Newswise — The College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois Chicago has announced that Liesl Olson has accepted the position of director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, effective March 1, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.
Olson is a respected scholar, cultural leader and social justice advocate who most recently built and directed the Chicago Studies program at the Newberry Library. This innovative series of public events, institutes for teachers, workshops and seminars leveraged the library’s unique archival collection to bring Chicago’s rich and complex history to life. It is distinguished by its many partnerships and far reach and has focused on such historical subjects as the neighborhood of Hull-House, the legacy of protest and riots in Chicago, the Great Migration, and the history of artists, writers and performers in Chicago and the Midwest.
Rebecca Rugg, dean of UIC’s College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, hailed Olson’s appointment.
“The promise of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in the 21st century relies on the stewardship of Addams’ prescient ideals and public practice through visionary programming for diverse audiences. Liesl Olson has demonstrated her leadership in this capacity through the Newberry’s Chicago Studies program, and she will do the same at UIC. We are thrilled to welcome her,” Rugg said.
A commitment to social justice and public engagement is a fundamental component of Olson’s work to date. Her writing has amplified and yielded new insights to the contributions of women and makers of color in Chicago, past and present. Olson extends her research and perspectives far beyond the academy into robust public practice through her service as board member of and participant in the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, workshops for teachers, and lively talks on PBS and NPR.
In 2020, Olson helped spearhead Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots, a programming series in partnership with 10 Chicago cultural organizations that explored the history and legacy of Chicago’s red summer. Recognizing the Chicago 1919’s ambition and accomplishments, Olson and her Newberry colleagues were awarded the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History.
“I am honored and thrilled to lead the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum into an exciting new era. I have long admired Hull-House for the way it exemplifies the historic intersection between the arts and activism in Chicago,” Olson said. “I hope to bring the distinctiveness of this city’s cultural life into conversations that help us broaden our understanding of the city’s history and its contemporary challenges. I look forward to working with the extraordinary staff at Hull-House, with students, faculty and staff at UIC, and with neighborhood partners across the city. Together we can carry forth a vision of social justice that inspired one of my great heroes, the feminist, activist, and champion of the arts, Jane Addams.”
Important exhibitions and projects led by Olson include the fall 2021 Newberry Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time exhibition and catalogue about remarkable women — Gertrude Abercrombie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Katherine Dunham, Ruth Page and Katharine Kuh — who made indelible contributions to 20th century art history. Since 2013, Olson has directed five National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes that explore the art and culture of Chicago, including the summer 2022 institute Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955.
Olson is also the author of the award-winning “Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis and Modernism and the Ordinary” and is frequently invited to write and speak about Chicago cultural history for scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, television and radio. She was awarded a Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022.
Lisa Yun Lee, a former Hull-House Museum director and current National Public Housing Museum executive director, is on the faculty of UIC’s art history department and served on the search committee.
“UIC students, faculty and the Chicago public will be the beneficiaries of Olson’s appointment,” Lee said. “She espouses the values that Jane Addams embodies and the commitment to social justice the museum advances every day. Her proven ability to bring history to life and make it relevant for diverse audiences distinguishes her in the field.”
As director, Olson will work closely with the dean of the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts to serve internal UIC audiences and external constituencies, while activating the mission and collections of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum serves as a dynamic memorial to social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and her colleagues whose work changed the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. The museum preserves and develops the original Hull-House site for the interpretation and continuation of the historic settlement house vision, linking research, education and social engagement. The museum is located in two of the original settlement house buildings — the Hull Home, a National Historic Landmark, and the Residents’ Dining Hall, a beautiful Arts and Crafts building that has welcomed some of the world’s most important thinkers, artists and activists.
A group of U.S. lawmakers wants the Biden administration to ask the United Arab Emirates to remove the oil company chief the country chose to lead the next U.N. climate talks — or at a minimum “seek assurances” that the UAE will promote an ambitious COP28 summit.
In a letter to Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry, 27 members of the House and Senate called for him to “urge” the UAE to withdraw the appointment of UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to lead the COP28 discussions, which start November 30 in Dubai. The company is one of the world’s largest oil producers.
“The appointment of an oil company executive to head COP 28 poses a risk to the negotiation process as well as the whole conference itself,” said the note, which was shared exclusively with POLITICO.
“To help ensure that COP 28 is a serious and productive climate summit, we believe the United States should urge the United Arab Emirates to name a different lead for COP 28 or, at a minimum, seek assurances that it will promote an ambitious COP 28 aligned with the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit,” the lawmakers added.
Kerry — along with other climate diplomats, including the EU’s Frans Timmermans — has repeatedly defended Al Jaber’s appointment in recent weeks, calling him a “terrific choice” in an interview with the Associated Press. Kerry also said ADNOC understood the need to shift its business away from fossil fuels. Kerry’s office was not immediately available to comment on the letter.
A COP28 spokesperson, who had not seen the letter, defended Al Jaber’s record “as a diplomat, minister, and business leader across the energy and renewables industry.” They highlighted his role as founder of renewables company Masdar, calling it “one of the world’s largest renewable energy company with clean energy investments in over 40 countries.”
“His experience uniquely positions him to be able to convene both the public and private sector to bring about pragmatic solutions to achieve the goals and aspirations of the Paris Climate Agreement,” the spokesperson said.
But the U.S. lawmakers noted the long history of fossil fuel industry interference in climate talks.
“Having a fossil fuel champion in charge of the world’s most important climate negotiations would be like having the CEO of a cigarette conglomerate in charge of global tobacco policy. It risks undermining the very essence of what is trying to be accomplished,” they wrote.
A philosopher weighs in on the rise of voter suppression, anti-protest legislation and efforts to roll back racial progress
Fifty-six years after Martin Luther King, Jr., told students at Southern Methodist University that “we have come a long way but we still have a long, long way to go,” Rutgers philosopher Derrick Darby is making a similar argument.
Darby, a Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and founding director of the Social Justice Solutions Research Collaboratory, discusses alliances, voting rights, affirmative action and the limits of racial remedies.
Martin Luther King Jr. argued that voter suppression undermines a citizen’s right to make choices, undermining their dignity. Equal voting rights is something King strived to get the nation to do. What would he think of voter access today?
The forms of voter suppression seen across America would have been a major concern for Dr. King. Tactics include tougher photo identification laws, closing or reducing polling places, attempts to eliminate Sunday early voting and making vote by mail more difficult.
It is doubly shameful in a democracy like ours that values equality and justice when it creates a significant burden for groups such as communities of color, seniors, young people and the poor.
Members of these groups tend to have more limited opportunities to vote because of voter suppression and long wait times on Election Day. We saw this in Georgia in 2020 and during the recent midterm elections. During the 2020 election, Georgia criminalized the distribution of water or snacks to people waiting to vote. Dr. King would have been appalled. He would have supported efforts to make voting easier – including issuing a federal voting ID card, enacting automatic voter registration, expanding early voting and ensuring greater access to polling places and multilingual ballot support.
During the civil rights movement, King recognized building interracial alliances to address social problems that disproportionately affected African Americans. What were some examples?
Dr. King believed addressing voter rights and civil rights concerns was crucial to getting America to live up to its promises and potential. Relying on the power of nonviolence direct action by interracial alliances of people committed to these and other causes was vital to this effort. The 1963 March on Washington for jobs and freedom is the most well-known example of the power of such alliances.
King and other prominent civil rights organizers such as Bayard Rustin believed freedom wasn’t just about racial and other forms of discrimination. It was also about freedom from poverty, hunger, joblessness, illiteracy, preventable illness, etc. Because these issues don’t recognize racial divisions, they provide a broader basis for building alliances.
King’s support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis and his efforts to build the Poor People’s Campaign are examples of objectives that demanded broader alliances.
Although America is awash in race and race-relations discussions, antiracist books are everywhere and diversity seminars are hot tickets. Many efforts are underway to roll back the racial progress clock. What are some of these efforts?
Following the senseless murder of George Floyd by the police, there was a massive public outcry and scores of organized Black Lives Matter protests around the nation. Protesters – a large and diverse group representing different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, classes and religions – took to the streets to demand social justice and end police brutality. These protests sought racial progress.
Some state legislators proposed, and in some cases enacted, anti-protest legislation in response. Alabama enacted a law in 2021 that upgraded obstructing a sidewalk during a protest to a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. Mississippi has a pending bill that would make “violent or disorderly assembly” of seven or more people a felony and would apply to peaceful protesters who pose a danger to property, personal injury or obstruct law enforcement.
In your opinion, affirmative action was once a way to provide African Americans with better educational opportunities, but that time has passed. What do you suggest in its place?
Affirmative action – understood as a race-specific remedy – is unconstitutional. Existing efforts to promote diversity in schools have had to show that considering race as a plus factor among other factors is part of a holistic approach to ensuring diversity. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on whether this practice, is permissible. I’m not optimistic about the outcome.
Various alternatives have been proposed, such as targeting socioeconomic diversity and targeting top students in districts for admissions but the jury is out on whether they can achieve the relevant kind of diversity without triggering court challenges.
Whatever the outcome, greater investment in preparing kids from disadvantaged communities and providing support for families seeking opportunities for educational enrichment for their children is part of a broader solution.
You argue securing racial justice in America calls for “big tent” remedies. That is, antiracists must build partnerships among populations interested in issues that impact them collectively. Could you explain further with an example?
Big-tent remedies involve paying attention to matters of economic justice in addition to racial justice and remaining mindful of their interconnectedness.
Marginalized populations are disproportionately impacted by health crises such as COVID-19 because they typically have no health care or poor care. They typically work low-wage jobs with no benefits, sick leave and time off. Individuals in these populations also can’t work from home, as many work in the service industry. They must rely on public transportation, which disproportionately increases the risk of exposure and illness in poorer black and brown communities.
Health concerns, getting paid decent wages, better working conditions, affordable child care and educational opportunities are among the issues of broader concern.
The Republican Party’s assault on truth, supercharged by Donald Trump—whose prolific lying and “fake news” catchphrase defined his presidency perhaps more than his policies—brought scores of historians to the fore of mainstream news media. But the task of correcting the record has proven to be a daunting challenge in the current information ecosystem. Few historians understand the country’s historical battleground better than Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, who, in their new book, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, trace the origins of 20 age-old right-wing myths that continue to permeate American discourse today.
The book’s incisive essays poke holes in everything from American exceptionalism and white backlash to Confederate monuments and America First, taking us on a sobering tour through some of the nation’s deepest and darkest chapters. Kruse and Zelizer, two Princeton professors, argue that Republicans are no longer just revising those chapters; they’re trying to expunge them altogether. “It’s easy to say, ‘Just stick to the facts, and assume that will win out,’” Zelizer tells me. “But that’s not the era that we live in.”
This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
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Vanity Fair:A good place to start is whereMyth Americabegins in its introduction, which centers on Trump’s use of alternative facts and the concept of fake news. What do you think it is about Trump in particular that’s allowed him to create an entire political movement around completely disregarding facts, and not just bending them and shaping them to his liking, as Republicans have done in the past?
Julian Zelizer: There are two factors that were important: One is the state of the party. The Republican Party had changed a lot in the last few decades to a point where they were more comfortable with a politics that wasn’t grounded in fact. Often, disinformation became a normal way of talking about policy issues like climate change. So part of it is the party, and part of it is the media ecosystem, which over the years has lost a lot of the filters that were important. And we’ve also seen the emergence of an openly conservative media ecosystem. So there was Trump, but there was this environment that allowed him to thrive.
I know both of you are particularly public-facing historians. You write for major outlets and make TV appearances. Do you feel like Trump and his deliberate historical amnesia has compelled more historians to venture out from the academy into the mainstream media?
Kevin Kruse: Yeah, I think so. A lot of us are catching up with the work he and others have done in the last few years, and Trump has been a big part of that. Trump and his enablers and the conservative media ecosystem have pushed a series of really bold and startling claims about the American past to make their standing or their accomplishments in the American present seem bigger, better, and bolder than they otherwise might have been. And that’s, in turn, prompted a lot of us to get engaged. And I think, in this case, social media has been a two-way street. It has certainly helped Trump and his supporters spread a lot of falsehoods, but it’s also given every historian on Twitter or Facebook or Substack an easy way to respond.
Zelizer: I think one other factor is that history has become a battleground. And it always has been, but the intensity has really accelerated. You’re seeing in different states efforts to legislate what can go on in the classroom. The former president made American history a central theme. He ended his term with [the 1776 Commission]—a response, in some ways, to the 1619 Project. So I think you’ve seen a broadening of interest among historians—even historians who don’t just do modern US history, like the two of us—to get engaged and to jump in.
What are your thoughts on the mayhem that’s taking place on Capitol Hill right now, where we essentially have a House Speaker-in-waiting, who’s failed 11 times now to get enough votes from his own party. What do you think is historically unique about the chaos with Kevin McCarthy and do any aspects of it harken back to earlier times or political moments in America? [This interview was conducted last week, prior to McCarthy’s confirmation as House Speaker.]
Kruse: One way to look at it would be to say, what does this moment tell us about the larger continuum of increasing extremism in the Republican ranks? If you see Kevin McCarthy as part of this group of self-styled young guns that came out about a decade ago, where Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan and McCarthy put this clip out where they were kind of a new generation. They’ve all been picked off one-by-one as the party has moved even past their own kind of extremism on the right. Cantor got primaried for being squishy on immigration. Paul Ryan got basically forced into retirement because he couldn’t deal with the crazies on the right. And McCarthy has tried to cultivate them, but even he is not enough. So it’s less about the votes for him and more about seeing this larger race to the far fringes.
This is an opinion editorial by Frank Nuessle, a publishing entrepreneur, former university professor and social system architect.
In this essay, I argue that Bitcoin and the Lightning Network are, by themselves, not enough to successfully implement an American sound money system, and that following evolutionary economics, new social technologies and new social system designs need to be part of the equation.
The primary purpose of money is to facilitate the exchange of value. Money is also our most critical, most important, baseline social system. Bitcoin is not yet money. Bitcoin fulfills one of the three functions of money in that it is a trustworthy technology for the electronic store of value. Once Bitcoin is integrated with newly-developed social system technologies, it no doubt will fulfill that primary purpose of money — to facilitate the exchange of value.
The Problems With The American Fiat System
Before launching into my argument, let me explain why my focus is on the implementation of an American Bitcoin economy.
First, being an American, I know more about America than anywhere else.
Secondly and more importantly, America has the most to lose when the U.S. dollar is no longer recognized as the world’s only reserve currency, or the dollar becomes worthless through exponential printing. Under either outcome, there will be hell to pay — cataclysmic disruption in the United States without there being a parallel sound money system operating successfully alongside the current Federal Reserve system.
Even today, the evidence is everywhere that the American economy is not working for everyone. Disruption and anger are spilling out all over. Mass killings happening every few days are waking people up to the fact that there is a mental sickness of hate and nihilism that seems to be spreading.
America’s national political parties are not meeting the moment. The monstrous scale of American financial inequality makes genuine democracy impossible. A few years ago, ABC News reported that 40% of Americans couldn’t raise $400 to cover an emergency. How can anyone think their votes give them the same political power as, say, Jeff Bezos who makes such an obscene amount of money?
And now the crypto industry has to deal with the perfidy of Sam Bankman-Fried, who The New York Times once nicknamed the “Crypto Emperor” because he embodied the pretension of the renegade, “people’s” billionaire. He lived the lifestyle embodied by Elon Musk, Bezos and other tech billionaires, but turned out to be too young to recognize that you can’t get there by cooking the books.
Maybe, Bankman-Fried’s downfall will be a wake-up call for the crypto industry to understand that Bitcoin and blockchain are not about individuals becoming the next billionaires, but are about utilizing Bitcoin technology to create real products and services that solve real human and planetary needs, and by so doing, moving America into an expanding state of societal well being.
In his book, “The Price of Tomorrow,” Jeff Booth writes, “The trend of more wealth inequality, more polarization, and more discord is a major threat to our collective future. And it is all being caused by the same thing: adherence to an economic system designed for a different time.”
The current economic system favors large corporations and is the enemy of local commerce. This system extracts value from the local marketplace and delivers it to remote shareholders and to corporate management.
Bankman-Fried, like others in the get-rich-quick crypto community, lives out of the unexamined mindset that life is a dog-eat-dog struggle and that getting filthy rich is how you win the game. It is rumored that Bankman-Fried played video games during investor meetings. This mindset rules corporate capitalism, and let’s be honest, we all are afflicted, to some degree, with this mental state.
The most important product of many corporations today is no longer whatever they provide to customers, but the shares they sell to investors. In his book “Team Human,” Douglas Rushkoff writes, “Corporations destroy the markets on which they depend or sell off their most productive divisions in order to increase the bottom line on their quarterly reports.”
In America today, producing money is more important than producing a sustainable product or service. The corporation takes money out of the local economy — out of the land and labor — and delivers it to its shareholders.
The Importance Of Money As A Social System
Money is the most important and powerful social system ever invented by man. Civilization began with the exchange of value. The primary purpose of money is to facilitate the exchange of value within a community. A community is a group of people who rely on each other.
The true nature of the human being is to be in relationship with the planet and within a community. Only a money system that is built upon that understanding can hope to fulfill the dreams we each have invested in the future of Bitcoin and in our own communities.
The Bitcoin sound money economy must be designed for the distribution of wealth, not just the exporting of capital to the already wealthy.
Clearly, the Lightning Network allows for the velocity of transactions that can make the Bitcoin sound money economy possible in the United States. Yet the Lightning Network is not enough.
I agree with Rushkoff, who believes that we cannot solve America’s problems solely with more technology. He writes that Bitcoin and blockchain “may disintermediate exploitive financial institutions, but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion and ethos of mutual aid that is undermined by digital capitalism.”
Because Bitcoin, as a technologically-sound money system, represents a potential transformative evolution of our social reality, its successful implementation requires that we must delicately design its implementation to embed our best and most highly-refined human traits such as honesty, integrity, generosity and forgiveness.
To do so, we must remember the work of the evolutionary economist, Eric Beinhocker, and his proposal that economic evolution is not a single process, but rather the result of three interlocked processes — physical technology, social system technology and system design fitness.
To be successful, Bitcoin through the Lightning Network must ignite the evolutionary search engine that is localized, free market capitalism.
Bitcoin and the Lightning Network are clearly the needed physical technologies, but what are the social technologies and the social system design that will allow the Bitcoin sound money system to spread like a virus?
Integrating With The Current Fiat Money System
To answer the above question, Bitcoiners must fully understand what we are up against when we think about social technologies to change the American preference for the current money system.
First, there is the very strong human resistance to change because nation-controlled money systems have been predominant for hundreds of years.
Secondly, money carries so much self-worth-related emotional baggage that there is a strong reluctance to talk openly about money and even less interest in the systems for money creation. Money, like sex, is just not talked about.
When considering the strong human resistance to change, it is helpful to understand a little bit of history. First, there is the historical axiom that whoever is in power in a society creates its money.
From the 10th to the 13th centuries, a historical period in Europe known as the Middle Ages, currencies were issued by local lords, and then periodically recalled and reissued with a tax collected in the process. This was a form of demurrage that made money less desirable as a store of value. The result was the blossoming of culture and widespread wellbeing throughout Europe. This prosperity corresponded exactly to the time period when these local currencies were issued.
We are talking about 600 years of enculturation which provide a strong psychological headwind against the successful implementation of an alternative, American, bitcoin-based money system. We have all faced this headwind when trying to convince friends or relatives about the significance of the Bitcoin innovation.
There is an interesting new concept from complex systems theory called “basins of attraction” that can help to visualize this headwind.
A basin of attraction is any complex system, such as a biological ecosystem, a human social system or ideas about a money system, that has multiple, local equilibrium states rather than a single equilibrium point. This is easier to understand with a visual representing two basins of attraction placed near each other.
Picture a ball, representing the ideas about a money system or money in general, lying at the bottom of one of these basins and think about how it must move to another basin of attraction for lasting change to occur.
You can imagine how the current money system will resist incremental change and that it will have the capacity to absorb many shocks to retain its historical attraction. There are over 600 years of pull into the state-controlled money system basin of attraction.
What’s needed is a new basin of attraction, a new configuration of ideas, with its own gravitational pull.
Bitcoin as sound money is that new basin of attraction.
Any conscious attempt to move that ball into a new bitcoin basin of attraction must include exposure and acceptance by a tipping point of public acceptance within a marketplace. To successfully move the culture to the bitcoin basin of attraction will require a change to the American story about money. More about that later in this essay.
Money As A Measure Of Self Worth And Survival
When considering the strong human resistance to thinking about money systems, it is helpful to dive into the deeper emotional issues people have about money.
Money is one of the primary taboos of American society, along with sex and death. Money is really the last taboo. Think about it: it’s less taboo today to talk about who you slept with last night than about how much money you have. It’s a real cultural blind spot.
To understand what those taboos have in common, we need to delve into collective psychology best described by archetypes. Archetypes are patterns of emotions and behavior that can be observed across civilizations and time periods.
One important archetype is the great mother, which represents the mother figure in mythology, religion and Jungian psychology. Repression of the great mother archetype is clear in the American collective consciousness. When you repress an archetype, it manifests itself through its specific shadows — with money, that turns out to be greed and fear of scarcity.
The earliest currencies all directly related to the great mother.
For instance, thousands of years before the common era, the original Sumerian shekel was closely linked to Inanna, the goddess of life, death and sexuality. Grain backed the money of the time. Farmers were given shekels for their grain which they could exchange for sex with the virgins of the temple. This was how they assured grain storage for the lean years they had often experienced in their history.
For the Sumerians, it was the priests who controlled the money. They gave receipts for wheat delivered to the temples as tax. The receipts could be used as currency to pay for sex with the temple priestesses or for other goods in the marketplace. These receipts were something like a modern-day, tax-funded welfare system — the wheat was a buffer stock, the sex, a fertility ritual and a charm against harvest failure (think of it as a type of early insurance).
It’s also interesting to note that the English word “money” itself derives from the Roman temple of Juno Moneta in Rome from whose basement the mint of the empire operated. Juno was the Italic goddess of the menstrual cycle, sexuality, pregnancy, birth… and, of course, money.
How To Convince Others Of The Value Of Bitcoin
So, how does one burst through the very strong human resistance to change and the unconscious mental taboos that surround fears about money?
Many Bitcoiners have come to realize that you are never going to overcome their brother-in-law’s beliefs through the force of logic and evidence. People arrange the evidence to align with their existing beliefs and their outlooks on life.
These individual personal beliefs are woven into a cultural story that becomes a consensus reality about money or, in the language of cultural systems theory, America’s current basin of attraction for money.
The current American cultural story about money is a story about scarcity and about there never being enough. This is a design feature of the current debt-based money system where the money supply must grow to pay back the interest because there is literally “never enough” so people must fight over what there is. This design feature is the fiat money system growth imperative which must, at some point, go exponential or go through a process of debt forgiveness.
As Charles Eisenstein writes, “As long as most people acquiesce to the present system, those heavily invested in its perpetuation (i.e. the already rich) will find ways to keep pretending that it is sustainable.”
To change existing opinions and beliefs about money requires giving people an experience that does not fit the existing story or an experience that resonates with a new story.
Buckminster Fuller used to say that you never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change a social system, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Eisenstein believes that the most direct way to disrupt the American story of scarcity is to give people an experience not based on scarcity. That could be “an act of generosity, forgiveness, attention, truth or unconditional acceptance.” This new story must be an invitation to a new way of being in the world, unafraid and connected. It must be an offer. One cannot compel another person to change beliefs.
Remembering Beinhocker’s three interlocked processes of economic evolution, we are back to the seminal question: “What are the social technologies and the social system design parameters that will integrate with Bitcoin technology to allow the Bitcoin sound money system to spread like a virus?”
This is a guest post by Frank Nuessle. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
KYIV — When the Russians first came to the school where Larysa taught history in southeastern Ukraine, they asked for all the history and Ukrainian language textbooks.
The director refused to hand them over.
The school closed — but then reopened virtually on September 1, with up to 80 percent of its 700 pupils attending online. More than half of them remain in occupied Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia region, said Larysa, who left in April for the Odesa region.
“Some go to Russian school and do homework with us,” she said. “We do all we can to make it incognito. We deleted all electronic lists, never put up any photos or screenshots or write names.”
Larysa did not give her surname or name the school for security reasons. Half of her colleagues are still on occupied territory and teaching online, risking imprisonment or worse from occupying forces — two were already detained and later released in September.
“They’re holding lessons in extreme conditions,” Larysa said. “Some were saved just because someone was on lookout. The wife was teaching a lesson and her husband was watching from the window so that she had time to hide everything before they came.”
After reopening in autumn 2021, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, Ukrainian schools have moved mostly back online following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But from bombs to blackouts to displacement to occupation, millions of Ukrainian children and young adults face an education interrupted, with educators struggling to work under desperate conditions.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Ministry of Education. School buildings are at risk of shelling or lack heating after massive damage to the country’s energy infrastructure, while blackouts and interrupted internet connections hamper learning from home.
Meanwhile, thousands of students and teachers living under occupation face pressure to switch to Russian schooling.
Education, with its propaganda potential to influence young hearts and minds, has become a front line in the war.
Ideological battle
Crimea, under Russian control for more than eight years, is an example of how Russian education in occupied territories aims — with eventual success — to erase Ukrainian identity and militarize children.
History lessons there claim that Ukraine was always part of Russia. Army cadet courses and classes sponsored by law enforcement agencies start for children as young as six, says Maria Sulyanina from the Crimean Human Rights Group.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed | Genya Savilov AFP via Getty images
“We see that these children who were small kids when the occupation started, after eight years they have been turned into Russians,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has steadily been moving its educational system away from that inherited from the Soviet Union. It has relegated Russian to foreign language teaching; moved Russian literature to part of the study of world literature; and revised history courses to include events like the Holodomor, the Soviet-caused famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians and is still largely denied in Russia.
Yet despite Russia’s carrot-and-stick approach — from September, parents in recently occupied territories are paid a one-off of 10,000 rubles (€145) to send their children to Russian school, plus 4,000 per month that they stay — many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it.
But the war has made Ukrainian education extremely tenuous.
When Russia invaded and occupied Kupiansk, a town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, the vocational school where Viktoria Scherbakova taught was pressured to switch to the Russian system, and later damaged and looted.
Now, her classroom — and office — is the kitchen table at a small rented flat she shares with her two children and elderly parents in Kyiv, after she and her children fled the Russian occupation. The flat is also her daughter’s Kharkiv university virtual lecture hall and her son’s Kyiv ninth-grade classroom on days when air raid sirens sound and he can’t attend school.
The motor transport vocational college in Kupiansk where Scherbakova taught, which offered practical training for mechanics and drivers along with courses in transport logistics to some 300 pupils aged 14 to 18, exists as a displaced, virtual entity, with no home of its own. Although she is offering lessons online, Scherbakova doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to teach there again in person.
“We’re not in Kyiv, not in Kharkiv, not in Kupiansk,” she said. “We’re not anywhere.”
The education front line
As of October, about 1,300 schools were on Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia. Teachers have been targeted for collaboration and detained, threatened and mistreated. Staff have been sent to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea for retraining in the Russian education system or told they would be replaced by teachers from Russia if they refused to work.
In Kupiansk, after the then-mayor surrendered to the Russians on February 27, educational establishments stayed open. However, many parents kept their children out of school — including Scherbakova, whose 14-year-old son stayed at home although she herself continued to work at the college.
Apart from hoisting a Russian flag outside, the occupiers left them alone — until June. But by the end of term, it became clear that staff would be forced to decide: leave, or start the next school year under the Russian system.
“And if you didn’t work for them, it wasn’t clear what the consequences would be,” said Scherbakova. “If you openly said you didn’t support them, you would end up in their prisons or cellars.”
Many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
One school director in Kupiansk, who refused to open her school after occupation, spent almost a month detained in the basement of the police station.
Of nearly 50 teaching and administrative staff in the vocational college, only seven refused to work with the Russian occupying authorities, according to Scherbakova.
“I’m ashamed of my college,” she said.
Spurred by the apparent ultimatum, Scherbakova and her children managed to leave Kupiansk for free Ukrainian territory in early June. The college was moved to operate virtually in Ukrainian-controlled territory, with her role shifting to acting director. With a colleague, they printed diplomas for those graduates who were reachable — 35 out of 53 — and developed a program to start the new teaching year.
But when she and a colleague started calling students, they found out that the teenagers had been enrolled to start the year in the college in Kupiansk — under the Russian system.
The physical and the virtual college started teaching parallel courses on September 1. Eight days later, Ukrainian forces took back Kupiansk.
When Scherbakova went back to Kupiansk after liberation, she found that though the college had been completely looted of its equipment and training vehicles, the library was full of untouched new Russian textbooks.
Some of the college staff who had remained in Kupiansk fled to Russia. Others got in touch with Scherbakova asking if they could work with her.
“At first I didn’t have an answer. I’m not the SBU [Ukrainian security services], I can’t judge them,” she said.
Some are under suspicion of collaboration. Later, the Ministry of Education clarified that teachers who had collaborated or brought in the Russian education system were banned from teaching. According to Ukrainian legislation on collaboration adopted in early September, teachers who engage in Russian propaganda in schools can be sentenced to prison terms. By mid-September, 19 proceedings had been opened against teachers in Ukraine.
Back in Kyiv,Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine.
Her students, scattered around the country by war, face power outages too. Others, displaced abroad, are fitting lessons around schooling in Germany or England. And some remain in Kupiansk, recently liberated from occupation, where there is no internet, and the town comes under Russian shelling morning and night.
Viktoria Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty images
“Those ones, all I can do is call and ask: ‘Are you alive? How did the night go? This is your exam question, just tell me something, whatever comes into your head,’” said Scherbakova.
“Of course, I can’t give them good marks. But I can’t abandon them.”
Lost generation
The physical challenges of war and the ideological battle as Russia seeks to impose its education system threaten the very basis of education in Ukraine: participation.
Scherbakova says her students, many of whom come from low-income families, are dropping out of online courses. “They need to survive. They dropped everything to find work,” she said. “Many of them had to leave their homes, and they need to live on something.”
Teachers are leaving the profession too — due to migration, retirement, low salaries, and war-related stresses and bans. The Kharkiv region has lost nearly 3,000 of 21,500 teachers since February, according to its education department.
In Kupiansk, as in many liberated towns and villages, the will to learn is not matched by the necessary infrastructure of electricity, internet and teachers. Children can only get an education if they move.
“We don’t want to leave. This is our land, and we want to live here,” said Iryna Protsenko, who was recently collecting humanitarian aid in Kupiansk with her daughter Zlata, 6. The family ran a small dairy business in the town before the war and stayed throughout occupation. “But now I’m afraid we will have to leave, because of school.”
Zlata, smiling shyly next to her mother, wants to learn, said Protsenko. She should start school this year. For the moment they read books together at home — easier now that electricity has been restored. “But she’s lonely.”
Ukrainian children were already starved of live interaction due to pandemic restrictions. Now, with only online teaching, plus the interrupted routines and safety restrictions of war, they are becoming increasingly stressed and withdrawn.
“It’s not so much the quality of education as the communication. They are losing socialization,” said Larysa, the teacher from Berdiansk.
Some parents compare the situation to that of their grandparents, who missed years of education during World War II. When the war was over, they had to study together with much younger children, earning themselves the name ‘pererostki,’ or ‘overgrown.’
“I think it will be like my grandma,” said Maria Varenikova, a journalist living in Kyiv with her son Nazar, 11. “Something will have to be figured out in Ukraine, given that for years children don’t have an education because of COVID, and now war.”
“They try hard and worry so much. They are lost children” said teacher Viktoria Scherbakova | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
Nazar’s school opened in person this September, keeping going with generators, bottled water and a basement bomb shelter. But Nazar is repeating the largely lost previous school year.
Scherbakova’s son, on top of the trauma of fleeing his home, had to cram in most of the last school year in extra classes over the summer in order to progress to the next grade in Kyiv.
“They try hard and worry so much,” said Scherbakova. “They are lost children.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Only recently, just before the pandemic, it seemed big companies were on a roll. A few “superstar” companies were dominating software industries and reaching their tentacles into multiple sectors. Market share was concentrated in much of the economy, the performance gap between large and small companies was widening and people were forming fewer new businesses. An article in Harvard Business Review reported concerns that “a lack of competition was strangling the U.S. economy.”
Many of those worries have begun to fade. We’re seeing a historic surge in new business creation and a shrinking performance gap between big and small businesses. The pandemic, with its “Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting,” was only a catalyst, accelerating an inevitable change — inevitable because that’s the nature of large organizations. They can’t sustain dominance for long, and indeed the profitability and longevity of big companies have been shrinking for decades. The superstar companies, now suffering from depressed stock prices, are laying off thousands of talented employees, giving way to smaller firms that are still hiring.
While this is a striking change of events, it follows a cycle that has existed since the beginnings of capitalism. By looking back at previous cycles of creative destruction, in which large firms have risen only to fall to scrappy smaller competitors, entrepreneurs can find many lessons that are applicable today.
The first lesson is that large companies tend to grow complacent the more successful they become. This provides an opening to smaller companies that are hungrier and more ambitious.
For example, the East India Company, chartered in 1600 and arguably the world’s first big business, once operated not only ships and warehouses but armies of soldiers to enforce colonial exploitation. Enjoying a monopoly on imports of tea and other staples, its power was so great that Adam Smith devoted a large section of The Wealth of Nations to criticizing its heft. Yet the company became a victim of its own success, eventually declining as its leaders enriched themselves, got caught up in politics, and stopped innovating.
The same lesson applies today. As soon as large companies think they’re in a solid situation, they relax and start enjoying their position. That’s the perfect time to enter the market with an innovation or a fresh way of thinking.
Lesson 2: Powerful connections aren’t everything
The second lesson is that entrepreneurs can still beat out larger companies even if they lack the same connections to power. History shows that “right” can often beat “might.”
Consider the example of wealthy Robert Livingston, who funded Robert Fulton’s successful invention of the steamboat in 1807. Livingston used his connections and wealth to gain a monopoly of the ferry business between New York City and New Jersey. But scrappy Cornelius Vanderbilt, with no social standing or education, dared to challenge Livingston’s privilege and won a landmark Supreme Court case, Gibbons v. Ogden, striking down interstate monopoly charters. Thanks to Vanderbilt’s relentless push for efficiency and lower costs – and the new country’s distaste for government-backed privileges, he gained the capital to improve not only ferries but ocean-going ships and then railroads.
Vanderbilt proved that companies that rely on personal connections often become over-confident, believing themselves protected from competition. This makes them vulnerable to smaller competitors who are willing to call out their unfair practices.
Lesson 3: Big companies prefer stability to innovation
By the end of the 19th century, steel had become fundamental to the economy, and Andrew Carnegie had the biggest and best factories. Like Vanderbilt, he had rapidly expanded by keeping costs low and reinvesting profits. The remaining steelmakers were so concerned about his moves into their markets that they pressed J.P. Morgan to buy him out for the then incredible price of $480 million.
After Morgan did so, creating U.S. Steel, he failed to maintain Carnegie’s aggressiveness, allowing tiny rivals to expand. Fearing antitrust and preferring stability and dividends to risky growth, U.S. Steel failed to innovate and eventually fell apart with foreign competition and the rise of steel mini-mills in the 1960s.
U.S. Steel’s preoccupation with stability is common among large firms, and it’s an opportunity for smaller competitors to rise up. Consider the many brick-and-mortar retailers that failed to invest in e-commerce until it was too late. They assumed they were safe because of their size, but their failure to innovate ultimately caused their downfall.
Innovation is critical to building and maintaining a competitive advantage — and it gets harder to do as companies succeed and grow. Entrepreneurs, as guerillas, can often find openings of attack against even the mightiest of gorilla companies.
The history of creative destruction shows us that the current travails of Big Tech companies like Meta are nothing new. Large companies tend to fall prey to a combination of hubris and complacency, while ambitious entrepreneurs continue to find openings to take advantage of emerging technologies and market trends.
Energetic commitment and talent will beat resource-rich rivals, as long as entrepreneurs pick their fights wisely. There are two reliable ways of spotting opportunities to do so.
First, as companies get bigger, even well-managed ones must leave opportunities on the table — market segments or product opportunities too small or too different for them to do well in or focus on. These often provide windows of opportunity for small players. Today’s small markets can become tomorrow’s large markets.
Second, new technologies and platform shifts inevitably create openings for nimbler firms, whether in specialized areas such as digital marketing or in transformative areas such as blockchain. Big companies almost never move fast enough.
Finally, in assessing today’s large companies, it’s important to remember that their success usually came from a basic entrepreneurial achievement combined with an organizational mindset. As entrepreneurs grow their businesses, they should be mindful of the competencies they have developed and remain intent on building new ones over time. New competencies — fueled by innovation — will likely increase their trajectory in growth and value.
A modern economy still needs big companies, which are essential to producing goods and services at scale at an affordable price. That’s where they excel. But we also need entrepreneurs to challenge them wherever they fall short — and eventually, replace them as new giants to move the economy forward.
For pundits and other desk-bound observers, bigness might seem inevitable. But bigness also inevitably corrupts. The vitality is not in supposedly “professional” management but in scrappy entrepreneurs.
Newswise — A new study shows that the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of land that once connected Asia to Alaska, emerged far later during the last ice age than previously thought.
The unexpected findings shorten the window of time that humans could have first migrated from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.
The findings also indicate that there may be a less direct relationship between climate and global ice volume than scientists had thought, casting into doubt some explanations for the chain of events that causes ice age cycles. The study was published on December 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This result came totally out of left field,” said Jesse Farmer, postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and co-lead author on the study. “As it turns out, our research into sediments from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean told us not only about past climate change but also one of the great migrations in human history.”
Insight into ice age cycles
During the periodic ice ages over Earth’s history, global sea levels drop as more and more of Earth’s water becomes locked up in massive ice sheets. At the end of each ice age, as temperatures increase, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. These ice age cycles repeat throughout the last 3 million years of Earth’s history, but their causes have been hard to pin down.
By reconstructing the history of the Arctic Ocean over the last 50,000 years, the researchers revealed that the growth of the ice sheets — and the resulting drop in sea level — occurred surprisingly quickly and much later in the last glacial cycle than previous studies had suggested.
“One implication is that ice sheets can change more rapidly than previously thought,” Farmer said.
During the last ice age’s peak of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, the low sea levels exposed a vast land area that extended between Siberia and Alaska known as Beringia, which included the Bering Land Bridge. In its place today is a passage of water known as the Bering Strait, which connects the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Based on records of estimated global temperature and sea level, scientists thought the Bering Land Bridge emerged around 70,000 years ago, long before the Last Glacial Maximum.
But the new data show that sea levels became low enough for the land bridge to appear only 35,700 years ago. This finding was particularly surprising because global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume.
“Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” Farmer said. For example, the change in ice volume may have been the direct result of changes in the intensity of sunlight that struck the ice surface over the summer.
“These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect,” said Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University and Farmer’s postdoctoral advisor. “Our next goal is to extend this record further back in time to see if the same tendencies apply to other major ice sheet changes. The scientific community will be hungry for confirmation.”
New context for human migration
The timing of human migration into North America from Asia remains unresolved, but genetic studies tell us that ancestral Native American populations diverged from Asian populations about 36,000 years ago, the same time that Farmer and colleagues found that the Bering Land Bridge emerged.
“It’s generally believed that the land bridge was open for a while, and then humans crossed it at some point,” Sigman said. “But our new data suggest that the land bridge was not open, and as soon as it opened up, human populations made their way into North America.”
The finding raises questions about why humans decided to migrate as soon as the land bridge opened, and how humans made their way across the land bridge with no previous knowledge of the landscape.
The researchers noted that they need to be cautious when considering these implications, as the interpretation requires combining very different types of information, including the new data and the information of human geneticists and paleoanthropologists. They look forward to seeing how their results are built upon by these other scientific communities.
A window to the past
To reconstruct the history of the Bering Strait, Farmer and Sigman sought an ocean chemical fingerprint.
Pacific waters carry high concentrations of nitrogen molecules that have a distinct chemical composition, known as an isotope ratio. Today, waters from the Pacific Ocean travel northwards across the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, carrying a traceable nitrogen isotope ratio.
By measuring nitrogen isotopes in sediments at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, Farmer found that the fingerprint of Pacific Ocean nitrogen disappeared when the Bering Strait was closed during the peak of the last ice age, as expected.
But when Farmer continued his analyses further back in time – to about 50,000 years ago – he found that the Pacific nitrogen fingerprint returned far more recently than researchers had thought possible.
“When Jesse showed me his data, he didn’t need to explain to me what had happened,” Sigman said. “It was too large of a change to be anything other than a previous opening of the Bering Strait.”
To understand the implications for global sea level, Farmer and Sigman collaborated with Tamara Pico, a sea level expert and professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, Princeton undergraduate Class of 2014, and co-lead author on the paper. Pico compared Farmer’s results with sea level models based on different scenarios for the growth of the ice sheets.
“When Jesse contacted me I was so excited,” Pico said. “A large part of my PhD thesis was focused on how fast global ice sheets grew leading into the Last Glacial Maximum, and much of my work suggests that they might have grown faster than previously thought.”
Farmer’s nitrogen analyses provided a new set of evidence to back up Pico’s research about sea levels during the last ice age.
“The exciting thing to me is that this provides a completely independent constraint on global sea level during this time period,” Pico said. “Some of the ice sheet histories that have been proposed differ by quite a lot, and we were able to look at what the predicted sea level would be at the Bering Strait and see which ones are consistent with the nitrogen data.”
“This study brought together experts in the Arctic Ocean, nitrogen cycling and global sea level. And the outcome has consequences not only for climate and sea level but also for human prehistory,” Farmer said. “One of the thrilling aspects of paleoclimate research is the opportunity to collaborate across such a broad range of subjects.”
“The Bering Strait was flooded 10,000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum,” by Jesse R. Farmer, Tamara Pico, Ona M. Underwood, Rebecca Cleveland Stout, Julie Granger, Thomas M. Cronin, François Fripiat, Alfredo Martínez-García, Gerald H. Haug, and Daniel M. Sigman appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2206742119). The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-2054780 and OCE-2054757), the Tuttle and Phillips Funds of the Department of Geosciences, the Max Planck Society, and the USGS Climate Research and Development Program.
Newswise — Analysis of more than 1,200 vessels from hunter-gatherer sites has shown that pottery-making techniques spread vast distances over a short period of time through social traditions being passed on.
The team, which includes researchers from the University of York and the British Museum, analysed the remains of 1,226 pottery vessels from 156 hunter-gatherer sites across nine countries in Northern and Eastern Europe. They combined radiocarbon dating, together with data on the production and decoration of ceramic vessels, and analysis of the remains of food found inside the pots.
Their findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that pottery-making spread rapidly westwards from 5,900 BCE onwards and took only 300–400 years to advance over 3,000 km, equivalent to 250 km in a single generation.
Professor Oliver Craig, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “Our analysis of the ways pots were designed and decorated as well as new radiocarbon dates suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission.
“By this we mean that the activity spread by the exchange of ideas between groups of hunter-gatherers living nearby, rather than through migration of people or an expanding population as we see for other key changes in human history such as the introduction of agriculture.”
“That methods of pottery-making spread so far and so fast through the passing on of ideas is quite surprising. Specific knowledge may have been shared through marriages or at centres of aggregation, specific points in the landscape where groups of hunter-gatherers came together perhaps at certain times of the year.”
By studying traces of organic materials left in the pots, the team demonstrated that the pottery was used for cooking, so the ideas of pottery-making may have been spread through shared culinary traditions.
Carl Heron, from the British Museum, said: “We found evidence that the vessels were used for cooking a wide range of animals, fish and plants, and this variety suggests that the drivers for making the pottery were not in response to a particular need, such as detoxifying plants or processing fish, as has previously been suggested.
“We also found patterns suggesting that pottery use was transmitted along with knowledge of their manufacture and decoration. These can be seen as culinary traditions that were rapidly transmitted with the artefacts themselves.”
The world’s earliest pottery containers come from East Asia and may have spread rapidly eastwards through Siberia, before being taken up by hunter-gatherer societies across Northern Europe, long before the arrival of farming.
This research is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
The unanimous vote awarded Till and his mother, both civil rights icons, the Congressional Gold Medal.
The United States House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager murdered in a racially-motivated attack in the 1950s, and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley.
The bill, which passed the Senate in January, is meant to honour Till and his mother – who had insisted on an open-coffin funeral to demonstrate the brutality of her son’s killing – with the highest civilian honour that Congress awards.
The medal will be given to the National Museum of African American History where it will be displayed near the coffin Till was buried in.
Till was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman at a grocery store in rural Mississippi, a violation of the South’s racist social codes at the time.
Four days later, he was rousted from bed at his great-uncle’s home in the predawn hours and abducted. His killing galvanised the US civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on the open coffin and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalised body.
The Senate bill was introduced by Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Richard Burr. The House version of the legislation is sponsored by Democratic Representative Bobby Rush, who also introduced a bill to issue a commemorative postage stamp in honour of Mamie Till-Mobley. She died in 2003.
“The courage and activism demonstrated by Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in displaying to the world the brutality endured by her son helped awaken the nation’s conscience, forcing America to reckon with its failure to address racism and the glaring injustices that stem from such hatred,” Booker said in a statement after the bill passed the Senate.
Congress has been handing out the medals since 1776, with previous recipients including civil rights icons like Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine and Jackie Robinson. The designation comes months after President Joe Biden signed the first anti-lynching legislation, named after Till, into law.
Until March of this year, Congress had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, beginning with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Representative George Henry White, the only Black member of Congress at the time.
PARIS — When French President Emmanuel Macron’s party lost its absolute majority in parliament six months ago, many wondered what the setback would mean for an ambitious, here-to-disrupt-the-status-quo leader whose first term was defined by a top-down style of management.
It turns out Macron 2.0 is a man about globe, pitching “strategic intimacy” to world leaders, as he leaves domestic politics to his chief lieutenant and concentrates on his preferred sphere: international diplomacy.
The Frenchman’s past “intimate” moves have been well-documented: affectionate hugging with Angela Merkel, knuckle-crunching handshakes with Donald Trump, and serial bromancing with the likes ofJustin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak. Now in his second term, the French president appears to be making a move on — quite literally — the world.
Since his reelection, Macron has been hopping from one official visit to another: in Algeria one day to restore relations with a former colony, in Bangkok another to woo Asian nations, and in Washington most recently to shore up the relationship with Washington. The globetrotting head of state has drawn criticism in the French press that he is deserting the home front.
“He is everywhere, follows everything, but he’s mostly elsewhere,” quipped a French minister speaking anonymously.
“[But] he’s been on the job for five years now, does he really need to follow the minutiae of every project? And the international pressure is very strong. Nothing is going well in the world,” the minister added.
Before COVID-19 struck, Macron’s first term was marked by a brisk schedule of reforms, including a liberalization of the job market aimed at making France more competitive. The French president was hoping to continue in the same pragmatic vein during his second term, focusing on industrial policy and reforming France’s pensions system. While he hasn’t abandoned these goals, the failure to win a parliamentary majority in June has forced him to slow down on the domestic agenda.
Foreign policy in France has always been the guarded remit of the president, but Macron is trying to flip political necessity into opportunity, delegating the tedium and messiness of French parliamentary politics to his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
There are few areas of global diplomacy where the president hasn’t pitched a French initiative in recent months — whether it’s food security in Africa, multilateralism in Asia or boosting civilian resilience in Ukraine. Despite some foreign policy missteps in his first term including the backing of strongman Khalifa Haftar in the Libyan civil war, Macron is now a veteran statesman, eagerly taking advantage of Europe’s leaderless landscape to hog the international stage.
The French president’s full pivot to global diplomacy in his weakened second term at home is reminiscent of past leaders confronting turmoil on the domestic front.
“The Jupiterian period is over. He’s got no majority,” said Cyrille Bret, researcher for the Jacques Delors Institute. “So now he is suffering from the Clinton-second-mandate-syndrome, who after the impeachment attempts over the Lewinsky [inquiry], turned to the international scene, trying to resolve issues in the Balkans, the Middle East and in China.”
But even as Macron embraces the wide world, the pitfalls ahead are numerous. Photo ops with world leaders haven’t done much to slow the erosion of his approval ratings at home. With a recession looming in Europe and discontent over inflation and energy woes, Macron’s margins of maneuver are limited, and trouble at home might ultimately need his attention.
Man about globe
The French president first used the words “strategic intimacy” in October, when he told European leaders gathered in Prague they needed to work on “a strategic conversation” to overcome divisions and start new projects.
If the thought of 44 European leaders cozying up wasn’t bewildering enough, Macron double-downed this month and called for “more strategic intimacy” with the U.S.
It’s not entirely clear what kind of transatlantic liaison he was gunning for, but it certainly included a good dose of tough love. Arriving in Washington, Macron called an American multi-billion package of green subsidies “super aggressive.” (He nonetheless received red carpet treatment at the White House, with Joe Biden calling him “his friend” and even “his closer” — the man who helps him bring deals over the finish line — even if he didn’t actually obtain any concessions from the U.S. president.)
Some of Macron’s success in taking center stage is, of course, due to France’s historical assets: a permanent seat on theU.N. Security Council, a nuclear capacity, a history of military interventions and global diplomacy.
But for the Americans, Macron is also the last dancing partner left in a fast-emptying ballroom across the pond. The U.K. is still embroiled in its own internal affairs and has lost some influence after Brexit, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hasn’t filled the space left by Merkel’s departure.
While Macron’s abstract and at times convoluted speeches may not be to everyone’s liking, at least he has got something to say.
“[The Americans] are looking for someone to engage with and there’s a lack of alternatives,” said Sophia Besch, European affairs expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Macron is the last one standing. There’s his enthusiasm, and at the same time he is disruptive for a leader and not always an easy partner.”
“He can count on some reluctant admirers in Washington for his energy,” she said.
The French touch
In his diplomatic endeavors, Macron likes a good surprise.
“Emmanuel Macron doesn’t like working bottom-up, where the political link is lost,” said one French diplomat. “He enjoys surprising people and marking political coups.”
“The [French bureaucracy] doesn’t really like that,” the diplomat added. “We prefer things that are all neat and tidy.”
Conjuring up new ideas — such as the European Political Community — that haven’t quite filtered through the layers of bureaucracy is one of Macron’s ways of pushing the envelope. The newly christened group’s first summit was ultimately hailed as a success, having marked the return of the U.K. to a European forum and displaying the Continent’s unity in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
It’s a technique that forces the hand of other participants but sometimes undermines the credibility of his initiatives, and raises questions about what has really been confirmed. Launching the European Political Community may have been a success; announcing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. president a couple of days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine less so. (The summit, obviously, never took place.)
Macron’s diplomatic frenzy has also raised speculation that he is already gunning for a top international job for when he leaves the Elysée palace. Macron cannot run for a third term, and speculation is already running high in France on what the hyperactive president will do next.
The question at the heart of Macron’s second term is whether his attempts to be everything and everywhere — combined with his stubborn dedication to controversial ideas — is what will ultimately trip him up.
Even as Macron’s U.S. visit was hailed a success, with him saying France and the US were “fully aligned” on Russia, he sparked controversy on his return when he told a French TV channel that Russia should be offered “security guarantees” in the event of negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
“That comment fell out of the line in relation to the coordinated message from Macron and Biden, which was that nothing should be done about Ukraine without Ukraine’s [approval],” said Besch.
Macron says he wants France to be an “exemplary” NATO member, but he still wants France to act as a “balancing power” that does not completely close the door on Russia. It’s a stance that may help France build partnerships with more neutral states across the world, but it does nothing to mend the rift with eastern EU member states.
For the man about globe who presents himself as the champion of European interests, that’s an uncomfortable place to be in.
When it comes to “strategic intimacy,” it’s possible to have too many partners.
Elisa Bertholomey and Eddy Wax contributed to reporting.
Newswise — ST. LOUIS – Atria Larson, Ph.D., associate professor of Medieval Christianity at Saint Louis University, has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The two-year grant totals $149,835 and will fund the prototyping and testing of a web platform for sharing medieval interpretations of culture-shaping texts.
The “Gallery of Glosses” project will allow users to identify and transcribe annotations and marginalia in medieval manuscripts. A gloss is a word, phrase, or extended commentary inserted in a text’s margin to explain a part of the original text.
“A gloss can include a legal or cultural interpretation of the original text,” Larson said.
Typically, medieval scholars must study the original manuscripts in the libraries where they are currently housed when working with annotations. The web application Larson is creating will allow that work to be done by various scholars from anywhere in the world.
“This will allow a broader approach to medieval studies,” Larson said.
Original texts authored during the Middle Ages (generally defined as the time between the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the 15th century) are held in libraries and museums across Europe. Studying the glosses provides a deeper understanding of the text and the meaning it held for people when they read it.
“Glosses aren’t just scribbling in a margin – these are updates and interpretations of the text,” Larson said. “We continue to uncover voices that we have not heard for centuries as we unearth and share these glosses.”
She likened working in medieval glosses to detective work.
“By reading the glosses in these works, we are not just getting the historical context of the work and the value given to it at the time of its writing,” she said. “By seeing which glosses are copied where, we can see how the original written works traveled across Europe, who worked on them and how they formed their interpretations. There are clues in the manuscripts if we can find them.”
Larson said writings by Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle in addition to the Bible and major law collections contain glosses by many different readers of their works.
“By connecting the dots on how the work traveled, you can see learned culture move throughout Europe,” she said.
Larson’s project is one of 226 humanities projects funded in the NEH’s third round of grants for the fiscal year 2022. The NEH supports vital humanities research, education, preservation, and public programs.
The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports research that examines the history, criticism, ethics, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society.
National Endowment for the Humanities
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Saint Louis University
Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic institutions. Rooted in Jesuit values and its pioneering history as the first university west of the Mississippi River, SLU offers more than 13,500 students a rigorous, transformative education of the whole person. At the core of the University’s diverse community of scholars is SLU’s service-focused mission, which challenges and prepares students to make the world a better, more just place.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
Newswise — DURHAM, N.H.—Prince William and Kate Middleton are both expected to make the trip across the pond for the second annual Earthshot Prize ceremony which will be held in Boston. Nicoletta Gullace, associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and an expert on the royal family, is available to talk about the significance of the trip and what this means for the monarchy as well as for the city of Boston.
“While Earthshot and the environment are passion projects for the royals and choosing Boston puts the spotlight on the city’s work around climate change, this will be the first time the Prince and Princess of Wales have traveled to the United States since the passing of Queen Elizabeth and, as William has said, protecting the environment was a cause close to his grandmother’s heart” said Gullace.
Gullace, who is an expert in 20th century and modern British history, says Earthshot is a decade-long initiative by the royals to find innovative solutions to the Earth’s most pressing issues which include climate change and air pollution. However, there is also chatter about this U.S. trip being a chance to rebuild their popularity since the very public break with Prince Harry and wife Megan Markle. Right now, there is no planned visit between the two brothers. The focus is expected to be on the ceremony. The couple is reportedly excited to come to Boston and see an “inspiring” city.
“The Earthshot Prize awards will be front and center, but this visit will certainly represent a shift from the old guard to a younger more modern monarchy with new values and attitudes and now that the queen is gone, the world will continue to look for signs of this change,” said Gullace.
The second Earthshot Prize awards were inspired by President John F Kennedy and his goal of landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s, known as Moonshot. The University of New Hampshire inspires innovation and transforms lives in our state, nation and world. More than 16,000 students from all 50 states and 71 countries engage with an award-winning faculty in top-ranked programs in business, engineering, law, health and human services, liberal arts and the sciences across more than 200 programs of study. A Carnegie Classification R1 institution, UNH partners with NASA, NOAA, NSF and NIH, and received $260 million in competitive external funding in FY21 to further explore and define the frontiers of land, sea and space.
Newswise — A newly compiled dataset quantitatively captures witchcraft beliefs in countries around the world, enabling investigation of key factors associated with such beliefs. Boris Gershman of American University in Washington, D.C., presents these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on November 23, 2022.
Numerous prior studies conducted around the world have documented people’s beliefs in witchcraft—the idea that certain individuals have supernatural abilities to inflict harm. Understanding people’s witchcraft beliefs can be important for policymaking and other community engagement efforts. However, due to a lack of data, global-scale statistical analyses of witchcraft beliefs have been lacking.
To deepen understanding of witchcraft beliefs, Gershman compiled a new dataset that captures such beliefs among more than 140,000 people from 95 countries and territories. The data come from face-to-face and telephone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and professional survey organizations between 2008 and 2017, which included questions about religious beliefs and belief in witchcraft.
According to the dataset, over 40 percent of survey participants said they believe that “certain people can cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen to someone.” Witchcraft beliefs appear to exist around the world but vary substantially between countries and within world regions. For instance, 9 percent of participants in Sweden reported belief in witchcraft, compared to 90 percent in Tunisia.
Using this dataset, Gershman then conducted an investigation of various individual-level factors associated with witchcraft beliefs. This analysis suggests that, while beliefs cut across socio-demographic groups, people with higher levels of education and economic security are less likely to believe in witchcraft.
Gershman also combined this dataset with other country-level data, finding that witchcraft beliefs differ between countries according to various cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic factors. For instance, witchcraft beliefs are linked to weak institutions, low levels of social trust, and low innovation, as well as conformist culture and higher levels of in-group bias—the tendency for people to favor others who are similar to them”
These findings, as well as future research using the new dataset, could be applied to help optimize policies and development projects by accounting for local witchcraft beliefs.
The author adds: “The study documents that witchcraft beliefs are still widespread around the world. Moreover, their prevalence is systematically related to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics.”
This is an opinion editorial by Seb Bunney, co-founder of Looking Glass Education and author of the Qi of Self-Sovereignty newsletter.
“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” — A quote commonly misattributed to Mark Twain.
Lately, I’ve been pondering whether we are witnessing a rhyming of history.
For those who have had the chance to dig into our monetary history, you may have encountered a little-known policy called Executive Order 6102. It was a momentous attack on the sovereign individual and the free market. An event that corralled U.S. citizens away from gold, into the U.S. dollar and assets from which the U.S. government benefits.
What Was Executive Order 6102?
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates within the continental United States.
At that time, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 required any newly issued dollar bills to be 40% backed by gold. Executive Order 6102 freed the Fed from this restriction as it could coercively obtain more gold than it otherwise would have been able to by restricting the usage of gold and purchasing it back at an exchange rate defined by the government.
Moreover, pushing people out of gold and into U.S. dollars helped strengthen the dollar during a period of monetary expansion and central bank intervention.
This Executive Order was in effect until December 31, 1974, when congress once again legalized private ownership of gold coins, bars and certificates.
With an understanding of Executive Order 6102, I wanted to shed some light on modern government thinking.
In the eye-opening book, “The Mr. X Interviews: Volume 1,” Luke Gromen takes the reader on a journey through the past, present and future macroeconomic environment. Although the book details many captivating events, one event in particular stood out to me. Groman cites a leaked document from the U.S. State Department dated December 10, 1974. Here is an excerpt from that document:
“The major impact of private U.S. ownership, according to the dealers’ expectations, will be the formation of a sizable gold futures market. Each of the dealers expressed the belief that the futures market would be of significant proportion and physical trading would be minuscule by comparison. Also expressed was the expectation that large-volume futures dealing would create a highly volatile market. In turn, the volatile price movements would diminish the initial demand for physical holding and most likely negate long-term hoarding by U.S. citizens.”
Essentially, the government knew that by promoting the gold futures market, gold would experience a significant increase in price volatility, diminishing its desirability and reducing long-term hoarding. More importantly, this document was dated 21 days before they reinstated the ability for individuals to own gold again.
What Does This Mean?
If people are disincentivized to store their hard-earned savings in a stable vehicle such as gold, they must look elsewhere. With equities and corporate bonds exposing the investor to greater risk and volatility, people have two options: government bonds or U.S. dollars, both benefiting the government.
The government has shown that it no longer needs to overtly issue an order such as 6102 to ban the holding of gold. It just needs to reduce gold’s desirability to achieve the same effect.
What Does This Have To Do With The Aforementioned Quote?
In October 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the first Bitcoin futures Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). For the less financially inclined, an ETF is a regulated investment vehicle that simplifies the purchasing of its underlying assets. For instance, if you purchase the SPY ETF, you can own exposure to the hugely popular S&P 500, without purchasing 500 individual stocks.
On its own, the futures market is no cause for alarm, but when the SEC prevents corporations and individuals from purchasing BTC through regulated means, only allowing futures ETFs, we have an issue.
Let me explain.
Companies in the Bitcoin industry have been applying for a “spot Bitcoin ETF” for many years, but to no avail. If this spot ETF were to get accepted, you could invest $100 into the ETF, which would then purchase $100 of bitcoin held by the fund, giving you direct exposure to bitcoin. This would provide pension funds, corporations, asset managers, etc., easier access to bitcoin. But this is not yet available in the U.S.; only a futures ETF is.
If not already evident from the gold futures explanation above, this may pose a threat to bitcoin.
When someone purchases a bitcoin futures ETF, they do not own bitcoin. Instead, they own exposure to an ETF which holds bitcoin futures contracts. In short, this futures ETF purchases contracts for the delivery of bitcoin at a future date. As that date approaches, it rolls the futures contract, selling the old contract and purchasing a new contract further out.
Don’t worry if you don’t quite understand how these ETFs work. The point here is not to understand the functionality but rather the drawbacks.
It is essential to understand two characteristics of futures ETFs over spot ETFs. In regular, functioning markets, if you want the right to buy something at a specified price in the future, you pay a premium over today’s price, and the further out in time you wish to lock in a price, the more premium you pay. Each time the contract is rolled, more premium is paid. This is called roll yield.
Even if bitcoin’s price stays the same throughout the life of the futures contract, the ETF will still decline in value because the ETF is paying a premium to purchase the right to buy bitcoin in the future. As that date nears, it’s selling the contract and purchasing a new one further out in time. This is known as rolling.
A byproduct of this rolling is that any paid premium diminishes as contract expiration approaches (roll yield). This creates a decay in the value of the ETF and is incredibly unfavorable for long-term holders.
As a result, this decay incentivizes short-term trading, increased volatility and short selling of the ETF as a portfolio hedge, suppressing the price.
Is it possible to see the effects of these futures ETFs in action? Below is a chart from Willy Woo. The date of the approval for the first futures ETF was in October 2021.
Immediately preceding the inception of the first regulated futures ETF, we saw a considerable increase in futures dominance. The futures market currently dictates 90% of bitcoin’s price (green line in the chart above).
In summary, just like gold from the 1930s to the 1970s, individuals and corporations alike have no regulated way to purchase bitcoin efficiently for long-term storage. The only difference being in the age of censorship, rather than overtly suppressing what the government deems as unfavorable or infringing on certain aspects of the economy, it can covertly suppress them. However, not all hope should be lost.
Many people and corporations are tirelessly petitioning for the approval of a spot ETF, a way to gain direct exposure to bitcoin. But this begs the question: Is bitcoin one of the last remaining bastions for the free market and self-sovereign individuals, or is it already under the thumb of the central planners?
This is a guest post by Seb Bunney. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
This is an opinion editorial by Frank Nuessle, previously a TV executive, university professor and publishing entrepreneur.
This is the second part of an essay that explores lessons to be learned from how Samuel Adams framed the American Revolution and how that same framing can speed the evolution of the vibrant American bitcoin economy that we all know is somewhere invisibly over the horizon. Part one can be found here.
Because the United States has the most to lose with the coming destruction of the U.S. petrodollar system, the focus of my research and conversation is an attempt to answer this question: “What is the social system design that will allow for the viral growth of a bitcoin economy in the United States?” The story of the American bitcoin economy is critical to the viral development of a sound money economy.
I believe that Samuel Adams destroyed the “divine right of kings” paradigm with his framing, just as bitcoin must destroy the “divine right of fiat money” paradigm if it is to be successful.
It is important for us to understand the frame of mind of the average European and American colonist in the 1760s. At that time in Western civilization, a king was essentially a god and was to be worshiped as such. The divine right of kings paradigm had captured human imagination and ruled Europe for 500 years.
In Europe at that time, there was a Spanish Empire, a British Empire and a French Empire, among other minor empires, each with its own king. This explains why Europe was in a perpetual state of war. How many divine kings can one world have?
Adams destroyed that paradigm because he recognized that America’s struggle for independence was a spiritual struggle above all. He believed that self-government and freedom were paramount for self governance and that the essential qualities were respect for all people, integrity, austerity and selfless service to the community.
How can Samuel Adams’ framing of the American fight for independence serve to break the current grip on the American paradigm of the divine right of fiat money?
Just as Adams was able to infuse the higher-level qualities of respect for all and service to the community into the struggle for American independence, Bitcoiners must find new ways to infuse values into money.
A successful American bitcoin economy will incorporate social values into money and develop participatory social structures that foster place-based communities and local economic structures along with a culture of reciprocity and mutual aid.
I suggest we label this new paradigm the “divine right of community,” where money serves the whole and not vice versa. Money is only a tool and is not to be put on a pedestal.
VISA founder Dee Hock envisioned such a community when he wrote, “The organization of the future will be the embodiment of community based on shared purpose calling to the higher aspirations of the people.”
In 1968, Hock was president of a small bank outside of Seattle when he took over a collapsing credit card company, franchised by Bank of America. Within three years, he founded VISA, resurrecting the nascent credit card industry that was failing at the time. VISA became the largest commercial enterprise on Earth.
In his 1999 book, “The Birth of the Chaordic Age,” Hock wrote, “Ahead, the possibility of regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence, such as the world has always dreamed.”
The challenge to fulfilling Hock’s vision is that we all are unwittingly still living out of the paradigm that the robber barons left us: Financial capital is sacred above all else. This scarcity mindset is also the chief barrier to convincing Bitcoin skeptics.
A direct assault on a skeptic’s beliefs only intensifies their fear and resistance. Something deeper has to shift. As change agents for Bitcoin, we have to address this deeper thing, this wound at the heart of the fiat money paradigm and the scarcity it produces.
Like all living things, paradigms have a lifespan. As the fiat money paradigm ages, serious cracks have begun to appear.
My deceased friend Joseph Chilton Pierce used to say, “A miracle is the name we give to the crack that allows the light to shine through from a larger, more radiant reality.” This crack says not only that the bigger reality is coming soon, but that it is more than you can imagine. It is both a glimpse and a promise.
The Bitcoin Revolution begins when we allow ourselves to envision a different kind of economy, a different kind of world. Bitcoiners have to offer an invitation into that larger, more beautiful world.
Just as Samuel Adams was able to ignite the American Revolution with his paradigm-busting vision of freedom, Bitcoin miracle workers can do the same for the world of sound money.
This is a guest post by Frank Nuessle. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Newswise — An interdisciplinary team headed by archeologists Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini of the University of Freiburg and Paul P. Pasieka of the University of Mainz has discovered a previously unknown Etruscan temple in the ancient city of Vulci, which lies in the Italian region of Latium. The building, which is 45 meters by 35 meters, is situated west of the Tempio Grande, a sacred building which was excavated back in the 1950s. Initial examination of the strata of the foundation of the northeast corner of the temple and the objects they found there, led the researchers to date the construction of the temple towards the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century BCE. “The new temple is roughly the same size and on a similar alignment as the neighboring Tempio Grande, and was built at roughly the same Archaic time,” explains Franceschini. “This duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare, and indicates an exceptional finding,” adds Pasieka. The team discovered the temple when working on the Vulci Cityscape project, which was launched in 2020 and aimed to research the settlement strategies and urbanistic structures of the city of Vulci. Vulci was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation and in pre-Roman times was one of the most important urban centers in what is now Italy.
New discoveries about city design and development
“We studied the entire northern area of Vulci, that’s 22.5 hectares, using geophysical prospecting and Ground Penetrating Radar,” explains Pasieka. “We discovered remains from the city’s origins that had previously been overlooked in Vulci and are now better able to understand the dynamics of settlement and the road system, besides identifying different functional areas in the city.” The researchers were able in 2021 to uncover the first sections of wall, made of solid tuff. “Our knowledge about the appearance and organization of Etruscan cities has been limited until now,” says Franceschini. “The intact strata of the temple are offering us insights into more than a thousand years of development of one of the most important Etruscan cities.”
Over the coming years the scientists want to study the different phases of use and the precise architectural appearance of the temple in more depth, in order to learn more about the religion of the Etruscans, the social structures in Vulci and what the lives of the city’s inhabitants were really like.
Fritz Thyssen Foundation and Gerda Henkel Foundation funding the excavation
The project is being funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (2020-2022) and the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022-2023) along with the University of Mainz’s research area “40,000 Years of Human Challenges: Perception, Conceptualization and Coping in Premodern Societies”. The departments of classical archeology at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Mainz are working together with the Vulci Foundation, which administers the archeological park “Parco Naturalistico Archeologico di Vulci”, and the Italian national monument authority, Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria meridionale.
Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini is an academic councillor at the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Freiburg. Since June 2021 she has been a member of the central committee of the Deutscher Archäologen-Verband, the German archaeological association. Her research focuses on the iconography and hermeneutics of figurative vases, landscape archaeology and urbanistics, and Etruscology.
Paul P. Pasieka is a research assistant in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Mainz. In 2019 he was awarded the Margarete Bieber prize by the Berlin archaeology society, the Archäologische Gesellschaft zu Berlin. His research embraces the archeology of the economy of the Roman empire, the history of science and Etruscology.
Newswise — Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been around for centuries. With a history of almost 3000 years dating back to the early Zhou Dynasty, it has been incorporated into China’s present medical system. The traditional practice involves the use of plants, animals, and minerals. It works on the principle of maintaining the delicate balance between ‘yin’ and ‘yang’—the opposite but interconnected forces said to be at the core of all creation—to prevent diseases and maintain health. Originating in China, TCM is practiced widely today, including in Japan.
It has long been considered that TCM was introduced in Japan by the monk, Jianzhen or Ganjin, who visited Japan in the 8th century to promote the teachings of Buddhism on the invitation of two Japanese clerics. Born in Yangzhou, the monk Jianzhen was well-versed in TCM and was proficient in Buddhism. When he arrived in Japan in 753 CE, it is said that he had with him 36 kinds of herbal medicines, each with different pharmacological effects and recipes for different combinations to treat a variety of diseases. Along with his Buddhist teachings, whether Jianzhen imparted his pharmacological and medical knowledge, thereby influencing existing traditional Japanese medicine, remains debated.
Now, researchers from Japan and China, led by Professor Toshihiko Matsuo of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health Systems, Okayama University, have conducted an extensive review of available Chinese, Japanese, and English literature to shed light on this longstanding mystery. The team comprised of Shihui Liu, former assistant professor in Okayama University, visiting research fellow Chie Matsuo, and senior assistant professor Takumi Abe, both from Okayama University. Their article, published on 18 October 2022 in the journal Compounds, offers interesting insights on the life of Jianzhen as seen through the lens of his ethnopharmacological knowledge.
On his trip to Japan, Jianzhen gathered and brought with him things he found on his way, things as insignificant as stalactites and Zixue (a TCM component), while also bringing traditional ingredients from China, including musk, agarwood, snail, rosin, dipterocarp, fragrant gall, benzoin, incense, dutchman’s pipe root, Pistacia lentiscus, Piper longum, Terminalia chebula/haritaki, asafetida, sugar, sucrose, 10 bushels of honey, and 80 bunches of sugar cane. In their article, the researchers have reviewed the 36 herbal medicines and their therapeutic effects that were brought to Japan. Local lore suggests Jianzhen also had with him a book called Jianshangren (Holy Priest Jianzhen)’s Secret Prescription, which has been lost for centuries. The team also reports being successful in tracking down a copy of another book that holds the same prescriptions.
Most interestingly, their findings show that the prescriptions by Jianzhen form the basis of herbal medicinal practice in Japan, popular under the name of Kampo. The herbal medicinal practice is very much integrated into the fabric of Japan’s current healthcare system. Kampo medicines are prescribed alongside Western medicine and modern drugs and is covered by the reimbursement of the national health insurance.
“People in Japan can buy Kampo medicines as over-the-counter drugs at pharmacies. This unique system in Japan has derived from a long history of systematic prescription of Kampo medicines and would have an origin in Jianzhen’s prescription in the 8th century,” observes Prof. Matsuo with much excitement.
He hopes for the spread of the use of Kampo medicine beyond Japan. “People in other countries also have a chance to use Kampo medicines in combination with Western medicines.” His inspiration in saying so is possibly, Jianzhen, again. “Jianzhen is one of the first people to bring Chinese traditional medicine to Japan. He is considered an ancestor of Kampo medicine, who molded Chinese traditional medicine to suit the needs of Japanese people,” reflects Prof. Matsuo. In the age of globalization, the journey of traditional medical knowledge that took 11 years to reach Japan from China may be accomplished in less than 11 seconds with the click of a button.
We live in that hope.
About Okayama University, Japan
As one of the leading universities in Japan, Okayama University aims to create and establish a new paradigm for the sustainable development of the world. Okayama University offers a wide range of academic fields, which become the basis of the integrated graduate schools. This not only allows us to conduct the most advanced and up-to-date research, but also provides an enriching educational experience.
About Professor Toshihiko Matsuo from Okayama University, Japan
Professor Toshihiko Matsuo is a professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health System, Okayama University, Japan. His areas of interest include Ophthalmology, Uveitis, Oncology, and Vitrectomy.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — U.S. President Joe Biden offered a full-throated American commitment to the nations of Southeast Asia on Saturday, pledging at a Cambodia summit to help stand against China’s growing dominance in the region — without mentioning the other superpower by name.
Chinese President Xi Jinping wasn’t in the room at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, summit in Phnom Penh. But Xi hovered over the proceedings just two days before he and Biden are set to have their highly anticipated first face-to-face meeting at the G20 summit in Indonesia.
The Biden White House has declared Xi’s nation its greatest economic and military rival of the next century and while the president never called out China directly, his message was squarely aimed at Beijing.
“Together we will tackle the biggest issues of our time, from climate to health security to defend against significant threats to rules-based order and to threats against the rule of law,” Biden said. “We’ll build an Indo-Pacific that is free and open, stable and prosperous, resilient and secure.”
The U.S. has long derided China’s violation of the international rules-based order — from trade to shipping to intellectual property — and Biden tried to emphasize his administration’s solidarity with a region American has too often overlooked.
His work in Phnom Penh was meant to set a framework for his meeting with Xi — his first face-to-face with the Chinese leader since taking office — which is to be held Monday at the G20 summit of the world’s richest economies, this year being held in Indonesia on the island of Bali.
Much of Biden’s agenda at ASEAN was to demonstrate resistance to Beijing.
He was to push for better freedom of navigation on the South China Sea, where the U.S. believes the nations can fly and sail wherever international law allows. The U.S. had declared that China’s resistance to that freedom challenges the world’s rules-based order.
Moreover, in an effort to crack down on unregulated fishing by China, the U.S. began an effort to use radio frequencies from commercial satellites to better track so-called dark shipping and illegal fishing. Biden also pledged to help the area’s infrastructure initiative — meant as a counter to China’s Belt and Road program — as well as to lead a regional response to the ongoing violence in Myanmar.
But it is the Xi meeting that will be the main event for Biden’s week abroad, which comes right after his party showed surprising strength in the U.S. midterm elections, emboldening the president as he headed overseas. Biden will circumnavigate the globe, having made his first stop at a major climate conference in Egypt before arriving in Cambodia for a pair of weekend summits before going on to Indonesia.
There has been skepticism among Asian states as to American commitment to the region over the last two decades. Former President Barack Obama took office with the much-ballyhooed declaration that the U.S. would “pivot to Asia,” but his administration was sidetracked by growing involvements in Middle Eastern wars.
Donald Trump conducted a more inward-looking foreign policy and spent much of his time in office trying to broker a better trade deal with China, all the while praising Xi’s authoritarian instincts. Declaring China the United States’ biggest rival, Biden again tried to focus on Beijing but has had to devote an extraordinary amount of resources to helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion.
But this week is meant to refocus America on Asia — just as China, taking advantage of the vacuum left by America’s inattention, has continued to wield its power over the region.
Biden declared that the ten nations that make up ASEAN are “the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy” and that his time in office — which included hosting the leaders in Washington earlier this year — begins “a new era in our cooperation.” He did, though, mistakenly identify the host country as “Colombia” while offering thanks at the beginning of his speech.
“We will build a better future, a better future we all say we want to see,” Biden said.
Biden was only the second U.S. president to set foot in Cambodia, after Obama visited in 2012. And like Obama did then, the president on Saturday made no public remarks about Cambodia’s dark history or the United States’ role in the nation’s tortured past.
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon authorized a secret carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia to cut off North Vietnam’s move toward South Vietnam. The U.S. also backed a coup that led, in part, to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a bloodthirsty guerrilla group that went on to orchestrate a genocide that resulted in the deaths of more than 1.5 million people between 1975 and 1979.
One of the regime’s infamous Killing Fields, where nearly 20,000 Cambodians were executed and thrown in mass graves, lies just a few miles outside the center of Phnom Penh. There, a memorial featuring thousands of skulls sits as a vivid reminder of the atrocities committed just a few generations ago. White House aides said that Biden had no scheduled plans to visit.
As is customary, Biden met with the host country’s leader at the start of the summit. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has ruled Cambodia for decades with next to no tolerance for dissent. Opposition leaders have been jailed and killed, and his administration has been accused of widespread corruption, according to human rights groups.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said Biden would “engage across the board in service of America’s interests and to advance America’s strategic position and our values.” He said Biden was meeting with Hun Sen because he was the leader of the host country.
U.S. officials said Biden urged the Cambodian leader to make a greater commitment to democracy and “reopen civic and political space” ahead of the country’s next elections.
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