Netanyahu Remains Dependent on Far-Right Allies, Analysts Say


Isabel Kershner

 the New York Times
Updated Mon, 1 January 2024 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at the the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday Dec. 31, 2023. 

(Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP)

JERUSALEM — The popularity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is plummeting in Israel, according to recent surveys, and deep political divisions that had been set aside after the Hamas assault of Oct. 7 are resurfacing in the country.

But Netanyahu made it clear this weekend that he would not resign after the war in the Gaza Strip ends. Some analysts say he is determined to ensure his political survival and that of his governing coalition, Israel’s most right-wing and religiously conservative ever.

Just over a year after his latest government was sworn in, Netanyahu remains dependent on far-right allies to keep his government in power. Some analysts argue that placating those allies is at least as important to Netanyahu, who has served longer than any other Israeli prime minister, as prosecuting the war against Hamas.

Asked during a televised news conference Saturday night if he would resign after the fighting ends, Netanyahu replied that he had no intention of doing so. “The only thing I intend to be rid of is Hamas,” he said.

The governing coalition holds a fragile majority, with 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Days after Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and abducted another 240 people, some of Netanyahu’s centrist rivals joined him to form a broader emergency government and bolster his small war Cabinet. But they did not sign on to any coalition agreements, and they say they will leave the government when they see fit.

“Netanyahu is the prime minister of two separate governments — the war government, which is a wider and more unifying one; and the other, his narrow political coalition of 64 lawmakers,” said Reuven Hazan, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“The second one has priority over the first one,” Hazan added.

Netanyahu has refused to accept any personal responsibility for failures leading to the assault of Oct. 7, saying the tough questions should wait until after the war. The longer the war goes on, many analysts say, the longer he can avoid a political reckoning.

Analysts say that to keep his far-right allies from leaving the coalition, Netanyahu has delayed any serious domestic discussion or diplomatic effort around “the day after” — the issue of who will administer Gaza when the war ends, a main point of contention between Israel and the United States, its chief ally.

Deep political divisions that were largely muted after Oct. 7 are also resurfacing, including over contentious government plans for a judicial overhaul that set off months of mass protests in Israel before the war.

“Israel is drowning once again in the political abyss that threatened to sink it until Oct. 7,” Yoav Limor, a veteran defense analyst, wrote this weekend in Israel Hayom, a right-leaning newspaper.

“Pushing off talking about ‘the day after’ the war in Gaza is particularly infuriating,” Limor added. “The meaning of that decision is that ensuring the integrity of this country and its future are less important than ensuring the integrity of this coalition and its future.”

Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have threatened to bolt and bring down his government on several occasions. They oppose any role in postwar Gaza for the Palestinian Authority, which nominally controls parts of the occupied West Bank, and they reject any progress toward a permanent solution to the conflict based on the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the vision laid out by the Biden administration.

Netanyahu has spoken out against any role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza in its current form and made a vague reference Saturday night to the need for some kind of “local administration” in postwar Gaza.

In a measure of the extremes within his governing coalition, several of its members publicly advocated for reestablishing Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew in 2005. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, of the far-right Religious Zionism party, told Army Radio on Sunday that if most Palestinians living in Gaza were to leave, “the whole conversation about the day after would be different.”

“They want to go,” he said of the Palestinians, asserting that he was not supporting a forced transfer but a “migration” that Israel should encourage.

Nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians have fled their homes since Israel’s offensive began, according to the United Nations, and many have expressed fears of being pushed out of the enclave, raising the specter of another mass exile. About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the hostilities surrounding the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and many ended up in Gaza.

Rebuffing international pressure to stop the fighting in Gaza, where more than 20,000 people have been killed, according to health officials there, Netanyahu pledged on Saturday to continue the war until “absolute victory.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

In rare apology, Israeli minister says she 'sinned' for her role in reforms that tore country apart

Associated Press
Sun, 31 December 2023 

Palestinians inspect the damage of a destroyed house following Israeli airstrikes on Khan Younis, Southern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Dec. 31, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman)

JERUSALEM (AP) — A former member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet offered a rare public apology Sunday for contributing to the internal strife in Israel that preceded the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip.

The mea culpa by Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu's Likud Party, was one of the first times a Likud member has accepted responsibility for the polarized atmosphere ahead of the attack, which triggered a devastating war that has continued for nearly three months.

Distel Atbaryan appeared to accept the argument that the internal divisions created perceptions of weakness that encouraged Hamas to attack.

“I’m here sitting and telling you, the democratic, secular public: I sinned against you, I caused pain for you, I caused you to fear for your lives here, and I am sorry for this,” she told Channel 13 TV.

Distel Atbaryan added that she was taking responsibility for her role in the massive protests and civil discord that erupted after Netanyahu’s right-wing government attempted to implement a far-reaching overhaul of the judicial system. The crisis sparked mass protests, alarmed business leaders and former security chiefs, and drew concern from the United States and other close allies.

“I was one of those people that caused the state to be weakened, that harmed people,” she said. “I created a split, I created a rift, and I created tension. And this tension brought weakness. And this weakness, in many ways, brought massacre.”

Distel Atbaryan, who served as public diplomacy minister, was one of Netanyahu's strongest supporters and drew attention for her harsh criticism of his opponents.

But days after the Oct. 7 attack, she resigned when it was clear that other government ministries were handling her responsibilities.

Distel Atbaryan said the office was a “waste of public funds” during wartime. She has remained as a member of parliament in the Likud.

___

Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.

Strawberry Case Study: What If Farmers Had to Pay for Water?


Coral Davenport

The New York Times
Sat, 30 December 2023 

Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s, the berry giant, at a greenhouse in Watsonville, Calif. on Dec. 22, 2023. 

(Nathan Weyland/The New York Times)

WATSONVILLE, Calif. — The strawberry, blackberry and raspberry fields of the Pajaro Valley stretch for 10 miles along the coast of California’s Monterey Bay, jeweled with fruit from April through early December. The valley’s 30,000 acres of farmland are also ruffled with emerald lettuces, Brussels sprouts and varieties of kale, bringing in roughly $1 billion in revenue to the region each year.

All that abundance doesn’t come cheap.

While American farmers elsewhere have watered their crops by freely pumping the groundwater beneath their land, growers in Pajaro must pay hefty fees for irrigation water — making it one of the most expensive places to grow food in the country, if not the world. The cost: up to $400 per acre-foot, a standard measurement equal to water covering 1 acre, 1 foot deep. The fees bring in $12 million a year, which is used to recycle, restore and conserve the region’s groundwater.


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The Pajaro Valley’s unusual system — essentially a tax on water — was born of a berry-growing disaster some 40 years ago that forced farmers to act. Today, as the nation faces a spreading crisis of dwindling groundwater, stemming from a combination of climate change, agricultural overpumping and other issues, some experts say the Pajaro Valley is a case study in how to save the vital resource.

“What they are doing is cutting-edge,” said Felicia Marcus, a former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board and now a fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program. While a few other regions have imposed fees on groundwater for farming, Pajaro Valley has been one of the most aggressive and effective. “They are way ahead of the curve,” she said.

Experts from as far away as China and Egypt are traveling to the valley to study the system. But replicating it elsewhere could face major challenges. For one thing, “people don’t like taxes,” said Nicholas Brozovic, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska. “There’s nothing mysterious about that.”

New research on the program revealed a direct connection between paying for the groundwater and conserving it: A 20% increase in the price of groundwater has resulted in a 20% decrease in the extraction of groundwater.

One reason experts see Pajaro as a model: Despite the high price of water, agriculture in the region is thriving. It is the headquarters of major brands, including Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry supplier, and Martinelli’s, which grows most of the apples for its sparkling cider in the Pajaro Valley.

Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s who in January will become the CEO, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a model of water pricing that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere, because you can’t run a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “That would apply to the globe.”

Yet if the Pajaro Valley experiment were to be replicated across the country, it could trigger changes across the economy that affect both farmers and shoppers, resulting in higher prices at the grocery store while forcing farmers to abandon low-cost commodity crops that are needed for animal feed and other purposes, such as textiles.

While corporate growers of premium products like berries, which are shipped to the shelves of major chains like Whole Foods, Safeway and Trader Joe’s, can absorb the price of Pajaro’s water, there is no way farmers of commodity crops like cotton, alfalfa and soybeans can make the economics work, said David Sanford, the agricultural commissioner of Santa Cruz County, which includes the Pajaro Valley.

In the years since the price on water was imposed, growers of those crops either shifted to high-priced berries and lettuces or simply left the region for cheaper pastures.

“There’s a big public policy argument for pricing groundwater,” said Louis Preonas, an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland. But if you were to try something like this across the country, he added, “it would mean farmers would shift away from growing crops like corn or leave agriculture altogether. Any way you cut it, it would likely raise food prices. But the alternative is running out of water.”

A New York Times investigation this year found that many of the aquifers that supply 90% of the nation’s drinking water systems are being severely depleted by a combination of climate change and overpumping by farmers, industrial users, cities and others.

For many of the nation’s farming regions, the day of reckoning with the loss of groundwater is fast approaching. In the Pajaro Valley, it came 40 years ago.

With its loamy, sandy soil and cool nighttime breezes, the Monterey coast is an ideal climate for strawberries. But in the 1980s, disaster struck. Growers overpumped the coastal groundwater, allowing saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to seep in below their fields, up through the roots of the berry crop.

“You could see the yellow leaves, the discoloration, the stunted growth,” recalled Dick Peixoto, whose family has farmed here since 1920.

Faced with an economic disaster, Peixoto and other growers formed a local water agency with two goals: preserve the groundwater and prevent the state from taking control.

The Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, still locally run today, got to work. Its first project was installing meters to measure how much groundwater growers were using. In 1993, it started charging farmers a modest fee of $30 per acre-foot to cover the cost of managing and reading the meters.

The water agency hired hydrologists and other consultants, who concluded that the aquifer was severely overdrawn and could be lost entirely to saltwater. In response, the agency built a $6 million project to capture and divert excess rainwater from a creek near the ocean and pump it into a storage basin, where it percolates into underground wells and is eventually used for irrigation.

Next came a $20 million water recycling plant, which cleans approximately 5 million gallons of sewage each day and sends it through a network of purple pipes to farm fields. The purple signals that the water inside is recycled.

Now the agency is building an $80 million system to capture and store more rainwater to be used for irrigation. Some of the cost of the agency’s projects has been covered by federal grants and loans, with the rest from the groundwater pricing system, said Brian Lockwood, who has been the general manager of the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency for 18 years.

“These projects are millions of dollars, and without this source of revenue, they could never come to be,” he said.

As the ambitions of the water agency increased, so did the price of the water. It is scheduled to reach $500 per acre-foot by 2025.

In the early years, farmers chafed under the rate increases. “The pricing was really difficult, when the water used to be, you know, free,” said Thomas Broz, who has farmed about 75 acres in Pajaro since 1996.

Eventually, a group of growers challenged the water agency in court and were able to drive down the prices for a few years, and even forced the agency to refund about $12 million to farmers between 2008 and 2011.

But then, from 2012 to 2017, California was struck by its worst drought in recorded history, parching farmland and devastating the rural economy. Growers across the state, particularly in the Central Valley, reached a deal with the state to sharply restrict their water use and fallow their fields.

In the Pajaro Valley, water became more expensive, but at least it was still flowing. To save money, many Pajaro farmers invested in precision irrigation technology to distribute carefully measured water exactly where it was needed. Gone were the days of sprinklers that drenched fields indiscriminately.

In the midst of the drought, the then-governor of California, Jerry Brown, signed a law requiring every part of the state to devise a plan to conserve groundwater. Miles Reiter, the outgoing CEO of Driscoll’s, spoke in support of the law.

Suddenly, Pajaro was a model.

“Now we’re seen as these pioneers who showed the way,” Lockwood said. “We get calls from all over the state. ‘How did you get this going?’” He partly credits local control of the resources, saying, “This is better than the county or the state coming and taking control. And by now, this is something that’s solid. It’s been tried. It’s survived lawsuits.”

The last time the agency raised rates, in 2021, there was almost no resistance from growers, said Amy Newell, who chairs the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency Board of Directors.

Broz, who paid $20,000 last year for water, said he has come around to accepting the system.

“The farmer has very little flexibility to build in the cost of water, so it means we have to price it into our product. It means we basically can’t be as competitive,” said Broz, who grows lettuces, berries, apples and other vegetables. “But the pricing has allowed us to put in place the kind of measures that will help us have a sustainable system for the long term, if we want to keep the resource.”

In the central California valley’s Westlands water district, where many farmers fought the groundwater management law, the board of directors will soon vote on a plan that would allow growers to pay for credits to use groundwater above a certain allocation. They could buy and sell the credits, starting at about $200 a credit. A handful of other water districts in California are implementing similar measures.

Many farmers worry about the beginning of such a trend.

“The concern is that any kind of pricing scheme or market-based mechanism that tries to manage or distribute this resource is likely to privilege a certain kind of producer — a multinational corporation — at the expense of small-scale independent farmers,” said Jordan Treakle, program coordinator for the National Family Farm Coalition.

And in some parts of the country, pricing groundwater could spell an end to current crops altogether. For example, some experts said that could be the case for producers of Texas cotton, a commodity crop that relies almost entirely on groundwater from the depleting Ogallala aquifer.

Bjorn of Driscoll’s said Americans should be ready to face just that outcome.

“We can’t get away with producing something for which the resources do not exist,” he said. “We would be fooling ourselves to keep growing low-value crops in places in the desert.

“Overcoming the hump of the politics is the hardest part,” Bjorn said. “After that, it’s just managing the resource.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

Red alert in Antarctica: the year rapid, dramatic change hit climate scientists like a ‘punch in the guts’

Adam Morton and Graham Readfearn
Sat, 30 December 2023 

In this article:
Nerilie Abram
Australian scientist.Her areas of expertise are in climate change and paleoclimatology, including the climate of Antarctica, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and impacts on the climate of Australia.


Photograph: Michael Shortt/AP

Morning is a construct in the Antarctic summer. It’s 7.30am and Nerilie Abram, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, is having breakfast at Casey station when she takes Guardian Australia’s call in late November. The sun barely kissed the horizon the night before, and won’t fall below it for weeks.

Constant daylight can be famously discombobulating for first-time visitors to Antarctica, but for experienced researchers such as Abram, it is just the backdrop to life at the end of the Earth. This year, though, something else is deeply strange.

When Abram was here a decade ago there was a mass of ice floating off the coast. It’s a vastly altered scene when she looks out the window now. “There’s no sea ice at all,” she says. “It’s a magnificent landscape. To think about what we’re doing to it and the changes that are happening here, it’s a punch in the guts.”


Related: Full Story revisited: Where did all the Antarctic sea ice go? – podcast

That punch has winded scientists and policymakers across the planet this year. As the hottest year on record crawls to its finish line, they have been asking: is 2023 the year humanity put its stamp on Antarctica in ways that will be felt for centuries to come?

The southern continent has suffered dramatic shifts that raise serious concerns about its immediate health. They have coincided with evidence that longer-term transformations linked to the climate crisis have started much sooner than it was assumed was likely.

The changes have ramifications for local wildlife, but also for people across the globe in ways that are often less well understood.
A catalogue of concern

Antarctic sea ice cover crashed for six months straight, to a level so far below anything else on the satellite record that scientists struggled for adjectives to describe what they were witnessing.

While the full effect is yet to be documented, a peer-reviewed paper in August gave some insight into what it might mean. Examining satellite images, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey found that the then record drop in sea ice in late 2022 – before this year’s larger slump – could have killed thousands of emperor penguin chicks. The usually stable sea ice that colonies rely on to rear their young in the Bellingshausen Sea just wasn’t there, likely causing a “catastrophic breeding failure”.

That event in the west of the continent followed parts of the east – the coldest place on Earth – last year recording what scientists think is the biggest heatwave ever recorded, with temperatures peaking at 39C above normal.

Looking ahead, a study published in Nature in March found meltwater from the continent’s ice sheets could dramatically slow down the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, a deep ocean current, by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continued at their current level. Two months later, a paper by some of the same researchers estimated the circulation, which influences global weather patterns and ocean temperatures and nutrient levels, had already slowed by about 30% since the 1990s.

Related: ‘We’ve lost control’: what happens when the west Antarctic ice sheet melts? – podcast

Separate research by a different team of scientists suggested that accelerated melting of ice shelves extended over the Amundsen Sea in west Antarctica is locked in and beyond human control for the rest of this century even if emissions are significantly reduced.

The new element here is the pace of melting – a tripling compared to last century. Previous studies have already found the full west Antarctic ice sheet, which is protected by the ice shelves and would push up global sea levels by five metres if entirely lost, could be doomed to collapse in the much longer term.

Late in the year bird flu reached the sub-Antarctic region for the first time, prompting concerns about a potential ecological disaster if it spread further south. It was reported as a meeting of 26 national governments on the Antarctic marine environment failed to agree on new conservation areas despite hearing evidence of the range of crises at play.

The director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Matt King, says the changes in the ice and ocean had made it a year in which “even the scientists have been sobered”.

“It’s not often in my career when scientists have really been gobsmacked by what they’re seeing, but people have really been alarmed. It caught them on the hop,” he says. “We knew that substantial change was coming down the pipeline, but we have seen processes that we thought might play out in the middle of the century playing out much sooner.”
Link appears broken

The drop in floating ice was particularly abrupt. In the middle of winter, the frozen part of the Southern Ocean was about 2.5m square kilometres less than the 40-year average. That is an area a little larger than western Europe.

Scientists are cautious by nature, and have stressed it remains open to debate whether this change is mainly attributable to global heating caused by burning fossil fuels and deforestation. But it is clear that the air is warming and most of the heat trapped by increased greenhouse gases is absorbed by oceans.

A study by Australian researchers in September found hemispheric wind patterns this year and last would usually have been associated with above-average sea ice cover. They concluded that link appears to have been broken, probably due to ocean warming between 100 and 200 metres below the surface.

Related: Without the Southern Ocean we cannot survive on Earth. Our research must wait no longer | Nathan Bindoff

Experts have different ways of describing the sea ice decline. Tony Press, a former head of the Australian Antarctic Division, says it is “statistically not predictable”.

What does that mean? “There’s a chance that it could come back again, but there’s also a very, very high chance that sea ice in Antarctica has moved into a new state,” Press says. “You would not be an alarmist if you said you were really worried about that.”

Researchers say a permanent fall in sea ice is likely to accelerate ocean warming, as dark water absorbs more heat than ice and amplify the rate of global sea level rise by removing a buffer protecting the continent’s ice shelves. It will also have an immediate impact on species that rely on it for food, breeding and refuge – not just penguins but krill, fish and seals.

Press, now an adjunct professor at the University of Tasmania, says along with other changes it should be seen as the “waking of a sleeping giant” that will reverberate globally. He describes the evidence of a slowdown and potential collapse of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, in particular, as a “wake-up call”.

The overturning circulation originates in the cold and dense waters more than 4,000 metres down off the Antarctic continental shelf. It spreads to ocean basins globally, bringing oxygen to the depths and nutrients to the surface. Australian scientists found freshwater from melting Antarctic glacial ice was already reducing the water density and slowing the circulation.

Matt England, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales and co-author on the two overturning circulation studies, says the slowdown could play out over centuries, affecting heat, oxygen, nutrients and carbon stores, but he was most concerned about the next few decades.
‘Incredible geopolitical consequences’

Press says the potential ramifications are far reaching. Take fish populations. “The world relies on fisheries for protein and sustenance. If fisheries move north and south away from the equator, where nearly all the people in the world live, there are incredible geopolitical consequences,” he says.

Many scientists emphasise the need for leaders to grasp the global effect of what is happening and the scale of the work and funding that will be needed to understand it.

Kaitlin Naughten, a British Antarctic Survey ocean modeller who led the research on the inevitable increased melting of west Antarctic ice shelves, says that “just because Antarctica is far away and uninhabited doesn’t mean it won’t affect you”.

She stresses she does not want to “feed the doom narrative”. Reducing fossil fuels may not save the west Antarctic ice sheet, but other climate impacts can be avoided through decisive action. “East Antarctica has about 10 times the volume of ice as west Antarctica, and we think it’s generally stable and likely to remain that way as long as emissions don’t rise much further,” she says.

This is what Abram is spending the summer examining. In November, she was preparing to travel about 500km to drill a core of ice from Denman glacier. The goal is to see how the climate of the past 1,000 years compares with today’s.

Denman glacier is part of the massive east Antarctic ice sheet, which until a few years ago scientists had thought was largely immune from global heating. As Naughten says, it is still considered likely to mostly hold steady if the world can get fossil fuels under control.

But on Denman glacier, at least, there are “worrying signs”. “The elevation of the ice sheet is reducing,” Abram says. “There are signs it’s losing ice and contributing to sea level rise.”

If this sounds exhausting – one more thing in Antarctica to worry about – Matt England can relate.

“You look at the results and it is truly confronting,” he says. “To me, 2023, I hope, is the year when all questions of the urgency of this problem are gone.”

Memes about animal resistance are everywhere — here’s why you shouldn’t laugh off rebellious orcas and sea otters too quickly


Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, University of California, San Diego
Sun, 31 December 2023 

THE CONVERSATION

It's tempting to envision orcas attacking yachts as the forward troops in an animal uprising.

Jackson Roberts/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.

One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts.

A surfboard-snatching sea otter in Santa Cruz, California has also claimed the media spotlight. Headlines dub her an “adorable outlaw” “at large.”

Memes position the otter as a renegade revolutionary, modeled on Ché Guevara. thesurfingotter via Instagram

Memes conjure her in a beret like the one donned by socialist revolutionary Ché Guevara. In one caption, she proclaims, “Accept our existence or expect resistance … an otter world is possible.”

My scholarship centers on animal-human relations through the prism of social justice. As I see it, public glee about wrecked surfboards and yachts hints at a certain flavor of schadenfreude. At a time marked by drastic socioeconomic disparities, white supremacy and environmental degradation, casting these marine mammals as revolutionaries seems like a projection of desires for social justice and habitable ecosystems.

A glimpse into the work of some political scientists, philosophers and animal behavior researchers injects weightiness into this jocular public dialogue. The field of critical animal studies analyzes structures of oppression and power and considers pathways to dismantling them. These scholars’ insights challenge the prevailing view of nonhuman animals as passive victims. They also oppose the widespread assumption that nonhuman animals can’t be political actors.

So while meme lovers project emotions and perspectives onto these particular wild animals, scholars of critical animal studies suggest that nonhuman animals do in fact engage in resistance.

Nonhuman animal protest is everywhere

Are nonhuman animals in a constant state of defiance? I’d answer, undoubtedly, that the answer is yes.

The entire architecture of animal agriculture attests to animals’ unyielding resistance against confinement and death. Cages, corrals, pens and tanks would not exist were it not for animals’ tireless revolt.

Even when hung upside down on conveyor hangars, chickens furiously flap their wings and bite, scratch, peck and defecate on line workers at every stage of the process leading to their deaths.

Until the end, hooked tuna resist, gasping and writhing fiercely on ships’ decks. Hooks, nets and snares would not be necessary if fish allowed themselves to be passively harvested.

If they consented to repeated impregnation, female pigs and cows wouldn’t need to be tethered to “rape racks” to prevent them from struggling to get away.

If they didn’t mind having their infants permanently taken from their sides, dairy cows wouldn’t need to be blinded with hoods so they don’t bite and kick as the calves are removed; they wouldn’t bellow for weeks after each instance. I contend that failure to recognize their bellowing as protest reflects “anthropodenial” – what ethologist Frans de Waal calls the rejection of obvious continuities between human and nonhuman animal behavior, cognition and emotion.

The prevalent view of nonhuman animals remains that of René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who viewed animals’ actions as purely mechanical, like those of a machine. From this viewpoint, one might dismiss these nonhuman animals’ will to prevail as unintentional or merely instinctual. But political scientist Dinesh Wadiwel argues that “even if their defiance is futile, the will to prefer life over death is a primary act of resistance, perhaps the only act of dissent available to animals who are subject to extreme forms of control.”

Creaturely escape artists

Despite humans’ colossal efforts to repress them, nonhuman animals still manage to escape from slaughterhouses. They also break out of zoos, circuses, aquatic parks, stables and biomedical laboratories. Tilikum, a captive orca at Sea World, famously killed his trainer – an act at least one marine mammal behaviorist characterized as intentional.

Philosopher Fahim Amir suggests that depression among captive animals is likewise a form of emotional rebellion against unbearable conditions, a revolt of the nerves. Dolphins engage in self-harm like thrashing against the tank’s walls or cease to eat and retain their breath until death. Sows whose body-sized cages impede them from turning around to make contact with their piglets repeatedly ram themselves into the metal struts, sometimes succumbing to their injuries.

Critical animal studies scholars contend that all these actions arguably demonstrate nonhuman animals’ yearning for freedom and their aversion to inequity.

As for the marine stars of summer 2023’s memes, fishing gear can entangle and harm orcas. Sea otters were hunted nearly to extinction for their fur. Marine habitats have been degraded by human activities including overfishing, oil spills, plastic, chemical and sonic pollution, and climate change. It’s easy to imagine they might be responding to human actions, including bodily harm and interference with their turf.
What is solidarity with nonhuman animals?

Sharing memes that cheer on wild animals is one thing. But there are more substantive ways to demonstrate solidarity with animals.

Legal scholars support nonhuman animals’ resistance by proposing that their current classification as property should be replaced with that of personhood or beingness.

Nonhuman animals including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, horses, chimpanzees and bears increasingly appear as plaintiffs alleging their subjection to extinction, abuse and other injustices.

Citizenship for nonhuman animals is another pathway to social and political inclusion. It would guarantee the right to appeal arbitrary restrictions of domesticated nonhuman animals’ autonomy. It would also mandate legal duties to protect them from harm.

Everyday deeds can likewise convey solidarity.

Boycotting industries that oppress nonhuman animals by becoming vegan is a powerful action. It is a form of political “counter-conduct,” a term philosopher Michel Foucault uses to describe practices that oppose dominant norms of power and control.

Creating roadside memorials for nonhuman animals killed by motor vehicles encourages people to see them as beings whose lives and deaths matter, rather than mere “roadkill.”

Political scientists recognize that human and nonhuman animals’ struggles against oppression are intertwined. At different moments, the same strategies leveraged against nonhuman animals have cast segments of the human species as “less than human” in order to exploit them.

The category of the human is ever-shifting and ominously exclusive. I argue that no one is safe as long as there is a classification of “animality.” It confers susceptibility to extravagant forms of violence, legally and ethically condoned.

Might an ‘otter world’ be possible?

I believe quips about the marine mammal rebellion reflect awareness that our human interests are entwined with those of nonhuman animals. The desire to achieve sustainable relationships with other species and the natural world feels palpable to me within the memes and media coverage. And it’s happening as human-caused activity makes our shared habitats increasingly unlivable.

Solidarity with nonhuman animals is consistent with democratic principles – for instance, defending the right to well-being and opposing the use of force against innocent subjects. Philosopher Amir recommends extending the idea that there can be no freedom as long as there is still unfreedom beyond the species divide: “While we may not yet fully be able to picture what this may mean, there is no reason we should not begin to imagine it”.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.Like this article? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

It was written by: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, University of California, San Diego.

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‘Robot Dreams’ Review: Androids Dream of Disco Beats In Pablo Berger’s Sweetly Sorrowful Buddy Movie


Guy Lodge

Variety
Sun, 31 December 2023 


Android or artificial intelligence isn’t the enemy in “Robot Dreams,” Pablo Berger’s gently whimsical fantasy of a loner finding manufactured friendship in a scuzzy vision of 1980s New York City. Indeed, one takeaway from this portrait of a shabby-happy Big Apple populated solely with anthropomorphic animals and surprisingly sensitive automatons is that the world might be a better place without humans in it. Like “Blancanieves,” his silent, flamenco-styled spin on Snow White, Berger’s fourth feature dispenses with dialogue in favor of cheerfully expressive, faux-naive visual storytelling. In all other respects, however, “Robot Dreams” is a significant left turn for the Spanish writer-director, beginning with an entirely fresh medium for him: simple, sharp-lined 2D animation in the manner of a pastel-softened “BoJack Horseman.”

Both the film’s aesthetic and its wordless approach, however, are rooted in American author and illustrator Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name. Where Varon’s work was primarily targeted at young readers, the audience for Berger’s film — suffused with nostalgia for a Reagan-era New York of roller discos and boomboxes on the sidewalks — is a little harder to pin down. It’s certainly clean enough for kids, with little of the snark or cynicism that drives similarly hip-looking adult animation, though small fry might be perplexed by its drifting, low-incident narrative and overriding air of melancholy. Still, it’s in such odd, in-between niches that cult items can bloom; already well-received at such festivals at Cannes and Annecy, “Robot Dreams” should build a sufficient following to prove its own message to the lonely and forlorn: when it comes to love, quality trumps quantity.

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What kind of love, exactly, is the most intriguing question in a tale that hints at a degree of queer companionship between its two seemingly (though not definitively) male-gendered principals, all while remaining wholesomely chaste. (Given they’re a dog and a mechanical robot, it’s hard to imagine how things could be otherwise.) Unnamed protagonist Dog is introduced living a solitary life in the East Village, following a fixed routine of work, walks and glumly microwaved TV dinners — paid no mind by anyone, save the pigeons crowding around his apartment window. He’s a stoic soul, but everyone has a limit: Late one night, inspired by an infomercial on his ever-blaring television set, he orders a flatpack build-your-own-robot-kit, promoted in much the same manner as a set of Ginsu steak knives.

Whatever it costs, it’s worth it. From the moment of assembly, the unnamed Robot improbably turns out to be a most affectionate and responsive compadre, forever fixated on his canine owner with a metallic grin and perma-wide eyes. He’s not much of a conversationalist, but then neither is Dog. Their summer days are spent sightseeing, sunbathing, hotdog-eating, rollerskating through Central Park — generally taking Manhattan in more or less the manner Cole Porter described decades before, though their special song is Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September.” That ever-elastic disco nugget soundtracks multiple buddy montages of varying mood and motion: Its ebullience matches the effervescent early stages of their friendship, only to gradually become an ironic counterpoint in a story of loss and subconscious yearning.

For September comes, and with it, separation: After a day’s gambolling at Coney Island, Robot’s sea-soaked joints swiftly rust, rendering him immobile. Unable to carry his pal home, and with the beach thereafter closed for the winter, Dog must endure the winter alone — all while the abandoned Robot withers and freezes in the cold, his parts plundered by piratical critters. Only in multiple dream sequences (thus part-answering Philip K. Dick’s burning question about androids, though no electric sheep are in evidence) can he attempt a reunion with Dog. Spring will come, as will some manner of closure, though it’s fair to say the uncompromised joys of the film’s opening acts are never regained. Counter to happily-ever-after endings of the Disney variety, “Robot Dreams” embraces the pleasingly mature philosophy that there can be more than one soulmate in an individual’s life, and that a finite relationship isn’t a failed one.

It’s a poignant arc that perhaps isn’t quite robust enough to power a 100-minute feature given to rhythmic and narrative repetition. “Robot Dreams” would have been no less effective or affecting as a short subject, though that format would have admittedly kerbed the gleeful volume of nifty visual gags that Berger packs around his sweet, slender story — many of them wittily attuned to the period (frozen food and advertising trends of the era come in for a good ribbing) and the anything-goes street life of New York itself. Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.

Neanderthals and humans may belong to the same species, say scientists. It could rewrite the history of our evolution.


Marianne Guenot

Business Insider
Mon, 1 January 2024 

An employee of the Natural History Museum in London looks at model of a Neanderthal male.

Will Oliver/PA Images/Getty

Up until recently, the consensus was that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.


But most humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA, challenging the view that we are different.


Other studies suggest Neanderthals weren't inferior to Homo sapiens and should be considered human.

Neanderthals have long been portrayed as dim-witted, brutish monsters who were genetically inferior to our direct ancestors, early modern humans.

These ape-like creatures spoke in grunts, were beset with illnesses, and died out 40,000 years ago after losing the evolutionary battle against Homo sapiens.

Or at least, that's what we've been told. Recent discoveries, however, are upending that view and reigniting a debate among scientists about whether Neanderthals should be considered to be the same species as early modern humans.

If Neanderthals belonged to our species, it could reshape the history of human evolution and challenge how we define what makes us human.

Most of us have some Neanderthal DNA

The first fossils of Neanderthals were identified almost 200 years ago. By now, you would think scientists would have made up their minds about whether they should be defined as a separate species from Homo sapiens.

But it turns out this is a matter of fierce debate, Antoine Balzeau, a paleontologist from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France, told Business Insider.

"When we were at first discussing the fossils in the 19th century, there was no real debate about specific species or not, simply because at the time, humans were seen as a species but by default," he said.

The cast of a Neanderthal skull is displayed in the Chemnitz State Museum of Archaeology.Hendrik Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images

As more fossils emerged, scientists started questioning the strict separation between the species.

Still, up to recently, the consensus was mostly that Neanderthals should be seen as separate. The hominins, who roamed Europe as early as 430,000 years ago, only briefly interacted with Homo sapiens emerging from Africa, who reached Europe about 50,000 years ago.

The lineages separated about 500,000 years ago — relatively recently in the story of human evolution, but long enough ago that they looked significantly different. For many, that evidence was enough to close the debate: Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.

That view started to change in 2008 when Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo achieved something that was thought to be impossible: he sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal by extracting DNA from ancient bones.

Through his research, Pääbo was able to show that there's a little Neanderthal in most of us. In fact, he showed most living humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA.

The evidence also suggests that human ancestors and Neanderthals likely had children together when they cohabitated about 50,000 years ago.

This news created a dogmatic rift, opening up the possibility, once again, that Neanderthals and humans should be considered to be the same species.

After all, according to the strict biological definition of species, animals from different species shouldn't be able to produce fertile offspring.

"It definitely was a big game changer at that point," Laura Buck, an evolutionary anthropologist studying hybridization between hominin species, told BI.

"I think it has sort of brought that discussion to the forefront again," she said.
Were Neanderthals more than just our distant cousins?

The idea that species can't reproduce is "intuitively attractive because it's sort of clear cut," Buck said, "but biology isn't clear cut."

She points to several examples of mammals that have been known to interbreed and have fertile offspring, like wolves and dogs, despite being clearly defined as separate species.

For her, a better definition of Neanderthals, the most scientifically tried and tested, is the first one: the characteristics of their bones separate them from modern humans and their direct ancestors.

Hyperrealistic face of a Neanderthal male is displayed in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina.

REUTERS/Nikola Solic

"I know there are various different papers saying if you shaved a Neanderthal, put him in a suit, and put him on the tube or the subway in New York, no one would notice, I don't think that's true," she said.

"I think we'd definitely think they looked a bit weird," she said.

Balzeau agrees. "There may be some discussion between specialists about how we define the different groups but from a paleontological point of view, Homo neanderthalensis and almost Homo sapiens are very clear anatomical differences," said Balzeau.

For others, however, the genomic information should be another argument to liberate the Neanderthal from its knuckle-dragging stereotype.

That's the case for Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist who specializes in the Paleolythic at Durham University in the UK.

"It would be guesswork to use that evolutionary divergence to assume that there are different species," he told BI.

Can culture define a species?

Over the past two decades, digs started emerging showing Neanderthals may have been much more sophisticated than had been previously thought.

Pettitt counts himself among those who, until recently, were skeptical that Neanderthals could have any sense of sophistication.

"Until say 20 years ago, Neanderthal behavior was looked on as fairly stupid, or at least fairly limited, and Homo sapiens were, by contrast, seen as quoting Shakespeare, as they dance across Europe," he joked.

"Which is, of course, nonsense, but it's a very entrenched view," he said.

This is thought to have been Neanderthal jewelry created using eagle talons 130,000 years ago.

After all, relative to their size, some studies suggest Neanderthals had a brain at least the same size, if not bigger, than our ancestors, indicating that they may have been very cerebral, Pettitt said

"You don't buy a top-of-the-range computer simply to use it as an alarm clock. There's got to be an evolutionary reason why Neanderthals had selected for this remarkably, metabolically expensive tissue," he said.

Studies have suggested that Neanderthals were skilled hunters, and hide workers, created rudimentary jewelry, had a complex lythic industry, and even worked with pigment.

Some scientists even believe they may have had some form of spiritualism, and would bury their dead, revere lions, and may have even created cave paintings — though that evidence is still a matter of debate.

For Pettitt, this suggests that as Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other in Europe, there's a good chance they shared a culture or learned from observing each other.

If they spoke, he said, "we can assume they probably spoke different languages. But that similarity suggests there was in fact a shared meaning, however simple."
Could Neanderthals be called human?

There's a bigger picture question at stake here: should Neanderthals be considered humans?

"What humanity is very much depends on which group of people you're talking to," Buck said.

"It's something that is culturally defined, but it's also something that has sort of value judgments. We talk about inhumanity. We talked about humanity. It's not something that just refers to different types of organisms," she said.

With the sheer number of people who are alive today, there is arguably more Neanderthal DNA on Earth than there ever was before.

Angela Saini, author of "Superior: the Return of Race Science," argues that there is a real risk of getting this wrong. Those who are thought to have more Neanderthal DNA today could be wrongly thought of as inferior.

Early studies have linked these Neanderthal genes to modern health effects like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and some cancer— though how these genes exactly affect the health of the person who carries them is still mostly unclear. Neanderthal genes have also notably been associated with catching COVID-19.

Because East Asian populations have been found to carry slightly more Neanderthal DNA on average, there is a real danger that this information will be used for discrimination.

The flip side is that our interpretation of Neanderthal culture has changed dramatically in recent years. Saini notes that the Neanderthal image was rehabilitated just as people started to draw them closer to populations in Europe, and genetic information started suggesting they were fairer skinned with red hair.

"That's what I find particularly galling. A hundred or so years ago, the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used as a justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity," she told WNYC.

"Now, because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern-day Europeans, Neanderthals themselves an extinct species has been thrown into that circle of humanity."

Rewriting our history

We are still in the process of understanding Neanderthals and our relationship to them. As we begin to unpick the history of human and Neanderthal evolution, new scrutiny is being placed on the decision of scholars to separate the two and depict one as superior.

When he revealed his research, Pääbo reflected on how humans living on the Earth today are rather exceptional — not necessarily because Homo sapiens are intrinsically better, but because there is very little time in the history of human evolution when Homo sapiens were the only hominin or human on the planet.

"Had Neanderthals and Denisovans survived, how would we deal with that today?" Pääbo said.

"Would we experience even worse racism against them than what we experience among us today — because they were in some respects really different — or could we think differently and say if we had them here today we would not just have one type of humans?" he added.

"I think both things are possible and it sort of reflects our view of humans and how we speculate about that."

A FRENCH candy maker helped popularize canning by bottling everything from eel to eggs to peaches

WAR AND COLONIALISM CREATED THE NEED FOR CANNED FOOD

Jenny McGrath
Mon, 1 January 2024 


Napoleon wanted to conquer the world, but he lost thousands of soldiers to starvation, disease, and hypothermia.

Heritage Images via Getty Images

In the 1800s, expanding empires and seafaring explorations required reliablely preserved food.


A candy maker was awarded 12,000 francs for his method of heating and sealing food in glass jars.


The bottles were heavy and fragile and were soon replaced by canned foods.

In 1815, explorer and botanist Sir Joseph Banks wrote to a tinned-food manufacturer raving about the canned two-year-old veal he'd just eaten.

He called canned food "one of the most important discoveries of the age we lived in." He also requested a supply of concentrated consummé, as it was better than the soup he usually ate "at home or abroad."

At the time, commercial canned food was practically brand-new — nearly the same age as Bank's veal.

Finding a reliable means of preserving food was essential for colonizing and warring nations. That included Napoleon Bonaparte's France.

The search for food preservation methods

Napoleon witnessed the effects of hunger and thirst as he led his army through the Egyptian heat in 1798.

When he took power in France, Napoleon elevated doctors and scientists to positions of power to solve problems like this.

Those men then formed organizations and "supported research related to food preparation and preservation that might benefit France's armies and navies," historian Jennifer J. Davis wrote in "Defining Culinary Authority."

In 1809, one such organization, the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, held a contest searching for food preservation methods.

Nicolas Appert — who had been sealing food in corked jars for several years and had already been experimenting with heating and bottling food for over a decade — took the prize.
The Appert method of food preservation

Appert had been in the food industry practically since childhood. His father was an innkeeper and brewery owner, and he'd worked in distilleries and wine cellars before opening his own confectionery shop.

The heating process needed to make candy as well as the bottling process for wine and beer may have influenced his method for preserving food. He described himself as reared "in the art of preparing and preserving" and "having lived, as it were, in pantries, in breweries, in store-rooms, and in the cellars of Champagne."

In 1795, he started trying to preserve different foods. He used empty Champagne bottles, then specially made glass containers. After sealing them, he'd boil the entire bottle and its contents in a water bath.

Nicolas Appert developed a large-scale method for preserving food that was a precursor to canning.

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Appert wasn't precisely sure why his method worked, but he believed limiting its contact with air and the water's heat were "both indispensable." He was correct on both counts.

In addition to bottling vegetables and fruit like asparagus, cauliflower, peaches, and cherries, Appert also partially cooked some dishes before bottling and heating them. He made seasoned eel, mutton tongue, meat broth, and egg in bechamel sauce.

To make sure his food retained the proper color, aroma, and taste, he tested different times and temperatures for heating different dishes. Many probably wouldn't pass food-safety inspections, like the beef jelly that only needed heating for 15 minutes.

Each jar of preserves could cost a day's wage. For those who could afford it, they could open the can (which was actually quite a chore until the can opener was invented decades later) and enjoy almost-fresh green vegetables in the middle of winter.
Why Appert's method didn't catch on

In 1810, the French Ministry of the Interior paid Appert 12,000 francs to print a description of his preserving process "to spread the knowledge." His book, "The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances For Several Years," sold thousands of copies.

"Appert has found a way to fix the seasons," according to one paper. Elite cookbook authors praised his process.

Folklorist Danille Elise Christensen noted that the "sugarless water-bath procedures" appeared in cookbooks written by women as early as the 1680s. Stories that focus on Appert while ignoring Mary Mott, Sarah Martin, and others "valorize 'scientific' over and against 'domestic' knowledge," Christensen wrote.

Appert had been able to scale his technique, at one point employing fifty cooks to help make his preserved dishes.

Other processes, including drying and using salt and sugar to preserve foods, endured after Appert published his book. His method was "not used widely on a scientific or industrial level" outside of his own factory, according to Davis.

Though the French navy had trialed Appert's preserves before he wrote his book, his fragile glass bottles weren't practical for sea voyages. Within a few years, another French citizen, Philippe de Girard, went to London and patented his idea for a tin can through an intermediary.
From glass bottles to tin cans

Bryan Donkin purchased the patent for £1,000, and it was he and his partners who made the consummé Banks so enjoyed. The cans could weigh as much as 20 pounds, but they were hardier than Appert's bottles.

The industry started spreading almost immediately. By the 1820s, the US had a few canneries, and the country's first patent for tin cans was granted in 1825.

An engraving from the 1870s shows a busy French cannery.

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

This was all decades before Louis Pasteur developed his pasteurization method and realized bacteria caused contamination. His technique significantly reduced the number of bacteria without fully sterilizing the food — that is, killing off everything.

Botulism has been called "a disease of civilization." Sausages and smoked ham have both caused deadly outbreaks. Improperly canned food can also harbor the bacteria.

It's one of the many reasons commercially sold canned goods have waxed and waned in popularity in the centuries since Appert's first experiments.

Despite his early success, Appert struggled with debt. When late in life he was threatened with eviction, he wrote to the Ministry of the Interior, "I gave my life to science and to mankind. You're taking away the premises I thought ought to be mine."

Though he was evicted from his lab in 1824, the Restoration government eventually paid him 4,000 francs annually for ten years "in recognition of his service to the nation," according to Davis.

Nikki Haley’s comment on the US civil war was no gaffe

Sidney Blumenthal

The Guardian
Opinion
Mon, 1 January 2024


Photograph: Christian Monterrosa/AFP/Getty Images

Nikki Haley’s feigning of staggering ignorance about the cause of the US civil war unintentionally revealed her quandary in the Republican party. It was not a gaffe. Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by. Some in the past praised her evasive formula as governor of South Carolina as her finest moment. It lifted her star. Yet one simple question instantly produced panicky rapid eye movements that are the telltale sign of a person desperately cornered, followed by an unstoppable stream of blather that she hoped would make it all evaporate into a meaningless ether but instead this time slid her into an abyss. Her performance, the most memorable of her entire career, was so devastating that even Ron DeSantis, the paragon of political aphasia, in the most cogent remark of his campaign, indeed his life, commented: “Yikes.” Nikki Haley turned Ron DeSantis woke.

Related: ‘History is not what happened’: Howell Raines on the civil war and memory

“What was the cause of the United States civil war?” a man asked Haley at a campaign town hall in North Conway, New Hampshire. She reacted as if she were being physically threatened. Haley immediately turned her back to the questioner, breathed fast and heavy into the microphone, and walked quickly away. When she swiveled to face the crowd, she did not speak at first. Gaining her composure, she replied with an accusatory edge: “Well, don’t come with an easy question.”


Of course, the answer is an easy one for any eighth grader. But for Haley it went to the molten core of the history and politics of South Carolina, where she had been governor, to the southern strategy that realigned the Republican party, and to its hard crystallization in Trump’s party. She retreated as if struck, not because she didn’t know the obvious answer, but because she knows that it is more fraught than it has been in decades.

“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.

“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”

She looked to her questioner in the hope that her flood of verbosity had overwhelmed him. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” he said. She shot back with her own question, as if in a spat: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” She wanted the townsman to answer for her. “You’ve answered my question, thank you,” he said. With that, he had won his point. Haley shifted again, and said: “Next question.”

Haley’s whole possibility of success in her contest with Trump depends upon winning New Hampshire, and within that open primary, unlike the closed primaries that follow it, she is relying on drawing independent voters. Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct. She keeps trying to pass the southern test.

If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction

Her language in New Hampshire was the same as the rhetoric she honed in South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’” The Journal noted approvingly: “She pledged to retain a political compromise that gave the Confederate flag a place of prominence in front of the State House, a position that puts her within the mainstream among GOP leaders in the state.”

Haley’s answer was an attempt to repeat her balancing act in the birthplace of secession, offering ‘lost cause lite’. Her rationale was a muffled echo of that of Confederate leaders justifying secession. Jefferson Davis, in his speech resigning from the Senate on 9 January 1861, before assuming the Confederate presidency, appealed to “the principles upon which our Government was founded”, and his “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited”. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice-president and framer of the Confederate constitution, in his speech of 21 March 1861 proclaiming slavery as its “cornerstone”, stated that it “secures all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties”. The Confederates consistently described opposition to their insurrection as “coercion”, to which Lincoln gave one of his many answers on 18 April 1864: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”

It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire. There are nearly 100 in the state to the Union cause. One-tenth of the population of New Hampshire at the time served in the Union army: 32,750 men, of whom nearly 5,000 died, 130 in Confederate prisons. The fifth New Hampshire volunteer infantry had the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment. About 900 soldiers from New Hampshire fought at Gettysburg, suffering 368 casualties, many of whom are buried at the cemetery there, where Lincoln delivered his address explaining their sacrifice for a “government of, by and for the people”. The monument to the fifth New Hampshire is one of five monuments to Granite state units at the Gettysburg battlefield.

If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up.

Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The Confederate battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor.

On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war. In the aftermath, after a contentious debate in the legislature, the Confederate flag was removed from the capitol. Haley favored its lowering. In 2020, another John C Calhoun statue, which had stood on a pedestal 115ft above central Charleston for 120 years, was removed.

Since the controversy over the Confederate flag, Haley has defended neo-Confederates who see it as a symbol of their “heritage” while trying to separate it from Dylann Roof. “For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”



The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party

In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.” In New Hampshire, she gave a blander argument, forgetting the false equivalence between those against slavery and those for “heritage”.

***

Lee Atwater, the most adept Republican political consultant to emerge from the south in his generation, did not try to parse his self-justifications. He was also a voracious reader of books on the civil war, especially James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Atwater, of course, knew the cause was slavery. In the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I had long discussions with him on the civil war. He was the one who gave me a tour of the capitol in Columbia and showed me the Calhoun statue.

Atwater began as a protege of Strom Thurmond, who invented the modern southern strategy. In 1948, Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, ran for president as a segregationist on the Dixiecrat party ticket. Elected to the Senate, he switched parties to become a Republican. His support for Richard Nixon in winning the Republican nomination at the convention in 1968 was crucial. Thurmond brought in Atwater to run his 1976 re-election campaign, beginning Atwater’s ascent. In 1984, working for the Reagan re-election campaign, when I first met him, he drew a chart in my reporter’s notebook to diagram the populist-establishment dichotomy along party lines.

Race was always the seam that Atwater mined. In 1988, as the campaign director for George HW Bush, he was behind the exploitation of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts, who on a weekend furlough program raped a white woman. The program had been instituted under a Republican governor, but Horton had been released while the governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent, had been in office. Atwater publicly promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate”.

Atwater explained in 1991 the evolution of race as a political weapon in the southern strategy. “Y’all don’t quote me on this,” he said. “You start out in 1954 by saying: ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”

That same year, Atwater died of brain cancer, but not before, seeking redemption, he issued a deathbed apology to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty”.

Haley came on the South Carolina scene post-Thurmond and post-Atwater, certainly aware of those who had turned the state Republican in the southern strategy. Her lowering of the Confederate flag has been her chief credential of moderation. Then Trump came down the escalator. Atwater was the partner in the consulting firm with Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, who unlike Atwater never has had any use for apologies.

Posed a question about the civil war, Haley tried to repeat her old balancing act, but she lost her equilibrium. Even if she had not been stunned and was instead fluent, she could not bridge the gap in the party of Trump with ‘lost cause lite’. Scrambling belatedly to say the questioner was “a Democratic plant” and that the civil war was about slavery after all did not solve her problem. Trump has now dispensed with the code words and symbols of the southern strategy. He has gone to a darker place, railing about “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood”.

The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party.

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth