The life, death, and resurrection of the Nestor Makhno monument

Features, Sep 20th

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the monument has become a symbol of defiance, identity, and hope

~ Sean Patterson ~

The monument to the world-famous anarchist Nestor Makhno in Huliaipole, Ukraine, received a newly restored head for the city’s 239th birthday. Russian shelling had previously severely damaged the monument in May.

Makhno’s hometown of Huliaipole is located in southern Ukraine, roughly 100 kilometres east of Zaporizhzhia city, just inside the Ukrainian side of the current war’s frontline. The city’s pre-war population of 13,000 has collapsed to less than 2,000 since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those remaining face a daily barrage of Russian artillery strikes. The vast majority of Huliaipole has been damaged or destroyed, including several particularly painful losses in recent months. On August 23, the city’s well-known Museum of Local History burned down after a Russian missile strike.

Source: Гуляйполе.Info, Oksana Havrylko, 23 May 2024

In this context, Makhno has become a regional and even national symbol of Ukrainian defiance against Russian imperialism. An oft-controversial historical figure, Makhno is known worldwide for leading a successful peasant-anarchist insurgency during the years 1918–1921. The Makhnovist movement battled all belligerent invaders in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to establish an autonomous libertarian territory in southern Ukraine.

Given his complex background, Makhno does not easily integrate into grand historical narratives. Soviet historiography vilified Makhno as a cruel and irrational bandit, while many Ukrainians remember Makhno as a representative of Ukrainian independence and their people’s indomitable Cossack spirit. In 2013, Makhno even became the world’s first anarchist to be memorialized with a state-issued coin.

Between 2006 and 2009, Makhnofest, a grand artistic and cultural event, was held annually on Independence Day. As its organizers emphasized, “Officials may celebrate in Kyiv, but real Ukrainians come to Huliaipole.” At the festival in 2009, the Makhno monument was unveiled in the city centre. It was created by the well-respected local sculptor Vladlen Dubinin (1931–2023). A prolific artist of Ukrainian and Cossack themes, Dubinin completed the monument in three weeks, working from photos of Makhno.

Unveiling of the Makhno monument at Makhnofest, 24 August 2009. Source: Bohdan Klid

Accompanying the city centre monument was an identical twin statue installed at the former residence of Makhno’s brother, Karp. Before the war intervened, the property was being transformed into the Nestor Makhno Family Museum. While the property was also damaged in shelling, the twin statue has thus far survived.

Source: Bohdan Klid, 24 August 2024

Since 2022, the monument in the city centre has become a symbol of defiance, identity, and hope. Ukrainian soldiers frequently posed with the statue for photographs and adorned him with their flags. Fears of its destruction led locals to sandbag the monument. In May 2023, the monument was fitted with a vyshyvanka (traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt).

Makhno family property, August 2011. Source: Sean Patterson

The restored monument was initiated at the request of the local military administration, who recruited the Kyiv-based sculptor Olexander Berezovchuk. Berezovchuk worked on refashioning Makhno’s head for over a month free of charge.

The head of the Huliaipole City Military Administration, Serhii Yarmak, wrote in his birthday message to the city, “When our symbol of freedom, the monument to Nestor Makhno, was destroyed during one of the shellings, the people of Huliaipole lost hope … Now our father has been reborn, as our Huliaipole will be reborn!” In addition to the head, Makhno is now permanently clutching the blue-and-yellow national flag.

Makhno family property, 2023. Source: Serhij Zvilinski

Western anarchists may be confused and even horrified by Makhno’s integration into Ukrainian national themes. Makhno was, in fact, an unrepentant anarchist who rejected state structures and national chauvinism. In his time, he fought against the Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists (although he also made tactical alliances with both at different junctures). Nonetheless, Makhno was profoundly concerned with the free cultural expression and territorial autonomy of Ukrainians throughout his life. His movement was officially called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.

Of course, elevating Makhno to a hero of the Ukrainian state is anachronistic and runs entirely counter to his anarchism. On the other hand, Makhno is well-suited as a symbol of Ukrainian cultural resistance and anti-imperialism.

Head of the Huliaipole City Military Administration, Serhii Yarmak, with the restored Makhno monument, 11 September 2024. Source: Facebook

How Ukrainians understand their relationship to Makhno and his ideals is an ongoing process and, for Huliaipolians, deeply personal. Whatever protestations Westerners may shout from abroad, the reality is that Makhno and his statue serve as an enduring figure of Ukrainian defiance, autonomy, and freedom in the face of the Russian invasion.

Nestor Makhno (centre), Spring 1919. Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Billionaires in space

Comment, Sep 16th

Elite tourism is not ‘paving humanity’s way to the stars’, but elites’ escape from a dying planet

~ Andrew J Boyer ~

Jared Isaacman has become the first billionaire to space-walk, in a successful Space-X mission titled Polaris Dawn. The event has attracted headlines for very few reasons apart from the fact that he is an American billionaire and not a traditional astronaut. In similar fashion last year, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic completed its first commercial flight into space, with tickets costing upwards of $450,000 a seat. Then, of course, there’s Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which promises spots not only for space tourism, but also spots for living and working in space.

While some may find it inspiring that a businessman can buy their way into a cosmic joy ride, the rest of us are deflated by the feeling that even space is up for being commodified. Capitalists dismiss concepts like abolition, a moneyless society, mutual aid, and direct democracy as ludicrous and utopian, but the moment space is mentioned to a billionaire – their eyes become as sparkly as the Milky Way.

The idea of billionaires paving the way to space travel via space tourism spotlights the question, what do we consider as progress? An average justification for states and capitalism is that they allow large scale projects like space exploration, and that building rockets is impossible without command structures and a profit motive. But while this grandiose sense of progress is smugly praised and defended, poverty still runs rampant as ever, war and genocides rage on, ecological disasters sweep the globe, marginalised groups still face violence, and many people remain overworked and isolated from their communities. There’s clearly a difference in priorities.

In a sense, tourism (of any kind) has always been a privileged escape to a commodified destination, complete with an overly curated cultural experience. But the bragging rights one imagines gaining when they post their Nordic Fjord holiday photos on Instagram pale in comparison to the godlike feeling a wealthy member of the elite may receive when they gaze at planet earth from afar. Their joy isn’t to go ‘where no one has gone before’, but rather ‘where no one can afford to go’.

But such hubris falls on the cynical ears of generations concerned with Earth’s environmental destruction. With extreme heat becoming the leading cause of weather-related death, younger people have very little interest in nostalgic Apollo-style space travel, and would sooner use the cost of their theoretical space ticket to pay for housing, food, and education.

Wanderlust and the desire to travel is completely natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. Exploring space has been a dream (or at least a passing thought) for every human who has ever gazed up at the big dipper. But Jared Isaacman’s spacewalk isn’t some heroic accomplishment that will pave the way to our dreams. Instead it shows how, facing a threat to the survival of life on Earth, elites are already preparing to buy their way off-planet.

“Don’t Pray – Go Gay”: Confronting the fundamentalists in Zurich

News, Sep 17th

Activists in Switzerland storm the stage at the homophobic and anti-abortion “March for Life” event

~ from Barrikade ~

As they do every year, this September too, the fundamentalists crawled out of every hole of their contempt for humanity to Oerlikon (Zurich, Switzerland) to demonstrate against the basic human right to a safe abortion. And as every year, only a huge police presence made the demonstration possible.

In addition to the inhumane slogans against abortion, the organisers and participants of the “March for Life” openly and violently incite against queer people. They portray the realities of queer people’s lives as a threat to their conservative constructs such as fatherland, Christianity and traditional family. And when they openly take their hate speech to the streets, protected and supported by cops, then the threat becomes real, because we — the faggots, transsexuals and tomboys — will not allow our self-determination and freedom to be taken away from us.

Nevertheless, the followers of fundamentalist Christianity try again every year. The emphasis in the previous sentence should be on the word “try” — because anyone who marches through Zurich with such inhumane content can be sure of one thing: where the fundamentalists are, resistance is not far away.

As part of this resistance, activists sneaked into the fundamentalist demonstration to storm the stage with a banner and make a statement against their right-wing agitation. This action is one of many acts of resistance to show that the fundamentalists and their ideas are not welcome in Zurich or anywhere else.

Our resistance is stronger than their demonstration, their cops and their Christianity. Whether we want children or not is up to u

 

Bulgaria’s LGBTQ+ community fights for its existence

News, Sep 23rd

The legislature has rushed through a law that mirrors Russia’s notorious “gay propaganda” legislation

~ from You Are Not (A)lone ~

In the heart of Sofia, under a sky that couldn’t decide between sun and rain, a rainbow flag fluttered defiantly. It was the penultimate day of what had become a grueling week-long protest against a draconian new law that threatened to silence Bulgaria’s LGBTQ+ community. The air was thick with tension, the kind that precedes a storm – or a revolution.

“We are here, we are queer, they can’t make us disappear!” The chant rose from a sea of faces, some painted in vibrant hues, others etched with determination. Among them was Stefi, her eyes scanning the perimeter nervously. Just hours earlier, she had received a death threat – one of many that had been hurled at the protesters like poisoned darts.

“I’ve been on the streets for five days now,” Stefi confided, her voice barely audible above the din of the protest. “We’ve been spat on, cursed at, had bottles thrown at us. One of my friends was kicked in the stomach by a Nazi provocateur.” She paused, her gaze distant. “But we keep singing, we keep shouting. It’s what we have to do.”

The protest was a last-ditch effort to challenge a law that mirrors Russia’s notorious “gay propaganda” legislation – a law that the European Union has twice declared unconstitutional. Yet, in a chilling echo of authoritarianism, the Bulgarian parliament had rushed it through, passing it in two readings within a single day, silencing the voices of those it would most affect.

As night fell, the shadows seemed to come alive. A group of 30 neo-Nazis materialized, circling the protesters like wolves. The police, conspicuous in their absence throughout the week, remained passive bystanders to the unfolding drama.

“The municipality can’t have two protests at the same place,” explained Stefan, another protester, his voice tinged with bitter irony. “They just wanted to put us at risk, to show us how pathetic and meaningless we are”.

The next day, the final day of the protest, brought a surreal twist. Another group, ostensibly protesting road violence, had been granted permission to occupy the same space. The LGBTQ+ protesters found themselves being asked to tone down their music, to make themselves smaller, less visible.

In a moment of raw vulnerability, one protester attempted to extend an olive branch, asking if they could show support for the other group’s cause. The response was swift and cruel – they were asked to leave, escorted away by the same police who had turned a blind eye to the violence against them all week.

This series of events unfolded against the backdrop of an open letter penned by the Solidarity Circle “You Are Not (A)lone”, a group uniting survivors of various forms of violence and discrimination. The letter, addressed to the Bulgarian public, laid bare the insidious nature of the new legislation and the broader anti-gender movement sweeping across Europe.

“What we are witnessing,” the letter states, “is a clear attempt to advance the covert agenda of the global populist movement against democracy, human rights, and prevention of social abuse of power and control”. The letter goes on to debunk the deceptive claims used to justify the legislation, exposing them as part of a larger strategy to mislead the public and obstruct progress in fighting discrimination and violence.

As the sun set on the final day of the protest, the air heavy with unrealized hopes, one couldn’t help but be reminded of James Baldwin’s prescient words: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist”.

In Bulgaria, it seems, the right to exist is still something the LGBTQ+ community must fight for, one rainbow flag at a time.

But the story doesn’t end here. As we go to press, reports are emerging of continued harassment, of protesters being recognised and targeted on social media. The urgency of their situation cannot be overstated.

“Sharing is caring”, one protester told me, her eyes shining with a mixture of fear and determination. “We need the world to know what’s happening here. We need help”.

As the international community turns its gaze to this corner of Eastern Europe, one question looms large: Will the arc of Bulgaria’s moral universe bend towards justice, or will the shadows of intolerance extinguish the rainbow’s vibrant hues?

The answer, it seems, lies not just in the halls of power in Sofia, but in the hearts and minds of people around the world who believe in the fundamental right of all humans to live, love, and exist freely.

For now, in the streets of Sofia, a chant continues to echo: “We’re here, we’re queer, they can’t make us disappear”.

 

Trial begins in Italy student murder case that opened eyes to femicide


By AFP

September 23, 2024


People attend the funeral of Giulia Cecchettin, a university student killed by her ex-boyfriend, on December 5, 2023 in Padova - Copyright AFP Rabih DAHER
Alexandria SAGE

A major femicide trial opens in Italy Monday, after the brutal murder of a university student by her ex-boyfriend that triggered outrage and national soul-searching over the roots of male violence against women.

The grisly stabbing in November of Giulia Cecchettin, 22, a biomedical engineering student at the University of Padua, cast a grim spotlight on femicide in Italy, where the vast majority of victims are killed at the hands of their current or former partners.

The accused, Filippo Turetta, 22, has confessed before a judge to the murder of Cecchettin.

Turetta, who risks life in prison, is not expected to appear in the Venice courtroom on Monday.

According to official statistics, a woman is killed every three days in Italy, a majority-Catholic country where traditional gender roles still hold sway and where sexist behaviour by men is often downplayed.

Cecchettin, who was due to graduate just days after her death, was reported missing on November 11 after accompanying Turetta to a mall and never returning home.

After video cameras near Cecchettin’s home revealed images of Turetta attacking her violently before fleeing with her in his car, police launched a week-long manhunt.

Her body was found on November 18 in a gully near Lake Barcis, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) north of Venice. Her head and neck were punctured with over 70 stab wounds, according to media reports citing the autopsy.

Turetta was arrested a day later on the side of the road near Leipzig, Germany after his car ran out of petrol.

Marking what activists hoped would be a turning point, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Italian cities on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, calling for cultural change.

Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, has denounced the “patriarchy” and “rape culture” prevalent in Italian society.

“Rape culture is what legitimises every behaviour that goes to harm the figure of the woman, starting with the things that sometimes are not even given importance such as control, possessiveness, catcalling,” Elena Cecchettin wrote in Il Corriere della Sera daily after her sister’s death.

At Cecchettin’s funeral in Padua, her father Gino called for his daughter’s death to be a “turning point to end the terrible scourge of violence against women”, imploring men to “challenge the culture that tends to minimise violence by men who appear normal”.

– ‘I am guilty’ –


The trial is expected to be relatively brief, with Turetta having waived his right to a preliminary hearing after his confession.

Turetta faces charges including voluntary manslaughter aggravated by premeditation and kidnapping, and others related to stalking and hiding Cecchettin’s body.

Excerpts of Turetta’s questioning before a judge on December 1 were broadcast last week on the Channel 4’s “Quarto Grado” in which he is seen admitting “I am responsible, I am guilty. I am responsible for these acts, yes”.

In a quiet voice, Turetta explains how Cecchettin rejected his offer of a gift of a stuffed animal, telling him she wanted to break off their relationship and prompting an argument in the car, which she fled.

Turetta describes how he grabbed a knife and stabbed her in the arm, before dragging her back in the car, from which she later escaped.

“I gave her, I don’t know, about 10, 12, 13, I don’t know, several blows with the knife,” Turetta says in the video.

According to the interior ministry, 120 women were murdered in Italy last year, of whom 97 were killed by family members or current or former partners.

Comparisons with other European countries are difficult due to inconsistent data, but the issue has recently also risen to the forefront in various European countries, especially France.

Following Cecchettin’s death, Italy’s parliament adopted a package of bills to strengthen existing laws to protect women, but activists say cultural change requires much more, starting with compulsory education on the topic in schools.

A July 2021 report from the government’s department of gender equality found that “in some regions of Italy up to 50 percent of men consider violence in relationships to be acceptable.”

Global Economy

The Battle Over U.S. Inflation and Its Real Cause


For all the focus on inflation ahead of the November U.S. presidential election, the debasement of the U.S. currency is the root of the U.S. cost of living crisis. And that is a bipartisan issue.

September 23, 2024
By Alexei Bayer

THE GLOBALIST




Mark my words: The upcoming U.S. presidential election will likely be won or lost on the issue of inflation.

Blame game under way

Given that, it is unsurprising that a big blame game is under way among Democrats and Republicans.

Of course, the Republicans point out that the cost of food and lodging, which is what most voters care about daily, has gone up by at least 30% over the past three years. They say it’s Joe Biden’s fault.

For their part, the Democrats say that inflation has been a global phenomenon. Indeed, inflationary pressures got out of control in every country of the world during the recovery from the Covid 19 pandemic and after Russia invaded Ukraine.

In any case, they argue, inflation has declined – and the U.S. Federal Reserve is poised to start cutting interest rates.

The true cause of the cost-of-living crisis

However, there is one factor neither party addresses: The debasement of the U.S. currency. It is the true cause of the current U.S. cost of living crisis.

Currency debasement was common when money consisted of gold and silver coins. When monarchs needed to raise funds, they resorted to reducing the amount of the precious metal in their coins. You would still get the same gold sovereign from the mint, but it would contain 20% less gold.

The dangerous temptations of fiat money

Later on, when fiat money – i.e., paper currency not backed by any tangible asset – came about, the idea was that money would be issued strictly in proportion to economic growth.

Thus, if the economy produced 5% more goods and services in a given year, it was assumed that the monetary base would be expanded by the same 5%.

However, fiat money was also an open invitation to abuse. If a government wanted to give tax cuts to voters, for example, or import oodles of cheap Chinese consumer goods, or finance a tech revolution, it could just print more money.

Then, once you ran into a financial crisis because plenty of money encouraged dangerous speculation and created financial bubbles – just turn on the printing press and drown the system in even more money.

No free lunch for the U.S. forever

Other countries play this game at their peril – because eventually foreigners will refuse to accept their currencies or give them loans. This is what regularly happens to Argentina, Brazil and other profligate countries.

But the United States has the almighty dollar, which is the international reserve currency and the lynchpin of the global financial system.

And so it went. Ronald Reagan, while railing against “tax and spend Democrats,” spent lavishly on the military, while his Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan obligingly opened the monetary spigot.

When Reagan assumed office in January 1981, U.S. government debt amounted to around 30% of GDP. When he left, it was 50%.

Monetary vodka for U.S. financial markets

More important, Reagan and Greenspan created a dangerous pattern: The government would prime the fiscal pump and the Fed would loosen monetary policy to accommodate extra government spending.

William McChesney Martin, who had been the Fed president during the age of American prosperity from 1951 to 1960, famously said that the Fed’s job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” In other words, the Fed was supposed to raise interest rates to prevent economic overheating and financial excesses.

Starting with Greenspan, the Fed has been plying financial markets with monetary vodka.

The big-spending Bushes

During his one term in the Oval Office, George Bush, Sr. – another Republican – boosted U.S. debt to 62% of GDP.

After him, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was able to reduce U.S. debt to 54% by the start of the new century. But with the arrival of George W. Bush the true monetary orgy began. It has not stopped since.

Having implemented a massive tax cut at the start of his administration, Bush Jr. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq without bothering to raise money for his military adventures. He promptly ran up U.S. debt back to where his father had left off.

Worse, the plethora of cheap money created a real estate bubble which blew up in 2008, the last year of Bush Jr.’s presidency, triggering a disastrous financial crisis and a global economic downturn.

Barack Obama was faced with the possibility of another economic Depression, which was avoided when he and Ben Bernanke, his Fed president, started, to use Bernanke’s phrase, to drop money out of helicopters. They did right the economic ship but raised U.S. public debt to 100% of GDP.

Crossing the 100% threshold

By the time Donald Trump was elected, the cooperation of the profligate government with the profligate Fed was well established. The cost of Trump’s tax cut, estimated at $1.7 trillion, pushed the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio to 105% by the end of 2018.

Curiously, Trump followed directly in Bush’s policy footsteps. He slashed government revenues with a tax cut at the start of his presidency and ran into a major crisis at the end, when his administration mismanaged the Covid 19 pandemic.

By the time Joe Biden alleviated the resulting economic crisis, U.S. debt amounted to 125% of GDP.

A study by the Center for American Progress found that without the tax cuts by Bush and Trump, the U.S. public debt ratio would have continued to fall as it did under the Clinton administration.

And even though, due to pressing economic circumstances, money had to be printed lavishly under the Obama and Biden administrations, it was largely the response to the mess their Republican predecessors had left them.

Beyond partisan angles

The result of all this is that the U.S. currency has become debased. The old compliment — “you look like a million dollars” — now sounds more like an insult.

Successive U.S. administrations and Fed presidents have turned the dollar into a commodity. Its value depends on a supply-demand relationship, which means that the more dollars are printed, the less valuable they become.

How the U.S. is like Russia and Saudi Arabia

This makes the United States a massive producer of the commodity called the dollar – in much the same way that Saudi Arabia or Russia pump oil out of the ground.

But most oil producers also have corrupt governments and have huge wealth disparities — grotesquely enriching some, while everyone else is pauperized.

Given the fact that the U.S. commodity is money, the consequences of this commodity economy are clear for all to see. Those who are active in financial markets — either as finance professionals or those who monetize their businesses in the stock market — have become the superrich, while much of the rest of the country is having trouble making ends meet.

A different kind of inflation

The United States had high inflation in the 1970s, but it was a different kind of inflation. Prices went up and triggered wage increases in their wake, even though there was no offsetting increase in productivity. More money was chasing the same quantity of goods and services, creating a vicious cycle.

Inflation which results from the debasement of currency is different. Those lucky enough to find themselves near the financial trough can make money at will.

Only the top benefits

They are the beneficiaries of the debasement process. Even though prices of yachts, vineyards, private planes, Maseratis, Swiss watches and works of art, along with tuition at top-flight colleges and universities and other luxury goods, are rising much faster than the overall inflation level, they have been more than compensated by their rising wealth.

Reaganomics postulated a “trickle-down” effect for wealth creation. Under this concept, more money for the rich would translate into higher incomes for everyone else.

The reality has been quite different. What has trickled down is the rising cost of living for ordinary consumers who are being paid with debased dollars.

Conclusion

Donald Trump has no plans to change this. He will actually exacerbate the situation.

But the Democrats will also have trouble solving the cost of living crisis – unless they are able to reverse the nearly half-century of fiscal and monetary profligacy and restore the trust in paper currency.

Author    

Alexei Bayer
Alexei Bayer is a Senior Editor at The Globalist, based in New York. [United States]

A Strategic Intervention Paper (SIP) from the Global Ideas Center


You may quote from this text, provided you mention the name of the author and reference it as a new Strategic Intervention Paper (SIP) published by the Global Ideas Center in Berlin on The Globalist.

Essay

Sci-Fi’s Lessons in Neutrality

By Suspending Reality, We Can Better See What Is Possible

Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher. Courtesy of Netflix.

TECHNICALLY THIS IS FANTASY A SUB GENRE OF SCI FI


By Matías Graffigna | September 23, 2024


Can we, and should we, ever really be neutral? In a new series, Zócalo explores the idea of neutrality—in politics, sports, gender, journalism, international law, and more. In this essay, philosopher Matías Graffigna explains how science fiction and fantasy can help us contemplate a wider range of possibilities.

“I just wanted to be honest. I don’t want to get mixed up in this conflict. I want to remain neutral,” Geralt of Rivia tells his good friend Yarpen, a dwarf. “It’s impossible!” yells Yarpen in response. “It’s impossible to remain neutral, don’t you understand that? No, you don’t understand anything.”

Geralt, the monster-hunting protagonist in The Witcher fantasy series by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, believes that it’s better to abstain from conflict than to participate in events without fully understanding their consequences. But Yarpen has chosen to take a side and fight against the rebel Scoia’tael forces, sees good and evil, just cause and oppression. Thus, he finds Geralt’s refusal to fight injustice unacceptable, indifferent, and cowardly: “Get out of my sight with your arrogant neutrality,” he tells Geralt.

Their heated exchange helps us to think of neutrality as an attitude one can adopt. This attitude consists of an initial approach to any given conflict, in which you abstain from choosing any one side. Whether this choice arises from careful consideration or indifference is something distinct from neutrality itself.

When it comes to interesting and responsible ways of being neutral, fiction, particularly the sci-fi and fantasy kind, can help us contemplate a wider, more exciting range of possibilities than reality.

The reason for this is quite simple: not everything that is possible is actual. But if we think we know what is possible based only on what is actual, we are closing ourselves off to an honest examination.
Being neutral is a conscious attempt at canceling prejudices, at not judging before we know enough to do so. It is an honest attempt at submerging ourselves in the fictional world and its whole range of sensations.

When we pick up a sci-fi or fantasy novel with this “let’s see” attitude, we are practicing the rather technical concept of “neutrality modification.” The term was coined by philosopher Edmund Husserl, who claimed that the exercise could open a realm of investigation into the very nature of our consciousness, experience, and perception. Say we’re observing an orange on a counter. Our experience amounts to a visual perception of an existing object. In perception, we commit to the existence of the perceived object. But if we operate a neutrality modification upon that act of perception, Husserl would say, we have as a result “a neutral orange”: an orange that neither exists nor ceases to exist. An orange that is indifferent to the question of existence.

By reading so-called fantastical literature with the attitude of neutrality modification, we allow ourselves to embark on an exploration of the possibility realm: If we are on Mars, we resist the thought that tells us, “That’s impossible!” If we are in Narnia, we ignore the idea, “There’s no such thing as magic!” By temporarily suspending our beliefs about what is real and accepting the world the author offers, we see how possible we find it. We see how possible it feels to us.

Judging what is possible is a hard exercise, one that might engage physicists and logicians. But we can all consider and analyze what could be when it comes to thinking about human nature, right and wrong, forms of political organization, or relating to one another. We can, in other words, speculate. Speculation might be the summit of the human being’s ability to reason abstractly. But it is also an activity that profits from what philosophers like to call intuition, “direct contact” with the thing we are thinking about. In the same way that a memory can give us back the feeling we once had, albeit not so intensely, the human faculty of fantasy allows us to have a certain experience of that which is not (yet?) actual.

The fantasy and science fiction genres, also known as “speculative fiction,” are authored by professional speculators who spend their lives asking “What if…?” Their kind of fiction builds a possible world full of intuitions. These stories trigger in us the feeling of something we have never really felt. They allow us to better grasp what we mean when we say some things might truly be different from how they actually are. They help us reconsider why we think that certain other things should be deemed impossible.

The worlds of fantasy and science fiction are filled with the exploration of possibilities. They invite us to experience the extent of such possibilities not just rationally but affectively, intuitively, presently.

If you feel like traveling into the realm of the possible, do so with a neutral attitude. Forget that the world in which you live exists and is just how it is. Being neutral is a conscious attempt at canceling prejudices, at not judging before we know enough to do so. It is an honest attempt at submerging ourselves in the fictional world and its whole range of sensations. Neutralize your prior beliefs and let the author and their ideas penetrate you. Dive into their worlds and their stories. Live through the characters and pay attention to how these inhabitants of other (perhaps) possible worlds, think, feel, and act.

It does not matter if the possible will one day become actual. It does not matter if you think you know better. Be neutral. Be open to what is offered and allow yourself to live in a different, possible world. Be neutral, and you might be changed in ways you would not have thought possible.


Matías Graffignais a writer and philosopher who researches Husserlian phenomenology and science fiction.

PRIMARY EDITOR: Jackie Mansky | SECONDARY EDITOR: Sarah Rothbard

Zócalo

Muslim mayor in Michigan endorses Trump for US president, creating challenge for Democrats

A Muslim mayor in Michigan has endorsed Donald Trump for president, possibly creating more difficulty for the Democrats to win the critical swing state.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO WASTE YOUR VOTE IN PROTEST 

VOTE GREEN


Brooke Anderson
Washington, DC
23 September, 2024

GAWD HE'S OLD, LOOK AT THE TURKEY NECK HE HAS


A Muslim mayor in the state of Michigan has endorsed Donald Trump for president, possibly creating more difficulty for the Democrats to win the critical swing state in November.

Amer Ghalib, a Yemeni immigrant who made headlines three years ago when he became the first Muslim and Arab mayor of a Muslim-majority-run US city, Hamtramck in southeastern Michigan, had reportedly been courted in recent weeks by Trump to endorse him, a decision he finally made on Sunday.

"He knew a lot about me before the meeting," Ghalib told The Detroit News.

"We talked about various topics including the debates, the polls updates, the statistics of votes in Michigan and Wayne County, the Arab American concerns and the Yemeni Americans in particular. We also talked about the situation in Yemen," the mayor added.

This new endorsement has created yet another challenge for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who has been trying to make inroads with Arab and Muslim voters as she treads carefully on the issue of Israel's war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in the dense enclave since last October.

The war, which is nearing its one-year mark with no end in sight, has become a major focus of the 2024 US presidential election, with the US as the Israel's main weapons supplier that has increased support for its ally over the last year—a position that has fractured the Democratic Party between progressives and the establishment.

Recent reports show Harris in a dead heat with Green Party candidate Jill Stein among Muslim voters. A late August survey of Muslim voters conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 29.4 percent of US Muslim voters plan to vote for Harris, while 29.1 percent plan to vote for Stein. This is followed by 11.2 percent planning to vote for Trump, with the remainder preferring other candidates.

Overall, the two main party candidates are nearly tied in Michigan, with Harris showing a slight lead in most of the state's polls, though falling within the margin of error.

Beyond his recent public statements, it's unclear why Ghalib decided to endorse Trump.

However, given Hamtramck's recent positions in culture war debates relating to gender identity and gay rights, which made national headlines when the city banned the pride flag on public property last year, it's possible that Trump was able to appeal to the mayor's or the city's social conservatism.

Trump, who hadn't had much in the way of rallies scheduled at the end of the week, appeared to have two new Michigan events scheduled by the end of the day on Sunday.

Why 'Comrade Kamala' memes are spreading among Latino exiles

Ione Wells and Jessica Cruz
BBC News


In Latino exile communities across the country, a question is being asked: is Kamala Harris really a communist?

The vice-president has been the subject of numerous misleading claims that she is a socialist or communist since becoming the Democratic candidate for president, according to the US’s largest Spanish-language fact-checker Factchequeado.

Experts say these claims capitalise on "genuine fears" held by some voters who fled repression in countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

In one viral video, Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz appear to pose for a selfie in front of a sign for Revolutionary Communists of America, a far-left group.

The video was fake. The background had been doctored by a group of Donald Trump’s supporters known as the Dilley Meme Team.

Their original post had more than 420,000 views, but it was shared by many Spanish accounts - and repeated offline.

“It’s everywhere, this doubt: ‘Is this person a communist?’” Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a cultural context strategist from south Florida, told the BBC.

She was listening to the Spanish-language radio station La Nueva Poderosa in Miami when she heard the hosts discussing the false meme.

“Did you see them standing in front of that picture? They have no shame in who they are,” the hosts said.

She contacted the station to point out it was a fake video. The hosts later said on air that they wanted to clarify the story was “not true” but that “doesn’t take away from the reality that Kamala is a Marxist”.

'Genuine fears' being weaponised


There are nearly 36.2 million eligible Latino voters in America, about 14.7% of the US electorate, and many live in key swing states like Nevada and Arizona, which makes them a coveted demographic for both campaigns.

They are by no means a homogeneous voting demographic, but historically, Latinos have tended to favour the Democrats. In 2020, 44% voted for Joe Biden, with only 16% voting for Trump. But polls show Republicans have gained ground this election cycle, with many factors cited including the economy, immigration, and abortion rights.

And for some immigrants, concerns about America today reflect their past experiences in their home countries.

Political messages warning about “socialism” or “communism” have been particularly prevalent in communities with large Cuban and Venezuelan populations, like in south Florida, experts noted.

These expats are especially vulnerable to misinformation about communism because of the trauma they experienced fleeing repression, said Samantha Barrios, a Venezuelan-American based in Miami, Florida, who votes Democrat.

She accused right-leaning Spanish media of using these terms to “scare Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans” because of “the main reason that we left our countries, trying to leave these regimes”.

For some, their criticism of the Democrats is grounded in opinions that the US government has not provided a tough enough response to political repression in Cuba or Venezuela.

But Ms Barrio is wary of the way these legitimate concerns are being weaponised through “false claims” that Kamala Harris herself is a communist.

Ms Pérez-Verdía agrees, but she also criticised the Democrat campaign for not doing enough to address their concerns.

“Don’t laugh off people’s fears. It’s really disrespectful. People have genuine fears, they came to the United States, they left everything behind. If they have doubts you should address their doubts.”

Debate fuels 'communist' claims

X/AI-generated image


Not all claims exclusively target Latinos, said the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which monitors more than 1,300 WhatsApp groups and more than 200 Telegram channels in Spanish and Portuguese.

And notable right-wing and pro-Trump actors and influencers have pushed a “fear of socialism” since 2020, the organisation found.

But while Joe Biden was accused of being a communist when he ran for president, Factchequeado’s founder, Laura Zommer, said their fact checkers had “never” seen this volume of AI and doctored images before.

Some of this misinformation has been spread by Trump himself, or his high-profile supporters.

Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, posted a faked image of Kamala Harris in a red uniform emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle, captioned “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”

It had more than 83.9 million views. A reverse image search suggests this was the earliest posting of the image on X.

Donald Trump shared an AI image of Harris addressing a communist crowd that had at least 81.5 million views on X, but it was not the first posting of this image.

Posts linking Harris to communism really took off online after the presidential debate, according a report by the DDIA prepared for the BBC.

During the debate, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris and her father a “Marxist” and suggested she would turn the US into “Venezuela on steroids” through her immigration policies.

After the debate, “Marxista” trended on social media and searches for "Marxist" on Google in the US jumped 1000% in 17 hours.

Factchequeado said the most searched question in Spanish after the debate was: "Who is Kamala Harris’s father?"
X
BBC Verify traced the membership card image to a website which allows people to make fake communist party documents

The DDIA said two claims especially gained traction in the week after the presidential debate. In one, a fabricated document falsely claiming Kamala Harris is a member of the Russian communist party went viral, according to Meta’s own metrics. Another claim, that Harris is “Kamarada [Comrade] Kamala”, arose from a Trump speech in which he portrays her as a “communist comrade”.

BBC Verify traced the membership card image to a website which allows people to make fake communist party documents.

The membership number, stamp and other details on the card were identical to a template on the site for making a party membership card.

Posts sharing the fake image, which was first shared in August, have been viewed more than half a million times.

'We'll slide into communism'

Republicans have been gaining ground with Latino voters in recent years

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, nor does it claim to support communist regimes. But some high-profile members like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have described their political views as “democratic socialist”.

When she was a California senator, Harris co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, which would have brought a single-payer health care system to the US. She has since said she no longer supports a single-payer health-care system, which would have abolished private insurers.

She has never advocated for communist policies, such as the abolition or seizure of private property.

Kamala Harris’s plan to crackdown on “price gouging” at supermarkets has been cited in Spanish social media posts as “communist”. Mr Musk claimed it would mean “empty shelves, just like in Venezuela”.

Her proposal, which would involve asking the trade commission to investigate price spikes far above the increase in the cost of production, is a far cry from the widespread price controls seen in Cuba and Venezuela that were in part blamed for severe food shortages.

But for some voters who fled those countries, their fear lies in anything they feel remotely resembles policies from the countries they came from.

Duke Machado, who runs a Latino Republican Facebook page from Texas called Latino Strikeforce, said he fears that if the Democrats win, the country would be on a slippery slope to communism.

“If we’re not careful, we’ll slide into Cuba and Venezuela. Their ultimate goal is to destroy capitalism."

When asked if it was responsible to share fears that the Democrats could turn the US into a communist country with his followers, including Latino exiles who had fled repression, he said: “It’s not irresponsible at all. I see it as a duty.”

With additional reporting by Kayleen Devlin from BBC Verify


More on the US election
SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?



North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Cambodia Pulls Out of Economic Agreement With Vietnam and Laos

Phnom Penh’s withdrawal from the CLV Triangle Development Area pact marks a potentially important shift in Cambodia-Vietnam relations

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By Sebastian Strangio
September 23, 2024

Credit: ID 49829279 | Cambodia Vietnam © Hans Slegers | Dreamstime.com

Cambodia has withdrawn from a two-decade-old regional economic development agreement with Vietnam and Laos, in a rare concession to opponents who claimed the pact had led to an erosion of Cambodian sovereignty.

On Friday, Prime Minister Hun Manet posted a statement to his Facebook page in which he said that his government had decided to pull out of the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam (CLV) Triangle Development Area, and had notified Vietnam and Laos of its decision.

While hailing the agreement’s “many achievements,” he accused “extremists” of using the deal as “a political weapon” to attack the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) by alleging it had led to a loss of land and sovereignty to Vietnam.

“Taking into account people’s concerns about territory… we have decided that Cambodia is ending its participation in the CLV-DTA from September 20, 2024, onwards,” Manet wrote, according to a translation from the AFP news agency. He also cited the “political necessity to disarm the extremists and prevent them from using the CLV-DTA to deceive the Cambodian people further.”

The CLV agreement, which was signed in 1999 and entered into force in 2004, was designed to develop 13 once-remote border provinces, including five in Vietnam, four in Cambodia, and four in Laos.

In a letter to its counterparts in Hanoi and Vientiane, the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “the cooperation mandate has reached its objectives.” Accordingly, “each country is fully capable of continuing and ensuring the development of its respective nation independently.”

Concerns about the CLV agreement began circulating on Cambodian social media back in July, with critics claiming that the agreement had led Cambodia to cede territory and control of natural resources in its four northeastern provinces. On August 11, several thousand Cambodians took part in protests against the CLV agreement in South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

When a similar protest was announced for August 18 in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, the government treated it as an existential threat. It deployed a heavy police presence around the country, and set up barricades to prevent people from traveling to the capital to attend the protest. The authorities also arrested at least 94 people in connection with the planned protest, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

The reaction spoke to the potency of the Vietnamese border as a mobilizing issue for the CPP’s opponents. As I noted last month, concerns about Vietnam – particularly, fears of encroachments into Cambodian territory and the effect of unrestricted Vietnamese immigration into border areas – have been an integral part of Cambodian nationalism since its gestation in the first half of the twentieth century. The issue has subsequently been one of the most potent lines of attack for opponents of the CPP, which was installed in power by Vietnam after its overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, and has since retained close relations with Vietnam.

However, the fact that the government has swung from a defensive crackdown, in which the virtues of the CLV agreement were trumpeted by government-aligned media and chanted by schoolchildren, to a surprise concession to its critics, is a sign that a significant shift in Cambodia-Vietnam relations is underway.

This was already evident with regard to the China-backed Funan Techo Canal. The project, which broke ground in early August, will connect the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand, reducing Cambodia’s reliance on Vietnamese ports.

The project is set to have potentially deleterious impacts on Vietnam’s agriculturally productive Mekong Delta region, to say nothing of potential security implications. But Hun Manet’s administration has done little to assuage Vietnamese fears about the Funan Techo project, and refused to share information about its impacts.

Instead, Manet has described the project that will help Cambodia “breathe through our own nose” by reducing its economic reliance on Vietnam, depicted the completion of the project as a totem of nationalist pride, and stated that Cambodia does not need any other nation’s permission. In so doing, it has used rhetoric with a subtle, though unmistakable and historically familiar, anti-Vietnamese valence.

The fact that the government would now take the rare step of acceding to its opponents’ demands to withdraw from the CLV agreement reflects not just its perennial concern about being seen as a puppet of Hanoi. It also points to a possible reversion to the historical mean in terms of Cambodian relations with Vietnam, as China has come to eclipse Vietnam’s historically prominent position in the country.

The friendship between the CPP and its counterpart in Hanoi is historically anomalous. The relationship was forged in the 1980s – an era of hostility between China and the Soviet Union, then the patron of both Vietnam and its client state in Phnom Penh. More than four decades later, the geopolitical winds have changed: China is perhaps now the most dominant economic and political influence in Cambodia, giving the CPP the means of distancing itself from Vietnam and defusing long-standing claims that it dances to Hanoi’s tune. At the same time, many of the personal connections that undergirded the relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia have weakened as the older generation of officials has passed on.

Relations between Vietnam and Cambodia are not about to collapse into open acrimony; there are still enough mutual interests to keep things on an even keel. But it is increasingly evident that the kinship between Hanoi and Phnom Penh can no longer be taken for granted.