Opinion

Carrying the torch: How a Ukrainian Baptist convention upholds a legacy of activism

September 28, 2024
Eddie Priymak

Eddie Priymak
Journalist & Researcher

At the height of the Cold War, the Ukrainian diaspora played an active role in influencing public opinion regarding the Soviet Union. What is seldom mentioned is the role that Ukrainian evangelicals played in this period. One Ukrainian Baptist convention has not forgotten its history and continues the previous generations’ legacy today.

The Seventh World Congress of the International Council of Christian Churches gathered in Cape May, New Jersey from August 14 to 24, 1968. Arriving at the event were 3,000 delegates from 85 countries. Although a fundamentalist group, this gathering attracted international attention. The delegates were greeted by telegrams from President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Governor of New Jersey Richard Hughes, and even the President of the Republic of China.No, Ukraine’s president hasn’t banned the Orthodox Church
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Olexa Harbuziuk, the president of the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention in the US (UEBC), was the speaker on August 22. Standing at the podium, Harbuziuk denounced the Soviet government, calling it an ‘evil tyranny’ and ‘imperialist’. He emphasised that it is because of the communist system that the Ukrainian people and religious freedom are being suppressed. Yet, it is the suppressed that are the strongest in the dystopian state, “those with more courage and deeper convictions are laying their lives for the truth and openly oppose godless communism”.

Following the speech, a resolution was drafted criticising the Soviet government, calling for worldwide isolation of the USSR and its expulsion from the United Nations. The statement concluded by identifying with the persecuted and supporting the “urgent appeal of the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention to the entire Christian world to pray for and to work for the liberation of all peoples from Communist tyranny”. It was through the UEBC that the entire world was able to hear of the suffering in the USSR.

Within the Ukrainian Baptist diaspora, Harbuziuk was not the only one to speak about the horrid religious circumstances in the USSR. This was a common thread of many Ukrainian-American evangelical leaders. Megaphoning the suffering of the oppressed was part of their religious calling. Yet, this legacy did not die with that generation. In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Baptist leaders are once again speaking out on behalf of Ukrainian suffering.

Continuing this tradition of advocacy, Roman Kapran, the president of the Ukrainian Baptist Convention in the US (UEBC), emphasises the active role their churches have played from the outset.

“Our churches have been very active from the beginning,” states Kapran. He notes that at the start of the war, a prayer service was held at the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. Hundreds attended, including church leaders from all backgrounds, Protestant, Greek Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox. He continued by stating that other Ukrainian Baptist churches around the US, “came with Ukrainian flags and held open-air prayers” in their states.

In addition to prayer services, the convention leaders penned a public letter denouncing Russia’s aggression. Although the Ukrainian Baptist Convention is small—roughly 20 affiliated churches —their actions reflect a continuation of the mission established by their predecessors: to stand up for Ukraine and support those in need. These actions not only show the UEBC’s commitment to advocacy but also serve as a direct link to the foundational mission established by its early leaders over seventy years ago.
Lived experience

The UEBC was originally founded in 1946 by six ministers of Polish and Ukrainian heritage. Their goal was to reach the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States and to support persecuted Christians in Ukraine.

After WWII, a new wave of immigrants arrived from Ukraine to the United States. They carried with them the lived experience of Holodomor, Soviet purges, and the horrors of World War II. Many of these third-wave immigrants were Ukrainian nationalists who had fought for an independent Ukraine during the war, only to be suppressed by both the Nazis and the Soviets.

Expecting a large group of immigrants after the war, the convention creators desired to evangelise and support them materially.

The secondary mission of evangelicals was to speak about the suffering of the Christians in their former homeland. During the Soviet era, evangelical churches were viewed with suspicion by Russian authorities. They saw them as foreign imports lacking patriotic fervor. This suspicion led to severe persecution, with evangelicals often labeled as spies and revolutionaries. The diaspora did not forget them. Instead, they amplified the oppressed voices using radio broadcasting and public advocacy.

Radio broadcasting was the main method used by Christians to minister to individuals in oppressive regimes. As historian Lauren Frances Turek notes in her book To Bring the Good News to All Nations, starting in the 1970s, evangelicals began mastering their use of technology “to fulfill their mission of sharing the gospel with all people of the world”. Ukrainian and Slavic evangelicals were at the forefront of using these technologies.

The radio network in Chicago, Slavic Gospel Association (SGA), was commonly heard throughout the Soviet Union. Peter Deyneka, a Belorussian, started the programme in 1934. Despite not being a member of the UEBC, his organization played an important role in airing religious material into the USSR. According to Turek, SGA was a “steadfast advocate for believers behind the Iron Curtain who were suffering from state persecution”.

Famously, they aired a letter from a dissident Ukrainian Baptist pastor, criticising Soviet religious oppression. Another active voice was Harbuziuk, whose programme, Voice of the Gospel into Ukraine, aired between 1966 and 1993. Although both broadcasts mostly aired religious material, there were plenty of occasions where they spoke of evangelical persecution.
Activism

Activism was another avenue for Ukrainian Baptists to speak on behalf of the suffering church. Ministers such as Iwan Renko and John Bojchuk were part of a seven-week tour around the United States discussing Soviet persecution of Christians in 1957.

As part of this tour, Renko dispelled myths about the Soviet church before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and again in 1958. Lev Zabko-Potapowich and his family commonly spoke at the Rotary Club on topics regarding religious rights. Harbuziuk spoke at many conferences, even presented lists of imprisoned Baptists to US diplomat Warren Zimmerman, and discussed religious persecution with Ronald Reagan.

Another powerful voice was Giorgi Vins. Vins was a Baptist pastor who was imprisoned for his faith. He became well known after being involved in a prisoner swap at the initiation of President Jimmy Carter in 1979. After coming to the United States, he received a hearing from the Senate, spoke to multiple presidents, and traveled around the world speaking on behalf of the Soviet church. This activism was later done on a grander scale through his organisation, the “International Representation for the Council of Evangelical Baptist Church of the Soviet Union”.

The efforts of the older generation are not forgotten but are revered. Kapran notes, “because of the old immigrants, it became possible for Christians to arrive [to the United States] in the nineties.”

Their role in influencing public opinion manifested itself in stronger policies against the USSR which culminated in liberating the church from Soviet oppression. Their past actions set the standard for the current diaspora and are guiding them in their fight for the current liberation of Ukraine and human rights.
Advocacy

Much has changed for UEBC since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The older generation has passed away and a new group of leaders have been filling their shoes. They have been actively helping Ukraine since its independence and enlarged their support after the Russian full-scale invasion. This has been done through providing humanitarian aid and advocacy.

Humanitarian aid has been the UEBC’s primary method of helping Ukraine. Kapran notes that since the beginning of the invasion, they have raised over 500,000 US dollars and delivered multiple containers of aid to Ukraine.

Furthermore, aid was provided to Ukrainian refugees at both the Ukrainian-Romanian and the Mexican-American borders. Individuals like Rev. Peter Ivanov, pastor of the Ukrainian Baptist Church of Berwyn, have also played a key role, organizing a community donation drive to assist refuges. These efforts continue through organisations such as World Relief and Save a Life International.

Another avenue to help Ukraine has been political advocacy. Just as Harbuziuk spoke out against religious persecution and Russian imperialism, so are the current leaders. Through local media interviews, public engagements and official statements, the church representatives speak out about the persecution of Ukrainian Christians and the ongoing war.

Likewise, according to Kapran, over a thousand letters, emails, and phone calls, by members of the convention, were made to government officials regarding the latest Ukrainian aid package.

On his end, Kapran has been actively advocating for Ukrainian Christians. Even before the full-scale invasion, he raised concerns about Ukrainian Christian persecution. Since then, he has advocated for the passage of the Ukrainian aid package and is actively involved with the broader Ukrainian diaspora.

Yet for Kapran, the most important message to convey is that “in the occupied territories, there is a total persecution of Ukrainian Christians…this too needs to be talked and written about.”

Olexa Harbuziuk passed away on October 4, 1997, but the legacy he and his contemporaries left, endures. “People need to know our earlier history,” Kapran emphasises, “our Ukrainian diaspora was very active… they very clearly spoke out.” This history may be unknown to many within the Ukrainian diaspora, but the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention kept it alive.

Today, a new generation of leaders has taken up the baton, continuing the advocacy for both Christians and Ukraine, building on the legacy of their predecessors.

From Nixon to Trump: How the GOP has weaponized 'othering' for political gain

Thom Hartmann
August 26, 2024 

Donald Trump and Richard Nixon

“Identity politics” can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who’ve traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it’s no longer needed.

The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today’s America that’s white Christian men) identifies people who aren’t part of their group as an “other” and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the “outsiders.”

This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized “states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities. GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course, Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.

Science, however, is catching up with the Republican’s strategy, and showing us both how powerful it can be and also how to defeat it.

Rob Henderson’s excellent Newsletter turned me onto the new book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham, who does a deep dive into the past 600,000 years of our species and its immediate predecessors.

Wrangham points out how violent our chimp cousins are: female chimps are routinely beaten into submission before being raped and impregnated by the most powerful of the male chimps. He notes, “One hundred percent of wild adult female chimpanzees experience regular serious beatings from males.”

The consequence of this is that over generations genes for aggression have come to dominate that species; chimp society very much operates along the lines Thomas Hobbes argued human society would without “the iron fist of church or state.” Chimp life is nasty, brutish, and short.

But at some point in our prehistory, as humanity was evolving into its modern form, we developed language. Using that new ability to communicate, we developed complex societies.

Citing biologist Richard Alexander, Wrangham writes:
“In his 1979 Darwinism and Human Affairs, Alexander argues that at some unknown point in our evolution, language skills developed to the point where gossip became possible. Once that happened, reputations would become important.

“Being known as a helpful individual would be expected to have a big effect on someone’s success in life. Good behavior would be rewarded. Virtue would become adaptive.”

For human societies to survive and prosper in the face of an often-hostile natural world, cooperation became more important than dominance. We left behind the violence of alpha male chimps and instead embraced human teamwork and social harmony.

In my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, I document how Native Americans had, at the time of first contact in the 15th through 17th centuries, shared with Europeans how they’d developed highly democratic systems of governance. To a large extent, our Constitution was based on things learned directly from native people.

As I showed from that era, and Wrangham does with hunter/gatherer tribes across the world while examining anthropological evidence of early humanity, psychopathic and hoarding alpha males were consistently brought under control by the rules of human society itself.

Wrangham shows how, in multiple ancient and modern hunter/gatherer societies, when what we’d today call sociopathic or psychopathic alpha males would begin hoarding wealth or asserting dominance over others, they were simply killed.

Over thousands of generations, he posits, this altered our gene pool in a way that only a very small percentage of us — psychologists estimate between one and five percent — still carry and can act out the alpha male role in a way that involves high-level hoarding and social dominance. We call them sociopaths, billionaire hoarders, and violent psychopaths.

The good news is that they’re very much in the minority; the majority of us are not psychopaths, and are deeply wired for cooperation and social cohesion.

This evolutionary process, which I also document in American Democracy, makes societies more stable, enhances a culture’s or nation’s chances for survival in the face of crises, and improves the quality of life for the largest number of members of a society.

But, as both Wrangham and I point out, when societies are taken over by hoarding, violent, psychopathic men (Hitler, Saddam, Mussolini, Putin, Trump, Iran’s Ayatollahs, etc.) they become top-heavy and brittle, and thus more vulnerable to disruption by both external and internal events (including the death of the leader).

While the evolutionary basis of this, which Wrangham brings to us in his book, is new, the idea of a society or nation being most resilient when it’s most democratic is not; it’s been the subject of speculation, documentation, and scientific and social inquiry from the time of Socrates through the Enlightenment and the creation of the United States (as I detail in American Democracy).

What struck me from Wrangham’s book as most relevant to this moment, though, was his assertion that we humans are, both genetically and socially, vulnerable to psychopathic alpha males taking over when they use one particular strategy to gain and hold power: identifying an “other” who they can successfully characterize as a threat.

On the one hand, Wrangham points out how we’re capable of great tenderness and compassion. In his book’s introduction, he writes:
“In short, a great oddity about humanity is our moral range, from unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity. From a biological perspective, such diversity presents an unsolved problem. If we evolved to be good, why are we also so vile? Or if we evolved to be wicked, how come we can also be so benign?”

The answer, in short, is that we’re tender and loving to our own group, but perfectly willing to be astonishingly violent toward any “other” group that we see as substantially different from us and believe is a threat to us.

This, on the other hand, is a key part of preparing soldiers to fight in wars and violate that core human imperative of not killing: First, we must “other” the enemy. My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War II straight out of high school in 1945, referred to Germans and Japanese as “krauts” and “japs” to his dying days. Such a racist “other” perspective was pounded into our soldiers throughout basic training, just like veterans of George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern wars often refer to Arab people as “ragheads” and other slurs.

This “othering” of members and supporters of violent dictatorships we must go to war against is arguably a useful or even necessary tool to prepare our young men and women to kill or be killed on the field of battle.

Because it’s grounded in genetically-mediated survival instincts and strategies as ancient as humanity, it’s relatively easy to intentionally program into people, and, once they come to believe there is a real threat from an “other,” very hard to defy. During both WWI and WWII in America, for example, those who protested against those wars were vilified, ostracized, and, in some cases, even imprisoned, all with popular support for that separation from society.

It becomes particularly dangerous, though, when violent psychopathic alpha males in a political leadership position turn that same strategy against members of their own society, turning average citizens into monsters. As Wrangham writes:
“The killers who committed genocide in World War II, Cambodia, and Rwanda were caught up in societies where moral boundaries became excessively crystallized. Yet most were not sadistic monsters or ideological fanatics. They were unremarkable individuals who loved their families and countrymen in conventional moral ways.
“When the anthropologist Alexander Hinton investigated the Cambodian genocide of 1975–79, he met a man called Lor who had admitted to having killed many men, women, and children. ‘I imagined Lor as a heinous person who exuded evil from head to toe….I saw before me a poor farmer in his late thirties, who greeted me with the broad smile and polite manner that one so often encounters in Cambodia.’ The combination of horror and ordinariness is routine.
“According to the anthropologists Alan Fiske and Tage Rai, ‘When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel…that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.’ Fiske and Rai considered every type of violence they could think of, including genocide, witch killings, lynchings, gang rapes, war rape, war killings, homicides, revenge, hazing, and suicide.”

Like Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler used this “othering” strategy against Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals so successfully that “good Germans” largely went along with the Holocaust, often enthusiastically. Stalin did the same against Ukrainians who were part of his Soviet Union, starving to death over four million human beings — men women, and children — in the Holodomor.

And now Donald Trump and his followers and enablers in the Republican Party — and thirty or so almost certainly psychopathic alpha male billionaires — are using this “othering” strategy against American citizens and immigrants to gain and hold political power.

In doing so, they’re playing with the most deadly form of fire known to humanity.

Because our instinctual willingness — or even enthusiasm — for dominating, destroying, and killing any “other” we see as a threat is deeply rooted in our genetic code, it’s damn near impossible for people who’ve been inculcated with a clear identification and deep fear of an “other” to resist embracing forms of violence ranging from discrimination to excessive policing and imprisonment to outright extermination.

It’s so archetypal that it’s the essence and message of every Bruce Willis-type movie: “Use violence to destroy the bad people.” As we watch that story play out on the screen, and we cheer the murder of the bad guys, we feel a release and exhilaration that keeps bringing people back to the theater.

We didn’t “learn” to love this violence: it’s wired into our DNA. All of us. We are all vulnerable to this type of emotional manipulation.

Trump’s open embrace of rounding up 12 million “other” immigrants and putting them into concentration camps prior to deportation seems unspeakably cruel, but we forget the brutality of his family separations and caging of young Hispanic children at our own peril.

He and his acolytes are fully capable of committing horrors like the world sees in various places every few generations when an alpha male psychopath uses “othering” to gain and hold wealth and political power.

In both Wrangham’s book and mine, we find the way to combat this: shatter the “othering” meme by converting the “them” Republicans identify (queer people, racial and religious minorities, “liberals,” and women) into a massive, collectively diverse “us.”

This fracturing of the GOP “othering” efforts was hugely on display last week during the Democratic National Convention, as people of all races, religions, gender identities, and disabilities were featured as part of a grand, collective “us.” Increasingly, we’re also seeing it in our media, from commercials featuring queer and multiracial couples to movies and TV programs with diverse casts.

To restore to our society the kind of resilient culture that has helped humanity survive to this point, we must defeat Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the psychopathic hoarder billionaires funding their attempt to take over America.

We must stop their effort to convert us into a fractured society with rich white Christian men in charge and everybody else subservient for another generation or more. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his prescient farewell address:
“…America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” He added: “We pray … that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

America defeated fascists who had used “othering” to seize and assert power eighty years ago; they forced us to do it on the battlefield. Here at home, we fought back against and thwarted the psychopathic alpha male Robber Barons of the 1880-1930 era with antitrust law, union organizing, and heavy taxation of the morbidly rich.

Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a collective and inclusive “us,” and to repudiate hate and “othering” as a political strategy.

If successful, we’ll usher in a new and beautiful America, and a grand example for the rest of the world. This could quite literally be a positive turning point for humanity for generations.

If only enough of us show up at the polls this November, and then stay engaged for at least a few years thereafter. As Tim Walz said, “We can sleep when we’re dead.”

 

The long-lasting impact of war on global diabetes prevalence

How the conflict in Ukraine and linked supply chain disruptions could lead to up to 180,000 additional cases of type 2 diabetes

Complexity Science Hub

 

image: 

The war in Ukraine highlighted the vulnerability of the global food supply system. With this visualization (https://vis.csh.ac.at/food-supply-shocks/), users can see which food products are lost and which countries are most affected when a specific supplier stops producing a specific food product. The visualization shows a variety of scenarios related to Ukraine, including the one showing what would happen if Ukraine could no longer produce wheat.

 

view more 

Credit: Complexity Science Hub

[Vienna, August 7 2024] — The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine has led to severe humanitarian crises, including widespread food shortages. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, an estimated 11 million Ukrainians—about one-third of the population—were at risk of hunger in 2023. This crisis, exacerbated by supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events, could increase diabetes prevalence not only in Ukraine but globally, argue Peter Klimek and Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub in a commentary published in the journal Science.

Malnutrition during early pregnancy is known to elevate diabetes risk later in life. With 187,000 children born in Ukraine in 2023, Klimek and Thurner suggest that the current diabetes prevalence rate of 7.1% could result in an additional 13,000 to 19,000 cases of diabetes in this birth cohort alone.

Global impact

Globally, the disruption of crucial food exports due to the conflict has pushed an estimated 23 million people into hunger. Considering other supply chain interruptions and weather-related shocks, projections suggest that up to 122 million more people could suffer from hunger compared to 2019. “This could potentially lead to up to 180,000 additional Type 2 diabetes cases worldwide,” the researchers say.

They caution that while these estimates are not intended to be quantitative predictions, they do underscore the profound and often overlooked—especially indirect—effects of geopolitical events on public health. 

Ukraine – a key producer

Prior to the war, Ukraine was a major global agricultural producer, ranking as the largest exporter of sunflower oil, the fourth-largest exporter of corn, and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat. The modeled impacts of Ukraine’s agricultural production loss suggest that countries like Moldova, Libya, Lebanon, and Tunisia could face significant wheat shortages, with extensive repercussions for food products that rely on wheat as an ingredient.

Why this matters

Klimek and Thurner emphasize the importance of addressing these indirect consequences of conflicts and supply chain disruptions: "Our estimates are meant to illustrate the scale of the impact on public health, so that health authorities can become aware of these emerging high-risk groups and potentially adjust screening and early prevention measures for the coming decades," the researchers stated. They also stress the urgent need to diversify global food supply chains and reduce dependencies.

 

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Famine and diabetes

The link between hunger and diabetes is well-documented, with studies from historical famines in the Netherlands, China, and Austria, for example, showing that malnutrition during early pregnancy can significantly increase type 2 diabetes risk later in life. Recent research into the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 by Lumey et al. has provided new insights into this relationship at a more granular level. By analyzing monthly birth cohorts and regional variations in famine severity, they found that severe malnutrition during early pregnancy can increase diabetes risk by 1.5 to 2 times.

This heightened risk is believed to stem from metabolic changes triggered by fetal exposure to poor nutrition, which prepares the body for a nutrient-scarce environment. When this environment changes, the mismatch can result in a higher likelihood of developing diabetes.

 

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About CSH

The Complexity Science Hub (CSH) is Europe’s research center for the study of complex systems. We derive meaning from data from a range of disciplines – economics, medicine, ecology, and the social sciences – as a basis for actionable solutions for a better world. Established in 2015, we have grown to over 70 researchers, driven by the increasing demand to gain a genuine understanding of the networks that underlie society, from healthcare to supply chains. Through our complexity science approaches linking physics, mathematics, and computational modeling with data and network science, we develop the capacity to address today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adr1425 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The lasting effects of famine

Article Publication Date

8-Aug-2024

Early prenatal exposure to famine increases Type 2 diabetes risk in adulthood, shows study of historical Ukraine event

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Prenatal exposure to famine significantly increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in adulthood, according to a new study of people impacted by the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine in Ukraine. While the immediate and short-term effects of famines on mortality and morbidity are well-documented, deciphering famines’ long-term health consequences – as this study did – has been more difficult. Previous research has suggested a link between prenatal nutrition and adult health outcomes, including metabolic disorders like diabetes. However, these studies were limited by small sample sizes and uncertainties of famine exposure. The Holodomor famine in Ukraine, which was caused by Soviet policies and resulted in the deaths of millions through extreme food scarcity, presents a unique opportunity to examine this link due to its extreme severity, well-defined time frame, large population size, and extensive documentation. Here, L. H. Lumey and colleagues studied individuals born during this period, investigating how severe nutritional deprivation in early gestation impacts health decades later. Lumey et al. conducted an ecological study using data from 128,225 type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2008 among more than 10 million individuals born in Ukraine between 1930 and 1938. They found that individuals born in early 1934, who were in early gestation during the peak famine period in mid-1933, had a more than two-fold increased likelihood of developing T2DM in adulthood compared to those unexposed to the famine. Notably, no T2DM increase was seen among infants exposed to famine in mid or late gestation or in the first years of life. The findings identified a critical time window for when severe prenatal malnutrition has the greatest impact on future health, highlighting the importance of early gestational nutrition. In a Perspective, Peter Klimek and Stefan Thurner discuss the study and the implications of its findings on understanding and preventing global health threats related to food scarcity.

Podcast: A segment of Science's weekly podcast with L. H. Lumey, related to this research, will be available on the Science.org podcast landing page after the embargo lifts. Reporters are free to make use of the segments for broadcast purposes and/or quote from them – with appropriate attribution (i.e., cite "Science podcast"). Please note that the file itself should not be posted to any other Web site.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adn4614 

Article Title

Fetal exposure to the Ukraine famine of 1932–1933 and adult type 2 diabetes mellitus

Article Publication Date

9-Aug-2024

 

Russia destroys monuments to Victims of Holodomor and Stalin’s Terror in occupied Luhansk

22.07.2024   

Halya Coynash

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is accompanied on all occupied territory by efforts to destroy historical memory and Ukrainian identity

Destruction of the memorials to the Victims of Holodomor and Stalin’s Repression in occupied Luhansk From the propaganda video

Missiles are the deadliest, but by no means the only weapon Russia is using in its determination to eradicate Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian historical memory on all occupied territory. 

The latest attack on Ukrainians’ memory of Holodomor, the man-made Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, and of Soviet repression was reported on 18 July 2024 in occupied Luhansk.  The Russian propaganda ‘Luhansk information centre’ announced the dismantling of stone monuments to the Victims of Holodomor and to the Victims of Stalin’s Repression on Remembrance Square in occupied Luhansk.  The report, although very brief, was filled with all the standard aspects of Russia’s narrative about Ukraine.  This, for example, includes labelling any Ukrainians or Ukrainian organizations with a pronounced sense of Ukrainian identity and patriotism as ‘nationalist’.   These are claimed to have been places of pilgrimage for “Ukrainian nationalists” and Prosvita activists, with this clearly viewed as something suspect.  The Prosvita, or Enlightenment, Society was only ‘radical’ to Russians who wanted to deny Ukrainian statehood, and the importance of Ukrainian as the state language. 

Even more typical is the pretence that the destruction of monuments honouring the memory of Ukrainians deliberately starved to death or persecuted was at the initiative of ‘Luhansk residents’.  It is claimed that there were appeals from “veteran organizations” which purportedly “demanded the dismantling of monument-fakes that have no historical or cultural significance and insult the patriotic sentiments of Luhansk residents.”

Memorial to the Victims of Holodomor in occupied Luhansk on 27 November 2023 Photo Realna Gazeta

Worth noting a poignant photo from 27 November 2023 of roses underneath the words: Rest in Peace, Those Starved to Death’  in occupied Luhansk.  The victims of this genocide are honoured throughout the world each year on the third Saturday in November, with at least one ‘Luhansk resident’ willing to take a major risk and lay flowers in memory, even though this was at the Monument to the Victims of Holodomor in a part opposite the Russian-controlled ‘ministry of state security’.

It is telling that the monuments, like others to Victims of Holodomor in particular, have been demolished since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and openly annexed Ukrainian territory, including Luhansk.  While a huge number of countries have joined Ukraine in recognizing Holodomor as an act of genocide, Russia has carried out an aggressive campaign of denial and disinformation.  The current regime under Russian leader Vladimir Putin has not openly denied the crimes of the Soviet era, and specially the Terror under bloody dictator Joseph Stalin.  It has, however, actively sought to ‘rehabilitate’ or whitewash Stalin and his henchmen, the notorious secret police from Cheka to KGB and has persecuted those organizations and activists who seek to remember the victims of the regime’s crimes.   Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, huge numbers of books on Ukrainian culture and history have been banned as ‘extremist’, including any books telling the truth about Holodomor and Soviet history.

The Monument to Victims of Stalin’s Repression in Luhansk that the Russians destroyed

The attacks on Ukrainian historical memory began back in 2014 in both occupied Crimea and the Russian proxy ‘Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics’ [‘LPR/DPR’].  In August 2015, a Memorial to the Victims of Political Repression and Holodomor was dismantled in Snizhne, within ‘DPR’. Such destruction was claimed to be aimed at the “reinstatement of historical justice”.  

By October 2022, the Russians had destroyed the Memorial to Victims of Holodomor in Mariupol.  The monument was made of granite and erected in 2004 near the Drama Theatre which was sheltering around a thousand residents when it was bombed by the Russians on 16 March 2022.   Here too the Russians produced a propaganda video claiming that Mariupol residents were in favour of the monument’s destruction, while only showing one collaborator who actually claimed that it was not Ukraine which had suffered from the Famine of 1932-33.   There was an especially cynical note in the attempt to justify the destruction by claiming that the granite was to be used ‘for construction work’.  No mention, of course, was made of who had destroyed Mariupol hospitals, residential buildings and places of culture.

Monuments to the Victims of Holodomor were also ostentatiously destroyed in occupied parts of Kherson oblast in late 2023.  The occupation forces in Ivanivka Hromada boasted of having destroyed at least fourteen memorials to Victims of Holodomor.  They prefaced Holodomor with the word ‘so-called’, and reposted images of the destruction, however did themselves wear masks to conceal their own identity.

LIKE STALIN'S HOLODOMOR IN UKRAINE

UN Experts Say ‘Targeted Starvation Campaign’ by Israel Has Led to Famine Across Gaza

The starvation of Palestinians in Gaza "is a form of genocidal violence," said 10 rights experts.

By Julia Conley

July 10, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


While the United Nations still has not formally declared a famine in Gaza after nine months of Israel’s near-total blockade on humanitarian aid, 10 top U.N. experts on Tuesday said they have seen enough.

“We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza,” said the experts.

Michael Fakhri, special rapporteur on the right to food, was joined in the statement by other experts including Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, and Paula Gaviria Betancur, special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons.

They said the recent deaths of three children in various parts of the enclave led the experts, who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations as a whole, to declare a famine has taken hold.

“Fayez Ataya, who was barely six months old, died on May 30, 2024 and 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi died on June 1, 2024 at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah,” said the experts. “Nine-year-old Ahmad Abu Reida died on June 3, 2024 in the tent sheltering his displaced family in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis. All three children died from malnutrition and lack of access to adequate healthcare.”

“With the death of these children from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, there is no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza,” they continued.

We are now seeing famine across the whole of Gaza. All houses destroyed, food systems destroyed and healthcare destroyed. And kids are dying. Is there any humanity left? https://t.co/jjI5ZHAvbA— UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing (@adequatehousing) July 9, 2024

At least 34 Palestinians in Gaza—the majority being children—have now died from malnutrition since October, when Israel began its bombardment of the enclave in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced there would “be no electricity, no food, no fuel” allowed in to Gaza.

Israeli officials said in response to Tuesday’s statement that it has increased the aid allowed into Gaza recently, but hundreds of delivery trucks remain stranded in Egypt and a floating pier built by the U.S. has not significantly improved the humanitarian crisis.

The U.N. experts said that with the first death of a child from malnutrition and dehydration, it should have been considered “irrefutable that famine has taken hold.”

“When a two-month-old baby and 10-year-old Yazan Al Kafarneh died of hunger on February 24 and March 4, respectively, this confirmed that famine had struck northern Gaza,” they said. “The whole world should have intervened earlier to stop Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign and prevented these deaths… Inaction is complicity.”

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is backed by the U.N., said last month that Gaza is at high risk for famine and that nearly half a million people were facing “catastrophic” food insecurity, with an extreme lack of food.

In May, Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, who had previously hesitated to say Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, said Israel’s “sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory” ultimately convinced him that Israeli officials are “engaged in genocide.”

In March, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to ensure its military refrain from violating the Genocide Convention by preventing humanitarian aid from reaching people in Gaza, saying that “the catastrophic living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have deteriorated further” and that “famine is setting in.”

A woman named Ghaneyma Joma told Reuters on Monday at a hospital in Khan Younis that she feared her son would soon die of starvation.

“It’s distressing to see my child… lying there dying from malnutrition because I cannot provide him with anything due to the war, the closing of crossings, and the contaminated water,” she told the outlet.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the U.S. government, the biggest international funder of Israel’s military and a persistent defender of its actions in Gaza, to ensure that a cease-fire agreement is reached and that Palestinians receive necessary humanitarian aid.

“The intentional starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza can only occur with the active complicity of the Biden administration in Israel’s campaign of genocide,” said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the group. “This complicity must end, and the Palestinian people must be offered a future in which they are free of occupation and can live in dignity.”

Israel’s Starvation Policy in Gaza is Forcing People to Eat Tree Leaves

By Tareq S. HajjajJ

uly 9, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss

Image by OMAR ASHTAWY/APA IMAGES

Ahmad Abdulrahim, 38, strolled the remains of the markets in Gaza City with 150 Shekels in his pocket, the amount of money he used to feed his family of five for a week before the genocide. Today, that amount can hardly buy a single meal.

The markets, now little more than bombed-out remains, are empty of all basic needs, including vegetables, meat, and fruits. For the majority of people, such luxuries are unavailable except at unimaginable prices. Most vegetables, rare though they are, come from people’s gardens.

All Ahmad could find were cleaning supplies and canned foods. Ahmad told Mondoweiss that due to his children’s long-term dependence on these foods, they’ve started to develop health problems. After a protracted search, Ahmad found some zucchini; he walked faster when he noticed the seller, who had placed them in a small pile on the ground on top of a plastic bag. When he asked about the price, he was surprised to know that one kilogram of zucchini cost 80 Shekels ($20). Before the war, it used to be 3 shekels per kilo (less than a dollar).

Such was the price for most other vegetables that could be found. One kilo of green peppers cost 250 shekels ($66), where it used to be 5 ($1.4). One kilo of cucumber and tomato cost 90-100 shekels ($23-$26), which used to be 2-3 shekels (53-80 cents).

Ahmad said that as he walked back home, disappointed, he was dreading his family’s reaction when they found out that he spent almost half of their money on two cans of beans.

“I’m starting to deal with my kids as adults,” he said. “I’m telling them this is war, and our enemy wants us to starve. I’m telling them that we should be thankful that we have been able to survive so far. I promise them that when this war ends, I will bring them whatever they want.”

The state of starvation in Gaza has not ended. In northern Gaza, it has dramatically increased, but in ways that are different from how it was at the war’s outset. Protracted periods of malnutrition and deprivation from vital nutrients are having a cumulative impact on Gaza’s population, especially for those who most need it, such as children and pregnant women.

“Before this crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said back in March. “Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are sick. Over a million people are expected to face catastrophic hunger unless significantly more food is allowed to enter Gaza.”

Only 0.8% of children under the age of five were suffering from acute malnutrition before the war, the WHO also said. By February, that figure had jumped to 12.4% – 16.5%.

Ever since those numbers were reported, Israel’s genocidal war has only worsened the systematic deprivation of food to the population. But Israeli propaganda would have us believe that there is no famine, and there is no Israeli policy of deliberate starvation. Many Israeli media outlets misleadingly focus on technical definitions of what constitutes a famine and dishonestly misquote passages from the UN’s ICP reports on conditions in Gaza.

The reality on the ground tells an opposite story, one in which the systematic deprivation of Gaza’s population from sources of nutrition is leading to long-term consequences. Gaza health officials and medical workers have already observed it for weeks.

Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told Aljazeera that the specter of famine was once again sweeping northern Gaza, stressing that the lack of availability of foods with diverse nutritional values will have a long-term impact on the population. Since the start of the Israeli army’s second invasion of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza City last week, access of residents in northern Gaza to food has only worsened.

Abu Safia said that no basic materials have entered the northern Gaza Strip for weeks, leaving flour as the only available staple. This is far from sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of children, the elderly, and pregnant women, all of whom require fats and proteins, Abu Safia asserted.

“Within 14 days, 214 children have arrived at the hospital showing signs of malnutrition,” Abu Safiya told Al Jazeera well before the second invasion of Shuja’iyya began. “Including over 50 cases of advanced malnutrition and 6 cases in critical condition in the intensive care unit.”

“These children are living solely on fluid replacements, and we do not have any milk or special food for them, which puts their lives at risk,” he said.
Eating tree leaves

People in the north of Gaza can tell that this wave of hunger is the worst to visit the strip so far, leaving many wondering about their prospects for survival if these conditions do not change.

Some residents of Gaza City have resorted to using tree leaves, such as mulberry leaves, to prepare dawali, a dish typically comprised of fragrant rice wrapped in grape leaves.

“People are cooking weeds,” Mahmoud Issa, a local journalist and resident of Gaza City, told Mondowiess shortly before the Shuja’iyya invasion. “They cook leaves in water and spices. Even using the water is risky, because there’s no power to run the desalination plants.”

“Solar power is no longer available in Gaza either. Israeli drones have systematically targeted every solar panel on every roof across Gaza. They want people to lose hope and starve,” he continued.

Issa explained that people believe expired canned foods, when made available in Gaza, are making their children sick. This has led some to try to avoid such foods for fear that they would not be able to get treatment for their kids should they fall ill, given that northern Gaza no longer has any health system to speak of.

“Families know there is no way to treat their children if they get poisoned, so they are abandoning canned foods,” he said.

But even though cases of food poisoning due to the consumption of expired food products have been reported in Gaza, reports are also emerging of additional cases of food poisoning from forage eating.

Fruits, vegetables, chicken, meat, and fish are all unavailable in Gaza, Mahmoud explained.

“Three months ago, the Israeli checkpoint in the Kuwaiti Square was closed, and the checkpoint in al-Rasheed Street was closed, too,” he said. “The Israeli army allows the entrance of food trucks from the Erez crossing, but that is not enough for the population in northern Gaza.”

“When the Rafah crossing was working, over 60 trucks used to arrive, including frozen vegetables, meat, chicken, and other necessary food,” he explained. “We could survive then. It was tolerable. But now every crossing is closed, and people have started to starve.”

In Germany, Liberals Lead the Authoritarian Turn

The rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has prompted a wave of troubled reactions in Germany. But authoritarianism isn’t just a far-right creation, and today, liberals are leading the charge against basic democratic freedoms.

By Ingar Solty

May 27, 2024

Source: Jacobin

For German weekly Der Spiegel, there’s no doubt about the real meaning of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): this far-right party is, in fact, an “Alternative against Germany.” This headline referred to alleged wrongdoing by the AfD’s lead candidate for June’s elections to the European Parliament, TikTok star Maximilian Krah, who is said to have received payments from China. One of Krah’s employees was arrested on suspicion of spying for the People’s Republic; Der Spiegel raised the accusation of “treason.”

It might be observed that Germany, just like any other major power, itself extensively finances actors abroad and influences foreign countries’ internal affairs via its numerous party-affiliated foundations and NGOs. Obviously, Germany’s own secret services are also spying. But beyond that, we may well question those liberal anti-fascists who think that it is really so clever to use the term “treason” against a right-wing authoritarian party that claims to be doing “everything for Germany“ — an SA slogan used by Thuringia AfD leader Björn Höcke. One day they will wake up surprised that they themselves reestablished this illiberal and nationalist rhetoric in the Federal Republic’s political culture.

Obviously, left-wingers can already set the clock for when criminal prosecution with accusations of treason will once again be turned against them. They could, in coming years, be leveled against anyone who raises the slightest doubts and even calls for an open discussion about some of the important questions facing us. Such as whether massively expanded military spending is really such a good idea. Whether Germany’s nuclear armament — once demanded solely by hard-right warhorses such as Franz Josef Strauss, but today with a fresh, pious, cheerful, open “yes to the nuclear bomb“ from Green and liberal icons like former secretary of state Joschka Fischer — is really a good idea. Whether a new bloc confrontation against China and the deployment of the frigates Bayern and Württemberg to the South China Sea to “fly the flag“ for “our values and interests“ — as the cruiser division once did off the Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory — will really help to secure peace and tackle global problems such as social inequality and the climate catastrophe.
Turning Point

The “Zeitenwende” (turning point) was announced by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (of the Social Democratic Party, SPD) on February 27, 2022, without prior parliamentary discussion, let alone broad social debate — a democratic scandal in form alone. This is indeed a turning point also in content. It turns the clock not toward a golden future, but toward a dark German past.

The internal “Zeitenwende” is a return to a time of soldiers’ memorials, so that a “society addicted to happiness“ (as former Federal President Joachim Gauck once put it) can once again learn to honor as heroes those who died “defending Germany in the Hindu Kush.” It goes back to the time of the national service called “Pflichtjahr,” with which the same people who once put a bomb under social cohesion through the welfare-slashing “Agenda 2010” and the Hartz laws now want to “strengthen public spiritedness.” Perhaps they forgot that the “Pflichtjahr” already existed once in German history, or what its purpose was and remains. It was the Nazis who introduced it back in 1938 to ideologically repair what was broken in terms of material economic and social policy.

The internal “Zeitenwende” is also about the reintroduction of the military into public schools. According to Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (of the Free Democrats, FDP), children should practice warfare together with soldiers in the interests of a “relaxed relationship with the Bundeswehr” and for “our resilience.” Youth officers from the Bundeswehr would be let loose on pupils as “career advisors“ in order to solve the troops’ general recruitment problems with the current record numbers of teenagers in military service. But clearly, in times of tight labor markets, relying solely on the “economic draft” is no longer enough. This approach once replaced “citizens in uniform” with “precariat in uniform,” creating an “underclass army,” as Michael Wolffsohn described it. In this system, the former East Germany contributed no generals to the German army but almost two-thirds of the soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, following the motto “unemployed or Afghanistan.”

This strategy is, however, no longer adequate to reach the declared goal of a 203,000-strong army by 2031. Foreign recruits from within the European Union (EU) have also failed to materialize so far because youth unemployment in Southern Europe is no longer 50 percent or more, as it was during the euro crisis. Added to this is the drop-out rate during basic military training, which is sky-high because the reality of joining the army has little to do with the image promised by the €35 million a year Bundeswehr advertising plastered across trams, bus stops, and YouTube: camaraderie, wrenching around on cool, horsepower-packed vehicles, war as gaming (only without a reset button), globetrotting, saving the world, finding meaning in life.

And by all means, Germany needs new soldiers in view of the record numbers of reservists who subsequently refused to enlist once the Ukraine War began and whose desire to be shot up for their fatherland is obviously low. Their caution on this front is only surpassed, at least in one sense, by Green voters. In survey after survey — unlike the supporters of any other party — they call for weapons and military service for Ukrainians and other people; but only 9 percent of these Greens, according to a Forsa poll, would be willing to take up arms to defend Germany personally.

Meanwhile, the internal “Zeitenwende” is not only bringing the military back into schools, but also to universities. Here, the government and the conservative opposition, cheered on by the left-liberal media, want to violate the mandatory peace requirement in the German constitution and override the civilian clauses that, as a lesson from World War II, have so far prohibited research and science from being put at the service of private and for-profit arms manufacturers. In North Rhine–Westphalia, easily the country’s largest state, this has long since happened with the votes of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats.

The internal “Zeitenwende” also means the return of the distinction between “good” (us, of course!) and “evil” (the others, who else?), between (Western) “civilization” and (Eastern) “barbarism.” What has changed is that the frontier of the “Eastern Problem” has been shifted further east and the barbarism no longer begins at the Polish border. We see the return of “hereditary enemies“ (once France, now Russia and China) and the “white man’s burden“ to civilize the barbarians, who are once again supposed to “heal from the German soul.” As former Maoist Reinhard Bütikofer, the Greens’ foreign policy spokesman in the European Parliament, recently put it, the Chinese must “simply let us transform them“ in such a way “that in the end something comes out that simply corresponds to the ideas we had about the country and about how the world as a whole should be organized.”
Enemies Within

The internal “Zeitenwende” is also the return of an ostentatious unwillingness to think about historical context or to take the “enemy” perspective (if not to promote international understanding, then at least to prevent the escalation of war). A knock-on-effect media ostracism punishes the mere attempt to think in such terms. Leftists are again called a “fifth column“ and prevented from exercising their freedom of assembly by illiberal justice and police violence — as recently happened during the suppressed Palestine Conference in Berlin. Alleged enemies from outside are banned by authoritarian means from entering Germany or speaking, as recently happened to the renowned American philosopher Nancy Fraser and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

It is a symptom of the internal “Zeitenwende” when a federal minister of science and higher education justifies massive police violence against peacefully protesting students by referring to a muck-spreading article in the tabloid Bild. This authoritarian liberalism places its critics and those who merely exercise their civil rights under blanket suspicion of being enemies of the constitution. We see the internal “Zeitenwende” when the Bundestag passes laws overnight that chill scholarly debate and produce conformity of opinion, using penal measures where historians once debated openly. This was what happened two years ago with the tightening of the German Criminal Code and the German Bundestag’s “Holodomor resolution.”

Blacklists have long been back in force for “internal enemies” kept out of public service through tests of political conviction, as with the “extremism check“ in the state of Brandenburg. This is the newest incarnation of the old “Radikalenerlass“ that sought to keep leftists and other radicals from finding public employment. The Bundestag decided this January — with the votes of Social Democrats, Greens, and supposed Free Democrats — that migrants should only be granted citizenship if they are committed to the “liberal-democratic basic order” and the raison d’état of unconditional support for the Israeli state, regardless of which far-right extremist forces are currently governing it and which AI-controlled war crimes it is currently committing. But more than that, migrants are even to be deprived of their citizenship retroactively, for up to ten years, for failing to obey this standard. Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (Free Democrats) and the Social Democrats, among others, demanded this for dual citizens.

It was quite preposterous for these same people to solemnly warn against the far right’s plans for mass deportations — after the AfD’s so-called “Wannsee Conference 2.0“ with the far-right Identitarian Movement leader Martin Sellner became known — and raise scandal over the fact that AfD MP Gerrit Huy advocated dual citizenship at this meeting, in order to make it easier to remove German passports from people with a migration background. In any case, problems of credibility surely arise when the same people who call these plans a red line, because the withdrawal of citizenship was ultimately the Nazis’ means of driving out their opponents, now flirt with it themselves. The same could be said about the outrage over the AfD’s “remigration” dreams, which were already — without question — “an unvarnished plan of state terror” when AfD leader laid them out in his 2018 book. Such outrage looked rather implausible just a few weeks after the current government had itself torn up European asylum law and Scholz had called for “deportations on a grand scale” as part of the “new toughness in refugee policy“ welcomed by Der Spiegel.
Manufacturing Consent

The internal “Zeitenwende” also includes the return of agitation and propaganda in state and private media, which has little to do with the fourth estate and much to do with “manufacturing consent” — spreading images of the enemy, certainty of victory, and slogans of perseverance. This is partly an effect of the fact that for long stretches of postwar history the population was not prepared to follow its elites into rearmament and war operations.

The new propaganda includes the creation of a “Schicksalsgemeinschaft” (community of fate) with an external enemy, national myths, and a “dominant culture“ meant to hold together a country torn apart by social inequality and neoliberal politics, a general renationalization and militarization of language, and the promotion of emotional coldness. We see this internal “Zeitenwende,” for example, when the single highest-circulation newspaper has the largest German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall — share price since the Ukraine war: up 523 percent — call for a return to compulsory military service because “the Zeitenwende . . . is a task for society as a whole“ and “liberal societies . . . must be able to stand up for their values.”

If things continue at this pace, initiatives such as the “Federal Program for Patriotism“ called for by the Christian Democrats will inevitably lead to the celebration of a reincarnated “Sedan Day,” used in the German Empire to celebrate the victory over the hereditary enemy of the time, France. Some planners are surely already considering how a military victory over Russia — which was never likely and is now increasingly unlikely — could be appropriately anchored in the collective memory of the masses.

The many articles from bourgeois-liberal media that warn against the AfD in the spirit of an “impotent“ anti-fascism or accuse the right-wing authoritarian nationalists of “treason” apparently do not notice that every text they write with a morally upraised index finger is driving at least a few hundred new supporters to the right-wing extremists. Their voters are led to believe that by voting for the AfD they are sticking it to the man. Surely these AfD voting masses fail to recognize that — to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht — they are actually just like the calves that trot behind the drum for which they themselves provide the drumhead. But the liberals fail to recognize one thing above all: it doesn’t take the far right itself to bring back the ghosts of the dark past. It is they themselves, the liberals, who conjure them up.
Heroic Thinking?

The “internal Zeitenwende” promoted by left liberals is already rehabilitating the concepts, language, political styles, and means of the German nationalist and authoritarian right of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “National security” is back, in the name of which the otherwise sometimes-invoked international law can be trampled upon. Also back are “raison d’état,” “autarchy,” which is now called “derisking,” massive military spending, and the call to be “ready for war“ — because otherwise, of course, “in five to eight years“ the Russians will be knocking on your front door. Once again, there are warnings of “war fatigue“ among the people, public pledges and military parades in front of state parliaments, and the “new desire for heroes“ that marks a return of “heroic thinking,” which tells us that in the bloody “unwinnable war“ of position and attrition in Ukraine — reminiscent of Verdun and World War I — “the slaughter is necessary.”

Moreover, a new cult of violence has emerged. The same politicians who bewail the “violence” supposedly committed by youths who set off fireworks on New Year’s Eve have established a political culture whose slogan is “weapons, weapons, and more weapons.” Liberal journalists and a federal Green Economics minister rave about the technical data of the latest weapons systems from the military-industrial complex like the pimps from the German Jungvolk of old, only to then act like first-person shooters in front of the screen celebrating kill counts against enemy soldiers dehumanized as “orcs“ and gloating over the killing of Russians from “world-record distances.” In short: all of this is returning in the words and deeds of the “liberal” middle classes, for which no Nazis are needed.

Fascists are not needed in order to introduce “Veterans’ Day“ and memorials to fallen soldiers or to demand “military education in schools.” They are not needed in order to declare Holocaust enablers like Stepan Bandera as freedom fighters. And they are not needed for there to arise an unprecedented historical revisionism — and the monstrous Holocaust relativization that equates Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler and Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine with Nazi Germany’s war of extermination in the East. Did these people perhaps forget that the aim of that war was the enslavement of the Eastern peoples and the liquidation of their entire social elite — at least 30 million people — through systematic massacres of the unarmed (“Kommissarbefehl“) and systematic starvation (as during the siege of Leningrad, with more than one million civilian deaths)? That this was all part of the “General Plan East,” from which the “Final Solution” plan for the systematic murder of the European Jewry also emerged?

While liberals love to talk about the “Putler” on X (formerly Twitter), it was an influential editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Berthold Kohler, who even before the Russian war crime in Bucha became known, used the term “war of extermination” for the Ukraine invasion. He was, of course, fully aware that he was equating Russia’s war against Ukraine, which according to United Nations figures has claimed at least 10,810 civilian lives in more than two years, with the “Russian campaign” of the Nazis, who killed 27 million Soviet citizens from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia in this “crusade against communism” in less than four years, about half of them civilians.

It was not Nazis but the European Parliament that four years ago, with the votes of the liberals and in the spirit of the historical revisionism of Ernst Nolte, blamed the Soviet Union for World War II. The liberal-left newspaper taz and the Green Youth already on their own initiative performed AfD’s fascist Björn Höcke’s hoped-for “180-degree turnaround in remembrance politics.” Hence the Berlin daily, under the title “Putin is the new Stalin,” explained to its green-alternative readership that “the real history of World War II” was “that Stalin had planned this war . . . long before Hitler came to power.” The Green Youth declared Operation Barbarossa the climax of a war of “settlement-conquest“ by a Russian “colonial state” which today needs decolonizing — thus giving retroactive legitimacy to the Nazis and their claimed “European mission“ to liberate the “Eastern peoples” from the Russian Hun.

Incidentally, an anti-feminist rollback does not require an extreme right-wing incel and “men’s rights movement,” either. Seven years ago, when AfD man Höcke called for an unwavering “masculinity” as a prerequisite for military prowess at the rally for anti-immigration movement Pegida in Dresden, he was scolded for being old fashioned. In the course of the internal Zeitenwende, the same demands are now coming from the so-called bourgeois center, for example when the award-winning literary scholar Tobias Haberl explained in Der Spiegel that the “German city-dwelling man” with his “polka-dot socks” who “is capable of cooking” is “too soft for the new reality,” which is why we need a return to the “necessary toughness” and the “conflict orientation of his fathers,” who — but only for our own good! — regularly beat us with their belts because they still knew that “not every problem can be discussed away.”
Hurtling Toward the Past

For liberals, it is part of the new normal to label their opponents and critics of (one-sided) arms deliveries as “lumpen pacifists,” “Putin’s willing executioners,” and “second-hand war criminals.” It is liberals who are already preparing for the time after the war in Ukraine and demanding that “pacifism must not be allowed to rise again.” It was the liberal newspaper ZEIT that, on the exact day of the eightieth anniversary of Joseph Goebbels’s “Do you want total war?“ speech, entitled the interview with a left-wing liberal, Eva Illouz, “I wish for total victory,” explaining that she wished for this “total and annihilating victory” because “the Russians are committing crimes against humanity every day that must not go unpunished” and because “Putin is threatening the ideal values of Europe.” (Illouz later had the audacity to publicly excommunicate her academic colleague Judith Butler from the Left, because, even though they are Jewish, they do not follow Illouz’s pro–Gaza War position.)

In short, none of all this requires the far right. The same people who today warn conservatives not to tear down the “fire wall” to the AfD, as a lesson from the history of 1933 — while they, like former health minister Jens Spahn declare that fire wall to, run to the right of Giorgia Meloni in Europe, and while they, like multiple corruption scandal suspect European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, kiss the “post-fascist” Italian leader wherever they meet her — do not even notice the flamethrower in their own hands, with which they have long since set the country on fire.

It should be noted that it is not only the die-hard conservatives of the “Stahlhelm faction” but also the “left” wing of the bourgeois class who are particularly committed to the internal Zeitenwende. Sure, it was the Christian Democratic foreign minister in waiting, Roderich Kiesewetter, who demanded a few weeks ago that the “war must be taken to Russia” and that “everything should be done” to “destroy” not only “Russian military facilities and headquarters” or “oil refineries,” but also central government offices like “ministries.” It was Kiesewetter who recently suggested that Ukrainian refugees in Germany should be stripped of their income as an incentive for them to let themselves be shipped off to war.

Liberal extremism, however, does not need die-hard conservatives. This approach — typified by the fact that it takes no account of the true circumstances, risks, and realistic goals, that crusades against “totalitarianism” with a somehow totalitarian fanaticism of its own, with a self-righteous moralism that is to be sated by all available means — has its ultimate origins elsewhere. We see this in the former Maoists in the German Green Party, for whom the “West” and NATO replaced Maoist sects and China as the vanguard of history. Then again, it was a Social Democratic defense minister who called for German “war capability.” And when the Christian Democrat Kiesewetter demanded a further 100, 200, 300 billion euros for the German armed forces — even as austerity measures are imposed on the working class — his demands were, of course, merely an echo of the SPD politicians Scholz, Eva Högl, parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

The warning of “war fatigue” came from a Green foreign minister, who would have liked to dress up as a Leopard tank for carnival and who, as a result of a profound Freudian slip, has long seen herself as “at war with Russia.” It was the Green economic minister who went into raptures about the Panzerhaubitze 2000 armored howitzer on a TV talk show: “It can really do something!” It was Free Democrat Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chairwoman of the defense committee, who answered a talk show question as to whether she had served by saying that she was “good for the Volkssturm.” And the call for “weapons, weapons, and more weapons” also came from a Green federal politician, in this case Anton Hofreiter, who also wants to make systematic starvation a principle of German power politics again, just like in the good old days of the siege of Leningrad. As an example of the foreign policy he called for, which would finally return to “negotiating with the colt on the table,” he suggested in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung in December 2022 that, with the European breadbasket of Ukraine on the leash, 1.4 billion Chinese should — because one of them might once again “dare” to “look cross-eyed at a German“! — be openly threatened with death by starvation: “If a country were to withhold rare earths from us, we could reply, ‘What do you actually want to eat?’”

It should thus come as no surprise that it is the left-liberal bourgeois class who are now publicly correcting their attitudes and proving their loyalty to the fatherland through symbolic vows, as if it were August 1914 all over again. A long list of figures have felt it necessary to symbolically withdraw their objection to military service and swear an oath of allegiance to the nation in arms. It ranges from Scholz and the “green-alternative” economics minister Habeck to aged intellectuals, journalists, and writers such as Ralf Bönt, Stern editor Thomas Krause, and taz editor Tobias Rapp to other public figures such as the Protestant bishop Ernst-Wilhelm Gohl, the comedian Wigald Boning, and the “eternal court jester“ Campino from “punk” band Die Toten Hosen. It was then only logical that Rapp — coeditor of the war-loving “radical left” organ Jungle World — recently welcomed Veterans’ Day in Der Spiegel as a “big step away from old lies”: “A society” can now “say: we can’t take the burden off your shoulders of having fought and possibly killed. But we can give you a stage once a year and remind you of this burden. It was not pointless.”

Theodor W. Adorno repeatedly expressed the feeling that even more dangerous than the traditional far right was the right-wing radicalization of the “center” — of the return of nationalism, authoritarianism, and fascism in the language of democracy. Those who believe they can best beat the AfD by taking their own migration policy, culture war, and political tools from the “age of catastrophes” are doing the far right’s business for them. In the short term, the AfD’s poll ratings may fall as a result of the scandal raising over its lead candidate for the European elections. In a recent interview for Italy’s La Repubblica he announced that “he would never say that anyone who wore a SS uniform was automatically a criminal” — prompting even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to break off collaboration with the party. In the long term, however, the AfD may lean back and take a rest, for they know that their politics are winning. Germany is hurtling toward a right-wing past at breathtaking speed; however, it is not the AfD in the driver’s seat, but the liberals themselves.