It is baffling yet interesting in equal measure to examine the reasons why migrant communities, such as Hispanic Americans, voted for MAGA candidate Donald Trump in the last US elections. Numerous commentators have analysed the reasons why a candidate who openly demonises migrants – Trump attacked Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists – would acquire political support among migrant communities.

During the first iteration of the Trump presidency, I wrote about the Iraqi Christians who voted for him, were then subject to the threat of mass deportations. Trump made no secret of his anti-immigrant agenda. In his most recent moves, the Trump MAGA cult invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan immigrants. This act has not been used since World War Two, and is invoked only in times of war.

At the time of writing, a federal judge has stopped this latest deportation. The 1798 act allows the US Congress to deport non-citizens, the latter unable to appeal the decision to an immigration or federal court judge.

The original legislation, passed by lawmakers worried about a potential war with France, has been used only rarely – during the war of 1812, for instance. This law has not been deployed since the end of World War 2.

Why is all this relevant to current circumstances?

Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation magazine, makes an important argument – do the Irish Catholics who supported Donald Trump realise they see the original enemy aliens? The Federalist party, at the time the equivalent of national conservatives, wanted a strong army, navy, economy, and intended to keep out enemy aliens.

The Irish Catholics, being of the same faith group as the French, were considered undesirable elements. The new American government, emerging from the war of independence, was concerned that French revolutionaries would infiltrate the nation, and bring their ideas with them.

The American patriots who rose up in the 1770s were certainly anti-British, but not politically revolutionary like the French Republicans. While expressing support for basic democratic demands, such as no taxation without representation, they were limited in their demands against the English monarchy. They made clear they were rebelling against the excessive impositions of the British crown. The French Jacobins demanded full equality without any geographic or time limitations.

Excluding the French was one thing; targeting the Irish Catholics for exclusion was particularly galling. Why? The American government, in a display of realpolitik, supported the failed 1798 Irish uprising against the British crown. That insurrection was led by Irish Catholics against the British-Anglican establishment. Having cynically supported the Irish rebels, the US government promptly closed the door on those Irish seeking asylum in the new nation.

Federalist politicians in Washington railed against the Irish, demonising them as wild, unruly pestilential elements, bound to disturb the tranquility of the American nation. Irish Catholic Republicans in the US were harassed and targeted as enemy agents, disloyal to the new republic.

Irish American republicans knew exactly what side they were on – in our own times, Irish left wing activists drew explicit links with the African American civil rights movement on a platform of antiracist solidarity. No doubt this caused consternation among conservative Irish.

Be that as it may, it is pertinent to ask if Irish Catholic MAGA supporters will now withdraw their support for the Trump administration. I am not holding my breath….. The MAGA cult, because that is exactly what it is, is not known for its logical thinking or interethnic solidarity.

Next time, think deeply about what you are voting for – decisions made by this administration are a predictable consequence of the political platform you supported at election time.

MAGA and military veterans

There is one electoral bloc that has consistently sided with the Republican Party down the years; military veterans. If that is going to change over the next four years, I do not know. There are already indications that US military top brass are unhappy with all the sackings of US generals and officers, only to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that military veterans are a key base of support for the Trump administration. Seeing that is the case, let’s make a suggestion which will further solidify US military veteran loyalty to the MAGA club – or perhaps it won’t, you be the judge.

In World War 2, the US Army’s 761 tank battalion fought courageously in the European theatre of war. What is special about that unit? It was staffed completely by African Americans. The original ‘Black Panthers’, this all-black unit confronted the preeminent white supremacists in Europe, the Nazi army.

This group of soldiers were not allowed to interact or train with white soldiers. Indeed, white race riots broke out in Louisiana and other military compounds where these black troops were being trained. The US army was not officially desegregated until 1947, after World War Two had finished.

The most famous of the black tank drivers was the late great Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues. These veterans, after risking life and limb fighting racism in Europe, returned to a nation which rejected them. They knew exactly what they were fighting against.

Troops of the 761 battalion helped to liberate Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria, in May 1945. The sight which confronted the African American soldiers was horrifying; inmates half starved, frozen, vermin-infested, barely able to walk, skin hanging off skeletons, weakened by malnutrition.

These troops, and their sacrifices for personal freedom (individual liberty being such a prized commodity in MAGA land), were all but ignored in the decades after 1945.

These military veterans should be commemorated and respected, especially when confronting racism today.

Translating articles or content into another language may seem like a straightforward task – just taking the words and finding their equivalents in a foreign language, surely? Since the dawn of Google Translate and now the Large Language Model (LLM) multilingual applications of artificial intelligence, translating a document from one language to another is pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

No, it is not.

Let’s start with one example of a translation, which will help us anchor this discussion.

Coors Light is an American brand of beer, popular around the world. Its advertising campaign was sophisticated, slick and ubiquitous. The accompanying slogan for their ad campaign was ‘turn it loose.’ Great, simple, concise phrase. Now translate that into Spanish; what is the result? In Spanish, their ad slogan was ‘you will suffer from diarrhoea.’ Not exactly the message the Coors Light brand wanted to convey.

How about when the Pepsi brand of soft drink was first introduced to mainland China, with the catchy slogan ‘Pepsi brings you back to life.’ The Chinese translation of that statement was ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.’ I am no marketing expert, but I doubt that sales of a food product would increase by associating it with the grave.

If I say, to an English speaking person, ‘finger-lickin good’, chances are they will understand it to be the famous advertising slogan of KFC. The equivalent in Chinese is ‘eat your fingers off.’ A touch of cannibalism thrown into food commercials is original, to say the least.

Let’s step away from the world of brands and marketing, and delve deeper into translations in the real world. I am certain that it is easier to translate everyday phrases and questions into other languages – ‘open the door’, ‘one coffee please’, and ‘my ankles are swollen’ do not contain any nuances or subtleties. What happens when we discuss wider sociopolitical and economic issues?

The big issue in the corporate-controlled media is the Russia Ukraine war. News regarding the casualties, attacks and fatalities is splashed and recycled across our tv screens and mobile devices. The Trump-Zelensky shouting match was the most recent iteration of the Ukraine-Russia news cycle.

There was extensive coverage of the screaming match, followed by the inevitable screaming and shouting on social media. Reams of commentary saturated the news coverage, along with a deluge of analysis by different commentators and organisations. Amidst all the tsunami of shouting and screaming, what gets lost is the crucial role of translation in bringing news and analysis about the conflict to the Anglophone audiences.

In every war, propaganda becomes a staple part of the news cycle diet, and the Russia-Ukraine war is no exception. Translation of articles from non-English sources inevitably has to tackle the propaganda aspect of war reporting.

When examining any overseas conflict, we in the Anglophone community necessarily rely on non-English speaking resources. On the socialist Left, respective socialist parties reach out to their ideological compatriots – comrades in the struggle – in the non-English speaking nations for news and analysis. The Russia-Ukraine war has generated inordinate amounts of analysis by socialist organisations and activists from different traditions.

Making sense of all this, in the midst of a propaganda barrage by our homegrown media behemoths, is a daunting enough task. Having to translate resources into English, maintaining the shared meanings and nuances of sociopolitical discussion only adds enormous complexity to the task.

This is why is say a big thank you to translators.

For instance, the following article here, regarding the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, first appeared in a Portuguese socialist publication.

Thank you to the Portuguese comrades who wrote this article. Thank you to the translators for translating it.

Translation is one hell of a difficult job; while Google translator is all well and good, translating the meaning of an article takes dedicated cognitive effort. Automated translators talk like machines – they churn out words and sentences, but not the meaning of the original article.

Translating a text on a difficult and controversial topic such as the Russia Ukraine war is fraught with complications. Conveying the meaning of solidarity and political analysis is not easy between languages. Decoding the war propaganda, locating blame for the conflict on the large NATO powers, fighting off accusations of Putin apologism, is no easy task. So a big thank you to the translators of the article above, who no doubt spent countless hours agonising over the correct words and meanings.

Translation necessarily involves immersing yourself in another language, culture and idioms. The origins, complexity and richness of language is still being debated by linguists, psychologists and anthropologists. It is daunting enough for new migrants to understand the language of their adopted homeland.

Ethnic communities in Australia have largely settled for insularity, retreating into the safety of their own language communities. That is an unfortunate strategy when dealing with issues of multiculturalism and assimilation. This makes cross cultural awareness and understanding of each other’s diverse political opinions and struggles that much more difficult.

How about we all start by realising that translating involves trans creating – if there is such a word. It is not just a mechanical, machine-driven process of finding the equivalent words, but an invisible yet powerful bridge crossing the cultural-linguistic divide. How about we understand this concept – Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Introduced by psychologist Alfred Adler, there is no direct English translation.

The rough English translation is ‘a community of equals working and maintaining social interest.’ The collective good is a concise way of summarising his concept. Translation is the bridge that can help us maintain a collective sense of community welfare, rather than only thinking about our own narrow insular groups.

When one hears the phrase German philosophy, our minds go to the past; a topic explored by intellectual-heavyweight dead guys in the nineteenth century. When we mention German philosophers, the immediate image we recall is of old, white haired, bearded men, with grizzled features poring over obscure texts – Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche (ok, Nietzsche died at 44, and sported a heavy moustache minus the beard).

Let’s park this stereotype for the moment, and return to our own times.

A contemporary German philosopher we need to learn from is Byung-Chul Han. Wait a minute – what was that name again? South Korean born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han (1959 -) examines, among other things, the impact of digital technologies on human society. He has lived and worked in Germany since the age of 22.

In Germany, he found his spiritual home, dedicating himself to philosophy. He has elaborated how our digitally-dominated culture has come to influence how we work and view our lives.

Neoliberalism drives us to work ever harder for mass consumption, and has converted us into consumers. The social media age has elevated narcissism into a product – we live on social media not to connect with others, but to circulate an image of our successful selves to influence others.

Narration has become indistinguishable from marketing; social media has converted every story into an SEO advertisement. Politicians sell themselves, slick advertising has replaced substantive policy discussions. The sound bite is all important.

The reward of instantaneous publicity, offered by social media, is reinforced by celebrity culture. Your storytelling becomes an SEO-driven marketing package. Collective reflection is replaced by repetitive social exposure.

Texting versus conversation

Texting has become the go-to method of communicating with each other. Facebook messaging, WhatsApp, mobile phone texting, Skype – digital texting has replaced face-to-face communication in business, education and social life. Texting is in fact influencing our conversation.

Texting enables us to communicate over vast distances, sharing our ideas with geographically disparate people. We can stay in touch with friends and relatives who have moved away, share documentation and photos across the distance, and ask technological assistants such as Alexa or Cortana for their answers. Anything from how to copy and paste, to what the weather forecast is, is at the tip of our fingers, reducing the need for human interaction.

Texting has come a long way since the first SMS in 1992. Two Vodafone colleagues texted each other, in December 1992, with a simple message ‘Merry Christmas.’ Since then, we have emojis, emoticons, GIF files, Facebook reacts – a kind of modernised hieroglyphics. It is almost its own language – digilect, in the words of Ágnes Veszelszki, a professor of communications and linguistics in Budapest, Hungary.

The medium certainly influences the type of message being conveyed. Digilect is a product of computer-mediated talking – talking to each other through machines, and talking to machines.

Think of all the internet acronyms and digitally inspired words that have made it into our conversational lexicon – hashtag, troll, meme, facepalm.

But is this digital communication strictly speaking a language? It is an approximation of a language – digilect – but not a distinct language.

Nonverbal communication

Have we all forgotten that an indispensable component and stage of language is nonverbal communication? Our bodily cues convey information just as important as our words. Hand gestures, tone of voice, the impact of sound – all these elements of nonverbal communication contribute to making connections and memories that digilect never could.

Indeed, the emergence of language was not a singular, explosive event, but rather the product of numerous steps and stages, one of which was nonverbal communication. In fact, until today, human communication consists of the interplay between verbal and nonverbal communication. No, nonverbal stages of language are not primitive or regressive, just different.

Let’s address an implicit, underlying yet important assumption here which will change how we think about computers and digital technologies. The brain is not a computer. That’s right, the brain does not have hardware, software, RAM, a central processing unit, an operating system, DOS, encoders, decoders – the brain is not a computer.

The analogy of the brain as a computer is very powerful. It has enabled neuroscientists to make deep insightful discoveries about the operation and mechanics of the brain and central nervous system. Analogies are just that – metaphors. They do not encapsulate the real thing. Analogies between brain and technology are nothing new.

A newborn infant’s brain has inbuilt reflexes. He/she can suck, swallow, blink their eyes, vocalise infant sounds, grasping objects in their tiny hands. No, the brain is not a computer. The baby is not born with algorithms, data, subroutines or programmable software. The baby brain does not process information.

Every technological age brings with it multiple analogies to dig into questions we have about the human brain and psyche. Rene Descartes, impressed by the burgeoning field of hydraulics, envisioned the brain as a system of hydraulic pumps and values. Isaac Newton surmised the brain is an interlocking system of mechanical clocks.

The advent of electricity and switches brought with it an array of brain metaphors as an interconnected electrical system. Helmholtz proposed that the human brain was analogous to a telegraphic system.

The rise of computers gave birth of to a whole new series of brain analogies – the computer network. It is a very seductive analogy – what could be more impressive than a network of computers, each with its processing power, sending and receiving information at the speed of light?

The seemingly awesome power of AI today is based upon decades of data retention, software development by developers, and increasingly powerful computer chips that require ever greater power to process AI chatbot requests. Why do I say this?

Deep Blue

May 11, 1997 – yes I was alive that year. That date was momentous. Gary Kasparov, world chess champion, victor in thousands of chess matches and tournaments, was beaten by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer specifically designed to tackle chess. Surely this is proof – a machine outsmarted a human in chess, and a chess grandmaster at that.

There was an entire team of human software developers, analysing Kasparov’s matches and chess tactics, programming Deep Blue to calculate countermoves. Deep Blue’s predecessors, which were no slouches in the computer world, were pitted against Kasparov. The latter defeated his computer opponents as easily as a person swats a fly.

Over the years, as IBM programmers learned more about chess and the strategies used by grandmasters like Kasparov, they added calculated plays to outmanoeuvre Kasparov.

Even Deep Blue, in its initial matches in 1997, was easily defeated by Kasparov. IBM’s software development team returned to the drawing board, and programmed their supercomputer to cater for the grandmaster’s tactics. It was an ever-evolving system.

They added ever-greater processing power capabilities to Deep Blue. The latter could research 200 million chess scenarios per second. Kasparov was basically worn down. Interestingly, after the 1997 win, once Deep Blue had shown it could defeat Kasparov, and gain IBM publicity to strengthen its corporate position, Deep Blue was rapidly dismantled; sorry, I meant retired.

Behind the apparent triumph of AI, there was vast and collaborative human input.

Every once in a while, look up from your mobile device.

In times of generalised and cascading crises, everyone turns to the humanities – in particular the philosophers – for answers. While we all inhabit the algorithmic panopticon (controlled by private corporations), the larger questions of the humanities may seem irrelevant. If transnational corporations control the algorithms, they can successfully and heavily influence public consciousness.

However, if we dig a bit deeper, we will find that our current problems and issues we wrestle with have been the subject of extensive debate and analysis by philosophers.

Let’s examine this series of interconnected issues.

Reading The Plague by Camus in a time of pandemic

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the public’s initial reaction consisted of anxiety and fear about the future. In order to anchor our reactions to this pandemic and its societal impacts, sales of an old novel went through the roof in 2020. Albert Camus’ The Plague (La Pest), first published in English translation in 1948, the book centres on the city of Oran, in French Algeria.

Oran was hit by a plague, and Camus explores the quarantine of the city, the human consequences of the plague’s dissemination, and the struggle by doctors and health care professionals to deal with the influx of stricken patients. While the novel is set in the 1940s, Camus drew on the long history of epidemics in Oran, in particular the 1846 – 1860 cholera outbreak in that city.

Camus examines the social impact of the contagion, the resultants deaths and existential crisis in the town, the struggle by the authorities to limit the fatalities caused by the pandemic, and the sense of loss and inevitability gripping the town’s residents. These examinations resonate with people going through the current pandemic. Camus was a philosopher and novelist, not a scientist, yet he was able to capture the social and cultural experiences of living through a shattering event.

In a time of widespread crisis, a book published seventy years ago became the defining novel of the current pandemic. We go back to the humanities to find answers, provide an anchoring experience in an otherwise rudderless environment.

Indeed, if there is a criticism to be made of The Plague, it is the fact that Camus, in a glaring and possibly deliberate omission, did not include any Arab or Berber characters in his novel. Algeria was a French colony, and Camus failed to provide a view of the epidemic from an indigenous perspective.

Magee, Copleston and Schopenhauer

The late Bryan Magee (1930 – 2019) was an articulate and talented British philosopher, who presented the programme The Great Philosophers on the BBC. Broadcasting philosophy to the public, Magee reached a wide audience, and helped dummies like me understand the complex world of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and logical positivism, among other things.

This was when I was going through my nineteenth century German philosophy phase. In many ways, I have never outgrown it, and I still go back to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer from time to time.

His talks, usually involving interviews with other subject matter experts, were always exceedingly polite, and I enjoyed listening to the Received Pronunciation on the television. That is what was called the Queen’s English back in the day. Make no mistake, this was the BBC-high culture version of a no-holds-barred, gladiatorial fight to the death contest between Magee and his interlocutor in the staid confines of a BBC studio.

Magee was an expert on Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), a German philosopher known for his exploration of existentialism. He never described himself as such, but the questions he asked regarding existence, pessimism and the world as will and representation place him in the German idealist and existentialist camp.

Magee, in one of his many BBC broadcasts, had Fr. Frederick Copleston (1907 – 1994) on his programme to discuss Schopenhauer. They debated Schopenhauer’s ideas, his ethics and his characterisation of the observable phenomenal world as a manifestation of the irrational noumenal will. Whether Schopenhauer is right or wrong I do not know; but what I do know is that being immersed in such debates as a young university student in the 1980s was excellent training in tackling the large existential questions which we face today.

Human induced climate change, increasingly severe fires, floods and droughts, economic dislocations, ecological breakdown, rising alienation and loneliness, interethnic warfare and the rise of the ultranationalist Right are all part of a cascading series of crises giving rise to an existential crisis.

I do not have a grand blueprint to solve all of these interconnected problems. What I do realise is that with the decline of the humanities, and the rise of the digital panopticon, we have abandoned the ability to dive deeply into serious sociopolitical and cultural problems. Our short attention spans demand the next webpage, the next online click, the next TikTok video or Facebook reel.

Am I suggesting that all of us drop everything and read Schopenhauer? No, I am not. Am I suggesting that science is useless or unnecessary to make sense of the human condition? Of course not. To take one example, modern science has been absolutely indispensable in confronting a most serious cultural virus, racism. Tackling the pseudoscientific underpinnings of racism is essential in reclaiming our common humanity.

There needs to be a reversal in the decline of the humanities, and we must discard the view that social sciences are ‘not useful’. The decline in media literacy has made us ever more vulnerable to propaganda – what we euphemistically call public relations.

If you think AI is making philosophy and the humanities obsolete – think again. Philosophy was instrumental in the emergence of computing, quantifiable variables and supplementing human cognitive capabilities since the first time we began thinking about thinking.

It is not everyday that an obscure topic like the origins of the Indo-European languages gets mentioned in the news. A topic that requires the increasing cooperation of disparate fields such as ancient DNA, genetics, linguistics and archaeology does not make news headlines in our short-attention span commercial media culture. However, it was with great enthusiasm that I read a news article about advances in the debate regarding the origin of Indo-European languages.

As a person of Armenian background, I get asked about the language and where it comes from. Armenian is a branch of the Indo-European language family. About 40 percent of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. That family includes English, Russian Kurdish, Sanskrit, Latin – just to name a few.

Yes, another name for Indo-European is Aryan. No, it does not mean what you think it means. Aryans are not a race, let alone a blond-haired, blue-eyed ethnicity. No, the Nazis mangled archaeology and ancient history. The term Aryan refers to the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European family. No, it was never used to identify the entire collection of languages and peoples designated under the term Indo-European.

The French racist theorist, Arthur Gobineau (1816 – 1882) created an Aryan racial category to provide a pseudoscientific basis for his contention that human races were unequal. We all know who picked up on that invention and took it to the extreme.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been numerous attempts to identify the origins of Indo-European languages. Two major scenarios have been put forward to provide an explanation. The Steppe hypothesis suggests that peoples north of the Black Sea, the Pontic-Caspian steppe lands, spread out from their homeland, and were the originators of the proto-Indo-European language. Their culture is known as the Kurgan culture.

The other compelling hypothesis is called the Anatolian. First formulated by the English archaeologist the late Colin Renfrew, the latter suggested that farmers on the Anatolian peninsula – present day Turkey – spread agricultural practices as they moved, and brought their Proto-Indo-European language with them.

Renfrew identified Neolithic Anatolia as the birthplace of the original Indo-European speakers. Hittite, an extinct language, was spoken by the farmers on the Anatolian peninsula. The Hittites, mentioned in the Old Testament, were an Indo-European people, and one of the first major civilisations in West Asia.

Which scenario is correct? That debate has simmered, and intermittently erupted with volcanic force, since the first attempts to identify the similarities between, and common origins of, words from different languages. The Dutch, and then the English, while on their colonising adventures from the 16th century onwards, noticed similarities between geographically distant languages.

For instance, English philologist and judge William Jones (1746 – 1794) noticed similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. He theorised that these languages must have had a common ancestral tongue. Earlier, Russian scientist and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711 – 1765) compared different language groups – Slavic, Baltic, Finnish, Latin, Greek, Russian, German – and suggested a common ancestor for the languages of his day.

Comparative linguistics can only take you so far. The advent of ancient DNA analysis opened up a whole new avenue of investigation into the deep human past.

The Yamnaya culture, which occupied the Pontic Caspian steppe, was identical from ancient DNA as being the people who initially spread the original Indo-European language. However, the Hittites, the Anatolian branch of Indo-European speakers, did not have any Yamnaya DNA. Archaeologists know from cuneiform tablets that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language. Was there another ancestral people that unites these disparate groups of ethnicities?

Recent DNA studies, examined by Carl Zimmer. NY Times science writer, identifies the Caucasus Lower Volga (CLV) people as the ancestors of the original Indo-European language. Being nomadic, they spread their agricultural practices and culture throughout the territories now comprising southern Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey.

The migration of the CLV people was not singular nor linear, but occurred in uneven waves. Some branches of the CLV people settled into a sedentary lifestyle, encouraged by the development of agriculture. The CLV people lived in a territory stretching from the Volga river to the Caucasus mountains about 7000 years ago.

The Black Sea and its environs forms a kind of Southern Arc of migratory channels. Branches of ancient peoples travelled to Armenia, the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia.

Before we definitively claim that the mystery of the origins of Indo-European languages is solved, let’s sound a word of caution. Perhaps I am demonstrating my inherently cautious disposition, but let’s remember one crucial fact – language dispersal and ancient DNA are not directly linked. Language is transmitted culturally and socially; DNA is obviously genetic.

If we are tracing the origins of blood groups, ancient DNA indicating migratory patterns would provide a firm tracing tool – blood types are determined by your genes. Language is socially transmitted. Human language is a distinctive feature of human culture. Animals certainly communicate, in many sophisticated ways, but they do not have words or language.

Yes of course, people who share DNA are related, and more likely to speak a shared language. Ancient DNA can resolve questions about ancient peoples and their intermixing. But language is a cultural transmission, and a person’s DNA does not nearly equate with the culture in which they are raised. It is in the intersections of life that we will find ultimate answers for our questions about language.

The US Agency for International Development (USAid) sounds innocuous and benevolent – a charity dispensing financial help to those in need overseas. Indeed, there are humanitarian programs within the purview of USAid, and the staff working on those initiatives are motivated by integrity and a genuine desire to help the less fortunate globally.

Being fair and reasonable regarding the financially helpful features of USAid programs should not blind us to the underlying reality – this organisation is an instrument of US soft power and regime change. Its top personnel have never been altruistic humanists, but cynical and politically calculating realists who have leveraged US assistance to the goals of extending American political and economic power.

No, this is not meant to intentionally sound conspiratorial, but rather encourage readers to engage in a critical analysis of the instruments and role of US soft power.

Forgive me for feeling schadenfreude at this moment; viewing the paroxysmal hysteria of centrist and liberal imperialist security state political tribes lamenting the shutdown of soft power regime vehicle of US foreign policy makes me smile.

Chris Hedges, long term activist and scholar, who can hardly be called a friend of the Trump-Musk-MAGA cult, wrote the following regarding US foreign aid:

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

Founded in 1961 by former US President John Kennedy, USAid’s mission was always the soft power promotion of US capitalist power. Spending millions on NGOs, ‘independent’ media networks, and humanitarian programmes, USAid was an instrument of the cultural Cold War. US imperialism, in line with previous empires, does not rely exclusively on brute force to expand, but also through cultural domination.

Noam Chomsky understood, in the 1970s, that USAid is the friendly face of US soft power imperialism. Chomsky, a veteran leftist critic of US foreign policies, cannot be considered politically adjacent to the far right Trump administration, by no means. Yet, he understood and wrote about the machinations of USAid, stating that it was hard to know when official CIA influence ended, and USAid began, in nations targeted for regime change.

He wrote about his experiences in Laos, where USAid was directly contingent on Laotian ruling parties following US interests in the region. And Laos was not the only place where financial support came with strings attached. In the early 1990s, USAid promised to finance the rebuilding of the international airport at Port-au-Prince, with one condition; that Haiti vote against Cuba’s bid to become a member of the Organisation of American States (OAS). The Haitian authorities duly obliged.

We can all see the immediate and devastating consequences of cutting off USAid to millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Recipients of humanitarian aid in Africa face famine, with crucial food supplies left undistributed in warehouses. HIV patients, millions in Nigeria for instance, rely on USAid-supported clinics to access antiretroviral treatment. Currently, 25.6 million people live with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is still prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Cutting of their access to medical treatments will only worsen the occurrence not only of HIV/AIDS, but also cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.

In fact, it is the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (WHO) which delivered the crucial blow to HIV patients health care in Africa. Canceling its international commitments and finance from the WHO represents a serious deterioration in health care provision both in the US and globally.

I am not oblivious to the unfolding humanitarian disaster which is a predictable consequence of shuttering USAid funding. It is not being heartless or cruel to recognise that USAid, far from being an innocuous charitable organisation, is a sharp spear in the effort of US soft power regime change. It is not just me saying this; leftist former President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, demanded that USAid be expelled from his nation in 2023, citing its role as an interventionist instrument of US foreign policy.

Former Bolivian president, the socialist and indigenous activist Evo Morales, expelled USAid from his country back in 2013, citing its role as a key financial of Bolivian right wing and oligarchic figures dedicated to the overthrow of his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. The MAS party has consistently opposed the exploitation of Bolivia’s natural resources by rapacious foreign (namely American) corporations, and defended the lives and welfare of the working class, the peasantry and indigenous people.

From 1996 until 2003, USAid was instrumental in funding, to the tune of millions of dollars, the seemingly benevolent Democratic Development and Citizen Participation programme in Bolivia. One of numerous NGOs funded by USAid overseas, it played a pivotal role in agitating against MAS.

The Trump administration, staffed by an assortment of MAGA cultists, religious fanatics, corporate leeches, Christian fascists and psychopaths, is engaging in a cannibalistic intra-security state warfare to cut government spending. Free market fundamentalism is what unites the MAGA cult. Any kind of government spending on social programmes is immediately denounced as ‘Communism.’ Indeed, Musk himself made this point clear, attacking USAid as being staffed by radical Marxists.

That is news to me. As Professor Vijay Prashad has stated, it is a viper’s nest of imperialists.

USAid has fallen victim to the relentless free market fanaticism of the MAGA cultist camp. Vilifying government spending for decades as a uniquely burdensome economic evil, whether it be on health care, education or scientific research, has now rebounded on the liberal imperialist segment of the US financial elite.

In Australia, the term ‘foreign aid’ gets a bad press. The underlying xenophobia of cutting Australia’s already measly contribution is rationalised with the simplistic claim ‘we should be helping Aussies’. Overhyped concerns about alleged corruption in foreign aid organisations divert the conversation from the fact that those who state ‘we should be helping Aussies’ do not help neither Australians nor the foreign-born.

Rather than lament the demise of USAid, let’s focus our energies on countering the oligarchic policies which continue to impoverish the majority of the world’s population; unceasing overseas wars, foolish spending on harebrained military fantasies, and the merging of IT tech companies with global surveillance.

It is curious and oddly funny in a way to watch multiple mainstream media outlets sanitise the Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at the post-inauguration ceremony of US President Donald Trump.

No, it was not a Nazi salute, we are assured, but a ‘Roman’ one….no, it was because Musk got overexcited due to autism…..no, he was indicating the height of the trees in his backyard…..no, he was signalling the arrival of his Uber.

Are we supposed to believe that Musk Nazi salute was just a case of an eccentric making a nervous twitch arm movement? Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian doctor with Nazi sympathies, moved to apartheid South Africa in the 1950s. Becoming active in supporting white supremacy, Haldeman denounced the hordes of coloured people who, controlled by an international cabal of Jewish bankers, intended to overwhelm the white Christian civilisation of South Africa. Statements like these are hardly the product of a nonpolitical arm twitch.

No, we cannot visit the sins of the grandparents onto the grandchildren, but Musk grew up in an environment with unmistakable fascist sympathies. The grandparents made white supremacist rants in the age before social media.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named after the Polish-born lawyer of Jewish background who first coined the word genocide, issued a red flag warning for the United States, urging all of us to exercise skepticism when it comes to attempts to whitewash or explain away Musk’s supposedly awkward hand gesture.

We cannot lightly dismiss an unmistakable gesture indicating support for, and boosting, an antisemitic genocidal ideology as just an unfortunate accident. This was not the sadly unintended antics of a publicity-seeking egomaniac. Musk is very close to the Trump administration, influencing its economic, technological and civil policies.

When Musk was a rising star of the IT/Silicon Valley complex, touting electric cars as an environmentally friendly replacement for the polluting and outdated internal combustion engine, numerous favourable comparisons were made between him and Henry Ford, founding father of Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford (1867 – 1943) was an industrialist and car manufacturer famous, not for inventing the petroleum engine itself, but making it affordable to millions of working class and middling Americans. His innovative production techniques, today collectively known as Fordism, revolutionised not only the automotive industry, but also factory production generally. Fordism provided the template for automotive manufacturing, and this impacted production techniques across manufacturing industries in the twentieth century.

The availability and ubiquity of the household car can be attributed to the widespread success of Fordism. However, let’s also remember another vital reason for the general use of the motor car; the deliberate running down of electric-based transportation, including public trams and trains.

Automotive and oil companies, starting in the 1940s, deliberately gained control of public transit systems to run them down. Enforced decrepitude of public transport only encouraged consumers to rely on motor vehicles. Creating a market for your product is just as important as technological innovation in persuading people to purchase your product.

In Sydney and Adelaide, the extensive networks of electric trams were ripped out to make way for the now ubiquitous motor vehicle.

Musk’s purchase of Tesla corporation back in 2008 was greeted with enthusiasm by industry commentators. Just as Henry Ford revolutionised automotive assembly line production in the early twentieth century, it was hoped that Musk’s energetic commitment to electric cars would similarly revolutionise the car market, heralding the move away from the petroleum-based engine.

Comparisons between Ford and Musk were made, and they were usually favourable. However, the similarities between the two industrialists is not what most media commentators would have us believe.

Both men were/are critical agents of industrial and economic change in their respective eras – that much is true. Although we have to add a caveat here; the electric car is gradually superseding the internal combustion engine, but not due to any innovation by Musk, but because of the robust commitment by China to move away from fossil fuel dependence.

Strong government subsidies for electric vehicle production, cheaper prices, and lithium battery support has made China the global leader in EV sales.

Be that as it may, there is a strong similarity between the two car manufacturers – and it is not complimentary. Both entrepreneurs are allowing (in the case of Ford, did allow) antisemitic conspiracy theories, prejudice and support for ultranationalist racist parties to dominate their lives. Ford, a dedicated antisemite and supporter of the Nazi party, used his financial power to circulate anti-Jewish racism, buying space in newspapers to publish articles promoting Nazi-adjacent ideology.

Elon Musk, the preeminent car manufacturer of our era, is walking down the same ultrarightist pathway. Expressing support for the far right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), Musk has platformed attacks against multiculturalism, denouncing what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’. The AfD, a vehemently anti-immigrant organisation, traces its ideological lineage to the Nazi party.

The techbro of Silicon Valley once hailed as an ecologically responsible progressive entrepreneur, has revealed himself to be the purveyor of ultranationalist grievance politics, directing resentment at the gains made by civil rights and migrant organisations for racial and educational equality. In this regard, Musk is adopting the same culturally and politically reactionary role that Ford played in his era.

A star addicted to fame and publicity, fellow MAGA cult follower Kanye West can be considered an appropriate parallel example to Musk. West, about whom I have written before, is obsessed with being in the spotlight. Musk definitely enjoys being the centre of attention, that is for sure. However, Musk has gone further than Kanye, and clearly chosen to align his politics with the inhabitants today’s ultrarightist cesspit.

Musk and Ford demonstrate that billionaires are not only conspiracy peddlers, harmful as that is. They also provide validation and political support for the anti-immigrant and fascist movements. The billionaire class provides a conveyor belt for the neoliberal white supremacist Right. Musk and Ford do not want to abolish government spending, they re-engineer the state’s functions to make the economy conducive to the conduct of big business.

The purpose of a good investigative writer is to explore what others ignore. What constitutes newsworthy items is not always determined by the mainstream media. Sure, the latter guarantees widespread exposure for issues it deems important, but also ignores those topics which shed light on the machinations of imperialist-corporate power.

I have deliberately chosen not to write too much about Syria just yet. That is not because the toppling of the former Ba’athist government in Syria is inconsequential, but because there has already been extensive coverage of the topic, accompanied by mandatory celebratory pictures of the downfall of a brutal regime.

I also do not wish to participate in the interminable, emotionally draining inter-Left debate on Syria which only recycles cliches on road trodden by numerous commentators in the past.

The Nazification of Arab nationalism

I never begrudge anyone their release from prison. Opening up the dungeons of the Ba’athist regime is a relief to its victims. Please, let’s stop using the word Assadist – there is no such thing. What I am concerned about, and was waiting for, is the anticipated Nazification of the Ba’athist regime and its leaders, both Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad. It is easy, and lazy, to deploy the Hitler analogy when an authoritarian leader is overthrown, and it plays directly into a view of the world our corporate-managerial masters want us to adopt.

Alois Brunner (1912 – 2001 or 2010) was an Austrian SS officer responsible for the deaths of thousands of European Jews. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, he fled accountability for his crimes, and settled in postwar Syria. The Ba’athist government gave him sanctuary, and he spent the rest of his life in that nation. He is buried in Damascus.

Our toadying corporate media, sensing an opportunity to kick the Ba’athist party while it is down, gave publicity to this sordid episode. Making the Arab-Nazi connection even more explicit, Al Jazeera claimed that Brunner advised Syrian security forces in setting up prisons and torture techniques.

Making the Arab-Nazi connection serves to further the false claim that Arabs – and Palestinians in particular – oppose the Israeli state on the basis of irrational antisemitism. The Ba’ath party advocated a pan-Arab nationalism which respected the rights of non-Arab ethnic minorities. It proposed the building of a socialist economy, not Soviet nor Marxist. Its ideological mix of pan-Arabism and ethnic inclusivity made it inhospitable to the racialist, ethnically paranoid hypernationalism of the Nazi party.

One wonders what the reaction of the mainstream media would have been if Syria, or another Arab nation, had provided sanctuary for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Actually, we do not have to look too far for such a scenario. Canada provided safe haven for thousands of Ukrainian (and Eastern European) wartime Nazi collaborators, who were the recipients of Ottawa’s considerable largesse.

Worthy refugees

When Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian man who served in the Waffen SS (Galician) was given two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament in September 2023, it was inadvertently providing the tip of an iceberg. Thousands of Ukrainian SS troops were quietly provided sanctuary by successive Canadian governments after the Second World War. One of the Trudeau government’s most prominent figures, Chrystia Freeland, is herself a grandchild of Mykhailo Chomiak, a propagandist for the Ukrainian Nazi administration during the war.

No, we cannot hold the grandchildren responsible for the sins of the grandparents. Freeland, who has used her ethnic background as a platform to climb the ladder of Canadian politics, has never distanced herself from her white supremacist grandfather. Indeed, Chomiak helped a white supremacist regime massacre the grandparents of today’s Holocaust survivors.

Trudeau and Freeland should face the consequences of the Hunka affair. They should admit the ethical bankruptcy of Canadian foreign and domestic politics – turning away Jewish refugees from Europe during the war, but then providing sanctuary for their white supremacist killers, is the height of moral decrepitude and cynical political expediency.

Both Trudeau and Freeland are intelligent, articulate politicians. Trudeau specifically has marketed himself as a reasonable centrist, removed from the rancorous, divisive Left vs Right paradigm. He should have known better than to sweep criminal and shameful episodes of Canadian history under the carpet.

We must highlight the words of Judi Rever, journalist from Montreal who wrote that:

Freeland knows full well that soldiers from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) collaborated with the Third Reich and took an active part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland. She would also know that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary group, carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and hunted down and killed several thousand Jews during that period. More than any other Canadian politician today, Freeland knows this history. Canadians should ask what was going through her mind as she bestowed praise on a man who fought the Russians during that pivotal time, a man we now know was part of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS whose troops were involved in the mass murder of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians in the 1940s.

Canadian politicians, including whomever replaces Trudeau and Freeland, should read a new book that explores this underreported chapter.

Published in 2024, Peter McFarlane is the author of a new book called Family Ties: How a Ukrainian Nazi and a living witness link Canada to Ukraine today. The author elaborates the history not only of Ukrainian Nazis, but their Jewish victims as well. For instance, traveling to the Eastern European town of Brody, a city in Western Ukraine, McFarlane found that out of a prewar Jewish population of 10 000, only 88 Jewish persons survived.

There is a museum in Brody today, which does commemorate the Second World War. No, not the Holocaust victims – the Holocaust is not even mentioned. It is a memory lane for the Galician Division; its history, uniforms, insignia, Nazi-aligned personnel and conduct. The government in Ottawa provided refuge for these personnel, but subjected Jewish refugees to bureaucratic obstacles and official resistance.

War crimes trials are something we regard as quite remote, from the Australian perspective. Indeed, our direct experience of war crimes relates more to the cruelties inflicted upon Australian and British soldiers by Imperial Japanese troops. We are more likely to remember the Burma death marches and the thousands of died building the Thai railways, rather than Auschwitz.

We are reasonably free in liberal democratic Australia, and I can do what I want in my front garden. How would it be if I erected a statue to former Japanese emperor Hirohito, in my front yard? Am I not exercising my right to free speech?

I raise this hypothetical example to highlight the similar kinds of issues being debated by antifascist Canadian communities today. No single person can be an expert on every historical issue. We do expect our political leaders, however, to exhibit better conduct and be held to a higher standard. The foreign and domestic policies of Anglophone nations are allegedly motivated by respect for the law, and not by manipulative and deceitful political calculations.

Lack of accountability is a poor lesson to pass on to future generations, especially when covering up shameful episodes from recent history.