It is always beneficial, and in some ways inevitable, that there will be comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides. That exercise, of genocide comparison, is sometimes familiar to Armenians in diaspora. The descendants of genocide survivors try to make sense of what happened, why it happened, and whether similar crimes occurred in other parts of the world.

That exercise is a pivot into a topic which I will take up here.

But first, let’s begin with the story of Uncle Kurt, better known as Kurt Heinrich Debus, (1908 – 1983). His trajectory illustrates better than I can an ideological affinity that has largely gone underreported – the ideological similarities between American settler colonialism, and Nazi German white supremacy.

No, similarities do not mean both experiences are completely identical. But the convergence between the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in the American colonial settler expansion in the West, and the German Lebensraum (living space) in the East, are not coincidental.

Uncle Kurt and NASA

Uncle Kurt, rocket scientist and NASA director, had the kind of storied career you would only find in epic historical sagas.

His expertise was impeccable; a pioneer of the German V2 rocket programme, he was responsible for the technology underpinning the Saturn rocket family of NASA missions, as well as supervising countless space missions involving military missiles. It is no exaggeration to say that without Debus, the NASA astronauts would never have made it to the Moon.

Debus was a member of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazi paramilitary brown shirts, an organisation crucial in the rise of the Nazi party. He went on to become an officer in the Waffen SS. However, he was not just a brainless thug, but a scientist and rocket engineer.

He and his colleagues were responsible for the deadly V2 ballistic rocket. That weapon was responsible for, among other things, thousands of casualties among the British population, when the Nazi leadership launched these ‘vengeance’ weapons targeting civilian populations.

After the war was over, the knowledge of rocketry was in demand, particularly in the United States. The bombing of cities was a war crime. Never matter, said the Washington authorities.

The Waffen SS was condemned as a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunals – aka the Nuremberg trials – in 1946. Individual membership of that group automatically attracted imprisonment. However, SS membership was not an impediment to emigration to the United States.

Debus was one of the hundreds of Nazi German scientists appropriated by Operation Paperclip, the covert American government programme to acquire German scientists and their knowledge capital. Provided refuge by the US authorities who were now waging a Cold War against the Soviet Union, technological advancements in that confrontation, particularly of a military nature, outweighed any concerns about using war criminals as allies.

Debus and his colleagues, including the more famous Wernher von Braun, went to successful careers as scientists and administrators for NASA. Cape Canaveral became their sanctuary.

Race, living space and Manifest Destiny

The white American colonists, from the Revolutionary Wars onwards, were determined to expand their agricultural settlements across the continent at the expense of the indigenous peoples. George Washington waged a simultaneous war; against the British authorities, and against the native nations in the form of the Iroquois confederation.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the new American republic, envisioned liberty, democracy and an agrarian-based nation devoid of the native population. The latter were destined to die out, he reasoned.

The so-called ‘red Indians’ as they were known, were to be eliminated and their lands seized. The Mississippi River, as the decades wore on, was considered the outermost boundary of the expanding settler nation. A new race of yeoman farmers, combining the qualities of sturdy self-reliance and dedication to the cultivation of the land, were to take over the new spaces emptied of their indigenous inhabitants.

In the 1840s, this expansionist imperative was summarised in the concise phrase Manifest Destiny. The white race, preordained by god, were on a mission to conquer the lands of continental North America. Biblically sanctioned violence became the cornerstone of the westward expansion of the American colonies.

An interesting side note here; no-one has ever invaded and colonised a country in the name of Satan….

The practices of mass killings, rape, starvation, disease, forced settlement into reservations, adopted against the indigenous peoples were remarkably effective, if I can use that term for a genocidal programme. Combining ideas of race and expanding living space for a new race of yeoman farmer colonists was a defining feature of continental imperialism.

What has all that got to do with Nazi Germany?

Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and the top Nazi leadership envisioned a continental empire in the European East. They drew direct inspiration from the American West. Himmler in particular developed a doctrine of ‘blood and soil’; a race of German colonist farmer-warriors settling the lands of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Slavs, Jews and other so-called ‘inferior’ peoples were to be eliminated in a social Darwinist experiment in societal reengineering.

Indeed, Hitler himself declared that the Volga river was the German equivalent of the Mississippi. All the conquered territories were to be Germanised, and the native Eastern European peoples eliminated or turned over to pitiful reservations.

Taking the westward expansion of the United States’ colonists as a template, Nazi propaganda portrayed hardy German settlers on wagons, heading out on a colonising mission to the California of the East. Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed his admiration for how Aryan America had seized the continental West, clearing out the doomed ‘red Indians’, thus making way for white settlers.

It is this kind of modern history that is under attack from the cultural vandals and free-market fanatics of the MAGA cult embodied in the Trump-Musk-Silicon Valley nexus administration. Understanding more about ourselves equips us with the tools to confront the current creeping censorship of the underbelly of US continental imperialism.

The Nazi East and the American West are geographically separated by thousands of kilometres, but have more in common than we realise.

De-extinction, the genetic engineering practice of resurrecting extinct species, sounds like a good idea. Surely, in this era of biodiversity loss – and Australia in particular is going through an extinction crisis – bringing back extinct species is ethically responsible and ecologically sound?

While that may appear to be a laudable goal, de-extinction will do nothing to address the extinction crisis, or solve the increasing loss of biodiversity. Indeed, de-extinction does not actually resurrect long-dead species, but simply provide high tech substitutes of the real thing.

Let’s sort this out.

Ancient DNA has achieved a kind of celebrity status of its own. Along with time travel, splitting the atom, and interplanetary travel, ancient DNA has provided the basis for Hollywood blockbusters, the most famous being the Jurassic Park movie franchise. Setting movie-making to one side, can extinct species be brought back to life from ancient DNA? This is where the topic of de-extinction comes in.

What is de-extinction?

De-extinction is not a new idea; it tracks back to scientific projects in the 1970s aiming to freeze the DNA, tissues, blood and reproductive cells from endangered animals with the hope of one day resurrecting them. The simple definition is that de-extinction is a form of species revivalism – cloning or generating an organism that revives or resembles an individual from an extinct species.

The extinction crisis, and declining biodiversity, are very real problems. Human economic activity, extractive capitalism, logging, mining, overexploitation of marine resources – all these practices are driving more species to extinction.

These issues require urgent political and economic solutions, and the genomics industry has stepped up to the plate with a seemingly simple solution based on the latest technology – de-extinction. Surely, the morally responsible thing to do would be to restore species that we have driven to extinction?

Gene-editing technology already stirs up ethical and political controversies. Colossal Biosciences, the genomics company that had previously announced their intention to revive the woolly mammoth, grandly proclaimed that they had de-extincted the dire wolf, a long-extinct canine species native to the Americas.

However, what they have brought back is a gene-edited version of a gray wolf with some dire wolf characteristics. That is an impressive feat of gene editing technology, but it is not de-extinction. Editing the genomic makeup of the gray wolf, the closest living relative to the dire wolf, and making specific modifications to its makeup is very clever, but it is creating a high tech replacement, not reviving the real thing.

Geneticists extracted ancient DNA from the preserved remains of the dire wolf, and then sequenced the entire genome. They compared the dire wolf genome with that of three gray wolf, identified multiple locations which were the genetic origins of key differences with the gray wolf.

The gray wolf genes were then edited (the single nucleotide polymorphisms were modified) to correspond to the distinctive characteristics of the dire wolf. From these cells, embryos were created, which developed into the three pups, which while born from a gray wolf, exhibit characteristics of the dire wolf.

That is all fascinating, and raises questions regarding the ethical implications of editing the genetic sequences of animals. But they are not dire wolves. They are not a resurrection of the extinct canine species. How does a species arise? Well, I seem to recollect that an English naturalist wrote an entire book on the topic back in 1859…..

The thylacine is a top candidate for de-extinction in Australia. The Tasmanian Tiger, as it is popularly known, is an extinct Australian marsupial. Hunted to extinction, there are those who would like to revive this species.

It is interesting to note that the debate around resurrecting the thylacine gets recycled with monotonous regularity in the Australian media, but the actual genocidal violence against the indigenous population of Tasmania still struggles to be recognised as a valid topic for national attention. No, I am certainly not suggesting that the indigenous nations of Tasmania are equivalent to mammalian wildlife – by no means.

I am just pointing out the recrudescence of nationalistic fervour underlying the ‘bring back the Tassie Tiger’ debate. That concern for life apparently does not extend to the indigenous peoples, who have been falsely accused of having been completely exterminated by the British.

That the British settlers ruthlessly eliminated the indigenous nations is not in doubt. What is false is the myth that with the passing of Truganini was the last ‘full-blooded’ indigenous person left in Tasmania. While she was one of the last speakers of indigenous Tasmanian languages, she was not the last Palawa Tasmanian person.

Be that as it may, the revival of the thylacine may seem like an ecologically responsible course of action, but there are many unanswered questions. How will the ‘new’ copy survive? Will it adapt to the radically altered landscape? After all, the hunting of the thylacine did not occur in a vacuum, but was part of the larger ecological effort to convert land into pastoral grazing territory for cattle and sheep.

Can a restored ‘thylacine’ reproduce? You may certainly be able to de-extinct individuals, but how will they adapt to the wider ecosystem?

Back in 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature developed guidelines for the revival of species. It noted that while de-extinction has marketing appeal, none of the gene editing technologies will reproduce an exact replica of the extinct animal. Indeed, the IUN does not use the word ‘de-extinction’ in the title of its guidelines.

It is very true that Australians want to do more to protect nature. Currently, there are now 2000 threatened species and ecological communities in Australia. We need to strengthen the laws that protect natural habitats, stop land clearing, and implement a federal environmental protection agency. We need more research into and programmes for controlling invasive species.

We are not going to address the extinction crisis by the methods of gene editing technology. De-extinction, while an important genomic development, is a distraction from the important national conversation we should be having about reversing the damaging economic and industrial practices which result in the loss of biodiversity.

Some topics are like pulling on a thread; you may initially want to remove the individual thread, but end up untying an entire pullover instead. You gradually realise that you have unraveled more than initially expected. That is the case of Anglo-American provision of sanctuary, and secretive cooperation with, ex-Nazis after the end of World War 2.

At first glance, you may be wondering what an obscure episode of modern history has to do with today’s political configurations. The policies of secret wheeling and dealing with escaping Nazis and ultranationalist foot soldiers finds a direct continuation with current US and British foreign policies with regard to Ukraine and Kyiv’s conflict with Russia.

Let’s begin with the first thread – in the late 1980s and 90s, while I was at university, I followed with interest the case of Klaus Barbie. The latter was a Nazi Gestapo officer, Waffen SS member and war criminal, known as the Butcher of Lyon. Advising Vichy France, the Nazi controlled state in France, Barbie was responsible for the torture, deportation and murder of thousands of Jews.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Barbie fled Europe, and found secret sanctuary in Bolivia. His case was made public in the 1970s and 80s, after French investigators identified him. Barbie had been using the pseudonym of Klaus Altmann.

How did a former Gestapo officer find refuge for decades in Bolivia? This is where pulling at the thread begins to unravel the entire fabric.

Barbie’s career as an intelligence officer did not end in 1945. Recruited by the United States army’s Counterintelligence Corps. Barbie, like many ex-Nazis, were viewed as intelligence assets in the context of the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union. Barbie had a new assignment; helping to instigate an anticommunist uprising in the Eastern bloc. His record of war crimes was quietly expunged, and he became a useful asset for his new American paymasters.

Barbie went on to provide the Bolivian military and intelligence services with expert advice on the capture, torture and imprisonment of dissidents. While there, he provided support for CIA-organised military coups, participated in narcotics trafficking and arms smuggling, and even provided a then unknown drug runner called Pablo Escobar with a start in the business.

Escaping justice in Europe, the US CIC helped him flee to South America. However, it is not only South American nations where ex-Nazis found sanctuary.

The main nations in the Americas that provided fleeing Nazis with a fresh start were the US and Canada.

As for Barbie, he was finally extradited to France in 1983, and while on trial, died of cancer in 1991.

Canada became a favoured destination of escaping Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and ultranationalists from the 1950s onwards. The fighters of the Galician Waffen SS division, composed mostly of Ukrainians, were given sanctuary in Canada as part of Ottawa’s commitment to the Cold War.

Implanting and cultivating the Ukrainian ultranationalist community has been a longstanding practice of Ottawa’s authorities. This is not my own invention, by no means. The late David Cesarani, expert on Jewish history, Europe and the Holocaust, documented the extensive relations between the British intelligence establishment and Ukrainian ultranationalist Nazi collaborators from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Obtaining sanctuary in Britain and then Canada, these militants for white supremacy has a long track record of killing Jews, massacring Poles, Russians and anti-Nazi Ukrainians. These killers of Jews were rebranded as patriotic freedom fighters by Ottawa and London, with help from the CIA.

Not only did the veterans of the OUN and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) find refuge in Canada, they were allowed to build up their own communities, publish their own newspapers, organise sporting clubs and social associations, start scouting groups featuring symbols of the Galician Waffen SS as mementos, acquire academic posts at universities, and built statues honouring Nazi collaborators.

They airbrushed from history the long history of the Ukrainian socialist Left in Canada, because they were foot-soldiers of anticommunist ultranationalism.

Stepan Bandera, the main leader of the wartime OUN and Nazi collaborator, was targeted for recruitment by British intelligence after the end of the Second World War. The thuggish leaders and foot-soldiers of Ukrainian ultranationalism found renewed purpose as anticommunist militants in the Cold War. Today, Bandera and his fellow ultranationalist commanders are hailed as heroes in Zelensky’s Ukraine.

Britain wanted Ukrainians with on-the-ground knowledge of Eastern Europe, hoping to instigate an anticommunist uprising in Ukraine. Detaching Ukraine from the USSR would have been an enormous success for Anglo-American foreign policy. Bandera’s agents were dropped behind enemy lines throughout the late 1940s and 50s.

A problem crept up in this budding insurgency – Britain and the US were backing rival Ukrainian ultranationalist groups. Bandera refused to cooperate with those he regarded as rivals, after all, he could not stomach the fact that there was more than one pony in the stable.

Let’s be clear about this; the ashes of the war had barely settled, and Jewish victims were buried, when the imperialist powers made clandestine measures to recruit antisemitic murderers. This sinister handshake across the needs to be exposed for what it is – a mockery of Holocaust memory, and an insult to the victims of Judeocide.

It is one thing to support the right of Ukrainians to self-determination; it is quite another to use ultranationalist Ukrainians as proxies forces in a long term attempt to weaken Russia.

The New York Times, the main newspaper of record in the United States, published an extensive expose of the intricate and essential interconnections between the US/British military forces on the one hand, and the Ukrainian military. The latter would not be able to continue fighting without the crucial logistical, intelligence and armaments support of the United States.

The intimate partnership between the US and its client regime in Kyiv makes a mockery of claims by the former Biden administration that it is not engaged in a proxy war against Russia. Not only is the US (and Britain) directly engaged in fighting Russian forces, it has turned Kyiv into a modern day Saigon South Vietnam client state

Of course US President Donald Trump shouted at Zelensky when the latter was in Washington; the organ-grinder always yells orders at the monkey.

The US and Britain have been using ultranationalist Ukrainians as proxies for decades; the Kyiv authorities are following the same decades-old configuration implemented by its American and British managers.

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.