Author: Gowani

by ALEXANDRA WITZE

Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game, and emerging technologies further threaten the status quo. The result is a risky new nuclear age.

The Doomsday Clock — a symbolic arbiter of how close humanity is to annihilating itself — now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, nearer than it has ever been to signalling our species’ point of no return.

Many threats, including climate change and biological weapons, prompted global-security specialists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago, Illinois, to move the clock’s hands in January. But chief among those hazards is the growing — and often overlooked — risk of nuclear war.

“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago, who advised on the Doomsday Clock decision. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.”

From Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine and the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that flared in May, to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, the world is not short of conflicts involving one or more nuclear-armed nations.

But it’s not just the number of clashes that have the potential to escalate that are causing consternation. The previous great build-up of nuclear weapons, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, essentially involved two, reasonably matched superpowers. Now, China is emerging as a third nuclear-armed superpower, North Korea is growing its nuclear arsenal and Iran has enriched uranium beyond what is needed for civilian use. India and Pakistan are also thought to be expanding their nuclear arsenals. Add to this the potential for online misinformation and disinformation to influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and for artificial intelligence (AI) to bring uncertainty to military decision-making, and it’s clear that the rulebook has been ripped up.

“Eighty years into the nuclear age, we find ourselves at a reckoning point,” says Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Amid this fraught landscape, scientists are working to prevent the world from annihilation. At a three-day conference in Chicago that started on 14 July — almost exactly 80 years after researchers and the US military tested the first atomic weapon — dozens of scientists, including Nobel laureates from a wide array of disciplines, met to discuss actions to prevent nuclear war. They released a fresh warning about its risks, as well as recommendations for what society can do to reduce them, including calling on all nations to speak transparently to each other about the scientific and military implications of AI.

Dawn of a nuclear age

The emerging multipolar world disrupts a tenet of nuclear security that helped to avoid nuclear war in the past. The principles of nuclear deterrence rest on the assumption that no nation wants to start a war that is bound to have devastating consequences for everyone. This meant having distributed nuclear arsenals that couldn’t be taken out with one strike, diminishing any incentive to strike first, in the knowledge the enemy would strike back and the consequence would be ‘mutually assured destruction’. It also meant clarity among nuclear-armed nations about who had what strike capability, and therefore what the possible consequences of any attack might be. A fragile stability prevailed, thanks to backchannel communications between hostile nations and diplomatic signals designed to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to the accidental pressing of the nuclear button.

Nature for more

by UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Sleep may not just be rest for the mind—it may be essential maintenance for the body’s power supply. A new study by University of Oxford researchers, published in Nature, reveals that the pressure to sleep arises from a build-up of electrical stress in the tiny energy generators inside brain cells.

The discovery offers a physical explanation for the biological drive to sleep and could reshape how scientists think about sleep, aging, and neurological disease.

Led by Professor Gero Miesenböck from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG), and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro at Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior, the team found that sleep is triggered by the brain’s response to a subtle form of energy imbalance. The key lies in mitochondria—microscopic structures inside cells that use oxygen to convert food into energy.

When the mitochondria of certain sleep-regulating brain cells (studied in fruit flies) become overcharged, they start to leak electrons, producing potentially damaging byproducts known as reactive oxygen species. This leak appears to act as a warning signal that pushes the brain into sleep, restoring equilibrium before damage spreads more widely.

“You don’t want your mitochondria to leak too many electrons,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells.”

The researchers found that specialized neurons act like circuit breakers—measuring this mitochondrial electron leak and triggering sleep when a threshold is crossed. By manipulating the energy handling in these cells—either increasing or decreasing electron flow—the scientists could directly control how much the flies slept.

Even replacing electrons with energy from light (using proteins borrowed from microorganisms) had the same effect: more energy, more leak, more sleep.

Physorg for more

by SARAH BLAKWOOD

In “Work: A Story of Experience,” Alcott fictionalizes her own stints as a servant, a seamstress, a governess, and a lady’s companion—and asks whether a wage counts as freedom for women.

In January, 1861, Louisa May Alcott began writing a novel that she planned to call “Success.” Alcott was twenty-eight and living at Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts. That same month, her mother became briefly yet seriously ill, and Alcott put down her manuscript to care for her. “Wrote on a new book—‘Success’—till Mother fell ill,” she writes in her journal. “I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse.”

In the decade that followed, Alcott wrote and published “Little Women,” along with four other novels (“Hospital Sketches,” “Moods,” “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” “Little Men”) and more than a dozen stories. In 1872, flush with financial security and fame, she returned to her unfinished manuscript. The book it eventually grew into was no longer about success but, rather, a subject that preoccupied Alcott throughout her career: labor. It soon ran as a serial story in the Christian Union, earning its author three thousand dollars (around eighty thousand dollars today). In 1873, the story, now retitled “Work: A Story of Experience,” was published as a novel, and earned her five thousand dollars more.

It’s easy to find out how much money Alcott made from her writing because she kept very good, simple accounts in her journals, which listed what the writing paid alongside what she made from sewing, teaching, and other odd jobs. She began the practice, endearingly, as a teen-ager, in 1850, the year she sold her first piece of fiction, the story “The Rival Painters,” for five dollars. (The story was published two years later.)

Alcott may be one of our greatest but least recognized feminist theorists of labor. Her novels, essays, and personal papers reveal how much, and how inventively, she thought about the relationship between money and art, and about her place within systems of paid and unpaid work. She was often asked to lay aside her writing for domestic labor, but she also describes her family taking on such tasks to support her in her creative work. She saw domestic drudgery in the service of people she loved as an incubator for creativity, writing in her journal as a very young woman that “??I can simmer novels while I do my housework, so see my way to a little money.” Toward the end of her life, as she cared for her father after he suffered a stroke, Alcott again drew a connection between the two kinds of work—domestic and creative—that had defined her life: “Began a book called ‘Genius.’ Shall never finish it I dare say, but must keep a vent for my fancies to escape at. This double life is trying & my head will work as well as my hands.”

“Work” fictionalizes Alcott’s experiences as a servant, a seamstress, a governess, and a lady’s companion. It treats these and other forms of labor performed by women of her era (housekeeping, factory work, sex work) as inherently dignified. There is a straight line between Alcott’s itemizing of her teen-age earnings and her efforts decades later to make such labor visible to readers, and demand that it be counted. The novel opens with a domestic scene—a young woman and her aunt kneading dough at a kitchen table. This sentimental tableau is disturbed when the girl, whose name is Christie Devon, announces “a new Declaration of Independence”: she’s going to “travel away into the world and seek my fortune.” She continues, “I’m old enough to take care of myself; and if I’d been a boy, I should have been told to do it long ago. I hate to be dependent; and now there’s no need of it.”

Christie is charming, energetic, and good-humored. (“Jest like her mother, full of hifalutin notions, discontented, and sot in her own idees. Poor capital to start a fortin’ on,” her grumpy Uncle Enos responds to her declaration.) For years, she’s attempted in various ways to curb her hunger for “a larger, nobler life.” She’s tried reading, she’s tried making friends with “buxom girls whose one ambition was to ‘get married,’ ” and she’s tried letting herself be courted by men who are entirely “wrapped up in prize cattle and big turnips.” None has provided the sense of personal fulfillment and independence she seeks. And so she leaves the family home and enters the workforce.

The novel’s first third follows Christie through five different types of paid employment. First, she gets a job as a domestic servant to a wealthy family—only to be dismissed when her “private candle” lights her dresses on fire and nearly burns the house down. She then finds work as an actress—until she realizes that the stage has made her vain and competitive. She takes a position as a governess, and her young charges’ uncle falls in love with her; she briefly serves as a paid companion to a melancholy young woman who, rather than pass on the family “curse” of madness, eventually takes her own life. Finally, Christie turns seamstress, until her forewoman forbids her association with a co-worker, Rachel, who, it is implied, is a “fallen” woman. Christie refuses and quits. Without meaningful work, she considers suicide. (Here, Alcott rewrites an episode of depression she experienced in 1858.)

By the second part of the book, Christie, increasingly disillusioned with the world of waged labor, falls in love with and marries David Sterling, a character loosely inspired by Henry David Thoreau, Alcott’s friend and former teacher. Both Christie and David take part in the Civil War, David as a soldier for the Union Army and Christie as a nurse. David is fatally wounded in battle, and the novel concludes with Christie, who has given birth to a daughter in the ensuing months, becoming active in a local social-reform group and remaking her life among a multiracial, multi-class, multigenerational community of women devoted to labor organizing.

Throughout “Work,” Alcott asks what counts as freedom for women. Christie leaves the family home and its enforced dependence, but her story is not a triumph of lean-in feminism. The constraints she experienced at home follow her into the outside world; a wage does not negate the limits placed on her by virtue of her gender. Alcott suggests that Christie’s true achievement lies not in her ability to support herself but in the lasting attachments she has cultivated with the women she has worked alongside in each of her various jobs.

At the outset of “Work,” Christie thinks of the home as “narrow” in a negative sense. She longs to “escape” her “narrow life,” she dismisses her uncle’s “grim prophecies and narrow views,” she finds the religious succor she seeks in despair “cold and narrow.” Midway through the book, as she begins to fall in love with David, she starts to feel comfortable, even cozy, within that narrowness. “As she lay in her narrow white bed,” Alcott writes, “with the ‘pale light of stars’ filling the quiet, cell-like room, and some one playing softly on a flute overhead, she felt as if she had left the troublous world behind her, and shutting out want, solitude, and despair, had come into some safe, secluded spot full of flowers and sunshine, kind hearts, and charitable deeds.”

The New Yorker for more

by ASATO IKEDA

Abstract: This is a conversation between Japanese artist Mio Okido and art historian Asato Ikeda, centered on Okido’s exhibition Remembered Images Imagined (Hi)stories—Japan, East Asia, and I at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. The dialogue examines Okido’s exploration of imperialism, nationalism, and cultural identity through works such as Ghosts, Holy Person from Hiroshima, and Viewing. Okido discusses her critical engagement with historical narratives, aesthetics as propaganda, and the systemic frameworks shaping art and memory.

Mio Okido (b. 1986) is a contemporary Japanese artist who lives and works in Berlin.¹ She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tokyo University of the Arts and a Master of Arts degree from Berlin University of the Arts. Her work explores conflicts between people, particularly those arising from differences in social class, ideology, nationality, and cultural and political identity. She employs a variety of media and techniques, including two-dimensional art, installation art, and action pieces. Most recently, her works were featured in Remembered Images Imagined (Hi)stories—Japan, East Asia, and I at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, part of the Humboldt Forum. This exhibition, which ran from September 2024 to February 2025, was the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. It took place in one of the semi-permanent galleries of Japanese and other Asian art.

Ikeda: How long have you been living in Germany, and why Germany?

Okido: I briefly studied in Germany in 2013 while still affiliated with Tokyo University of the Arts, but I returned to Japan afterward. I moved to Berlin more permanently in 2015. My primary interest was in understanding how postwar German history differed from that of Japan. During the Cold War, Germany was divided into two spheres—Western capitalist and Eastern communist—while Japan was not. I come from Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture, which is geographically close to Russia. My grandfather, who was stationed in China as a soldier during the war and later sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war, spent some time in Russia. Despite this physical proximity, Japan has been diplomatically and culturally distant from Russia on the official level, which has always felt like a “black box” to me. I found that very intriguing, and Germany’s unique relationship with Russia was one of the reasons I chose to live there.

Ikeda: I’d like to ask about the works currently displayed at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, particularly those related to Japan and the Second World War. Could you first talk about how the exhibition came about?

Okido: The exhibition was curated by Kerstin Pinther (curator for modern and contemporary art in a global context) and Alexander Hofmann (curator for arts of Japan).² In 2023, I became a fellowship holder for the project Collaborative Museum at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art, both of which are located at the Humboldt Forum in Mitte. These museums house over 500,000 objects, making them one of Europe’s largest collections of non-European art and culture.

The Humboldt Forum and its authoritative presence in central Berlin have been a focal point of critical debate about decolonization. The museums launched this project to collaborate with contemporary artists who are critical of the state’s colonial legacy, reframing the collection to challenge colonial structures and existing power dynamics. The aim is to promote diversity, accessibility, and a reimagined relationship with the collection, even though the content of the collection itself cannot be changed easily.

APJJF for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.- and Israeli-backed humanitarian aid scheme, journalist Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News says the sparse aid is actually another Israeli military tactic “meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. … They’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Israeli-U.S. plan to sideline the United Nations aid delivery system is continuing to cause chaos in Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians have been shot dead as Israeli troops have repeatedly opened fire at newly established aid distribution sites.

The aid is being distributed by a shadow U.S. group registered in Delaware called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A separate U.S. company called Safe Reach Solutions is helping to provide security. The New York Times reports that firm is run by a former senior CIA officer named Philip Reilly, who reportedly helped train the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

The U.N. and international aid groups have condemned the new Israeli-U.S. plan. This is UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

PHILIPPE LAZZARINI: The model of aid distribution proposed by Israel does not align with core humanitarian principle. It will deprive a large part of Gaza, the highly vulnerable people, of desperately needed assistance.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, recently wrote an article headlined “Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide.” Jeremy Scahill has also been reporting on proposals for a new ceasefire in Gaza.

We’ll get to that in a minute, Jeremy. But why don’t you lay out what is going on? This shadowy group that has moved in, condemned by humanitarian aid organizations, by the United Nations, talk about who they are and what’s happening.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, first of all, Amy, we should be very clear that this cutout of a company — you know, “cutout” is a term of espionage — it was established by people with ties to the CIA and Israeli intelligence, was meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. Netanyahu himself said the quiet part out loud in a recent speech, when he said that he was getting some pressure even from his most passionate backers in the Republicans in the Senate. And he said, you know, that they didn’t want the optics of starving Palestinians, and that this could hinder the ability of the United States to continue arming and supporting Netanyahu, and so they wanted to give the veneer of some form of aid.

And Netanyahu and Israel have been at war against UNRWA, the U.N. agency that was established in the aftermath of the Nakba in the late 1940s, when the state of Israel was imposed on Palestine as a European colonial-settler state. And so, this serves two purposes. It allowed Netanyahu to say, “Look, we’re letting aid in, and we’re doing it so that Hamas can’t steal it” — which, by the way, was a lie. And even Biden’s top humanitarian official, David Satterfield, said this week that there was no evidence ever presented by Israel that Hamas was stealing or hoarding the aid. So, part of it was just was to give the veneer of we’re doing something humanitarian. The other part of it was to continue the war against UNRWA, to destroy the premier aid organization serving Palestinian refugees, forcibly displaced people. And UNRWA, its very existence, Netanyahu and Israel hate, because it recognizes the international laws that say that the Palestinians have a right to return to their land that they started to be — to lose in 1947, 1948, when the Nakba began.

So, they created this shell company, with ties to American intelligence officers, as a way of further destroying UNRWA, but also serving Netanyahu’s agenda. They then bring in an American mercenary company that — you know, Blackwater-style guys that you saw in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the so-called war on terror. And then they created what international aid officials have said are concentration camp or internment camp-like conditions. Others have likened it to ghetto-style conditions, where Palestinians are going to be forced to stand out in the heat all day in barbed-wire fence enclosures, looking like a cage, and then they get a box with a paltry amount of food aid in it. There’s no medicine. There’s no infant formula. This is all just trickery that is being used to further the genocide.

And, Amy, I’ve been talking to people. A personal friend of mine whose family is from Khan Younis, four members of his family were shot sniper style yesterday by the Israeli military when they went to pick up these aid boxes at one of the two sites, the one near Rafah.

What is happening is that the Israelis are also using this as an intelligence operation. They’ve snatched, kidnapped a number of Palestinians. They’ve interrogated them. When they don’t get the answers they want, they’ve disappeared them.

They haven’t given any mechanism for how people are supposed to line up or know where to go. What we’re hearing from sources on the ground is that word just spreads via WhatsApp and text messages. “Oh, there’s going to be aid delivered in this place.” People go there, and it’s just pure chaos.

So, none of this is by accident. This is by design. And you have, on the one hand, a pittance of aid that is being actually distributed, relative to what is needed just to have — just to address the basic starvation factor in Gaza right now. And on the other hand, Israel is using this and the desperation of people to further dehumanize Palestinians. And when they go to try to desperately grab whatever aid they can, as we saw happen at a U.N. warehouse, then they say, “Well, Hamas is shooting starving people trying to get food.” No, Israel has intentionally starved the population of Gaza now for three months. They have continued the campaign of dehumanization, and they’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.

And the last thing I’ll say about this is Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, who’s in the war cabinet, both said that the point of this is to lure Palestinians, as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza, where they can either kill them in an increasingly shrinking killing cage or lock that cage and ship them off to another country. They call it Trump’s plan, but actually it’s been Netanyahu life’s work to try to erase Palestinians as a people and as a territory.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, on Wednesday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation posted a video online showing Palestinians lined up, cheering at a new aid distribution site. The post includes this message: “Humanity shines as thousands cheer the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, heralding a new era of hope and compassion.”

MASKED MAN: Isn’t this crazy? Look at that.

Democracy Now for more

by BEN NORTON

Geopolitical Economy for more

by B. R. GOWANI

CBS The Late Show with Steven Colbert host was mad at POTUS:

“And now for the next ten months, the gloves are off. I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump starting right now.”

but then when was Steven Colbert not outraged at Pres Donald Trump?

he has been poking fun at Trump for a very long time

Trump is a terribly disgusting person,

and it seems Trump played a role in Colbert getting fired

but Colbert has always had his gloves off in regards to Trump

the facts:

• CBS is part of Paramount Global, a giant multinational company
• David Ellison’s Skydance wanted to acquire Paramount Global
• on July 17, 2025, CBS dumped Colbert’s show

Trump gloated on news that Colbert will leave in May 2026:

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! [Fox News late night host] Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”

Colbert vented his anger:

“How dare you, sir? Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go fuck yourself.”

on Trump’s comment on Kimmel, Colbert said:

“Nope, absolutely not, Kimmel. I am the martyr. There’s only room for one on this cross, and I’ve gotta tell you, the view is fantastic from up here. I can see your house!”

if Colbert was really on a cross, he would be begging for Trump’s mercy …

but the way things are going, that time seems not too far away …

unless he joins other real protest movements to oppose unfolding fascism …

rather than cracking jokes and pocketing millions of dollars

on 24 July, Trump govt approved Skydance-Paramount Global merger

Skydance paid $8 billion to takeover Paramount Global

David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle

who is worth $251 billion, and the world’s 2nd richest person

Trump got his goonda tax of $16 million from paramount Global

he also expects to get $20 million from the new owners

if Colbert would have spared some time for Palestinians,

his huge popularity could have really made a difference …

especially if he had shown outrage at repeated Palestinian massacre

as much as he was furious at Netanyahu for Israel’s attack on WCK

World Central Kitchen was struck killed 7 workers in Gaza

Spanish chef Jose Andres, Colbert’s friend, runs the WCK charity

“And as many of you know, the World Central Kitchen is near and dear to my heart. It was founded by our friend, Chef José Andrés, to bring food to hungry people after natural disasters and in war zones.”

Netanyahu tried to defend himself with the lame excuse:

“This happens in war. We are conducting a thorough inquiry and are in contact with the governments. We will do everything to prevent a recurrence.”

Colbert shot back:

“Nothing just happens. You are responsible. If your answer is, ‘This happens in war,’ then maybe consider ending the war.”

Colbert was mad for the death of WCK workers – a very good gesture

but Colbert never talked about 59,106 Palestinians killed by Israel

(that include about 30% children, that is, at least 17,400 children)

actually over 400,000 Palestinian deaths …

and growing by the day as Ralph Nader points out …

this is the power of the Israeli Lobby’s hold on the US politics

Colbert could say “go fuck yourself” to Trump …

but could not mention Israeli genocide or ask US govt to stop arming Israel

Colbert doesn’t talk about Israel’s killing/starving/humiliating Palestinians …

but Colbert didn’t forget to question Zohran Mamdani about …

Israel’s right to exist

many people criticized CBS for firing Colbert

Colbert is making $15 million a year for his Late Show

he makes more money as a voice actor, stage performer, & author

his net worth is $75 million

with such money and fame, Colbert will find a way to continue working

the real danger is not the end of the Late Show but …

it is the merger of the two giants Skydance and Paramount Global

a decade and a half back, Ramzy Baroud had warned us about merger:

“How will democracy, mass participation or public interest be served by the Comcast Corp.’s purchase of NBC’s Universal or the Disney Company’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment Inc.? The media industry has turned into a jungle, where the survival of the fittest is determined not by value of content, or by contribution to society, but rather by ‘smart’ business deals that ensure survival in an increasingly demanding media market.”

when a company merges and gets bigger

the profits increases manyfold

but …

• workers lose job
• people’s voices vanish
• democracy becomes a joke
• freedom of speech for the elite enhances

Paramount Global/Skydance merger is clearly the more dangerous

and should generate more scrutiny and publicity …

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

DEMOCRACY NOW

We continue our conversation with Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa about her new Netflix documentary, Apocalypse in the Tropics. The film delves into the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in Brazil and how it fueled the rise of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for an alleged coup attempt following his defeat in the 2022 presidential election.

“I really see this film as a parable of our times, where we have leaders that are trying to destroy democracy from within,” says Costa. “Instead of proposing solutions for a world that is in danger and going towards ultimate collapse, they’re actually trying to accelerate that collapse. And that has very much to do with this apocalyptic theology.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now for Part 2 of our conversation with Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa. Her 2019 film, Edge of Democracy, was nominated for an Academy Award. It traced the rise and fall of democracy in Brazil from 1985 through the first election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, through the years in power of the Brazil’s Workers’ Party until the impeachment of Lula da Silva’s protégée, Dilma Rousseff, in 2017.

In her new documentary, Petra Costa traces the rise of Christian nationalism in Brazil and its power in politics. It’s called Apocalypse in the Tropics. Let’s go to a clip from the film which begins with images of crowds of supporters surrounding former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after he was released from prison. He had been jailed following a corruption conviction that was later annulled. The first voice in the clip is director Petra Costa, followed by a leading evangelical pastor and adviser to former President Bolsonaro, Silas Malafaia.

PETRA COSTA: When he was sent to prison, half the country felt robbed of the chance to vote for their candidate, while the other half felt that he deserved it. Now that he was out, joy and anger had switched sides, and the memory of his two terms as president, where millions were lifted out of poverty, prematurely launched the next presidential race and put him ahead in every poll.

Democracy Now for more

by NADEEM FAROOQ PARACHA

“Iqbal set out to create a self-actualised Muslim collective that would come into being through the dialectic process between reason and revelation, science and tradition, physics and metaphysics”

In 1918, when the First World War was coming to an end, the already depleted Ottoman Empire was facing defeat and rebellions. The Ottomans, headquartered in Istanbul, had sided with Germany in the hope that their empire would be able to restore its rule over at least some of the territories that it began to lose from the 19th century onwards. But the Ottoman armies were routed by allied forces led by the British. When the British facilitated Arab tribes in Arabia to rise up against the Ottomans, Dr Ansari, a member of the All India Muslim League (AIML) invited some ulema to an AIML session in Delhi. The ulema agreed to attend.

But not all AIML leaders were so thrilled by this. For example, an AIML leader Choudhry Khaliquzzaman feared that the party’s program would be overshadowed by the emotion of ‘jihad’ being popularised by the ulema and the Pan-Islamists. He warned Dr Ansari of the dangers of Islamising politics. But Khaliquzzaman was unable to keep AIML from joining the ‘Khilafat Movement’(Caliphate Movement) that aspired to dissuade the British from dismantling the Ottoman caliphate. Once Khilafat became a powerful symbol in the minds of India’s Muslims, the ‘modernist’ leadership of the AIML was marginalised. The ulama, as the custodians of religion, came forward to lead the Muslims of India. According to the Pakistani historian Mubarak Ali, many Muslim leaders who had started their political careers as moderates, were won over by the ulema and became ‘maulanas with beards.’

However, men such as the barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah who had once been a member of Indian National Congress (INC) before joining the AIML, took Khlaiquzzam’s line. In 1919, when the INC leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was planning to bolster the Khilafat Movement with INC’s own anti-British programme, Jinnah wrote to Gandhi warning him that the movement would unleash religious passions and that the Hindus and Muslims would lose the political and economic gains that they had negotiated with the British.

The Friday Times for more