Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany

by C.J. Hopkins / April 4th, 2024

One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” and demonize them, and the artists who created them, and censor them, or otherwise erase them.

The Nazis went about this process in their characteristically ham-fisted fashion …

“In September 1933, the Nazis created the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber oversaw the production of art, music, film, theater, radio, and writing in Germany. The Nazis sought to shape and control every aspect of German society. They believed that art played a critical role in defining a society’s values. In addition, the Nazis believed art could influence a nation’s development. Several top leaders became involved in official efforts on art. They sought to identify and attack ‘dangerous’ artworks as they struggled to define what ‘truly German’ art looked like.” — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

One of the most ham-fisted events in the course of this process of ideological “synchronization” (a process known as “Gleichschaltung” in German) was the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich in 1937 …

New Normal Germany is not Nazi Germany, so there is no “New Normal Chamber of Culture,” and no new “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism, one which can’t afford to be perceived as totalitarianism, and thus the Gleichschaltung process works a bit differently.

I’m going to use my prosecution as an example, again. I apologize to any regular readers who are sick of hearing me go on about it. I know, I promised not to go all “Late Lenny Bruce,” but the Germans keep providing me with new comedy material. If you’re not one of those regular readers and thus are unfamiliar with the background of my case, you can read about it in The Atlantic, Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, and in various independent media outlets.

The short version is, back in 2022, I posted two Tweets criticizing mask mandates and making fun of Karl Lauterbach, the German Health Minister. Both Tweets included an image from the cover artwork of my latest book, The Rise of The New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

The German authorities did not appreciate those Tweets, so they (1) had them censored by Twitter, (2) had Amazon ban my book in Germany, and (3) dragged me into criminal court and prosecuted me on trumped-up “hate crime” charges. I was acquitted of those charges at my trial in January, but the Berlin State Prosecutor has appealed the verdict.

The latest bit of comic material the German authorities have provided me with is a copy of the prosecutor’s grounds for the appeal. In it, the Oberstaatsanwältin als Hauptabteilungsleiterin (i.e., “The Senior Public Prosecutor and Department Head”) argues that my Tweets do not express opposition to the Nazis, which … she’s right, they don’t. They express opposition to the mask mandates, and lies of the German authorities, and their violation of the German constitution.

My Tweets do not express my opposition to the Nazis because my Tweets assume opposition to the Nazis. They assume that all decent people understand and take it for granted that the Nazis were … well, Nazis, vicious, sadistic, mass-murdering fascists, with zero respect for democracy and the rule of law, who were obsessed with imposing their fanatically insane ideology on the entire planet. They (i.e., my Tweets) assume that comparing a contemporary group of power-intoxicated, constitution-violating, official-propaganda-spewing psychopaths — for example, the current German authorities — to the Nazis is not exactly a compliment.

The Senior Public Prosecutor and Head of Department, who is clearly not only an expert on the law, and political commentary, but is also an expert on art, and subtlety, and other elements of aesthetics, explains the other problem with my art (i.e., in addition to the problem of opposing the German authorities’ unconstitutional dictates when I should have been opposing the Nazis) in her “Revisionsbegründung” (“Grounds for Appeal”) … too much subtlety, not enough “clarity” and “obviousness.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Revisionsbegründung (translation, clarification, and emphasis mine).

“The general politically-critical presentation [of the Tweets] does not even begin to express opposition to the NSDAP [i.e., the Nazi Party] and its ideology in an equally obvious and unequivocal way.” […] “Ultimately, the representations express that the accused wanted to emphasize his concerns about the measures in the Corona policy by adding the so-called swastika and the implicit reference to National Socialism. The implication is diametrically opposed to the required obviousness and clarity.”

If only someone had told me about the importance of “obviousness” in works of art when I was back in film school or starting out as an avant-garde playwright in New York City, who knows, I could have been somebody! Instead, I got myself all confused by artists like … well, for example, John Heartfield. The title of this 1936 piece is “HAVE NO FEAR – HE’S A VEGETARIAN.”

In light of The Senior Public Prosecutor’s argument, I don’t know what to think about this piece anymore. What was Heartfield trying to say? Was he pro- or anti-Hitler? More importantly, was he pro- or anti-vegetarian?

And what are we supposed to think about this? Is Barbara Kruger pro- or anti-shopping?

And here’s an illustration by Anthony Freda, the artist who designed the cover of my book, and who is clearly suffering from a “clarity and obviousness” deficiency!

Oh, and speaking of inadequate “clarity” and “obviousness,” and the displaying of swastikas on German Twitter, here’s a Tweet by Die Tageszeitung, the big “left” newspaper here in Berlin …

Back in November, my attorney filed a complaint about that Tweet with the Public Prosecutor, as an experiment, just to see how they would respond. Of course, they declined to investigate, and prosecute, and cited the same exceptions to the ban on displaying swastikas that apply in my case, and which the judge also cited when she acquitted me in January.

I asked my attorney to carry out that experiment, because, at the time, I was terribly confused about whether Die Tageszeitung opposed the Nazis, or was trying to promote the Nazis, or what, exactly, all those swastikas and smirking Nazis were doing in a Tweet about “German Muslims” and other “migrant people” and how they think about the Holocaust. In the end, I decided the Twitter operators at Die Tageszeitung were probably working under the same assumption about how people view the Nazis as I was when I posted my two Tweets, i.e., the assumption that the Nazis were bad and that you do not have to reiterate that to the general public each and every time you include a photograph of them, or a swastika, in your social-media artwork.

But, seriously now, as I noted in court, my case has nothing to do with the Nazis or The Senior Public Prosecutor’s understanding of art. It’s part of the crackdown on political dissent that is being carried out, not just here in Germany, but in countries all throughout the West. Yes, it’s particularly fascistic in Germany — if you can read German, here is yet another example of a case like mine, but under a different pretext — and it is absolutely focused on critics of the official Covid narrative and the Covid restrictions, but it isn’t focused exclusively on us. If you can set aside your allegiance to whatever side of whatever you have pledged it to, and have a look at what is coming down the pipe, or is already all the way down the pipe, in the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, and various other countries … well, I strongly recommend that you do that, preferably before we all get “gleichgeschaltet.”

If you need a place to start, I posted links to a few articles on Matt Taibbi’s Notes thing …’

OK, that’s it … I need to finish this column and go and up my “clarity and obviousness” game. The last thing I’d want to do at this point is post some other non-obvious art and accidentally “delegitimize the state.” I’m already in enough trouble as it is! Thank God I have The Senior Public Prosecutor’s Revisionsbegründung to refer to!

I tell you, I don’t know where I’d be without these Germans!Facebook

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C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. Read other articles by C.J..

“Genocide Enablers” Gaza And The Corporate Media

by Media Lens / April 5th, 2024

A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. They do supply news. But it is no accident that they supply news of a type that covers up the crimes of elite power.

However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal. We may well be living through an unprecedented era where the vast crimes of the West, and the complicity of major news organisations, have never been more exposed to the public.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in a recent interview:

‘We are seeing a massacre in front of our eyes—it is absolutely inhumane; it is absolutely war crimes; it is arguably, I personally think, likely genocidal according to the legal standards of the 1948 Genocide Convention.’

He continued:

‘We haven’t had genocides captured by video feed day by day.

‘We have IDF forces standing with their thumbs up as they blow up universities, mosques, hospitals, and apartment buildings—it’s unbelievable. We have members of the Israeli cabinet preaching hate.

‘We’ve seen these religious nationalist extremist rabbis talk about killing all the people in Gaza. “And do you mean the children?” the Rabbi is asked. “Yes, the children. They can grow up to be terrorists.”’

The indescribable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has elicited little more than anguished hand-wringing from Western leaders who have continued to send weapons to the apartheid state.

Sachs made the point that matters which is so often ignored or glossed over by ‘responsible’ media, notably BBC News:

‘It could end by the United States government saying, “We are not providing the munitions for slaughter, period.”’ That would end it. Israel cannot do this one day without the United States.’

Likewise, the daily Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, the country’s most widely distributed newspaper, recently carried a key quote from its lead correspondent [cited in an interview with former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy at around 6 mins : 25 secs] that:

‘Israel could not continue this war were it not for US military support.’

Indeed, a clear-cut historical example of US leverage over Israel was provided by Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, an American think tank specialising in US foreign policy:

‘In 1982, President Ronald Regan was “disgusted” by Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. He stopped the transfer of cluster munitions to Israel and told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a phone call that “this is a holocaust.” Reagan demanded that Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Begin caved. Twenty minutes after their phone call, Begin ordered a halt on attacks.’

Five British prime ministers have stopped arms to Israel in the past, including Margaret Thatcher when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Tony Blair who stopped the export of UK weapons that could be used to suppress Palestinians during the Second Intifada in 2002. But not Rishi Sunak, so far, in 2024.
‘Nothing Left To Assault’

Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone wrote this week:

‘Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.’

British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza, told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview:

‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarized the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place. And the genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.’

Dr Abu-Sittah paid tribute to Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a fellow surgeon who was killed by Israeli forces at Al-Shifa alongside his mother:

‘And so, they have the blood of my friend — the blood of Ahmad Maqadmeh is on the hands of the CNN journalists and the BBC journalists and the ITV journalists, who, from the very beginning, were peddling this narrative.’

These news organisations, and others, have routinely downplayed Israeli atrocities by serially publishing deceptive headlines that mask Israel’s responsibility. For example, when seven aid workers, three of them British, were killed in an Israeli drone attack this week, targeted in three separate strikes along a supposed ‘approved’ Israeli route, the New York Times (NYT) headline was:

‘Founder of World Central Kitchen says several workers killed in Gaza airstrike’

The word ‘Israel’ was glaringly absent from the NYT headline. Middle East historian Assal Rad said:

‘Covering up Israel’s crimes enables them to commit more, name the attacker.’

If something similar had happened in Ukraine, the headline would have prominently featured the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Putin’.

Similarly, the NYT last month shielded Israel with the headline:

‘Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh call for ceasefire’.

The phrase ‘Israeli massacre of Gazans’ was missing from the headline.

Rad pointed out yet another egregious example: an Economist article titled, ‘Gaza could face a famine by May’:

‘An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn’t say the word “Israel” once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.

‘Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include.’

Presumably stung by public exposure and criticism, the Economist later updated its piece to include mention of Israel…by including the propaganda claim: ‘Israel insists it is not obstructing aid lorries.’ Days later, this lie – because that is simply what it is – was highlighted by the Israeli murder of the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen.

Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official in New York who resigned last year over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, tweeted:

‘The murder of @WCKitchen staff is only the latest. The genocidal Israeli regime has sealed the border & destroyed crops, wells, bakeries & food stores, murdered 200 aid workers, targeted security for aid, blocked aid trucks & massacred starving people lined up for aid. #genocide’

A Guardian website headline declared:

‘Israeli military investigating after foreign aid workers killed in Gaza airstrike’.

As former UK diplomat Craig Murray noted:

‘Beyond satire from @Guardian. Who killed them?

‘The Israeli military are the good guys apparently, investigating it.’

Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, observed:

‘Israel makes allegations against UNRWA but provides zero evidence. What happens? UK suspends funding pending investigation Israel carries out three strikes against known aid worker vehicles. What happens? UK says – Israel please investigate yourself, and we’ll still sell you arms’

It is clear that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, and Israel’s starvation of Gazans, are deliberate. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said via X (formerly Twitter):

‘Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed #WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries & most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.’

Israel’s intention, made clear in multiple public statements, is to get rid of Palestinians from Gaza and to impose Israeli sovereignty ‘from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’.

It is significant that even establishment-friendly figures on prominent platforms are finally speaking out. Richard Madeley of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, clearly appalled by Israel’s killing of seven aid workers, described it as an ‘execution’ while Nick Ferrari of LBC called for the suspension of UK arms sales to Israel, adding:

‘It could’ve been our missiles that killed them.’

One could rightly argue that such outrage is long overdue. At the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza is 33,000, including more than 13,000 children. There is even overwhelming evidence that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza. In a dramatic front-page spread under the stark headline, ‘Enough’, the Independent loudly declared:

‘It may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality.’

‘It may seem wrong’? It is wrong. It is damning evidence that Palestinian lives are deemed by those in power to be less valuable than the lives of Westerners. But it is right that so many are now saying, ‘Enough’, regardless of the motivation.
‘Not A Normal War’

Dr Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician who founded the US-based charity Humanity Auxilium, left Gaza in the third week of February as Israeli forces were threatening a ground assault against Rafah. She said:

‘This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.’

Claudia Webbe, the independent MP for Leicester East, summarised where we are:

‘Israel is out of control.

‘Israel is deliberately killing International aid workers. It has now passed a law to ban journalists.

‘Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza. Murder and genocide in plain sight. They don’t want you to know the truth. Our political leaders are complicit’

But the complicit role of the media also needs to be highlighted. Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, believes that:

‘We need journalism that is committed to accurate and uncompromising investigation and not a spurious “impartiality” that hides brutal facts of occupation and genocide.’

Freedman noted that the BBC, along with other major news outlets, largely ignored growing claims of Israeli genocide until the South African government brought evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024. The ICJ then found that there was a ‘plausible’ case that genocide was taking place.

Freedman continued:

‘Since then, references to genocide on broadcasters’ ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) feeds – a sign of their editorial priorities – have virtually disappeared. While there are 54 mentions of genocide in Al Jazeera’s feed since 1 February, there is not a single one in the feeds of @BBCNews, @BBCWorld or @Channel4News.’

The BBC actually made the rare concession of a ‘mistake’ in their live coverage of the ICJ genocide case against Israel. BBC editorial policy director David Jordan made the admission to MPs after BBC editors had chosen to show Israel’s defence against genocide charges in full, while only showing clips of South Africa’s case arguing Israel is committing genocide.

Despite Jordan’s denial, the unequal coverage was indicative of serious BBC bias on Israel and Palestine, as has been demonstrated over many years by the Glasgow University Media Group, for example, and by a recent report from the Centre for Media Monitoring.

One glaring aspect of the crisis in what passes for ‘democracy’ in this country is that there is no real party of opposition in Westminster. Labour under Sir Keir Starmer has done its best to divest itself of anything that smacks of socialism, cleaving as closely as possible to the establishment, and not daring to ruffle the feathers of the billionaire-owned press.

Peter Oborne, former Telegraph chief political writer, observed recently that:

‘From the suffragettes to Gandhi, those who challenged the British state and were labelled extremists ended up being vindicated. The pro-Palestine protesters will be too.’

He warned that the real extremists are those running the country or who wish to do so:

‘I am coming to believe that the real extremists can be found in Downing Street, the Conservative Party, and in Starmer’s Labour Party.’

In a scathing column explaining why he was rescinding his Labour party membership, Owen Jones wrote:

‘The assault on Gaza, the great crime of our age, adds moral indecency to the pile of dishonesty and vacuity. When Starmer declared Israel had the right to cut off energy and water to Palestinian civilians, he did so as a human rights lawyer who understands the Geneva conventions. After letting shadow cabinet ministers defend him, he claimed it “has never been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”. We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.’

There are now belated and sporadic calls from Westminster demanding British arms be ‘suspended’. Insufficient media attention has focused on the damaging revelation that the Tory government has been told by its lawyers that Israel is in breach of international law and that the UK ‘has to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay’ or it could be found to be complicit in genocide. The government wishes to bury these truths.

But pressure continues to mount on Downing Street: more than 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, including three former supreme court justices, have signed a letter to the prime minister warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel. Neither the Tory government nor the Labour ‘opposition’ have yet agreed to stop selling arms to Israel. ‘Shameful’ hardly sums it up.

Meanwhile, Department for Business and Trade civil servants who administer licenses for arms exports to Israel have raised concerns with their trade union that they could be complicit in war crimes in Gaza. They wish to cease such work ‘immediately’. As reported by Sky News, the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, has requested an urgent meeting with the department to discuss ‘the legal jeopardy faced by civil servants who are continuing to work on this policy.’

What does it say about the state of British society, and indeed democracy itself, that the public is being denied a realistic political choice to dissociate itself from mass slaughter and to stop the genocide in Gaza?

Noam Chomsky has often pointed out that ‘the ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged’ and that ‘elections are largely a ritual form.’ In other words, the public is technically allowed to participate in ‘democracy’ by pushing buttons every few years. But we have ‘essentially no role in formulating policy’. Our function is largely reduced to ratifying decisions made by the people in power. (Quoted in ‘Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter’, Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, PM Press, 2021, pages 103 and 159).

If public awareness of this reality becomes widespread, then, and only then, is there hope of real progress in society.

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

 

WMO Bright Red Alert

by Robert Hunziker / April 5th, 2024

The World Meteorological Organization (Geneva, Switzerland) State of Climate 2023 Report by Celste Saulo, secretary general, was issued on March 19th, 2024.

“As secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, I am now sounding the Red Alert about the state of the climate.”

The WMO has issued an annual State of the Climate Report for more than 30 years. Accordingly, Dr. Celste Saulo’s release of the Flagship Report: “The year 2023 set new records for every single climate indicator. This annual report shows that the climate crisis is the defining challenge that humanity faces, closely intertwined with the inequality crisis as witnessed by growing food insecurity, population displacement, and biodiversity loss.”

According to WMO Secretary-General Saulo (Ph.D. Atmospheric Sciences, University of Buenos Aires): “Scientific knowledge of climate change has existed for more than five decades, and yet we’ve missed an entire generation of opportunity. We must base today’s decisions upon future generations rather than short-term economic interests.”

Economic interests might consider taking a back seat by adjusting, considerably lower, its “infinite growth as soon as possible” footprint so the planet can catch its breath. Short-term economic interests as a feature of the neoliberal brand of capitalism are antithetical to the staid principles of climate science. They simply don’t mix.

The inherent antagonism between neoliberalism’s free market dictates of “follow the money” versus the planet’s complex ecosystems that don’t need money is addressed in Global Social Challenges d/d May 4, 2021, The University of Manchester: “It seems then, that in order to prevent total ecological breakdown, we need to radically change our relationship with the way we produce and use resources. Any system that provides profit as an incentive, seems to always lead to exploitation of the earths finite resources. The idea of unlimited growth continuing indefinitely is the key culprit in climate breakdown.”

What’s more important for life: Profits or Mother Nature?

Accordingly, economic interests risk sudden failure, blindsided without the support of planetary ecosystems, i.e., planetary infrastructure which is increasingly under attack like never before. Throughout the biosphere, ecosystems struggle, rainforests emitting CO2, ice caps melting, Greenland a basket case, permafrost methane bubbling to surface, glaciers clobbered, and severe drought repeatedly hitting nations of the world, everywhere worldwide, Europe much harder, especially Spain subject to risk of 75% desertification with temperatures running in-excess of +2°C pre-industrial throughout the EU.

Some highlights of WMO’s State of the Climate:

Climate change is an existential threat to vulnerable populations everywhere: “The cost of climate action may seem high, but the costs of climate inaction are much higher.”

Glaciers, as of 2023, had the largest loss on record. Yet, glaciers are the “water towers of the world, and we’re losing them fast. They are freshwater reservoirs.”

A separate report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences, coincided with WMO’s Red Alert: “Swiss glaciers are melting at a rapidly increasing rate. The acceleration is dramatic, with as much ice being lost in only two years as was the case between 1960 and 1990. The two extreme consecutive years have led to glacier tongues collapsing and the disappearance of many smaller glaciers. For example, measurements of the St. Annafirn glacier in the canton of Uri had to be suspended as a result.”

On a positive note, according to the secretary-general: “A glimmer of hope… in 2023 clean renewable energy increased nearly 50% over 2022.” Africa has huge renewable potential that is only using 1% of renewable investments. “We must focus on renewables for Africa.”

Omar Badur, WMO Head of Climate Monitoring

A key climate Indicator: Global temperatures 2023 were the warmest on record at 1.45°C above 1850-1900 average. Past 9 years, warmest 9 years on record. This trend appears endless.

Sea ice loss in Antarctica was one of the major climate features reported in 2023. As a result, 2023 saw the highest rise in sea level ever. The rate doubled. In previous decades it was 2.13 mm per year. The recent decade recorded 4.17 mm/yr., nearly double.

The most extreme climate events for the year related to heat and extreme precipitation:

Extreme heat during the summer occurred (1) Japan had the hottest summer on record (2) Australia the hottest July-Sept on record (3) unprecedented wildfires in Canada (4) SE Asia extreme heat April/May (5) All-Europe extreme heat in summer (6) SE United States exceptionally hot summer (7) Mid-South America March, September extreme heat waves. All of which led to excessive mortality and massive forest fires.

WMO’s discussion of extreme precipitation and deficit precipitation references the impact on agricultural food security and flooding. Most of South America, Central America, and North America experienced extreme dry episodes. North Africa experienced a long drought with some dam reservoirs at nearly zero percent of capacity. Water deficits are defining significant parts of the African continent.

Meanwhile, pervasive flooding was seen throughout, especially in China and New Zealand, the worst flooding in recorded history. For example, in August 2023 more than 1,000,000 were forced to flee homes in China’s northeastern Hebei province, thereafter over one month to recede.

A major concern, maybe most significant of all, and most hidden from sight, major changes in the oceans, over time, become irreversible. According to WMO’s report, 80-90% of the oceans recorded marine heatwaves in 2023. Like drought on land, excessive heatwaves lead to desertification of the oceans. However, in contrast, changes in the ocean are not as fast as atmospheric changes, and as such. once a change is established in the oceans, it’s irreversible. This is an extremely worrying trend as 80-90% experienced heatwaves.

Confirming WMO’s observations, according to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, 2o23 ocean temperatures were, in the words of researchers: “Off the charts.” (Source: “Astounding Ocean Temperatures in 2023 Intensified Extreme Weather, Data Shows”, The Guardian, January 11, 2024.)

According to Secretary General Celste: “We are having temperatures that are way above what we used to have, and our populations are not prepared to cope with that. Their infrastructure is not prepared. Their homes are not prepared. That’s why we spoke about a Red Alert.”

Future UN climate conferences should consider focusing on adaptation measures for countries infrastructure to withstand the onslaught of drought, wildfires, floods, and sea level rise. After all, insurance companies are raising rates and, in some areas, dropping coverage altogether to adapt to climate change’s impact on bottom line profits, but in the harshest fashion, leaving the public to fend for itself, hopefully finding state-sponsored support.

In contrast to insurance companies, which are running for the hills as global warming slashes profits, after 30 consecutive years of UN climate meetings, every issue brought before the plenary body of experts ends up worse until the following annual meeting, when it is again discussed one more time as an existential threat that gets progressively worse by the next annual session, on and on it goes. Yet, nothing about adaptation.

In fact, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023 found the world underfinanced, underprepared, with inadequate investment and thus exposed to “slow progress on climate adaptation.”

Adaptation to the forces of climate change at UN climate conferences, as a major focus, would likely be a welcomed relief and a more appropriate topic than whining about excessive fossil fuel CO2 emissions now that climate change/global warming is starting to look more and more like an out-of-control freight train barreling down the mountainside.

In line with publication of WMO’s 2023 flagship report, January 2024 was the hottest January on record.

Moreover, as reported by NOAA, February 2024 was the hottest February on record. February is the ninth consecutive month of record heat.

Now that the climate system is setting new hottest temperature records month-by-month, it goes without saying, it’s a deadly dangerous affair.

How long can this trend last?

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

 

Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness

by Edward Curtin / April 5th, 2024

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air”
— Lord Byron, “Darkness”, 1816

Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table.  She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book.  Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”

The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”

She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.

It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing it.  Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne.  Crowds regularly gather in the evenings, cell phone cameras raised, to laud the death of the light that they embalm on their dinguses (i.e.gadgets, just as the atomic bomb was nicknamed “The Gadget”), trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate the death of another day.  This twisted relationship to day and night, life and death, darkness and light is perhaps best summoned up in a few lines of poetry from Rainer Maria Rilke from his Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.

We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.

And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is the next great big thing to see.  A plunge into the heart of darkness that is apposite to the dark heart of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride in killing.  It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just won the Academy Award.  As Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness: “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

And we will die in a flicker if the dark-hearted leaders of this country continue to push against Russia in Ukraine for the nuclear war that they previewed in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is understandable why in retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first report from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many years portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his honest reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in the truth that the mainstream media blacked them out.  The exposure of America’s ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist influence, just as today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.

But now it’s time for a flick to give us crocodile tears from the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with that must-see Academy Award winning film, Oppenheimer.  The imprisoned and executed German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before he was executed by Hitler for opposing Hitler’s mass atrocities, called such subtle self-glorification “cheap grace.”  It is grace we bestow on ourselves, forgiveness without requiring repentance, feats of self-glorification mastered by Hollywood.

A biopic of one man with all his complicated and twisted personality and scientific brilliance is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine in its U.S. proxy war against Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and NATO’s encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that makes nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game.

The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic – pure evil.  Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, claimed last year in The New York Times. As I wrote in “Trinity’s Shadow,” he was “complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.” Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate themselves.  Anyone who would give the name “Trinity” to the site where the first bomb was exploded had a twisted mind.

Oppenheimer, which excludes scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently opened in Japan. The New York Times published a piece about the opening that contains various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a fundamental issue: the film “celebrates a group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power. We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the U.S (and elsewhere).”

Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic.  Why it is good to see some flickering images and not others?  Why is night for day and the blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we are on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our dark-hearted leaders is not?

We live in very dark times.  There is no need to watch the sun being extinguished and day turn to night in the heart of an immense darkness.  Kurtz’s dying words as recalled by Marlowe at the end of The Heart of Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’ are not words we want to utter as we realize we too have gone mad in our souls because we looked the wrong way as the nukes were in their flight.

Chase the light!  As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”

It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.

So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical and contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the darkness – the heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our heartless leaders – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating and expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to name a few.

And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough to impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.

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

South Africa to end captive lion breeding for hunting BY THE 1%

Agence France-Presse
April 3, 2024 

Breeding big cats to later have them shot by wealthy hunters typically paying thousands of US dollars has long been loathed by conservation and animal rights groups 

© STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP/File

South Africa on Wednesday laid out plans to phase out the captive breeding of lions for hunting purposes as the country moves to ban the controversial business.

The practice of breeding big cats to later have them shot by wealthy hunters typically paying thousands of US dollars has long been loathed by conservation and animal rights groups.

Hunters, usually foreigners, sometimes take home the head or skin of the killed animal as a trophy.

The South African government had already announced its intention to ban the breeding of lions for hunting in 2021 and an ad hoc panel has been working on the issue for the past two years.

"The panel recommended the closure of the captive breeding sector, including the keeping of lions in captivity, or the use of captive lions or their derivatives commercially," Environment Minister Barabara Creecy told a press conference in Cape Town.

Breeders will have two years to voluntarily withdraw from the sector and change their business model before the ban kicks in.

The idea, which has faced strong opposition from representatives of the highly lucrative industry, was approved by the government last week but is yet to be translated into law.

The move comes with trophy hunting facing a growing backlash in the West.

Campaigns to ban the import of trophies have drawn support in the United States, Australia and several European countries in recent years.

"The industry is large and complex with a long history that is not aligned with both current international trends and domestic policy changes on conservation," said Kamalasen Chetty, head of the ad hoc panel.

Between 8,000 and 12,000 lions are kept on about 350 farms across South Africa, according to estimates by animal rights groups that regularly denounce the conditions in which the animals are held.

The number of wild lions in comparison totals only around 3,500, according to the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a South Africa-based NGO.

 

German far-right firebrand Höcke again accused of quoting Nazi slogan

2024/04/03

Alternative for Germany (AfD) parliamentary group leader Bjoern Hoecke attends a session of the Thuringian state parliament. Martin Schutt/dpa

Public prosecutors in Germany have brought further criminal charges against far-right firebrand politician Björn Höcke for allegedly using a banned Nazi slogan.

Höcke, who leads the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Thuringia, is already facing criminal trial for allegedly using the banned slogan of the Nazi Party's SA stormtroopers, "Everything for Germany!" (Alles für Deutschland!) during a speech in May 2021 in the town of Merseburg.

On Wednesday, public prosecutors in Halle brought another charge of using the emblems of a former Nazi organization against Höcke for also quoting the same slogan during a speech in December at an AfD event in the eastern city of Gera.

Höcke allegedly said the first part of the slogan himself - "Alles für" - and used gestures to encourage the audience to shout "Deutschland."

"The accused has not yet admitted to the matter," prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Prosecutors have asked the court to add the new charge to the existing criminal proceedings against Höcke already underway in Halle.

Höcke is scheduled to go on trial beginning in mid-April.

Even within the far-right AfD, Höcke is well-known for his particularly hardline and extreme positions.

The domestic intelligence service in Thuringia has classified him as a known far-right extremist.

The state-level AfD party organization in Thuringia - as well as in the neighbouring eastern states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt - have also been designated as known far-right extremist groups.

Höcke is to be the AfD's lead candidate in the Thuringian state elections on September 1. The AfD currently leads in opinion polls there.

Donald Trump has already laid out his 5-step fascist plan

Robert Reich
April 2, 2024

RAW STORY

On Friday, Trump posted a video featuring an image of President Biden hog-tied —with hands and feet bound together.

Trump has previously posted doctored photos and videos depicting him physically attacking Biden, such as hitting Mr. Biden with golf balls.

It’s all part of Trump’s 5-step fascist plan.

In a previous post, I laid out the defining traits of fascism and how MAGA Republicans embody them, and I suggested that Trump and his lackeys shouldn’t be seen as simply “authoritarian.” They need to be understood as fascist.

But how could Trump actually turn America into a fascist state?

In five steps, which he’s already signaled he plans to take. Here they are:

Step 1: Use threats of violence to gain power.

Hitler and Mussolinirelied on their vigilante militias to intimidate voters and local officials. We watched Trump try to do the same in 2020. Even before he incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol, he said on national television: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

Now, Trump is vilifying his political opponents as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out.” He shows an image of Biden hog-tied.

After Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg requested a gag order, providing some 300 pages of exhibits documenting the real-world consequences of Trump’s attacks, Judge Juan Merchanfound the filing persuasive. He said Trump’s statements:
“were threatening, inflammatory, denigrating, and the targets of his statements ranged from local and federal officials, court and court staff, prosecutors and staff assigned to the cases, and private individuals including grand jurors performing their civic duty,” citing Bragg’s filing, [and had caused] “the assignment of increased security resources to investigate threats and protect the individuals and family members” of those Trump targeted.

After the gag order was issued, Trump attacked Judge Merchan’s daughter for running a political consulting firm that’s worked with Democrats, saying it should disqualify Merchan from his case. On Friday night, Bragg asked the judge to “clarify or confirm” that the order applies to family members and order Trump to “immediately desist from attacks on family members.”

Also last week, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton spoke out in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about Trump possibly instigating violence:
“We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law and we believe in the rule of law. And the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.”

Meanwhile, Republican election officials have testified to the threats they faced when they refused Trump’s demands to falsify the 2020 election results.

Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused Trump’s demand to “find” the votes needed to flip the state into Trump’s hands, said “my email, my cell phone was doxxed.”

Rusty Bowers, the Arizona state speaker and a pro-Trump Republican who resisted pressure from Trump and Rudy Giuliani and refused to go along with an illegal scheme to replace Arizona’s legal slate of electors, remains a target of pro-Trump partisans. As he said, “They have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile.”

Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state who helped manage the 2020 presidential election and recount in Georgia that found no widespread fraud, has faced death threats. Sterling admonished Trump:
“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. … This has to stop. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”

Step 2: Consolidate power.

After taking office, a would-be fascist turns every arm of government into a tool of his will. One of Hitler’s first steps was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis.

In October of 2020, Trump issued his own executive order that would have enabled him to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. He never got to act on it, but he’s now promising to apply it to the entire civil service if reelected.

Trump has urged making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. This has become the centerpiece of something called Project 2025, a presidential agenda assembled by MAGA Republicans, that would, as the AP put it, “dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision.”

Step 3: Demonize a group of people and establish a police state to round them up into detention camps.

Hitler used the imaginary threat of “the poison of foreign races” — mostly Jews — to justify taking control of the military and police, placing both under his top general, and granting law-enforcement powers to his civilian militias.

Now Trump is using the same language to claim he needs similar powers to deal with immigrants. Trump says they’re “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Recently, Trump warned that the country would face a “blood bath” if he lost the election (he then walked back the claim, saying he was referring to losing the auto industry). A few days later, he attacked Jewish Democrats in a radio interview, saying that Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion and Israel.

At a rally on March 16, Trump baselessly claimed that other countries were sending gang members and other undesirables to the United States: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” He then referred to them as “animals.”

Trump plans to deploy troops within the U.S. to conduct immigration raids and round up what he estimates to be 18 million people who would be placed in mass-detention camps while their fate is decided.

Even though crime is actually down across the nation, Trump is citing an imaginary crime wave to justify sending troops into blue cities and states against the will of governors and mayors: “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting.”

Trump insiders say he plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military crush civilian protests. We saw a glimpse of that in 2020, when Trump deployed the National Guard against peaceful protesters outside the White House.

With promises to pardon January 6 criminals and stop prosecutions of right-wing domestic terrorists, Trump would empower groups like the Proud Boys to act as MAGA enforcers.

Step 4: Jail the opposition.

As Putin and other of the world’s dictators do, Trump is now openly threatening to prosecute his opponents: “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business.”

He’s looking to remake the Justice Department into a tool for his personal vendettas: “As we completely overhaul the federal Department of Justice and FBI, we will also launch sweeping civil rights investigations into Marxist local district attorneys.”

In the model of Hitler and Mussolini, Trump describes his opponents as subhuman: “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…”

Step 5: Undermine the free press.

As Hitler well understood, a fascist dictator needs to control the flow of information. Trump has been attacking the press for years, calling them “the enemy of the people.”

He’s threatening to punish news outlets whose coverage he dislikes. On his “Truth Social” platform, he wrote: “Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!”

He has helped to reduce trust in the media to such a historic low that his supporters now view him as their most trusted source of information. He tells them: “I will never lie to you,” although his lies are constant and continuous.

***

Trump has not hidden his plans. You’ve heard him promise to “be a dictator for one day.” History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships.

We must take Trump’s 5-step fascist plan seriously and do everything in our power to stop it.

One thing you can do right now is to share this video, which my colleagues and I made recently about Trump’s planned steps toward a fascist dictatorship:

How Trump is Following Hitler's Playbook | Robert Reich youtu.be

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.