The billionaire space race, which received an inordinate amount of media attention over the last few years, has increased public awareness of space exploration. Each billionaire – Musk, Bezos, Branson and so on – promises to outdo the exploits of their rivals. However, such missions are outsized vanity projects.

These projects will satisfy the overinflated egos of the rocket oligarchs. However, such cosmic parasitism will do nothing to advance our understanding of space, cosmology or fulfil the objectives of planetary missions.

There are more important scientific objectives, elaborated by astronomers and cosmologists, which if fulfilled will deepen our knowledge and understanding of the cosmos.

Venus is sometimes called the Earth’s sister planet – it is of similar size to Earth, occupies an adjacent orbital lane to us, and its atmosphere contains greenhouses gases like ours. In fact, the discovery of the phases of Venus – the stages of reflective lighting on the planet’s surface, just like the Moon – was crucial for Galileo. He contradicted the then predominant Ptolemaic view of an Earth-centred universe. Venusian phases proved that Venus revolves around the sun.

The atmosphere of Venus, and the planet’s surface, is another story. A nightmarish hellscape, Venus is a place which demonstrates the consequences of the runaway greenhouse effect. Surface temperatures reach 400 degrees Celsius, and there are heavy clouds of sulfuric acid circulating in the atmosphere. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead.

In 2021, NASA scientists listed Venus as the next priority target for a new space mission. The intention was to explore the Venusian atmosphere, geology, chemical makeup and any possibility of finding traces of life, however remote. Astronomers, all the while the billionaire egotistical space race was developing, worked out the scientific objectives of VERITAS, a proposed mission to Venus.

In fact, in June 2021, the NASA administrator announced two missions to Venus. One is the above mentioned VERITAS, and the other is DAVINCI+. The names are acronyms derived from the objectives and instrumentation involved in each mission.

Earlier this year, scientists closely examined the images of the Venusian surface taken by Magellan – the last detailed mission to Venus undertaken 30 years ago. The images uploaded by that effort, upon examination, revealed that Venus has active volcanoes. There are only two other solar objects that have active volcanoes – Earth, and Io, a moon of Jupiter. Not much is understood about Venusian geology – other than that it is very different to the continental plate tectonics of Earth.

Things were looking exciting for Venusian space exploration. However, early in March this year, some dismaying news; the budget for the proposed VERITAS mission has been drastically reduced. The initial budget request for the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, was $US124 ($172) million. This was cut by NASA to $US1.5 ($2) million for 2024.

The VERITAS mission has several objectives, the main one being to map the rock composition of Venus, boosting our knowledge of the geological activity of the planet. This objective is even more relevant in light of the recent discovery of active volcanism on Venus. The viability of the VERITAS mission is now in doubt. Astronomers are left feeling confused by the budget cuts, and are organising to uphold the feasibility of the Venus planetary mission.

Planetary missions, such as the proposed Venusian projects, inspire thousands of young people to take up astronomy and cosmology, and increase awareness of the importance of those subjects – not to mention increased participation in amateur stargazing clubs. In 2015, the New Horizons mission returned masses of data from the planet of Pluto. Never before had any spacecraft flown so close to that planet. Yes, I realise that Pluto is now officially classified as a dwarf planet, or trans Neptunian object – but that is another story.

Pluto, about which little was known, turned out to have a geologically active surface. There are a number of mountain ranges on Pluto, and the ‘heart’ of the planet is Sputnik Planitia, a large ice-covered basin with intricate features. The New Horizons mission was a historic achievement, and opened up new possibilities of space exploration.

It would be an appalling outcome for the planetary science community, and for humanity in general, if such projects are delayed or cancelled outright. Yet the billionaires continue their egotistical ambitions to travel to outer space. Spectacular and cynical outer space stunts by ultrawealthy billionaires may make good television, but do nothing to deepen our understanding of the universe.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia experienced large antigovernment protests in the early weeks of March. These demonstrations received favourable coverage in the corporate media. The protests, the reasons they happened, and why the Georgian political situation is in the news at all forms a multifaceted subject, which we shall untangle here.

Georgia-Russia relations after 1991 have taken many twists and turns. It is necessary to understand this background so we can make sense of current Georgian developments. Since the dissolution of the USSR, Georgian authorities have veered towards the West in their domestic and foreign policies. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of post-communist Georgia, was a dissident in Soviet times. Hailed as a hero, he was also a vicious racist and violent ultranationalist, pledging to rid Georgian of all its ethnic minorities.

Provoking the ethnic enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to secede from Georgia, Gamsakhurdia failed to unite his nation. The economic collapse of Georgia, mirroring that of Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, was appalling.

Rival mafiosi groups fought each other for control, and federal governmental authority was crumbling. Ousted in a near civil war by rival Georgian warlord ultranationalists in late 1991, Gamsakhurdia tried to stage a comeback, but to no avail. He was assassinated by his former colleagues in 1993.

From this cesspit of unrestrained privatisation, ethnic conflict and mafiosi wars, Edward Shevardnadze – the former and last Soviet foreign minister – emerged as the new president. Opening up to the west, he allowed a huge network of western NGOs and civil society networks to set up shop in Georgia, on the rationale that this would lead to the construction of an open society. Open for big capital, yes – but not for the vast majority of the Georgian people.

Dealing with a shattered economy, mafia wars, ethnic separatist conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and a Gamsakhurdia-loyalist rebellion, Shevardnadze failed to stabilise the inherent turbulence of Georgian economics and politics. He kept relations with Moscow cordial and friendly, but never abandoned the dream of full Euro-Atlantic integration.

Legitimate anger against the authorities was building. The post-communist politicians failed to solve any of Georgia’s long term sociopolitical problems, and basically presided over a failed state. Georgia has also been a central focus of intrigues by imperialist powers, which intend to install business-friendly governments in Tbilisi.

Georgia, located on the Black Sea, is within reach of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan, with its tremendous oil reserves, has cooperated with foreign oil multinationals to build pipelines to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. These pipelines, originating in the Caspian, pas through Georgian territory – the Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan pipeline is a major artery for the global oil industry.

The 2003 Rose revolution was a US-orchestrated regime change operation, utilising the soft power of US funded NGOs inside Georgia to push for a more pro-western orientation. Shevardnadze was ousted, and US trained lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili took over as president. From the outset, Saakashvili amplified the pro-imperialist orientation of the nation, supporting the American invasion of Iraq in that year. Preaching a free market fundamentalism, Saakashvili made the Georgian economy dependent on tourism, an outflow of cheap labour, and financially parasitic activities.

Georgia intended to join Nato, an objective set out by Shevardnadze. Saakashvili continued this pro-imperialist course, supporting the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, sending 1000 troops to participate in that effort. Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defence, visited Tbilisi in 2003.

The Georgian authorities, since 1991, cast the country as a fundamentally Christian and European oriented nation. They promoted a particular history of Georgia, denouncing Communism as ‘Sovietisation’, portraying Georgia as an eternally Christian, crusader, ethnically pure entity, battling rival empires to find its ‘rightful’ place in Europe.

Buoyed by the visit of then US President George Bush in 2005 to Tbilisi, Saakashvili made bellicose and fanatic promises to reconquer the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia had long been the recipient of US largesse, to the tune of billions of dollars. Saakashvili thought his time had come, to be the ‘saviour’ of Georgia. After a brief war in 2008, Georgian forces were quickly and resoundingly defeated. Saakashvili resigned in disgrace, only to reappear in Ukrainian politics as a supporter of Kyiv.

Since the early 2010s, Georgian politics has been dominated by a coalition of ultranationalist politicians known as Georgian Dream. And what of the current protests? The immediate trigger was a proposed bill by the government to register foreign entities working in Georgia as foreign agents. Any organisation which derives more than 20 percent of its funding from overseas was deemed to be a foreign agent.

The proposed law, withdrawn by the Tbilisi authorities after the widespread protests, is similar to US laws designed to track foreign owned operators. Misleadingly named the ‘Russian’ law, its character was deemed to be authoritarian, targeting the foreign owned NGOs which operate in Georgia. In the US, entrepreneurs who receive income from overseas must register with the Department of Justice, and provide reports regarding their operations to keep them transparent.

The March 2023 protests certainly witnessed the involvement of individuals motivated by legitimate grievances against the government. However, we cannot neglect the undeniable role of US interference in Georgian affairs. The scale and political character of these latest s demonstrations bear all the characteristics of a US sponsored colour revolution, which will take Georgia further down the path of Euro-Atlantic integration.

Integration with the European Union and the NATO imperialist alliance is but a mirage; an ever shifting illusion which serves only to motivate Georgians to work as pawns of outside powers. There are many legitimate grievances to raise against the Georgian authorities. Marching in lockstep with Washington and London will not bring this vaunted integration any closer, but will result in Georgian lives being used as cannon fodder for future wars.

Ancient Egypt has long been recognised as a treasure trove for the archaeologist – no pun intended. The subject of numerous documentaries, popular movies and biblical mythology, the ancient Egyptians have been the target of an enduring fascination. However, one question that keeps arising about that civilisation exposes our own misconceptions about the ancient Egyptians.

What race were the ancient Egyptians? This question is misleading for a number of reasons. Egypt has been conquered by successive waves of empires – Greek Macedonian, Assyrian, Roman – among others. Did these waves of new conquerors change the genetic makeup of the Egyptian population? Ancient Egypt did not think in terms of race; we are applying a misconceived 18th century categorisation and imposing it on a civilisation that was multicoloured in the first place.

To be certain, white supremacists have long deployed pseudo archaeological fantasies to claim that the ancient Egyptians were of white Nordic descent. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party ideologist and racist, made the claim in his writings that the ancient Egyptians (including Tutankhamen) were of Northern European white ancestry. Today’s white nationalist groups have followed in his footsteps. In this way, white supremacists seek to illegitimately acquire ancient Egyptian credibility for their ancestry, as opposed to the putatively ‘lesser’ Semitic races.

Sub-Saharan Africa had numerous empires and civilisations for centuries prior to European colonisation. While Europe remained a backwater, Africa had the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, and the west African Malian empire, to name but two examples.

There is the stereotypical image of the African bushman in a loincloth hunting their prey with a spear – but I would venture to suggest that there is no a single iota of difference in intelligence between the Zulu and the Oxford don. The latter possesses technical intelligence; the former possesses a practical knowledge of their environment and culture.

Ancient DNA

Over the last two years, there has been an increase in news stories covering the scientific results of ancient DNA findings. Extracting ancient DNA does pose its own problems, but they are not insurmountable. Egypt is not exactly a hospitable environment for DNA; in the hot Egyptian sun, DNA is usually incinerated. The pyramids, trapping humidity, are also a hostile environment for ancient DNA.

What if ancient DNA could be extracted from mummified bodies? Surely teeth and bones, even preserved hair and skin, can provide DNA from the bodies of ancient Egyptians, thus resolving the question of what racial background predominated? A team of geneticists and researchers did just that.

Johannes Krause, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany – and his team – managed to successfully extract ancient DNA from mummified remains. The mummies, ranging from between 2000 and 3000 years old, originated from middle Egypt in a region called Abusir el-Meleq. The remains date from a period of pharaonic Egypt dating from the New Kingdom, up to the time of Roman rule.

What the researchers found was not entirely surprising – the ancient Egyptians were most closely related to the people of the Levant. The latter comprises the current nations of Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. In other words, the ancient Egyptians were not black African, but close in genealogy to the Arabic speaking nations.

The conquerors of Egypt did not have a significant impact on the genomes of the population. In fact, the presence of sub-Saharan black African DNA in the Egyptian population increased in the centuries after the Roman conquest had ended. This was due to increased trade and intermixing after the decline of the pharaonic period.

Ancient Egypt was never a black African empire, even though today’s Afrocentric writers have engaged in an exercise in Kemet-speculation. To be fair, the drive by Afrocentric scholars to prioritise the teaching of African civilisations is legitimate and commendable. They are responding to the centuries of European colonial subjugation and denial of sub-Saharan cultures and knowledge.

No, black separatism is not ‘just as racist’ as white nationalism. The latter is the offending structure; black Afrocentrism developed as a response to the suppression and denial of African history. Let’s have a respectful disagreement with Afrocentrism, the latter being a therapeutic mythology, in the words of one expert of African history.

It is completely erroneous to pressure-fit Ancient Egypt into modern racial categories. In fact, Afrocentrism has a distinctive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim undercurrent to it. We have departed a long way from the 1960s, when Malcolm X and W E B Du Bois upheld Nasser’s Egypt, and revolutionary Algeria, as solid Arab allies of the pan-Africanist cause.

The Islamic Arab invasion of North Africa, while violent, did not result in mass racial displacement or the extermination of the original inhabitants. Let’s not overstate the impact of the Islamic invasion. Egyptians were not displaced, but rather absorbed by the new conquerors. The violent replacement interpretation gained traction, in alliance with American evangelical churches, to drive a wedge between the Arab and African peoples.

Progressive and leftist voices are being drowned out by parochial nativists, Afrocentrism in particular being a kind of black Zionism. Do not break down the bonds of solidarity between sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs. Afrocentrism wrongly portrays the Near Eastern Arabs as violent intruders and marauders into an otherwise pristine Africa.

Distorting the history and legacy of ancient Egypt only serves to reinforce divisions between sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab nations of Northern Africa.

At Jubilee Park, Parramatta – western Sydney – the Indian community contributed to the setting up of a statue to Mahatma Gandhi. This statue is in recognition of the courageous and principled struggle of Gandhi and his supporters to establish a culturally tolerant, democratic India. Sadly, the current Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu sectarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), follows the ideological tradition of Gandhi’s assassin. Hindutva is steadily making inroads into the Indian diaspora communities in Australia, Britain and the United States.

Hindutva is an ethnonationalist political ideology which advocates for a purely Hindu majoritarian state. An ultranationalist philosophy, Hindutva partisans demand the expulsion of non-Hindu minorities, such as India’s Muslim community, from the lands of historic India. To be certain, Hindutva exploits the religion of Hinduism for political and ethnosupremacist reasons. There is no suggestion that every Hindu is an extremist or fanatic. Please do not conflate Hindutva with Hinduism.

Jacobin magazine has been regularly covering the rise of BJP-affiliated Hindutva lobby groups in the United States. Azad Essa, in an extensive article, details the rise and operations of Hindu sectarian organisations. The Overseas Friends of the BJP, (OFBJP), has been active in projecting a Hindutva image of India externally. Founded in 1991, it has grown into a powerful lobby group in the halls of the US Congress.

To be sure, projecting a Hindutva image of India overseas is nothing new. In the early 1990s, the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya, carried out by Hindu nationalists (under the protection of the authorities), created a public relations problem for India.

The Hindutva supporters overseas quickly mobilised to promote a Hindu supremacist rationalisation of the mosque demolition, framing it as a legitimate reclamation of land by majoritarian Hindu forces. The Indian Muslim community has long been stigmatised as the products of foreign invaders.

Indeed, the main philosopher behind the ideology of the BJP and its associated Hindutva organisations, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883 – 1966) was an outspoken Hindu supremacist. Savarkar, the creator of this ethnonationalist ideology, was anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and anti-British. Let’s clarify that while he opposed Britain, he was never an anti-imperialist. His opposition to Britain was based on his hostility to non-Hindus.

It is no exaggeration to state that Savarkar is Modi’s original inspiration. In fact, Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, was motivated by Savarkar’s vision of a Hindu supremacist India. Savarkar expounded his views, which included the expulsion of Muslims from India.

He sympathised with Nazi and fascist movements in Europe, and expressed his support for Zionism, as an allied ideology committed to building an ethnonationalist state in Palestine. Shared hostility to Muslims contributed to this burgeoning ideological correspondence.

Islamophobia is a potent ideological glue, cementing alliances between various ultrarightist political groups. Hindutva organisations, such as the BJP, have long been Islamophobic, agitating for the violent expulsion of India’s Muslims. However, since 2001 and the launch of the purported war on terror, Islamophobic ideology moved to a new level of state policy.

From Azad Essa’s article, the following observation is directly relevant here:

The War on Terror didn’t merely usher in programs of surveillance and racism against the Muslim community. It also facilitated the cross-pollination of essentially right-wing ethnonationalisms and helped normalize anti-Muslim bigotry in different parts of the globe.

In the 2000s, Hindu nationalist groups have learned from political lobbying organisations, in particular from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Modelled on AIPAC, Hindutva organisations are creating a new generation of politically engaged Indians in the diaspora. One of their main goals is forging agitating closer cooperation between Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi.

When Indian PM Modi travels to the US, he is welcomed by a near-rock star reception by Indian audiences. Since becoming PM, the Indian government has oriented strongly towards Tel Aviv, providing support to the Zionist state. Hindutva organisations in the US and Britain have dutifully circulated anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli propaganda, in contrast to India’s traditional support for the Palestinians.

Abdulla Moaswes, writing in 972 magazine, states that in similar fashion to the Israeli government, the BJP intends to make membership of a religion the political basis of citizenship. Modi has constructed the most Israel-friendly government in independent India’s history. Savarkar, the ideological forebear of the BJP and Hindutva organisations, expressed his support for the Zionist ethnostate.

This is not to suggest that there is no opposition to the BJP and its ideology inside India – in fact, opposition to the Hindutva ethnonationalist vision of the BJP is growing. However, we must not allow the Indian communities in the diaspora to become unchallenged partisans of Hindutva philosophy. The ghost of Gandhi’s assassin needs to be exorcised.