Right wing diaspora communities form a fertile climate in which ultranationalist groups can grow. These organisations then combat the political Left in their host nations. Multiculturalism is a wonderful policy, but the right wing leadership of diasporic communities misdirect their anger at vulnerable minorities.

Let’s examine this multifaceted topic by starting with a recent news story.

Germany and Turkey have a fractious relationship at the best of times, and the connection soured even further this month. The German authorities denounced a Turkish football player, and his team’s supporters, for making the wolf gesture during a soccer match.

The wolf salute is a signature of the ultranationalist neofascist Turkish outfit, the Grey Wolves. Calling themselves the Idealist Hearths, they are a paramilitary formation, strongly anticommunist and advocating an ethnically pure expansionist Turkish nation.

These Turkish ethnonationalists, while originating in the turbulent political climate of Turkey decades ago, have found supporters among the expatriate and refugee Turkish communities in Germany and France. Espousing a racist ideology of Pan-Turkism, they wish to expand Turkey’s borders to include the putatively Turkish-origin populations of Central Asia.

Indeed, the mythical expanded ethnonationalist Turkish empire sought after by the Grey Wolves, includes the Xinjiang province of China, to which they refer as East Turkestan. What a coincidence, the Turkish ultranationalist formation is incredibly concerned about the human rights of the Uyghur Muslim community in Xinjiang, China. That is a cynically emotional tactic to disguise their own advocacy of American-backed violent regime change in China.

Building on the political rapprochement between Turkey and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Grey Wolves are the street-fighting arm of the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP is the acronym in Turkish). Targeting Kurds, Armenians, and antifascist Turks, the Grey Wolves have implanted themselves in the refugee Turkish communities in Europe.

Marching against refugees

Grey Wolves use violence against their political opponents, not only in Turkey, but in Europe as well. Such extremist violence only plays into the hands of far right Islamophobic politicians, such Le Pen in France, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

The Turkish ultranationalists have also marched against any refugee intake from Syria and other Middle Eastern nations. Wait a minute – Turks in Germany, who were themselves once refugees, are now opposed to granting entry to prospective asylum seekers?

Is not that hypocritical and selfish? Yes, it is. It also reflects the end-logic of ultranationalist political philosophy. Far right extremism not only hates foreigners, but supports foreign-born racists and right wing extremists.

Chinese Americans – a right wing diaspora

Conservative Chinese Americans are among the most vociferous supporters of MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump. But just wait a minute….does not Trump express Sinophobic sentiments? Yes, he does. He also circulates the bizarre ‘lab leak’ conspiracy theory beloved by MAGA conservatives. Targeting China as a supremely evil nation, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, Trump and his partisans have their supporters among the Chinese-American community.

Chinese-American far right supporters cheered on Donald Trump, and were excited by the January 6 attempted coup d’état by the MAGA ultranationalist American camp.

Conservative Chinese Americans have donated to the Proud Boys, an ultranationalist neofascist street gang which, among other things, engages in violent attacks against migrants and refugee ethnic minorities. Fund raising appeals for the Proud Boys were accomplished by sympathetic Chinese proverbs; “For those who pave the road to freedom, do not leave them struggling with thistles and thorns”. The ideological crossover between conservative Chinese Americans and American ultranationalist groups is not difficult to fathom.

Migrant communities, due to language and cultural barriers, avoid the mainstream English language media, and resort to news in confined areas. It is easy, in this day and age of social media, to create an ecosystem of conspiratorial hate. The Chinese American community is no exception. The pandemic has brought forth not just the Covid virus, but the viral superspreader of misinformation.

Social conservatism among migrant communities is nothing new. Try speaking about or teaching evolutionary biology to groups of Sydney Armenians, and you will feel the full force of social outrage. What is different this time around is the weaponisation of such conservatism for political gain.

To be sure, importing conservative migrants has long antecedents. It is no secret that Australia, Canada, and other Anglophone nations welcomed Eastern European Nazi collaborators not only for their political qualifications and intelligence assets, but also as a bulwark against labour unions and the Left.

Far right groups are certainly not the friends of the labour movement. If anything, they have a durable track record of dismantling labour militancy and union organising. Yes, we need multiculturalism; every ethnic group makes its unique contribution to the wider polity. But we must not turn a blind eye to the dark underbelly of multiculturalism, where right wing hypernationalism can flourish.

There is a renewed Cold War, with China and Russia once again demonised as the enemy, despite all the economic and political changes undergone by those two nations since 1991. Right wing diaspora communities are yet again being corralled into becoming foot-soldiers for the American empire – in both the foreign and domestic realms.

It is crucial for migrant communities to speak out against war and mass killings done in the name of regime change. Imperialist wars overseas require domestically-produced cannon fodder. Cultural conditioning plays an essential role in building public support for war. We would do well to change our mindset, and resist backing those parties calling for further ethnic conflict.

Peru does not usually make the news in Australia. Our heavily monopolised corporate media have a very narrow Anglophone perspective; it’s only worthwhile news if it happens in the Anglo-American cultural sphere. However, there are exceptions – and it is interesting to note that there are lessons for us from non-Anglocentric nations.

Keiko Fujimori, daughter of longtime Peruvian constitutional dictator Alberto Fujimori, has been indicted for corruption and leading a criminal organisation. A former presidential candidate, pivoting off the fame of her father, it is good to see a high profile politician held to account for their criminal behaviour. Her party, Popular Force, is accused of being a criminal organisation. Good to see that in the Americas – South, not North – accountability still applies, even to public figures.

Why is this important? Her father, Alberto, built his reputation as a strongman political operator after capturing the longtime head of the rebellious Communist Party of Peru, widely known as Shining Path. The Maoist rebels had waged a stubborn guerrilla struggle over the decades, and their determination seemed unstoppable.

Alberto Fujimori, coming to power as a neoliberal candidate in 1991, quickly set about making the defeat of terrorism (as he portrayed Shining Path) in an early 1990s Peruvian version of the ‘war on terror’.

Suspending the constitution, and relying on the secret police, Fujimori the elder waged a relentless campaign to capture the leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzman. The latter was commonly known as Comrade Gonzalo.

Alberto Fujimori was hailed as the hope of the future for Peru by none other than former US President George Bush (the elder). Heroised as a great statesman, Fujimori rammed through neoliberal policies and entrenched the power of the financial oligarchy. The capture of Guzman in 1992 seemed to confirm Fujimori’s success, and his far right administration received favourable coverage in Australia at the time.

It is interesting to note that Fujimori’s constitutional violations and suspension of civil liberties were not discussed in the adulatory coverage of his regime in Australia. At about the same time, 1991, the corporate media could barely hide their malicious glee with the defeat of Zambia’s longtime president, Kenneth Kaunda.

The latter had led the anti colonial liberation struggle to expel the British from northern Rhodesia, as Zambia was then known. From the 1960s onwards, Kaunda lent his support to other African liberation struggles, such as that of the African National Congress (ANC) against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

Kaunda was a charismatic, eloquent politician, frequently smiling, sports-mad (he loved football), rode his bicycle everywhere, and danced at the drop of a hat. His passing in 2021 marked the end of an era, the last of the great anti colonial freedom fighters. His rule, that of a one-party state, came to an end in 1991 with the first multiparty elections in Zambia.

The corporate media were virtually beside themselves with happiness; Kaunda, who had triumphed over British imperialism was humbled by his own people. Kaunda took the defeat gracefully; peacefully handing over power, and settled into the role of an active elder statesman. He still smiled, and laughed, and danced.

Zambia, throughout Kaunda’s reign as president (1964 – 1991), nationalised most sectors of the economy, pushing out foreign (mainly British) capital. While maintaining friendly relations with the USSR and the Eastern bloc, Zambia charted its own noncommunist course of African socialism. Agreeing to multiparty elections, Kaunda’s time had seemed over in 1991. While he was electorally defeated, he maintained his popularity with the people throughout his post-presidency life.

Let’s remember that Kaunda, in 1964, inherited a nation who main resources (copper mining) were dominated by English capital. Ian Smith, racist leader of southern Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa, imposed economic sanctions on Zambia. Most of Zambia’s revenue was derived from mining.

Exports from Zambia had to pass through Rhodesia and South Africa to reach their destination. Economic sanctions are considered acceptable behaviour by pro-western nations when the targets are newly independent countries charting their own course. Embarking on state-led industrial independence, Kaunda was never forgiven by the Anglo-American imperial axis for his resource nationalism.

Fujimori, after losing the presidency in 2000, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder, kidnapping, corruption and crimes against humanity. After serving 15 years, he was controversially pardoned and granted early release. Peru has had a succession of corrupt oligarchic presidents since 2000. From July 2016 to December 2022, Peru had seven presidents in six years. Fujimori’s legacy is one of institutional corruption.

Kenneth Kaunda never lost his stature as one of the great presidents of Zambia, and a pan-African leader. He died in 2021, at the ripe old age of 97. Since 2021, 4000 people have achieved literacy as a result of educational programmes implemented by the Socialist Party of Zambia in conjunction with Cuban educators. I think Kaunda would be proud.

I like to think that his indomitable spirit is still among us, smiling, riding his bicycle, playing football – and dancing.

We have all seen the Top Gun movies. The words Maverick, Iceman, Goose have all entered the popular lexicon. Tom Cruise’s fame still pivots on the success of the Top Gun franchise. T-shirts emblazoned with the quote ‘talk to me Goose’ still sell today.

Val Kilmer still gets requests (despite his throat cancer) to repeat his character’s famous catchphrase ‘you can be my wingman anytime.’ But how many of us know that the first Top Guns, Air Force pilots awarded the honour of outstanding air combat skills, were actually African American?

The story in Top Gun is fictional, but the Tuskegee airmen were definitely real. The first African American fighter pilots, trained decades before the heavily fictionalised version of Navy air pilots portrayed in Top Gun, the members of the 332nd Fighter Group pilots won the first ever Fighter Gunnery Meet in 1949. They were the first Top Guns, and their accomplishment was ignored for the next 55 years.

The gunnery meet was held in May 1949 at the Las Vegas Air Force base, and saw squadrons from around the nation gather for the fighter competition. Retired Lt. Col. James Harvey III, one of the first African American pilots, commented years later that everyone, especially the all white officers, were stunned. The Tuskegee airmen, African Americans, won the competition.

Along with Harvey, Captain Alva Temple, 1st Lt. Harry Stewart and alternate 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander, collectively won the first propeller-driven aircraft fighter gunnery meet. Harvey recalled that there was dead silence at the time of their win. Not only was there no applause, but long-festering resentment at the success of the black American pilot team. The top gun trophy mysteriously disappeared, lost in the sands of time for decades.

This was the time of legalised segregation, and the Tuskegee pilots were put in their place. Lt. Col. Harvey, when training at the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama, was told by a local sheriff ‘if I see you again, I’ll blow your brains out.’ Approximately 1000 African American air men served in the US Air Force between 1941 and 1946. The immediate needs of the war outweighed the requirements of military segregation.

Harvey fought missions in the Korean War. Shunned after returning from service, he and his fellow Tuskegee airmen were acknowledged with a plaque commemorating them at the Las Vegas Air Force base in 2022, 73 years after their Top Gun victory.

To be sure, this is not an advertisement for air force recruitment. The role of the US Air Force is to expand the military and economic power of the financial oligarchy that runs the United States. Movies such as the Top Gun franchise serve not only as recruiting tools, but also to obfuscate the suffering, blood and guts spilled, and lethal casualties of aerial warfare.

Savagery from the skies can become normalised if we keep telling ourselves that the personnel who drop the bombs are heroes to be admired. Indeed, in this age of drone strikes – a policy escalated and routinised under the first African American president Obama – the casualties of aerial warfare can seem even further distant and out of sight to Anglophone audiences.

Another African American first – an accomplishment for which the originator has been marginalised – was the use of radar to calculate the speed of the Moon. The astrophysicist responsible was Walter McAfee (1914 – 1995). An African American whose knowledge of mathematics was impressive, he joined Project Diana in the 1940s.

McAfee joined the United States Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in 1942. The US military wanted a more effective way to spy on its enemies; would radio signals break through the ionosphere? Bouncing radar echoing signals off the Moon – which had been tried before and failed – was a practice requirement of the Diana Project.

Enter Walter McAfee – and he calculated how to bounce radar signals off the Moon. In January 1946, he and his colleagues successfully detected the returning radar echo signals from the Moon. This achievement not only provided the military with an edge in radar technology, it also opened the way for radar astronomy, a civilian and scientific offshoot from the original military purpose of McAfee’s work. If it were not for him, travel to the Moon would have remained a practical impossibility.

McAfee was subsequently shunned, and his achievement were forgotten outside of the American military-scientific community. It is important to note that the African American was marginalised; at the same time, NASA, and other American scientific institutions, deliberately and secretly recruited ex-Nazi scientists, providing sanctuary for scientists whose work led to the deaths of millions in Europe.

Decades after McAfee’s accomplishments, he was finally honoured as a pioneering astrophysicist.

Hollywood has a cottage industry of making films about how American military veterans are treated poorly. The old cliche of the allegedly mistreated Vietnam veteran has done the rounds through numerous Hollywood movies. That myth has gained wide currency, drumming up public sympathy for the soldiers participating in imperialist wars overseas.

Let us see if Hollywood will make movies about the mistreatment and shunning of African American veterans, and personnel who served in various capacities. After serving their nation (in both world wars), African American veterans returned to a country that rejected and marginalised them.

These are historical matters, to be sure, and we have come a long way since then. The way we teach history impacts the way we see ourselves, and influences our contemporary choices. A general public that views the American military as heroes will resist attempts to hold US soldiers to account for their crimes. Let’s honour the African Americans who served, but let us also avoid masking imperialism with the fig leaf of inclusivity.

Being a writer for most of my working life, I have striven to understand the requirements and interests of readers. Understanding the audience influences the type of writing I use, and the topics I cover change. Instructional material is one thing – guiding the users of a Microsoft Word platform on how to copy and paste text is an example of a reader requirement.

Over the years, however, I have seen the description content creator become more frequent. I must confess, I still do not know what that means. Yes, I am well aware that writing involves more than just text. Images, audiovisual presentations, podcasts, audio, webinars – all these are now part and parcel of good writing.

The term content creator sounds like a corporate buzzword, intending to obscure rather than inform. Keeping things concise and easy to understand is the hallmark of an effective writer.

The days of taking your manuscript to a publisher, and sweating over the outcome of its reception, are long gone. The writer must have a say on the design, book over, graphics, data analytics of a potential audience – these are new tasks. However, you are not a content creator; you are still a writer.

The world of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat has changed the ways writers interact with the reading public. That is great – having direct access to a reader audience is wonderful. However, do not be dragged into the cesspit of acting as a social media influencer. There is a profusion of influencers – I say misinformation peddlers – who are damaging the reputation of writers by circulating all kinds of conspiracy fictions, hyper-weaponised memes and content that belongs in the sewage.

Writers do appreciate larger audiences, but they are mainly aiming for credibility. The latter is difficult to find on social media.

Language emptied of any meaning

We are all aware of the ubiquity of corporate buzzwords. A particular type of jargon, corporate buzzwords are a way of making adults seem like grownups, in the words of Olga Khazan. The terms such as ‘innovation’, ‘disruption’, ‘synergies’, – all of them have meanings which we are meant to discern. While every profession has its jargon, corporate buzzwords are often euphemisms, deployed to disguise an ugly reality beneath them.

Mass layoffs are described as ‘pivots’; the closure of departments is described as a company ‘synergising its ongoing trajectories into operational capabilities’ – you get the idea. The rise of the tech giants – Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Silicon Valley behemoths – has produced its IT-related buzzwords. They have seeped into other industries, including sales and marketing, where the content creator originated.

Job descriptions are becoming more vague and yet grandiose. Content creator is one of those vague, yet grand-sounding jobs. The position of a salesperson can be recycled as a customer happiness enhancement officer. Corporate buzzwords make harsh realities sound softer. Lora Kelley, writing in The Atlantic, states that corporate buzzwords are euphemistic bubble wrap.

Language that is hollowed out, denuded of all meaning – corporate buzzwords then become their own reality. The market has earned a place as a hallowed ground, where all participants – sellers, buyers, workers, owners, corporations, small business entrepreneurs – are equal actors in an economic utopia. Obscured beneath the all encompassing term ‘market’, or indeed ‘free market’, is a network of social relations determining the power relationships in that market.

The word privatisation entered the public lexicon from the 1970s and 80s, a euphemism for the transfer of state assets into private hands. The pursuit of private corporate profit was disguised with positive-sounding buzzwords – ‘efficiency’ and ‘reform’. Even the word ‘austerity’ has a positive connotation to it. Who but only the cantankerous would be against spending within our means, and cutting back profligate spending? Privatisation has ended up one of the worst money-wasting scams of our times.

While most working class people can see that privatisation is a trick, it is still relentlessly pushed by political elites. The euphemistic bubble wrap is part of the package, softening public opinion for the final blow. No, I am not suggesting that people are fools – far from it. But if the corporate buzzwords take over the conversation surrounding socioeconomic issues, then people will be convinced to acquiesce to foolish things.

Monetisation is another of those corporate buzzwords that has taken off in the IT era. Blogging and content creation for the purpose of turning a buck is all well and good. But what happens when large tech companies, who have collected all our data, use that information for monetisation? Big tech is quite aware of a mental health crisis gripping the population. Should they use that to monetise our data? They are doing that already. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, stated that his corporation’s biggest contribution to humanity will be in the area of health.

The rise of the content creator is, in its own way, confirmation of the power of words. In the days before the internet and social media, it was novels, literature and books that disseminated the words of the author. If words were not powerful or impactful, then institutions such as the CIA would not have spent billions of dollars financing writers and publications to propagate its business-friendly message to the world.

Please be a content creator if that is your passion. We all have to adapt to changing times. But do not lose the value of insights from the past. AI may be a necessary accompaniment for copywriters, editors and content creators, but it can never be a substitute for human creativity and credibility.

The story of science which we are taught in Anglophone nations usually traces the origins of the scientific method to Europe. European scientists – Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and so on – are regarded as starting a scientific revolution. Along come Copernicus, Newton, Descartes (the latter being a philosopher of science), and here we have the commencement of a global scientific revolution.

We like to place ourselves within a tradition tracing back to Ancient Greece and Rome, something we label western civilisation. The Anglocentric settler nations regard themselves as the inheritors and developers of the Greco-Roman school of science and philosophy.

There was a scientific revolution in Europe as a component part of the cultural movement known as the Renaissance, but it was definitely not global. That story is the way European Christendom discovered the scientific method. The rest of the world, in particular the Islamic empire, was already light years ahead of Europe when it came to the sciences, and the philosophy underpinning the scientific method.

We have all heard of Nicolaus Copernicus and Isaac Newton, but how many of us have heard of Ibn al-Haytham? (c. 965 – c. 1040). The latter lived and worked as a scientist centuries before the heavyweights mentioned above. We will get to Al Haytham in a minute, but first, some observations are in order.

It is a great shame, and an indication of our own prejudices, that the overwhelmingly ubiquitous stereotype of Islam is that of terrorism. We can easily find millions of images, through a Google search, of pictures of bearded men brandishing guns, yelling purportedly Islamic slogans, demanding the death and destruction of infidel societies. The immediate association of Islam with violence, savagery, beheadings and other unspeakable atrocities serves to promote the stereotype of the irrational Muslim, resistant to rational thinking and impervious to scientific enquiry.

We in the English-speaking world believe that it was only in Ancient Greece, or the Renaissance, that vast, philosophically deep scientific intellectual developments occurred. Not so – while Europe was mired in the relative ignorance of the Dark Ages, the Islamic world was developing science, philosophy and technology light years ahead of anything Europe could offer. In fact, Europeans owe a great debt of gratitude for the innovative discoveries and philosophical insights of the Islamic world – scientific outpourings which prefigure the debates of contemporary times.

Remember the Islamic polymath mentioned above, Ibn Al-Haytham? His name is sometimes Latinised as Al-Hazen. He was the first experimental scientist, and the father of the science of optics – no disrespect to Isaac Newton. Al Haytham, born in Basra, Iraq, criticised the theories of Aristotle, specifically that the planets did not move in perfect circles, but in elliptical orbits.

He birthed the scientific method, using experimental evidence to verify (or falsify) hypotheses. He overturned centuries of received wisdom regarding the nature of light and the eye. The ancient Greeks had held that the eye emits rays which bounce off objects, thus forming the basis of vision. Not so, said Al-Haytham. Overturning the emissions theory, as the prevailing view was known, he proposed that light rays enter the eye, the latter acting as a pinhole camera.

As Jim Al Khalili, the physicist and historian of science points out, Al Haytham did not invent the pinhole camera. The latter, known for centuries as the camera obscura, had been developed by numerous civilisations, such as the ancient Chinese. However, Al Haytham was the first to elaborate the mathematics underlying the operation of the pinhole camera, and that the eye possessed a similar structure.

Al Haytham was the first to connect visual perception with the subjective experience. He regarded vision as not only a function of the eye, but as an experience of the brain and mind. He was not alone among the Islamic scholars in exploring what we today would call the mind-body problem. Centuries before René Descartes and Cartesian dualism, Muslim scholar Avicenna (Ibn Sina c. 980 – June 1037) was conducting thought experiments about perception, the individual experience and the nature of mind,

We have all heard the seemingly intelligent observation – Islam did not have an Enlightenment. The cynical implication of this claim is insidious; that Muslims are way behind us in the enlightened English-speaking world, and so require an education in the scientific method. It is true that the Islamic world never had an Enlightenment phase; because they did not need one.

As Sean Ledwith points out, the Abbasid caliphate, which covers the time period of the Golden Age of Islamic science, is distinguished by its deliberate cultivation of state-sponsored Enlightenment. The authorities, having conquered their Persian and Byzantine neighbours, absorbed the cultural achievements of those societies, and proceeded to develop their own scientific and philosophical innovations. Science and the cultivation of knowledge was actively promoted during the Islamic golden age.

They did not require a specific Reformation or Enlightenment period to push back against theological mysticism, as was required in European Christendom. The Islamic world translated the Ancient Greek and Roman texts, but also went on to blaze their own trail of cultural and scientific flourishing.

It is relevant to note here that one thousand years before Charles Darwin, Islamic scholars such as the zoologist Al-Jahiz (c. 776 – 868/69) were discussing evolution. No, they never used the now-familiar expression natural selection. They were discussing competition in the natural world for finite resources, adaptations of characteristics to environmental conditions, and branching speciation. These lines of enquiry are precisely those explored in evolutionary biology today.

Am I suggesting that Islam is a genetically superior system to all other religions? No, I am not. I am suggesting that we re-examine our own anti-immigrant prejudices, especially in the light of the resurgence of far right parties in Europe. Attacking the allegedly ‘barbaric’ outsider may make us feel good about ourselves, but only serves to inhibit cross cultural cooperation and solidarity.

A number of news items, seemingly unrelated, come together to form a coherent subject. Indigenous Australian news is the starting point for us today, and this will lead us into an examination of racism, eugenics and World War 2. Let’s begin…

University of Melbourne truth telling project

This year, three scholars from the University of Melbourne released a documentary report regarding the treatment – indeed, mistreatment – of indigenous Australians by the University of Melbourne governing forebears. The report called Dhoombak Goobgoowana – which translates as truth-telling – is a disturbing report into the dark underbelly of racism and eugenics underpinning the institution of the university.

In the words of the authors of the project, the university throughout its history honoured racists, eugenicists, Nazi apologists, grave robbers and body snatchers. One professor of veterinary science, Daniel Murnane, not only participated in a massacre of indigenous people, but also advocated restricting the ‘lesser races’ to avoid polluting the superior white-Anglo stock. Until this year, the university had a scholarship and a building named after him.

The list goes on – numerous Australian academics, members of eugenics societies, advocated the forced sterilisation of ‘undesirables’, meaning those with developmental delays – to reduce the numbers of useless eaters. Celebrated anthropologists, doctors, scientists and others whose names adorn buildings at the university, were proponents of a ‘master race’ perspective, proposing the racial stratification of society, and restricting the breeding (and immigration) of nonwhite deemed to be unfit.

Legacy of eugenics

The documentation of the University of Melbourne’s truth telling report highlights just how ubiquitous the philosophy of eugenics was in academia. However, it is not only in the hallowed halls of university departments where eugenics made a lasting impact that resonates until today.

News item: This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the US Immigration Act. Named the Johnson-Reed act after the main politicians pushing for its approval, the Immigration act excluded nonwhite ethnicities, including European Jews, from entering the United States. This included those southern and Eastern Europeans fleeing Nazism in Europe. The act was a practical application of the eugenicist philosophy.

It is difficult to overstate just how restrictive the Immigration Act was. The New York Times, commenting on the law passed by then President Coolidge declared that America as a melting pot has ended. Immigrants from nations deemed inferior – Eastern Europeans, Jews, Arabs and other nonwhites – were subject to strict quotas. The alleged purity of the white Anglo stock had to be preserved, so immigrants from northern and Western Europe were prioritised.

The eugenicist underpinnings of the 1924 were well established in the decades prior to its enactment. There were already laws on the statute books prohibiting Asian immigration, legislation passed with the support of American labour leaders. Being of ‘pure’ blood was of incredible importance to American legislators, economists, scientists and journalists. The US enacted numerous ‘one drop’ laws, which deemed a person of mixed race if they had at least one nonwhite ancestor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court justice and advocate of liberal causes, spoke out in favour of eugenics, and helped to pass the Buck vs Bell judgement in 1927, opening the way for thousands of forced sterilisations of those deemed ‘feeble-minded’.

It is interesting to note that the 1924 Immigration act, and American eugenics laws and programmes, were an inspiration for Hitler and the Nazi party. German scholars, looking for a successful example of a racially stratified society, examined the laws and practices of the United States. Eugenics was a mainstream ideology, influencing the passage of racial laws and antisemitic legislation in the US.

We like to think of eugenics as a relic of a bygone era, consigned to the dustbin after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In many ways that is true – the immigration was finally repealed in 1965, after decades of struggles against it by antiracist activists and legislators. The defeat of the Nazi white supremacist regime put a seemingly definitive end to the antiquated notions of breeding a ‘superior’ stock of humans through restricting immigration and forced sterilisation.

It would be wrong to let knowledge of eugenics to fall into an amnesiac gap. Ignoring the strong and intimate connections between American and German eugenicists in the prewar years is a serious omission, leading to widespread ignorance regarding the crucial and very real role of white supremacy in shaping domestic legislation.

News item; this month witnessed the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Allied landings. The veterans of that campaign confronted a monumentally powerful German military, implementing white supremacy in Nazi-occupied Europe. When African American soldiers returned home, they found a society unwilling to accept them as equals.

Eugenics dominated academic thinking and legislative policies on population and immigration. In Europe, and across the Atlantic, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is becoming normalised and mainstreamed, influencing increasing numbers of political parties and policy makers. This trope asserts that white Anglo majority societies are under threat of being ‘replaced’ by mass immigration. Allegedly orchestrated by liberal elites – usually meant to indicate Jewish elites – this ideology motivates the violence of the far right.

In Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the Great Replacement has become an official ideology. Providing a lightning rod for the ultranationalist Right, Orban has provided an ideological cement to solidify a European, and global, ultrarightist political force.

Reinvigorating white supremacy with false ideas and demographic paranoia, both eugenics and Great Replacement regard nonwhite immigration as an existential threat, unassimilable into the Anglo-majority national culture.

Did the D-Day veterans fight white supremacy eighty years ago, only to see the resurgence of that ideology in a new, mutated form today? Portrayals of immigration as a menace to Western society has a long pedigree. Elevating them to mainstream doctrine has real-world consequences.

We are all familiar with the general facts regarding the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the residents of those cities were not the first victims of atomic warfare. With all due respect to the Japanese who died in those attacks, the first victims of the nuclear age were Americans. Specifically, those who were downwind of the first atomic explosion – at Alamogordo, in the New Mexico desert, in July 1945.

On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico hinterland, the first atomic test was conducted by the scientists and military officials of the Manhattan project. Codenamed Trinity, the explosion was more powerful than the physicists anticipated, and the fallout zone was larger and more extensive than they had calculated. The area surrounding the explosion was sparsely populated, and US military authorities would later claim that the area was uninhabited.

Barbara Kent was 13 years old when the explosion occurred. She and her classmates – they were on a summer dance camp in Ruidoso, New Mexico – were thrown out of their bunk beds by the force of the blast. The detonation at Alamogordo, NM, was so bright it was seen from hundreds of miles away. In another small town, Carrizozo, residents ran into the local church, believing the Rapture and the end times was upon them.

Kent and her schoolmates ran outside, and began playing in what they thought was snow. Snowing in July? It was strange, but teenagers intent on playing cannot be stopped. The white dust which enveloped their location was radioactive fallout from the explosion. The kids rubbed it on their skin, in their faces – the dust contaminated their drinking and cleaning water. Farm animals consumed it with the grass and crops.

The mushroom cloud – the iconic symbol of nuclear power – went up 50 000 to 75 000 feet in the air from the Alamogordo blast. Higher than anticipated, the fallout from the explosion is only now slowly being uncovered. The US military failed to evacuate people from the immediate vicinity of the blasts, and the Trinity downwinders, as they are known, having been fighting for recognition, an apology and compensation.

Trinity downwinders were told, in 1945, that the explosion they witnessed was from an ammunition dumping ground. It was only after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the downwinders began to understand the magnitude of what had befallen them.

The families of the Trinity downwinders have experienced generations of cancers – stomach, thyroid, pancreatic, among others. Tina Cordova, a resident of Tularosa, NM, has been fighting for the Trinity downwinders. Her home is only 34 miles from the original atomic test site. Her family, from her great grandparents onwards, have been afflicted with various types of cancers. In the immediate three months after the Trinity tests, infant deaths from cancer in NM jumped by 56 percent.

Cordova formed the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005, and has painstakingly accumulated medical evidence and statements from downwinder families about the cancers they have suffered, along with the official neglect they have encountered. It is true that in 1990, the US Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) which provided limited and partial compensation for those affected by radiation exposure from US military atomic tests.

The RECA act excluded the Trinity downwinders, but provided compensation to those affected by the hundreds of post-1945 atomic tests throughout the United States. From 1945 to 1992, the US conducted 1054 atomic tests, including atmospheric and underwater environments. Each one took its ecological and financial toll.

The other group of Americans excluded by the RECA act is the uranium miners, most of whom are from the Navajo indigenous nation. The tests performed in south west Nevada, for instance, required the laborious exertions of labourers from the indigenous and Hispanic communities.

It is indicative of the priorities of the US Republican Party when they complain about the financial burden of RECA. In what way? The $2.5 billion dollars paid out to radiation victims over the last approximately 30 years pales into insignificance compared to the hundreds of billions spent to upgrade and maintain the stockpile of nuclear weapons. Somehow, financial burdens are absent when considering the maintenance of nuclear weapons.

When Soviet dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921 – 1989) denounced the Soviet nuclear programme, and upheld the basic principles of human rights and civil liberties, he was hailed as a hero in the West. Sakharov was granted east access to the Reagan administration, and received overwhelmingly positive coverage in the corporate media.

That is all well and good, except for the glaring hypocrisy at the heart of the Sakharov human rights project. Not only was the Reagan administration a ferocious advocate of nuclear weapons, increasing spending on that military technology by the millions. Astrophysics and the military have a close, intertwined relationship. Authors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang describe that relationship as a double-hinged door in their 2018 book Accessory to War.

The principles of high energy physics are partly based upon the thermonuclear fusion that occurs in cosmic environments. Astrophysicists who study the collisions and emergence of particles at such high energy states are fully aware of the military implications of their work, sharing laboratory facilities and sometimes working within shouting distance of each other.

Our understanding of cosmic interactions, and the particles that pop in and out of existence, is inextricably linked with government programmes to support military research. Sakharov was well aware of this symbiotic relationship. His failure to even acknowledge this issue blasts a huge hole in his credibility as a universal human rights peacemaker.

How about we begin to acknowledge the ecological and medical harm caused by US nuclear testing. As Cordova explains in her documentary film, First We Bombed New Mexico, thousands of Americans were lied to about the Trinity tests, exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation, and then neglected for generations. A historic injustice needs to be corrected.

Defector stories – high level personnel who escaped from the former USSR and sought asylum in the West – made for gripping propaganda. Ideologically driven people, attracted by the magnetic appeal of freedom and capitalist consumerism, risked their lives to escape the dreary life of Communist tyranny. Sounds like a great morality play; the triumph of the indefatigable human will to freedom over totalitarian conformity.

How true is this picture? While there is a grain of truth in this fable, the stories of defectors, and the motivations of US and British policies in utilising them, tell a more complicated picture. This subject should be examined closely, because it has relevance for our times. US imperial policy towards regimes it deems adversarial remains essentially unchanged – mobilise extreme ultranationalist groups to advocate for regime change, and create a domestic culture sympathetic to that objective.

It is no secret now that defectors from the Eastern bloc were viewed not only as heroes to be cultivated by US and British intelligence agencies. Numerous scholars, such as Benjamin Tromly, have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that US intelligence agencies encouraged and publicised the plight of defectors, attempting to create a consensus for capitalist economic and cultural policies at home, while demonstrating to the Moscow leadership the ‘superiority’ of capitalist consumerism.

They were used as political and intelligence assets, valuable sources of information about the inner workings of the Soviet security and military apparatus. Russian emigres, for instance, were actively recruited and organised by the CIA and its predecessors (the OSS) to serve as anticommunist forces in covert actions against the Eastern block.

Consider the high profile defection, in 1948, of two Soviet combat pilots. Flying their plane into the American zone of occupation in Austria in 1948, Peter Pirogov and Anatoli Borzov were transferred to the United States, where they were celebrated as heroes. Welcomed by the American intelligence establishment, they received adulation in the media. Was this not clear evidence that American consumerism and individual liberty superior to Soviet drudgery?

The defectors, who had undergone miserable experiences in the Soviet Union, received surreptitious support from the CIA. Pirogov, only a few months after his escape, wrote a bestselling book in English, and settled into a house paid for the CIA. He was immediately cultivated for intelligence information about the inner workings of the Soviet military system.

Defectors’ stories provided a feeding frenzy for the political sharks of the London-Washington axis. Pirogov, who retreated into a quiet life with his new family, was dropped from the CIA payroll in the 1950s for failing to actively participate in an anticommunist emigre organisation set up by the intelligence community. He went off-script from the narrative as a freedom-loving defector.

Borzov went even further offline from the scripted part as an ideologically zealous defector – he returned to the USSR six months after his defection, dissatisfied with American consumerism and unimpressed by American supermarkets.

The 1950s was a period of intense CIA activity among anticommunist Russian and Eastern European communities. Mobilising defectors was one plank of a multifaceted strategy of using ultranationalist and ex-Nazi collaborators from Eastern European nations as private armies in the Cold War.

It is certainly no crime to seek asylum. During the Cold War, the United Nations ratified the convention on the status of refugees (1951) to elaborate the specific rights of asylum seekers. This was a time when there were refugees from Eastern European nations making up the bulk of Communist nations. Being receptive to those fleeing Communism was in line with human rights doctrine; it was also a cynical exercise in encouraging illegal immigration, an activity demonised by the media in our times.

Non-ideological reasons for defecting from the Eastern bloc nations were routinely minimised. There were defectors escaping imminent arrest or avoiding criminal charges; they were provided lenient treatment given that they were from the ‘captive nations’. The needs of political propaganda superseded considerations of law and order. American-backed dictatorships which produced an outflow of refugees somehow escaped the classification as ‘captive nations’ in the calculations of the Washington Beltway foreign policy experts.

How does this relate to contemporary times?

By way of investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg, an interesting story was published in Bloomberg web magazine. Remember in 2019 the Umbrella revolution which gripped Hong Kong? Thousands of activists were on the streets protesting laws that would bring the enclave closer to the rules and regulations of Beijing. It appears that the participants in that failed adventure are rethinking their positions.

In 2024, increasing numbers of Hong Kongers, including Umbrella activists, are choosing to work, live and study in Shezhen, China. The record economic growth achieved under Chinese premier Xi Jinping, including the construction of high speed rail, has convinced young Hong Kongers to avail themselves of the economic opportunities in China,

Shopping malls with loads of much-coveted consumer goods, entertainment, booming cultural parks, and all the modern conveniences have appealed to the former democracy activists. They have largely reconciled themselves to the rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC). It is a sign of a regime’s effectiveness to persuade its erstwhile opponents to accommodate and accept new realities. Providing a lower cost of living, cheap housing and work/educational opportunities has certainly placed the Umbrella movement’s NGO-style astroturf revolution into perspective.

Am I suggesting that we all migrate to China this instant? No I am not. Am I advocating adopting Xi Jinping Thought as an official doctrine? No I am not. I am suggesting that defector stories made for exceptional morality tales to soothe our collective conscience. They serve a particular propaganda purpose, disguising the cynical political motivations of the US and British authorities.

In the Netherlands, the country’s first National Holocaust museum opened in March this year. While there are museum’s dedicated to World War 2, and the plight of the Dutch under Nazi occupation, the new museum in Amsterdam is the nation’s first detailing the suffering of Netherlands’ Jewish community.

Seventy five percent of Holland’s prewar Jewish community (102 000 people) perished in the Holocaust, the highest proportion of any Western European nation.

In the country of Anne Frank, the plight of Dutch Jews has until recently been swept under the carpet. The question has been asked; why didn’t the non-Jewish Dutch people help the Jews? The Dutch prime minister in 2020, Mark Rutte, officially apologised for the failure of the Netherlands to assist the Jewish people. While there were individual efforts to rescue the Jewish community, the wartime Dutch authorities remained passive, and acquiesced in the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people.

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the homeland of Anne Frank is struggling to educate its population today regarding the Holocaust. There is a disturbing lack of awareness among the younger generation of Dutch about the Holocaust and the deportations of Dutch Jews.

Did non-Jews help Jewish people find sanctuary? The most famous gentile to rescue Jews is Oskar Schindler, now internationally known because of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1993 movie. Before Schindler became famous, there was another non-Jew who achieved the status of a cause célèbre – Raoul Wallenberg. Born in 1912 into a prosperous Swedish family, Wallenberg traveled to Budapest in July 1944 as part of the Swedish legation in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Sweden was officially neutral during the war, but maintained business relations with both the Axis and Allied powers. Wallenberg, while not a professional diplomat, used his position to rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain captivity and death. Issuing passports and travel documents to the besieged Jewish community, Wallenberg is hailed as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

The latter is a category created by Yad Vashem and the Israeli government to honour those non-Jews who went to extraordinary lengths to provide sanctuary for European Jews. Budapest was a nest of spies in 1944-45, with the Allied powers competing for influence once the Axis-aligned dictatorship should fall. The Soviet army was rapidly approaching Budapest, and the Allies were concerned about a Communist-dominated Hungary.

The Jews of Budapest faced a daily struggle to survive. Subjected to pogroms, their situation became even more perilous in the later stages of the war. The Hungarian leader, Admiral Miklos Horthy, had been secretly contacting the British and Americans to arrange a surrender. When the Nazi leadership got wind of this, they viewed it as treason to their cause. Organising a coup d’etat, Horthy was deposed and replaced by the fanatical racists of the Arrow Cross.

Wallenberg faced certain death should his activities as a refugee advocate be discovered. He was a member of the American-financed War Refugee Board (WRB), an institution created by American president Roosevelt to rescue Jews from Europe. Too little, too late in my opinion. The US and Canada had highly restrictive immigration laws at the time, and European Jews fleeing persecution were turned away.

The WRB, in cooperation with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid (known as Joint), worked to save Budapest’s Jews. Wallenberg was part of this effort. So why did he become a cause célèbre in the 1980s and onwards?

In early 1945, Wallenberg was captured by Soviet counterintelligence, sent to the Eastern bloc, and never seen again. The exact circumstances of his death have remained a mystery ever since. The Soviet government stated that Wallenberg died of heart failure in July 1947. This explanation has never been fully accepted, especially by those whom Wallenberg rescued, and their descendants.

Awarded honorary citizenship by Australia, the US, Britain, Canada, Hungary and Israel, Wallenberg became a almost mythical figure – symbolising great personal courage and nonviolence in the face of unspeakable atrocities. From the 1980s, reports emerged that eyewitnesses spotted an ageing Wallenberg, still alive, in Soviet prisons.

From there, the campaign to internationalise his case ramped up – streets and public squares were named after him. Books were published and TV movies made, heroising Wallenberg as the moral hero of our times. The Cold War was in full swing, so a tale of sacrifice and courage brought down by Soviet ‘totalitarianism’ encapsulated by Wallenberg found a mass audience.

Interestingly, the CIA was helpful in promoting the Wallenberg case, bringing it into the public consciousness. His moral courage was exemplary – so we are told. There is one aspect of his case which only came to light decades after the publicity campaign died down – Wallenberg was a spy. He was an intelligence asset for the OSS – the predecessor of the American CIA.

His presence in Budapest was not motivated by pure altruism or overwhelming concern for the plight of the Jewish community. He was on an intelligence mission. His humanitarian work, while perfectly admirable, must be understood as part of a wider context of American (and Swedish) intelligence gathering. Budapest was in line to become a Communist-aligned state, and the Allies were doing their level best to prevent this postwar scenario.

Swedish military intelligence, during the war years, had a deliberate program of recruiting businesspeople to gather intelligence on the economic and military resources of European nations. Sweden and Hungary had established intelligence sharing networks for mutual benefit. This murky, yet practical side, of Wallenberg’s actions casts doubt on his status as the legendary Swedish Schindler.

The Swedish government, ever wary that Wallenberg’s role as a spy be discovered, did not sufficiently press Moscow for answers as to his ultimate fate. The Swedish authorities, in 2016, officially declared that Wallenberg had died in 1952, five years after the last credible information that he was alive. The statues of Wallenberg remain in place, reminding us of his heroism while keeping his secretive intelligence role hidden.

The angel was indeed a spy.

When discussing the rescue of European Jews in World War 2, let us remember that the Anglophone nations closed their doors to fleeing Jewish refugees. Denied sanctuary, they returned to their fate in Europe. The Wallenberg heroism story, while captivating, must not blind us to the fact that Jewish refugees were rejected en masse.

The pyramids of Giza have exercised the imagination of Anglophone nations, and their Western counterparts, for decades. The so-called mysteries of the pyramids have permeated popular fiction for a long time. When I tell people that my background is Egyptian (Armenians from Egypt to be exact), I know what is next; the inevitable and wide-eyed questions from my interlocutor about pyramids.

You see, when my late father migrated to Australia from Egypt, the first thing he did was build a house in the shape of pyramids……and if you believe that, I suggest you seek psychiatric help.

Discovering lost civilisations

The appeal of finding lost civilisations is durable and longstanding. We like to uncover lost worlds, and certainly archaeology is the study of the human past. There are long extinct worlds just waiting to be uncovered. Pseudoscience manipulates this healthy curiosity by taking it into dead ends, such as the mythical Atlantis.

The claim – or rather hallucination – that aliens built the pyramids, along with other ancient structures, is nothing new or original. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and practising egomaniac, made the ‘aliens built the pyramids’ claim in 2020. The Egyptian archaeological community, in so many words, told Musk to go take a running jump. The new boss of X/Twitter did his part in amplifying misinformation.

Zahi Hawass, veteran Egyptian archaeologist, commented that the pyramid builders were not slaves, as popular imagination would have it, but a dedicated workforce. The notion of slaves building the Egyptian pyramids stems from the fictional Hebrews-enslaved-in-Egypt portrayal in the Old Testament.

Steven Novella, neuroscientist and science blogger, writes that the aliens built things claim does contain an element of racism. Nonwhite civilisations are not given the credit for possessing the scientific and technological know how for building complex and impressive structures. The aliens built it trope is easy to deploy and requires no further scrutiny.

Notice how we in the West never ask how the ancient Greeks built the Parthenon in Athens, or the Acropolis of Rhodes, were built – no alien explanations required here. The Colosseum of Rome – was that built by aliens?

Those questions never arise because we in the Anglophone nations view ourselves as cultural descendants of a continuum starting in Greco-Roman times. They were smart enough to build their own structures. Funnily enough, the aliens only constructed complex structures in Egypt, or Mesoamerica, or sub-Saharan Africa.

How were the pyramids built?

That is a longstanding question, and numerous commentators, from Herodotus onwards, have been perplexed by this question and the enigmatic pyramids. The Egyptians certainly had all the requisite engineering technology to build the pyramids; using levers, wheels, pulleys and so on. How did they haul and lift such enormous blocks of stone over miles and secure them in place? A news item elaborating some recent archaeological research may have the answer.

A long-dried up branch of the Nile, a waterway, was the superhighway used by the Egyptians for constructing the pyramids at Giza. Researchers from North Carolina university, led by Professor Eman Ghoneim, have found a 64-km branch of the Nile, covered over for centuries by farmland and desert. The pyramids at Giza, 31 in all, are clustered in an area west of the Nile.

This new information regarding the river landscape helps scientists answer how the pyramids were built – water power was the main method of transportation.

An ancient water superhighway

This recently discovered branch of the Nile, called Ahramat, is in line with the ever-changing landscape. Yes, I know, we think of deserts as timeless and unchanging. Yet, mapping the environment of alluvial plains, obscured by centuries of cultivation and urban expansion, can reveal surprising results. The Ahramat flowed into the western desert floodplains of the Nile, close to the pyramids.

The pyramids were built over a thousand year period, commissioned by different pharaohs. They were the tombs of royalty, designed to enforce the legitimacy of dynastic authority. The pyramids of Giza, concentrated near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, are located at an accessible location given the course of the Ahramat – a mega water highway and power source.

A word about Pythagoras

Every school student is familiar with the theorem that bears the name Pythagoras. The latter, a Greek mathematician from the Hellenic island colony of Samos, has been cursed by generations of students. The famous theorem, memorised by all of us going through high school, was known to the ancient Egyptians (and Babylonians for that matter). Samos, the island from which Pythagoras hailed, had extensive commercial exchanges with Egypt.

Various accounts of Pythagoras’ life explain that he traveled to Egypt. To be sure, the ancient Greeks were familiar with geometry and engineering – Euclid and Archimedes stand out. Pythagoras’ innovation was to take the practical mathematics of Egypt, which the latter developed in abundance, and place it on a metaphysical plane of abstract reasoning.

Numbers became an underlying framework for interpreting the cosmos, and mathematical mysteries were integrated into a semi-mystical religion. No Jehovah of the monotheistic cousins was required, just an overwhelming fascination with the infinite mystery of numbers which allegedly produced the apparent order of natural world.

The cult of Pythagoreanism has died out, but its remnants continue to mutate in the form of numerology. As for the pyramids – the Egyptians built them, based on the mathematical knowledge and engineering resources they had.