The study findings should alert all the people around the world. “The data tell us one thing: We must prevent nuclear war from ever happening”, climate science professor and study co-author Alan Robock said. Robock said: “The five-year-old UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 66 nations, but none of the nine nuclear states. Our work makes clear that it is time for those nine states to listen to science and the rest of the world and sign this treaty.”
Till today, most of the assumptions about nuclear war focus on the deaths and destructions due to the bombing.
But the latest study finds that the real suffering of humanity would come in the years after the war, as there’ll be breakdown of supply chains and devastation of infrastructure, and problems from these will increase with the effect of a nuclear winter on food crops. So, there’s no other option, but oppose war. On the question of nuclear war, imperialism, and economies and politics of interests leading to nuclear armaments are to be opposed.
The study (Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K. et al, “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection”, Nature Food, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0, August 15, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0) has been conducted by scientists at Rutgers University, US.
In a nuclear war, the cooling effect would be created when the ash from a nuclear devastation would enter the atmosphere, and it would reach a peak within a year or two. The study finds the reduction in temperature would last for over a decade and would also involve reduced precipitation.
The cooling effect of ash entering the Earth’s atmosphere was recorded following major volcanic eruptions including the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland or the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. Both of these eruptions led to famines and political upheavals.
Referring to a number of studies, the study report said: “In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet. Such soot loadings would cause decadal disruptions in Earth’s climate, which would impact food production systems on land and in the oceans.”
“[T]he ozone layer would be destroyed by the heating of the stratosphere, producing more ultraviolet radiation at the surface. We need to understand that impact on food supplies”, said Lili Xia, lead author of the study.
The scientists estimated crop yields by country, changes to livestock pasture and marine fisheries; and analyzed potential mitigation policies including utilizing livestock grains to feed humans and increasing fishing operations. But these factors had a negligible effect on world food supplies.
The study analyzed six nuclear war scenarios including five smaller nuclear conflict scenes while the sixth looked at a large-scale US-Russia conflict. The smaller scenes included Pakistan-India nuclear conflict.
The study report said:
# More than 2 billion people could die from an India-Pakistan nuclear war.
# More than 5 billion could die from a US-Russia nuclear war.
The study report said:
“For a nuclear war, the global cooling would depend on the yields of the weapons, the number of weapons and the targets, among other atmospheric and geographic factors.”
“A war between India and Pakistan, which recently are accumulating more nuclear weapons with higher yield, could produce a stratospheric loading of 5 – 47 Tg of soot. A war between the United States, its allies and Russia — who possess more than 90% of the global nuclear arsenal — could produce more than 150 Tg of soot and a nuclear winter. While amounts of soot injection into the stratosphere from the use of fewer nuclear weapons would have smaller global impacts, once a nuclear war starts, it may be very difficult to limit escalation.”
After a US-Russia nuclear conflict, the study models found, the quantity of global food production would go down by 90% within three to four years, and 75% of the global population would be starving within two years.
The study found: In the case of smallest scale nuclear war scene, the global food supplies would have disastrous effect – the average caloric production would be reduced by 7% globally within five years, which would be the highest change since the Food and Agricultural Organization started keeping records in 1961.
The study report said:
Recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3–1 Tg of smoke (0.006–0.02 Tg soot), which was subsequently heated by sunlight and lofted high in the stratosphere. The smoke was transported around the world and lasted for many months. This adds confidence to our [the scientists’] simulations that predict the same process would occur after nuclear war.
The study report said: Local radioactive contamination and climate change from nuclear war would impact the insect community.
However, it said, the influence on pests, pollinators and other insects is unclear, and hence further studies are needed.
The study didn’t consider inland fish capture, as inland fish contribute only 7% of total fish production, and inland fisheries would not change the main conclusions of this study.
Direct climate change impacts on livestock and fish, and large-scale use of alternative foods, requiring little-to-no light to grow in a cold environment, reduced human populations due to direct or indirect mortality and possible reduced birth rate were not also considered in the study. However, alternative foods, requiring little-to-no light to grow in cold environment could be a lifesaving source of emergency food if such production systems were operational.
The scientists used a state-of-the-art global climate model to calculate the climatic and biogeochemical changes caused by a range of stratospheric soot injections, each associated with a nuclear war scenario; combined results with assumptions about how other crop, livestock and fish production and food trade could change; and calculated the amount of food that would be available for each country in the world after a nuclear war.
According to the study report, “for a regional nuclear war, large parts of the world may suffer famine. Using crops fed to livestock as human food could offset food losses locally but would make limited impacts on the total amount of food available globally, especially with large atmospheric soot injections when the growth of feed crops and pastures would be severely impaired by the resulting climate perturbation. Reducing household food waste could help in the small nuclear war cases but not in the larger nuclear wars due to the large climate-driven reduction in overall production.”
The scientists found “particularly severe crop declines in major exporting countries such as Russia and the US, which could easily trigger export restrictions and cause severe disruptions in import-dependent countries.” Their “no-trade response illustrates this risk — African and Middle Eastern countries would be severely affected.”
“New Zealand”, according to the study report, “would also experience smaller impacts than other countries”, and “Australia and New Zealand would probably see an influx of refugees from Asia and other countries experiencing food insecurity.”
The study report said:
“Cooling from nuclear wars causes temperature limitations for crops, leading to delayed physiological maturity and additional cold stress. Calorie reduction from agriculture and marine fisheries shows regional differences, with the strongest percentage reductions over high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Even for the India–Pakistan case, many regions become unsuitable for agriculture for multiple years. [….] The nuclear-armed nations in mid- to high latitude regions (China, Russia, United States, France, North Korea and United Kingdom) show calorie reductions from 30% to 86%, and in lower latitudes (India, Pakistan and Israel), the reduction is less than 10%. Impacts in warring nations are likely to be dominated by local problems, such as infrastructure destruction, radioactive contamination and supply chain disruptions, so the results here apply only to indirect effects from soot injection in remote locations.”
“The climatic impacts”, the study found, “would last for about a decade but would peak in the first few years”.
Since many years, scientists are warning about nuclear war/arms. With this latest warning from the scientists, sources creating/engaged with nuclear armaments business, creating conditions for nuclear arms manufacturing and competitions need to be identified; and the information should be disseminated among peoples, so that people raise voices, and oppose these sources of/interests leading to nuclear weapons and threats of nuclear war. This is not a task of only the working classes. It’s a task of all the classes that find its survival threatened with nuclear arms/war, that find no interest in nuclear armaments. It shouldn’t be missed that interests of only a very small coterie is involved with and benefits from nuclear armaments/nuclear war business.
Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Note:
- All quotes, direct/indirect, are from the study report cited in the article.
- The following figures are from the study report, which help further comprehend the issue the scientists searched.
Fig. 1: Climatic impacts by year after different nuclear war soot injections.
a–f, Changes in surface temperature (a), solar radiation (c) and precipitation (e) averaged over global crop regions of 2000 and sea surface temperature (b), solar radiation (d) and net primary productivity (f) over the oceans following the six stratospheric soot-loading scenarios studied here for 15 years following a nuclear war […]. These variables are the direct climate forcing for the crop and fishery models. The left y axes are the anomalies of monthly climate variables from simulated nuclear war minus the climatology of the control simulation, which is the average of 45 years of simulation. The right y axes are the percentage change relative to the control simulation. The wars take place on 15 May of Year 1, and the year labels are on 1 January of each year. For comparison, during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, global average surface temperatures were about 5 °C cooler than present. Ocean temperatures decline less than for crops because of the ocean’s large heat capacity. Ocean solar radiation loss is less than for crops because most oceans are in the Southern Hemisphere, where slightly less smoke is present.
Fig. 2: Calorie production changes for crops and fish, and accumulated carbon change for grasses following different nuclear war soot injections.
a–c, Global average annual crop calorie production changes (%; maize, wheat, rice and soybeans, weighted by their observed production (2010) and calorie content; a), marine fish production changes (%; b) and combined crop and fish calorie production changes (%; c) after nuclear war for the different soot-injection scenarios. d, Grass leaf carbon is a combination of C3 and C4 grasses, and the change is calculated as annual accumulated carbon. For context, the grey line (and shaded area) in a are the average (and standard deviation) of six crop models from the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI […]) under the 5 Tg scenario. CLM5crop shows a conservative response to nuclear war compared with the multi-model GGCMI response.
Fig. 3: Global average human diet and protein composition and usage of crop-based products.
a, Global average human diet composition. Percentages are % of available calories. Veg. is vegetables. b, Global average human protein diet composition. Marine wild capture contributes 75% of marine fish. Percentages are % of dry matter production. c, Distribution of four major cereal crops and marine fish between human food and other uses. Percentages are % of dry matter production. d, Usage of crop-based products in 2010 (% of dry matter crop-based production). The color gradient legend in grey in c illustrates the usage of different crops and fish in colors. While humans consume most of the wheat and rice grown, most maize and soybeans are used for livestock feed.
Fig. 4: Food intake (kcal per capita per day) in Year 2 after different nuclear war soot injections.
The left map is the calorie intake status in 2010 with no international trade; the left column is the Livestock case; the middle column is the Partial Livestock case, with 50% of livestock feed used for human food and the other 50% still used to feed livestock; and the right column is the No Livestock case, with 50% of livestock feed used for human food. All maps assume no international trade and that the total calories are evenly distributed within each nation. Regions in green mean food consumption can support the current physical activity in that country; regions in yellow are calorie intake that would cause people to lose weight, and only sedentary physical activity would be supported; and regions in red indicate that daily calorie intake would be less than needed to maintain a basal metabolic rate (also called resting energy expenditure) and thus would lead to death after an individual exhausted their body energy reserves in stored fat and expendable muscle. 150 Tg + 50% waste is half of the household waste added to food consumption, and 150 Tg + 100% waste is all household waste added to food consumption.
Fig. 5: Overview of global calorie intake and sensitivity to livestock and food waste assumptions.
a, Global average change in calorie intake per person per day in Year 2 post-war under the Livestock case (yellow bars) and for the Partial Livestock case (red bars), assuming that all food and waste is evenly distributed. For the Partial Livestock case, additional calories potentially available by human consumption of animal feed, mainly maize and soybeans, are plotted for various portions of converted animal feed (pink tick marks), and the remaining livestock crop feed is used for raising livestock. Critical food intake levels are marked in the right margin. b, Without international trade, the global population (%) that could be supported, although underweight, by domestic food production at the end of Year 2 after a nuclear war if they receive the calories supporting their regular physical activity and the rest of the population would receive no food, under the Livestock and Partial Livestock cases. The blue line in b shows the percentage of population that can be supported by current food production when food production does not change but international trade is stopped. National data are calculated first and then aggregated to global data.
As China unleashed live-fire military exercises off the coast of Taiwan, simulating a real “reunification by force” operation in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ceremonial visit to the island last week, the bipartisan fervor for a new Cold War with China and Russia took greater hold in Washington.
“Leaders in both parties,” Post columnist Josh Rogin reports, “understand that the United States has a duty and an interest in … pushing back against America’s adversaries in both Europe and Asia.” The United States showed that it could take on both China and Russia at the same time, he adds. The Senate voted 95-1 to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. The Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act enjoys bipartisan support. And politicians in both parties scrambled to give the Pentagon even more money than it asked for.
Cold War is America’s comfort zone. We won the last one. We wear the white hats. It’s democracy against authoritarianism. And we’ve got the biggest and best military. Who could object?
But haunting questions remain. Does a new Cold War—taking on Russia and China at once—serve the real security of Americans? Does it further President Biden’s promised “foreign policy for the middle class?” Might most Americans prefer that this country curb our enthusiasm for foreign adventure while focusing on getting our own house in order?
The existential threat to our security now is the extreme weather caused by climate change, which is already costing lives and billions of dollars in destruction from wildfires, floods, plagues and drought. Monkeypox reminds us that the deadliest attacks have come from global pandemics. Throwing money at the Pentagon doesn’t help. Wouldn’t it be better if Special Presidential Envoy John F. Kerry’s journeys got as much attention as Pelosi’s Taiwan performance? Addressing climate change and pandemics can’t be done without Chinese and Russian cooperation, yet the Chinese officially terminated talks on these issues in the wake of Pelosi’s visit.
Biden’s foreign policy team has focused on lining up bases and allies to surround and contain Russia and China. But the Ukraine war has revealed Russia’s military weakness. Meanwhile, sanctions have cut off access to Russian food, fertilizers and minerals vital to countries worldwide and might contribute to a global recession.
China is a true “peer competitor,” as the Pentagon calls it. But its strength is its economy, not its military. It’s the leading trading partner for countries across the globe, from Latin America to Africa to Asia. When Pelosi stopped in South Korea after her visit to Taiwan, South Korea’s president did not receive her. President Yoon Suk-yeol, we learned, was on a “staycation,” attending a play. The snub by a loyal ally, home to nearly 30,000 U.S. troops, is surely a reflection of the fact that China is South Korea’s leading trading partner. The United States would be well advised to focus—as China does—on developing the new technologies that will define the markets of the future, rather than spending more than $1 trillion on items such as a new generation of nuclear weapons that can never be used.
The revived Cold Warriors assert that the U.S. deployment of forces around China and Russia is defensive. But as Stephen Walt notes in Foreign Policy, this ignores the “security dilemma”: What one country considers innocent measures to increase its security, another might see as threatening. U.S. administrations kept asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO as security against the threat posed by Russia. Russia saw the possible basing of NATO forces and U.S. missiles in Ukraine as a threat. Biden’s comment that Putin “cannot remain in power,” echoed by U.S. politicians, and the history of U.S. support for regime change around the world, weren’t exactly reassuring.
Though Washington formally accepts that Taiwan is a province of China, it arms the island and deploys more forces to the Pacific. Pelosi described her visit as an “unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.” Beijing views this as an attack on its national sovereignty, a violation of our official position, and as a provocation designed to spur independence movements in Taiwan.
The Cold Warriors assume that most of the world stands with us. True, our NATO allies rallied against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, but two-thirds of the world’s population, according to the Economist, lives in countries that refuse to sanction Russia. Much of the developing world is skeptical or worse about U.S. claims regarding democracy or the rules-based order. This makes sanctions less effective—China’s purchases of Russian oil and gas, for example, have increased by 72 percent since the Ukraine invasion. It also reflects the growing strength of Chinese “soft power” and the declining currency of the U.S. military force.
Great powers decline largely because of internal weakness and the failure to adjust to new realities. In an era of dangerous partisan enmity, the reflexive bipartisan embrace of a new Cold War is a striking contrast. But the old habits don’t address the new challenges. This is hardly the way to build a vibrant American democracy.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of the Nation and is president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord (ACURA). She writes a weekly column at the Washington Post and is a frequent commentator on U.S. and international politics for Democracy Now, PBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN. Find her on Twitter @KatrinaNation.
This article is distributed by Globetrotter in partnership with The Nation.
Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine.”
Initially, he seemed shocked that he had blurted that out and tried to back off his slip by shrugging and muttering, “Iraq, too,” as if it were a joke. Some in his audience even laughed. But his initial attempt to sideline his comment only deepened the hole he was in. Then he tried another ploy. He suggested that his slip could be forgiven or excused because of his age, 75, and that his invasion and the destruction of Iraq could now be forgiven because of his cognitive decline. All in all, it was a first-class mess.
An Earlier Pathetic Attempt at Comedy
I remember another of Bush’s attempted jokes that got an immediate laugh from his audience, but soon fell seriously flat. It was in 2004. The Iraq War was underway and the president was at the yearly dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association, a black-tie event attended by both journalists and politicians.
After various comedy sketches, then-President Bush rose to present a short meant-to-be humorous slideshow featuring himself supposedly looking for the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Remember that, in the lead-up to war there, Americans were hammered with fearful and deceptive political messaging, emphasizing that only an invasion could stop that country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, from having WMD. (None were ever found, of course.) At that dinner, Bush showed photos of himself supposedly searching for those devastating weapons in the Oval Office beneath a cushion on the couch and under the desk. “No weapons under there! Maybe they’re here!” said the smiling president repeatedly in a sing-song voice, as if engaged in a child’s game. Horrifyingly enough, many in that audience of journalists did indeed laugh.
I was offended then, just as I was by Bush’s recent slip and his sorry attempts to minimize and excuse his responsibility for the blood on his hands, the massive death toll from his invasion, and so much additional destruction and suffering. According to The Costs of War project, more than 207,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in that nightmare, while the number who died from the indirect violence of that war was far higher, given the damage done to the Iraqi health care system and the rest of that devastated country’s infrastructure. More than 20 years later, people are still dying needlessly. And I also mourn the more than 7,000 U.S. servicemembers who died in the post-9/11 war zones Bush created, as well as the many more who were wounded.
I can’t help but wonder if George Bush doesn’t feel at least a little of this himself. Otherwise, why would he have made such a slip? Or maybe it wasn’t a slip at all, but an inadvertent confession.
That his telling gaffe about Iraq and Ukraine received so little attention certainly reveals something about our media’s ongoing uneasiness with Bush’s wars and perhaps the conflicted feelings of our citizenry as well when it comes to what they did (and didn’t do) during the Iraq War. How many who were initially enthusiastic about the Afghan and Iraq wars would now, like their former president, admit we were wrong? How many people who supported those conflicts have taken what happened to heart and are thinking more deeply about an American propensity for war and the war culture that goes with it? Like George W. Bush, too few, I’m afraid.
Worshipping Lies
This past July 24th, the New York Times featured “I was wrong” op-ed pieces by a number of its columnists. The editors defined “being wrong” as “incorrect predictions and bad advice,” as well as “being off the mark.” Of course, one of the definitions of the Greek word for “sin” (amartia) in the New Testament is “missing the mark.” Fascinating.
I would have taken the editors’ definitions further though. Saying “I was wrong” means more than “rethinking our positions on all kinds of issues,” as the Times suggested. Often, the problem isn’t simply that people lack the best, most up-to-date information or data. Only by digging into ethics and social psychology will we better understand why people deceive not just others but even themselves with lies, slippery rationalizations, or comedic attempts at distraction to cover up deeper dynamics that have to do with privilege and power, or what religious traditions sometimes call “worshipping false idols.”
Moral psychologist Albert Bandera has explored some of the diverse mechanisms people rely on to morally disengage and excuse inhumane conduct. They shift their rhetoric and thinking to redefine and even rename what they are doing, “sanitizing” language (and their acts) in the process. In this way, they often shift responsibility onto someone else, minimize any damaging consequences for themselves, and dehumanize the victims of the violence they’ve let loose.
But there are other examples of moral disengagement that are even harder to understand. In such cases, people make decisions and act in ways that even undercut their own self-interest and values. For me, one of the saddest recent examples is Stephen Ayres, a witness at the House select committee’s January 6th hearings this summer. He had been part of the Trumpist mob that stormed the Capitol. A family man who, until then, owned a house and had a job with a cabinet company, Ayres came across in those hearings as a lost soul who couldn’t fully comprehend how he had willingly injured himself and his family by idolizing Donald Trump and his election lies.
His arrest for participating in the insurrection resulted in the loss of almost everything he had. With his wife sitting behind him, he testified about having to sell his house, losing his job, and struggling to come to terms with his actions. “I wish I had done my own research,” he said, trying to explain how he could have been so easily deceived by Trumpist lies regarding the 2020 presidential election.
Clearly, the social media bubble he slipped into that captivated and compelled him to head for Washington had given his life new meaning and an otherwise missing sense of excitement. He hadn’t planned to enter the Capitol building that day but was swept away by the moment. “Basically, we were just following what [Trump] said,” Ayres testified. In handing over his critical thinking to right-wing social media and a president intent on hanging onto power at any cost, he unwittingly also handed over his capacity for moral deliberation and, in the end, his very life.
Liz Cheney’s Struggle for Moral Clarity
In recent weeks, Liz Cheney, vice-chairperson of the January 6th committee, was questioned about a past moral choice of hers by Leslie Stahl in a 60 Minutes interview — specifically, how years ago she threw her lesbian sister and family under the bus for political purposes. It was a time when Cheney was struggling to get elected in conservative Wyoming. That meant coming out as anti-LGBTQ. Now, she says, “I was wrong” to have condemned her sister then.
Listening to her, I wanted to hear more about such moral grappling and how, in these years, her convictions had or hadn’t changed when it came to people, religion, family, political life, power, and the role her father played as George W. Bush’s vice president in those godforsaken wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, Stahl didn’t push her further.
I disagree with Liz Cheney on almost every policy position she’s taken in these years. Nonetheless, I find myself grateful for her rejection of Donald Trump’s mad election claims and her determined, even steely, leadership of the January 6th committee hearings. Cheney eventually discovered her moral bearings on her sister’s sexual orientation and family life. Now, I wonder if that past moral struggle influenced her decision to throw political expediency to the wind regarding her own House seat in a Wyoming primary that she might lose on August 16th. After all, by resisting the Trumpian tide, she’s become one of the few Republicans willing to do some serious truth-telling.
Today, Cheney finds herself in another league from most of her party’s leaders and power players. In the state where I live, Pennsylvania, Republicans are coalescing behind the candidacy of Doug Mastriano for governor. Candidate Mastriano not only wants to arm school employees, but according to my local newspaper, he even organized buses for January 6th, now “rubs shoulders with QAnon conspiracy theorists,” and until recently had an active social media account at Gab, a site well-known for its white supremacist and anti-semitic rhetoric.
Mastriano continues to spread Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, is a Christian nationalist, and believes in an abortion ban without exceptions, and the list goes on and on. Nonetheless, Republicans like Andy Reilly, a member of the state GOP national committee, rationalize their support for Mastriano by saying things like, “When you play team sports, you learn what being part of a team means… Our team voted for him in the primary.”
Lying to Others and Oneself
What enables such self-deception? According to journalist Mark Leibovich, author of Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission, what “made Trump possible” even after the January 6th insurrection was “rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender.” Reviewing Leibovich’s book, Geoffrey Kabaservice added this: “The routine was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it. They all knew better.” In other words, “knowing better” doesn’t assure anyone of doing the right thing. Instead, too many Americans were swayed by “greed, ambition, opportunism, fear, and fascination of Trump as a pure and feral rascal.”
Tim Miller, author of Why We Did It: Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell, adds “hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception” to the mix of reasons why so many politicians do what they do. “How do people justify going along?” he asks. But he, too, played that game once upon a time. A Republican gay man with a husband, he rationalized helping the GOP pass anti-LGBTQ legislation by “compartmentalizing” his personal life from his professional one. As he now says, “Being around power, being addicted to power,” along with the insatiable compulsion to “be in the room where it happens,” is a recipe that leads people to act self-deceptively, while deceiving others.
It’s like placing scales over your own eyes and those of others, to blind as many people as possible, yourself included, to the immorality of your acts. And some lie even more to themselves, claiming that they can resist the worst tendencies of destructive power-mongering. They say, “We need to have good people in the room” to stop the worst from happening, even as they capitulate to power players and justify what should never be justified.
Many of us are waiting to hear an “I was wrong” from so many politicians (though I can’t imagine Donald Trump ever succumbing to honesty), including most of the Republican leadership. Just for starters, I’d like to hear “I was wrong” regarding Muslim bans, the demonization of immigrants, the refusal to seriously address gun violence, the denial of women’s human rights, the gerrymandering and weakening of voting rights, religious nativism, and sidling up to white supremacy, not to speak of the supposed “steal” of the 2020 election. But given the likelihood that people in power will lie to themselves and others, I’m not holding my breath.
Telling the Truth about U.S. Military Spending
What I’m also waiting for is an “I was wrong” from both Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington who, year after year, support ever more outlandish military budgets, despite so many other existential crises in our country and on the planet, despite the death-dealing costs of war to the servicemembers Americans claim to highly esteem, and despite the fact that our violence abroad simply hasn’t worked.
Remember that the United States spends more than half of its entire discretionary federal budget on militarization and war, a tally greater than the military budgets of the next nine highest-spending countries combined. Tragically, it doesn’t appear that this will change any time soon.
According to an analysis by the anti-corruption group Public Citizen , in 2022, the congressional armed services committees only added to the already gigantic military budget the Biden administration requested for 2023. The House added another $37.5 billion, while the Senate added $45 billion. Our leaders refuse to learn from the last decades of unremitting war. Instead, power and privilege continue to hold sway.
As the same report explained, after military-industrial-complex corporations donated $10 million to congressional armed services committee members, “the Department of Defense received a potential $45 billion spending increase.” This was in addition to the president’s $813 billion recommendation. The report concluded, “The defense contractors will have clinched a return on its $10 million investment of nearly 450,000%.”
It’s discouraging to see how deception and rationalization so regularly undermine truth and moral courage. It’s also sobering to witness individuals who willingly lie to themselves and, in doing so, subvert their own and others’ wellbeing. But I’m also encouraged by times when, as with Liz Cheney on that committee, some of us demonstrate what it means to dig deeply for moral clarity against the prevailing headwinds of moral disengagement, disinformation, power, and privilege.
The fact is that truth-telling and confession, while difficult, are good for the soul. I wish for more and hope it will be enough. God knows, all of us and this beleaguered planet truly need it.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
The lingering and fractured memories of three decades of CPM rule in Tripura are not so rosy anymore, even as the people today seem totally distraught and disgusted with the current regime of the BJP ruling the state.
The latest source of discontent is what the tribal communities in the deep interiors call ‘Miking’ — announcements on a mike by the government and the forest department in a vehicle, proclaiming a list of Dos and Don’ts for the locals. This is a unilateral and one-dimensional ‘Miking’. No conversation or discussion is done with the locals by officials.
Deep inside lush green dense rain forests, darker than the night in stark daylight, now soaked with incessant rain, beyond the river Gomati and the old capital of the kings called Udaipur, across mountain springs, ponds, water bodies, meadows and sprawling paddy fields, high up the zigzag trail of the hills touching the border of Chittagong Hill Tract in Bangladesh, their current story is that of disappointment and dismay. The ‘Miking’ is surprising, jarring, unexpected and unprecedented. And what are they announcing anyway?
Suddenly, out of the blue, breaking away from hundreds of years of tradition and convention, something not even practiced during the British-era when Tripura was still not totally subjugated to the Empire and the British operated through an agent, the Forest Department seems to be indulging in overreach. They are announcing that the tribal communities in these dense forests should not work on “government land or forest land’ without permission, that they cannot do ‘Jhoom’ (shifting cultivation) and that they will face punishment if they do so.
In other words, this amounts to an authoritarian diktat that the tribal communities no longer have their traditional and established rights to the forest. It also means that the Forest Rights Act (FRA), whereby tribal populations have natural and organic rights to the forest and its produce, which they inhabited and lived in for centuries, and whereby the Gram Sabha is the supreme decision-making body, and, which, even the Supreme Court has ratified after the protracted and peaceful agitation by an ancient tribal community against bauxite mining by a multinational company in Niyamgiri in Orissa, is now being turned null and void in Tripura.
These pristine forests stretch for miles in the hills and merge with the Chittagong Hill Tract – indeed there were no borders before the Partition of India, and migration from one terrain to another in search of newer and greener pastures was a normal activity. The community owned the forests as a shared collective. Everyone would have their share of Jhoom land, while water bodies and other spaces were collectively shared.
Tripura joined the Indian republic only in 1949. For centuries, the forests belonged to the tribes, in this case, the Reangs, a beautiful, soft-spoken, gentle community, who are specialists in Jhoom cultivation, and who continue to practice it in large parts of this area, often, untouched by the mainland civilizations and cultures, and left to their way of life by the state apparatus till now.
Usually, Jhoom cultivation is done every eight years by burning the forest after the crop is ready and collected by the villagers in a particular year. The area is burnt by fire. Then it is left to its own destiny – whereby organic and natural biodiversity takes over the land, the land is left untouched to resurrect and heal, and yet another forest grows in this area slowly and steadily.
Till the early 1970s, the entire forest area was called a Tribal Reserve, because the tribal kings in Agartala were far-sighted in creating this exclusive zone in which the indigenous collectives would have total control over the forest and decide how to nourish and save it, and how to use the forest land and its produce for cultivation and shared living. It was only after the early 1970s that the central government in Delhi announced that all tribal land would be under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. This was unheard of in the region and took the people by surprise.
However, while the Forest Department was officially marked as the administrative in-charge of the land, the people were not disturbed. They continued to live, share the forest and cultivate the land as per tradition and shared ownerships.
At the far extreme South of Tripura, there are 600 Reang families doing Jhoom cultivation in village Shimbuja in the Karbook subdivision. Across the terrain several Reang families continue to live in various villages. As many as 50,000 people live in scattered forest villages in this border area in the dense forest.
Ajendra runs a local school and is one of the few who has land records. His father was the head – choudhury – of his village community. His father and the others would earlier decide the daily and long-term administrative tasks for the village, including who cultivates which part of the land. Land is usually marked by local signposts – a tree on the left, a pond on the right, or similar such landmarks. Thereby, the village survived on this shared cultivation, including through gathering of food and fruits from the forests.
The new ‘Miking’ campaign therefore came as a shock. Especially because the natural ownership of land and forests here is taken for granted.
Ironically, the Forest Rights Act (FRA) has not been fully implemented in this region, even during the prolonged CPM rule, considering that the Left totally backed the FRA under the UPA government in Delhi. In Shimbuva itself, only a handful of families have land papers allotted to them. Most of the families have no document to prove that they have land ownership. “It is a dark irony that the Left government did not give land ownership papers and rights to the tribal communities here despite the enactment of the FRA which they supported so strongly in Delhi. Now, consequent to this ‘Miking’, it would have been so much more difficult for the Forest Department to bully the people if they had their official documents to prove that they have land. This and other villages in this hilly region do not even have Gram Sabhas, which is the supreme authority among indigenous and forest communities,” said Agartala-based Narayan Patari, leader of the Tripura Tribal Rights Movement, and a leading journalist in the area.
According to him, only after a huge agitation in 2007, after the enactment of the FRA, did the Left government move to implement this far-reaching and progressive Act. “They first reluctantly agreed to implement the Act. They consequently declared that 1 lakh, 15,000 land pattas have been given, but if you go to the ground, you can see that the picture is not so happy. Most people have no land documents in this region. So who got the land in the South of Tripura? Just look at this village of the Reang community. Only a few have land records and documents,” said Patari.
Ajendra said that if the Forest Department starts flexing its muscles, the community will have to organize and fight back. That too will be an uphill task in these hills with scattered and distant villages and literally no public transport available.
Under the BJP government in Agartala, according to other locals, till now they have been left in peace. Several petitions for land allocation have yielded nothing, however. “If the current scenario changes, we will have to mobilize the people to claim their fundamental and indigenous rights to the Tribal Reserve, which our ancestors have inherited since centuries,” said Ajendra.
Amit Sengupta is Executive Editor, Hardnews and a columnist, currently based in Kolkata
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