers at lefty ‘massive wasters snorting failed theories and downing shots of communism, or occasionally injecting socialism straight into our veins, even though we know it’s bad for us.’ That’s just the price of ‘freedom’.

Poe, Freud and Visigoths

Edgar Allan Poe explains in The imp of the perverse (1845) that knowing something is bad for us is the one unconquerable force that compels us to do it. Freud took this to Einstein when he asked Freud if we could avoid war and conflict. Freud replied that we have a tendency to self-sabotage, Thanatos. People are their own worst enemies and strive to bring themselves and the world to ruin, ‘to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter.’ We distract ourselves from stress, guilt, fear of death with reckless behavior, leading ourselves and the world to destruction.

Kisin can’t explain this (like his incomprehension of the lack of universal health care in the US) except as ‘too much freedom’. That’s no explanation, though again, he is right that we are gaslit into thinking that it’s western culture that’s to blame and that the way forward is backwards, to cancel culture, to yet another revolution. To start again, this time basing our (magical) thinking on race, making sure that there’s a balance of colors everywhere, that this balance, like Lenin’s communism, will somehow bring peace and prosperity. He likens the new ideology to a bacterial infection, which targeted and killed Christianity, the English language and capitalism.

Nonsense! Christianity was in steep decline by the mid-19th century, capitalism is alive and well. Kisin is right about how language is being held hostage (be careful what you say doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), but it’s not just woke culture that’s responsible. It’s technology, pushing us to write like AI. You are now a ‘client’ at the public library rather than a patron.

But a good chunk of cancel culture is well-founded. There’s no getting around it: West was in fact built on slavery, racism, militarism and genocide. Kisin has no time for that. But he has no idea how to stop cancel culture and renew the social fabric. Many argue that ‘a good war’ is the solution’ though he demurs. He wants ‘liberals to have a little bit of grit in their oyster.’

Kisin is caught in his ‘love letter to the West’ by the contradictions of capitalism, where freedom means more sexual violence, and social malaise is solved by war, which conveniently increases profit and leads to greater ‘prosperity’. He bemoans the ‘new tsars’ who want to flatten everything and start again, much like what happened in the Soviet Union and which led to woeful results. He compares the West to the Roman empire brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in the 5th century, quoting Carinal Robert Sarah: Europe has lost the sense of its origins. And, like a tree without roots, it will die. ‘Ancient Greece and Rome were the most advanced civilizations of their day. Technologically, culturally, philosophcally, scientifically and politically. Right up until the moment they collapsed.’ Hello Dmitry Orlov!

From Marx to Islam?

This is what was missing in Marx’s critique of capitalism – the psychological side of any attempt to make socialism work. Contrary to Kisin (and Thatcher), socialism is the only way out of our physical destruction of the world at this point, so we better get on board fast. This (huge) hole in Marx’s social theory was seized upon by CRT, a pseudo-Marxism which views everything via race.

No! Kisin reacts viscerally to CRT, but his hatred of all things Soviet prevents him from appreciating that precious part of Soviet reality: an end to racism, and to make sure, you tax the rich and keep income distribution within bounds. Racism is, in the last analysis, economic. Kisin talks about ‘learning from mistakes’ but has no interest in a fair assessment of Soviet experience as important for us precisely now.

We have to build on what worked in the SU and what didn’t, including psychology as a vital part of any answer. He stands by ‘the marriage of free-market capitalism and western liberal democracy, despite the ‘fact’ that they are both at the center of the problem. He knows that income inequality means a bad society, that ‘people’s subjective experience of life is that they are losing,’ that taxing the rich is the unpalatable answer, i.e., socialism. ‘That the ugliness of socialism is only matched by the grotesqueness of capitalism’s excesses,’ but rather than promoting a political backbone to tax the rich, he lamely concludes that ‘society is usually fucked.’

Kisin considers us ‘by far and away the luckiest people in history.’ He even claims capitalism creates peace (‘The UK is currently a nation at peace.’), meaning Friedman’s Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. So why are Macdonalds trashed and  forced to shut down across the Middle East, as IDF soldiers are fed free Big Macs in pursuit of … by far and away not ‘peace’?

Kisin’s family’s ‘dissident Jew’ status was unpleasant, but understandable. Those that wanted to managed to leave, happy and healthy. The SU was not ‘a complete fucking nightmare’ as Kisin claims. It did not ‘collapse under the weight of its own flaws’ so much as it was subverted to death, done in by paranoia and consumerism. And the post-Soviet ethnic strife was not a return to primordial animal instincts so much as the lifting of a firm social norm of equality, replaced by greed, which loves dissent and strife, the better to chain the masses to a soulless consumerism.

Read some Marx, Kostya! Have another look at your Soviet-Russian homeland which tirelessly fought for peace from 1917 and was met by war, invasion and subterfuge right up until 2024 and for many more horrible, blood-drenched years, until ‘the collective West’ is defeated. Who incited and why the current war in Ukraine? Whose missiles are raining down on Russian Crimea, Belgorod, the Kremlin?

Or better yet, have a look at Islam, which meets your socially conservative goals, but unlike capitalism and like socialism, is not so much concerned with flooding the world with consumer junk, but creating a society where your heath and education are free, where social harmony is maintained by redistributing income, where peace is not just hoped for as a by-product of greed, but is the priority of all people, of society, the ummah. Where we have the best conditions to praise God for the bounties we have been blessed with, where we are encouraged to do this with humility. But then there is not a trace of humility in Kisin’s worship of capitalism and ‘his’ talents (as if he produced them), and his new-found exciting consumerist paradise. Our enfant terrible is really just a terrible infant.

ENDNOTE

  • 1
    In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a ‘pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.’Facebook
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

 UK

Soaking Sunak Calls the Sodding Election


It was a pitiful sight.  Soaked and literally washed-out, the feeble thin British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, made an announcement that caught many in his party by surprise.  On July 4, the United Kingdom will be going to the polls.  Necks will find themselves in nooses and placed in the guillotine – metaphorically speaking.  The stretch to slaughter has been laid out.  The oddity of this drenched occasion was made all the more pungent by a protester playing, in most audible fashion, the anthem of Tony Blair’s Labour’s victory in 1997, Things Can Only Get Better.

The PM’s speech rattled off the usual trimmings about a world dangerous and uncertain, as if various preceding eras were not.  With the lumpy historical discordance, he suggested that the world was “more dangerous than it has been since the end of the Cold War.”  Savage Russian President Vladimir Putin was one to blame for his “brutal war in Ukraine”.  Islamist extremism continued to bloody the map of the Middle East.  On the bookkeeping front, he claimed to have restored “economic stability,” a dagger remark to his predecessor, Liz Truss, who had a distinct talent for giving the economic books away.

The hordes of the Middle Kingdom and irregular migration also come in for a wet lettuce belting.  China was a country “looking to dominate the 21st century by stealing a lead in technology and migration is being weaponised by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our bodies.”

As for the Labour Party, his opponents and contenders for government, no credible basis could be found.  He did not “know what they offer.  And in truth, I don’t think you know either.  And that’s because they have no plan.”  Sunak has a point, but wise oppositions hankering for government tend to release their program closer to the election date than their greener counterparts.

The conservative stable in Sunak’s party, and the commentary box, were making the obvious point: why now instead of waiting till later in the year?  If you are doing well in readjusting the direction of the economic ship, surely, it’s good to be reassured it’s heading the right direction and gloating about it to the voters before they cast the vote?  Such questions are pertinent, given that the UK economy emerged from the stifling chrysalis of recession in the first quarter with 0.6%, with an inflation rate of 2.3%, a touch above the 2% target set by the Bank of England.

Reactionary, brutal, and cruel, Sunak could also boast that the Rwanda legislation, intended as part of a vain effort to deter boat arrivals to UK shores, had at least passed, despite being widely condemned, and reviled, by the legal fraternity and activist groups.

Strategizing for incumbent governments facing cool slaughter by an unhappy electorate is never an easy call.  Isaac Levido, the shadowy Australian Conservative election strategist, plumped for some time later this year.  Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s Chief of Staff, aided by the views of deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, and political secretary James Forsyth, preferred the starter gun to go off earlier.  Best bring the cull on.

Commentary from various Conservatives tended towards Levido’s view.  One senior figure, speaking to the BBC, confounded “the assumption of the entire establishment, not to mention Tory MPs, that it would be autumn”.

The Spectator, Britain’s consistently conservative magazine, was certain about the implications of premature electioneering.  “Calling an early election is an admission of defeat – and that, on everything from public finances to public services, the worst is yet to come.”

Since the announcement, the Tories have been paternalistic in the hope that anyone will notice.  Fatherly suggestions have come in the form of proposed mandatory national service, a case of carrot, stick and tease to discipline and condition the youth of the country.  Were he to retain office, Sunak promises to reintroduce a measure that seems cumbersome and unconvincing.  These are his words at a campaign event at Buckinghamshire: “It is going to foster a culture of service which is going to be incredibly powerful for making our society more cohesive, and in a more uncertain and dangerous world it’s going to strengthen our country’s security and resilience.”

Cruising onto TikTok, a platform otherwise viewed with Sinophile suspicion, Sunak made the point that, in line with other nation states, “we will provide a stipend to help with living costs for those doing the military element alongside their training.”  Promises of sanctions for not following the program, were it to be introduced, are already being mooted by the likes of Tory Party deputy chairman James Daly.  “If you are fit and healthy and you are able to make a contribution to your wider community to do something for your area, I have faith that young people will take that opportunity.”

In a sign that this government is spluttering in its terminal doom, Home Secretary James Cleverly offered a less punitive view.  “There’s no one going to jail over this.”  Foreign Office minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan preferred to toss the matter over to the royal commission intended to investigate the details of the proposal were fines to apply to disobedient children unwilling to serve their country.  Defence personnel minister Andrew Morrison, within twenty-four hours of the election being called, walled off the possibility that “any form of national service” would be introduced.

For any government, confusion in the already scatty ranks spells death.  In the case of the Tories, a wheezing sense of entropy will continue to soften them for the chop.  While the losses may be checked come the date the votes are cast, the Tories are set for an all-country drubbing.  Were Sunak to offer a decent salvaging from the blood bath for his party, he might almost be forgiven.Facebook

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.comRead other articles by Binoy.

 

If The Wars Go On


I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:

(Verse 1)

Come, you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

(Verse 3)

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain


Indeed there is a system of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked.  It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency.  Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession.  It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.

These wars have their cold and hot phases.  There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game.  That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state.  Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold.  Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT.  It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.

The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult.  Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.”  It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down.  It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.

And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day.  Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.

Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.

In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear.  That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East.  That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power.  In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure.  That they can butcher and badger the world into submission.  The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.

Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of  U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war.  He is not alone in this warning.

There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line.  Russia has made it very clear they will respond.  As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines –  “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but  since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations.  They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything.  Just a wasteland.

Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.

Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous.  Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level.  Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.” 

It doesn’t get any stupider.  But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same.  Crooke writes:

The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by The New York Times and its ilk.  It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell.  Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.

Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:

Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.”  And so?  More of the same?

Ray McGovern suggest what is more likely:

Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.

Desperadoes do desperate things.  In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes.  These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:

If the World Goes On.

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of LiesRead other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

Brazil’s Flood of Austerity and Climate Catastrophe


Padre Josimo Settlement

From 28 April, heavy rains, strong winds, and widespread flooding have lashed the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, killing over 160 people and impacting 2.3 million. The waters rose and rose again, rushing through houses and fields, erasing not only homes and the memories built there but also many crops in the country’s largest rice-producing state and agricultural powerhouse, the impacts of which are likely to reverberate across the nation.

Meteorological agencies and officials predicted the events with eerie precision. A week into the flood, experts pointed to the extraordinary rainfall as the primary cause. Estael Sias, managing director of the weather forecaster MetSul, wrote that this was not ‘just an episode of extreme rain’, but ‘a meteorological event whose adjectives are all superlative, from extraordinary to exceptional’. The seemingly unending rain, she wrote, ‘is absurdly and bizarrely different from what is normal’. It will take a very long time for this region of Brazil to recover from the flood.

Within the floodwaters are several encampments and settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), about which we published a dossier last month to commemorate the movement’s 40th anniversary. The MST was born from land struggles in Rio Grande do Sul, where it retains a strong presence and has become the epicentre of the MST’s agroecological rice production. These are the same fields on which the MST grew much of the 13 tonnes of food that it donated to the Gaza Strip from October to December of last year and the more than 6,000 tonnes of food that it donated to communities in need during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we write in our dossier. Many of these fields, as well as the facilities used to process their harvests, have been damaged by the flood. Residents of MST settlements such as Apolônio de Carvalho and Integração Gaúcha Settlement have lost immense amounts of their resources.

The images in this newsletter, taken from a report by Brazil’s National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) using satellite images from the Brazil M.A.I.S. Programme, Ministry of Justice and Public Safety, show some of the MST’s lands before and after the floods – lands now inundated with flood water that has washed toxic materials into the soil. The MST has focused its relief efforts not only on its own members, but also on the people of the region who have lost everything in the face of rising waters from which they cannot escape. If you wish to assist the MST in its flood relief efforts and to rebuild the settlements, you can do so here.

Santa Maria Settlement

Last year, after a much less serious flood impacted Porto Alegre (the capital of Rio Grande do Sul), the Brazilian architect Mima Feltrin, drawing from the work of hydrology professor Carlos Tucci, warned that the state faced an imminent risk of flooding equal to or worse than the historic floods of 1941 and 1967. The analyses of scholars such as Tucci and Feltrin have repeatedly warned about the impact and looming threats of carbon emissions-driven climate change across the world as well as the deficiencies of policies put in place by reckless climate change denialist politicians.

As floodwaters rose in Rio Grande do Sul in 2023, so too did they inundate Derna (Libya), central Greece, southern China, southern Nevada (United States), and northeastern Turkey. The immediate explanation for these floods is that they are caused by carbon emissions-driven climate change, intensified by the refusal of Global North governments to contain their outsized carbon emissions. But the broader explanation is that the climate catastrophe is largely the product of reckless capitalist development, particularly in cities located within areas that are predictably dangerous to inhabit (such as lowland coastal settlements built next to savaged mangrove forests and badly managed river flow or beside forests that face long periods of dry weather). This reckless development is exacerbated by the rampant underfunding of environmental regulatory agencies and the deliberate slashing of budgets that maintain and revitalise infrastructure that is crucial to protect people from adverse climate events. With the flood in Libya, for instance, the state – already destroyed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s harsh bombardment in 2011 and pickled in confusion and corruption – neglected the crumbling dams of Derna. Much the same kind of attitude has been on display in southern Brazil for the past several decades.

Sino Settlement

The two most recent mayors of Porto Alegre, Nelson Marchezan Júnior (2017–2021) and Sebastião Melo (2021–present), as well as the governor of Rio Grande do Sul Eduardo Leite (2019–March 2022 and then January 2023–present) spent their tenures eroding the basic institutions of their administrations. Governor Leite, for instance, undermined 480 rules of his state’s environmental code as part of the anti-environmental agenda pursued by the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). Meanwhile, Mayor Marchezan Júnior ignored the need to fund flood prevention infrastructure, including the renovation of thirteen pump houses that were central to Porto Alegre’s drainage system, and his administration shut down the entire Department of Storm Drainage Systems (DEP), which had been set up in 1973 to manage drainage. Marchezan Júnior and Melo, along with their predecessor José Fortunati, each cut the number of employees in the departments that managed sewage and water systems.

People such as Leite, Marchezan Júnior, and Melo hold an attitude of disregard for the majority of the population and an attitude of the highest regard for the offshore bank accounts of the wealthy and their friends, the Western investor class. These people have been shaped by Brazilian big business, whose interests are consolidated by groups such as Instituto Liberal, set up in 1983 to further the neoliberal ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and by intellectuals of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) such as its economic ministers Roberto Campos and Hélio Beltrão. These ideas were brought into the mainstream by Brazil’s former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), whose Plan for the Reform of the State Apparatus (1995) used the idea of ‘modernisation’ to undermine state institutions and to start what Professor Elaine Rossetti Behring called a period of ‘permanent fiscal adjustment’. Cardoso, Leite, Marchezan Júnior, and Melo are Men of Austerity, proponents of a counter-revolution against humanity.

Filhos de Sepé Settlement

When the catastrophe comes, as it has in Rio Grande do Sul, these neoliberal officials are quick to blame climate change, as if it were some sort of inevitability in which they played no part. However, when it comes to the climate, these people are the first to advance the agenda of fossil fuel companies and promote ideas and policies that amount to climate change denialism. Their denialism is not rooted in science, but in class interests that prioritise big business over people and the planet. They do not have any scientific arguments to explain the climate catastrophe, since there is no scientific basis for denialism, which seeks – with complete disregard for the fate of the planet – to ensure the upward distribution of wealth.

From 1968 to 1980, the Brazilian poet Mário Quintana (1906–1994) lived in the Majestic Hotel in Porto Alegre, where he wrote beautiful poems of what he called ‘simple things’. Shortly before Quintana died, his supporters and friends built the Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana in the Majestic Hotel, which the state government purchased, restored, and transformed into a cultural centre in the 1980s. This hotel, Quintana’s home, became a haven for writers and artists to show their work. It was inundated by this year’s flood.

In 1976, from that hotel, Quintana wrote ‘A Grande Enchente’ (‘The Great Flood’), motivated by the floods of 1941 and 1967:

Cadavers of Ophelias and dead dogs
stopped momentarily at our doors,
though, ever at the mercy of the maelstrom,
they will continue along their uncertain path.

When the water reaches the highest windows
I will paint roses of fire on our yellow faces.
What does it matter what is to come?
The mad are spared all
and allow themselves everything.

Let us embark, spirit of the Gods.
Over the waters we glide.
Some say that we are merely clouds.
Others, the few, say that we are increasingly dying,
but I cannot see, down below, our dead.

And in vain I look around.
Where are you, friends,
from the very first and last days?
We must, we must, we must continue together.
And so, in one last, diluted thought,
I feel that my cry is but the gasp of the wind.Faceboo

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global SouthRead other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3


On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.


Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.
WORKERS CAPITAL
Europe’s biggest pension fund sells €10 billion in fossil fuels
Bloomberg News | May 28, 2024 | 3:50 pm Energy Europe Coal Oil & Gas

Coal-fired power plant. (Reference image by Greg Williams, Flickr).

Europe’s biggest pension fund, Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, has exited all liquid assets in oil, gas and coal worth about €10 billion ($10.8 billion), in an effort to be greener.


The last shares and bonds owned by the fund were sold in the first quarter of this year, Harmen van Wijnen, chairman of ABP’s board of trustees, said in an interview at the fund’s headquarters in Amsterdam. ABP, which had pledged to sell down a majority of the investments by early last year, no longer holds any “liquid assets” in fossil energy producers, he said.

In its latest disclosure since the 2021 commitment to cut €15 billion exposure to fossil fuels, the Dutch fund has gradually divested all stocks, bonds and investments in oil and gas futures contracts linked to fossil fuels, Van Wijnen said.

The fund has said the step is necessary after efforts to engage with fossil-fuel producers and get them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions proved ineffective.

Still, about €4.8 billion of investments linked to oil and gas remain in the fund’s portfolio as of the end of March. These include holdings in unlisted companies, private equity or hedge funds.

“There are some more infrastructure-related investments that we are still in,” Van Wijnen said.

ABP needs longer to exit these assets as they are bound by long-term contracts. The fund estimates it would take a few years before these investments are fully phased out.

ABP’s actions are part of the finance industry’s response to stricter environmental, social and governance norms, with Europe leading the way globally in creating a regulatory framework to target emissions reductions.

The Dutch fund sees a risk in investing in companies that don’t adapt to the transition toward a low-carbon economy. Firms whose activities are bad for the climate or biodiversity are “no longer suitable” for its investment strategy, the fund said in March.

“We only want to invest in companies that also have a vision and are on a pathway in the transition to a sustainable economy and companies that don’t harm climate or biodiversity,” Van Wijnen said.



With about €520 billion in assets under management, the fund manages the pensions of three million government and education sector employees in the Netherlands. ABP says returns from the sale of fossil-fuel assets have been “easy to replace.”

“Anyone who looks back about 10 years will see that investments in oil and gas producers did not perform exceptionally during that period,” ABP said in a statement.

(By Sarah Jacob and Cagan Koc)

 

Goodbye Oil and Gas: Hello Thermal Bricks


The world of energy struggles with the nearly impossible task of getting off fossil fuels. This requires thinking outside of the box, something revolutionary bustling with energy that bails us out of sluggish fossil fuels that emit too much CO2 into the atmosphere and rapidly overheats the planet. The CO2/global warming relationship, joined at the hip, must come to an end, or it’ll self-destruct everything in sight.

In the face of ultra-rapid technological developments, oil and gas production is old and dirty and slow and captures unbelievable sums of money for few people by removing the remains of dead organisms found deep underground; i.e., oil. In a strange, twisted manner, this is biological money stolen from Earth. but that’s too deep of a subject for now.

Instead, what if thermal bricks with zero CO2 content could convert electricity to 1,800°C (3,275°F) powerful enough to melt steel, no fossil fuels needed? And not only create heat for heavy industry but also store heat for days when the sun doesn’t shine. Sounds too good to be true. It’s a case that breaks that rule.

Abracadabra! Meet Electrified Thermal Solutions (“ETS”) an MIT spinoff that has designed Joule Hive, a thermal battery the size of an elevator that’s featured in a write-up in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Can Electrically Conductive Bricks Replace Fossil Fuels?“, d/d May 27, 2024, (originally from Inside Climate News).

Even more miraculous yet, ETS has perfected the technologically marvelous brick and contracted with a major industrial brick manufacturer, using ETS’s proprietary formula, to bring to market orders ranging from two tons of bricks to 2,000 tons of bricks, or more. In fact, ETS recently received its first multi-ton order for thermal bricks, no CO2 included.

A Brick that Creates Industrial-Scale Heat

ETS’s brick is a brilliant answer for the energy transition to convert electricity to high temperature heat that today is done by coal and natural gas to power heavy industry. Bring the bricks, remove the coal, turn off the natural gas. Brick technology is here to eliminate global warming’s biggest advocates; i.e., oil and gas and coal.

Significantly, and this is big: With the Joule Hive Thermal Battery, for the first-time electricity can be used to drive a gas turbine. Interpretation: The world’s 1.8 Terawatts of existing natural gas power plants could be converted to grid-scale batteries to balance intermittent renewable generation. ETS intends to transform natural gas power plants into decarbonized batteries to enable a zero-carbon grid of the future. Here’s the bottom line: One trillion watts (one Terawatt) equals all the electricity from all US power plants, now targeted by thermal bricks that will boot CO2 out of the front gate of the industrial plant.

The origin of thermal bricks came from Dan Stack and Joey Kabel, when Dan Stack, as a grad student at MIT, wondered out loud whether fire bricks like those commonly used in residential fireplaces could be used to store heat as well as create heat. Thereafter, altering the metal oxides within brick creation, wonderful things happen: (1) conduct electricity (2) generate heat (3) store heat. It’s remarkable and marketable and should become a hot new product, assuming success in the commercial market with a couple of high-profile adventurous first-time customers.

According to Stack, “There’s no exotic metals in here, there’s nothing that’ll burn out.”

Thanks to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act -IRA-, the US Energy Department awarded ETS a $5 million grant to help build the first commercial-scale demo at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio: “The project will demonstrate how the thermal battery could provide high temperature heat for a number of industrial processes including cement manufacturing, which currently relies primarily on burning coal for heat.” (Bulletin)

Massimo Toso, president and chief executive of Buzzi Unicem USA, one of the largest cement producers in the United States and an industrial partner with ETS on the Energy Department grant, praised the company’s thermal battery: “ETS’s Joule Hive Thermal Battery is the first industrial heat decarbonization solution we have identified that could potentially enable us to cost effectively and eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our heating processes.” (Ibid.)

This is a big step for decarbonization of heavy industry, which accounts for approximately one-fourth (1/4th) of direct greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. It’s believed thermal batteries (bricks) powered-up by renewable energy could reduce one-half of industry emissions. That’s a huge step in the right direction and groundbreaking for more rapid decarbonization of the economy. Indeed, if as successful as it appears, this is a giant leap forward towards getting off fossil fuels.

Another astute placement by the Biden administration was a $35 million grant to Ashland, a specialty chemical manufacturer in Wilmington, Delaware, a matching grant from the Energy Department for commercial deployment of ETS’s thermal batteries to be installed at Ashland’s ISP Chemicals Plant in Calvert City, Kentucky where large volumes of high temperature steam are needed to run its operations.

“The project would replace natural gas-fired boilers at the Calvert City plant with ETS’s thermal batteries. Air blown through the Joule Hive batteries would transfer flame-temperature heat to the boilers to generate steam. The project would reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with steam generation at the plant by nearly 70 percent, according to the Energy Department.” (Ibid.)  Ashland is currently evaluating the proposal.

This brings to the forefront the significance and key role of policymakers that focus on mitigation of global warming; it’s never been more important. Global warming is not a tongue-in-cheek make-fun-of issue. It’s already killing people and decimating life-sourcing ecosystems, rising ocean levels, and turning the global weather system inside out and upside down with unprecedented levels of ferociousness never witnessed, world’s biggest, fiercest wildfires, meanwhile, scorching heat now blankets the planet like never before: When it is hot, it’s never been so hot!

A fair question is whether Electrified Thermal Solutions would have been funded under the description of the following proposal for a new 2025 federal administration: Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for MAGA Republicans going forward: “The plan’s proposals include eviscerating existing climate programs and increasing reliance on fossil fuels. It emphatically repudiates efforts to decarbonize the economy and is a wholesale reversal of the progress made on climate policy over recent years.” (Source: ” Project 2025 Tells us What a Second Trump Term Could Mean for Climate Policy. It Isn’t Pretty“, WBUR nonprofit news org, March 27, 2024.

The light at the end of the tunnel just flickered.

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.