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The handgun freeze is the latest in an ongoing battle among Canadian lawmakers over gun control measures. In parliament, legislators are still debating the passage of a bill, introduced in May, that would be one of the strongest pieces of gun control legislation in decades. The new handgun freeze is an "immediate action" the Trudeau administration said it is taking as conversation around the bill continues.
"When people are being killed, when people are being hurt, responsible leadership requires us to act," Trudeau said at a news conference on Friday, announcing the new measure. "Recently again, we have seen too many examples of horrific tragedies involving firearms."
In addition to a ban on handgun sales, it is also now forbidden to bring newly acquired handguns into Canada. The freeze is being met with elation from gun reform groups who welcomed the immediate action.
"Reducing the proliferation of handguns is one important example of the evidence-based measures Canada needs to reduce gun violence and save lives," Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns tweeted in response to the news.
"More than a million households in Ukraine were left without electricity following Russian strikes on energy facilities across the country." (photo: Reuters)
More than a million households in Ukraine are without power after a Russian attack on energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, Russian-installed authorities urged residents of Kherson to leave the city. DW has the latest.
"The aggressor continues to terrorize our country. At night, the enemy launched a massive attack: 36 rockets, most of which were shot down... These are vile strikes on critical objects. Typical tactics of terrorists," Zelenskyy said on social media.
More than a million households in Ukraine were left without electricity following Russian strikes on energy facilities across the country, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidency said.
"As of now, 672,000 subscribers have been disconnected in Khmelnytskyi region, 188,400 in Mykolaiv region, 102,000 in Volyn region, 242,000 in Cherkasy region, 174,790 in Rivne region, 61,913 in Kirovohrad region and 10,500 in Odesa region," Kyrylo Tymoshenko said on social media.
State grid operator Ukrenergo said the attacks targeted transmission infrastructure in western Ukraine, but that power supply restrictions were being put in place in ten regions across the entire country, including in the capital, Kyiv.
"The scale of the damage is comparable or may exceed the consequences of the attack on October 10-12," Ukrenergo said. Russian forces rained more than 80 missiles on cities across Ukraine on October 10, according to Kyiv, in apparent retaliation for an explosion that damaged a key bridge linking the Crimean peninsula to Russia
Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said Moscow wanted to create a new wave of refugees into Europe with the strikes, while foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said they constituted "genocide."
"Deliberate strikes on Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure are part of Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians," Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson begins – report
An assessment provided by the Washington-based think-tank the Institute for the Study of War reports, "The Russian withdrawal from western Kherson Oblast has begun. Russian forces likely intend to continue that withdrawal over the next several weeks but may struggle to withdraw in good order if Ukrainian forces choose to attack."
The Institute’s daily report notes that Russian forces are in the process of moving materiel from the west bank of the Dnipro River to the eastern bank by ferry.
The Institute for the Study of War also notes, "The Russian withdrawal from western Kherson requires that a Russian detachment left in contact hold the line against Ukrainian attack, covering other Russian forces as they withdraw."
Ukraine’s General Staff said it likely the most combat-ready units will be withdrawn first with mobilized conscripts in theory offering cover for the withdrawal.
Despite the withdrawal, the Institute for the Study of War assesses, "Russian President Vladimir Putin is setting conditions for Russia to continue a protracted high-intensity conventional war in Ukraine, not a negotiated settlement or off-ramp."
Meanwhile, the Russian-installed authorities in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, urged residents of the region's eponymous main city to leave "immediately" in the face of Kyiv's advancing counter-offensive.
"Due to the tense situation on the front, the increased danger of mass shelling of the city and the threat of terrorist attacks, all civilians must immediately leave the city and cross to the left bank of the Dnipro river," the region's Russian-installed authorities said on social media.
German ministers call for more financial aid for Ukraine
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock are calling for significantly more money for military assistance to Ukraine in the coming year than previously planned.
In a letter to Finance Minister Christian Lindner, the two ministers demanded that the €697 million ($687 million) planned so far in the draft budget for 2023 be increased to €2.2 billion. According to the letter, €2 billion was already earmarked in the current budget for Ukraine.
Lambrecht and Baerbock also demanded Lindner to increase the previously planned commitment appropriations of €100 million to €1 billion.
The previous budget estimates would reduce "the room for manoeuver to a politically no longer justifiable minimum," Lambrecht and Baerbock warn. A significant increase is needed for the German government to be able to keep its commitments for continued massive support to Ukraine, according to the letter.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has asked Germany for further military aid as soon as possible. Ukraine is "impatiently" waiting for new ammunition, which is needed "right now," Shmyhal told the Sunday edition of Germany's broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Ukraine vows to 'hit back harder' if Russia blows up Kherson dam
Ukrainian will "hit back even harder" if Russia destroys a hydroelectric power plant in the Kherson region, the head of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office warned.
Andrii Yermak tweeted that Moscow's "nuclear blackmail" had failed to intimidate Ukraine and its allies, so now "they are trying to scare everyone by blowing up" the Kakhovka hydro-electric dam on Dnieper River.
"Ukraine will not succumb to peace by coercion ... They won't break us. We will hit back even harder," he wrote on Twitter.
Separately, Zelenskyy accused Russia of mining the dam as his forces prepared to push Moscow's troops from the occupied city of Kherson.
"Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack. Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster," he warned.
Russian-installed officials in Kherson meanwhile claim Ukrainian forces have been attacking the dam in part to cut the water supply to Crimea.
Security expert tells DW Putin can't conquer more of Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin is no longer able to set out what he wanted to do when he invaded Ukraine, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, told DW.
"He can prolong the fight, but I do not see that he has the possibility to actually conquer more Ukrainian territory," Heusgen said.
"[Putin] has not made for the last month any progress on his military path to conquer more territory," Heusgen said. "Quite the country. He's on the defensive."
He said Russia's use of kamikaze drones shows Putin has "his back against the wall."
"Putin continues to commit war crimes in the country," Heusgen said of Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure. "This is just a series of crimes against humanity, war crimes that Putin is committing."
Heusgen also described the Russian leader's partial mobilization of military reservists as "a desperate move."
He said Russia would have to follow Germany's example of de-Nazification once Putin is out of power.
"I think there has to be some de-Putinization," he said.
"People have to understand that the way that Putin has conducted the policy is unacceptable, that, you know, Russia does not stand above other nations, has to respect international law, has to respect human rights, has to respect the rules-based international order," Heusgen added.
Probe of Russian use of Iran drones urged
The United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have asked the United Nations to investigate allegations that Russia used Iranian-made drones to attack Ukraine.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the three European countries asked the UN to send a team to investigate the origin of the drones.
"These UAVs are being used by Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine in attacks against civilian infrastructure and cities across Ukraine, leading to the death of innocent civilians," they wrote.
The United States sent a similar letter, saying Iranian drones were transferred to Russia in late August.
The accusations were denounced as "false and baseless" by Tehran, whose Foreign Ministry "strongly rejected and condemned" calls for a UN probe.
Over the last two weeks, Russia has struck Ukraine with a wave of drone attacks including dive-bombing the capital, Kyiv.
The US and three European powers said if Iranian drones were used in the attacks it violated the UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which restricts certain arms transfers to or from Iran.
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the drones are Russian and repeated a warning that an investigation would seriously affect relations between Russia and the UN.
US Deputy Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis told a Security Council meeting that "The UN must investigate any violation of UN Security Council resolutions and we must not allow Russia or others to impede or threaten the UN from carrying out its mandated responsibilities."
Separately the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said diplomacy was still the best way to address Iran's nuclear program but he saw no imminent revival of the 2015 nuclear deal because of Tehran's injection of "extraneous issues."
He specifically said Iranian drones were used in Ukraine.
On Thursday, the US said Iranian troops were in Crimea and had helped fly the drones.
Despite Iran denying having supplied the drones, many have been shot down and recovered making their origins clear.
More from DW's coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Following Russian drone attacks on Ukraine, Kyiv has once again asked Israel for military help. Israel, however, is seeking to maintain relations with both Ukraine and Russia. Read more about Israel's Ukraine dilemma.
Russia "is deliberately delaying" grain exports from Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, without going into details. He added around 150 vessels were waiting to be loaded.
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Trump supporters stand on a Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Conservatives have long harnessed the extremist, far-right energies of their base to animate the party
But the moment quickly passed. January 6 obviously wasn’t enough for Republicans in Congress to actually impeach or for conservatives to break with Trump in any meaningful way. Instead, they closed ranks and rallied behind Trump: Republicans first acquitted him, then they started obstructing every attempt to hold him accountable, and now a majority of GOP candidates are running on the Big Lie, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The few who broke with Trump have been fully marginalized or even ostracized from the party. Republicans did not come to see January 6 as the end of the line, the outrageous conclusion of the Trumpian experiment – they have come to see it as a blueprint: never concede an election, never accept defeat at the hands of what they see as a fundamentally “un-American” enemy.
Was there a viable alternative path after January 6? Was that road not taken ever as realistically an option as the statements by McConnell and McCarthy may suggest, at least at first sight? I’m skeptical. I have no doubt that many Republicans, like McConnell himself, personally despise Trump for summoning a mob to attack the Capitol. They may consider Trump too crass, just as they probably aren’t entirely comfortable with the rise of Trump-endorsed white Christian nationalist extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Doug Mastriano.
But they certainly don’t consider any of that a dealbreaker. That’s partly because Republican elites understand they can’t win without the base, and the base remains committed to Trumpism. But there is more to consider than just opportunism. Almost every time the right is at a crossroads, they choose the path of radicalization, even when it’s not at all clear that’s a reasonable choice from a purely electoral standpoint – even when, for instance, it makes winning statewide races on the west coast nearly impossible.
The problem runs a lot deeper than Trump. It is crucial to grapple with the underlying ideas and dynamics that have animated the Republican party’s path for a long time. They have led to a situation in which moments of brief uncertainty almost always result in a further radicalization of the Republican party and the right in general. What happened after the 2012 election defeat that shook conservatives to the core is an instructive example: The Republican National Committee famously released an “autopsy” report that called for moderation and outreach to traditionally marginalized groups. But instead, the GOP doubled down – and went with Trumpism.
There are ideological factors at play that severely restrict the realm of possibility and significantly privilege the more radical over the more restraint forces within the Republican party. It has become dogma on the right to define “us” (conservative white Christians) as the sole proponents of “real America” – and “them” (Democrats, liberals, “the left”) as a fundamentally illegitimate, “un-American” threat. Within the confines of such a worldview, it’s hard to justify compromise and restraint.
Every crisis situation only heightens the sense of being under siege that’s animating so much of what is happening on the right, legitimizing and amplifying calls to hit harder, more aggressively. There’s always permission to escalate, hardly ever to pull back. This underlying permission structure is absolutely key, and it is always the same: It states that “real Americans” are constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics, besieged by “un-American” forces of leftism; “we” have to fight back, by whatever means. In the minds of conservatives, they are never the aggressors, always the ones under assault. Building up this supposedly totalitarian, violent threat from the “left” allows them to justify their actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization.
It’s a permission structure that doesn’t allow for lines that can’t be crossed. It has proven remarkably adaptable, fully capable of handling even the most outlandish rhetoric, actions, transgressions, even crimes. As crass or radical or outrageous as some on the right might have initially perceived January 6, nothing Trump has ever done has betrayed the accepted dogma of conservative politics: that only white conservatives – and the party that represents them – are entitled to rule in America, that Democratic governance is inherently illegitimate.
And so, the permission structure of conservative politics remained fully intact and quickly allowed for a realignment behind Trump: anything is justified to fight back against the supposed onslaught from a radically “un-American,” extremist “left.” This fundamental logic of conservative politics was always likely to drown out everything else after a brief moment of shock. It is the reason why former attorney general William Barr, while leaving no doubt that Trump was responsible for an attempted coup and is completely detached from reality, still maintains that “the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party.” And it finds its most extreme iteration in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that it is time for “freedom-loving Americans” to fight back because “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they already started the killings.” Greene’s rhetoric constitutes a breathtaking assault on the very pillars of democratic political culture, on the demand that we accept the legitimacy of the political opponent and denounce the use of violence. But it is fully in line with, and justified by, the underlying logic of escalation.
Trump himself was never the cause, and always a result of these dynamics – this permission structure that overrides all else. It has shaped Republican politics for a long time and has almost always overwhelmed attempts to moderate since at least the 1990s, an era in which a more explicitly anti-democratic populism moved to the center of Republican politics. GOP elites and more “moderate” conservatives have often tried to harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base to prevent egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy from ever upending traditional hierarchies. And purely in terms of Trump’s legislative agenda, the Republican establishment has mostly gotten what it wanted – which is why Mike Pence, for instance, still doesn’t think he and Donald Trump “differ on issues”. But elites and “moderates” have never been able to control the accelerating radicalization that is now threatening constitutional government in America: not when the Tea Party rose after Barack Obama’s election, not when Trumpism came to dominate the GOP, not when militant white Christian nationalist extremists are reveling in the idea of using fascistic violence against their enemies.
We are now at the point where an attack on the Capitol was not nearly enough to break this logic of escalation. That dynamic continued to shape the right after January 6. And it not only explains past instances of radicalization in moments when it looked like there could have been an alternative path. It should also shape our expectations going forward and our understanding of what American democracy is up against.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Most of that money is coming from dark money outside groups with little-to-no donor transparency — and Republicans are getting a huge boost from them.
Outside groups have poured in nearly $1 billion to buoy GOP Senate candidates. Just how important have these groups been to Republicans? Eighty-six percent of the money going toward pro-GOP TV ads is coming from these outside groups, compared to 55% for Democrats. (Below, see how much Republican and Democrats' campaigns and outside groups are spending on TV ads in key states.)
Put simply: If it weren't for these outside groups, Republican candidates would be swamped on the airwaves.
The concentrated ad spending is reflective of just how narrow the fight for control of the Senate is. The chamber is evenly divided with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. Democrats, though, are in charge of the agenda because there is a Democratic president, and in her role as vice president, Kamala Harris comes in to break ties.
Republicans need a net pickup of two Senate seats to win a majority, and many of the top races will likely be decided by only a few percentage points.
So the campaigns and outside groups are pouring in tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in each state to sway the ever-shrinking percentage of persuadable voters.
Because campaigns get lower ad rates than these groups, they can run more TV ads than outside groups for the same amount of money
So the inability for Republican campaigns to keep pace with Democrats has meant these GOP outside groups have had to make up a lot of ground, spending more for less.
The biggest outside spender is the Senate Leadership Fund, the group aligned with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. It has spent $219 million in eight states, with $110 million going to just three races — Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Each of those states feature Trump-backed Republican candidates, who have been struggling.
The top spender on the Democratic side is Senate Majority PAC, which has ties to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. It has spent $145 million in six states.
Including all expenditures in addition to TV ad spending — like staffing, mailers, events and get-out-the-vote efforts — outside groups have so far spent more than $1.3 billion, a record for a midterm election, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign finance spending. It continues a trend since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for outside spending.
Overall, OpenSecrets projects that more than $9 billion will be spent on federal elections in 2022, including Senate and House races. It's a record for midterm elections and represents a massive escalation from recent years — double, for example, what was spent in 2014 and a 32% increase from 2018.
Here are the top 10 states seeing the most spending on TV ads with a breakdown below that of what's come from campaigns versus outside groups:
1. Georgia: $258 million
2. Pennsylvania: $241 million
3. Arizona: $213 million
4. Wisconsin: $204 million
5. Nevada: $171 million
6. Ohio: $167 million
7. New Hampshire: $128 million
8. North Carolina: $113 million
9. Florida: $66 million
10. Colorado: $40 million
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A still from the video game Call of Duty: Warzone. (photo: Activision)
Video games are the most popular entertainment media on the planet — and one of the American war machine’s most effective propaganda tools.
The episode drew national coverage, even from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who introduced legislation that would stop the military from using Twitch to recruit. AOC’s largely symbolic measure failed to pass. But the incident helped to highlight the tight working relationship between the US military and the video game industry that has existed for decades.
While Hollywood flaunts its relationship with the US military, game studios tend to be coy, preferring to keep quiet about their collaboration with the world’s biggest war machine. Game designers use military consultants to help with story and level design in order to give games a sense of “authenticity,” particularly in the tactical shooter genre. For its part, the military uses games as a tool for recruitment and propaganda. Sometimes this propaganda is obvious. More often, it’s more insidious, as when consultants help shape the narrative of blockbuster games like Call of Duty.
The big first-person shooters like Call of Duty, which have become synonymous with gaming, are extremely profitable. The Call of Duty series itself boasts over $30 billion in total revenue, and the various Tom Clancy–branded games have sold an estimated seventy-six million copies. They generally exult the lone soldier, solving the world’s problems with his assault rifle, and cast even the most suspect military activities in a favorable light. With hundreds of millions of players worldwide, they’re a constant advertisement for US military might.
Partners in Propaganda
From academic research centers to designing training and war game simulations in the 1980s, the US military helped develop gaming’s foundations. Today, the military actively helps to shape the art and design of games. Video games are an increasingly popular medium — industry revenue has grown steadily for a decade but jumped 23 percent in 2020 compared to 2019 and will likely hit $222 billion in 2022 alone — and the military wants to ensure its depiction in them is positive.
This desire led to the launch of the America’s Army series in 2002, a free-to-play shooter that sought to capitalize on the popularity of the military shooter genre. The game, released at the outset of the so-called “war on terror,” was a straightforward piece of propaganda designed to recruit players to enlist in the US Army. When it was finally shut down in May 2022, it had reached an estimated twenty million players.
In every respect, however, the series paled in comparison to its inspirations, Call of Duty and Battlefield. These two juggernauts in the world of commercial entertainment tell stories about armed conflict that focus on valor and heroism. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War went so far as to include Ronald Reagan, portraying him as a straight shooter willing to bend the rules of international law in service of “the free men and women of the world.” An earlier installment of the series sent players on covert missions in Latin America, and featured consulting work by disgraced Colonel Oliver North, a key figure in the United States’ sordid involvement in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The forthcoming shooter Six Days in Fallujah purports to be more sensitive to the realities of war. Set during the second battle of Fallujah, the game is a dramatic retelling of the bloodiest conflict in America’s invasion of Iraq and, in some ways, a typical military shooter. Like Call of Duty, it equips the player with realistic weapons and asks them to advance through missions by gunning their way through a virtual battlefield.
In other ways, the game is an outlier that has drawn fierce criticism and opposition. Fallujah, after all, was the site of the deadliest battle in the invasion of Iraq. An estimated thirteen hundred soldiers were killed on both sides of the fighting, and eight hundred civilians died in the cross fire. American forces used white phosphorus munitions during the battle, an incendiary weapon that burns human flesh down to the bone. The site of such atrocities then became the setting for a first-person shooter, a genre hardly known for its subtlety.
The developers behind military shooters claim that their art is a balance between fiction and authenticity. Developers and publishers are also terrified of bad PR and insist that their games are apolitical. Asked to explain his company’s relationship with Oliver North, Mark Lamia, the head of Call of Duty developer Treyarch, said, “We’re not trying to make a political statement with our game. We’re trying to make a piece of art and entertainment . . . for us to have met with him as we’re creating our fiction is totally appropriate.”
Striking a similar chord, Peter Tamte, CEO of the company behind Six Days in Fallujah, told Polygon that the game is about empathy and understanding. “We’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war itself was a good or a bad idea,” he said. “It is really about helping players understand the complexity of urban combat. It’s about the experiences of that individual that is now there because of political decisions.”
War Can Be Fun
There are reasons to be skeptical when developers claim their games are apolitical. Indeed, the very structure of modern tactical shooters, in which the player advances through the game by moving into hostile territory and gunning down (often brown) enemies, serves to normalize the imperialist world order.
As Jamie Woodcock explains in Marx at the Arcade, military-themed shooters “are experienced through the first-person perspective, allowing players to ‘see’ war, not only through virtual eyes, but also mostly from the perspective of American imperialism. Although players may code and decode these experiences in different ways, they are all asked in some way to reflect and act upon the ideology of military conflict and imperialism.”
A well-designed game casts that ideology in a favorable, fun, light. The politics of a game do not need to be explicit to be effective. Military-style games help create a common sense around the state’s use of force. Players exert near-total control over how the protagonist moves through the virtual world, and the consequences of failure are limited and short-lived. The medium gives players a fantasy of idealized military action, cementing certain attitudes about how a modern imperial power conducts war, while obscuring the real-world horror and devastation that goes along with it.
The realistic gear and tactics featured in franchises like Call of Duty are intended to facilitate immersive gameplay. In one recent installment, developers employed sophisticated 3D scanning technology to translate real-world objects into digital copies. Developers drew on the expertise of former Navy SEALs to ensure maximum accuracy. The result, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, marked both a noteworthy technical achievement as well as a new level of sophisticated military propaganda in video game form.
None of this is to say that the games themselves aren’t fun. At their best, Call of Duty games have tight game mechanics that reward skill. Quickly identifying and eliminating enemies, moving to strategic locations on the map, and gaining new skills and weapons are all a blast. As Woodcock argues, “This powerful feedback loop has drawn in huge audiences to play FPS games . . . . It is an experience that is much more rarely found with other forms of contemporary culture.” A game’s plot and politics matter less in multiplayer gameplay, which is typically far more popular than the single-player campaign.
But regardless of the developers’ politics, games about war inevitably raise political questions. Like movies and books before them, video games have become an important medium through which millions of people experience collective myth-making and memory. Two decades after the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, video game creators are, intentionally or not, also telling a story about how American society should remember those wars and the motives that led it into them.
Perhaps it is true that Six Days in Fallujah is designed to help players empathize with the soldiers depicted in the game. But empathy always has a political dimension. What does it mean to empathize with the invading side of a war started under false pretenses? And what does it say about our concern for the war’s biggest victims, the Iraqi people?
Another War Game Is Possible
There is nothing inherently wrong with exploring war in a video game, nor are all war games necessarily propagandistic. This War of Mine, by independent Polish developer 11 Bit Studios, brilliantly uses survival game mechanics to depict the life of civilians caught in the middle of urban warfare. Bury Me, My Love is a mobile game that puts players in the shoes of refugees escaping Syria while trying to maintain contact with loved ones left behind.
The military shooter genre itself can be used to explore the darker realities of war and subvert the pro-military messaging implicit in much of the genre. In 2012, the German development studio Yager and publisher 2K released Spec Ops: The Line. On the surface, the game feels similar to other first-person shooters. Players take on the role of Captain Walker, a protagonist leading an elite team of American special operations forces on a rescue and recon mission in a post-apocalyptic Dubai. The mission, however, takes a dark turn as Walker pushes deeper into the city, killing most of the people the team encounters, including civilians. As he descends into madness, the game becomes frenetic and hallucinatory.
Spec Ops: The Line was groundbreaking in how it used game mechanics and storytelling to present a compelling criticism of the military shooter genre itself. Inspired by the classic antiwar film Apocalypse Now, the game explores the very real psychological effects of war on those who do the killing, and what it means for video games to offer shallow simulations of this violence. The game regularly breaks the fourth wall, asking the player provocative questions like, “Do you feel like a hero yet?”
For all the purported realism in military shooter games, their exploration of war is incomplete and inauthentic. They obsessively focus on replicating the tools and tactics of war without bothering to reflect on the “why,” or on how war can change someone for the worse. Compare this to Spec Ops lead writer Walt Williams’s approach, who witnessed how friends and family in the military were changed by war: “Seeing them come back and seeing the little differences between them, playing the military shooters has always felt a little off to me, because it was not a representation of what the people I know actually went through.”
Outside of game design and aesthetics, the military’s role can also be contested in material ways. Unions are finally gaining a foothold in the gaming industry, giving workers more leverage with which to push back on objectionable practices and relationships. Tech workers at Google organized a walkout in 2018 to protest the tech giant’s involvement in a Pentagon artificial intelligence program. A year earlier, workers at Facebook, Intel, and Google joined a rally outside data analytics company Palantir, protesting the company’s partnership with the Donald Trump–era Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau. There is no reason why game workers couldn’t follow suit, disrupting or limiting the role the military plays in the industry.
With video games more popular than ever, the ongoing partnership between the military and game studios should attract the attention of anyone concerned with the growing militarization of the world. Fortunately, military involvement does not indelibly taint games as a reactionary medium. It’s little surprise that, in a society dominated by the military-industrial complex, the military plays an outsized role in structuring games. Whether things stay that way will depend on the people whose labor makes the games possible, and the millions of gamers whose money keeps production going.
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Greta Thunberg. (photo: Getty Images)
UN annual conference on climate change is set to be hosted in Egypt next month amid tight restrictions on assembly and free speech
Cop27 will be hosted in Egypt's resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh from 7 to 18 November amid tight restrictions on peaceful assembly and free speech.
On Thursday, Thunberg tweeted a petition which bore the signature of hundreds of human rights groups and individuals who expressed dismay over Egypt hosting a UN summit, while thousands of Egyptian political prisoners remain locked in dire conditions.
"We stand in solidarity with prisoners of conscience in Egypt," she tweeted.
The petitioners said that they: "Emphasise that effective climate action is not possible without open civic space.
"As host of Cop27, Egypt risks compromising the success of the summit if it does not urgently address ongoing arbitrary restrictions on civil society.
"Prisoners are held in detention conditions that violate the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment, and since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power hundreds have died in custody amid reports of denial of healthcare and other abuse," they added.
Human rights activists stressed that tackling climate change goes hand-in-hand with addressing social and economic inequality, corruption and impunity, and ecological destruction.
"We stress the importance of the right to freedom of expression and independent reporting to foster efforts to address the climate crisis," they added, calling on Egyptian authorities to release jailed human rights defenders and journalists and end the blocking of websites of independent media and civil society groups.
"We note that, under the current government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, thousands continue to be arbitrarily detained without a legal basis, following grossly unfair trials, or solely for peacefully exercising their human rights."
Greenwashing
Thunberg's call comes on the same day as the European Parliament demanded that respect for "criteria relating to human rights" be taken into account in the choice of host countries for future Cops.
"Egypt (...) is using the Cop27 to restore its image and hide its catastrophic record on human rights", said French environmentalist MEP Mounir Satouri, one of the elected officials behind an amendment to a bill concerning Cop27, which MEPs approved on Thursday.
Satouri said that the issue of respecting human rights should be raised when the United Arab Emirates hosts Cop28 next year.
On Tuesday, Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah completed 200 days on hunger strike in an Egyptian jail, with no end in sight to his ordeal.
Abdel Fattah, an activist who called for peaceful assembly and free speech, was an icon of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and has spent eight out of the past 10 years in jail on various charges.
Human rights activists said that the Egyptian authorities must take meaningful steps to address the human rights crisis, including by lifting restrictions on access to civic space and ending their crackdown on peaceful dissent.
They noted that Egypt remains one of the world's top executioners, executing 107 in 2020 and 83 people in 2021 while sentencing at least 356 Egyptians to death in 2021.
People walk in a flooded street next to damaged houses in Catano town, in Juana Matos, Puerto Rico. (photo: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
Composting could be the solution.
Arache then points to the ground, gesturing at the ashy brown soil filled with wood shavings. The material is the product of a program that took vegetative debris from Hurricane María and turned it into compost. “We planted this small tree with compost produced thanks to the success [of our program],” explained Arache, the founder of Isla Nena Composta, a nonprofit organization that manages Vieques’ community composting program.
Like the rest of Puerto Rico and its archipelago, Vieques was devastated twice in September 2017: first by the strong winds and rain of Hurricane Irma, followed two weeks later by Hurricane María, which made landfall as a Category 4. The luscious green foliage that defines Puerto Rico disappeared. María’s 155-mile-per-hour winds scattered branches, leaves, and tree trunks across streets, sidewalks, and roads.
In total, hurricanes Irma and María produced 2.5 million tons of debris in Puerto Rico, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers – equal to 2.5 to 3 years’ worth of landfill space.
The government needed to act quickly to clear paths in the debris so first responders and loved ones could bring assistance and essential items to people in need. In the rush to move the rubble, agencies made decisions that shortened the life of Puerto Rico’s already-strained landfills. They moved the debris to the roadside and left it there without separating the materials or diverting it to places where it could be processed or recycled. Eventually, most of it ended up in landfills.
In the years since, the crisis has only worsened. Because of climate change, hurricanes are becoming more intense and frequent in the Caribbean. Category 1 Hurricane Fiona, which made landfall in southern Puerto Rico on September 17, downed trees, homes, and power lines, demonstrating how even less potent storms can strain Puerto Rico’s limited landfill space. The government doesn’t have an archipelago-wide action plan to solve the problem. One study from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, estimates many of Puerto Rico’s landfills will reach capacity as soon as 2023.
Now, a group of organizations including nonprofits like Isla Nena Composta and Puerto Rico Composta Inc. and companies such as TAIS are racing to delay the islands’ landfills from filling up.
Puerto Rico has never been great at recycling. The Solid Waste Reduction and Recycling Act of 1992 set a goal that Puerto Rico recycle 35 percent of the waste it generates; in reality, that number has reached just 10 to 15 percent. Territory-wide, 44 percent of the material that ends up in landfills is compostable; of that number, 22 percent is vegetative material like trees, grass clippings, and bushes.
“With the crisis, the need, we got an opportunity,” said Arache. “María was the push to start taking composting seriously.”
The government of Puerto Rico first recognized its landfill crisis in the 1970’s. Two government agencies, the Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board, or JCA for its Spanish acronym, and the Solid Waste Management Authority, or ADS, were formed to take care of the issue. But since their conception, they’ve been hindered by inadequate budgets, a lack of personnel, and limited powers to fully implement its proposals. JCA and ADS were absorbed by the Department of Environment & Natural Resources, or DRNA, in 2018 due to austerity measures. This has reduced the solid waste management of the entire archipelago to a single office within the DRNA.
Two-thirds of Puerto Rico’s landfills fail to follow U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
When many of Puerto Rico’s landfills were built in the 1950s and 1960s, they were designed without effective systems to limit gas emissions and leachate spills (liquids created when food scraps and vegetative debris decompose). The gas emissions contribute to climate change, while leachate spills can release heavy metals, ammonia, and other components that may be toxic, radioactive, and mutagenic to water bodies and nearby communities.
The Vieques landfill is no exception. Essentially, anyone can go to the landfill to dump their trash in sections such as residential garbage bags, scrap metal, electronics, and furniture – there’s even a space for dead animals. A lack of proper soil cover over the garbage has caused fires in the landfill, which affect air quality community-wide.
According to the EPA’s latest assessment, the Vieques landfill has no liner, a net that protects the soil and groundwater from leachate contamination. It also has no leachate collection system or groundwater monitoring program. The lack of monitoring is significant since the landfill is located adjacent to the Caribbean Sea and 8km (5 miles) from Vieques’ most important groundwater system. The nearest house is just 54 meters (0.03 miles) away and the closest school is 2 km (1.3 mi).
“There are days where the flies are unbearable,” said Melisa Molina, a municipal worker who lives near the Vieques landfill. But what has affected her health even more has been landfill fires. The smoke “invades the whole area” and has a strong, pungent smell. It was so “unbearable” at one point that she had to live with her parents on the other side of the island. “I’ve had asthma for 16 years and obviously it doesn’t get any better,” she added. Puerto Ricans have higher asthma rates than any other ethnic group in the United States.
As a collection of islands, Puerto Rico is in desperate need of new ideas to manage its consumption and waste strategies. There is only so much land available before communities run out of space for their garbage.
Practices like incineration are highly contested by communities and governmental agencies alike. That means that as landfills fill up, the archipelago must either start shipping garbage overseas or drastically revamp its recycling industry.
“The public policy that we have – and have had – has been unstable and inefficient,” said Francisco V. Aquino, a lawyer and member of Generación Circular, a coalition of organizations pushing for public policy that promotes a circular economy in Puerto Rico – an effort to reuse and recycle products locally as long as possible.
Generación Circular recently pushed for a bill (Ley 51-2022) to ban some single-use plastics. The law was approved in June and will go into effect in 2024. The group is also pushing for legislation to create a Circular Economy Trust that would gather data, provide oversight on the disbursement of public funding, and advocate for public policies that prioritize the health and well-being of Puerto Rico rather than private economic gains.
Part of the failure of the planning, according to Aquino, has to do with the lack of community integration. “There are parameters established top-down without taking into consideration what communities can do, what they’re willing to do, how you strengthen communities so they can participate in this economy, because an important part of the circular economy is that resources are not always going to the same hands.”
One of the most essential solutions is diverting and recycling organic materials.
In the months following hurricanes Irma and María, Arache’s group, Isla Nena Composta, received roughly 30,400 cubic yards of vegetative debris. After sorting out construction debris and crushing the vegetative materials, they ended up with approximately 17,000 cubic yards of clean and chipped vegetative materials. Eventually, that became 4,000 cubic yards of compost, about the size of an olympic pool.
“Sin composta no hay paraíso,” Arache said, laughing. It means that without compost, there’s no paradise, a play on a popular salsa song by El Gran Combo.
Arache describes compost as “the cornerstone of the circle of life” and believes that it is necessary for humanity to survive. Turning organic matter – vegetation, food scraps, or animal waste – into soil not only creates nutrients for the ground to produce food, but it also helps to grow trees and other plants whose roots are essential for retaining water and mitigating floods and other disasters related to climate change.
Isla Nena Composta has sold its compost to local gardeners and community agricultural projects which has helped sustain the nonprofit’s operations for almost five years. They have also donated compost to schools so they develop their community gardens.
Isla Nena Composta is a rare public-private partnership. The composting facility and the budding fruit tree forest is located in Vieques National Wildlife Refuge which, from 1941 to 2001, was used as a bombing and live-fire training range and ammunition storage by the U.S. Navy. Arache, who is also an environmental scientist and engineer, explained that before military intervention this area consisted mostly of tropical forest and wetlands. The Navy covered the land where Isla Nena Composta is located with asphalt to build a tarmac. That asphalt was removed after the Navy ceased its operations and recycled to make the road that now connects the wildlife refuge. According to Arache, the process transformed this section of the park into a semi-dry forest.
Today, the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The local office of the federal agency offered Arache’s organization five acres to process vegetative materials and an additional acre for the fruit forest. The composting site is filled with massive piles of vegetative materials (leaves, branches, tree trunks), cardboard, and wooden palettes. Since Hurricane Fiona, they have received a lot more material. “It’s beautiful,” Arache described via email.
Among the materials, one small dark brown pile stands out – this is what’s left of the compost produced by the vegetative debris from Hurricane María.
“My goal has always been that everything compostable in Vieques be recycled so it doesn’t get to the landfill and we can transform it into fertile soil,” Arache explained. “Not only Vieques, my dream is to accomplish this in Puerto Rico and the whole world, but we have to start one community at a time.”
Less than a mile away from the compost pile are the offices of the local U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, led by biologist Mike Barandiaran, who manages the refuge. He’s from New York, with Chilean and Native American descendancy, but proudly notes that Vieques has been his home for over 20 years. He shows us around the reserve, miles and miles of green foliage surrounded by the pristine blue Caribbean sea. Everywhere we go, horses are roaming around. Barandiaran wears feathers in his hat, gathered from diseased birds after Hurricane María. He pledges to wear them until Vieques fully recovers from the hurricane.
Barandiaran recalls that he first met Arache around 2012, when the Obama administration formed the Vieques Sustainability Taskforce. While many of the recycling efforts focused on managing paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum, Barandiaran remembers Arache repeatedly asking: “What about compost?”
“At the end of the day, a lot was discussed, a lot of decisions were made, nothing was implemented – but she never left,” Barandiaran said. “She kept persisting, and we know her as ‘Ana Composta.’”
At the beginning of her efforts, Arache’s intention was to establish the composting site on municipal lands, but the mayor’s office at the time did not see its value. “They were skeptical and asked, ‘For what? That’s not needed,’” she recalled. Yet as a biologist that works in conservation, Barandiaran understood Arache’s vision and decided to collaborate.
Arache and Barandiaran went together to ask the mayor of Vieques for help. Even though they didn’t get full support, they went forward with their plans and by 2016 they built the composting site in the Vieques Wildlife Refuge with retention ponds and infrastructure. But when Hurricane María made landfall just a few months later, it completely destroyed the site.
Shortly after the hurricane, Arache and Barandiaran met with the mayor again and explained that they could take the vegetative materials blown down by the storm; it was otherwise slated to go to the town’s landfill. But the mayor still didn’t budge. Arache and Barandiaran next met with FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to explain that they had the space to receive the materials. Although it took months, eventually the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began transferring the vegetative materials to Isla Nena Composta.
Once the federal agencies were on board, the mayor decided to support the program as well. “When you have a government agency working with a community organization, they complement each other very well because the government agency can recognize and give them legitimacy,” Barandiaran added.
In 2021, there was a change in the local government – and its mindset toward composting. José ‘Junito’ Corcino Acevedo, the current mayor, is a former commercial fisherman who had previously purchased compost from Isla Nena Composta and understood the project’s value.
The legislative assembly of Vieques has since signed an ordinance that decrees that any vegetative material on Vieques should be processed by Isla Nena Composta. The municipality, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and Isla Nena Composta also signed a collaborative agreement that gave the nonprofit a municipal contractor that receives the vegetative material from Monday to Friday. This allows Isla Nena Composta to have steady hours and gives Arache time to work on critical education and fundraising efforts.
Mayor Corcino says that he wanted to work with Isla Nena Composta because it has the potential of extending the life of the landfill, to control brush fires at the garbage dump, and because it reduces disease carriers such as rats, mosquitoes, ticks, and cockroaches.
After Hurricane Fiona hit the island last month, the municipality hired two companies to take vegetative debris to Isla Nena Composta. “It has been our salvation,” explained Corcino Acevedo in a phone interview a few weeks after the storm. “Almost all the vegetative material has been taken to Isla Nena Composta instead of the landfill.”
Between the required equipment, transportation, and labor costs, solid waste management is an expensive industry. As nonprofits, community groups, and local small businesses step in to address Puerto Rico’s landfill crisis, they’re running into major financial hurdles.
Between 2017 and 2021, hurricanes Irma and María, earthquakes, and the pandemic all worsened Puerto Rico’s landfill crisis, which moved Governor Pedro Pierluisi to declare a landfill emergency in early 2021, and with it making funds available to bring landfills into compliance. But almost a year has passed and no money has been distributed. Community organizations say they are having a hard time accessing that money because of bureaucracy and a lack of federal understanding of local conditions.
According to María V. Rodríguez Muñoz, director of the land contamination control area for the Department of Natural Resources in Puerto Rico, the agency is currently planning a public hearing to listen to nonprofits and community organizations working with solid waste management.
Isla Nena Compost has had to rely on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife equipment to maintain its composting and fruit tree facility, but it lacks the equipment to process the new raw material it has collected. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired a company to grind the vegetative debris from Hurricane María, but their contract ended after the hurricane clean up concluded. Industrial shredders can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – money the organization does not have. It also needs funds to train and employ knowledgeable staff.
“The biggest challenge is to keep operating with limited resources. We need basic equipment to move the materials, grind them, and be able to market [the resulting compost], and in this way sustain the operation,” said Arache, who has applied for public funding with no avail. Her goal is to make Isla Nena Composta financially viable. “We are having some success but we could accelerate the process if the government would support us with subsidies that are available but never arrive,” she said. “The federal government has money, I don’t know what happens if they don’t get it where they need to.”
As more intense storms hit Puerto Rico due to climate change, and more power outages cause food waste and damaged appliances, there is a critical need to invest in solutions.
“The goal is that a local NGO can create dignified jobs for local people,” Barandiaran of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. “When Isla Nena Composta is operating as we envision, it can generate 20 [recurring] jobs, that’s 20 families impacted.” Because Vieques has 2,405 households, impacting 20 of those households is essential to help retain citizens in an island that has been severely impacted by the economic recession and emigration and where more than half of its population lives below the poverty line.
Aside from the setbacks, Arache is committed to her mission because she believes that recycling and composting are essential for humanity’s survival.
“If the Earth recycles, the universe recycles, then we need to recycle to continue the circle of life,” she said.
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