It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Trump isn’t just lying about the Suleimani threat — he’s covering up the fact that the strike was illegal: law professor
President Donald Trump has frequently changed his story on the nature of the “imminent threat” posed by Iranian general Qassim Suleimani that led him to order a strike to take him out, leading many to believe that his justification is based on lies.
But that betrays something much more fundamental, wrote NYU Law professor Rebecca Ingber in the Washington Post. Trump is trying to cover up the fact that he had no legal justification to order the strike in the first place.
“The question of imminence is crucial under both domestic and international law,” wrote Ingber. “Under the U.N. Charter, the president’s authority to kill Soleimani required that the United States was facing an armed attack — as well as that the use of force was necessary to repel or prevent it. The United States has long understood that doctrine to also permit force necessary to stop an imminent attack. Whether an attack was truly imminent is also key to the domestic legal question, because U.S. law does not permit the president to use force unilaterally (that is, without congressional authorization) outside of the most exigent circumstances.” Enjoy progressive journalism? Help fight right-wing disinformation by supporting Raw Story. Click to learn more.
“These legal questions are no mere technicalities,” continued Ingber. “The purpose behind the law is to limit unnecessary war to the greatest possible extent. U.S. presidents have at times pushed the limits of such laws, but doing so has dire consequences — including unnecessary conflict, civilian casualties and the lost trust of our allies, as well as of the U.S. public.”
Many in the Trump administration have tried to argue the strike was justified by past threats from Iran, with Ambassador Kelly Craft listing a series of cases in which Quds-backed Iran forces attacked U.S. military targets in the region.
However, wrote Ingber, “Even were each of the acts listed in the letter both attributable to Iran and properly characterized as armed attacks — a stretch for various reasons, including that the U.S. drone was itself unmanned and that Iran claimed it shot it down in Iranian airspace — the use of force in response must still be necessary to stop an ongoing attack or prevent one. Soleimani’s history, and Iran’s, provide context for analyzing the nature of any current threat. But the use of force as retaliation or punishment for a past wrong is strictly prohibited under international law; the narrow exceptions the charter permits do not include revenge. So we are back to the original question: whether Soleimani posed an immediate threat for which the use of force was necessary.”
“Finally, even were an attack against Iran itself justified, the fact that the Soleimani strike took place in Iraq makes the question of imminence even more important,” wrote Ingber. “Iraq, of course, did not itself attack us. A crucial step in determining whether it is necessary to use force on the territory of a state that did not itself attack us — the long-standing U.S. approach, dating to the Caroline incident, increasingly adopted by other states — has been to, first, establish the imminence of a forthcoming attack and then to analyze whether that state is itself unwilling or unable to prevent or stop the attack. The administration has not put forward evidence on either question — and has not even addressed the issue of Iraqi sovereignty.”
“The most significant check on a president who has little inherent interest in law or norms is a political one,” concluded Ingber. “Elections matter. Law can constrain the president, but only if we care, sufficiently and in sufficient numbers, when he violates it.”
OCTOBER 16, 2019 The Miami Herald is partnering with the Miami Foundation to launch the Investigative Journalism Fund. With your donations, we can do more projects like Perversion of Justice, our series on Jeffrey Epstein. BY EMILY MICHOT
A lawsuit filed Wednesday by the top law enforcement officer in the U.S. Virgin Islands alleges that multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually trafficked hundreds of young women and girls on his private island, some as recently as 2018, aided by a web of shell companies to carry out and conceal his crimes.
The allegations, if validated, broaden the scope of Epstein’s sexual trafficking, and shed new light on the tactics Epstein used to hide his illicit activities.
The lawsuit seeks forfeiture of the islands, valued by managers of Epstein’s estate at more than $86 million, because of their use in alleged crimes.
“This lawsuit focuses on conduct that happened here in the Virgin Islands in violation of Virgin Islands law,” Attorney General Denise George said during a news conference. “The conduct described in our complaint ... betrays the deepest principles and values of the government and the people of the Virgin Islands.”
Epstein, who was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell last Aug. 10, allegedly brought girls as young as 11 to his private island, known as Little St. James, and maintained a database to track their availability and movements, the lawsuit said.
George, who became attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands last April, alleged that Epstein used “a complex web” of shell companies to hold properties, including Little St. James and Great St. James, at which the former financier engaged in human trafficking, forced labor, sexual servitude and other criminal behavior.
Through at least six corporate entities, Epstein “carried out and concealed his criminal conduct,” she said, adding that a toll-free, 24-hour hotline had been established (800-998-7559) for victims and the public to report on Epstein’s activities.
“We do need your help to see that justice is done now,” she said.
Most of the Virgin Island companies were created in 2011 and 2012, soon after Epstein registered as a sex offender in the Virgin Islands following his 2008 guilty plea to state prostitution charges in Palm Beach County, the lawsuit said.
That 2008 plea came about after Epstein received a controversial non-prosecution agreement from then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta. The deal shelved a federal sex trafficking indictment that could have put Epstein away for life. Instead he served a year in the Palm Beach County stockade, enjoying liberal work release privileges.
The lawsuit adds to the criminal allegations against Epstein, who had been charged by Manhattan prosecutors in July with sexually exploiting dozens of women and girls in New York and Florida.
In August, Epstein was found dead in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been awaiting trial on the same allegations that had been sidetracked a decade earlier. It was categorized as a suicide by hanging. While napping and shopping online, corrections officers failed to check on Epstein regularly on the night he died, and then allegedly lied about their own negligence. Two officers have been criminally charged.
Prior to his death, Epstein and his attorneys had denied the criminal charges. Epstein’s attorneys had said previously that he had not broken the law since his 2008 conviction in Florida. In an interview with the Herald in November, Mark Epstein said he believed his older brother did not kill himself nor had he engaged in sex trafficking since the 2008 conviction, and since had relations only with women 18 or older.
But the lawsuit filed Wednesday alleged that Epstein not only sexually trafficked women and young girls after his Florida conviction — he intended to expand his illicit operation in the Virgin Islands for years to come by purchasing Great St. James, the island closest to Little St. James, to conceal his conduct from public view and to evade oversight by the police.
Using Little St. James, the lawsuit said, “Epstein and his associates could avoid detection of their illegal activity from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement and prevent these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping the abuse.”
Epstein’s shell companies also were used to hold private airplanes and helicopters that Epstein used to transport young women and girls to and from the Virgin Islands, the lawsuit said.
“The Epstein case highlights how sex traffickers — like all organized criminal enterprises — thrive on the secrecy provided by anonymous shell companies,” said Clark Gascoigne, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, a group calling for greater transparency about true owners of shell companies. “Opaque ownership structures make it difficult — if not impossible — for law enforcement to track individuals” behind human trafficking.
George said she was “early in the stage of what we are going to be doing” and would not disclose if the alleged victims in the Virgin Islands were brought from South Florida or elsewhere to the Epstein properties. Her focus, she said, was that crimes were committed on Epstein’s islands.
It’s unclear why George chose now to bring the civil enforcement action, and why her suit leaves out important details in the Epstein saga. His company, Southern Trust, was able to win a huge 10-year tax break from the island’s Economic Development Commission in February 2013. It was after he was required to report his travel plans as a sex offender, and in exchange he promised to hire locally and create a huge data-mining operation for the pharmaceutical industry.
There is no proof that those conditions ever were met, though the head of the Economic Development Authority, Kamal Latham, told the Herald late last year that Epstein was audited annually and confirmed a site visit in 2018. Latham declined to make public any audits or records.
Flight logs and other sources cited in the lawsuit established that between 2001 and 2018, Epstein’s companies were used to transport underage girls and young women to the Virgin Islands, then take them via helicopter or private boat to Little St. James, where they would be abused and trafficked, the lawsuit said.
Girls between the ages of 12 and 17 years old were lured and recruited on the pretext of modeling opportunities, careers and contracts, the lawsuit said.
As recently as 2018, air traffic controllers and airport workers reported seeing Epstein leave his plane with young girls, some of whom appeared to be between the ages of 11 and 18 years old, according to the allegations.
One 15-year-old victim was forced to have sex with Epstein and others and then tried to escape by swimming off Little St. James, the lawsuit said, but Epstein and others organized a search party and found the girl.
They kept the girl captive and confiscated her passport, the lawsuit said.
Another victim, first hired to give massages to Epstein, was forced to perform sex acts at Little St. James, the lawsuit said. When she attempted to escape the private island, Epstein and a search party found her, returned her to his house and suggested they would physically restrain her if she did not cooperate, the lawsuit said.
Little St. James, which Epstein’s companies bought in 1998, is described in the lawsuit as the “perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault.”
The secluded private island is about two miles from St. Thomas and has no other residents. It can be visited only by private boat or helicopter as there is no public or commercial transportation available or bridge to allow public access.
In 2016, the lawsuit alleges, Epstein’s companies used a straw buyer to cloak the former financier’s identity and purchase Great St. James for more than $20 million. By then, Epstein was a convicted sex offender. Recent reporting by McClatchy and the Miami Herald details how Epstein used trickery in its purchase.
Buying Great St. James afforded Epstein privacy for his illicit activities, and prevented those held against their will on Little St. James from escaping or finding help, the lawsuit said.
The two islands owned by Epstein’s estate are also considered environmentally sensitive, with native coral and protected wildlife. Virgin Islands authorities repeatedly issued citations and assessed thousands of dollars of fines for violations of the U.S. territory’s construction code and environmental protection laws, the lawsuit said, but the fines had little effect in curbing or stopping Epstein’s illicit conduct.
Epstein “flagrantly disregarded the law,” the attorney general said.
The lawsuit said Epstein’s estate continues to attempt to prevent or limit Virgin Islands authorities from conducting random inspections on Little St. James and Great St. James, and that employees of Epstein’s companies were required to sign confidentiality agreements that prohibited them from cooperating with law enforcement.
Epstein estate executor Darren Indyke, his longtime attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.
Monitoring a registered sex offender with his own private islands and the resources to fly victims in and out on private planes and helicopters also posed a challenge for Virgin Islands law enforcement, the lawsuit said.
Registered sex offenders in the Virgin Islands are required to make periodic personal appearances to verify and update their information, the lawsuit states.
At his last verification in July 2018, the lawsuit said, Epstein refused to allow Virgin Islands investigators, accompanied by U.S. Marshals, from entering Little St. James beyond its dock — claiming that the dock was his “front door.” Instead, the lawsuit said, Epstein arranged to meet with investigators at his office on St. Thomas.
The lawsuit charges Epstein’s estate, his companies and other individuals identified only as John and Jane Does with eight counts of human trafficking; two counts of child abuse and neglect; two counts of aggravated rape; two counts of second-degree rape; two counts of unlawful sexual contact; two counts of prostitution and keeping a house of prostitution; one count of sex offender registry violation; two counts of fraudulent conveyance; and one count of civil conspiracy.
DECEMBER 19, 2019 LOCAL Watch raid on Jeffrey Epstein’s island AUGUST 13, 2019 VIDEO Nearly two dozen victims of Jeffrey Epstein voiced their outrage at a hearing in Manhattan on Aug. 27, 2019.
BY EMILY MICHOT | MARTA OLIVER CRAVIOTTO
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Jeffrey Epstein abused girls as young as 11 on secluded private island, lawsuit says
Convicted sex offender ‘kept a computerised database of women and girls’ Clark Mindock New York @ClarkMindock Little St James Island, one of the properties of financier
Jeffrey Epstein, is seen in an aerial view in July ( REUTERS )
Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein trafficked girls in the Caribbean as young as 11 years old up until 2018, according to a new lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed by US Virgin Islands attorney general Denise George claims that Epstein had brought girls as young as 11 and 12 to his secluded estate there, and kept a computerised database that tracked the availability of women and girls. The lawsuit could ultimately reduce the amount of money available to victims who have come forward as a part of claims against the estate in the United States, according to Reuters.
“Epstein clearly used the Virgin Islands and his residence in the US Virgin Islands at Little Saint James as a way to be able to conceal and to be able to expand his activity here,” Ms George said.
The lawsuit against Epstein, who died by suicide last year in a New York City jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, marks a broadening of the accusations against the financier who is known in part for his powerful social circle that at various times included Prince Andrew, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
The latest accusations would suggest his exploitation did not stop following his previous convictions in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. That case against him began in 2005 when Florida police received a complaint from parents that the financier had abused their 14-year-old daughter. Charges in New York and Florida only alleged trafficking as recently as 2005.
Jeffrey Epstein: Controversies surrounding paedophile billionaire Show all 9
Epstein later served 13 months in jail, receiving a contentious and extensive work release allowance that let him leave the jail for much of his sentence.
He was also only forced to plead guilty two two of the crimes he originally faced, even though federal officials had identified dozens of girls he had sexually abused. Read more
The new lawsuit was filed against Epstein’s estate, and seeks the forfeiture of the Little Saint James residence where the alleged abuse occurred. It also seeks forfeiture of Epstein’s second private island, Great Saint James, and the dissolution of numerous shell companies that officials say acted as fronts for the sex trafficking efforts.
Government policy on the Virgin Islands has determined that the assets could be distributed between the women and girls who were victimised in the region, according to Ms George.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Epstein and his estate vigorously denied that he had engaged in sex trafficking.
It is unclear how Epstein’s $500 million worth of assets will be allocated, and legal experts have noted that there is relatively little precedent to help the courts determine how to proceed.
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China’s manufacturing exodus set to continue in 2020, despite prospect of trade war deal China’s rising costs, tricky regulations and increasingly unstable geopolitical situation are forcing more manufacturers to move production elsewhere First and second wave of leavers underway, with more to follow, despite the prospect of a minor US-China trade truce
Finbarr BerminghamPublished: 9 Jan, 2020 Many foreign firms are considering shifting production from China due to rising costs and the unpredictability of exporting from the country. Photo: AP Weeks after switching on the machines of a new production line near Bangkok, veteran manufacturer Larry Sloven has a quip for the stream of companies leaving China: “Elvis has left the building.” After three decades of building up manufacturing bases in China, Sloven helped Capstone International Hong Kong, of which he is managing director, wind one down. Costs were rising before the trade war, but a 25 per cent tariff on the lighting products the company exports back to the United States helped accelerate a shift that was set in motion 18 months ago – moving its production base to Thailand.
Now, despite the fact that lead time to hit the shelves in US stores can take up to 40 days from Thailand, almost twice as long as from China, few retailers are willing to pay the premium price that needs to be charged to keep production in Guangdong.
“Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, most people are not coming back,” he said. “But I do not believe that most retailers in America understand this process of what a supplier must go through. Nobody will pay the price.” Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, most people are not coming back. But I do not believe that most retailers in America understand this process of what a supplier must go through. Nobody will pay the priceLarry Sloven This is a situation playing out in boardrooms around the world, as international companies accept the reality that the US-China phase one trade deal will not materially improve the lay of the land for their Chinese-based operations.
Rising labour and environmental costs, a head-spinning regulatory environment, the ever-looming threat of more and higher tariffs, along with a sharp increase in the perception of risk associated with living and working in China mean that the manufacturing exodus that began at the tail end of the last decade will continue well into this one. There is acceptance that the “Goldilocks Zone” provided by China’s industrial heartlands for the last 30 years – in which the mixture of costs, quality, human resources and infrastructure was just right – will not be matched in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam or anywhere else. “This is the right stepping stone, just the start,” Sloven said of Thailand. “I believe that Vietnam is already full, it's like having a ticket at a bakery, you have to wait in line. Right now, there's no line in Thailand, but it will get full.” As a direct result of trade war tariffs, China has fallen behind Mexico and Canada to become the US’ third largest trading partner. Before the trade war, it was number one.
Tariffs saw China’s trade in goods surplus with the US fall by 7.9 per cent in November, according to data released by the US Census Bureau on Tuesday. This was amid a 20.84 per cent fall in Chinese exports to the US from a year earlier, including items like cellphones. US purchases of Chinese goods are now at their lowest point since March 2013.
At the same time, the US has been buying more goods from the countries to which Chinese-based manufacturers are most commonly fleeing. Compared with June 2018, the month before the trade war began, US imports of goods from Vietnam have soared 51.6 per cent, Thailand 19.7 per cent, Malaysia 11.3 per cent, Indonesia 14.6 per cent, Taiwan 30 per cent and Mexico 12.7 per cent, according to South China Morning Post calculations based on US Census Bureau data for November. If there were any new year optimism about the US-China trading relationship, it is in scarce supply among foreign manufacturers in China.
“For companies exporting to the US, the entire time span of the trade war has sent the message that this isn't going to go away and that they need to rethink things,” said John Evans, managing director at Tractus Asia. Evans, who advises firms on relocating from China, said that even with the announcement of a phase-one deal, he has been getting more calls. “There were still a number of companies sitting on the sidelines, even into the last quarter of last year, thinking there'll be a grand resolution. But in reality, it’s more of a new normal.”
This so-called new normal has helped drive a long list of big-name companies out of China, with others choosing to keep a presence but scale back operations to continue selling to the domestic market.
But for every Hasbro, Samsung, Sonos, Sharp, GoPro, Sony or Nintendo, there are a host of small suppliers being forced out due to costs, or because they are pressured to follow their major customers.
For every foreign company that left China in 2019, there were two to three more seriously contemplating doing so and we expect more companies to leave China in 2020 than in 2019 Dan Harris
“For every foreign company that left China in 2019, there were two to three more seriously contemplating doing so and we expect more companies to leave China in 2020 than in 2019,” wrote Dan Harris, founder of Harris Bricken, an international law firm working extensively in China, in a blog post. A director at a company supplying accessories to Apple – who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the topic – said the US tech giant had told them that they should plan to leave China if they were to be kept on as a supplier, forcing them to scout for new production sites in Southeast Asia. Other exporters that have yet to face US trade war tariffs are making contingency plans due to rising costs and the unpredictability of exporting from China. They are not just American firms, but companies from all over the world. Allar Peetma is the CEO of Estonian manufacturer Gerardo’s Toys, which makes rocking horses near Shanghai using moulds made in the European Union. His biggest export market is the US, and his products were due to face a 15 per cent tariff on December 15. This was postponed indefinitely with the announcement of the phase-one trade deal, but Peetma does not seem comforted by the truce. US and China reach ‘phase-one’ trade deal
“Our costs are going up, but our customers want the same price, and they don’t understand that the costs are rising,” he said. “Our plan is to produce in the EU. We can use automation which can allow us to keep the costs and prices about the same. And it’s higher quality than being handmade in China. Our biggest market is the US, so tariffs are of course a worry, but other countries have high [import] taxes for China too, like Brazil and Turkey.” Similarly, Tsutomu Aoi – a manager in the Hong Kong division of Japanese magnetic toymaker Sumaku – said that costs in their plant in the eastern port city of Ningbo have ratcheted up. For some products like action figures, the company has automated processes such as mould injection and spraying at a separate plant in Jiangmen, across the border from Macau. But should the postponed US tariffs eventually hit, production would be quickly switched to Indonesia.
“The labour costs are low, but the process is slow. Currently the US forms a small part of our exports but it is a target to grow there this year,” said Aoi. “The 25 per cent [tariff] would be expensive, that’s one of the reasons we have set up in Indonesia, to export to the US from there.”
The 25 per cent [tariff] would be expensive, that’s one of the reasons we have set up in Indonesia, to export to the US from thereTsutomu Aoi
French scooter manufacturer Globber, meanwhile, is experiencing “15 to 30 per cent higher costs” at its Dongguan plant, in southern China, compared to its previous production base near Hangzhou in the country’s east. New tariffs would make it more expensive to export to the US.
“December 15 was good news for us,” said CEO Pascal Comte, but he is already thinking of what might come next. “In the short term, you can’t do anything [about tariffs], you have to pay the costs and it affects sales. Long term for sure, or medium term, the best option is Vietnam. It takes a while to transfer tooling, and to find operations and manpower.”
Rarely, however, is the divorce from China a clean one. Sloven at Capstone moved to a new base in Thailand with the help of a Chinese manufacturing partner that still provides many of the components used in their products. It can be a delicate balance, working with a Thai manufacturing partner to ensure that enough of the finished product is made of local content, to qualify for a low-tariff “Made in Thailand” label. “We’ve worked out a formula that’s good for both of them so they both can stay in business,” he said. “It’s difficult to get out of China without the help of your Chinese partner.” A year of the US-China trade war
The company needs to ship a particular form of glue from China that cannot be sourced in Thailand and will also import packaging from there.
“You would be amazed at the things that you find out. It’s cheaper to produce your packaging in China, put it on a boat, ship it to Thailand than to have a factory in Thailand produce that packaging,” Sloven said “My point is you can’t do this overnight. This is a two year process.” Consultant Evans said that the “first wave” of companies leaving China started moving 12 to 18 months ago, while the “second wave started mid-2019”. A brief period of armistice in the US-China relationship is unlikely to stop more waves in the future, as foreign companies continue to wean themselves off the Chinese manufacturing dream that has helped shape the global economy for the past 30 years.
Finbarr Bermingham has been reporting on Asian trade since 2014. Prior to this, he covered global trade and economics in London. He joined the Post in 2018, before which he was Asia Editor at Global Trade Review and Trade Correspondent for the International Business Times.
We don’t know how many mountain gorillas live in the wild. Here’s why
January 14, 2020
Mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Shutterstock/Claire E Carter
A new census – carried out by the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (a coalition of governments, non-profits and conservationists) in 2018 – shows that the population of mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park is now at 459, up from 400 in 2011. This could bring the total number count for the subspecies to 1,069 gorillas. Katerina Guschanski explains that while this is great news, these figures may still not be accurate.
How important are the mountain gorillas of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park to global populations?
Mountain gorillas are one of the two subspecies of eastern gorillas. They are divided into just two populations: one in the Virunga Massif that spans the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and one population that lives in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda and the adjacent Sarambwe Nature Reserve in DRC.
The Bwindi population holds a bit less than half of all mountain gorillas in the world, thus its importance for the global survival of these great apes cannot be overstated.
Mountain gorillas receive admirable conservation attention but they’re vulnerable due to habitat encroachment, potential disease transmission from humans, poaching and civil unrest.
Because there are only about 1,000 mountain gorillas left, it’s important that their population size be continuously monitored to evaluate whether, and which, conservation tactics work.
Their populations must keep growing because mountain gorillas have very low genetic diversity. This reduces their ability to adapt to future changes in the environment. For instance, if faced with new diseases, they are extremely susceptible because they don’t have genetic variants that would give them more resistance. Low genetic diversity was implicated in the extinction of some mammals, such as the mammoth.
Continued population growth is also needed to make them less vulnerable to random events, such as habitat destruction through extreme weather events, which could wipe out an entire population.
What can account for a rise in the number of gorillas?
One of the main factors that explains the higher detected number of gorillas is the change in the census technique used. During mountain gorilla censuses researchers collect faecal samples from gorilla nests (where they sleep at night) to genetically identify individuals. Gorillas that are used to human presence can be directly counted.
The teams in the latest census conducted two full systematic sweeps through the forest. They covered the entire region twice from east to west. This is a physically and logistically demanding method, but it’s very thorough.
The previous census, carried out in 2011, also covered the area twice, but only one of these attempts was a full sweep – meaning it started at one end of the forest and systematically progressed towards the other end. The other sweep was disjointed, in terms of how it covered the area and the timing, allowing gorilla groups to easily move and avoid detection.
In Bwindi, from the estimated 459 individuals, 196 are in groups that are used to people and can easily be counted. This means that population estimates are largely based on genetic profiles generated from night nests and so can’t be fully accurate because some will be missed.
Censuses of Virunga mountain gorillas are more accurate because more of their gorillas are used to human presence. In the most recent census, there’s been a rise in their population. It shows an increase from 458 individuals in 2010 to 604 in 2016. Most of these gorillas – 418 out of 604 – belong to groups that are used to human presence, they can be followed daily and easily counted.
The population increases in the Virunga gorillas is strongly attributed to active conservation. This includes continuous monitoring and veterinary attention, such as the removal of snares and treatment of respiratory diseases.
Is this rise a significant number and how accurate do you think it is?
The Bwindi census results were made publicly available in a somewhat unusual way. Scientific studies generally undergo a thorough peer-review before they are published, which has not yet happened for these findings. This means the findings haven’t yet been properly scrutinised and leaves the question about the gorilla’s population size open.
In addition, as mentioned above, the larger number of individuals detected in the 2018 census could be the result of the changed survey method. We therefore can’t make reliable comparisons to previous estimates from the 2011 and the 2006 censuses.
Consider that in the latest census, of the 33 gorilla groups – which weren’t used to the presence of people – only 14 (or 42%) were detected during both sweeps. Similarly, only one of 13 solitary individuals was detected in both sweeps. So, even with full, systematic sweeps, more than half the groups and solitary individuals were missed every time.
This shows we still do not have a good understanding of the actual population size of Bwindi mountain gorillas. The previous surveys are likely to have missed multiple groups and individuals so we can’t derive conclusions about population size changes. If another sweep were to be conducted, researchers could find more individuals, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the population has grown.
What we can say is that there are more mountain gorillas than we thought, which is great news.
What can be done to improve census methods?
Using the results of the two census sweeps in Bwindi, researchers will estimate the likely number of gorillas. The accuracy and precision of the estimate depends strongly on how many gorilla groups and individuals were detected in both sweeps.
To make census figures more concrete, more sweeps need to be included so that more individuals are confirmed. This would make the population size estimates more accurate with less uncertainty.
Author Katerina Guschanski Associate professor, Uppsala University Disclosure statement Katerina Guschanski receives funding from the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, The Royal Physiographic Society of Lund, and the Carl Tryggers Foundation. Partners
Donald Trump has endorsed a tweet describing him as a “monstrous, domineering behemoth” capable of striking fear into the hearts, or, presumably, similarly vital organs, of potential alien adversaries.
The US president retweeted a post by Fox News presenter Greg Gutfeld which contrasted his bombastic style with that of “meek” Democrats, who the broadcaster said appeared to be an entirely different species.
While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were arguing about sexism and Joe Biden was apologising for supporting the Iraq war, their Republican foe was telling a Milwaukee crowd that “you gotta love Trump”. Mr Trump won Wisconsin by the narrowest of margins in the 2016 presidential election.
Talking up his achievements, the president told the rally that “America is the envy of the entire world” – before pivoting swiftly into a complaint about his impending impeachment trial.
Shortly afterward and in typically robust style, the president touted his administration’s slaying of both ”the animal known as al-Baghdadi” – the Isis leader – and “the world’s number-one terrorist” Qassem Soleimani.
Mr Gutfeld tweeted: “if you were a space alien, bouncing between the debate and the trump rally, you’d think these are two different species -- meek, dull creatures, and a monstrous, domineering behemoth. you’d know who to fear, and deal accordingly.”
Mr Trump also retweeted a post by conservative commentator Michael Knowles, who wrote: “If the election were held in the 24 hours after this #DemocraticDebate, Trump would win every single state, including Greenland.”
Earlier in the week Mr Gutfield had told viewers of The Five that “Trump makes all these candidates look like runner-ups at The Bachelor, right? They seem so much smaller”. Watch more
He added: “These candidates are suffering from Trump oxygen depletion effect, which happened in 2016, Trump walks into the room, sucks out all the oxygen.”
Mr Trump’s rally was briefly interrupted by a protester, drawing a chorus of boos and “USA!” chants from the president’s supporters.
On Tuesday, however, the president was in a better mood than on a previous occasion when he complained that a security guard did not treat a female protester roughly enough. This time he merely admonished his supporters for giving the woman attention and cracked a joke.
At a recent summit in Damascus the leaders were filmed discussing the US president and using a biblical reference to joke about his personality.
During a visit to a Greek Orthodox church the pair discussed the biblical story of Saul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.
God is said to have struck Saul, a Pharisee who persecuted Christians, blind, before the future apostle was cured and converted to the new faith.
In the video, posted to Twitter by a Russian journalist, Mr Assad is heard to say: “If Trump also travelled on this road, it would fix him.”
The leaders are both seen to laugh at the quip.
Mr Putin then urges his host to extend an invitation to the US president, adding: “He’ll come.”
“I’m ready,” says Mr Assad, to which Mr Putin replies: “I’ll tell him”.
The Russian president visited Syria for a surprise summit last week to discuss the military situation there, the Kremlin said.
Moscow is the Assad regime’s strongest backer in the Syrian civil war and the campaign against Isis.
The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, championed the theory of natural selection, and revolutionized the study of the nervous system. Today, he is all but forgotten.
Unlike Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard, who endure as heroes in England and France, Emil du Bois-Reymond is generally forgotten in Germany — no streets bear his name, no stamps portray his image, no celebrations are held in his honor, and no collections of his essays remain in print. Most Germans have never heard of him, and if they have, they generally assume that he was Swiss.
But it wasn’t always this way. Du Bois-Reymond was once lauded as “the foremost naturalist of Europe,” “the last of the encyclopedists,” and “one of the greatest scientists Germany ever produced.” Contemporaries celebrated him for his research in neuroscience and his addresses on science and culture; in fact, the poet Jules Laforgue reported seeing his picture hanging for sale in German shop windows alongside those of the Prussian royal family.
Those familiar with du Bois-Reymond generally recall his advocacy of understanding biology in terms of chemistry and physics, but during his lifetime he earned recognition for a host of other achievements. He pioneered the use of instruments in neuroscience, discovered the electrical transmission of nerve signals, linked structure to function in neural tissue, and posited the improvement of neural connections with use. He served as a professor, as dean, and as rector at the University of Berlin, directed the first institute of physiology in Prussia, was secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, established the first society of physics in Germany, helped found the Berlin Society of Anthropology, oversaw the Berlin Physiological Society, edited the leading German journal of physiology, supervised dozens of researchers, and trained an army of physicians.
He owed most of his fame, however, to his skill as an orator. In matters of science, he emphasized the unifying principles of energy conservation and natural selection, introduced Darwin’s theory to German students, rejected the inheritance of acquired characters, and fought the specter of vitalism, the doctrine that living things are governed by unique principles. In matters of philosophy, he denounced Romanticism, recovered the teachings of Lucretius, and provoked Nietzsche, Mach, James, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein. In matters of history, he furthered the growth of historicism, formulated the tenets of history of science, popularized the Enlightenment, promoted the study of nationalism, and predicted wars of genocide. And in matters of letters, he championed realism in literature, described the earliest history of cinema, and criticized the Americanization of culture.
Epistemology rarely inflames the public imagination anymore. In the second half of the 19th century, however, epistemology was one of the sciences of the soul, and the soul was the most politicized object around.
Today it is hard to comprehend the furor incited by du Bois-Reymond’s speeches. One, delivered on the eve of the Prussian War, asked whether the French had forfeited their right to exist; another, reviewing the career of Darwin, triggered a debate in the Prussian parliament; another, surveying the course of civilization, argued for science as the essential history of humanity; and the most famous, responding to the dispute between science and religion, delimited the frontiers of knowledge.
Epistemology rarely inflames the public imagination anymore. In the second half of the 19th century, however, epistemology was one of the sciences of the soul, and the soul was the most politicized object around. When du Bois-Reymond proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, he crushed the last ambition of reason. Everyone who longed for a secular revelation was devastated by the loss. The historian Owen Chadwick put it this way: “The forties was the time of doubts, in the plural and with a small d. . . . In the sixties Britain and France and Germany entered the age of Doubt, in the singular and with a capital D.”
Jealous rivals identified du Bois-Reymond as a member of the “Berlinocracy” of the new German Empire. This was not quite fair. As a descendant of immigrants, du Bois-Reymond always felt a bit at odds with his surroundings. He had grown up speaking French, his wife was from England, and he counted Jews and foreigners among his closest friends. Even his connections to the Prussian crown prince and princess disaffected him from the regime. Du Bois-Reymond supported women, defended minorities, and attacked superstition; he warned against the dangers of power, wealth, and faith; and he stood up to Bismarck in matters of principle. His example reminds us that patriots in Imperial Germany could be cosmopolitan critics as well as chauvinist reactionaries.
He once joked to his wife that Prussian officers assumed that anyone of his eminence was an intimate of the government who regularly conversed with the Kaiser. He might have told them that he had introduced the engineer Werner Siemens to the mechanic Johann Georg Halske, or that he had launched the career of the physicist John Tyndall, or that he had sponsored the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, or that he could recite poetry by Goethe and Hugo that he had seen in manuscript, but he was too polite to do more than excuse himself. His enthusiasts would have been pleased to learn that he did indeed present himself to his king, a considerable honor for someone who once signed a guestbook as “Emil du Bois-Reymond, frog-faddist, Berlin.”
Du Bois-Reymond’s distinction was a long time coming. Most of his life he worked in obscurity, although every so often a keen observer would perceive the significance of his methods. Ivan Turgenev, for one, based the character of Bazarov in “Fathers and Sons” on his example. Another famous student at the University of Berlin, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote:
Of all sciences physical science is decidedly the most insipid, and I find it amusing to reflect how, with the passing of time, that becomes trite which once called forth amazement, for such is the invariable lot of the discoveries inherent in “the bad Infinity.” Just remember what a stir it made when the stethoscope was introduced. Soon we shall have reached the point where every barber will use it and, when shaving you, will ask: Would you like to be stethoscoped, Sir? Then someone else will invent an instrument for listening to the beats of the brain. That will make a tremendous stir, until, in fifty years, every barber can do it. Then in a barbershop, when one has had a haircut and a shave and has been stethoscoped (for by then it will be very common) the barber will ask: Perhaps you would also like me to listen to your brain-beats?
Detecting brain-beats is not yet common practice in barbering, but it is in medicine. In this respect Kierkegaard was right: The march of technology has been steady to the point of routine. Every refinement of du Bois-Reymond’s electrophysiological apparatus, from the vacuum-tube amplifier to the microelectrode to the patch clamp, can be thought of as a footnote to his original technique. Such achievement in instrumentation is anything but small: Two years after Kierkegaard’s taunt, du Bois-Reymond contended that physiology would become a science when it could translate life processes into mathematical pictures. The imaging devices associated with medical progress — the EKG, the EEG, the EMG, and the CT, MRI, and PET scanners — seem to vindicate his prediction. But success is not a category of analysis any more than failure. To make sense of why du Bois-Reymond devoted the whole of his scientific career to one problem, it helps to understand his deepest motivations.
Du Bois-Reymond’s laboratory apparatus for observing the nerve signal. Reprinted from Emil du Bois-Reymond, “Untersuchungen über thierische Elektrizität, Vol. 1” (Berlin: Reimer, 1884)
The physiologist Paul Cranefield once asked a simple question: “What kind of scientist, in 1848, would promise to produce a general theory, relating the electrical activity of the nerves and muscles to the remaining phenomena of their living activity?” Cranefield’s answer was someone who believed that electricity was the secret of life. Perhaps du Bois-Reymond really did think of himself as a visionary — after all, he was born in the year in which “Frankenstein” was published. On the other hand, a scientist obsessed with electrophysiology could just as easily be deemed a practical philosopher, a misguided fool, or a complex figure.
The study of animal electricity has a long history. When du Bois-Reymond came to the topic, it was still musty with doctrines of vitalism and mechanism, forces and fluids, irritability and sensibility, and other arcana of biology. Underlying all this confusion were the elementary workings of nerves and muscles, the problem that sustained him throughout his career. The reason is plain: Nerves and muscles are the basis of thought and action. Du Bois-Reymond never gave up trying to understand animal electricity because he never gave up trying to understand himself.
“If you want to judge the influence that a man has on his contemporaries,” the physiologist Claude Bernard once said, “don’t look at the end of his career, when everyone thinks like him, but at the beginning, when he thinks differently from others.”
This quest for identity informed the course of his science and his society, a Romantic theme of parallel development common to the first half of 19th century. Du Bois-Reymond’s struggle to establish himself might stand for Germany’s struggle to establish itself, the success of both endeavors catching witnesses off guard. Less apparent is the more classical theme of the second half of his life: the understanding that authority implies restraint. This is the deeper significance of his biography — how his discipline failed to capture experience, how his praise of the past hid his disapproval of the present, and how his letters and lectures only hinted at the passion of his ideals. “The result of a year’s work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in,” Henry Adams wrote in 1907. Du Bois-Reymond shared Adams’s Attic sensibility. The sad fact is that most of his countrymen did not. Du Bois-Reymond was not the first intellectual to counsel renunciation over transcendence, but he was one of the last in a nation bent on asserting itself. His caution deserves notice.
El Arenal, du Bois-Reymond’s summer house, circa 1860. Courtesy of Mary Rose Kissener.
How, then, could someone so famous and so important end up so forgotten? Let me suggest three kinds of answer. The first has to do with the histories that disciplines write about their origins. These usually take the form of the classical Greek myth of the Titanomachy, with a Promethean figure (the disciplinary founder) aligning with the Olympian gods of truth against an older and more barbaric generation (here symbolized by Kronos, or tradition). Psychology provides a perfect case in point. In Russia the discipline’s heroes are the two Ivans, Pavlov and Sechenov, with little discussion of how much they owed to Carl Ludwig’s studies of digestion or Emil du Bois-Reymond’s studies of nerve function. In Austria the hero is Sigmund Freud, and only recently has Andreas Mayer laid out just how much he learned from Jean-Martin Charcot’s use of hypnosis. And in the United States the hero is William James, the center of a veritable industry of scholars, none of whom quite put their finger on why he moved to Berlin in 1867. James never mentioned his debt to du Bois-Reymond, perhaps because he quit his class, or perhaps because so many of his early lectures drew from du Bois-Reymond’s writings. In each case the titanic hero breaks the line of continuity, throws over the all-devouring father, and benefits humanity with his torch of reason.
The second answer has to do with academic specialization. Du Bois-Reymond is hard to pigeonhole. This is the trouble with studying polymaths: It takes a long time to master the history of the fields in which they work, and when one does, it isn’t easy to sum up their contributions in a catchphrase. As a result historians have tended to reduce the complexity of Imperial German culture to caricatures of creepiness on the one hand (Nietzsche, Wagner, and “the politics of despair”) and kitsch on the other (nature, exercise, domesticity, and Christmas). Such distortions fail to capture the main feature of the age, which was excellence in science, technology, and medicine. After all, it’s not just du Bois-Reymond who has been forgotten — pretty much every German scientist of the 19th century has been forgotten as well.
Du Bois-Reymond is hard to pigeonhole. This is the trouble with studying polymaths: It takes a long time to master the history of the fields in which they work, and when one does, it isn’t easy to sum up their contributions in a catchphrase.
To my mind du Bois-Reymond provided the best explanation for his oblivion. Reflecting on how few of his generation remembered Voltaire, he suggested that “the real reason might be that we are all more or less Voltairians: Voltairians without even knowing it.” The same holds true for du Bois-Reymond: He is hidden in plain sight.
Du Bois-Reymond reminds us that individuals mark their times as much as their times mark them. “If you want to judge the influence that a man has on his contemporaries,” the physiologist Claude Bernard once said, “don’t look at the end of his career, when everyone thinks like him, but at the beginning, when he thinks differently from others.” Bernard’s comment regards innovation as a virtue. By this measure du Bois-Reymond’s contributions are as noble as any. But du Bois-Reymond taught a lesson of even greater importance, one that matters now as much as ever: how to contend with uncertainty.
The 20th-Century Obelisk, From Imperialist Icon to Phallic Symbol Amid all the imperial aspiration, wooly-minded New Age mythologizing, and pure unadulterated commerce, the obelisk stands tall.
Left: Place de la Concorde. Number 6 in the series Curiosités Parisiennes, early 20th century. Postcard; offset lithography. Courtesy Leonard A. Lauder. Right: Monolite Mussolini Dux, via Wikimedia Commons By: Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss
Previous centuries did not miss the fact that obelisks make a visual rhyme with a certain male body part. In the 1520s, for example, the brilliant poet and pornographer Pietro Aretino was quite specific about the association, using the same word, guglia, for both. Even the sex-obsessed and sex-denying 19th century made the connection with greater frequency than those looking for evidence of Victorian prudery might expect.
There is a faint but persistent undercurrent in 19th-century scholarship about the relationship between obelisks and the phallus, though that connection was usually relegated safely to the far distant past. Hargraves Jennings, who hinted at such associations in his pamphlet, “The Obelisk,” was also the author of a series of privately printed books documenting similar ancient monuments throughout the world, part of his attempt to recover the legacy of what he saw as a worldwide prehistoric phallic religion. But in this context the obelisk was a phallus, not a penis. Occasionally, the association could become a bit more explicit, as when the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne noted that: “Her majesty has set up — I should say erected — a phallic emblem in stone; a genuine Priapic erection like a small obelisk.” But in the 19th century such pointed talk was reserved for letters and pub chat. That the obelisk had represented a phallus in antiquity was an intellectually acceptable, if not entirely respectable, idea; that an obelisk might still be one today was a concept best reserved for private moments.
It was Sigmund Freud who let the cat out of the bag. Although Freud did not include obelisks in the extensive and imaginative catalog of phallic symbols — “things that are long and up-standing” — that occupies many pages of both his “Interpretation of Dreams” and “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” he might as well have. For he did include tree trunks, along with knives, umbrellas, water-taps, fountains, extensible pencils, and zeppelins. In a rare moment of interpretive unanimity, Carl Friedrich Jung concurred, specifically noting the obelisk’s “phallic nature” in his “Psychology of the Unconscious.” The two great men had spoken, and from then on nearly everyone who cared to make the connection seems to have done so. In 1933 Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, sitting in a park, hungover and quite possibly suffering a concussion, became alarmed at an obelisk whose shadow “lengthened in rapid jerks, not as shadows usually lengthen,” and which “seemed red and swollen in the dying sun, as though it were about to spout a load of granite seed.” A penis, not a phallus. In a more popular context, in the 1956 Biblical epic, “The Ten Commandments,” Cecil B. DeMille made the erection of a great obelisk the centerpiece of an early scene that established the testosterone-fueled rivalry between Yul Brynner’s strutting Ramesses II and Charlton Heston’s chest-heaving Moses.
Today it is not Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, or Renaissance popes who leap to mind when people stumble across an obelisk; it is Freud.
Scholars were less vivid in their language, but in 1948 the establishment Egyptologist Henri Frankfort declared — still, it’s true, in the discreet context of an endnote — that “it is likely that the obelisk did not serve merely as an impressive support for the stylized bnbn stone which formed its tip, but that it was originally a phallic symbol at Heliopolis, the ‘pillar city.’” By mid-century, what was once a whispered, almost occult association had become practically banal. In 1950 the psychiatrist Sándor Lorand could include a young boy’s dream about New York’s Cleopatra’s Needle in his analysis of the early stages of fetishistic obsession without even feeling the need to spell out exactly what role the obelisk might play.
Today it is not Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, or Renaissance popes who leap to mind when people stumble across an obelisk; it is Freud. The subtext has become the text itself. Russell Means, the Lakota/Oglala activist who led the 1973 takeover at Wounded Knee, was making a political point when he described the obelisk to Custer at Little Big Horn as “the white man’s phallic symbol.” But the designers who placed the Washington Monument (pointy side down) between a spread pair of disembodied legs on the cover of a mainstream, trade paperback about the seamy underside of Washington, D.C., likely had no political agenda. They were just trying to sell books. The novel, naturally, was called “The Woody.”
In historical terms this change has been blindingly swift. Obelisks retained their original meaning for thousands of years. Yet it is only a matter of decades between the slightly naughty French postcard of the early 1900s that features a policeman inquiring of a young woman, who clings to the monument in the Place de la Concorde, whether she has finished “polishing the obelisk,” to the moment on December 1, 1993, when the clothing manufacturer Benetton and the Paris chapter of ActUp marked World AIDS Day by putting a 22-meter pink condom on the very same obelisk. That, apparently, made the implicit a bit too explicit; the condom had not been approved by the Ministry of Culture and was gone within hours. Time, however, moves ever more quickly, and a vivid image cannot be kept down; in 2005 Buenos Aires decorated its own gigantic obelisk-shaped monument in a similar manner — this time with the full support of all relevant governmental bodies.
The ancient Egyptian ‘Luxor Obelisk’ in Paris wearing a giant pink condom to advertise World Aids Day. Image: ActUp
But sex is not the only association obelisks carried through the 20th century. They have become increasingly caught up in the mystical stew of theosophy, pagan revival, and the occult that has come together in the New Age movements of the last few decades. This has proven fertile ground for the revival of the more outrageous and conspiratorial Victorian writers on obelisks and ancient Egypt. Their books are now, paradoxically, much easier to find and buy than major works of 19th–century Egyptology. There is, to this day, no English translation of Champollion’s “Précis du systême hiéroglyphique,” his summa on Egyptian writing, or even of his short letter to Joseph Dacier, the key document explaining his ideas about hieroglyphs; but works by marginal figures like Hargraves Jennings and John Weisse, who found evidence of ancient Freemasons wandering the upper Midwest, have been reprinted and are readily available. Around the world, New Age shops and websites nearly all sport obelisks among the crystals, pyramids, and other mystical gewgaws available to channel good energy or dilute and disperse bad. The obelisks are usually advertised as effective at dispelling negative forces, such as “trapped energy, which could cause destruction like volcanoes.”
Around the world, New Age shops and websites nearly all sport obelisks among the crystals, pyramids, and other mystical gewgaws available to channel good energy or dilute and disperse bad.
Hollywood saw this mystical resurgence early and wove it into the science-fiction movies and television shows that proliferated in the 1960s. The mysterious resonating monolith that drives the plot of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is not, technically, an obelisk, but plays perfectly the otherworldly role ascribed to Egyptian obelisks in the farther reaches of the New Age. “2001” was one of the sensations of the spring of 1968; later that year the creators of the television series “Star Trek” were much more explicit, when, in shameless emulation, they included an obelisk in “The Paradise Syndrome.” That episode features a wise and peace-loving group of American Indians who, at some point in the distant past, had been transported to a faraway planet. There they live in safety, protected by strange forces that emanate from an obelisk that sits on a small altar in the woods. Unlike the “2001” monolith, this one actually looks like a short, fat obelisk and even sports hieroglyph-like inscriptions.
This manifold expansion of meaning and association is characteristic of the whole 20th century. The very explosion of monument building in the late 19th and early 20th centuries probably helped accelerate this process. Obelisks and obelisk-like monuments sprouted up everywhere in the decades on either side of 1900. Many, to be sure, were dedicated to victory and commemoration, but the sheer number — nearly every city in Europe and the Americas has a brace of them — meant that obelisks were applied to ever-stranger purposes. In 1896, at Pennsylvania State University, Magnus C. Ihlseng, a geology professor, found himself so pestered with questions about the qualities of the stones found in Pennsylvania that he organized the construction of a 33-foot obelisk, made up of all “the representative building stones of the Commonwealth, and thus to furnish in a substantial form an attractive compendium of information for quarrymen, architects, students, and visitors.” The stones are organized to reflect the geology of the region, with the oldest ones near the base.
Obelisks took on similarly untraditional forms throughout the century. The 1922 competition to design a new headquarters for the Chicago Tribune drew two different proposals for obelisk-shaped towers, including one from Chicago architect Paul Gerhardt, who also submitted a proposal for a building shaped like a gigantic papyrus column. Neither won. Although the idea of an obelisk as haven for office workers seems a long way indeed from Egyptian solar cults, such a building would have been very appropriate to the well-nigh pharaonic ego of the Tribune’s publisher, Robert McCormick. Obelisks appeared on every scale and in every imaginable context. Smaller sorts of executives could obtain smaller sorts of obelisks. In the 1960s, for example, the Injection Molders Supply Company offered 20-inch plastic desk obelisks for the “plastics executive who has nearly everything.”
The sign for the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, one of a series of thematic fantasylands along the Strip — New York! Venice! Egypt! — is a giant obelisk, complete with accurate hieroglyphs that celebrate the immortal kingship of Ramesses II. The obelisk lures people to the pyramid-shaped hotel, whose check-in desk can be reached via a drive-through sphinx. Inside, guests can find (in addition to floor shows and slot machines) a remarkably accurate reconstruction of King Tut’s tomb as well as a New Age-inflected movie experience about the mysteries of the pyramids.
Even as new obelisk-shaped monuments sprouted up, the meaning of existing ones shifted. The Bunker Hill Monument is a case in point. It was constructed in the 1820s and 30s as a memorial to a Revolutionary War battle and to the very idea of liberty. So it remained, but by the end of the 19th century it had become an even more powerful symbol of place — of Charlestown, Massachusetts. It became the emblem of the city (and after annexation by Boston, the neighborhood), appearing on shop signs, the bottles of the local pickle packager, and the jackets of high-school students. By the 1990s the identification of neighborhood and structure was so complete that when a dramatic new cable-stayed bridge was built across the Charles River from Boston’s North End to Charlestown, the designer, Swiss engineer Christian Menn, fashioned the bridge’s towers in the shape of obelisks. His reference point was the monument itself, a symbol of place, rather than the ideas the monument was originally intended to embody. The bridge’s towers and the monument now form a trio of obelisks across the Charlestown skyline, reinforcing the association yet further.
But symbolism can also come full circle. In 1998 Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art commissioned a major piece by the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who has specialized in gigantic projections, generally on the sides of buildings. In Boston he chose the Bunker Hill Monument as his canvas. During the 1970s and 80s, Charlestown, then a tight-knit and somewhat insular neighborhood, had been the scene of violent gang warfare, accompanied by a rash of murders. These became known as the “code of silence” killings, as the police consistently found that eyewitnesses were unwilling to speak about the crimes. By the late 1990s the neighborhood had changed, tensions had calmed, and Wodiczko convinced people to talk about the murders for his projection. For six nights, the monument itself seemed to speak with the voices of many of the victims’ mothers, who told of the murders and the murdered — of freedom, loss, and sorrow. It was a plea for peace and liberty, but on a much more personal and visceral level than the monument’s designers probably envisioned.
Other 20th-century artists found inspiration in the obelisk’s form itself. Barnett Newman’s great, enigmatic Broken Obelisk — a huge sculpture of COR-TEN steel consisting of a pyramid whose apex is just barely kissed by the point of a broken, upturned obelisk — may be the most inscrutable and moving “obelisk” of the century. The whole rises nearly 39 feet (nine meters) before the broken shaft of the steel obelisk trails off into the air. The sculpture not only embodies the very form of an obelisk, but even maintains the curious balance of great size and delicacy that characterizes the Egyptian original. The effect is reinforced by the fact that the contact point between the massive pyramid and the only slightly less massive obelisk is but a few square centimeters. Although Newman claimed some inspiration from his own childhood memories of the Central Park obelisk, he was unwilling to assign the piece specific meaning. Always a bit gnomic about his work, Newman wrote to John de Menil, who acquired one of the three versions of the sculpture, only that: “it is concerned with life and I hope I have transformed its tragic content into a glimpse of the sublime.” Perhaps in response, de Menil installed the sculpture as a monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Any number of 20th-century states, cities, and rulers tried to turn obelisks to their own political or commemorative advantage. Nearly all seem to have suffered from cases of equivocal symbolism.
Yet amid this very modern cacophony of meanings, the traditional association of obelisks with political power has never been drowned out completely. Any number of 20th-century states, cities, and rulers tried to turn obelisks to their own political or commemorative advantage. Nearly all seem to have suffered from cases of equivocal symbolism. In the early 1920s, the government of the newly born Czechoslovak state hired the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik to oversee the Prague Castle, which was being transformed into the seat of the new government. One of Plečnik’s ideas was to raise a gigantic obelisk — a true monolith — as a combined celebration of the new state and memorial to those who had perished in World War I. The obelisk, which would have been one of the largest ever erected, fell down an embankment during transit from the quarry in southern Czechoslovakia and broke in two — an event that in recent years has been taken as an ominous prefiguring of the eventual severing of the state itself. The salvageable half, still a very respectable 17 meters, stands by St. Vitus’s cathedral in the inner court of the castle. Fifteen years later, in 1936, the city of Buenos Aires also built a huge obelisk — this one of concrete and steel — in commemoration both of the city’s 400th anniversary and its arrival, in the early 20th century, as one of the world’s great cities. The obelisk became a symbol of the city, but it, too, took on a more sinister cast after Argentina began its long slide into political darkness. One morning in 1974, in what was advertised as an attempt to calm the city’s notorious traffic, Porteños awoke to find the obelisk bearing a great lighted sign that read “Silencio es salud” — “Silence is Health.” In the age of Argentina’s right-wing dictatorship, it didn’t take much to realize that the banner referred not only to car horns.
Trujillo’s government fell in 1961, and, in a pointedly anti-phallic gesture, his obelisk now bears a mural by Elsa Núñez and Amaya Salazar that celebrates the Mirabal sisters, three women who effectively martyred themselves in 1960 to help end the dictatorship.
In Latin America obelisks even made the Marxian turn from tragedy to farce. Also in 1936, Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered up a gigantic obelisk for Santo Domingo, part of his grand project to modernize and remake the city, which was, of course, renamed Ciudad Trujillo. The traditional imperial symbolism was given a nicely 20th- century sexual overtone in the dedication ceremonies, during which Jacinto Peynado, Head of the Pro-Erection Committee, praised the monument as mirroring Trujillo’s own “superior natural gifts.” At the same time, in a blatant sop to the dictator’s American sponsors, the seaside road in which the obelisk stands, the Malecón, was renamed Avenida George Washing- ton. Trujillo’s government fell in 1961, and, in a pointedly anti-phallic gesture, the obelisk now bears a mural by Elsa Núñez and Amaya Salazar that celebrates the Mirabal sisters, three women who effectively martyred themselves in 1960 to help end the dictatorship. The murals were unveiled in 1997, on International Women’s Day.
The 20th-century political leader who adopted the obelisk with the most historically informed style was Benito Mussolini. In 1932 the Italian dictator had an Art Deco–inflected “obelisk” raised on the banks of the Tiber, north of Rome’s old city center. The huge monolith bears no hieroglyphs, just the words “Mussolini Dux” in great blocky letters that run down the monument’s side. The largest piece of Carrara marble ever quarried, the obelisk was the centerpiece of the Foro Mussolini (now the Foro Italico), a grand complex of sports stadia and arenas intended as part of the Fascist campaign to encourage physical fitness — itself part of Mussolini’s plan to restore Italy’s imperial power.
It was a tall order. Italy, seat of the original European empire, came very late to the new imperialism of the 29th and 20th centuries. There had been no country of Italy at all until the 1870s, when Giuseppe Garibaldi united a fractious group of principalities into an equally fractious kingdom. The new country almost immediately began trying to acquire overseas colonies. Italy turned first to Africa, but by the end of the 19th century other European powers had neatly parceled out almost the whole continent. Only Liberia (effectively a protectorate of the United States) and Africa’s northeast corner were not yet part of the colonial system. So Italy focused its attention on the “Horn” of Africa. In short order it acquired both Eritrea and what is now the southern part of Somalia. The Italians tried to conquer Ethiopia as well, but met with an embarrassing defeat in 1896. There matters remained until Mussolini came to power in the 1920s. He renewed Italy’s push for empire, and in 1935 managed to defeat Ethiopia.
Mussolini got lucky. Among the benefits of invading Ethiopia was that, like Egypt, it was the seat of an ancient culture, one that had itself been a powerful imperial force. The kingdom of Aksum flourished from the first to the eighth centuries CE, growing rich from control of long-distance trade from the interior of Africa to the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans. Some of that wealth was spent on monuments. In the fourth century CE, the kings of Aksum had erected a series of enormous stone stelae at their capital. The great standing stones are not obelisks exactly, but they were close enough for Mussolini’s purposes. In 1937 he ordered one brought to Rome. He originally planned to set it up in the E.U.R., a model city of Fascist planning to the west of Rome’s center. Now a tourist attraction in its own right, the neighborhood, like a painting by Giorgio de Chirico come to life, captures better than any other place the aesthetic fantasies that inspired Europe’s fascists. Supremely orderly, it is ancient-seeming yet newly made at the same time — a calm, predictable place in a famously noisy, busy, and very unpredictable city. In the end, though, it was decided that the Aksum obelisk was better suited to the city of Rome proper, and Mussolini had it set up in the Piazza di Porta Capena, near the Circus Maximus, in front of the Ministry of the Colonies. E.U.R. received a gigantic “obelisk” dedicated to Guglielmo Marconi instead.
Twenty-four meters (78 feet) high and weighing 160 tons, the monument from Aksum was very much worthy of comparison to the ancient emperors’ obelisks. It is made of nepheline syenite, a hard rock similar to granite that was probably quarried about seven miles west of Aksum, at Wuchate Golo. The monument was one of many erected as part of a tomb complex in the ancient city; more than 200 survive. The largest of these originally stood 33 meters high (nearly 100 feet) and weighed about 550 metric tons, making it probably the largest monolith ever erected. At ground level its surface is carved with a false door; tiers of false “windows” climb to the top, as in a multi-storied building, perhaps representing royal residences in the next world. These stelae seem to have functioned as giant markers for subterranean tombs, probably those of the Aksumite rulers who governed just before the royal line forsook its polytheistic religion to adopt Christianity. The Aksum kingdom faded by the eighth century, and, like Rome’s obelisks, many of the stelae fell in subsequent centuries. Among the fallen was Mussolini’s, which was toppled in the 16th century, during a Muslim rebellion in Christian Aksum. It broke in three pieces, making it easier to transport when the Italians carried it overland to the coast.
The obelisk stood in Rome for only 10 years before Mussolini’s fall brought a new government and an admission that the obelisk should never have been taken. In 1947 the new Italian government agreed to return all loot taken from Ethiopia during the occupation. But they didn’t send the obelisk back. In 1956 the Italians again signed a treaty with Ethiopia, agreeing that the obelisk “was subject to restitution,” though leaving it ambiguous who was to pay the bill to send the stele home. Again, nothing happened. In 1970 the Ethiopian parliament threatened to cut off diplomatic relations with Italy unless the obelisk was returned. Again, nothing. The matter faded somewhat after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 brought a long period of political chaos, but the campaign was renewed in the 1990s by a group of Ethiopian and Western intellectuals. When the Italian government finally committed itself to returning the monument, the project was delayed yet again by the 1998–2000 border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. (Aksum is near the border.) But the case for return was strengthened in 2002 when a lightning strike damaged the obelisk, instantly demolishing the argument that it would be safer in Italy than in Ethiopia.
Even today, moving an obelisk is an engineering challenge. First the stele had to be dismantled. A team of Italian and Ethiopian experts had assembled in 2000 to study the problem. Giorgio Croci, the engineer in charge, explained that the team was anxious to avoid creating cracks or doing any further damage, and planned to separate the pieces where they had been joined when the obelisk was erected in 1937. The engineers designed a scheme using computer-guided jacks, and, in 2003, finally disassembled the obelisk. The dismantling was accompanied by the cheers of a jubilant crowd of Ethiopians, and the monument taken to a warehouse near Rome’s airport, very close to the spot where Nero’s obelisk ship had been turned into a public monument two thousand years before. Image: November 8, 2003: the Aksum obelisk being disassembled
Mussolini’s engineers had brought the obelisk to Rome by road and ship. This was no longer possible, as the roads in Ethiopia had disintegrated and the port used in the 1930s was now in Eritrea, a country that after years of war would never have permitted the Ethiopian monument to pass through its territory. Air transport was the only solution. The Italian company in charge, Lattanzi, described the obelisk as “the largest, heaviest object ever transported by air.” So big and heavy, in fact, that only two planes in the world were large enough to carry it: a Russian Antonov An-124 or an American Lockheed C5-A Galaxy. Both are themselves imperial objects, designed at the peak of the Cold War to ferry material to the far- flung proxy wars of the United States and the Soviet Union. The planes are so huge that the airstrip at Aksum had to be upgraded to handle the An-124 that took the monument home. Heaters were installed in the cargo bay to protect the stones from damage by freezing. Finally, nearly 70 years after the monument left Ethiopia, and almost 60 since the Italians first agreed to return it, on April 19, 2005, the first piece arrived back in Aksum. The other two pieces followed within the week. National celebrations commemorated the return, but there were critics as well. The move ultimately cost six million euros, and some Ethiopians questioned the amount of money spent on the project in a country without a stable and secure food supply. Others, mostly in southern Ethiopia, insisted that the cause célèbre was regional, rather than national — that it made little difference to them where the obelisk came to rest. Finally, in 2008, the obelisk rose again at Aksum — the very first wandering monolith ever to return home.
Amid all this imperial aspiration, wooly-minded New Age mythologizing, and pure unadulterated commerce, the real obelisks — their message no longer hidden behind a veil of allegory, but easily legible to any who can read hieroglyphs — still stand. Those obelisks are, more often than not, far from their original homes, but most are now equally at home in their new locations. They are majestic embodiments of the ancient culture that created them, but they are just as much the bearers of all the other ideas that have accreted to them over the many centuries since. Obelisks do not have a single meaning; they carry all the meanings ever applied to them.
Even so, the stones can speak for themselves. In Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, still a symbolic gateway to the city, stands the single obelisk conjured from the earth by order of Seti I in the 13th century BCE — more than three thousand years ago. It was completed by Ramesses II, who had it erected at Heliopolis, the city of the sun. It stood there for more than a thousand years, until in 10 BCE a new emperor — a conqueror — Augustus, wrenched it from its native place and carried across the sea to Rome. For five centuries it graced the Circus Maximus, until the new empire fell, and with it the obelisk. It broke and sank into the circus’s marshy ground. There it waited. Nearly a millennium later, it was excavated by order of an imperial pope and, in 1587, carried to its present site. The obelisk has stood there now for more than four centuries — four times longer than the Republic of Italy itself. Yet through all of the changes — geographical, intellectual, religious — the obelisk has remained the same. From time immemorial it has proclaimed, to all who could understand, the eternal fame of Pharaoh Ramesses II:
Horus-Falcon, Strong Bull, beloved of Maat; Re whom the Gods fashioned, furnishing the Two Lands; King of South and North Egypt, Usimare Setepenre, Son of Re, Ramesses II, Great of name in every land, by the magnitude of his victories; King of South and North Egypt, Usimare Setepenre, Son of Re, Ramesses II, given life like Re.
Perhaps not the sort Ramesses expected, and maybe a bit delayed, but immortality nonetheless.
Brian A. Curran was a renowned art historian and professor at Pennsylvania State University. Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Pamela O. Long is an independent historian who has published widely in medieval and Renaissance history of science and technology. Benjamin Weiss is Director of Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This article is excerpted from their book “Obelisk: A History.“ POSTED ON DEC 16, 2019
Image: November 8, 2003: the Aksum obelisk being disassembled