Refugees fleeing Sudan wait at a bus station in Aswan, Egypt, 25 April 2023. IMAGE/ Xinhua
While authorities continue mass deportations to Sudan, a new asylum law could set a precedent in the region
Egypt is currently pressing ahead with the adoption of an asylum
law. Although it is unclear whether it will actually be adopted, the
situation of people on the move in the country is likely to remain
disastrous in either scenario. The regime continues to respond to the
arrival of Sudanese refugees with mass deportations to the war-torn
country. The EU, meanwhile, is once again expanding its migration and
military cooperation with Cairo and backs Egypt’s struggling economy
with loans and grants, this time pursued to reduce irregular arrivals of
people in Crete but also to keep el-Sisi’s regime in line for its role
in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
To the surprise of many observers, the Defence and National Security Committee in Egypt’s House of Representatives,the lower house of parliament,approved a draft asylum bill in late October 2024, followed by the parliament adopting the law only a few weeks later.
The government drafted the controversial legislation back in 2023. The
text itself, however, remained undisclosed until October.
The draft law paves the way for transferring refugee status
determination (RSD) from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to Egypt’s
government ? with potentially far-reaching consequences. “It
remains unclear how the law will affect asylum procedures in Egypt”,
explains Mohamed Lotfy, Director of the Cairo-based human rights
organization Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF).
“Registration, RSD, and protection are to be transferred from UNHCR to a
new governmental Permanent Committee for Refugee Affairs, but there is
no clarity at all about how a transition period would look like or what
exactly UNHCR’s role would be after the law is adopted”, he told the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Despite Egypt’s ratification of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention in 1981,
it is not the Egyptian state but only the Egypt branch of UNHCR that
processes asylum applications in the country, grants people a refugee
status, issues corresponding IDs, and ? at least on paper ?
provides emergency assistance to refugees and asylum seekers. In a 1954
memorandum of understanding with the UNHCR, Egyptian authorities agreed
to consider status IDs issued by UNHCR as proof of identity and to
refrain from deporting people in the possession of those IDs.
Nevertheless, people registered with UNHCR are denied access to
education, the public health system and the formal labour market.
In other words: “The government is generally not concerned with the
affairs and lives of refugees unless it involves security issues”, reads
a paper by the migration researchers Prof. Dr. Gerda Heck and Elena Habersky of the American University in Cairo. If the government’s current draft law is ratified, this would certainly change.
Formalizing Deportation
The bill now grants refugees the right to education and access to the
labour market for the very first time. However, “the law appears to
prioritize security considerations over refugee protection, potentially
undermining the right to asylum”, warns ECRF Director Lotfy. “The text
contains broadly worded provisions concerning ‘acts that may affect
national security or public order’. This vague language grants excessive
discretion to the new committee responsible for determining refugee
status, leaving the door open for arbitrary denials”, he explains.
The Earth is made up of layers. The lithosphere is the solid, outer part of the planet, including the brittle upper portion of the mantle and the crust. IMAGE/ Volcan26/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Is it possible to dig all the way through the Earth to the other side? Anishwar, age 8, India
When I was a kid, I liked to dig holes in my backyard in Cincinnati.
My grandfather joked that if I kept digging, I would end up in China.
In fact, if I had been able to dig straight through the planet, I
would have come out in the Indian Ocean, about 1,100 miles (1,800
kilometers) west of Australia. That’s the antipode, or opposite point on Earth’s surface, from my town.
But I only had a garden spade to move the earth. When I hit rock,
less than 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, I couldn’t go deeper.
Now, I’m a geophysicist and know a lot more about Earth’s structure. It has three main layers:
The outer skin, called the crust, is a very thin layer of light
rock. Its thickness compared to Earth’s diameter is similar to how thick
an apple’s skin is to its diameter. When I dug holes as a kid, I was
scratching away at the very top of Earth’s crust.
The mantle, which lies beneath the crust, is much thicker, like the flesh of the apple. It’s made of strong, heavy rock that flows up to a few inches per year as hotter rock rises away from Earth’s center and cooler rock sinks toward it.
The core, at Earth’s center, is made of super-hot liquid and solid metal. Temperatures here are 4,500 to 9,300 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 to 5,200 degrees Celsius).
Earth’s outer layers exert pressure on the layers underneath, and
these forces increase steadily with depth, just as they do in the ocean –
think of how pressure in your ears gets stronger as you dive deeper
underwater.
That’s relevant for digging through the Earth, because when a hole is
dug or drilled, the walls along the sides of the hole are under
tremendous pressure from the overlying rock, and also unstable because
there’s empty space next to them. Stronger rocks can support bigger
forces, but all rocks can fail if the pressure is great enough.
When digging a pit, one way to prevent the walls from collapsing
inward under pressure is to make them less steep, so they slant outward
like the sides of a cone. A good rule of thumb is to make the hole three
times wider than its depth.
Unstable walls
The deepest open pit in the Earth is the Bingham Canyon Mine
in Utah, which was dug with excavators and explosives in the early
1900s to mine copper ore. The pit of the mine is 0.75 miles (1.2
kilometers) deep and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide.
Since the mine is more than three times wider than it is deep and the
walls are sloped, the pit’s walls are not too steep or unstable. Still,
in 2013, one of the slopes collapsed, causing two huge landslides that released 145 million tons of crushed rock to the bottom of the pit. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the landslides caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
by CALEB McCULLOUGH, MIA OSMONBEKOV, & AMY SHERMAN
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, right, has thrown in his lot with US President-elect Donald Trump and has been rewarded with a position leading the newly announced ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ IMAGE/File: Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President-elect Trump is promising more government efficiency – but is money really being wasted on cats on treadmills?
Musk, the world’s richest person, amplified posts on his X platform that said the United States government funded research on “transgender” monkeys, cats on treadmills and “alcoholic rats” sprayed with bobcat urine.
“Some of this stuff is not merely a waste of money, but outright evil,” Musk wrote on November 13.
“Your tax dollars at ‘work’,” Musk said on November 12 with a laughing emoji with tears.
Musk said he wants the federal government to cut “at least $2
trillion”, or almost 30 percent of what the US government spent in 2024.
Trump didn’t specify a target amount for the group led by Musk and
former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy,
but he set July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence, as a deadline for identifying cuts. The department can
make recommendations, but Congress has the ultimate power on spending
decisions.
Many federal research projects Musk cited overlap with findings in
annual “Festivus” reports about government spending by Republican US
Senator Rand Paul, who said Musk and Ramaswamy can use his reports as
“inspiration”.
Some projects stretch back decades. For example, one list on X
compiled by Dillon Loomis, host of the YouTube show Electrified, called
out Department of Agriculture credit card spending on “concert tickets,
tattoos, lingerie and car payments”. This came from a 2003 government
audit.
Musk boosted another X post by The Redheaded Libertarian that said
the government spent $4.5m “to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine”
in 2020.
Medical research has long been a bipartisan target for criticism, Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense said.
“Whether tequila makes fish angry, shrimp on a treadmill are two projects that come to mind,” Sewell said. “You comb through the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and other agencies, and there are a lot of weird-sounding studies – at least superficially.”
Many complaints exclude the problems the research is trying to
address, which might change how people perceive its value. In the case
of these new examples Musk cited, the money went largely to research and
academic institutions over several years to study animals to solve
health problems in humans.
Against all odds, I race toward inclusivity, embracing resilience, and claiming my right to equality.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. – William Ernest Henley
Nature bestows birthmarks of ‘impairment’, doctors pronounce verdict of ‘deformity’, society brands as ‘useless’, families shield from ‘failures’, teachers embrace as ‘special’, and colleagues perceive as ‘fragile’: defining hallmarks of an arduous marathon a race marked by exclusivity!
From birth to infancy, from childhood to adolescence, from adulthood
to youth, and from maturity to advanced age, entire life of a
differently abled person is often spent racing on an exclusive track in
an unending quest of inclusivity.
Participation in this double-tracked marathon – one lane reserved
exclusively for apparently ‘less competent’ contestants – in pursuit of a
level-playing field seems like an endless endeavour. Few contestants
aspire to cross the finish line; many find solace in crossing smaller
milestones, content with incremental progress rather than chasing the
ultimate goal. Yet, I believe, the ultimate reward – the triumph of
breaking through barriers – is well within reach, no matter how limited
one’s inner courage and strength may seem.
Personally, I count myself among the few contestants striving for the last post, determined to reach the finish line.
Even before the starting whistle was blown, my adventure was riddled
with warnings, doubts and skepticism. I was cautioned about the risks,
reminded of the potential failures, and my skill to compete against
seasoned opponents was repeatedly questioned.
When the race finally began, defying all the odds, obstacles emerged
in various forms – negative slogans, discouraging remarks, and an
overwhelming wave of cheers and support directed towards my opponents.
These challenges threatened to slow my pace, and, I admit that some
moments indeed caused temporary setbacks, but thankfully, they never
extinguished my persistence. Ironically, the guiding chants, suggesting
me to avoid direct confrontation and to maintain a safe distance from
professional athletes, became the catalysts for my resolve. Their doubts
fueled my desire to take charge, devise my own strategies, and prove my
capabilities. Amidst the isolation I faced in a packed arena, I found
an unshakable resolve: to seize this moment, showcase my abilities, and
send a powerful message – that competition on equal footing is not just a
dream but a reality waiting to be claimed.
This racing track is a reflection of a complex life journey of
differently abled individuals, struggling to overcome personal
limitations but also to earn equal opportunities in a world that often
hesitates to acknowledge, rather underestimates their true potential.
As someone who has been visually challenged since birth, I have lived
this marathon at every stage of my life. Time and again, I have been
discouraged to make my own choices and take decisions for myself by
arguing that my physical vulnerability could render me incapable to
navigate this ruthless world. The concept of trial and error was deemed
unsuitable for someone like me, yet, this constant reminder of perceived
weakness gradually helped me develop a mechanism to identify my inner
strengths and explore the doors remained open to me.
Growing up I witnessed my elders and well-wishers meticulously
planning a secure and comforting future on my behalf, instead of feeling
reassured or taken aback, this ignited within me an unconscious urge to
challenge their assumptions. I became determined to carve my own path
and prove that I am fully capable of shaping my own destiny.
Hence, the desire to pull myself out of despair and push myself to
the limit has always been stronger than the obstacles in my way.
Despite the rocky and uneven terrain, I have armed myself with
resilience, determination, and an unwavering belief in my ability to
succeed. This marathon has taught me that inclusivity is not just about
receiving opportunities, but about claiming them with zeal and
conviction.
The finish line may still seem distant, but I am determined to keep
running, not just for my own self but for countless others who yearn to
break free from the chains of exclusion and step into a world of
equality and inclusion.
The actor, who was fired from the Scream franchise for calling out Netanyahu, recalled experiencing times when she felt her life had ended.
Melissa Barrera is opening up about the darkest year of her life
after facing a major career setback for taking a stand for Gaza. In a
candid interview with The Independent, the actor shared her journey of self-discovery following her firing from the Scream franchise.
A year ago, Barrera became known as a staunch advocate for Palestine.
She actively called out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
his regime’s atrocities in Gaza.
“Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp,” she
wrote in an Instagram story in October 2023. “This is genocide and
ethnic cleansing.” In another post, she talked about the struggle to
find news stories on Palestinian suffering. “Western media only shows
the other side. Why they do that, I will let you deduce for yourself. We
don’t need more hate. No Islamophobia. No antisemitism,” she wrote.
Spyglass, the studio behind the latest Scream films, immediately dropped
Barrera from the franchise. “We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or
the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to
genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that
flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” the company said in a
statement following her removal.
Barrera released her own statement, saying she condemned
“antisemitism and Islamophobia,” and hate and prejudice of any kind
against any group of people. “I believe a group of people are NOT their
leadership, and that no governing body should be above criticism.”
Reflecting on that time, Barrera told the outlet, “It was the darkest
and hardest year of my life, and I had to reevaluate everything. There
were times when I felt like my life was over.”
For nearly 10 months after getting fired, the actor recalled how
substantial job offers were scarce. While smaller roles trickled in, the
overarching sentiment seemed to be that she was “desperate” for roles.
“It was quiet for, like, 10 months. I was still getting offers for
small things here and there — I’m not going to lie and say there was
nothing — but the message was, like, ‘Oh, she probably doesn’t have
work, she’ll say yes to anything,’” Barrera explained.
“I would get [roles] that I wasn’t excited about, and I’ve never been
a person that just wants to work for work’s sake. I give so much of
myself to acting that if a part of me feels like it’s not worth it, I’m
gonna be miserable,” she added.
The professional lull forced Barrera to reassess her personality
beyond her acting career. “For the longest time, I gave myself value as a
human because of my work. So when I saw it potentially ending, I was
like, who even am I? And I realised that I’m so much more than just an
actor — I’m a great sister, a great daughter, a great friend.”
Barrera expressed mixed emotions when reflecting on her time in the Scream
franchise. “They gave me a lot in my career. I made really good
friends. I have such loyal fans from those movies.” However, the firing
and subsequent backlash remain a sore point. Fans also frequently bring
up the controversy when they meet her, she said.
The series itself has shifted directions, with the seventh instalment
starring Neve Campbell. Barrera also recalled getting sympathy for what
happened to her from fans and how uncomfortable that made her, making
her feel like she failed at something.
“They’re like, ‘What they did to you is so messed up, I’m so sorry
that happened!’ And it’s something, I think, that’s never going to end.
Because the franchise is never going to end. So while I still have so
much love for [those movies], the reminders of that very sour moment
make it a little bit weird,” she said.
Right after Barrera’s dismissal, Campbell agreed to return for the forthcoming Scream VII,
which divided fans of the franchise. Some, out of respect for Barrera,
pledged to boycott subsequent installments, while others, out of loyalty
to the series’ original heroine, pledged full allegiance to Campbell.
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson, Verso, 373 pp.
For? more than fifty years, Perry Anderson has been the most erudite and compelling voice on the British Marxist left. His writing has always been marked by prodigious reading across the widest possible front, a commitment to clarity and analytical rigour, and fidelity to a materialist reading of history. The style is cool and forensic, its austere surfaces set off by a sprinkling of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned Anderson wide renown for the brilliance and complexity of their conceptual architecture, though the empirical soundness of their arguments was challenged by some historical specialists. The epochal disappointments of the 1980s, when it became clear that the political hopes of the radical left were not going to be realised any time soon, had a muting effect. The mordancy of the early decades made way for the realism of the mature Anderson style, marked by long and probing critical essays focused on individual issues and thinkers.
There was a mid-19th-century
moment when critics emerged as arbiters of the present, applying a
science of discernment whose purposes were no less (and sometimes were
more) ambitious than those of the works they examined. Anderson is a
critic in this mould. His attention falls not just on works, but also on
the persons who fashion them. This is not because he is in the business
of augmenting or destroying reputations, but because he sees writing as
a way of being active in the world. He can say, with Sainte-Beuve, who
pioneered this exalted form of critique: ‘I do not look upon literature
as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man and
his nature; I can savour a work, but it is difficult for me to judge it
separately from the man himself. For me, literary inquiry leads quite
naturally into moral inquiry.’
Anderson
brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a
book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its
structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere; then he can
step out of it again and size it up coldly from a distance. It’s
surprising how rare this is. Historians rarely attempt it. We tend
either to dismiss one another’s books altogether or to fillet them for
material and move on. Anderson, by contrast, lets the books and
arguments of his subjects relax and breathe a little, until they begin
to betray their inner contradictions and blind spots – then the
vivisection can begin. The result is an unsettling oscillation between
connoisseurial appreciation and brusque takedown. Nobody is exempt from
this severity, not even the superstars of his own intellectual
tradition. In his Considerations on Western Marxism
(1976), Anderson rebuked György Lukács for his ‘cumbersome and abstruse
diction’, Walter Benjamin for his ‘gnomic brevity and indirection’,
Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular
self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze
of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of
elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic,
it manifests a fundamental tension between Anderson’s humane interest in
a great variety of things, persons and ideas, and the commitment to
clarity, analytical discrimination and theoretical rigour that drives
him as a writer.
In Disputing Disaster,
Anderson examines a debate without parallel in Western historiography:
the multigenerational contention over the causes of the First World War.
This began before the war itself, as the statesmen chiefly involved in
starting it forged arguments exonerating themselves and inculpating
their adversaries, arguments that would later resonate in the works of
historians. The formerly belligerent states weighed in with enormous
volumes of official documents designed to put their own policies in the
best light (an exception was the Russian collection, edited by Bolshevik
scholars, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma, which aimed to impugn tsarist imperialism).
The debate unfolded under formidable political and emotional pressures,
not just because the question of culpability was so central to the
postwar order, but also because the matter became intertwined with
national, political and academic identities. By 1991, an overview of the
current literature estimated that it ran to more than 25,000 books and
articles; the number today will be much higher. The variety of arguments
on display is bewildering. Some accounts have focused on the
culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but
none of the Great Powers has escaped the ascription of chief
responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for
faults in the ‘system’. Even within the schools that emerged from the
skirmishing there are endless nuances. All of this was possible because
the convoluted aetiology of this war and its oceanic documentary legacy
made certainty elusive. There was always enough complexity to keep the
argument going. And around the debates of the historians, which have
tended to turn on questions of culpability, extends a landscape of
international relations commentary, in which categories such as
deterrence, détente and inadvertence, or universalisable mechanisms such
as balancing, bargaining and bandwagoning, occupy centre stage.
This is a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of considerable
interest, yet synthetic historical accounts of it have been surprisingly
few, and most of those that do exist are exercises in adjudication by
historians aiming to vindicate a specific view of culpability. Against
this background, Anderson’s book is unusual. His interrogation of six
authors who have contributed to the debate on the origins of the war is
not primarily intended to chart its mutations over time. Nor is it
focused exclusively on books or articles pertinent to that debate;
Anderson reads these against other texts by the same authors – it is the
body of work that is under scrutiny. There is no summative chapter
distilling the ‘correct’ view, no contrastive adjudication of the kind
ubiquitous in the literature, and no qualitative ranking. Anderson is as
interested in the way arguments are constructed as in what they
postulate. And, like Sainte-Beuve, he moves easily from literary into
moral inquiry, from questions of quality to questions of character and
stance. At no point does he single out one of his historians and
announce ‘This is the winner’ (though he has his preferences). All are
evaluated and, while most are commended on specific merits, all are
found wanting, some more so than others.
Anderson’s sextet is an odd crew. The eldest, who would now be 153
years old, is the Italian newspaper editor and politician Luigi
Albertini. Next, at 131 and 116 respectively, are the French and German
historians Pierre Renouvin and Fritz Fischer. The American historian of
international relations Paul W. Schroeder would be 97 and his British
colleague Keith Wilson 80. The youngest, at 64, and the only one still
alive, is me. Anderson states in the introduction that he selected his
sextet for two qualities: ‘originality’ and ‘impact’. This is less
acclamatory than it sounds because it quickly becomes clear that impact
is for Anderson no index of quality, and originality no guarantee of
trustworthiness. The book is a study of the way historians handle
complex material, the mutations and inconsistencies in their thinking,
the underpinning that leads them to focus their attention on some things
and remain blind to others, and the pressures, both political and
emotional, that warp their arguments. Of his own take on the problem at
the heart of this book, Anderson offers only partial glimpses, though
these are revealing enough. On this journey through the work of six
historians, the reader feels underfoot the sonorous reverberations of
his hermeneutic, like the murmur of engines beneath the deck of a ship.
Ivividly recall?
a conference in 2014 at which the French historian Antoine Prost spoke
impromptu about the memory of the First World War in France: ‘It is like
a scar,’ he said, lightly touching his left wrist, ‘that can still
cause pain.’ This was true in a literal sense of Pierre Renouvin. Called
up when war broke out in 1914, the 21-year-old Renouvin was sent to the
front, where he lost first his right thumb and then his left arm,
mutilations that would cause him pain throughout his life. Renouvin had
begun his studies as a historian of the French Revolution, but his
career changed direction after he was selected by the minister of
education to run the documentation section of the newly established
Library and Museum of the War in Vincennes. By 1922, he was teaching on
the subject at the Sorbonne.
Today, Renouvin is best known as the author of two magisterial studies, Les Origines immédiates de la guerre of 1925 and La Crise européenne et la Grande Guerre
of 1934. The first focused on the weeks of the July Crisis between 28
June and 4 August 1914, the second on the years from 1904 to 1918.
Writing at a time when the bitterness stirred by the conflict was still
fresh, Renouvin fashioned work of monumental scope, empirical depth and
serene tone. It was time, he wrote in the opening pages of Les Origines immédiates de la guerre,
to set aside the political passions of the war years and apply the
techniques of a cool and exacting scholarship. The narrative that
followed was beautifully written and lucidly structured around the many
decision-makers and theatres of action. Reviewing the book, Aubrey Leo
Kennedy, who had been a correspondent for the Times
in Paris and the Balkans before the war, observed that ‘no one can
write except from his own point of view, but with this qualification, M.
Renouvin is as impartial as a man can be.’
And yet, Anderson observes, Renouvin’s books were shaped – how could
they not be? – by the emotion and politics of his time and milieu.
French innocence of any share of responsibility for the outbreak of war
was axiomatic. This, Renouvin pointed out in an article of 1931, was the
unanimous conviction of ‘the majority of Frenchmen …
To us it seems unnecessary to prove a commitment to peace that is part
of ourselves.’ His accumulation of appointments and preferments made
Renouvin something of an official historian, entrusted with defending
the French government view. As secretary and later president of the
commission charged with publishing the Documents diplomatiques français,
he was among the foremost warriors in what the German historian
Bernhard Schwertfeger called in 1929 ‘the world war of the documents’.
Renouvin was close to Raymond Poincaré, president of France between
1913 and 1920 and prime minister intermittently during the 1920s. After
the cessation of hostilities, Poincaré’s record in office came under
hostile scrutiny from French historians, most of them men of the left.
They argued that his belligerence had helped to bring the war about and
that he had falsified and concealed his own role in the crises of the
prewar period. Anderson suggests that Renouvin became complicit in the
effort to whitewash the former president’s record. Les Origines immédiates de la guerre
was strikingly taciturn on the subject of Poincaré’s controversial
visit to St Petersburg in the week before the outbreak of war, and La Crise européenne et la Grande Guerre
airbrushed Poincaré’s name almost entirely from the narrative.
Renouvin’s handling of Austrian policy on the Balkan peninsula in the
prewar years was tendentious and one-sided; there was no mention of the
expanded remit of the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1912, negotiated by
Poincaré when he was foreign minister; German provocations were itemised
in detail, whereas those of the Entente powers were not. As Anderson
observes, there was a tension between evidence and inference: Renouvin’s
narrative suggested a war of complex inception involving interlocking
decisions in different locations, yet the conclusion assigned ‘undivided
responsibility’ to the Central Powers.
The tension was even more pronounced in the work of Luigi Albertini,
sometime editorial secretary, director, managing editor and two-fifths
owner of Corriere della Sera, which he
built into the most influential newspaper in prewar Italy. In 1911, he
was a cheerleader for the unprovoked Italian assault on Ottoman Libya,
an escapade that helped to trigger the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.
Once the world war was underway, Albertini and his paper goaded the
Italian government into entering the conflict on the side of the
Entente. Throughout the bloodbath that ensued, he was promoter-in-chief
of Italy’s incompetent and brutal supreme commander, Marshal Luigi
Cadorna. In the turbulence following the end of the war, Albertini
backed Mussolini and campaigned for the ‘absorption’ of the fascists
into the Italian constitutional order. Only after the abduction and
murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 by Mussolini’s
henchmen did he part ways with the fascists and exit from public life,
though hardly under heroic circumstances. At Mussolini’s behest, the
other part-owners of Corriere della Sera
paid handsomely for Albertini’s share of the paper. He retired to an
enormous estate outside Rome, where he lived in luxury and spent his
days travelling and writing history until his death in 1941.
Le Origini della Guerra del 1914,
published in three volumes in Milan in 1942 and 1943, remains the key
point of departure for serious research. To a greater extent than
Renouvin, Albertini offered a genuinely multipolar analysis of the
aetiology of the Great War. The perspective was distinctively Italian
(and highly original) in its close attention to developments on the
Balkan peninsula, where Italian and Austrian geopolitical ambitions had
long been in conflict. Albertini benefited here from the collaboration
of Luciano Magrini, one of the most gifted journalists of his era, who
managed to track down and interview many of the Serbian and Austrian
participants in the crisis of 1914. In Albertini’s account, there is
plenty of blame to go around: the official justifications offered by all
the belligerent governments for their respective entries into the war
are denounced as tissues of lies and manipulations; the Serbian
connection to the Sarajevo assassinations receives extensive critical
scrutiny, as does the ‘fatal’ Russian decision to mobilise for war on 30
July, well before Germany. Albertini also reproached France for urging
Russia into the conflict. And yet he assigned blame for the outbreak of
war squarely to the Central Powers and above all to Germany, whose
support for Austria had been decisive. It was in Berlin, Albertini
insisted, without actually making the case, that ‘all the acts and all
the roles in the tragedy were settled in advance.’ Anderson notes the
subtle modulations in the book’s tone: the missteps of the Entente
powers are narrated ‘more in sorrow than anger’, those of Germany and
Austria ‘more in anger than sorrow’.
In? a critique of Renouvin’s La Crise européenne,
the historian Jules Isaac noted that the placid surface of ‘objective’
historical prose could be deceptive. Might it not be better, he wrote
that a work of history not seem too objective, since it never is … I begin to worry when a historical exposition, by its even, bare, ‘scientific’ tone, gives the reader the illusion of certainty: I ask myself where the author is hiding, for that he certainly has to do, and by looking carefully one always finds him, as in those picture-riddles where a sheep’s fleece, insidiously drawn, contains the silhouette of a shepherd.
Nowhere
does the quest for the hidden author lead along more convoluted paths
than in the case of Fritz Fischer. In a suite of studies published
between 1961 and 1979, Fischer argued first that Germany had uniquely
aggressive war aims in 1914, and later that the country’s political
leadership had deliberately engineered the outbreak of war, and even
planned it in advance, initiating a countdown in 1912 that expired in
the summer of 1914.
It would be
difficult to overstate the impact of Fischer’s books. Since 1945, a
consensus had been settling among European historians – led by Renouvin,
among others – that blame for the outbreak of war should be shared out
among the chief belligerent powers. Fischer triggered a paradigm shift.
He and his collaborators and assistants dug more widely and deeply than
any previous researchers into the German archival record to construct a
portrait of an elite in the grip of paranoia and aggression.
Particularly resonant, in the context of the cultural revolution
underway on West German university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, was
his increasingly shrill insistence on the continuities between the
Wilhelmine empire and the Third Reich. The Fischer thesis became
intertwined with the arguments of a younger generation of German
historians for whom the disasters of modern German history were rooted
in the lopsided political and economic development of its society since
the mid-19th century. The burst of critical
energy released by these reorientations in turn converged with the quest
for a fuller reckoning with the Nazi past. In the process, adherence to
the Fischer thesis became a marker of probity and moral rectitude. ‘The
Fischer controversy of the 1960s was always more than just an academic
dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German
historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil
society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult
past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its
neighbours. The transformation was profound and lasting, making Germany a
model democracy and its people the most peace-loving in Europe.’
Fischer’s ascent to the status of moral icon appears strange, even grotesque, if we set it against the background of his early life. As a teenager he joined the militantly antisemitic Bund Oberland, receiving paramilitary training in his native Franconia. He took part in the Deutscher Tag of September 1923, a rally in Nuremberg organised by the Nazis and other far-right groups, two months before the Munich putsch. In 1926, he joined the militant student association Uttenruthia Verband, which offered a mix of antisemitism, weapons training, homage to Hitler and propaganda work. He signed up with the paramilitary SA in November 1933 and the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937, as soon as the ban on the admission of new members was lifted.
Fischer had first studied theology, not history. He was drawn to the teachings of the German Christians, a network of groups within German Protestantism aligned with the principles of Nazism. German Christian theologians argued for the application of racial principles to religious life, the severing of the New Testament from the Old and the acknowledgment of Christ’s Aryan racial heritage. But by 1936, Fischer’s interests were shifting, as Anderson puts it, ‘from articles of faith to questions of power’, and he applied to switch from theology to history. Frustrated by academic bureaucracy and finding it hard to make ends meet on his postdoctoral stipend, he turned in 1939 to the Institute for the History of the New Germany, set up by the Hitler regime and run by the vehement antisemite Walter Frank. Fischer proposed a research project on ‘external enemies’ of the Reich in adjacent neutral countries, to be coupled with a study of ‘inner enemies’ in the form of the parochial-quietist and cosmopolitan-universalist strands of German Protestantism. He was rewarded with a monthly stipend that continued until he was called up for military service in the anti-aircraft arm of the Luftwaffe. His appointment in 1942 to a post teaching history at the University of Hamburg was a political preferment made possible mainly by support from the Nazis who ran Frank’s institute. In a letter he wrote to Frank’s deputy, Erich Botzenhart, while he was serving on an anti-aircraft battery in Berlin in 1941, Fischer wrote that he was proud to be lecturing his unit on themes of crucial importance such as ‘Jewish penetration into German culture and politics in the last two hundred years, Jewish blood in the English upper class and the role of Jewry in the economy and society of the USA’.
Fischer appears to have removed the texts of these lectures, along with much else, from the Nachlass he bequeathed to the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. After the war, he lied extravagantly about his past, removing all Nazi and völkisch associations from the picture. He couldn’t deny his membership of the party, which was a matter of public record, but claimed he had been driven to join by economic need. There were, Anderson concedes, other gravely compromised historians, such as Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze, who remained silent about their roles in the formulation of wartime Nazi plans for the occupied East. But Fischer was a public figure in a way that they were not, celebrated internationally as an emblem of integrity and civic courage. His career thus came to embody what Anderson calls ‘a performative self-contradiction’ marked by interlocking reflexes of exposure and concealment. These personal traits need not, of course, cast doubt on the integrity of Fischer’s work as a historian. But Anderson observes that his works, though diligent and painstaking, reveal ‘the same propensity to omission and exaggeration, a loose joint of mind or character’. Always an energetic self-promoter, Fischer acquired an evangelical confidence in the truth of his claims. ‘There does not exist a single document in the world,’ he declared in 1965, ‘that could weaken the central truth that in July 1914 a will for war existed solely and exclusively [‘einzig und allein’] on the German side.’
Of? all the works
produced by the sextet, Fischer’s had the deepest impact, both on
public memory and on the historiographical landscape, because they
meshed in a way that those of the others did not with broader processes
of cultural change. And it was in turn thanks to Fischer, Anderson
believes, that complex multi-nation studies of the kind written by
Renouvin, Albertini, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and others
made way for the single-country studies (France and the Origins of the First World War, Russia and the Origins
and so on) that dominated from the 1970s onwards. Why waste time on the
complex prewar interactions of the powers if the issue of
responsibility had already been resolved? It remained merely to show how
the other states had been drawn into the snares of a German war.
Neither Keith Wilson nor Paul W. Schroeder published a major monograph
on the origins of the First World War, but both wrote articles and book
chapters that pushed hard at parts of the post-Fischer war-guilt
consensus. Wilson’s Policy of the Entente
(1985) was a collection of partly overlapping essays whose cumulative
thrust was against the received view that prewar British foreign policy
was driven by the need to counter the threat posed by German aggression.
Wilson proposed that the men around the then foreign secretary, Edward
Grey, were focused chiefly on the security of the British Empire (and
especially northern India), which was seen as vulnerable to Russian
predation. The British Entente with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian
Convention (1907) were not designed as a counter-balance to German
power, but intended, first, to loosen the link between France and Russia
and then, when this failed, to tether St Petersburg to a settlement
that would minimise the risk of Russian aggression on the British
imperial periphery. Britain faced a choice: it could appease Germany and
oppose Russia, or it could oppose Germany and appease Russia. Concerned
above all with the integrity of the empire, Grey and the coterie of
liberal imperialists around him chose to do the latter. From this it
followed that Britain went to war in 1914 less to defend France against
German aggression than to maintain the entente with Russia. In other
articles, Wilson challenged the image of Grey as the golden boy of
liberal memory, depicting him as a geopolitically aggressive and
manipulative figure prepared to deceive colleagues and the British
public alike about the true direction of his policy.
Schroeder is best known for The Transformation of European Politics
(1994), a magisterial account of international relations before and
after the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, but he also wrote brilliant
shorter reflections on aspects of the origins debate. In ‘Embedded
Counterfactuals and World War One as an Unavoidable War’, Schroeder
critiqued the consensus view that Germany and Austria caused their own
isolation through their egregious international behaviour. On the
contrary, he argued, the Germans – however irritating their parvenu
posturing might on occasion have been to their rivals – were playing by
the same rules as everyone else. It was the system that was at fault,
not the players. In another essay, the wonderfully titled ‘Stealing
Horses to Great Applause’, Schroeder focused on shifts in the system’s
logic, arguing that in the last decades before the war, the powers
gradually abandoned the principle that Europe was a continental ecology
in which every state had a role to play. One consequence of this was the
growing conviction among the Entente powers that Austria-Hungary was an
anachronistic entity whose interests did not command international
respect and whose extinction could be contemplated with equanimity. This
was a potentially dangerous mutation, because it removed Vienna’s
incentives for trusting the system and amplified the risk of impetuous
solo initiatives.
Neither Wilson nor
Schroeder escapes criticism, but Anderson warms especially to these two
members of his sextet. For this there are several reasons. First, he
admires analytically driven writing. Evocation and synthesis are all
well and good, but analysis is where the hard work is done. Second: the
two men were laconic and self-effacing and refused to play to the
gallery. Anderson respects that, just as he abhors the vainglorious
gyrations of Fischer. Third: for Anderson, ‘system-level’ explanations
are always to be preferred to those constructed at ‘unit-level’ (though
he never gives a persuasive account of how a ‘system-level’ explanation
might actually work). Here, too, Wilson and Schroeder both get high
marks, though the case is harder to make for Wilson. Anderson praises a
chapter in Wilson’s Problems and Possibilities
(2003) – a slightly scrappy book bereft of scholarly apparatus – for
impartially and correctly ‘ascribing imperialist drives to all the Great
Powers in precipitating the carnage’.
Schroeder was an American conservative, not a man of the left like
Wilson. But in him Anderson detects a kindred sensibility, based in a
shared hostility to liberal idealism, disgust at the adventurism of US
foreign policy and dismay at the expansion of Nato ‘to the borders of a
shrunken, chaotic and humiliated Russia’. Anderson met Schroeder at UCLA
in 2010 and the two men began an unexpected email and Skype friendship
which lasted until Schroeder’s death in December 2020. This book is rich
in critical appraisals of personality – the haughty grandeur of
Renouvin, in whose presence his former student Pierre Nora could not
remember having sat down; the braggadocio of Albertini; the sinuous
manoeuvring of Fischer – but in the final chapter on Schroeder Anderson
edges towards eulogy. Schroeder’s ‘strong moral sensibility’, Anderson
writes, ‘impelled him to intervene publicly on political issues of his
time’. His ‘unswerving decency’ drove him to ask ever more radical
questions of his own society, to the point, according to Anderson, where
he began to read works by Marxist scholars and to contemplate with
equanimity ‘the notion that capitalism might be nearing its end’.
Schroeder may have been a conservative, but he would ‘prove more humane
in outlook than many a self-declared liberal’. It is at moments like
this, when he slips, like Sainte-Beuve, from literary to moral inquiry,
that Anderson steps out most boldly from behind the smooth surfaces of
his own prose.
Anderson? offers many criticisms of The Sleepwalkers,
my own attempt to make sense of the problem of 1914. The book’s title
is wrong, for a start, because the actors of 1914 were awake, not
asleep. He takes issue with my presentist analogies. In my work on the
1848 Revolutions, he notes a disturbing sympathy for left-liberals and
the ‘liberal metapolitics’ of modern parliamentary representation. Some
of these grumbles (analogies, liberals) raise issues of real import, but
one higher-order complaint stands out. This relates to my book’s
preference for a narrative saturated with contingency over the analysis
of systemic causal drivers. Among the missing causal drivers Anderson
identifies, the two most important relate to the place of the Balkans in
the international system and the presence of imperialism as a force in
inter-state relations.
It is absolutely
true, as Anderson points out, that the Balkans occupied an anomalous
place in the European international system. Because the Ottoman Empire
was excluded from the peace settlement concluded at Vienna in 1815, the
Balkan peninsula, then still mostly under Ottoman rule, lived under a
geopolitical ozone hole. Anderson first articulated this intuition in Lineages of the Absolutist State
(1974), where he noted that the Balkans were separated from the rest of
the continent by their ‘whole anterior evolution’ and identified this
as the anomaly that ignited war in 1914. I don’t doubt the value of this
insight, and my book would be better if I had thought harder about how
to integrate it. But the problem with remote causes of this type is that
it is difficult to endow them with the traction that would make them of
use in explaining why a continental conflagration was sparked on the
Balkan peninsula in 1914, but not in 1911, 1908, 1905, 1878 or earlier.
To do that you need to assemble other layers of causation: political
change across the Balkan states, Austrian security dilemmas, the Italian
war on Libya, mutations in Russian thinking on the Balkans and the
Turkish Straits, the changing character of the Franco-Russian Alliance
and so on. These causal layers unfold in parallel but in different
timeframes. Acknowledging them does not imply a retreat into pure
contingency, because each incorporates structural features and path
dependencies of various kinds. It seems to me in any case a mistake to
think of ‘structures’ as hard and unyielding and events as soft and
malleable – the opposite can also be true. But Anderson knows this. In Lineages of the Absolutist State
he urged Marxist scholars to attend more closely to the reciprocal
relations between ‘abstract’ models and ‘concrete’ instances: ‘There is
no plumb-line between necessity and contingency in historical
explanation … There is merely that which is known … and that which is not known.’
The same problem of timescales and specificity arises in relation to
‘imperialism’, which is undeniably important as a fundamental pressure
on events, but both too temporally extended and too ubiquitous to
explain the specific trains of events that led out of peace and into
war. Anderson makes an awkward attempt to solve it by invoking Lenin’s
theory of imperialism, which proposed a linkage between the outbreak of
war and ‘a deeper structural feature of capitalism’, namely its
propensity to ‘convert economic competition between firms into military
conflict between states’ by means of an ‘uneven development’ that
necessarily deepens tensions and instabilities. To mesh the argument
with the mechanisms that eventually triggered war in 1914, Anderson
proposes that we admix Lenin with a ‘sociology of imperialism’ of the
type advanced by Schumpeter, for whom imperialism was ‘an aristocratic
atavism’ tending to generate military aggression and expansionist
pressures. You can tighten this clunking Leninist-Schumpeterian gearing
further, he suggests, if you add to it the notion of the ‘Austrian
anomaly’ advanced by the American Laurence Lafore in The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War One
(1965). Now we have a differential transmission that can capture the
epochal energies of imperialism and focus them on the south-eastern
periphery of Europe.
There are several
problems here. The first is that by Lafore’s own account, the ‘Austrian
anomaly’ cannot carry the explanatory weight Anderson proposes to give
it. It is true that Austria-Hungary was in some respects an incongruous
entity. As a congeries of nationalities ruled by an ancient dynasty,
Lafore claimed, Austria was unable to function like a modern
nation-state. It had no ethnic majority, only minorities. Whereas the
other powers engaged in ‘decorous meddling’ in the affairs of small
states, Austria-Hungary was ‘unique in being a Great Power in whose
affairs small ones meddled’. This may be true, but can it explain the
outbreak of war? Lafore himself wrote that the Austria-Hungary of 1914
was ‘still well-governed, prosperous, and perfectly solid’. Nor did he
see its anomalousness as in any way diminishing the importance of
contingency. On the contrary: ‘If either Sazonov [the Russian foreign
minister] or Berchtold [his Austrian colleague] had behaved differently,
on any of several occasions,’ he wrote, ‘the course of events [in July
1914] would certainly have been different.’ And perhaps the Austrian
anomaly was not so anomalous after all. Lafore also spoke of ‘the
anomalies of the Russian and German states’. The ‘problem of
Austria-Hungary,’ he argued, ‘was in some ways comparable to that of
Great Britain.’
The notion that there were ‘normal’ ethnically coherent states and one anomalous outlier raises further questions, because the argument from anomaly can only be made to work if it can be shown that Austria’s behaviour as a power was also anomalous in a way that helps to explain the outbreak of war. It is striking how close Anderson comes at this point to replicating – and implicitly endorsing – the trend of Entente thinking before the war, which came to see Austria-Hungary as an obsolete and dispensable element in the continental system. By contrast, Schroeder observed in an article from 1972 that it was precisely the readiness of the Entente powers to write off Austria-Hungary that helped pave the way to disaster in 1914. Preserving a system based on the balance of power, Schroeder declared, ought to mean ‘preserving all the essential actors in it’. This is an important point because, for Anderson, one of the principal roots of the world’s current troubles lies in the triumph of a state-killing liberal idealism over the quest for a balance of power based on reciprocal self-restraint.
Disputing Disaster is a book unlike any other on the 1914 debate. Anderson digs deep into, between and around the works of his subjects to expose the taproots that feed each project. The result is a monument to a lifetime of reading and writing propelled by the conviction that something is at stake. Fellow Marxists will admire the author’s forensic panache and enjoy the beams of utopian effulgence that dart through the occasional chinks in his text. But even readers who are not ‘unreconstructed Jacobins’ (Anderson’s self-description) will find in it a wealth of sharp and compelling reflections on how and why historians argue as they do, why they rethink, abandon or double down on their positions, and how politics and emotion flow into the writing of history and back out of it into the world.
A pro-Palestinian demonstrator holds a mock edition of The New York Times at a rally marking the anniversary of the Nakba, on 18 May 2024 in New York City IMAGE/Michael Nigro/Sipa USA
Genocidal Zionists supported by the ‘paper of record’ have long attempted to silence the world through false charges of ‘antisemitism’. It no longer works
I read The New York Times daily as a barometer – as a farmer would
heed a bellwether, or an old-fashioned European anthropologist would
stare at the behaviour of a faraway tribe – to see which way the liberal
Zionist wind is blowing.
I strongly recommend that people with a smidgeon of sanity left in
them in this exceedingly diabolical political culture do the same: never
read the Times or its ilk for news and analysis, but as the archival
evidence of the liberal savagery that has long sold itself as “the world
order”.
Consider the big song and dance that Times editors, reporters and columnists made about “antisemitism” in Amsterdam in the aftermath of a gang of Israeli
hooligans singing and dancing to genocidal chants, and challenging
decent human beings either to confront them or else run for cover.
Before and after a Uefa Europa League football match in Amsterdam on 7
November between Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch club AFC Ajax,
militant Israeli thugs exported their habitual savageries and unleashed them on a European capital for the whole world to see.
What is an Israeli football team doing in a European football game?
Well, of course, where else should a European settled colony play
football, except in the continent that created the garrison state?
True to their habitual behaviours inside the settler colony, these
platoons of Israeli louts had torn down a Palestinian flag from the
facade of a building and burned it, attacked and vandalised taxis with
Arab drivers, while all the while chanting,
“Let the IDF [Israeli army] win, we will fuck the Arabs”, “Fuck you
Palestine”, and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children
left there.”
Just take the words “Arab” and “Palestinian” out of these slogans for
a second, and replace them with “Jews” and “Israelis” – and see what
happens.
Enter The New York Times
As soon as news of the Israeli thuggery in Amsterdam broke, the Times
went into high gear to distort, deviate, manoeuvre, meander and rush to
place the word “antisemitism” in headlines.
“What to Know About the Attacks on Israeli Soccer Fans in Amsterdam,” read one headline
of an 8 November article, explaining that “Dutch and Israeli officials
described the clashes after a soccer match as antisemitic”.
By the following day, The New York Times had joined officials in Israel and Amsterdam to declare the Amsterdam incident as ‘antisemitic’
Bret Stephens, one of the two chief pro-Israel columnists gainfully employed at the Times, was immediately called into action that same day to decry: “The Age of the Pogrom Returns”.
Stephens begins by invoking the memory of his grandparents, who
experienced antisemitic violence. (Apparently, only Zionists have
grandparents. Palestinians never have any grandparents slaughtered by
Zionists. They were born and are killed as terrorists.)
He goes on to quote a Dutch official, who wrote on X: “Barbarians on
scooters are riding through our capital city hunting Israelis and Jews.”
It seems that what the Israeli hooligans were doing in the streets of
Amsterdam was not considered barbarism, but those who resisted them were
barbarians.
Representation of an ancient human skull. IMAGE/ansap/Getty Images
A “provocative” new piece in Nature has proposed a whole new group of ancient humans – cousins of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – that once lived alongside Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago.
The brains of these extinct humans, who probably hunted horses in
small groups, were much bigger than any other hominin of their time,
including our own species.
Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences
(CAS) and anthropologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawai’i
have called this new group the Juluren, meaning “large head people”.
In the past, some scientists have attributed the Juluren (Homo juluensis) fossils to Denisovans (pronounced duh-nee-suh-vns), who are a group of ancient humans, related to Neanderthals, that once lived alongside and even mated with modern humans in parts of Asia.
But Wu and Bae have taken a closer look, and they say the features of
some fossils found in China cannot be easily assigned to modern humans,
Neanderthals, Denisovans, or Homo erectus, the hominins that came before our own species.
Their mosaic of traits hint at a mix of ancestry between various
hominin groups, all living in the same regions of Asia between 300,000
and 50,000 years ago.
“Collectively, these fossils represent a new form of large brained hominin,” concluded Wu and Bae in the journal PaleoAnthropology earlier this year.
“Although we started this project several years ago, we did not
expect being able to propose a new hominin (human ancestor) species and
then to be able to organize the hominin fossils from Asia into different
groups,” says Bae.
Anthropologist John Hawks who was not involved in the research calls Bae and Wu’s recent commentary “provocative“, and in his blog earlier this year, he reviewed
their study and agreed that while evidence of the Juluren is limited,
the human record in Asia is “more expansive than most specialists have
been assuming.”
Until very recently, all hominin fossils found in China that did not match Homo erectus or Homo sapiens were lumped together. Compared to hominin fossils in Africa and Europe, the human fossil record in eastern Asia is poorly differentiated and described.
“Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a
contrast to recent humans, not as a description of their populations
across space and time,” writes Hawks on his blog.
“I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to a particular group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups.”
