Chris Hedges's Blog, page 3

Black Plague, Spanish Flu, Smallpox: All Hold Lessons for Coronavirus

Pandemics are nothing new in history, and their long record across the ages and continents has much to teach us about how best to handle the current outbreak, writes California State University professor Ibrahim Al-Marashi in a fascinating piece at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Al-Marashi begins with a tour through the animal origins of both common viruses and lethal pathogens, of which COVID-19 is just the latest example. Three-quarters of infectious diseases result from what he calls “zoonotic spillovers,” mostly from common farming animals. “The domestication of the horse led to the virus responsible for the common cold in humans, while the domestication of chickens gave humans chickenpox, shingles, and various strains of the bird flu,” he writes. “Pigs were the source of influenza, and measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis emerged from cattle.” (Popular history often associates the wrong animal with famous outbreaks. For example, the medieval Black Death, commonly associated with rats and fleas, most likely originated with a marmot or great gerbil.)

Al-Marashi argues that modern pandemics hold “key lessons” for us today. Specifically, the need for “transparency as well as the effectiveness of quarantines.” One of these lessons is passed down in the very name of the so-called “Spanish” flu pandemic of 1918. It has this name, writes Al-Marashi, “not because it originated in Spain, but because Spain was the first country to widely publicize the outbreak. Since Spain was not a belligerent in World War I, it did not have wartime censorship in place, while other nations censored the news of the pandemic. Because of the headlines and coverage in the Spanish press, many people simply assumed that’s where the outbreak started.”

There are echoes of this in the way Chinese officials initially ignored the current outbreak, likely making it worse. “[The initial Chinese response] resulted in little critical information being released in a timely manner, depriving national leaders in Beijing the opportunity to implement informed decisions,” he writes, describing the reasons for the delayed quarantine. (The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian “quaranta giorni,” or 40 days, and “was first implemented in the mid-14th century to keep the bubonic plague from spreading from incoming ships.”)

Despite their mostly zoological origins, xenophobic tropes are as old as pandemics, as is what we today call “misinformation.” During the Black Death, writes Al-Marashi, “fake news then included attributing the disease to bad air and miasmas, as well as to Jewish communities. Today, coronavirus has been falsely attributed to biological weapons labs and the Gates Foundation. As an individual, one can fight this virus by debunking the viral myths that spread today, as they did centuries ago.”

Read this full article here.

Following House Approval, U.S. Has a Chance to Ban the Cruel Shark Fin Trade

Every year, fins from as many as 73 million sharks circulate throughout the world in a complex international market. They are the key ingredient in shark fin soup, a luxury dish considered a status symbol in some Asian cuisines.

The global trade in shark fins is contributing to a crisis among shark populations worldwide. Sharks are being killed 30 percent faster than they can reproduce, and the fin trade is one of the main culprits. Up to one-quarter of all species of sharks and their relatives are at risk of extinction. Some shark populations have declined by nearly 90 percent in recent decades. The disappearance of sharks can , because as top predators, sharks help balance the populations of species below them in the food chain.

Additionally, many of the fins traded are obtained through the brutal, inhumane practice known as finning, in which fishers at sea catch sharks, slice off their fins and throw the animals—usually still alive—back into the water. Unable to swim without their fins, the sharks drown, bleed to death or are eaten alive by other fish. Because space on boats is limited and fins are by far the most valuable part of the shark, fishers have an incentive to use this cruel method to get fins.

However, the tide is turning against the shark fin trade.

In November 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives issued a resounding bipartisan “no” to this cruel practice, voting 310 to 107 to pass a bill banning commercial trade of shark fins and products derived from shark fins in the United States. The Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, led by Representatives Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (D-Northern Mariana Islands) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), would prohibit all purchase, sale and possession for commercial purposes of these parts and products. The legislation builds on previous laws passed by Congress—the Shark Finning Prohibition Act of 2000 and the Shark Conservation Act of 2010—which banned the act of shark finning in U.S. waters and the transport on U.S.-flagged vessels of shark fins not naturally attached to a shark carcass.

The action has now moved to the U.S. Senate, where a third of the members have sponsored a parallel bill, S. 877, introduced by Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia). Already the Senate Commerce Committee has cleared this bill for potential floor action.

States are also taking up the fight. In January, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill into law that bans the sale and trade of shark fins in the Garden State. The state’s general assembly had approved the bill by a vote of 54 to 19, and the state’s senate passed its version of the bill by a vote of 33 to 6. These vote tallies reflect the will of the state’s constituents: In a recent survey, a majority of New Jersey voters said they would support a prohibition on the sale, possession and trade of shark fins.

New Jersey now joins 13 other states, including all of its coastal neighbors, and three U.S. territories that have passed legislation to ban or limit the sale of shark fins—American Samoa, California, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.

The current to stop the shark fin trade is also flowing internationally. In June 2019, Canada, the largest importer of shark fins outside Asia, passed a bill that includes measures to prohibit that country’s trade in shark fins as well as the act of finning in Canadian waters. Worldwide, nearly 60 airlines and container shipping companies—including Air China, Eastern Air Logistics (the parent company of four major Chinese airlines) and Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line—have banned the transport of shark fins. Many high-end restaurants and hotel chains in Asia have also stopped serving shark fin soup. Demand for the soup is declining but not quickly enough to save sharks on its own.

While finning in U.S. waters is already prohibited, current law is not enough because once shark fins are on land, they can be sold. Furthermore, U.S. participation in the global fin market continues to fuel the practice in places that lack shark-finning bans or adequate shark management and conservation policies.

It is impossible to guarantee that shark fins are humanely and sustainably sourced. That is because once a fin is detached, it is impossible to know where it was obtained, or whether it was sliced off a shark at sea or removed after the shark was brought to shore. It is also difficult to determine the species of the shark. For the most part, shark fins sold in the United States do not come from U.S. fishers. Because of this, fins sold here can come from sharks that were finned, or from endangered or threatened shark species.

Our role is magnified by the fact that the United States is a major transit hub for international shark fin shipments. Latin America is one of the most significant shark fin-producing regions, and many of these countries transport shark fins through U.S. ports. Some Latin American nations ship as much as one-third to one-half of all their shark fin exports through the United States. In fact, on February 3, almost 1,400 pounds of dried shark fins worth around $1 million were found by wildlife inspectors in Miami. The shipment is believed to have originated in South America and was likely headed to Asia.

Still, banning the shark fin trade in the United States has its opponents. They argue that U.S. shark fisheries are already well managed. In reality, however, fewer than 20 percent of U.S. shark stocks are considered sustainable. They also argue that it is wasteful for fishers to land a shark and not be able to sell its fins. By that standard, not selling the ivory from a dead elephant is wasteful, too—but as a nation, we have decided that the broad well-being of all elephants supersedes that pernicious use of their tusks.

Fishing industry advocates claim that banning the fin trade would have harmful economic impacts. The truth is, though, that sharks are worth much more alive than dead. In 2016, shark-related diving in Florida produced more than $221 million in revenues and more than 3,700 jobs. Moreover, fishers would still be able to sell the meat and other products from the sharks they land. In states where the shark fin trade has been banned, there is no evidence of negative impacts to the commercial fishing industry.

Finally, some believe we can address the shark crisis not by changing our own practices, but simply by requiring other countries to improve their shark fishing methods. The latter is an unrealistic goal. The low percentage of U.S. shark stocks known to be sustainable underscores how difficult fisheries are to manage, even here in one of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations. Additionally, when the United States leads, other countries follow. After we banned commercial trade in ivory, many other nations followed suit, including China, the European Union and Australia.

Simply put, the United States must remove itself from the cruel and ecologically damaging global shark fin trade. Americans overwhelmingly oppose it, and we are in a position to set an example for the rest of the world.

Join the wave for a U.S. shark fin ban. Call your two U.S. senators and ask them to support S. 877, the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act.

Sharks are worth more alive than in a bowl of soup.

This article first appeared on  Truthout  and was produced in partnership with  Earth | Food | Life , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Fear Can Spread From Person to Person Faster Than the Coronavirus – but There Are Ways to Slow It Down

As cases of COVID-19 proliferate, there’s a pandemic of fear unfolding alongside the pandemic of the coronavirus.

Media announce mass cancellations of public events “over coronavirus fears.” TV stations show images of “coronavirus panic shopping.” Magazines discuss attacks against Asians sparked by “racist coronavirus fears.”

Due to the global reach and instantaneous nature of modern media, fear contagion spreads faster than the dangerous yet invisible virus. Watching or hearing someone else who’s scared causes you to be frightened, too, without necessarily even knowing what caused the other person’s fear.

As a psychiatrist and researcher studying the brain mechanisms of social regulation of emotions, I frequently see in clinical and experimental settings how powerful fear contagion can be.

Responding with fear in face of danger

Fear contagion is an evolutionarily old phenomenon that researchers observe in many animal species. It can serve a valuable survival function.

Imagine a herd of antelopes pasturing in the sunny African savanna. Suddenly, one senses a stalking lion. The antelope momentarily freezes. Then it quickly sets off an alarm call and runs away from the predator. In the blink of an eye, other antelopes follow.

Brains are hardwired to respond to threats in the environment. Sight, smell or sound cues that signal the presence of the predator automatically triggered the first antelope’s survival responses: first immobility, then escape.

The amygdala, a structure buried deep within the side of the head in the brain’s temporal lobe, is key for responding to threats. It receives sensory information and quickly detects stimuli associated with danger.

Then the amygdala forwards the signal to other brain areas, including the hypothalamus and brain stem areas, to further coordinate specific defense responses.

These outcomes are commonly known as fright, freeze, flight or fight. We human beings share these automatic, unconscious behaviors with other animal species.

Responding with fear, one step removed

That explains the direct fear the antelope felt when sniffing or spotting a lion nearby. But fear contagion goes one step further.

The antelopes’ run for their lives that followed one frightened group member was also automatic. Their escape, however, was not directly initiated by the lion’s attack but by the behavior of their terrified group member: momentarily freezing, sounding the alarm and running away. The group as a whole picked up on the terror of the individual and acted accordingly.

Like other animals, people are also sensitive to panic or fear expressed by our kin. Human beings are exquisitely tuned to detect other people’s survival reactions.

Experimental studies have identified a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as vital for this ability. It surrounds the bundle of fibers that connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain. When you watch another person express fear, your ACC lights up. Studies in animals confirmed that the message about another’s fear travels from the ACC to the amygdala, where the defense responses are set off.

It makes sense why an automatic, unconscious fear contagion would have evolved in social animals. It can help prevent the demise of an entire group bound by kinship, protecting all their shared genes so they can be passed on to future generations.

Indeed, studies show that social transmission of fear is more robust between animals, including humans, that are related or belong to the same group as compared to between strangers.

Nevertheless, fear contagion is an effective way of transmitting defense responses not only between members of the same group or species but also across species. Many animals, through evolution, acquired an ability to recognize alarm calls of other species. For example, bird squawks are known to trigger defense responses in many mammals.

Transmitting fear in 2020

Fear contagion happens automatically and unconsciously, making it hard to really control.

This phenomenon explains mass panic attacks that can occur during music concerts, sports events or other public gatherings. Once fear is triggered in the crowd – maybe someone thought they heard a gunshot – there is no time or opportunity to verify the sources of terror. People must rely on each other, just like antelopes do. The fear travels from one to the next, infecting each individual as it goes. Everyone starts running for their lives. Too often, these mass panics end up with tragedies.

Fear contagion does not require direct physical contact with others. Media distributing terrifying images and information can very effectively spread fear.

Moreover, while antelopes on the savanna stop running once they’re a safe distance from a predator, scary images on the news can keep you fearful. The feeling of immediate danger never subsides. Fear contagion didn’t evolve under the always-on conditions of Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour news.

Tempering fear others transmit to you

There’s no way to prevent fear contagion from kicking into gear – it’s automatic and unconscious, after all – but you can do something to mitigate it. Since it’s a social phenomenon, many rules that govern social behaviors apply.

In addition to information about fear, information about safety can be socially transferred too. Studies have found that being in the presence of a calm and confident person may help overcome fear acquired through observation of others. For instance, a child terrified by a strange animal will calm down if a calm adult is present. This kind of safety modeling is especially effective when you have your eyes on someone close to you, or someone you depend on, such as a caretaker or an authority figure.

Also, actions matter more than words, and words and actions must match. For example, explaining to people that there’s no need for a healthy person to wear a protective face mask and at the same time showing images of presumably healthy COVID-19 screening personnel wearing hazmat suits is counterproductive. People will go and buy face masks because they see authority figures wearing them when confronting invisible danger.

But words do still matter. Information about danger and safety must be provided clearly with straightforward instructions on what to do. When you are under significant stress, it is harder to process details and nuances. Withholding important facts or lying increases uncertainty, and uncertainty augments fears and anxiety.

Evolution hardwired human beings to share threats and fears with others. But it also equipped us with the ability to cope with these threats together.

Jacek Debiec is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry, and an assistant research professor at the Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Unaccountable Nation

Exceptionalism, triumphalism, chauvinism. These characteristics define most empires, including, like it or not, these United States. The sequence matters. A people and national government that fancies itself exceptional — an example for the rest of the world — is apt to assert itself militarily, economically, and culturally around the globe. If that self-righteous state happens to possess prodigious power, as the U.S. has since the Second World War, then any perceived success will lead to a sense of triumphalism, and thus put into motion a feedback loop whereby national “achievement” justifies and validates that conception of exceptionalism.

Then the exceptionalist-triumphalist power inevitably runs off-the-rails, and — especially when it feels threatened or insecure — lashes out in fits of aggressive military, economic, religious, or racial chauvinism. This cycle tends to replay again and again until the empire collapses, usually through some combination of external power displacement and internal exhaustion or collapse.

Such imperial hyper-powers, particularly in their late-stages, often employ foot soldiers across vast swathes of the planet, and eventually either lose control of their actions or aren’t concerned with their resultant atrocities in the first place. On that, the jury is perhaps still out. Regardless, the discomfiting fact is that by nearly any measure, the United States today coheres, to a remarkable degree, with each and every one of these tenets of empire evolution. This includes, despite the hysterical denials of sitting political and Pentagon leaders, the troubling truth that American soldiers and intelligence agents have committed war crimes across the Greater Middle East since 9/11 on a not so trivial number of occasions. These law of war violations also occurred during the Cold War generation — notably in Korea and Vietnam — and the one consistent strain has been the almost complete inability or unwillingness of the U.S. Government to hold perpetrators, and their enabling commanders, accountable.

Enter the International Criminal Court (ICC). First proposed, conceptually, in 1919 (and again in 1937, 1948, and 1971), in response to massive war crimes and human rights violations of the two world wars, the Hague-headquartered court finally opened for business in 2002. With more than 120 signatory member states (though not, any longer, the U.S.) the ICC has the jurisdiction to prosecute international violations including “genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.” A compliment, rather than a replacement, to sovereign national justice systems, the ICC is designed to be the “court of last resort,” obliged to exercise jurisdiction only when a nation’s courts prove unwilling or unable to prosecute such crimes.

All of which sounds both admirable and unthreatening (at least to reasonably well-behaved states with accountable, responsive justice systems), but to the contemporary American imperial hyper-power, the very existence of the ICC is viewed as a mortal threat. Matters demonstrably came to a head this past week when an ICC appeals court reversed a lower-level decision and allowed its special prosecutor — whose visa Washington has already revoked — to simply open an official investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by all three major parties to the conflict: the Taliban, U.S., and U.S.-backed Kabul-based Afghan government. This decidedly mild decision, which only allows a multi-directional inquiry, unleashed an immediate firestorm in Washington.

The reflexive reactions and responses of current and former Trump officials was both instructive and totally in line with decades worth of bipartisan U.S. disavowal of the very notion of international norms and standards. Trump’s recent hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton — now an MSNBC-DNC darling for his apparent critique of the president in a new memoir — has spearheaded opposition to the ICC since its inception, has asserted that the ICC is “illegitimate,” and that the U.S. Government “will not sit quietly,” if “the court comes after us.” After the most recent ruling, Secretary of State (and former director of the very CIA that is likely to be implicated in said war crimes investigation) Mike Pompeo declared the ruling a “truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable, political institution masquerading as a legal body,” adding, threateningly, that “we will take all necessary measures to protect our citizens from this renegade, unlawful, so-called court.”

On that latter point, Pompeo is neither wrong, nor espousing a policy — no matter how aggressive or rejectionist — unique to Donald Trump’s administration. Here, a brief bit of all but forgotten history is in order. In 1998, the UN General Assembly voted 120-7 to establish the ICC. The United States, in good company with a gaggle of criminally compromised states — China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Yemen, and Qatar — voted against the measure. Two years later, however, President Bill Clinton unenthusiastically signed onto this foundational Rome Statute, but with some dubiousness and the requisite American exceptionalist caveat that he “will not, and do not recommend that my successor, submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.”

Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This tragedy turned (for then ascendant neoconservatives) opportunity for expanded U.S. military global assertiveness, ensured that Clinton’s successor — one George W. Bush — wouldn’t even consider ICC treaty submission to the Senate. Rather, in May 2002, Bush sent a note to the UN Secretary General informing him that the most powerful and influential country in the world no longer intended to ratify the Rome Statute or recognize any obligations to the ICC (which officially opened for business only two months later). Never simply a morality tale of Republican villainy, Bush’s disavowal didn’t explain the half of it.

Far more disturbingly, a stunningly euphemistic American Service-members’ Protection Act of 2001 amendment, first introduced just 15 days after the 9/11 attacks, to the Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery From and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States, was already under consideration in Congress. With broad bipartisan majorities, that legislation — which authorized the U.S. president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court” — passed in the House a couple weeks after Bush sent his note to the UN, and the Senate just two weeks later. President Bush then signed this authorization for, up to and including military, force into law on August 2, 2002. Much of the world was appalled and international human rights organizations took to – quite appropriately – calling it the “Hague Invasion Act.” It remains in force today.

The timeline is instructive and itself tells a vital part of the story. Democrats and Republicans alike had chosen to “preempt” — an internationally prohibited precedent that Bush would later invoke to invade Iraq — the not yet in force ICC with this bill. They did so, I’d assert, because they knew a salient dirty secret: the U.S. was about to unleash martial fury across the Greater Middle East. In the process, inevitably, American troopers and intelligence spooks would push the limits of acceptable wartime behavior, and thus be vulnerable to international prosecution by the soon effective ICC.

This was unacceptable for an exceptionalist, triumphalist nation, about to undertake chauvinist actions the world over. That unilateral, world-order-be-damned national position held, and still holds, sway in the intervening 18 years. So, for all the Trump administration’s coarse obtuseness in response to the opening of the latest ICC Afghan investigation, this is, at root, not (as the mainstream media will inevitably now claim) a Donald phenomenon.Three administrations, and multiple guard-changing Congresses, chose to not to touch the infamous Hague Invasion Act or realign the U.S. with the ICC or the spirit (or even the pretense) of international law.

The cast of elite characters, many still politically influential, who voted for the Hague Invasion Act is nothing short of astounding. The bill passed the House by a margin of 280-138, and counted such “yea” votes as House Intelligence Committee Chair — top Trump opponent and Russiagate investigator — Democrat Adam Schiff. Notably, especially in this ongoing electoral cycle, then Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders opposed the measure.In the Senate, an even larger portion of Democrats joined current Speaker Mitch McConnell (and most of his Republican caucus), to vote for the Act. These included such past and present notables as former Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and, then Foreign Relations Committee Chair, and now Democratic presidential frontrunner, Joe Biden. His vote, naturally, should come as scant surprise since even in early Senate committee hearings four years earlier, ranking minority member Biden was at best tepid, and at worst quite skeptical of the ICC – even finding unlikely points of agreement with the later Hague Invasion Bill’s sponsor, and longtime unilateralist hawk, Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

Still, the swift, frenetic response of senior Trump officials to ICC decision is telling. I suspect that Pompeo and Bolton know the inconvenient truth – that U.S. national security forces have committed crimes in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) and that the U.S. Government hasn’t ever truly held these select perpetrators sufficiently accountable. Contra Pompeo, Bolton, and other Trump officials’ ardent public assertions, the U.S. military and intelligence community are, in fact – due to being demonstrably “unwilling or unable to prosecute such [war] crimes” – the perfect candidates for ICC investigation, and if evidentiary appropriate, prosecution. The U.S. has a historically abysmal record either of restraining or punishing wartime violations.

The rarely recounted record is an extensive as it is appalling:

After U.S. Air Force pilots and U.S. Army soldiers strafed and gunned down some 400 Korean refugees (most women, children, and old men) hiding under a bridge at No Gun Ri over the course of four days in 1950, there was no criminal investigation when the military determined the killings represented naught but an “unfortunate tragedy inherent to war.”
When, after a two-year coverup, the journalist Seymour Hersh brought to light the blatant execution of at least 504 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai, South Vietnam, just six soldiers were charged, and only one – Lieutenant William Calley – convicted. Though countless victims were beheaded, scalped, or had their throats slit in an orgy of violence, even Calley’s original life sentence was repeatedly reduced by senior generals until he was ultimately granted clemency by President Richard Nixon. Convicted by jury of military officer peers of personally killing at least 22 civilians, Calley served only five months in detention and some three years under house arrest.
Later in the Vietnam War, when Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert blew the whistle on endemic torture among some U.S. troops, and a subsequent investigation uncovered 141 confirmed incidents of prisoner abuse, not a single criminal charge was filed and only three soldiers were administratively fined or reduced in rank. The only significant punishment meted out was leveled at Herbert — recipient of four Silver Stars and three Bronze Stars, who was also shot 10 ten times and bayonet thrice — when his reputation and career were ruined in retaliation.
When allegations of systemic prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison were reported by Major General Antonio Taguba, and simultaneously uncovered by the very same Seymour Hersh, not a single soldier above the rank of staff sergeant faced charges. Taguba, incidentally, did suffer — his career unceremoniously curtailed in the wake of threats, intimidation, and harassment by the senior army commander in Iraq (General John Abizaid) and the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Finally, and perhaps most relevant to the current ICC investigatory backlash, after an American AC-130 gunship unloaded on a civilian hospital (by definition, a war crime) repeatedly for 30-60 minutes and killed 42 doctors, patients, and staff members, the top theater commander, General John Campbell, and then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter changed their stories four times in four days without ever fully explicating what exactly caused the massacre. An official military probe – instructively, the generals always investigate themselves in these matters – found no criminal culpability, and, while Campbell’s nominal boss, General Joseph Votel, claimed to have administratively disciplined sixteen soldiers and officers, the names of those personnel – and he details of their punishment – were never released.

Add to that the disconcerting fact that the U.S. crossed a rather macabre tipping point in 2019, whereby, for the first time, the American military and its Afghan allies killed more civilians than the Taliban, and this brings us full circle to an alarming present reality. The very figures who championed and supported the wildly chauvinistic “Hague Invasion” Act seem set to hold sway over, and in Biden’s case serve as candidate for, the Democratic Party.In November, that faction will likely, then face off against a Trump team that vehemently opposes even a basic investigation into alleged American criminal misbehavior in the Afghan theater of its ongoing forever wars.

All of which demonstrates, once and for all, that human rights, and international law or norms were never of genuine interest to the United States. None of this will play well on the “Arab,” or even broader global, “Street,” and will – just like U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – actually increase worldwide “terrorism” and anti-Americanism. None of which matters to, or greatly concerns, a Washington elite lacking even a modicum of self-awareness.

Because empires, like the United States, which peddle in exceptionalism, triumphalism, and chauvinism are, historically, the world’s true rogue states.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and a contributing editor at antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War is now available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet. Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.

Like It or Not, Donald Trump Won the Biden-Sanders Debate

As I was writing this column late Sunday night, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced an emergency action to close all bars, nightclubs, restaurants and gyms to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that is ravaging my hometown and, quite literally, the planet as a whole. The mayor’s pronouncement reflects the grim reality that the quality of life in Los Angeles and the world beyond has declined drastically in a very short period of time, and there is no telling when it will improve.

Evaluated on the heels of Garcetti’s action, Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was extremely disappointing.

There have been many great debates in American political history when candidates rose to meet and overcome particularly difficult circumstances. What we saw Sunday night between Biden and Sanders wasn’t one of them.

Lincoln-Douglas? The Biden-Sanders clash didn’t come close. Kennedy-Nixon? Forget about it. Obama-Clinton? Those faceoffs felt like pressure-packed boxing matches between two pugilists intent on winning.

By comparison, Sunday’s contest resembled a rambling, festering quarrel between two tired old men, aged 77 and 78, respectively. The candidates took a few shots at each other over Medicare-for-All, economic inequality, student debt, immigration and other subjects. But neither landed anything close to a hard, let alone knockout, blow against the other. Neither seemed to have either the strength or the inclination.

More importantly, neither landed much of a blow against Donald Trump, who will square off against one of them in November. That failure made Trump the big winner of the night, and a major failure it was, especially because the candidates were served a softball question on the all-consuming issue of the coronavirus by CNN’s Jake Tapper at the outset of the debate, inviting each to appraise Trump’s handling of the crisis and to tell us what they would do differently as president.

Biden, who has never been a good debater, answered that we are “in a war” with the virus and that he would provide funding for temporary hospitals to meet “the surge” in our medical needs, even calling out the military to help build the makeshift facilities. He invoked, as is his wont, the experience of the Obama administration in dealing with public-health emergencies as models that he would follow in his own administration. But like the gaffe-prone speaker he is, he referred to the Obama administration’s handling of the “N1H1” flu when he meant to say “H1N1,” and to the “coronavirus” before correcting himself and saying, “Ebola.”

Sanders, who is generally a good debater, got off to a strong start, remarking, “The first thing we’ve got to do is to shut this president up right now because he is undermining the scientists and the doctors who are trying to help the American people. It is unacceptable for him to be blabbering with unfactual [sic] information that is confusing the general public.” But he then went on to discuss how he would handle the “Ebola” outbreak with universal single-payer health care before correcting himself to reference the coronavirus.

Slips of the tongue can happen to anyone, but these were hardly reassuring, coming at this hour of dire national prostration. Still, the verbal miscues weren’t the real problem, which was that neither man took the time needed to administer the kind of verbal lashing that Trump deserves over a public health emergency that he allowed to get out of control and which has since tanked the American economy, shut down much of life as we know it in this country, and threatens to kill tens of thousands of us before the emergency ends.

Surely both men and especially Sanders, who has often singled out Trump as the most corrupt and dishonest president in our history, could and should have said more.

Part of being a proficient debater is knowing when to go hard against your opponent. Even if Sanders did not want to tear into Biden, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, he owed it to his supporters and the public at large to highlight Trump’s abject lies about the virus at far greater length and in far more detail.

I realize that the debate took place under eerie circumstances in CNN’s Washington, D.C., studios without a live audience, and that preparation may have been more difficult than usual. But all either man had to do was a little research on the internet to find multiple news accounts of Trump’s step-by-step betrayal of the nation in this time of urgent need.

Indeed, all either of them had to do was open up the opinion section of the Sunday New York Times and read a single article: David Leonhardt’s column, “A Complete List of Trump’s Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus,” and then recite with force and feeling some of Leonhardt’s major findings.

Or better yet, to save time and avoid any possible errors of memory, they could have quoted directly from the column, which Leonhardt began:

President Trump made his first public comments about the coronavirus on Jan. 22, in a television interview from Davos with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. The first American case had been announced the day before, and Kernen asked Trump, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”

The president responded: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

By this point, the seriousness of the virus was becoming clearer. It had spread from China to four other countries. China was starting to take drastic measures and was on the verge of closing off the city of Wuhan.

In the weeks that followed, Trump faced a series of choices. He could have taken aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus. He could have insisted that the United States ramp up efforts to produce test kits. He could have emphasized the risks that the virus presented and urged Americans to take precautions if they had reason to believe they were sick. He could have used the powers of the presidency to reduce the number of people who would ultimately get sick.

He did none of those things.

Instead, as Leonhardt went on to note, Trump engaged in a series of blatant and self-serving distortions and prevarications, propounding multiple lies about the availability of test kits, phony reassurances that “one day — it’s like a miracle — it [the virus] will disappear,” and criticisms of the media for panicking the stock market. In so doing, our pathetic president revealed not only his ineptitude to meet the challenge at hand, but his lethal lack of empathy for ordinary Americans.

Like climate change, the coronavirus crisis poses an existential threat to all of us. Although either Democrat, especially Sanders, would make a better commander-in-chief than the malignant narcissist who presently occupies the Oval Office, I wanted to hear a candidate Sunday night who was able to expound on the coronavirus crisis and who was prepared to take Trump down to the political sewer where he belongs. Sadly, I didn’t hear one, and neither did you.

The RNC Gave Massive Contracts to Companies Linked to its Chairwoman’s Husband and Political Backers

The Republican National Committee has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors closely connected to the organization’s chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel.

One contract went to her husband’s insurance company. Two others went to businesses whose executives recently donated to Ronna for Chair, a largely inactive political action committee that McDaniel controls. She had set it up in 2015, when she successfully ran for chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, her home state.

The companies won the contracts soon after McDaniel became the party’s top official. She was picked for the position by President Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

The RNC vendor payments and PAC contributions, detailed in federal tax filings and campaign finance reports, mirror a trend of transactions with favored contractors and employees previously reported by ProPublica.

The RNC conflict-of-interest policy states that employees “should avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” such as steering work to “members of an employee’s family” and businesses “with which the employee has a financial relationship.”

An RNC spokesman, Mike Reed, did not make McDaniel available for an interview. In a statement, he said ProPublica’s reporting was an attempt to make “innocuous RNC spending items seem scandalous,” and he accused ProPublica of harboring “a severe bias against conservatives and President Trump.”

Under McDaniel, the RNC is generating and disbursing record amounts, bringing in about $240 million last year and spending just over $190 million. And public scrutiny of its spending is increasing. ProPublica reported last month that in 2019 the RNC obscured payments to its chief of staff, who executes vendor contracts and is part of a tight network of operatives who have reaped financial rewards during the Trump era. This week, The New York Times reported that since 2017 the tiny circle, including a husband-and-wife duo of former RNC chiefs of staff and Trump’s campaign chairman, Brad Parscale, have billed the campaign, the RNC and other Republican groups some $75 million.

During McDaniel’s first year as chairwoman, the RNC hired a large, privately held insurance brokerage firm called Hylant to conduct an insurance review and liability assessment. Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC specifically paid Hylant’s Detroit branch almost $40,000 for the company’s services.

The president of that particular office is Patrick McDaniel, the husband of the RNC’s chairwoman.

Reed, the party spokesman, told ProPublica that the Hylant contract “did not violate any RNC policy,” despite the organization’s written guidance about awarding business to members of an employee’s family. Reed said the RNC’s then-treasurer “solicited and signed off on” Hylant’s services. He did not not address who recommended Hylant or why the work was done out of the company’s Detroit office. Reed added that McDaniel’s husband “does not own this company and he received no financial benefit from this work.” Neither Hylant nor Patrick McDaniel returned messages seeking comment.

The two companies whose executives made contributions to McDaniel’s PAC had not received work from the RNC before she became chair.

Less than a week after McDaniel took over the party in January 2017, the RNC made its first monthly payment to the Templar Baker Group, a small political consulting outfit in Michigan headed by Robert Schostak, who chaired the Michigan Republican Party before McDaniel. Since she has been at the RNC, , Templar has been paid more than $550,000 for “political strategy services.”

Schostak is also a partner in MadDog Technology, a firm that is chaired by Peter Karmanos Jr., who helped found Compuware, once Michigan’s leading computer technology company. Last year, according to FEC filings, the RNC paid MadDog $50,000 for “website services.”

During McDaniel’s first month as RNC chair, Karmanos and a political spending entity used by the Schostak family contributed $10,000 each to McDaniel’s PAC, federal tax filings show.

Reed, the RNC spokesman, did not describe what services Templar and MadDog provided the organization, but he said they were “invaluable.” When asked about McDaniel’s relationship to Schostak and Karmanos, and the timing of their PAC contributions, he said that ProPublica was “trying to connect dots to come up with something scandalous.” Moreover, he added, McDaniel “has no financial relationship” with MadDog and Templar.

Reed also disputed that the vendors had not worked with the RNC before McDaniel became chair, an assertion that is contradicted by FEC reports. When asked to explain the discrepancy, he referred to Kim Jorns, who, he said, “has worked with the RNC prior to the Chairwoman’s tenure.”

Jorns is an employee at Templar and previously was an RNC staffer, serving as regional political director in the 2016 election cycle. She didn’t return a message seeking comment.

Karmanos and Schostak did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, Ronna for Chair received no contributions, but it continued to spend money, a practice that is legal and common among elected officials.

McDaniel was reelected as chair of the RNC in January 2019, with Trump’s endorsement. Two days earlier, her PAC paid $5,000 to Kathleen Berden, a voting member of the RNC, a volunteer position. Reed said the PAC paid Berden because she “whipped votes” for McDaniel’s reelection. He would not address why McDaniel needed Berden’s services or whether it was appropriate for McDaniel to pay a volunteer RNC voting member to influence fellow voters.

When reached for comment, Berden declined to elaborate on her work for McDaniel.

Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death

Sheri Fink at the NYT reports that Center for Disease Control scientific modeler Matthew Biggerstaff estimated in a conference call that the coronavirus pandemic could last for many months or as long as a year and could infect half to two-thirds of the population of the United States. Between 200,000 and 1.7 million people could die.

The Trump administration could have avoided this prospect by swinging into action with testing kits, tracking cases, and selective isolation practices months ago. Instead, Trump did nothing, and indeed, tried to deny the severity of the threat. He has still been lying about it this week, worried about how the outbreak will affect the stock market or the economy or, apparently, his image. But his weird insouciance and clear cluelessness had the opposite effect of the one he was going for, tanking the market. It wouldn’t have been necessary to close down so many things and harm the economy so deeply if steps had been taken early on.

There is an exact analogy between Trump’s treatment of Covid-19 and his treatment of the climate emergency. In both cases, he and his surrogates attacked the science and took pride in giving the finger to reality. Trump actually promotes coal and petroleum, the dirtiest fossil fuels, as though he is impatient to see the lower floors of his Trump Tower in Manhattan under water. Likewise, he takes pride in holding infectious rallies and shaking hands. Last weekend, he met with another Covid-19 and Climate Emergency denialist, Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, whose government spokesman was along for the trip and was a carrier of Covid-19. So Trump and the Mar-a-Lago gang were exposed because of being damn fools.

People who don’t believe in science might have difficulty accepting this, but the climate emergency is deeply connected to disease and the potential for epidemics, according to the scientists at the World Health Organization. That’s right. The high end threat of one-point-seven million dead Americans is only the beginning if we go on burning coal, petroleum and other hydrocarbons. We are putting some 36 billion metric tons (about 40 billion US tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is like blowing up atomic bombs in the sky constantly, lots of them. It makes things hot.

It also makes things dirty. Poor lung health is a serious risk factor for dying of Covid-19, and people who live near coal power plants or along highways or in cities with car- and power-plant-polluted air typically have poor lung health. Breathing air polluted by burning hydrocarbons produces the lung disease of emphysema the same way smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 29 years would. It is worth noting that Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus, is China’s 14th most air-polluted city. (And that is saying something. When I went to Beijing in 2015, I could barely see two feet in front of my face sometimes, and my trip to the Great Wall was spoiled by impenetrable smog.) Some proportion of Covid-19 deaths in China were certainly because of the long history of burning masses of coal there. (China has made slow progress in moving to renewables, reducing coal-generated electricity from 85 percent to 60 percent; but 60 percent is a lot, and China won’t even stop building new coal plants until 2030).

As for the novel coronavirus itself, we do not know if China’s warmer winters compared to a century ago allowed it to thrive during a season when the cold used to sterilize things. Some viruses actually like it to be warmer– MERS is like that. The virus is thought to be a zoonose, transmitted among bats or perhaps pangolins, which crossed directly to humans because people in Wuhan eat those meats.

Guess what? The climate emergency is going to set bats, pangolins and many other animals in motion, fleeing as their food dies out in mass extinctions, and their habitats heat up, or dry out, or burn down or are flooded. The resultant mass migration of animals will put them in direct contact with human populations, hugely expanding the chance that pathogens will leap from them to humans. Further, the negative impact of global heating on livestock raising could push people in some parts of the world toward eating more bushmeat, raising the chances of cross-species infection.

Worse, a heated-up earth of the sort we are creating for our children and grandchildren will have loads of thriving pandemic diseases, helped on by the expansion of the tropics. Renee Cho at Columbia University’s Earth Institute observed,

“Malaria killed 627,000 in 2012 alone. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change will be associated with longer transmission seasons for malaria in some regions of Africa and an extension of the disease’s geographic range.”

Then there is cholera, dengue fever, the hantavirus, the West Nile virus, etc., etc.

If we go on heating the earth so radically and rapidly, pandemics could become a way of life. For one thing, in those areas like the US Southwest that will be made dryer by the climate crisis, people’s mucus membranes will be dryer and so won’t be able to keep the moisture needed to expel bacteria and viruses.

The tragedy is that we already have the solution. It is cheaper to build and run new wind and solar farms than just to try to go on operating a coal plant. Loads of electric vehicles are coming online with respectable range and at an increasingly affordable price. We don’t have to put ourselves and the next generations through hell. It is a matter of political will.

As Coronavirus Outbreak Intensifies, Trump Puts Big Oil Interests Ahead of American Families

Climate action groups and progressive critics expressed disappointment and outrage on Friday afternoon after President Donald Trump—despite a continued failure to offer far-reaching support to the U.S. public—moved to bolster the bottom lines of oil and gas companies by announcing a massive federal purchase for the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

“Based on the price of oil, I’ve also instructed the Secretary of Energy to purchase at a very good price large quantities of crude oil for storage in the U.S. strategic reserve,” Trump announced during a White House press conference—surrounded by CEOs from major corporations, including Walmart, CVS, and Target—in which he also declared an official national emergency in order to combat the outbreak of the coronavirus.

“We’re going to fill it right up to the top,” said of the SPR, but critics were quick to point out that move has everything to do with helping his wealthy friends and cronies in the fossil fuel industry, and nothing to do with helping average people now under threat from the spreading pandemic.

“Trump has once again put the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities,” said Alex Doukas of Oil Change International. “With this move, Trump has rolled out a plan to prop up U.S. oil companies before he has even bothered to guarantee paid sick leave for US workers who are going to be on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis for weeks to come.”

The news came Friday as additional school closures were announced for states nationwide, grocery store shelves were wiped clean, and worry continues to spread about just how extensive the outbreak will become.

Greenpeace warned that the total cost of the oil purchase “could exceed $2.6 billion in public funds,” a stark comparison when put next to the proposal put forth by House Democrats just hours earlier. Introducing the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act“(pdf), which calls for an estimated $1.7 billion aimed at helping working families and children to weather the public health crisis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “The American people expect and deserve a coordinated, science-based and whole-of-government response to keep them and their loved ones safe: a response that puts families first to stimulate the economy.”

By putting his administration’s emphasis on bailing out the oil industry, John Noël, a senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace USA, said the president is doing the opposite of putting people first.

“Trump’s response to a global pandemic is to put billionaires and corporate polluters ahead of American families. There’s no evidence that this handout would protect jobs, pensions, benefits, or ease the hardships facing fossil fuel workers or communities confronting the COVID-19 outbreak right now. It’s nothing more than a gift to the industry that created the climate crisis.”

Doukas agreed, calling it “wildly inappropriate” for Trump “to abuse the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to prop up the oil and gas industry at a time when the White House should be focusing on how to help everyday people in the US.”

“Where is the relief for workers grappling with caring for their families, retail workers risking exposure every day, families grappling with debt and mounting bills while their livelihoods are put at risk?” he asked. “No, today President Trump focused on propping up polluting industries and trotting out CEOs to sell their wares.”

Despite the criticisms from those focused on the needs of families, it appeared the announcement during what was dubbed Trump’s “Shock Doctrine press conference” had the desired result.

As CNBC reported, following Trump’s late-day announcement, “crude futures jumped 5%” in the last hour of market trading.

 

Renewable Energy Could Power the World by 2050

Virtually all the world’s demand for electricity to run transport and to heat and cool homes and offices, as well as to provide the power demanded by industry, could be met by renewable energy by mid-century.

This is the consensus of 47 peer-reviewed research papers from 13 independent groups with a total of 91 authors that have been brought together by Stanford University in California.

Some of the papers take a broad sweep across the world, adding together the potential for each technology to see if individual countries or whole regions could survive on renewables.

Special examinations of small island states, sub-Saharan Africa and individual countries like Germany look to see what are the barriers to progress and how they could be removed.

In every case the findings are that the technology exists to achieve 100% renewable power if the political will to achieve it can be mustered.

“It seems that every part of the world can now find a system that edges fossil fuels out in costs”

The collection of papers is a powerful rebuff to those who say that renewables are not reliable or cannot be expanded fast enough to take over from fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Once proper energy efficiency measures are in place, a combination of wind, solar and water power, with various forms of storage capacity, can add up to 100% of energy needs in every part of the planet.

Stanford puts one of its own papers at the top of the list. It studies the impacts of the Green New Deal proposals on grid stability, costs, jobs, health and climate in 143 countries.

With the world already approaching 1.5°C of heating, it says, seven million people killed by air pollution annually, and limited fossil fuel resources potentially sparking conflict, Stanford’s researchers wanted to compare business-as-usual with a 100% transition to wind-water-solar energy, efficiency and storage by 2050 – with at least 80% by 2030.

By grouping the countries of the world together into 24 regions co-operating on grid stability and storage solutions, supply could match demand by 2050-2052 with 100% reliance on renewables. The amount of energy used overall would be reduced by 57.1%, costs would fall by a similar amount, and 28.6 million more long-term full-time jobs would be created than under business-as-usual.

Clean air bonus

The remarkable consensus among researchers is perhaps surprising, since climate and weather conditions differ so much in different latitudes. It seems though that as the cost of renewables, particularly wind and solar, has tumbled, and energy storage solutions multiplied, every part of the world can now find a system that edges fossil fuels out in costs.

That, plus the benefit of clean air, particularly in Asian countries like India and China, makes renewables far more beneficial on any cost-benefit analysis.

The appearance of so many papers mirrors the consensus that climate scientists have managed to achieve in warning the world’s political leaders that time is running out for them to act to keep the temperature below dangerous levels.

Since in total the solutions offered cover countries producing more than 97% of the world’s greenhouse gases, they provide a blueprint for the next round of UN climate talks, to be held in Glasgow in November. At COP-26, as the conference is called, politicians will be asked to make new commitments to avoid dangerous climate change.

This Stanford file shows them that all they need is political will for them to be able to achieve climate stability.

 

Port of Last Call

“Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

For decades, Hong Kong — cosmopolitan, in possession of a free economy, and strategically situated — served as China’s face to the West. It is no surprise then, that when the British handed it over to China in 1997, many believed that the city’s unique status would enable Hong Kongers to continue enjoying, for the next 50 years, freedoms and rights not available on the mainland, under the “one country, two systems” framework. Moreover, there was a widespread expectation that these rights would be expanded in due time and that Hong Kongers would eventually be accorded the right to elect their own chief executive and other rights of a democratic civil society before Hong Kong’s special status expires in 2047.

Instead, the last two decades have felt like a contraction — a tightening of control from Beijing over the territory that has led to numerous protests over fears that China is reneging on its promise to grant the former British colony the high degree of autonomy promised in its Basic Law, or mini-constitution.

The most recent spate of demonstrations began in June 2019 and has continued nearly unabated ever since, save for a brief period when streets emptied due to the escalating coronavirus crisis in January. The immediate catalyst was the proposal of an anti-extradition law that would allow China to try criminal suspects on the mainland. But the protests are also the ideological heirs of the many pro-democracy movements that preceded them in the territory. They differ, however, both in scale (over a quarter of the city’s 7.4 million residents demonstrated on June 16, making it the largest protest in Hong Kong’s history), and in the degree of unrest and violence that has been roiling the city for months.

The significance of this tumultuous moment in Hong Kong’s history is the subject of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, a specialist on student protests, and a longtime observer of Hong Kong. In this slim volume, rich in the sort of anecdotes and personal observations that lend it the feel of a report from the ground, Wasserstrom brings us into the world of Hong Kong’s activists while explaining the current and historical context underlying their cause. It is no easy feat to convey a sense for the diffuse nature of the movement, but he succeeds. And he describes the ways that distinctions are increasingly blurring between the territory and the mainland, a blurring he sees increasing on every trip he makes back to the territory.

“The epic David-and-Goliath struggle currently underway in Hong Kong,” he writes, “can be seen in part as rooted in contrasting views of the meaning and significance of borders and what happens as they blur or disappear.” Some residents welcome this blurring, finding it inevitable, pragmatic, or convenient; others oppose it, fearing the loss of the vibrant civil society and independence from Beijing that make Hong Kong so distinct.

The city serves, among other things, as barometer — a harbinger of the degree of political openness, or lack thereof, that might be seen on the mainland. It serves, too, as a test case for the one country, two systems framework, long regarded by Beijing as a model for bringing Taiwan into the fold. But these are unique times. What makes this moment distinct is not just the fear that Beijing is increasingly brazen in exerting control over the territory, but that the protests are spearheaded by a generation of young people living in a singular moment in Hong Kong’s history. This is a generation that has no memory of Tiananmen, the sort of memory that might temper their fervor in the face of police aggression. These young people have never experienced what it feels like to be “second-class citizens in a British colony,” nor do they relate to those of an older generation that feel loyalty toward China from having profited from its economic rise. Their allegiance is to Hong Kong itself.

These are young people who, Wasserstrom tells us, see their future as grim, who face economic uncertainty in one of the most inequitable cities in the world, and who languished in a depression after what felt like the failure of the last major pro-democracy movement in 2014. These latest protests have given them new reason to devote themselves to a cause greater than themselves.

But this is also a generation bearing the psychic trauma of loving a homeland that bears a timestamp. In one of the more poignant sections of the book, Wasserstrom interviews a number of Hong Kongers and asks them to name a film or book that they believe best captures the current state of Hong Kong.

Hana Meihan Davis, a 21-year-old student who chooses the Hunger Games series, takes note of the “all-or-nothing feeling of desperation” in characters who feel that a “way of life they treasured was disappearing.” The dystopian franchise is an inspiring reminder of what is entailed in “giving your all for a lost cause.” (One of the rallying cries during last summer’s protests was a direct quote from the Hunger Games: “If we burn, you burn with us.”)

Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a reporter born and raised in Hong Kong, chooses the film In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai because “it evokes a sense of dreams that cannot be realized.” Wasserstrom explains, “She refers to this feeling as a ‘nostalgia for the future,’ a longing for the impossible.” It is precisely this — that “feeling of something almost within grasp but then forever out of reach” — that seems the psychological dilemma of the generation of protesters today.

Wasserstrom asks, “Will China ever genuinely keep its promise of implementing actual democracy in Hong Kong?” No, he writes, and in any case this isn’t the question anymore. Rather, it is whether the resistance can slow or stop the “erosion” of the beloved institutions and hopes and dreams that make Hong Kong what it is to its people. One might ask, though, whether this ever should have been a viable question at all. The British had a century to propose, let alone institute, political reforms in Hong Kong, yet waited until they were on the very brink of the handover. What was the motive in proposing them at the moment of departure? Could it possibly be that China is on the hook for reforms it never explicitly promised to deliver? When Wasserstrom writes that “it is difficult to overstate how strange and enigmatic the Basic Law of Hong Kong is,” one wishes there had been space for a fuller explanation of the circumstances surrounding the drafting of this as well as the joint agreement between Britain and China that it derived from. It is indeed enigmatic, and the ambiguity built into its language explains the vague understandings and assumptions about China’s intentions; it is open to interpretation. There was no clear articulation about what would be allowed, what would be off-limits; there was only an ambiguous, vague set of commitments.

Nevertheless, the movement has “put Beijing on notice,” writes Wasserstrom, “to show that if Hong Kong’s autonomy is wilting so, too, is the grand experiment of ‘One Country Two Systems.’” But it might be that maintaining the facade is not a high priority for China anymore. Hong Kong’s uniqueness — so striking in 1997 — has waned and diluted. The rise of China had not yet occurred at the time of the handover; Chinese cities on the mainland were still developing economies. Today, however, there are many business dynamos like Hong Kong: Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou. They may well be lessening the importance of Hong Kong for Beijing.

What happens when the political arc of a territory is out of sync with the aspirations of its people, when a territory is losing its relative significance at the same time that its population is crying out for more? There is a palpable disconnect between the activists’ ambitions and the political and economic arc of Hong Kong itself. This is a populace whose awareness of themselves and their hopes for their city appears to be reaching a peak just when Hong Kong itself is waning in significance.

A friend who teaches at a university in Hong Kong recently reminded me of what any author writing a story knows: in fiction, unlike in real life, the ending determines which actions her characters will take. Change the ending, and all else in the story must shift as well. But this is a real-life instance in which the protagonists are living in a narrative where the ending — 2047 — is already known.

Wasserstrom’s strength lies in how he puts a human face on the protesters and makes heartbreakingly clear their dilemma. One is left feeling compassion for a generation that feels doomed, that is waking up to its identity only to have it recede before their very eyes at the moment of their awakening.

This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Christine Gross-Loh is the author of Parenting Without Borders and co-author of The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.