It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Alienable Right to Life features the names of 1,039 people killed in mass shootings since the Columbine high school massacre in 1999. Photograph: Alienable Right to Life
On Capitol Hill there is no shortage of politicians who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes and founding documents when seeking to defend the right to bear arms. But any who walk up Pennsylvania Avenue in the next 10 days will be confronted by an inversion of these patriotic symbols and an urgent plea to tackle gun violence.
Alienable right to life is a public art installation at Freedom Plaza that features a massive American flag bearing the names of 1,039 people killed in mass shootings since the Columbine high school massacre 25 years ago.
“I, sadly, have left one panel blank on the northeast corner of this artwork in case there is yet another mass shooting while this art is on exhibition,” artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg said on Friday at a rainy launch event attended by congressional Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Jamie Raskin and gun safety advocates.
The piece, made of scaffold wrapped with vinyl, is 35ft long, 25ft high and 12ft wide and secured by 32,000lbs of ballast. Nestled behind the flag is a giant facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, which takes the assertion that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, magnifies the word “unalienable” and puts a red cross through “un”, leaving only “alienable”.
Nearby is an interactive circular mural, representing an upside down Stars and Stripes (a sign of imminent danger or distress) for visitors to share personal stories.
“Kids shouldn’t be afraid to go to school!” one says.
The structures are surrounded by trappings of the nation’s capital: historic quotations about Washington inscribed on the upper terrace; a statue of Casimir Pulaski, a general in the Continental army, on horseback; the executive office of the mayor and the council of the District of Columbia; the National Theatre, about to stage Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.
In her remarks on Friday, Firstenberg, 64, described her motives for creating alienable right to life, noting that gun violence has become the leading cause of death for American children.
“America has become a dangerous place,” she said. “It used to be a place where we talked about a chicken in every pot and now it’s a handgun in every nightstand.
“This art is meant to broaden the dialogue regarding gun access from a singular focus on the right to bear arms to the individual right to life that emanates from the Declaration of Independence. I’m just going to go there, folks: if people are willing to fight for the rights of frozen embryos in Alabama, we should fight for the rights of America’s children.”
The artist told how a friend named Andrea recently bought a 9mm handgun and used it to end her life. Firstenberg has added her name to the circular mural, where the public are invited to use black stickers to add their reflections or the names of loved ones lost.
“The image of our American flag will disappear under those stories of gun violence,” Firstenberg said.
Alienable right to life, privately funded, was made possible with the help of the National Park Service and DowntownDC Business Improvement District, will be on display until 20 May.
Firstenberg added: “Let us all commit that we will not let our children die in car seats, in math class, at the movies, or sitting on a kerb watching a Fourth of July parade. We must stop adding names to the flag.”
The launch event heard Pelosi and Raskin praise Firstenberg’s work and urge Congress to do more to curb gun deaths, including legislation to ban assault weapons. Chaplain Denise Reid recounted how her life has been affected by gun violence for half a century including when her son, Tavon Waters, was shot at a traffic light in 2006 and left paralysed from the neck down. He died from his injuries three years later at the age of 25.
Reid, a deputy lead of the Baltimore city chapter of the group Moms Demand Action, said: “A senseless act of violence took my precious child from me and senseless acts of gun violence continue to plague our communities. How far to the sky would this flag need to be to include all the names of those needlessly lost? As this art beautifully conveys, the Declaration of Independence clearly expressed 248 years ago that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Firstenberg is known for poignant installations such as In America: Remember, which blanketed the National Mall with 701,000 white flags for 17 days in 2021, in memory of victims of the coronavirus pandemic. Their stories are now being entered into a database at George Washington University and some of the flags are preserved at her studio in Bethesda, Maryland.
In an interview, the artist said she hopes the scale and prominence of her work can transcend political divisions.
“Words are going unheard because we’re all existing more and more every day in our own echo chambers so public art is one of the few ways in which we can reach people without prior intention on their part of choosing what information they get,” she said.
“Public art gives us a way to have free expression and hope that people see it. Will it change minds? I can only hope. We have to start comparing ourselves to other countries rather than just thinking we’re the best. We have to pull back and understand what’s happening here.”
Walk into any community health centre and look at who is at the bedside of the patients. Women. Young girls who should be in school instead of tending to the sick. Young women who should be at work trying to eke a living in a world where they already get less pay than their male counterparts – and being absent means that their performance is questioned and chances of earning further diminished.
Women farmers who will miss the planting season and their families will go hungry because they had to be in hospital looking after a sick relative. As you walk further into the ward, you will see the old women – weary from a lifetime of unpaid care work. Yet having no choice but to take care of the sick because that is the way it has been for them, their mothers, and their mother’s mothers.
If the health centre you walked into is on the African continent, chances are that at least some of the patients are suffering from malaria – one of the oldest diseases that continues to plague the continent. Every year, malaria causes an estimated 600,000 deaths. 95 percent of these are still in Africa. As are 94 percent of the 233 million cases occurring worldwide every year.
When malaria rages, the women whose paid and unpaid labour contributes significantly to the economy, suffer – and the effects are felt by each one of us. As health systems are over-burdened by a disease that – if we use the right suite of gender-sensitive tools – we can eliminate, food systems are failing because the women on whom these systems depend are overwhelmed and not adequately supported.
Women receiving treated bed-nets at Milalani village, Msambweni on the south Kenyan coast, for NRS International’s Tana Netting DAWA mosquito net. Courtesy: RBM Partnership to End Malaria
Women are the backbone of the care economy. They not only make up 65 percent of the global health and care workforce but also perform more than 75 percent of unpaid care activities. Conversations on gender and health continue but what we need the most is action.
There is an inherent injustice in the fact that we are not investing enough resources to eliminate a disease that affects a group of people who already live in a society whose socio-cultural norms leave them disadvantaged. Or is it precisely because of these socio-cultural norms that we cannot see the damage that this disease is causing and act fast?
Are we so used to seeing women lose time by the bedsides of the sick that a few more hours lost over their lifetime ceases to give us sleepless nights? I refuse to believe that inequality has become so normalised that it is no longer an affront to our conscience.
And even though reality tells me that we have only invested $3.5 billion – less than half of the $7.3 billion that we need in order to eliminate malaria by 2030 – the tenacity of the people, especially women, gives me hope. The dedication of the women in our homes who keep the environment clean to keep dangerous vectors that cause malaria and other diseases away. The love of the women who tuck their children under treated mosquito bed nets every day. The female health workers who have dedicated their lives to fighting the disease, sometimes in the most complex of circumstances.
Why, then, do we take this tenacity for granted? Our investments in malaria must address the way in which women are disproportionately affected not just because of biological factors such as childbirth and pregnancy that leaves them more susceptible but also social factors.
It is already an indictment on us all that the same women who shoulder the care load when it comes to malaria are also more likely to die when they get the disease – especially if they are pregnant. While malaria is responsible for 10,000 maternal deaths each year, only about 40 percent of women receive the treatment that they need for malaria during pregnancy.
Yes, the same women who look after the sick are not looked after. Even where treatment for malaria is available, women may not have the economic means to access it as they already form the majority of the population living in poverty. In some cases, they have to get permission from their partners before going to the health centres to seek treatment. And this delays interventions.
Gender is high on the agenda of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria. Every single one of our partners’ interventions, right from who receives mosquito bed nets for the family, who we are enabling to participate in policy conversations, our evidence and documentation to our support to governments in designing and implementing gender-sensitive approaches, is underpinned by gender considerations.
But social norms permeate society in deep and complex ways, and this cannot be a fight for RBM or the malaria community alone. Seeing malaria through a women’s rights prism means we realise that we must all respect, protect and fulfil women’s rights to health – and that this is not just a call for us to benevolently support women but rather a demand that we meet our duty to address inequality and invest more in the multiple sectors that would contribute to freeing women from the burden of malaria.
Source: Pressenza Image by Derzsi Elekes Andor, Creative Commons 3.0
Thousands of innocent civilians are dying– men, women, children– being bombed to death as they sit in their homes. Thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have been unwillingly drafted into the military, torn from their families, forced to kill each other, and forced to die. Images and videos of cold-blooded genocide plague our news in a constant loop, and our government has the audacity to sit in their comfy little chairs and not only deny what is happening, but to also order more money sent to continue these horrors.
The US has a long history of involvement in overseas conflict; this isn’t the first time we’ve had to fight back against militants in power, and it won’t be the last. Now, the US clearly has its sights set on China. Billions of dollars have already been spent militarizing the Asia-Pacific, surrounding China with military bases and conducting threatening war games– the US military’s version of peacocking.
The first step of war, as US military elites are well aware, is information warfare. Currently, the media is spouting hateful rhetoric towards China, contributing to a giant spike in Asian American hate crime. Our political leaders accuse China of everything the US is guilty of: preparing for war, spying, stifling business. The government is so paranoid they’ve even banned the Chinese social media app Tiktok– an unprecedented divergence from our first amendment rights.
We’re at a critical junction point in history. Either we let the US continue to spout narratives of fear and division and drive us towards war, or we sift through the lies, raise the truth, and fight back against the imperialist elite.
It’s time to re-navigate the situation. Let’s step back and debunk some claims.
Statement: China wants war.
Evidence:
China has, throughout its thousands of years of history, long stood for peace and harmony. Modern political ideology is interwoven with ancient Chinese philosophy and the belief that war is a failure of the state.
But let’s look at something nobody can dispute: what are US politicians saying, and how does this compare to what Chinese politicians are saying?
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently published a report detailing five objectives China had for Secretary Blinken’s visit this week, reflecting the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, a foundational pillar of Chinese foreign policy. One of those objectives was for “the China-US relationship should be stabilized, improved, and move forward along a path of stability, health, and sustainability.” They also advocated for mutual cooperation, strengthening dialogue, and effectively managing differences.
Meanwhile, numerous US political and military figures have said the opposite, calling for the US to raise arms and surround China with military bases, missiles, and troops. They cite a future war as almost inevitable, declaring that China will “invade” Taiwan by 2027. Just this month, Xi Jinping met with the former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, to express their mutual consensus to stand for peace, agreeing that war “would be an unbearable burden for the Chinese nation.”
To summarize, China does not want war. Prominent political figures and spokespersons have repeatedly pronounced their adherence to peace, and have implored the US numerous times to work towards mutually beneficial cooperation rather than current antagonistic practices.
Conclusion: FALSE!
Statement: The US stands for peace.
Evidence:
You might be thinking: who has ever made that statement? Quite a few, believe it or not.
We’re going to look at the statement in the context of China, and for a moment, leave behind all the other wars the US has been involved in and actively pushed for.
The United States spends more money on defense spending than the ten following countries combined. That’s around $850 billion dollars per year– and every year, the amount goes up. In 2024, the budget request was for $911 billion dollars.
A good amount of this money has been spent building military bases in the Asia-Pacific, surrounding China with threatening long-range missiles and other defense systems. As it stands, the US has over 750 military bases around the world, with 313 bases in East Asia alone. Meanwhile, China has no military bases in the entire Western hemisphere.
US military strategy in the Asia-Pacific operates along one dominant strategy: militarize, militarize, militarize. Policy experts continue to recommend “porcupining” nearby nations, including Japan, the Philippines, and Guam. In doing so, they have repeatedly harmed the natural environment, destroying protected reefs and dumping harmful chemicals into the ocean. Many locals denounce US military presence and rising militarism, terrified they may be pulled into a conflict they want no part in.
The truth is, the US has a long history of war and imperialism. Including militaristic and covert operations, the US has invaded over 50 countries since its inception. Since WW2, the US has started wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, all of which were unmitigated disasters. Adversely, China has not fought a war in 45 years.
Statement: The US needs to protect itself by surrounding China with weapons.
Evidence:
Policy experts and military professionals adhere to the concept of deterrence with a disconcerting level of zeal. Logically, and according to their favorite Game Theory 101 class, it makes sense. One is less likely to attack if they are aware how strong their opponent is– aware they would face severe repercussions that outweigh any potential gain.
However, the logic goes sour when you recognize a few basic facts:One, China is not an opponent and does not wish to be an opponent. Two, hyper-militarizing the Asia-Pacific makes war more likely, not less. It’s not deterrence– it’s provocation. Three, the US is trampling on the desires of local populations and harming the environment while at it.
China does not want war, as we’ve covered, and has expressed its concern that US militarization of the region can lead to increased risk for misunderstanding and misjudgement– which could easily escalate into conflict. The US needs to focus on prevention rather than deterrence, by strengthening dialogue, reaffirming commitments to peace, and fostering a partnership with China on other potentially catastrophic issues, such as environmental protection and nuclear disarmament.
Ultimately, there are no gains to be had by throwing billions of tax dollars into militarizing the Asia-Pacific. What the US fails to realize is that there are people living on the land they are abusing. The environment is protected– and sacred– and the military-industrial complex has no place rearing its ugly head where it does not belong.
Conclusion: FALSE!
Statement: The US needs to “beat” China to maintain power and position.
Evidence:
First, it’s important to acknowledge the origins of such a claim. Why, exactly, does the US need to maintain its hegemonic status over China, and why are our politicians and policy experts so obsessed with the idea?
There are three terrible, powerful factors at play here: colonialism, imperialism, and racism.
Colonialism: The US has a steep history of adhering to colonialist doctrines. Even its inception was a story of colonialism, running Native Americans off their indigenous lands to take over. Over the course of its comparatively short lifetime, the US has seized Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, Hawaii, and more. The US government feels it has the right to continue abusing these ties, building military bases against the desire of local indigenous populations.
Imperialism: US imperialism is essentially the belief in the expansion of American political, economic, military, and cultural influences. It ties into colonialism in many ways, reflecting the belief in racial and cultural superiority.
Racism: Racism is one of the driving factors of US imperialism and colonialism– the glamorization of “the white savior” to lead “others” out of barbarity and into salvation. Sinophobia has run rampant in the US for many years, leaking into American politics and media. Since the 2020 global pandemic, Asian American hate crimes have been on the rise.
All three tie together into a twisted undercurrent of thought running below the surface of US foreign policy. While US politicians push us towards confrontation for the sake of preserving a US hegemony, China reports that, “We firmly believe that great power competition should not be the dominant theme of this era, nor can it solve the problems faced by China, the US, and the world.”
Yikes. That’s a stiff departure from Biden’s “we want competition with China” State of the Union speech, and an even worse departure from former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger and Congressman Mike Gallagher who say, “The United States shouldn’t manage competition with China; it should win it.” In doing so, they also claim that “the US needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in US-China relations.” This is nothing short of an admittance: US political leaders are so concerned with winning some power competition that they’ll risk going to war– push for it, even.
RAND policy experts punched the numbers. Even a minor conflict could lead to a 20-35% economic shrinkage of China’s economy. This would devastate the lives of millions of Chinese citizens. Recovery would take years. It’s no wonder the US imperial agenda is pushing for war.
Conclusion: FALSE!
Imagining a better world…
The US has spent billions and billions of dollars preparing for war with China. Imagine what the world would look like if those billions had been spent elsewhere– on infrastructure, poverty alleviation, cultivating a peace economy, environmental sustainability initiatives, pushing for love and mutual respect rather than division, fear, and hate…
There is a world where the US and China are capable of a respectful, cooperative relationship, where differences are set aside in accordance with a bigger picture: how can we make the world better for each and every person? How can we cultivate peace? How can we preserve the natural environment and ward off climate change?
Humans have been on this earth for a long time, and yet, we still don’t know what it would be like to live a life of peace. War infects every community, influencing the ways we live and interact with the world. It’s up to us, as citizens of the most militaristic country in the world, to put an end to our government’s rampage of imperialism and fear.
DDT pollutants found in deep sea fish off Los Angeles coast
As the region reckons with its toxic history of offshore dumping, the new findings raise troubling questions about whether the banned pesticide remains a threat to wildlife and human health
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO
IMAGE:
RESEARCHERS ABOUT RESEARCH VESSEL FALKOR USED REMOTELY OPERATED VEHICLE SUBASTIAN TO COLLECT SEDIMENT PUSH CORES OFF THE COAST OF LOS ANGELES DURING THE BIODIVERSE BORDERLANDS EXPEDITION IN JULY 2021. CREDIT: SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE
In the 1940s and 1950s, the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles was a dumping ground for the nation’s largest manufacturer of the pesticide DDT – a chemical now known to harm humans and wildlife. Due to the stubborn chemistry of DDT and its toxic breakdown products, this pollution continues to plague L.A.’s coastal waters more than half a century later. While legal at the time, details of this industrial-scale pollution of the marine environment at a dump site some 15 miles offshore near Catalina Island have deeply concerned scientists and the public since they gained wider recognition in 2020.
Now, new research from scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State University (SDSU) finds deep-sea fish and sediments collected from near the Catalina Island offshore dump site are contaminated with numerous DDT-related chemicals.
The study, published May 6 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that the DDT-related chemicals dumped into the ocean decades ago may still be making their way into marine food webs.
Since the rediscovery of the offshore dump site near Catalina Island, scientists have been working to discern the extent and severity of the problem today. Of particular urgency are the questions of whether the decades-old chemicals, now settled on the seafloor thousands of feet underwater, are staying put or whether they are circulating in marine ecosystems where the compounds could be harming wildlife or even posing health risks to humans.
“These are deep-sea organisms that don’t spend much time at the surface and they are contaminated with these DDT-related chemicals,” said Lihini Aluwihare, a professor of ocean chemistry at Scripps and co-author of the study. “Establishing the current distribution of DDT contamination in deep-sea food webs lays the groundwork for thinking about whether those contaminants are also moving up through deep-ocean food webs into species that might be consumed by people.”
From 1948 until at least 1961, barges contracted by DDT-producer Montrose Chemical Corporation would motor from the Port of Los Angeles out toward Catalina and pump manufacturing waste laden with sulfuric acid and up to 2% pure DDT directly into the Pacific Ocean. Legal until 1972, this offshore dumping largely escaped public scrutiny because it was overshadowed by Montrose’s other waste disposal practice: Pumping a more dilute acidic slurry that also contained DDT through L.A. County sewers and into the ocean off Palos Verdes. An estimated 100 tons of DDT ended up in the sediments of the Palos Verdes Shelf, and the Environmental Protection Agency declared it an underwater Superfund Site in 1996. In 2000, a judge ordered the company to pay $140 million to remedy the environmental damages. Research has since linked the DDT pollution on the Palos Verdes Shelf to contamination and health problems in local wildlife including sea lions, dolphins, bottom-feeding fish, and even coastal California condors (likely from consuming dead marine mammals).
In 2011, UC Santa Barbara researcher David Valentine used an undersea robot to rediscover Montrose’s offshore dumping near Catalina at a place now known as Dumpsite 2. The findings leapt into the public consciousness in 2020 when the Los Angeles Times published the first in a series of exposés unspooling the region’s toxic legacy of offshore dumping.
Beginning in 2021, Aluwihare, study co-author Eunha Hoh of SDSU, and other collaborators began a series of research efforts to work on two key questions: Are the DDT-related chemicals lurking on the seafloor near Dumpsite 2 being stirred up and ingested by marine life in the deep? And could they identify a kind of chemical fingerprint unique to the contamination from Dumpsite 2 and other offshore dump sites that could be used to distinguish them from pollutants emanating from the Palos Verdes Shelf?
The team opportunistically collected sediment samples and deep-sea animals from the water column in the San Pedro Basin near Dumpsite 2 to test for a wide range DDT-related compounds. The research cruises to collect these samples were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Typically, testing for DDT looks for four to eight chemicals, but a 2016 paper co-authored by Hoh and Aluwihare identified 45 DDT-related chemicals in the blubber of dolphins from off the coast of Southern California. The results demonstrated that wildlife was being exposed to a much larger suite of DDT compounds in the real world. In the present study, the team tested for this larger suite of DDT-related chemicals, known as DDT+, in hopes that it could help develop a chemical fingerprint for Dumpsite 2 and the other offshore dump sites used by Montrose. Also, testing for DDT+ will provide a more holistic picture of the degree of contamination in sediment and animals that might otherwise go undetected.
When the researchers analyzed the sediments for the presence of DDT+ they found no fewer than 15 chemicals, 14 of which had been previously detected in birds and marine mammals in Southern California.
The researchers collected 215 fish spanning three common species near Dumpsite 2. Chemical analysis revealed that the fish contained 10 DDT-related compounds, all of which were also present in the sediment samples.
Two of the fish species were collected between 546 meters (1,791 feet) and 784 meters (2,572 feet) – Cyclothone acclinidens and Melanostigma pammelas – and the third, Leuroglossus stilbius, was collected between 546 meters (1,791 feet) and the surface. The species collected at shallower depths contained a lower concentration of contaminants and were missing a pair of DDT-related compounds that were present in the deepest fishes.
“None of these fish species are known to feed in the sediment of the seafloor,” said Anela Choy, biological oceanographer at Scripps and co-author of the study. “There must be another mechanism that is exposing them to these contaminants. One possibility is that there are physical or biological processes resuspending sediments around Dumpsite 2 and allowing these contaminants to enter deeper water food webs.”
The findings can’t yet rule out the Palos Verdes Superfund Site as a potential source of the contamination in the fish, said Aluwihare. But several lines of evidence uncovered in the study – the lower overall concentrations and two missing DDT-related compounds in the shallower water fish species, as well as the overlap between contaminants found in the sediment and those found in marine mammals and birds – point to the alarming possibility that pollution is moving from the seafloor and into the marine food web.
“Regardless of the source, this is evidence that DDT compounds are making their way into the deep ocean food web,” said Margaret Stack, an environmental chemist at SDSU and the study’s lead author. “That is cause for concern because it’s not a big leap for it to end up in marine mammals or even humans.”
Hoh said understanding the pathways by which the DDT-related chemicals are entering the food web is vital and “will help us figure out what to do as far as mitigation and what not to do in terms of offshore development that could make this problem worse by stirring up these contaminants.”
Aluwihare said more work needs to be done to pinpoint the source of the DDT contaminants they found in the deep-sea fish and establish whether the same contamination exists in larger, open-ocean fish species that are consumed by people.
Numerous additional studies are ongoing to answer these urgent questions. Researchers at Scripps and SDSU are currently analyzing samples from fish species targeted by recreational anglers and commercial fisheries, including basses and sanddab, for DDT+. Comparing the chemicals and their concentrations found in these fish with sediment samples collected from the Palos Verdes Shelf and Dumpsite 2 may allow the team to determine the source of the toxins in these fish.
“We are still seeing this DDT contamination in deep-sea organisms and ocean sediments more than 50 years after they were dumped there,” said Hoh. “I’m not sure if that company expected the consequences of their pollution to last this long, but they have.”
In addition to Aluwihare, Stack, Choy, and Hoh, Raymmah Garcia, Tran Nguyen,, Paul Jensen, and Johanna Gutleben of Scripps as well as, William Richardot, and Nathan Dodder of SDSU co-authored the study.
Additional information on Scripps Oceanography research underway on the DDT dumpsite offshore Southern California can be found here: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ddtcoastaldumpsite.
JOURNAL
Environmental Science & Technology Letters
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
ARTICLE TITLE
Identification of DDT+ in deep ocean sediment and biota in the Southern California Bight
by M Bookchin · Cited by 317 — Illness may occur under "favorable" as well as "unfavorable" environmental conditions. Heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes-the most important.
101 pages
Friday, May 03, 2024
Future Warfare and Critical Technologies: Evolving Tactics and Strategies
Author Edited by Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan and Sameer Patil
Modern warfare has continuously evolved, with technological advancements shaping its conduct. Critical technologies like cyberspace and artificial intelligence (AI) are making new warfighting tools available, even as traditional ones like nuclear weapons are witnessing a resurgence. These changes have brought greater lethality and destruction in warfighting and blurred the lines of conflict, with direct warfare being replaced by new forms such as hybrid warfare or grey zone tactics (where the threat has diffused, and proxy actors have taken the lead).
Edited by Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan and Sameer Patil, the essays in this volume seek to unpack key critical technologies and explore their implications for the future of warfare. They tackle themes like cyberwarfare, challenges of attribution, swarming drones, autonomous weapons, AI, and their impact on land warfare, blockchain and nuclear weapons and space. Written by domain experts and renowned scholars, the essays answer four critical questions: Who/what are we fighting? Where are we fighting? How are we fighting? And when are we fighting?
To download the free volume as a PDF click please click here or for e-book readers please click here.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Strategic and Tactical Perspectives on Technologies
1 The Plague Beckons: On the Proliferation of Drone Swarms by Zachary Kallenborn
2 Virtual and Augmented Reality and Warfare: Fighting War as a Computer Game? by Akshat Upadhyay
3 The Future of Competition and Warfare in Cyberspace by Nishant Rajeev
4 Exploring the Utility of Blockchain in Military Operations by Meghna Bal and Mohit Chawdhry
5 Biotechnology and the Return of Biological Warfare by Shruti Sharma
6 Assessing the Military Applications of Generative AI by Amoha Basrur
7 Space and Counterspace Technologies in Future Warfare by Victoria Samson
General Strategic Perspectives
8 Should India Publicly Attribute International Cyber Incidents? by Arindrajit Basu
9 How the US Should Prepare for Space Warfare: Illustrated by Countering Rendezvous Spacecraft Threat by Brian G. Chow
10 Decoding China’s Nuclear Modernisation by Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan
11 The Role of Nuclear Deterrence by Tanvi Kulkarni
12 No Domain an Island: Ground Forces Need AI in Other Domains to Succeed by Michael Depp
13 ‘It was an Accident’: Implications of AI on the Ability to Distinguish between ‘True’ Accidents and Violations of International Humanitarian Law by Laura Bruun
About Editors and Authors
Beyond Murder: Colin Wilson, Criminology, and the Evolution of Consciousness
In 2019, I read Paupers’ Press’ latest release, Colin Wilson’s ‘My Interest in Murder’. Although a short book at 40-pages, I kept a notepad close to hand and jotted down some reflections on Wilson’s many books on murder, most of which I had read. These include: The Criminal History of Mankind, Order of Assassins, A Plague of Murder, as well as the many ‘Mammoth’ crime editions published by Robinson. It quickly occurred to me that one could attempt a general synthesis of his overall philosophy with his works on criminology. I saw that the two ran side-by-side, complementing and reinforcing each other. Consequently, my notes became so substantial that I summarised my findings in this informal essay. It wasn’t until Easter 2022, however, that I revisited this article after two encouraging comments on my original piece. I was moved by these comments to revise and update my originally rather spontaneous musings into a more streamline and — hopefully — pleasurable and insightful read, despite its morbid subject.
‘My Interest in Murder’ was first penned as the Introduction to Wilson’s 1972 book, Order of Assassins, but was shelved by the publisher in favour of an alternative preface. Order of Assassins explores the psychology of murder and presents a uniquely stimulating and evolutionary interpretation of the human mind, as well as some of its darker expressions.
Although ‘My Interest in Murder’ is essentially the size of a pamphlet, it is not lacking as a substantial autobiographical reflection on just how and why Wilson became so fascinated by the subject of criminality and criminal psychology. But like anything Wilson wrote about, he always attempted to go beyond the limitations of the self-defeating, pessimistic mindset that has increasingly plagued the late 20th century and much of the beginning of the 21st. What Wilson penetratingly revealed about the criminal mind, however, is something closer to home for many of us non-murderers: the sense of frustrated energies of the creative individual who finds himself in a society increasingly alienated from its vital reserves — its cultural wellsprings. This was a theme which Wilson had already explored at length in his first book, The Outsider, in 1956.
A young Colin Wilson.
The creative process and the inner tensions that may lead to an evolutionary shift in consciousness — a breakthrough, in short — and the self-defeating collapse of values, which results in nihilism and breakdown, is central to Wilson’s philosophy. However, his fascination with murder, and its psychological and philosophical implications, are to be found in his first creative efforts in the form of the novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960), which took nine years to write. But it was his later novel, The Glass Cage (1966), that became for Wilson the “favourite among my own novels.” The Glass Cage is the crystallisation of his philosophy and the culmination of his early researches into criminology and mysticism — the two extreme poles of human experience; the former emerging from a denial of values — moral, philosophical, even cosmological and religious — and the latter a recognition of affirmation, cosmic consciousness, and universal yea-saying.
For Wilson, these tensions were ever close to the surface, especially in his teenage years and early twenties. He was determined to become a writer despite the banalities of his working-class existence, and declared that he would “make literature out of my revolt”. He had “tasted the pleasures of the imagination and intellect” and “wanted the pleasure to pursue them”. This lead to his first writing venture — Ritual in the Dark, which was originally titled after the Egyptian Book of the Dead as Ritual of the Dead. The novel is timeless, pacey and presents a fascinating reflection on the themes of frustration, alienation, and — importantly — outsiderism. It is hard to avoid comparisons with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with the protagonist being torn between the intensities both within himself and the often shady people with whom he’s become embroiled.
In contrast to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, however, Wilson describes his protagonist — Gerard Sorme — as a ‘Simple Simon’. Sorme is found wandering around London after receiving a large inheritance and, in his aimlessness, meets various eccentrics and intensely driven individuals, each with a backstory of semi-mystical visions which end up defining them, for better or for worse, as outsiders. Individuals who, because of their very intensity and thirst for more encompassing experiences and truths about human existence, make up a social minority.
The Misfits (1988)
Turning to Wilson’s later book, The Misfits (1988), which is advertised as a study of sexual outsiders, it is clear how he had his own ‘Simple Simon’ moments. Wilson admits in this book that he slowly (some would argue too slowly) realized a broad-shouldered, deep-voiced and intensely masculine Charlotte Bach was, in fact, a Hungarian cross dresser and conman called Karoly Hadju. Bach first caught Wilson’s interest when he or she forwarded him a manuscript which posited an evolutionary theory based upon a dynamic and creative tensions or interplay between the male and female psychological forces within each individual. Hadju — or Bach — was, a character that could have been lifted straight out of Wilson’s novels.
It was through Wilson’s such meeting with liminal characters that lead him to explore further the psychology of the outsider or misfit. It is therefore not surprising that this should lead to an interest in criminality and the motives for such extremities of experience, whether through sexual fetishes or indeed murder. After all, what is imperative to all such outsiders is a search for intensity of consciousness — an insight or control over one’s emotions, environment, or having achieved some sense of an ultimate reality from which to act meaningfully.
Wilson’s own interest in murder is reflected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character John H. Watson, who observed in Sherlock Holmes that he appeared “to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century”. Wilson, commenting upon Watson’s remark, responds: “And why not? — for such knowledge was a part of his working equipment.” Wilson notes that by working with such morbid and extreme material, he felt like a “pathologist, working with unpleasant material, but viewing it with detachment”. And, in some alchemical sense, turning over the darker elements of human psychology and transmuting it into its opposite: affirmation consciousness instead of self-destructive criminality.
For Wilson, the sexual impulse and the impulse for murder or sadism are all driven by an intense stimulus — a release of enormous amounts of pent-up energy. This energy, in its raw state, is neither negative nor positive, but pure potential. In other words, the same forces that underlie these extreme drives could be used for great acts of creativity. But such negative expressions as murder or absurd sexual fetishes result when dammed-up potential has collapsed in upon itself.
Wilson writes:
“[T]here are certain people who possess the potentiality of creation, of purposive action; if this is frustrated it turns rotten. The mind is like a forward flowing river; if it is dammed up, it will turn the land around it into a swamp.”
The trajectory from Wilson’s earliest work is not driven by a morbid obsession, but a recognition of the creative spirit in its more general sense. The Outsider dealt with ballet dancers, poets, mystics, and esoteric teachers like the Russian-Armenian G.I. Gurdjieff, who was obsessed with de-automatising man and introducing a level of freedom rarely found in the ‘triviality of everydayness’. I’d argue that Wilson was not so much a ‘Simple Simon’ — far from it! — but a man of immense openness that enabled to him to actualise in his work what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described the initiatory experience of all true existentialists. Whitehead argued the true thinkers should make it their job to experience everything; drunkenness, sobriety, depression, ecstasy, and so on. None of this, of course, is pursued out of mere hedonism or sadism, but as an attempt to understand the extent of the human instrument throughout its entire existential spectrum. Only then, Whitehead and Wilson would likely argue, could you comment upon the human condition in any general sense. Not as an ivory tower intellectual, but as one on the frontline of life, so to speak.
Murder emerges out of an immense damming up of frustration which then bursts out as a destructive and utterly pointless act. But it is these implicitly creative potentials that Wilson was so fascinated by. Ritual in the Dark resulted from Wilson’s own frustration, much like other classic books — Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Emil Cioran’s On The Heights of Despair, and Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. These were attempts to describe an essential feeling of alienation and the slippery texture of reality. But, unlike these authors, Wilson was driven by something altogether more optimistic and life-affirming.
Initially, he wrote out of a basically emotional revolt that expressed itself creatively. Once the circumstances in his life lightened up — and his naturally cheerful temperament reasserted itself — the tone and philosophy of Ritual in the Dark changed correspondingly. This in turn meant that the protagonist’s response to murder became more nuanced. A sensitivity or basic will-to-health appeared in Gerard Sorme who, albeit it late on in the novel, recognised the murderous act as truly sick and insane. These murders, Wilson wrote, were a “gesture of revolt” against reality — a reality, that the murderer had completely lost touch with, but was slowly dawning on the more healthy-minded Sorme, and, in turn, the author.
The gesture of revolt against reality underpins Wilson’s study of criminology. In low moods we experience a weak grip on reality, and if we allow ourselves to sink yet further, we perceive from the equivalent of a worms-eye view of existence which, in the murderer, includes the reality of other people. Suddenly, the world seems to us meaningless and uninspiring, but, beneath all this, a resentment builds and seeks some sort of cathartic expression. But, as the individual’s grip on reality fails, so does his value judgements — and such ‘cathartic expressions’ become misleading and self-destructive. Murderers and criminals have fallen down this hole, becoming stuck in a loop where reality becomes increasingly unreal, which in turn requires increasingly extreme experiences to evoke any such sense of what the psychologist Pierre Janet called the fonction du reel, or reality function.
“The real present for us” wrote Janet, “is an act of a certain complexity which we grasp as one single state of consciousness in spite of this complexity, and in spite of its real duration, which can be of greater or lesser extent,” meaning that reality and the perception of it requires a fundamental grasping of complexity — a complexity that is increasingly low-resolution when one is feeling low or depressed. Perception is buoyed-up by energy, and, consequently, the more energised one feels, the more one can grasp complexity and the richness — and inherent meaning — of life.
One thing that has always interested me is how we observe ourselves in certain moments. As I’ve gotten older — I’m now 35 — it’s becoming increasingly obvious just how much we take for granted in our lives. Each moment — no matter how banal — offers itself up as a revelation, especially when considered in retrospect. For instance, I’ve worked in several industries, ranging from office work, apple picking, working as a drayman and working in various pubs. I’ve also written and edited several books. It was becoming acquainted with Wilson’s work that I felt an immediate sense of kinship. I too had sat on trucks and lorries for long journeys and had worked in several offices. On the one hand, I enjoyed the freedom of being out on the road, and on the other, I enjoyed stretching my intellectual muscles in office environments. However, I felt an enormous constriction on my energies in both — whether mental or physical. But after much meditation, I’ve now examined my experiences for more general and transformative insights or themes that revolve around something interesting or potentially helpful about the human condition. This is my debt to the work of Wilson.
Around about February and March 2018, I was working as a drayman during the ‘Beast from the East’ storm. A cold wave had blown over from Russia and North Asia, covering most of the West Midlands in precarious snowdrifts and unusually freezing temperatures. I’d get up early each morning and trek down a long and treacherous hill — Standhills Road in Kingswinford — avoiding the many opportunities for slipping over or filling my boots with powdery snow. Once I had arrived at my workplace, a cold room full of plastic and steel casks of ale would greet me each morning. A forklift truck driver would then prepare to stack up the van, which I attempted as best I could in the biting cold and slippery, black-ice-covered surfaces. Eventually the casks would be secured in place and we’d head out to the various pubs and then reverse the process, hoisting down the casks into the dark cellars using a fraying piece of rope with a hook attached to the end. The snow made it enormously difficult to push eighteen-gallon barrels. Often snow would gather up in front of the barrels as you pushed them, and you’d have to get around and kick out a path ahead of yourself.
After a long day of unloading and loading, I’d be exhausted. Again, I’d have to walk back up Standhills Road. This was made all the more difficult, as you’d have to put in twice the effort to walk up a hill than down it. But occasionally I’d take a shortcut and, each time, I’d pass a warm and inviting salon. Inside, beautiful women were blow-drying hair and manicuring fingernails.
In contrast to my day battling with steel casks and accompanying a grumpy chain-smoker, there seemed an obvious difference between men and women. Feminists had missed an important point about manhood. Suddenly — in my exhausted state — I glimpsed a world that appeared delicate and enchanting, altogether removed from the grim machine-like noise of working with heavy machinery and beer. For instance, I could understand why men working with tarmac or scaffolding would leer at the opposite sex. It wasn’t because they were sexist or sex-obsessed, but because the opposite sex represented another world of values.
Obviously, this is a controversial admittance in our politically saturated times. But I am convinced that this is commonplace enough that it is difficult to argue with. After all, political correctness is usually only correct in one dimension — politics. Psychologically, spiritually, experientially, it might be incorrect, impracticable and impractical, and exposing the limits of a political ideal. Life is not lived for political or economic reality alone, no matter what Aristotle or Karl Marx claimed contrariwise.
A few months later I began working in an office. This work demanded far more attention to detail and a different level of concentration. Initially, it was difficult to adjust to the people who have worked in offices for several years. Each day I’d sit at the same desk writing various bids for council jobs. The other employees baffled me as much as I probably baffled them. And not only did the work not engage me — writing about Health & Safety and fire extinguisher codes is intensely boring — the whole environment was vast contrast to working outdoors with burly, outspoken men, that I felt like I was trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare of pedanticism and bureaucracy. I’d secretly yearn for some chaotic event to break the monotony, whether it was a wasps’ nest falling through the ceiling or a member of staff revealing themselves to be a closet Nazi.
I had had a similar experience while working at an academic bookshop in Nottingham. The manager was insufferably short-tempered and petty-minded. Often, her accusations of misconduct or incompetency turned out to result from her own oversights or misinterpretations. Again, I found the people I worked with lacked a certain humility — or indeed sanity — that I’d found in manual labouring work. Feelings and thoughts seemed to be bottled up and would express themselves through passive aggression and the odd cutting comment. All this transferred itself to me, and I noticed that to calm down after work, I’d watch a film about boxing or listen to gangster rap.
This digression into my experience has been an attempt to point out how — and in what form — energies can frustrate or be redirected into darker regions of our psychology, collectively or individually. Our day-to-day lives quickly reflect our feelings and those around us, also pent-up and frustrated, may begin to act out or project their unhappiness onto others. This, in turn, can also be taken into oneself unconsciously, and before you know it, you are reflecting your environment. Tensions escalate and the need for expression presents itself, albeit it in a form that is often unrecognised or unaddressed. This logical regression to an outburst of crime is made quite obvious, but relatively few of us are unbalanced enough to commit anything seriously consequential such as taking another person’s life.
Here I am reminded of a question levelled at the Indian mystic, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, about the purification of the mind. Nisargadatta used a brilliantly phenomenological and penetrating analogy, saying:
“Basically, man is afraid. He is afraid of himself most. I feel I am a man who is carrying a bomb that is going to explode. He cannot diffuse it, he cannot throw it away. He is terribly frightened and is searching frantically for a solution, which he cannot find. To me, liberation is getting rid of this bomb. I do not know much about the bomb. I only know that it comes from early childhood. I feel like the frightened child protesting passionately about not being loved. The child is craving for love and because he does not get it, he is afraid and angry. Sometimes I feel like killing somebody, or myself. The desire is so strong that I am constantly afraid. And I do not know how to get free from fear.”
In the frustrated criminal — or in the outsider battling with an inner conflict between absolute affirmation and absolute denial (mystical yea-saying and the negation of existence) — it is common to feel as if one is “carrying a bomb that is going to explode”. Nisargadatta compares the mind two water and honey — the European mind, steeped in logic, is like water; affected by any slight disturbance. Honey — which Nisargadatta compares to the Hindu mind — is disturbed but quickly returns to a state of immobility, of inner-stillness. The more de-energised the mind, the more sensitive is the water of the mind, but the more energised, the more coherence and inner-resilience that buffers such a disturbance.
We are here talking about levels of frustration and their potential consequences — creative or destructive.
One day, while I was working in the bookshop, an electrician arrived to fit some new strip lights. That day, the atmosphere was uniquely dull; the streets were empty, the sky overcast, and dreary and syrupy acoustic music played incessantly in the background. The air seemed to be charged with some sort of life-draining static. After an hour of unbearable tedium, the electrician caught my eye and, probably feeling so bored as to provoke a reaction in me, requested I change the music to death metal (he requested a band called Cannibal Corpse).
This took me aback, as I felt much the same. The environment seemed to demand chaos — a force of energy to stir-up a life-force that had become stagnant and even toxic. Extremity in the form of heavy metal — or even Beethoven — seemed to be the answer to our inner-frustration with the dullness of the job at hand. Indeed, everyone knows children are much more impatient than adults, and during monotonous journeys kick their legs or repeatedly ask, ‘Are we there yet?’. They are attempting to stir-up or spend latent energies that are being dammed by the seemingly endless waiting (time passes much slower for children than adults) and monotony of the journey.
The vitality of a child is redirected and siphoned off into displacement activity, which is defined in a popular dictionary as an activity “that seems inappropriate, such as head-scratching when confused, [and is] considered arising unconsciously when a conflict between antagonistic urges cannot be resolved.” Murder, too, is arguably a form of displacement activity; an attempt to express or channel latent energies into a destructive act. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas seemed to express this when he told the police that he was bitter at the world and killing someone, for him, “was just like walking outdoors.” Murder had provided him with a sense of reality that had become eclipsed by his own bitterness toward the world.
For many of us, simply walking outdoors can offer us such a release of pent-up energy. Recently I undertook a four-hour walk from Penzance to Porthleven. When I finally arrived, I found I enjoyed it far more than if I had driven there or simply caught the bus. The effort of walking outdoors had amplified my sense of values, my ability to as it were taste experience. For Lucas, this would have not been enough; negative emotions and frustrations had too eroded his grip on reality for him to appreciate anything so ordinary. His tastes — or more over his inability to taste experience — had become deformed and murder became the only form he could ‘walk outdoors’. Like any alcoholic, the only way he can feel his emotions is through increasing the quantity of his indulgence; a negative feedback loop that is ultimately self-defeating. We could say the same of sex and extreme fetishes that have distorted the basic innocence and pure essence of sex and of its higher expressions in lovemaking. All these extremes are attempts to grasp an ever-fading sense of aliveness, and to escape the worms-eye-view of low-pressure consciousness.
According to Wilson, reading about murder reminds us forcibly that we could easily misdirect our energies. This is not to say that most of us could easily become murderers — but simply that we can easily sink into states of passivity in which we require more extreme forms of stimulus to evoke a basic sense of aliveness. A violent act such as murder implicitly suggests that the killer has a low estimation of the meaning of his own life, which, in turn, is projected upon his victim and acted out as a basically pointless and anti-creative activity.
For Wilson, the purpose of such novels as Ritual in the Dark and The Glass Cage is to “confront the two extremes: the mystic and the criminal: the man whose sense of the goodness and worth-whileness of life is constant and fully conscious, and the man whose self-pity and lack of self-belief have driven him to expressing his vitality in the most negative way he can find.” Both novels portray the murderer as a failed mystic in the sense that their violent energies have usurped their emotions and expressed themselves in a profound act of life-negation.
Insightfully, Wilson describes the murderer in The Glass Cage, as a man of “immense and violent energies and appetites” that have curdled and express themselves negatively. He continues:
“[His] conscious attitude to life is so negative and defeated that they cannot find ordinary expression. When he eats, he eats ravenously, with the sweat pouring down his face; when he drinks, he gulps it down until he is unconscious. And when he has sex, all the vast energies roar out like a volcanic explosion there is a desire to eat, to drink, to entirely consume his sexual partner. If he possessed the power to remould his personality to express these energies positively, he might be a Michaelangelo or a Beethoven.”
None of this, of course, is a defence of the act of a murder, or even a celebration of a murderer’s innate potential for genius. Instead, it is a recognition of intensely frustrated energies that could have been put to good use had they found a more fulfilling and evolutionary outlet. The problem with destructive acts is that they are self-cancelling and fraught by diminishing returns — nobody gets anywhere by murder. It is an ultimately devolutionary act and, once the law catches and prosecutes the criminal, his life is over and more often than not the killer attempts suicide.
If one can get past the savagery of murder, then it is quite easy to see how that in our own moments of frustration — whether it’s exhaustion after a hard day’s work, or a sense of diminishing returns in life — we might, too, chose a destructive outlet. It is precisely in these experiences which can undermine our sense of values, of our general sense of a larger meaning to life. The murderer has simply abandoned all such scruples and has declared his statement on life — that it is ultimately meaningless and not worth the effort to elevate, or to pour our energies into producing great art or a loving family environment.
My own experiences have been ordinary enough to share. And I suspect they are general enough to be familiar to many of my readers. Ultimately, this article has explored what Wilson called ‘duo-consciousness’ — that state you find yourselves in when you are in bed during a cold rainy day and know you have to get up in five-minutes. Duo-consciousness is that heightened savouring of warmth and comfort beneath those sheets. This state ceases to affect us on weekends when there is no great demand to get up early. As our mind rests in a type of one-sidedness, we cease to enjoy the moment — the contrast between a warm, comfy bed and the harsh, cold outside world. All this is abruptly changed when we are awaiting the alarm-clock on a busy workday…
The psychological mechanism of duo-consciousness can be accessed by our very reading about such morbid subjects as murder. We can read accounts of horror and tragedy as a sort of mirror, contrasting our more coherent and stable lives against those nightmarish worlds of true crime. Effectively, this reminds us that our lives could be a lot worse than they are. The act of reading true crime is, for Wilson, a means to “throw light upon its opposite: the passion for order, creativity, sainthood.”
‘My Interest in Murder’ is a fascinating study of the basically existential and evolutionary purpose of true crime writing. Wilson wrote the book in the spirit of pleasure and good faith; as an attempt to stimulate duo-consciousness in the reader, a way of ‘throwing light upon its opposite’, and to ignite the spirit to improve our own lives and those of others. Reading about criminality helps us to attain a firmer grip on our own reality — a grip that enables to climb to higher levels of consciousness and contribute to our own inner-development and creatively engage more fully with life.
