empire
Q and A with Caroline Derry on Agatha Christie, lesbians and criminal courts
Lesbian relationships in Britain were regulated and silenced for centuries, through the courts and though wider patriarchal structures. In an interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Caroline Derry speaks about research from her book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020) and what the portrayal of same-sex relationships in Agatha Christie’s novels reveals about attitudes towards homosexuality – and specifically lesbianism – in post-war Britain.
Caroline Derry will speak at a hybrid event hosted by LSE Library, Agatha Christie, lesbians, and criminal courts on Thursday 15 February at 6.00 pm.
Q: In your book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, you speak of lesbianism being silenced in upper-class British society “because of acute anxieties about female sexual autonomy.” Where did these anxieties stem from?
Women’s autonomy posed a profound threat to patriarchal structures. Marriage, particularly for elite men, was central to maintaining those structures: transfer of property, inheritance, and control over their household all depended upon it. Legally, the wife’s existence was subsumed in her husband’s, giving him power over her property, actions, and sexuality. This was not only true in the 18th century, when the book begins; it persisted through the 19th century and has only slowly been dismantled over the past century and a half. For example, the legal rule that a man could not be convicted of raping his wife was finally abolished in 1991.
There was anxiety that if women ‘discovered’ lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined.
There was anxiety that if women “discovered” lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined. That was explicitly stated by lawmakers at various points in history. In 1811, Scottish judge Lord Meadowbank said that “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners”. In 1921, judge and MP Sir Ernest Wild asserted in Parliament that “it is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing whatever to do with the other sex”. And the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed reform of the law on male homosexuality, spoke of lesbianism as damaging to “the basic unit of society”, marriage.
Q: Why do you write in Lesbianism and the Criminal Law that “Patriarchal oppression […] made the criminalisation of lesbianism almost redundant”?
There were many other ways of regulating women’s lives and relationships that could offer more effective control and less public scandal. These included economic constraints: in the 18th and 19th centuries, married women of all classes had little or no legal control of their own money. Single women without private incomes were little better off. For example, servants’ employers regulated most aspects of their lives under threat of dismissal without a reference.
Social norms set strict limits for unmarried women’s behaviour and gave families a great deal of control over them – although this could sometimes be evaded, as we know from Anne Lister’s diaries! Religious regulation of moral conduct was important, while medicalisation became more significant from the 19th century. Lesbian relationships were pathologised as a symptom of mental illness and the consequences could be awful: an extreme example was the use of clitoridectomy by surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. In the 20th century, “treatments” included aversion therapies and even brain surgery. And until relatively recently, the courts themselves had the power to detain young women in “moral danger”.
Q: Although lesbianism may not have been strictly outlawed, you refer to a “regulation by silencing” of lesbianism within the British court systems. How did this operate?
Legal silencing was based on the assumption that if women – particularly “respectable”, higher class, white, British women – were not told that lesbianism existed, they probably wouldn’t try it. Eighteenth-century models of sexuality assumed women craved men’s greater “heat”, while 19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire. It was unlikely that two passive and desireless creatures would discover lesbian sex for themselves.
19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire.
In the criminal courts, silencing worked in several ways. The most obvious was to avoid criminal prosecutions altogether, because court hearings are public and could be reported in the press. So, there has never been a specific offence criminalising sex between women (unlike sex between men, which was wholly illegal until 1967). However, when a prosecution did seem necessary, silencing could be maintained by choosing an offence which concealed the sexual element of the case. There is a long history of prosecutions for fraud where one partner presented as male (cases relevant to both lesbian and transgender history). In the 18th century, this was supposed financial fraud to obtain a “wife’s” possessions; in the later 19th and 20th centuries, making false statements on official documents. And throughout these periods, women have been brought before magistrates for disorderly behaviour and breach of the peace – although few records survive.
Q: What does analysis of the defamation case Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon (1810-1812) reveal about how legal discourses defined morality in relation to race and class?
This Scottish case offers a really potent example of those discourses. A half-Scottish, half-Indian teenager, Jane Cumming, told her grandmother Lady Helen Cumming Gordon that her schoolmistresses were having a sexual relationship. Cumming Gordon urged other families to withdraw their daughters, forcing the school to close, and the teachers brought a defamation claim for their lost livelihood.
The court had to wrestle with difficult questions: could two middle-class women of good character have done what was alleged? If not, how did their accuser come to know of such things? At the initial hearings, the judge’s answer was that the story must been invented by a working-class maid. But when witness evidence was heard, it became apparent that the story originated with Jane Cumming. Attention then shifted to her early life in India. The climate, the supposedly immoral culture, her race, or – in a mixture of race and class discourses – the bad influence of “native’” servants were all blamed.
This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism.
This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism. Greater awareness of the horrors of violence, corruption and exploitation by the East India Company made it difficult to present their activities as legitimate trading. Instead, a moral justification was claimed: that Indian people needed to be rescued from iniquity by the imposition of superior British law and standards, exemplified by virtuous British womanhood. Many of the judges and witnesses in this case had connections to India, so it is unsurprising that these discourses made a particularly powerful appearance here.
Q: What were the legal implications of the 1957 Wolfenden report for homosexual activity in Britain? What did the report (or its omissions) reveal about attitudes towards women’s sexuality?
The Wolfenden Report recommended partially decriminalising sex between men, but barely acknowledged sex between women. The few mentions implied that lesbianism was “less libidinous” and thus less of a threat to public order. That was important because politically, equality for gay men through full decriminalisation was not attainable at that time. Wolfenden therefore took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law, and focusing on arguments specific to male homosexuality. It was successful: Parliament eventually implemented the recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
Wolfenden […] took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law
Nonetheless, the Report was a watershed event in the legal regulation of lesbianism. Until then, the law had treated male and female sexuality as very different things. Wolfenden introduced the term “homosexuality” into law, and lesbianism became seen as “female homosexuality”. Combined with the Report’s characterisation of lesbians as less sexual than gay men, this meant that lesbianism was treated as a lesser variant of male homosexuality – an attitude that has never gone away.
Q: Was it remarkable that Agatha Christie included or suggested homosexuality in her novels?
Yes and no. These were not issues that were generally discussed in polite conversation. At the same time, lesbian (and gay) people were a fact of life, even if not directly acknowledged. In 1950, most people knew of women living quietly living together like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd in A Murder is Announced. Christie walked a careful line in that book, portraying an intimate and deeply loving relationship but showing nothing explicitly sexual about it.
By 1971, when [Christie] wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society.
And of course, Christie was a rather more daring writer than people often realise: it’s unfair to treat her as a narrowly conservative author of formulaic novels. By 1971, when she wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society. But Christie was in any event happy to engage with difficult issues in her work, even quite taboo ones like child murderers.
Q: What insights do these portrayals provide into the criminal justice system’s attitudes to lesbianism in post-war England?
Christie’s novels reflect wider middle-class attitudes at the specific times they were written, so they offer insights that we can’t get from court reports alone. They also come from a woman’s perspective rather than that of the elite men who mostly made the law, and gender does make a difference here. Men were convinced that respectable women did not know of such things, but women didn’t necessarily agree!
The novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings.
In particular, the novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings. If we look at medical, psychological and sexological work on women’s same-sex relationships in post-war Britain, the courts seem hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison. But Christie’s books show us that outside expert circles, attitudes were indeed decades behind the latest science. In other words, the courts were reflecting and contributing to mainstream opinions, not falling behind them.
Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: A still from the the episode, “A Murder is Announced” of the BBC Miss Marple series (1984 to 1992), adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple (left) and Paola Dionisotti as Miss Hinchcliffe (right). This image is reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” exception to UK Copyright law.
A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn’t Matter Who The President Is
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/f589e6f13aab623eeb2a4a26148b1ab3/href
So it turns out the dementia symptoms Biden’s supporters have long dismissed as a “stutter” are actually exactly what they look like.
The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.”
Hur reports that in interviews Biden couldn’t even remember things as fundamental as the years of his term as vice president, or when his son Beau died. Hur also writes that Biden’s memory had gotten worse between the aforementioned recorded 2017 interviews and the interviews with the president last year.
In short, the president’s brain don’t work. It’s shot. The “leader of the free world” has rusted out gray matter. It’s like swiss cheese in there.
https://medium.com/media/c089f13ba794244b3c6100de78e63641/href
And it is indeed getting worse. During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice.
If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.
Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.
Which is a bit of a problem for Americans who would like to change certain aspects of their government’s behavior, like for example the backing of an active genocide in Gaza. Whose conscience do they work to appeal to if the person they were told is in charge actually isn’t? Who do they vote for if the people who really call the shots aren’t even on the ballot?
https://medium.com/media/4e1f8f3ee6486565f511ad3048c8eeb7/href
The fact that the US president has dementia exposes the uncomfortable truth that the functioning of the empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it.
The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is run not by the official elected government of that nation, but by unelected empire managers who filter in and out of each administration and maintain a steady presence in government agencies and government-adjacent institutions. These empire managers form alliances with corporate powers and working relationships with the many nations, assets and partners who function as members of the undeclared US empire.
Which means there’s not really any way for Americans to vote their way out of this mess. If you have a problem with genocide, militarism, economic injustice, authoritarianism, or any other crucial building block for the US-centralized power structure, you will never be permitted to have any influence over those things through the official electoral system. Voting in western “democracies” is done to give us the illusion of control, like letting a toddler play with a toy steering wheel while you drive so they can feel like they’re participating.
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "Make no mistake: Israel has lost control of the narrative about Gaza, and they are very, very worried about this. That's why they're making big moves like the below. Don't let anyone tell you your efforts to expose Israel's criminality to more people make no difference. https://t.co/CCioIt78AA / Twitter"
Make no mistake: Israel has lost control of the narrative about Gaza, and they are very, very worried about this. That's why they're making big moves like the below. Don't let anyone tell you your efforts to expose Israel's criminality to more people make no difference. https://t.co/CCioIt78AA
Remi Kanazi on Twitter: "Weird, almost seems like direct action works https://t.co/agxl19TxYR / Twitter"
Weird, almost seems like direct action works https://t.co/agxl19TxYR
That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, just that there’s no way out of this mess that involves voting. We’re already seeing pro-Palestine activists throwing significant obstacles in the operations of Israeli weapons dealers, and the push to educate and inform the public about what’s happening in Gaza has caused Israel to lose control of the narrative so severely that it’s now resorting to desperate online influence ops. Measures like this can be implemented across the board to bring about the end of the imperial power structure. Once enough people begin turning against the empire, using the power of our numbers to force real change will quickly move from impossible to possible to likely to inevitable.
But we’ve got to stop hanging all our hopes on the electoral system first. Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote. But don’t let that performative ritual distract you from the real project: to wake up our fellow humans and begin forcing real change.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Never Before Has The Empire Been So Exposed
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/e126e188b3b2ef376926a303565de8d6/href
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The Iraqi government says 16 people were killed in the latest round of US airstrikes in Iraq, including civilians. You might think 16 deaths as payback for three Americans killed by Iraqi militants would be more than enough, but you would be wrong. There will be many more.
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I’ve been railing against the US war machine for around seven years now, and never during that time have I had more westerners on my side than right now. Never has the depravity of the western empire been more starkly exposed in the cold light of day.
Usually perceiving the monstrousness of US foreign policy requires some knowledge and understanding, some background and context, and I’ve had to spend my time providing that so readers could see what I’m seeing. Now it’s just a deluge of massacred children appearing right on people’s social media feeds, with the US president proudly acknowledging that he’s backing it and bombing countries throughout the middle east to help it continue.
There’s not really any way for the imperial propagandists to spin that as anything other than what it is. They try (my god do they try), but not enough people are buying it. Too many people are looking right at the emperor’s shriveled nutsack in the cold morning air and saying “Hey wait a second, this bitch is ass dick naked!”
Everyone who opposes the US war machine has that one moment that snapped their eyes open, where they realized the media are lying to them and they’ve been cheering for the imperial stormtroopers this entire time. Syria. Libya. Iraq. Vietnam. There’s always something. And in terms of freshly opened eyes, this moment in history may wind up leaving the rest far behind.
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Top ten reasons people support Israel:
1. Their favorite political party supports Israel
2. They were taught to support Israel and revising your worldview is hard
3. They believe the media would never lie to them
4. They hate Muslims
5. They want Jesus to come back and send nonbelievers to hell
6. Their employment depends on it
7. They have a personality that always sides with power
8. They want to fit in socially with other people who support Israel
9. They hope to retire in an Israeli settlement someday
10. They want a career in politics or media
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https://medium.com/media/966a53a937d018148338f46d84b749dc/href
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Step 1: See the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine on your social media feed.
Step 2: Israel supporters show up to explain why the thing you just saw is actually fine and normal and should probably happen more.
Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 through 3, every day, for months.
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If Israel was the moral and responsible force it purports to be it wouldn’t need a huge army of paid and unpaid apologists running around all day every day explaining why its latest documented atrocity is fine/is being misunderstood/didn’t happen/is someone else’s fault.
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Israel has been the sole perpetrator of atrocities since October 7, so they keep “discovering” new atrocities Hamas perpetrated on October 7 to make it look less one-sided. Oh look they beheaded babies on October 7! Oh look there were mass rapes on October 7! Oh look UNRWA was involved in October 7! Etc.
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“Am Yisrael Chai” is a popular Hebrew political slogan which loosely translates to “Palestinians should not have hospitals”.
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Only liars and manipulators try to reframe criticisms of Israel as criticism of Jews instead of criticisms of the specific actions of a specific state power. Revealingly, both Zionists and neo-Nazis do this constantly.
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Get out of the middle east. Just get the fuck out. Stop backing a genocide in Gaza, stop murdering people to shore up domination of world resources, and leave. Leave before you unleash something far worse than the nightmare you’ve already inflicted upon our species.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
‘To Restore Trust, Rip Up the Astroturf’
The Right Honourable Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg is jolly cheesed off and thinks you should be too.
Sharing a clip of an interview with Zewditu Gebreyohanes, former director of the Restore Trust, on his GB News evening show on 23 January, he tweeted: “The National Trust regrettably dislikes our nation.”
In the excerpt, he expanded on the theme: “The National Trust is there to maintain great historic buildings, that were very often given to them by the families that built them and apart from everything else, it feels like slightly bad manners to trash the families who gave you these fantastic properties.”
His guest agreed. “We all want more history,” Gebreyohanes said. But “unfortunately this is very bad history; they’re not using historians they’re bringing in people like English academics... or people who are trendy for other reasons and bringing them in to front campaigns that are virtue signalling rather than anything else.”
For Gebreyohanes and Rees-Mogg (which sounds a bit like a forgotten 1960s folk duo) only a select group of ‘approved historians’ should be commenting. It is distasteful for anyone else to do so, let alone bring up uncomfortable truths about the powerful families that built great homes, on the basis that they altruistically gifted them to the National Trust.
Rees-Mogg is a historian. He studied the subject at Oxford University and got a 2:1 for his troubles. Gebreyohanes, with a degree in PPE, is (by her own definition) not. But her remarkable CV – which has seen her become a trustee of the V&A Museum (with Boris Johnson’s backing) as well as an editor at History Reclaimed, and a director at Restore Trust, all by the time she is 25 – perhaps more than makes up for that.
Despite having written two books on the subject, I make no claim to be an academic or a historian. But despite that, I am happy to say that, in my opinion, they’re both talking agenda-driven balls. Here’s why.
Twisting History
For most of the 20th Century, the popular narrative of British history was in the hands of a tiny elite.
In school textbooks and popular histories, it propagated the notion that ‘our’ Empire (unlike others) was broadly a good thing; that the British people had an exceptional and indomitable ‘spirit’; that our history was more interesting than everyone else’s; and that even when this country did bad things, they were somehow good – because we always redeemed ourselves by later putting it right.
So, for example, while Britain did participate in enslaving millions of people, the slate was later wiped clean when ‘we’ magnanimously abolished it and played ‘our’ part in ending the trade altogether.
It’s an attitude that has informed many a contemporary ‘Hannanist’ worldview and is something I have previously dubbed ‘Ladybird Libertarianism’: a bowdlerised view of the past with all the horrid bits edited out.
British history served up as a nice, neat, ordered state of affairs, peppered with benign monarchs, great men, a tiny handful of women, and millions of grateful serfs (sorry ‘subjects’) – who every now and then were sent off to willingly die for the vested interests of the establishment.
Like so much other self-reinforcing propaganda, it served as an attractive myth and one which Britons largely bought into. But, from the 1960s onwards, that narrative began to be challenged in books, television documentaries and school curriculums – and with it came a growing interest in the facts over the imperialist fantasy.
As the sands shifted, the old guard began to organise. With the dawn of the 21st Century, the fight-back came.
In 2007, the think tank Civitas republished 'Our Island Story’, an Edwardian children’s book written by HE Marshall, which told a decidedly Anglocentric, patrician, and (in its view) a very attractive version of British history. Having done so, it started a campaign to get a copy into every school in the land.
The ‘Our Island Story’ movement was highly successful and, with the Telegraph’s backing, Civitas managed to get all sorts of endorsements from leading politicians, including David Cameron who proclaimed it his "favourite childhood book" in 2010.
Retrospectively, that moment saw the first shots fired in the British 'culture war' but crucially – in 2010 – very few people seemed to have noticed the agenda.
Igniting the Great Culture War
That changed with Brexit. And when in 2020 the National Trust published a landmark report into ‘Colonialism and Historic Slavery’, the phoney culture war ended – and the real conflict began.
That report, published in the immediate wake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the felling of the Colston statue in Bristol, seems to have triggered the Ladybird Libertarians who have been howling with outrage ever since.
In the past five years, a series of ‘grassroots’ organisations – including the Save Our Statues campaign, History Reclaimed, its precursor History Matters (set up by Policy Exchange), and of course Restore Trust – have all gone into battle, with many of the same personnel dotting their ‘who are we’ pages.
Like its forerunners, and despite its protestations that it is simply run by ‘concerned’ National Trust members, Restore Trust has some very powerful friends indeed. Byline Times and the Bylines Network, as well as the Good Law Project, have done good work in exposing the links. But suffice to say, Restore Trust is no more a grassroots organisation than I’m Winston Churchill’s fictional swearing parrot.
And it clearly has some significant resources to pull on. It was telling, for example, that until a few months ago, its X (formerly Twitter) account sported a gold checkmark, at the eye-watering cost of £950 a month. Show me another grassroots movement that could afford that.
Its proposed members for the National Trust board have not exactly been ordinary folk off the Clapham Omnibus either. They have included former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, ‘socialite’ Lady Violet Manners, Boris Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson, and historian Dr Zareer Masani.
In Facebook ads by a group calling itself Respect Britain’s Heritage – the website of which links back to Restore Trust – Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg have lent their support.
In the press, it has been able to call on the help of Lord Charles Moore, who was ennobled by Boris Johnson, and Oldie Editor Harry Mount – who once wrote a book entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson. And of course, GB News has been hugely supportive of its efforts – that's the GB News co-owned by the Legatum Institute which now employs a certain Zewditu Gebreyohanes.
Depressed? Well, you shouldn’t be because, for once, this is a good news story. The old consensus that organisations like the National Trust or the RNLI should simply ‘take it’ has shifted. The National Trust, led by director of communications Celia Richardson, has fought back against the group and done so very effectively. For the moment, the cynical attempts at entryism have been successfully fended off.
There are two lessons here and ones which we should all take to heart. Firstly, we all ignore the sneaky forces of astroturfery at our peril. Secondly, it is not only possible to fight back – but even to win.
Welcome To The Empire
Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:
https://medium.com/media/8f8260307141b80626897c59af28d0c2/href
Welcome to the empire
Where genocide is self-defense and peace rallies are genocide
Where war criminals are the victims and the hospitals are Hamas
Where calls for freedom are hateful and ceasefires are anti-semitic
Where civilians get called terrorists and real terrorists get Nobel Peace Prizes
Where the propaganda is journalism and the journalism is propaganda
Where the democracy is real and the apartheid is imaginary
Where the corporations are people and the people are corporate resources
Welcome to the empire
Whose bombs are humanitarian and whose provocations are invisible
Whose veterans are heroes and whose victims are forgotten
Whose wars are always just and whose enemies are always Hitler
Whose cause is always righteous and whose critics are always Russian
Whose sufferings are unforgivable and whose crimes are erased from history
Whose atrocities are always an unfortunate accident and whose enemies kill civilians for fun
Whose disastrous interventions are always innocent mistakes no matter how often they happen
Welcome to the empire
Ever the victim of unprovoked attacks from the people it has been strangling
Ever the shining city on a hill of human corpses
Ever the defender of the poor helpless plutocrats of Wall Street
Ever the savior of the families incinerated by missiles made by Raytheon
Ever the protector of natural resources in the soil of foreign nations
Ever the upholder of the rules-based order of a world with a boot on its throat
The empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil
The empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer
The empire is your only friend
The empire is the only one who will ever love you
You can’t leave
You can’t get rid of the empire
If you get rid of the empire, this world could be taken over by tyrants
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock (formatted for size).
At This Point We Have To Always Assume Israel Is Lying Until Proven Otherwise
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/842efb1906dc51387b92a4f29407020b/href
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Israel is killing children at a historic rate, is killing an unprecedented number of journalists, and is starving half a million civilians while raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp. No part of this is complicated. No part of this is two-sided.
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On Tuesday Israel killed a Palestinian baby girl who was born during the IDF bombing campaign on Gaza. They’ve been killing children so aggressively for so long now that they’re starting to kill children who were born after the child-killing began.
Seventeen days. Al-Amira Aisha got seventeen days on this planet before being crushed to death by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Rafah, alongside her two year-old brother Ahmed and 25 others who’d been living in the same apartment building. She never knew a day of peace.
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A Washington Post investigative report into Israel’s attack on al-Shifa Hospital has found that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.” The Post reports it came to this conclusion after “analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.”
At this point the default assumption of any thinking person should be that all claims made by Israel are lies until proven otherwise by mountains of rock-solid evidence.
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The belief that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties is based on literally nothing. It has no evidentiary basis whatsoever. People believe it because they want to. Because believing it is more emotionally comfortable than facing the obvious reality.
Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده on Twitter: "Gaza was once here, then the barbarians came to wipe it off the map. We will not forgive, and we will not forget. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1v2qRNZDnS / Twitter"
Gaza was once here, then the barbarians came to wipe it off the map. We will not forgive, and we will not forget. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1v2qRNZDnS
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There are two aspects to the war on journalism over Gaza. The first is a highly concentrated assault in Gaza itself where journalists are actively being assassinated, and the second is a worldwide assault where journalists who don’t follow the official line are being purged.
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It’s so weird watching western rightists babble about how barbaric they think Muslims and their culture are while western culture amasses a mountain of ten thousand child corpses in Gaza.
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When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen’s critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them.
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It’s not okay for progressive Democrats to talk about how sad and bad the Gaza massacre is and how important a ceasefire is without naming Biden, as though it’s some remote foreign conflict that your president is just passively witnessing instead of actively facilitating.
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Biden backed a genocide in Gaza, sabotaged peace negotiations in Ukraine to launch a world-threatening proxy war, and now we’re all praying that he doesn’t launch a new full-scale war with Hezbollah and/or Ansarallah. But you’re still meant to fiercely support his re-election.
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Bush’s wars were dumb when they happened under Bush, and they’re even dumber now two decades later as they’re happening again after learning precisely nothing.
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Claiming to support a “two-state solution” that Israel has never had any intention of permitting lets liberals pretend they can support Israel without supporting murder, tyranny, apartheid and abuse, and thus never need to experience any guilt or dissonance about their position.
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There’s a single news story about international conflicts which keeps repeating itself again and again in different iterations, and that story is this: “US-centralized empire fights to secure domination of planet Earth, and some populations resist this.”
You’re seeing this story with Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansarallah today. That’s what you’ve been seeing with all the standoffs with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. That’s what you see when the US-centralized power structure terrorizes nations in Latin America like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
It’s a giant empire attacking nations who have the temerity to insist on their own national sovereignty rather than being absorbed into the imperial blob. It uses full-scale wars, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and blockades, drone wars, CIA coups and deliberately fomented color revolutions to subvert any government which defies the US agenda of securing total planetary domination.
If you can understand this, you can understand pretty much any major international conflict in modern times.
___________
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‘A Disunited Kingdom? For Younger Minorities, Britishness is an Identity We Can Work With – A Quest for Englishness Must Confront This’
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I am a Londoner. I am the Sikh Punjabi daughter of immigrants. I am British.
My parents were born and raised in countries of the British Empire: my mother two years after partition in Delhi; and my dad in Nairobi, where he lived under British rule in one of British East Africa’s stratified societies (the whites above; the Kenyans below). 'Great Britain’ was a country they, like many Asian immigrants, then came to; aspired to thrive in, were proud to be part of. The mother country.
Having long explored Britain’s imperial project with my parents growing up, I have never bought into the uncritical exceptionalism of Britain’s ‘greatness’ but the acknowledgement of my Britishness is a sort of recognition of my parents’ history. And how this history was and is British history. Those times may have passed, but for some of us they haven’t. They are living legacies. More British than the British.
And it was the British National Party that had its headquarters, disguised as a bookshop and meeting room, opposite the house I grew up in south-east London, where I was born. And it was the Union flag its supporters carried when they rioted with police outside my living room window following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in nearby Eltham in the 1990s.
For the generations who came before me, that flag is a terrifying symbol of the violence of far-right extremism in modern Britain: p*ki-bashing; the National Front chasing black skin. It wasn’t their flag. But their struggles, historic and continuing, made my journey easier and helped change our country. So I was frightened too: why were these rioting hooligans carrying my flag?
And it was ‘Cool Britannia’ the tabloids talked about when New Labour came to power and the Gallagher brothers went to Downing Street. And when Geri Halliwell wore the Union Jack dress at the Brit Awards.
The Spice Girls reunited years later for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It was a moment many of us felt proud, perhaps, never more British: outward; diverse; plural; confident.
And it’s good old British goodwill I think of when strangers daren’t jump the queue or pull together on a packed, packed-up train. Or when I think of the NHS and our welfare state. Decency.
Art work/graffiti in Waterloo, London. Photo: Hardeep Matharu
But what is it, to me, to be English?
Unlike the other nations of the UK, it is true that England does not have as strong a sense of a distinct identity. England is the only nation in the Union not to have dedicated political representation outside of Westminster. One compelling analysis of Brexit was that it was an outlet for a kind of unheard English nationalism.
For me, the United Kingdom is a last expression of England’s imperial project. And so I personally believe that if the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland see their futures as independent countries or united with other independent countries, that is their right. But I am also conflicted.
If the Union and Britishness is a limitation of their beings, this I understand. But the same identity that limits them, brings for me expression and expansion.
Why?
Because in Britishness is the notion – however this has emerged in me – of diversity; plurality; difference; inclusivity; outwardness. For me, these thoughts and feelings don’t show themselves when it comes to Englishness – with its inwardness; isolation; exclusion. Englishness is something I have never felt part of. Little England. How many of us from similar backgrounds, people of colour, minorities, living the legacies of Empire, have?
I have my own reasons – for identity is not either political or personal; it is both. But, in a wider sense, because the negative associations of England with the far-right have not been replaced by anything more positive or inclusive, Englishness is not an identity that has ever really been presented to me as me.
That's not to say that 'Englishness' isn't on my radar. The quaintness of formal hall at Cambridge University felt very English. Whenever I speak to Americans, Britishness isn’t a thing (she was the Queen of England, Elizabeth II). A recent Christmas carol service at Southwark Cathedral, Shakespeare’s local church back in the day, felt more English than it did British – and I was part of it, alongside (some) other diverse faces. And the occasional Sunday roast never feels very British (while I do love the odd English breakfast)…
On a substantive level, an example which has been instructive – and which, I believe, points a way forward – has emerged in football and our current England team. Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane … During the 2020 Euros, the Migration Museum tweeted that “without players with at least one parent or grandparent born overseas, England would be down to just three players”.
Many of us relate to and are so proud of that diverse England team that is achieving such success, which is embracing its togetherness and differences, where there is solidarity, tradition and evolution. Taking on those young men taking the knee was one culture war this Government could not win. And that is saying something.
As the England manager, Gareth Southgate, said in his open letter ‘Dear England’ when those players were being condemned by the likes of Priti Patel and Boris Johnson for raising awareness of racism and structural injustice through sport: “I feel like this generation of England players is closer to the supporters than they have been for decades. Despite the polarisation we see in society, these lads are on the same wavelength as you on many issues.”
For me, these players are both English, when they play for the England team, and British – because they represent the values I associate with this. And that's the point: our identities are multiple. We don’t, and shouldn’t, have to choose one or the other.
On the deeper constitutional analysis as to why Englishness needs to be given political expression, I am not an expert. But I believe we need to consider our identity associations with the heart, not just the head.
What does embracing Englishness and feeling ‘more English’ mean? And how would it happen? Why hasn’t it happened so far?
Of course, for some, it will have always meant something; always have been an identity that speaks to them. But from where will this affiliation have developed?
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While the political dimensions of Britishness and Englishness may be alive for some, I suspect for many more that the question of our identities is an exploration of the many forces that shape us on a personal level.
The matters of Westminster and regional representation are not, I believe, outweighed by our experiences cultural, social and individual. Most of my reflections of my Britishness are personal reflections. And so merely giving England more political representation will not, in itself, change the state of my attachment to this identity.
I ask the same questions of my Punjabiness. If I am to be ‘more Indian’, what exactly am I supposed to be connecting with? And according to who and what? For some in my community, I’m not Indian enough even though I am Indian. Identities are complicated and not always knowable – to ourselves or to others.
One of the reasons I identify with Britishness is its plurality – for me, it doesn’t tell me what to be or what I need to be. Identities should not be imposed, but be created. They are reflections of the stories within us. The ideas we view the world with.
Could we not, then, create an Englishness that sits alongside our Britishness?
Could we decouple Britishness from its more imperial overtones and, alongside this more modern version, also develop a sense of Englishness – which appeals not just to the head but to the heart? Which is not merely about politics but personal? Not imposed but made available?
Because I don’t think we need to choose. And neither Britishness nor Englishness needs to be fixed in what we have thought it was in the past.
In this age of the hyper-weaponisation of identities, the blood of tribalism, and the stoking of people’s baser instincts with division, we need to encourage an understanding of ourselves based on the idea of the multiple identities within us – the different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes shifting, aspects of who we are that sit side by side. That this is true but this is true too.
Britishness and Englishness are political and personal. Both can be part of our stories. But we have to be free to choose them.
Hardeep Matharu is the Editor of Byline Times. This is an edited version of her speech at the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023
‘A Disunited Kingdom? Britain is Built on Forgetting Our Imperial History’
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Of the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell each other, and the stories the powerful and the political class tell the rest of us, the last one is of particular interest to me. Why?
We know those who control the past control the present. Therefore, the stories we tell ourselves about our past will determine the parameters of what today is considered politically possible and what’s ruled out. And it partly explains, for example, why England can have Brexit but Scotland can’t have independence.
It’s clearly powerful.
Why else do you think the Faragist-right of this country – the intellectual inheritors of Enoch Powell – are so intent on waging and winning their ‘history wars’. It’s because they understand that maintaining the illusory story of what Britain was, is integral to the illusion of what Britain is and the maintenance of their political and economic hegemony.
I switched on BBC News earlier this year to see the Trevelyan family (British aristocrats) apologising and paying reparations to the Caribbean island of Grenada. They were doing so for their ancestors’ part in the enslavement of thousands of Africans – including some of my own ancestors, it transpires, on my father’s side.
It’s led to a podcast, Heirs of Enslavement, which charts the story of Britain’s transatlantic chattel slave trade and plantations, all the way through to today and the continued exploitation of the same people by the same banks and financial institutions that made their money from that brutal exploitation in the first place.
Otto English charts the different strands of English identity over the years and how a dark turn may now be giving way to something altogether more inclusive, decent and inspiring
Otto English
The former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan, my co-presenter, told me something which stuck in my head because its redolent of a wider truth. She explained how her family had told itself for generations that they were part of the good and the great of British history (the Irish potato famine aside). They were renowned historians, civil service reformers and even Labour Party secretaries of state. But the realisation they had enriched themselves through the longest, most brutal, and exploitative crimes against humanity ever perpetrated, from what I could discern, was like being woken up by a bucket of cold slops; a shock to the system.
But it opened eyes – including my own. It’s allowed me to see that there has been a deliberate forgetting of our history. Whether the usual sanitised story of slavery that focuses on abolition to the assertion that Empire really wasn’t that big a deal (and if it was, well, it brought the rule of law to the world).
A deliberate forgetting. But why?
To cover up a crime scene that spanned the globe and hundreds of years.
To completely disconnect those crimes – and the wealth and power they generated – and how it ended up in the hands of the wealthy, corporations and financial institutions.
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To enable the construction of a new, national post-Empire narrative of Britain.
Together, I think they help explain a big part of our democratic crisis. 'Britain’ is a construct born of that empire. As post-war decolonisation took place, those sat in the driving seat of Empire PLC needed a new story of what Britain was.
Enoch Powell, the first parliamentarian to embrace neoliberalism – and best known for his Rivers of Blood speech – is less well known for his role in this transformation. In 1950, he exclaimed that "Britain without an empire is like a head without a body".
By the time he wrote his 1965 book, A Nation Not Afraid, he claimed that the Empire was simply an invention that never really happened; that Britain had never set out to conquer the world and that instead it had been landed with the colonies.
Rather, Britain was a pioneering Island where the laws, constitution and systems of government had been unbroken for a millennia. Powell and others gave birth to the lie the British state was born by immaculate conception, then growing organically into the modern day construct we now see. Plucky Britain, so different from its European neighbours.
If that’s the story we tell ourselves then of course the crisis of democracy makes no sense. Its like trying to square observational data of planetary orbits, holding onto the belief the Earth is at the centre of the solar system.
Therefore, this’ forgetting’ is crucial to both the maintenance of the British state as is – the monarchy, the Union, an unwritten constitution, and even our voting system.
It covers up the origins for the gross wealth inequality within our country. Why the city of London, the banks, the financial institutions wield such wealth and power over us. Why a racialised immigration narrative is so deeply embedded into our political culture. Why human rights commitments are now under attack. Why the Union is so fragile.
Everything begins to make sense when we tell ourselves the truth of how we got here. And by doing that, we can better work out what it is we need to do to tackle the crisis of our democracy.
Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South. This is an edited version of his speech at the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023
A Message to White Environmentalists: Demanding a Fossil Fuel Phase Out is Not Enough
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The revelation that the COP28 president told former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson that he believed there is “no science” to justify a total phase-out of fossil fuels to stay within 1.5C has stoked anger and shock around the world.
But overwhelmingly this global backlash has come from white environmentalists who fail to realise that the blanket demand to eliminate fossil fuels is widely perceived across the developing world as an ill-conceived and self-serving colonial narrative promoted by Western interests.
The next day, Dr Sultan Al Jaber told a press conference that he believed he had been misinterpreted, and that both a “phase down and phase out of fossil fuels is inevitable”. This has not stemmed the backlash, but it has revealed a fatal failure at the heart of the Western environment movement.
Poverty Blindness
For too many in the developing world, basic infrastructure for transport, health and food barely exists. Many of these countries have only just begun developing their own natural resources, including fossil fuels, to rise out of poverty and become independent.
For them, the clarion call from Western environmentalists for phasing out fossil fuels sends a very different message – it says that these countries must not be allowed to use their own natural resources to pursue sovereignty, fight poverty, feed their families, build new cities and opportunities, and strive for a good life.
They fear that ‘green colonialism’ will force them to stop relying on their own oil and gas and end up dependent – once again – on Western investors, expertise and technology, who will end up reaping the benefits of an energy transition away from fossil fuels.
Here at the COP28 summit in Dubai, I’ve been working with delegates from a range of developing nations – the Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Mali, and Malaysia to name just a few. Overwhelmingly, they tell me that the fundamental problem with the fossil fuel phase-out call is that, for them, it’s meaningless.
How can 200 countries sign up to phase out fossil fuels – including 98 oil producers (half of whom are in the developing world) – when there is no accompanying agreement on:
- a 100% plan for a completely new energy system for every one of these near 200 countries – because the deployment for every country will be unique and specific to its composition and need;
- a clear build-out transition plan on deployment, logistics, costs, and distribution for each of these countries;
- a ‘just transition’ strategy to allow industries and workers to pivot, all along a transparent timeline for every one of these 200 countries, especially for those developing nations whose economic prosperity is symbiotically dependent on oil exports, or chronically addicted to oil imports (such as my own country of origin, Bangladesh)?
- a ‘just transition’ strategy that ensures critical minerals and raw materials extraction from developing nations is done in a circular economy model that protects workers.
- an investment structure that for all these countries ensures that huge volumes investment in the transition flowing in do not result in the extraction of profits and resources for the predominant benefit of Western companies, but is distributed with and benefits local communities.
‘The BBC’s Claim About COP28 Secret Oil Deals Is Deeply Flawed’
The job of journalism is not to reinforce a pre-existing bias, writes Nafeez Ahmed
Nafeez Ahmed
Climate Danger
There can be no doubt that the climate science makes clear that carbon dioxide from exponentially increasing fossil fuel production is driving us into the climate danger zone – perhaps long before the 1.5C ‘safe limit’ agreed at Paris.
In 2021, I was the lead contributing editor of Rethinking Climate Change by RethinkX, a major study exploring how scaling up key technology disruptions in energy, transport and food could potentially reduce emissions by 90% by 2035. But one of our most alarming findings was that in every scenario we modelled, it was impossible to avoid breaching the 1.5℃ safe limit even with the speed and scale of these disruptions.
Several scientific studies have concluded that there is no pathway to staying within 1.5℃. One recent paper in Nature Climate Change found a two-thirds chance of exceeding the 1.5℃ climate safety threshold after 2030.
But a paper published in the Climate Risk Management journal went further, concluding that “dangerous climate target overshoot is almost inevitable”. The only way to now mitigate this is to stop carbon emissions as soon as possible, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and deploy technologies “for rapidly cooling global temperatures”.
What this means, however, is that to claim that there’s a scientific pathway to staying within 1.5℃ just by phasing out fossil fuels is highly questionable.
Phase Down or Phase Out?
So here we need to not only stop new emissions as soon as possible but somehow begin rapidly drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. That much the scientific community agrees on. The question, of course, is how.
While the climate scientists who call for a fossil fuel phase-out might well be able to justify the idea in terms of a general goal – what they have failed entirely to do is to produce a viable and concrete plan to actually make this happen. I don’t mean yet another technical report showing we can build a 100% renewable energy system. We need a comprehensive, region-by-region, country-by-country, roadmap.
To that extent, it’s simply not enough to demand a fossil fuel phase out. We need a scientifically and technically rigorous practical plan.
200 countries will not sign up to a phase-out agreement if they can’t see how it will work – and many of them see it as an even more immediate existential threat than climate change. Repeating slogans won’t make it happen. Doing the work to ensure every country can envision concrete post-carbon alternatives is what we need to focus on – and is what the environment movement so far has still failed to do.
EXCLUSIVE
The Great Contraction: How the End of Cheap Money and Energy Will Degrade or Renew Civilisation
Nafeez Ahmed predicted the 2008 financial crash. But it was not resolved and has led to a more profound crisis which will require a major restructuring of the global economy to survive
Nafeez Ahmed
The Risk of Colonial Control
Several COP28 delegates from Nigeria and Chad, two oil-producing countries in Africa, told me that Sultan Al Jaber’s caution around a fossil fuel phase-out is welcome. One, Dayo Israel is a veteran COP delegate for 20 years who is head of the youth wing of Nigeria’s largest political party, and one of the COP28 delegates I’m working with here in Dubai. He told me that he found the recent media coverage astonishing:
“Climate change is ravaging countries in Africa. But before we are even thinking about climate change, we are thinking about how we can feed ourselves, how we can get a job. Nigeria is using our own resources to try to develop new infrastructure so that we can live better lives. But come to Lagos, and you’ll see that it’s the only place with a basic metro. The rest of the country has barely a transport infrastructure. We have only recently begun to try to build up our country by standing on our own feet, using our own resources. Now we are being told we must become dependent on the West again! Why should Nigerians and Africans be denied our aspirations to meet our basic needs, let alone to attain prosperity on a scale that Westerners take for granted? You can talk about phase out all you like. But if you don’t give us the tools and funds to do it, it’s really just another Western colonial control narrative.”
For countries in the developing world which are dependent on oil imports, it’s a different fear.
Bangladesh, for instance, where I delivered systems thinking training to civil society activists last summer, is 99% dependent on fossil fuel imports. Speaking to Bangladeshi climate activists was eye-opening.
For them, while they urgently want fossil fuel use to disappear to avert the increasingly devastating impacts that are afflicting Bangladesh more than most places in the world, they worried about the justice of such a transition. Several activists I spoke to told me that a global climate deal which focuses on a total fossil fuel phase-out, without committing to the energy system that will replace it, will not be welcomed by Bangladeshis, but instead seen as a disaster waiting to happen.
The country, one of the most vulnerable in the world to climate change, has made scant progress on renewable energy – if the country is unable to import oil and gas in this scenario, it would plunge into catastrophe. ‘Back into caves’ would be an understatement. As such, signing up to such an agreement would feel like a suicide pact.
Some climate activists have overlooked the complex interlinkages between this issue. Whatever one thinks of Sultan Al Jaber, one statement he’s made repeatedly makes perfect sense: “We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.”
The focus, then, has to shift. Instead of focusing on dismantling the incumbent system, we need to focus on accelerating the deployment of the new system that will replace it (both in terms of technological transformations across key sectors, as well as related socio-economic transformations): because that’s the only way that demand for oil and gas can be eliminated.
Ultimately, the conversation needs to change to how we phase out fossil fuel demand. Because it’s demand that keeps producers in business. That, of course, shifts the locus of responsibility for action, and brings up the stark necessity of accelerating two things: the deployment of the specific technologies that have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of slashing emissions, and the social changes we need to optimise and adapt our societies to distribute the benefits of this transformation.
And that’s why a viable global climate agreement has to not just talk about a phase out, phase down, or whatever term we might want to use to describe it; it has to ensure that it makes available the trillions of dollars worth of climate financing that will be necessary for this transformation to actually take place at pace in the developing world – and in a way that’s structured properly to uplift, not exploit, developing nations.
EXCLUSIVE
Trump and Putin’s War on the ‘Green Agenda’
Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the Russian energy giant Gazprom planned to control Ukraine’s gas and backed Donald Trump due to Putin’s existential fear of net zero
Nafeez Ahmed
The Most Ambitious, and Most Precarious COP?
So far, the COP28 negotiations have exposed deep-seated global divisions that could easily derail some of the most ambitious climate action goals tabled by the Presidency. If the polarisation around the phase-out/phase-down issue becomes too toxic, it could leave the final draft agreement in tatters.
Yet we have to not lose sight of the opportunity ahead. We have a chance to get a global agreement on some unprecedented milestones that have never been on the table before: tripling renewables worldwide by 2030, reducing fossil fuel use worldwide, and releasing trillions of climate finance.
What many don’t realise is that we are dealing with nonlinear dynamics here – not simple straight line change.
Tripling renewables would lead solar, wind and battery costs – already more competitive than fossil fuels in most regions of the world – to plummet by 50% by 2030. That, in turn, would increase their competitiveness which would dramatically accelerate their deployment far beyond the tripling target.
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That target fits well with the recognition of a phase-down of fossil fuels (as opposed to a phase-out) because it would, in itself, lead to a huge chunk of global fossil fuel demand being extinguished by 2030. As the fossil fuel system is already dependent on multi-trillion dollar direct and indirect subsidies to remain profitable, however, a large dent in demand will strike an economic blow to these incumbent industries, driving many companies to extinction, and incentivising investors to flee new fossil fuel investments.
Both these dynamics, together, would dramatically amplify both the phase-out of fossil fuels, and the phase-up of the new system. As the fossil fuel system enters accelerated decline, the emerging clean energy system will experience accelerated deployment.
So, if implemented, such an agreement would be critical to accelerating the global system transformation we need by shifting energy markets into a new gear under the realisation that the demise of the age of oil is, indeed, inevitable. If we fail to get this agreement, the world will have taken a step backwards leaving all of us vulnerable to higher risks of breaching tipping points that could catapult us into increasingly dangerous climate chaos.
Never Stop Being Shocked By The Depravity Of The Empire
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a24d3cd8b4ee42d9420179fbec6afaa6/href
A friend of mine shared my article about how the Biden administration is worried the pause in fighting will allow journalists into Gaza to show Israel’s crimes to the world, saying he knows he shouldn’t be surprised by how evil these freaks are but somehow he still is.
I told him I actually consciously cultivate the ability to stay surprised by such things. If you stop being surprised when you see the world’s most powerful people always finding new and innovative ways to make the world a worse place for ordinary human beings, it means it’s become normalized in your system in some way. It means that on top of all the other horrible evils they’ve inflicted upon our world, they’ve also managed to steal an important part of your humanity.
No longer being shocked by the murderousness of the empire is a counterintuitive sign that something unhealthy is happening to you, like when the body stops shivering as it sinks into the later stages of hypothermia, or when the hunger pangs go away in the later stages of starvation. It’s a sign that your system is no longer forcefully rejecting conditions it ought to reject, and has instead shifted into giving up and trying to conserve energy.
I spend all day every day staring into the ugliest parts of the imperial machine, but I refuse to let it desensitize me. These monsters have taken so very, very much from the world, and I refuse to let them take that too. I refuse to let them rob me of my humanity like that.
I see it as a sacred duty to keep a flame lit in myself which knows what a healthy world looks like, which knows what sanity looks like, which knows how things ought to be, and which naturally finds it jarring when the sickness of this civilization reveals itself.
I refuse to accept this as normal. I refuse to let the abuses of the empire turn me into a callused, jaded husk of a human who can only respond to each new monstrosity with a deep world-weary sigh. I make sure it still brings up a white hot rage in me. I make sure it still brings white hot tears to my eyes.
You can’t let them take that from you. You can’t let them harden your heart and darken your eyes. We’ve got to keep the flame burning for a sane and healthy world, if not for ourselves then for our children, and for future generations who we will never meet.
If you’re still finding yourself shocked and shaken by the actions of our rulers, that’s a very healthy sign. It means they haven’t got you yet. It means they haven’t succeeded in snuffing out your flame.
We’ve got to protect our sensitivity at all costs. We’ve got to maintain that visceral rejection of madness, because that’s what’s calling us home. That’s what’s calling us home to a healthy world. That’s what will guide our way as we fight our way there, one small, almost-insignificant victory at a time.
If they haven’t yet snuffed out your flame today, that’s one more small win for humanity. That’s one more tiny step toward health.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image via Adobe Stock (formatted for size).