The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will  be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

 Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated  rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf  was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.) [SEE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW.]

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

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You can read the transcript of this episode here:

THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Vinita Srivastava: For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land, and the wealth that comes with that.

This colonization was accompanied by an entitlement approach, the belief that the indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer. So today we’re looking at two historic examples, the decimation of indigenous populations in North America, what has been referred to as a cultural genocide, or the American Holocaust, and the famine in Bengal, India, in 1943 under British rule.

According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. Of course, these are two vastly different populations that were decimated by a complex set of factors. But both populations had a few things in common.

They were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied that they accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition. In other words, as the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, chronic famine springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food.

With us today are two experts on the famines I just mentioned. James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. And Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire.

Thank you so much both for being here.

INTERVIEW

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita.

James Daschuk: Thank you.

Vinita Srivastava: So, today’s conversation is a bit of an experiment, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that is, can we talk about the tools of colonialism as a playbook across different regions? So, let’s give it a try, and let’s jump into this conversation.

James, in your book, you mention a scholar who describes what happened in North America as an American Holocaust. This is a very complicated history with many different factors impacting things. But can you describe generally what this means?

James Daschuk: I think standards approach to American holocaust talk about the apocalyptic events that happened after the arrival of Europeans.

So not only was, They’re the displacement of indigenous people, but the diseases that came with them, unbeknownst even to the Europeans themselves, it was before the days of germ theory or anything like that. So I think the arrival of Europeans and, and all the baggage, the biological baggage they brought with them brought such monumental events that’s standard to use that term, like you said, an American Holocaust.

Vinita Srivastava: I remember reading in the very beginning of your book that stayed with me is that The indigenous population declined by almost 90 percent and that they were basically destroyed, as you’re saying. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about what contributed to that decline of population.

James Daschuk: It’s more than biology, for sure, but I think one of the things to think about is, Indigenous people in North America and other places around the world that didn’t have a long tradition of, for example, uh, domestication of animals.

We know now in the 21st century that animals are the reservoir of diseases. So because indigenous people in America didn’t domesticate animals, they hadn’t had the, the biological experience of passing germs or viruses between animals and humans. Europeans arrived with endemic smallpox, the people who they encountered had no biological resistance.

There’s a new interpretation that it’s more than just that. It was, it was the violence enacted by the Europeans, by the new arrivals. But I think those two things combined to create standards, Holocaust like situation.

Vinita Srivastava: One of the things I really liked about reading your book, James, is that every single thing is, is really sourced. You provide all of this information. It’s like thousands of years, like 2000 years, and you take us through this history. And one of the most famous lines that’s quoted from your book is this line that the first prime minister of Canada said, which is that we’re doing all we can basically to refuse food to Indians who are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense. So first of all, hearing that quote, it might explain why we had this problem with statues of John A. Macdonald in Canada, why they were being asked to be taken down, why some of them were taken down. But can you explain a little bit more in the context of that very famous quote? Now, what was happening at that time?

James Daschuk: For sure. This wasn’t me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the house of commons. One thing we don’t tend to think about is that really provocative statement by Prime Minister Macdonald about keeping people on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.

He was being criticized by the Liberal Party for spending too much money on food. So, there didn’t seem to be too many sympathetic actors in 19th century Canadian Parliament with regard to the well being of Indigenous people. I think he was bragging that he was controlling the population, weaponizing food, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

He was actually quite proud that he was able to control 20, 000 Indigenous people as cheaply as possible. He wasn’t wasting the taxpayers money, which is a very cynical thing to say. What that did was, that food as a, as a means to control the population, ensured the, the quick construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is the backbone of the nation, especially here in Western Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: So he sacrificed Indigenous populations to build a train across Canada and to help settlers come into this nation, into this land.

James Daschuk: Yeah. And once you had an industrial means of bringing settlers in, they were coming in potentially by the hundreds every week. So the population here in Saskatchewan. Rose like a rocket over the decades after that, First Nations people were barred from leaving their reserves with a pass system. They were excluded from the commercial economy with a permit system that lasted until the 1960s. So that hunger, the initial hunger was institutionalized for decades.

And the abduction of children into the residential schools program, which we all know about. The hunger was institutionalized to such an extent that tuberculosis broke out almost universally in those kids. And Ian Mosby from Toronto Metropolitan has, has written that things were so institutionalized in the mid 20th century that there were nutritional experiments undertaken on residential school children by Canadian government physicians and scientists.

Vinita Srivastava: I saw that instead of feeding the children, they, or instead of feeding indigenous populations, they decided to study the impact of hunger and starvation. Janam, moving forward into a different time period, but also a different continent, You’ve researched and published a book about the 1943 Bengal famine in India.

Even though there’s now books published on the famine, it’s still a relatively unknown history that in the 1940s that more than 3 million people died in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. I know it is complicated, but I’m wondering if you could help unpack what happened in that era.

Janam Mukherjee: I think the prevailing condition of India at the inception of World War I is colonialism. Colonialism is the most dominant force politically, societally, geopolitically, etc. So we have to see colonialism itself as a sort of authoritarian regime with resort to famine throughout the colonial period.

Famine is used throughout the colonial period as a way to subjugate the colonized population. And then in particular, the other main vector creating famine in Bengal in the 1940s is war itself. So the pressures of war, particularly on Bengal in Eastern India, once Japan takes Burma and India becomes the front of the war against the Axis powers, tremendous pressure to produce for the war effort is made in Bengal.

So there’s a huge extraction of goods, uh, commodities, resources, as well as people, that puts tremendous economic pressure. And then the colonial system overlaying it. So in the name of war, they’re also claiming certain emergency powers that amount to a totalitarian state. They’re also facing armed rebellion and active rebellion from the Bengali population in particular.

So famine is a very. Useful tool in a sort of collective punishment of Bengal and India at large. So if we see these two factors of colonialism and then empire at war as being the kind of concrete context of famine, we can expand that and look at famine around the world and see the relationship between authoritarianism, war and famine quite broadly.

And I think explains a lot of modern famines.

Vinita Srivastava: Many of us are a victim of a lot of brainwashing. You know, we’ve been taught certain things in school. We’re talking about John A. Macdonald in the case of Canada, similar to what John A. Macdonald said. There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill, who lays the responsibility of the famine on the too high population of Bengal.

That’s been a standard trope in the West that people in the Global South starve because they’re just simply too many people. And what you’re saying, I think is something very, very different that famine across the board, almost you can point to certain factors. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like responsibility behind the famine, who was responsible for it.

Janam Mukherjee: I think famine is, is most commonly seen as a kind of by product of various systems, whether that’s economic systems or environmental systems or political systems. When you have empire at war, the kind of will towards power becomes totalitarianism, as Winston Churchill famously called the war effort, a total war.

During total war, extreme measures are taken, and those extreme measures are also categorical. I believe that famine defines a certain category of people who are beyond the pale of our humanity, who are outlined and then marked as outside of human life itself. Authoritarian regimes often resort to famine and torture.

These are the most direct, biopolitical, Aspects of a structural violence on population. And I think famine has to be seen not as a consequence of certain orders of power, but it’s really necessary of certain power structures to delimit a population that is beyond human concern or compassion or life itself, because to starve a population is a collective act, whereas torture, for instance, is an act upon individual parties.

Famine is a collectivization of a kind of torture of populations. So you starve an entire population, which is a collective punishment, whereas torture is an individualized punishment.

Vinita Srivastava: In your book, you said, the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large grew more indifferent month after month and year after year.

Janam Mukherjee: So, because famine, as I say, delimits a population that is understood through public discourse to be outside of human concern. I think this is why famine is allowed to occur in the world in places like Yemen today, which has been suffering a famine situation for many years. And the concern of the world is not there.

And in kind of solidarity with the people of Yemen or the people of Sudan or the people of Afghanistan, for that matter, as well as Gaza, starvation in being seen as a consequence of certain orders of power and of war is seen as an incidental. I think it needs to be seen rather as a part and parcel of certain orders of power and authority and in relation to conflict occupation and territorial expansion, as in the case in North America.

Vinita Srivastava: James, I see you nodding your head. I wonder if you want to jump in.

James Daschuk: I think here in the Canadian West, it was, it was more of a slow burn, but I’m thinking of the idea of settler colonialism. It’s not an event. It’s a structure. And here in Western Canada, our founding mythology of the Canadian society is that we’re the breadbasket of the world and we’re a haven for dispossessed European peoples and people came here to have a good life and that may all well be true, but that society is founded on the institutionalized structural In position of, if not outright starvation, of generational food insecurity that continues into the present.

We’ve got hungry kids going to bed without supper here in Saskatchewan every single night.

Vinita Srivastava: Last week on this podcast, Hilal Elver, who is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, talks about the famine in Gaza. And then she talks about the lingering intergenerational impacts of starvation.

Not only are people living through it in the present day, but she talks about the impact on future generations. She talks about especially the impact on children. How three months or longer of malnutrition can impact so much in one’s little body. James, you write extensively about this, the lingering effects from the North American famine. That’s one of the reasons you wrote your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of those lingering effects?

James Daschuk: Yeah, for sure. Well, I teach in the Faculty of Health Studies. We use as an interpretive model the social determinants of health. One thing to think about, across Canada, a former federal government cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, in 2018, said there was a 15 year life expectancy between Indigenous people and the rest of the population in Canada.

So what that means is, if you’re Indigenous, you can expect to lead a shorter, sicker, hungrier life. And it’s really based on poverty. There’s no biological difference. What it is, is it’s the social forces, the structures that have kept people poor, that have created that intergenerational trauma. Think about a hundred years of a family having their children taken away from them, abducted by the authorities, sent to a place where they’re institutionally malnourished, potentially abused.

They have their language taken away from them, generation upon generation. And actually, there’s a class action lawsuit. That, that’s being organized for the survivors of intergenerational trauma. So not only are the, the survivors of schools going through that, the legal system, now the children of, of, of those people are, are starting the process of restitution.

You can physically see the impacts of two generations, three generations later. And I want to turn to Janam to talk a little bit about it because you, you talk about in your book, how directly tied you are personally to the Bengal famine. It’s part of the reason you started your research there. Your dad lived through it. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Janam Mukherjee: My interest in the, in the spirit of time in India, in Bengal, the 1940s is the period of my father’s childhood. He was born in 1932. I was born in the U. S. in my own childhood. I heard these stories that were very disconnected from my own reality about the things that my father had seen when he was a child, and that was aerial bombardment by the Japanese on Calcutta.

His house was very close to the docks that were bombed, and he remembered the foundation cracking, The sound of the bombs, the famine, and then the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India at the end of colonial rule. So that’s essentially what I knew of India, but famine itself in particular, I found when much later in life, I began researching it and traveling to Calcutta to do that research.

Had written a deep script in Bengali population at large. The 1943 famine was told about by parents and then grandparents and now great grandparents. It had influenced the culture of Bengal in deep ways and abiding ways in terms of aesthetics, art, food, culture, et cetera. So famine is very much with Bengali people.

I think it will remain as such in many ways. It’s also a collective experience, often of populations. You see that in Ireland. You see that in Ukraine with the Holodomor famine, where, you know, it is also a cultural foundation or, or starting point and often a nationalist, uh, starting point, it triggers off resistance and collective understanding of a collective plight, uh, so famine has that boomerang effect.

Vinita Srivastava: You said it. Resistance. I have to say that since I’ve been thinking about this, I just keep writing down in a piece of paper resistance and putting a big square around it. How do we start to talk about resistance?

In your book, Janam, there’s a scholar that talks about How people in Bengal, quote, died without a murmur. James, in your book, you talk about the collective punishment that would happen if there was resistance, that food would be withheld for a whole week. The ration of food would be withheld on that reserve. So I do want to ask you both about if you can think about instances of resistance that you can draw from in your work and in your research about these famines. Janam I can start with you and then go to James.

Janam Mukherjee: What I really aim to detail is that the Bengal famine was resisted at every stage. You can’t expect people in the last throes of starvation who are walking skeletons, who are ridden often with madness because of the condition, their physiological condition is such.

that you can’t really expect resistance from already starving masses. What you see is resistance to the policies that lead to starvation. Often those policies, particularly in the context of the Bengal famine, were related to war. So the wartime efforts to appropriate rice were resisted. The efforts to collectively punish various parts of the population were resisted in the form of armed resistance often.

So these all have to be seen as part and parcel of resistance to the power structure that is exacting famine. So resistance, I think has to be seen more broadly, but it often does delineate the power structure itself. It sheds light on the power structure. It, in a sense, exposes its weakness. Because famine is often the result of a dying power structure, of a power structure in a desperate attempt to maintain its order of power.

It’s often a last ditch of empire in particular. So we see famines at the end of many of the colonial states as empire is coming apart and colonialism is being ejected from the colonized world.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think?

James Daschuk: I think the resistance was at a different level here in Canada. With the Indian Act, during the patriarchal system, adult male First Nations people were made wards of the state.

So they had the legal sanctions of children. So instead of having an organized campaign, as Janam just mentioned, I think the, the resistance was more at the community level, at the family level. One of the things that comes to mind is a film that a friend of mine, Floyd Favel just produced. Ashes and embers.

And in 1948, the residential school children made a plan and burned the school down. They warned all the other kids when it was time to make a break for it, and they burned the school down. And there are plenty of instances of that without the structure actually changing. And I think at the end of the Second World War, there was an inordinate amount of First Nations men that volunteered for service, probably to get out of reserve conditions, whatever it might be.

Also to, to get back to traditional warrior societies, that kind of thing. But when they came back, they were fighting in the same trenches as non Indigenous people. And they organized politically and worked very hard and ultimately successfully to gain recognition. You know, that recognition is still coming, but you know, these things take time.

I think it’s important to talk about resistance and all, even if it’s like, as you say, kind of an everyday in community resistance, it’s, it’s it’s very challenging to talk about what we’re talking about. You guys have both written books, but these are very challenging things to engage with. I’m wondering, how do you both see these two very different chapters of history intersecting?

Janam Mukherjee: You know, I think the way you began, the question of territorial expansion, the question of control of populations, the role that food distribution and starvation play into those orders of colonial power. are certainly in conversation with each other and are related. I always see famine as delineating the other, the colonized other, more clearly than any other act of state.

It is to make of the colonized people, the wretched masses that the colonizer wants to understand them as. It’s actually to make them physically that. And the intergenerational connection then of devitalization, of impoverishment, of the long trajectory of slow famine, that also has close similarities in the North American as well as in the Asian context.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think learning about the history of this famine, starving, clearing the plains you talk about, what do you think it can teach us?

James Daschuk: Well, the stories we’ve heard about Canada being, you know, one of the kindest nations in the world probably isn’t so true. But one thing, and this is in conversation with Janam and, and, and other scholars, is the British empire, when we were kids, when I was at the French school back in my hometown, we had that, to that map with all of the pink countries, that sort of, the sun never set.

Different manifestations of colonialism, different uses of food as a weapon, uh, it wasn’t just them. You know, all different strategies. And I guess we’re coming together to deconstruct that myth of the British empire, the benevolence of the British empire. We have a long way to go down that trail, but there are actually scholars now trying to defend the British empire and receiving a backlash.

I’m thinking of Nigel Biggar, a retired professor from Oxford, who’s written a book called the Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning in an attempt basically to explain the mixed legacy of colonialism. So in one sense, the anti anti colonialists getting organized is a sign that, uh, that we’re doing our job.

Janam Mukherjee: Good point.

Vinita Srivastava: I want to turn to the current situation in Gaza and I’m wondering if you think that there’s anything to learn from these chapters of history and can we apply it to the current situation in Gaza where experts are saying famine is imminent?

James Daschuk: I’m just a simple Canadianist. But on the radio, Antonio Guterres was speaking about there are truck convoys full of food, there’s a fence, and there are people who are in imminent danger of starving to death.

That’s not an absence of food. That is the organizing principle I’ve been looking at, that Janam been looking at, and that other scholars have been looking at.

Vinita Srivastava: That there is no lack of food, basically, that famine is a structure.

James Daschuk: Absolutely. And no matter what the geopolitical implications are, children should not be starved.

Janam Mukherjee: As is also well outlined in international law. I think all famines are very specific and as a historian, I always argue for the historical specificity and not to make too gross generalizations, but we can learn from previous famines about orders of authority, occupation, and war in particular. I would suggest that famine is not a consequence of war.

It’s incidental to war. Famine is the handmaiden of war. It has been for centuries. It is part and parcel of war, no matter what legislation is made to outlaw the directed use of starvation as a weapon of war. It seems that those international laws have not worked. And famine remains part and parcel of how war is fought.

Practiced on the face of the earth. So the question of the orders of authority that war allows and the decisions made in terms of sacrificing large populations of people and subjecting them to hunger remains with us. And I think there’s a lot to learn from history in that regard. And there’s unfortunately a lot to be seen in the present in that regard as well.

Not just in Gaza, but also in Yemen and also in Sudan and in other parts of the earth as well. So you still have one out of two people living in India under the nutritional kind of global standards or one half of this hungry people on earth live in India. So these orders of power still exist.

Vinita Srivastava: I think they exist right in Saskatchewan, as James was saying, too, where he says children are going hungry and this just seems to be unacceptable that if it’s about control, then it’s unacceptable.

Janam Mukherjee: And it’s about war and it’s about winning. The ideology of war is in the modern age, regardless of all kind of Codes of conduct otherwise, it’s still what it’s always been. It’s a brutal attack on whole populations that does not discriminate well or often between enemies and civilians. And we see that collapsing in all the wars around us. Those questions of who is the enemy and the civilian population most often becomes the enemy in relation to the opposing sides in conflict.

James Daschuk: It’s really interesting to have both of us, Vinita, because in Janam’s case, it’s a conflict. In my case, it’s the establishment of what is thought of as a peaceful society and it can structures continue.

I don’t know if they diverged food insecurity, famine, that whole continuum. In the case of my research is the structure of our province and potentially Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: I thank you both very much for taking the time to have this conversation. I appreciate your time today.

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita, and nice to meet you, James.

James Daschuk: Thanks, Vinita.

OUTRO

Vinita Srivastava: That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. You heard me say at the beginning that this was a bit of an experiment from us, and I would love to know what you thought. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram. @dontcallmeresilientpodcast.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Our student journalist is Husein Haveliwala. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing, and our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Resources

“When Canada used hunger to clear the West” (by James Daschuk, July 19, 2013)

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life (by James Daschuk, 2013)

“Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952” (in Social History by Ian Mosby, 2013)

“Proposed class action seeks damages for intergenerational trauma from residential schools” (CBC News)

Ashes and Embers: Stories of the Delmas Indian Residential School (by Floyd Favel)

Churchill’s Secret War (by Madhusree Mukerjee, 2010)

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (by Janam Mukherjee, 2015)

“Three Million” (The documentary podcast by the BBC)

“Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship” (Journal of Visual Culture by Tanushree Ghosh, 2019)

“We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war” (The Guardian, March 21, 2024, by Alex de Waal)

Ateqah Khaki, Associate Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They said of the just-realeased Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, “This is unprecedented. No IPC analysis has ever recorded such levels of food insecurity anywhere in the world.” [Emphasis added.]

They continued, “Life-threatening levels of acute malnutrition have risen at an alarming rate since the last report, and we are already witnessing with horror the death of children due to starvation. Hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. What we are seeing is not a natural hazard but a manmade disaster, and it is our moral duty to stop it.”

Borell said in Brussels, “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine, we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people.” He added, “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine.”

Sometimes a telling detail outweighs a statistic. Something like 25,000 babies have been born in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began.

According to reporters on the scene, many of their mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for them. Imagine the anguish and the guilt.

There is no powdered milk in the market. Most of the available water is full of bacteria, which kills newborns by giving them diarrhea and dehydrating them. One mother said that her two-month-old is like a two-week-old because of malnutrition.

Al Jazeera video: “2-month-old baby dies from hunger in Gaza | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

The IPC review [pdf] found that 100% of the Palestinians in Gaza face food insecurity as a result of Israel’s war strategy. But matters have gone beyond the level of food insecurity in some parts of the Gaza Strip, for instance in the north.

The report says, “Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest from mid-March 2024 to May 2024.”

We’re in mid-March. Something like 300,000 people remain in these two governorates.

People there are now suffering acute malnutrition.

Acute malnutrition, WHO explains, shows up in four broad ways: “wasting, stunting, underweight, and micronutrient deficiencies.” These conditions make people horrifyingly skinny, reducing their limbs to the dimension of sticks. Physicians measure limbs according to mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), which tells them about the degree of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM).

In Gaza’s children from a half-year old to 4.9 years in age, 1% were considered to be suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition according to their MUAC in September, 2023. By January it had risen to 6-9%. By February, just last month, it was 12%-16%. It has been just about doubling. So by the end of March you’re looking at at least 24%-26% of infants and toddlers and young children suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition so severely that their upper-arm circumference is tiny. But what if the numbers aren’t just doubling? The IPC provides a helpful graph of Israeli cruelty:

We don’t have the raw data to nail it down, but we probably aren’t seeing more than 2 deaths per 10,000 per day yet from malnutrition, according to the IPC. But that would be 60 people starving to death per day in north Gaza, or 1,800 a month.

The Israelis only let in half as many aid trucks in February as they had in January. That is a recipe for an exponential, not just serial increase in hunger. We could be going to half or more of north Gaza’s children suffering this extreme malnutrition. Of course, it isn’t just children, but children are half the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

The IPC expects a big spike in deaths from starvation beginning as early as now through May.

The worst level of malnutrition is Phase 5, which has two stages, famine and catastrophe.

The report found that fully 70% of the population of north Gaza is now in Phase 5-Catastrophe. That is 200,000 people.

An Israeli ground offensive in Rafah will push more 500,000 people into Phase 5-Catastrophe. If just 2 per 10,000 of them died daily of starvation as a result, that would be 100 per day or 3,000 a month, on top of the ones in the north. That is nearly 5,000 people a month dead of malnutrition, and that is if it stays at the rate of 2 per 10,000 per day. It won’t.

The IPC concludes, “The persistent attacks on hospitals, health posts, ambulances, water services, civilian telecoms services, and IDP sites must cease. Attacks against health care workers must cease. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected, as required under International Humanitarian Law. (Already stipulated in the December 2023 FRC report.”

The authors note that the only proven way to avert famine is to deliver food to those threatened by it. Moreover, they point out that unless people are in fair health, they can’t take in the nutrition, so health care has to be restored as well.

Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and medical aid to Gaza. After their cargo was seized by the Israelis, the latter actually delivered it to the UN for distribution in Gaza. This act served as an admission that the cargo was inoffensive, and there had been no reason to kill all those volunteers.

PBS NewsHour Video: “News Wrap: U.S. Army ship en route to Mediterranean for construction of pier for Gaza”

Doğan’s impulse has been vindicated by President Biden’s decision to send a US Navy flotilla to Gaza to succor the starving Palestinians. Biden’s action has the same legality as that of the crew of Mavi Marmara. Since Biden seems now to agree that someone should do something to stop Israel’s government from starving the Palestinians, he should give Doğan a medal for having thought of it first and having tried to do something about the food insecurity imposed by Israel on Gaza from 2006. Doğan gave his life at the age of 19 for a cause that Biden is now implicitly admitting was just.

On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos boarded five humanitarian aid ships in international waters, whose crews and aid workers had expressed the intention of sailing to Gaza to break the Israeli embargo on aid to its occupied territory. The occupation of four of the five ships went smoothly, but it may be that some aid workers put up a fight on the fifth, the Mavi Marmara, finding anything to hand to fend off the Israeli parachutists. They had no firearms or formal weaponry. Since the ship was in international waters, they were within their rights to attempt to prevent the boarding of their ship. Encountering opposition, the Israeli commander ordered his troops to open fire on these unarmed civilians, killing ten noncombatants. One was Doğan, the American citizen, and the nine were Turkish nationals. The American was a journalist. No weapons were found aboard the ship, despite complaints by the Israeli military that a ship had some iron bars on it, which were wielded as bats. The world’s most whiny army initially tried to depict the ship has having had arms (it didn’t) and charged that the volunteers were terrorists (they weren’t, except insofar as having sympathies for oppressed Palestinians makes you a terrorist.)

A UN Human Rights Council report found the attack on the aid ships “clearly unlawful.” The report said that “there is clear evidence to support prosecutions of crimes such as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.”

VP Biden in 2010 justifying Israel's deadly raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attempting to get humanitarian aid into Gaza 👇 @jricole https://t.co/6umdaWv8AX pic.twitter.com/K0QT6wqttM

— Fahad Desmukh (@desmukh) March 11, 2024

The UN concluded, “Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range. Furthermore, the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back. The other wounds were not the result of firing in contact, near contact or close range, but it is not otherwise possible to determine the exact firing range. The wounds to the leg and foot were most likely received in a standing position.”

The ships were attacked to maintain illegal Israeli control over the Palestinians of Gaza.

Israel had withdrawn troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but retained control of its land borders, its air space, and its seacoast. After Hamas won the 2006 elections, Dov Weisglas, spokesman for the prime minister, explained of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As a result of this policy of limiting aid into the Gaza Strip, a majority of the population was reduced to food insecurity.

The BBC reported that after a few years of this blockade, an Israeli report on it was released by court order: “The report cites a number of ailments suffered by Palestinian children in Gaza. Ten percent of children under 5 have stunted growth due to prolonged exposure to malnutrition. Anemia, caused by an iron-deficiency, affects 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, 68.1 percent of children nine to 12 months old and 36.8 percent of pregnant mothers.” That was in 2012.

Since the Israelis were allowed to get away all those years with half-starving the Palestinians, the Netanyahu government appears to have decided that it has carte blanche to up the ante from putting them on a diet to actually starving them to death. Biden has been forced by public outcry to at least try to put a band-aid on this problem by sending in the US navy with food aid. It is too little too late. If Biden had had Furkan Doğan’s empathy and decisiveness, we would not be in this mess.

The response of some in the Biden administration to do an end-run around President Joe Biden’s studied unconcern with these child deaths by joining in a Jordanian air drop effort ends up being more a public relations effort than an effective food provision strategy. On Sunday, the US air-dropped 38,000 meals for 2.2 million people, which is like putting a band aid on an amputated leg. Air drops are costly and inefficient and would be rendered unnecessary if Israel allowed in sufficient food aid and actually began governing this territory it military occupies instead of playing shooting fish in a barrel with it.

Although the Biden administration says it has pleaded with the fascist government of Binyamin Netanyahu to allow in more food trucks, the US doesn’t have to beg. The Israelis ran out of ammunition a long time ago, and can only continue to bomb and shell Gaza because Mr. Biden supplies them with the requisite rockets and shells on a daily basis. After the Israeli government promised to let in more flour under (mild) US pressure, fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that he personally intervened to sequester the flour and keep it from going into Gaza. Unless Biden cuts off the arms supplies, his PR pleadings that he wishes Netanyahu and his black shirts would behave more humanely are just bunk.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian structures and refugee camps has killed some 12,500 children, but many times that are in danger of dying of lack of food and potable water. UN’s OCHA reports that “Between the afternoon of 1 March and 10:30 on 4 March, according to the MoH in Gaza, 306 Palestinians were killed, and 543 Palestinians were injured, including 124 killed and 210 injured in the past 24 hours.” These deaths are disproportionately women and children and cannot be justified as a war on “Hamas,” since you cannot destroy a clan-based guerrilla movement with bombing raids on densely populated buildings and camps.

Ten-year-old Yazan al-Kafarneh put a face on the horrifying phenomenon of deliberate child starvation as a weapon of war when pictures of his leathery, emaciated little corpse emerged onto the internet.

“Yazan al-Kafarneh,” by Juan Cole, 2024, Digital, LunaPic/ IbisPaint.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reported on a visit by WHO aid workers to two hospitals in northern Gaza over the weekend.

“Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed.

The visits over the weekend were the first since early October 2023 despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza.

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children. The lack of electricity poses a serious threat to patient care, especially in critical areas like the intensive care unit and the neonatal unit.

We managed to deliver 9,500 litres of fuel to each hospital, and some essential medical supplies. This is a fraction of the urgent lifesaving needs.

We appeal to Israel to ensure humanitarian aid can be delivered safely, and regularly. Civilians, especially children, and health staff need scaled-up help immediately. But the key medicine all these patients need is peace. Ceasefire.”

Given this situation, and the way in which the US is deeply implicated in these starvation deaths, the air drop comes across as a tasteless gimmick, a mere blowing of kisses to dying children.

( Tomdispatch.com) – Various versions of the aphorism “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” have been making the rounds ever since the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. The quip (which, despite legend, appears not to be attributable to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or any other famous person) has proven all too accurate when the war in question directly involves American troops. When, however, non-U.S. combatants and civilians suffer and die from conflicts relatively unrelated to Washington’s “strategic interests,” our media outlets tend to avert their eyes, aid agencies get stingy, and Americans learn no geography whatsoever. Oh, and given this country’s power and position on this planet, millions suffer the consequences of that neglect.     

Terror Days in Khartoum

Let’s start with Sudan. A civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) is now dragging into its seventh month with no end in sight. Since the conflict erupted, Washington has issued only a few token calls for the fighting there to end, while providing insufficient aid to desperate millions of Sudanese. The assistance that did go out has proven microscopic compared to the vast quantities of humanitarian, economic, and military aid our government has poured into similarly war-torn Ukraine.

In the first five months of brutal fighting in Sudan, 5,000 civilian deaths and injuries to at least 12,000 more were reported — and those were both considered significant underestimates. Meanwhile, more than a million people have fled that country, while a staggering 7.1 million have been displaced in their own land. According to the International Office of Migration, that represents “the highest [number] of any internally displaced population in the world, including Syria, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Human Rights Watch reports that “over 20 million people, 42% of Sudan’s population, face acute food insecurity and 6 million are just a step away from famine.” 

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Try to take that in for a moment and wonder, while you’re at it, why you’ve heard so desperately little (or nothing at all!) about such an immense human tragedy. Worse yet, the Sudanese people are hardly the only ones being treated shabbily by Uncle Sam and other governments of the rich North while suffering deadly deprivation. Sudan is, in fact, at the center of a region stretching from the Middle East deep into Africa in which countries suffering some of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies are largely being ignored by the Global North.

Given the near vacuum of news on the Sudan conflict in our media, we contacted Hadeel Mohamed, an educator we know who fled Sudan for neighboring Egypt, but is still in frequent contact with her neighbors who stayed behind in the capital city, Khartoum. We asked her for an update on what people still living there were telling her they were enduring after six months of unending civil war.

Every house in their neighborhood, she’s heard, has been looted by combatants. In the process, her friends and neighbors say that they’ve experienced “terror days when their houses were being invaded or even re-invaded to see if there’s anything left.”

“When it starts to get dark outside,” she told us, “that’s scariest, because you never know who’s going to come in and attack.” If female household members are there, what grim fates are they likely to suffer? And she adds, “If you have males in the house, are they going to be abducted and what’s going to happen to them?”

We asked whether atrocities were being committed by both the Sudanese Army and the RSF? “Yeah, both sides,” she responded. “Listen, I’m not validating any side, but when you’re in war, you really don’t know who’s coming at you or who’s a threat to you. So, everyone is seen as a threat.” And that, she adds, leads the combatants to act violently toward the civilians who’ve stayed behind.

Food is especially scarce in Khartoum, because travel in and out of the city is so dangerous for the usual suppliers and, as Hadeel points out, “Most of the stores have been looted, but in certain areas, some bread and other food is available for a few hours per day per week. There’s no fixed schedule, though.” Worse yet, wherever there’s active fighting, electricity and water supplies are normally cut off. “Some people can have electricity for weeks, while others will not have it for weeks.” Some engineers have bravely remained in Khartoum trying to keep power and water supplies flowing, but it’s often a hopeless task.

“People are on such unstable ground,” Hadeel concludes. “They really don’t know when their next food supplies are going to come in or when they’re going to be able to refill their water.” They have to watch for opportunities to slip outside in relative safety to “find something to keep them and their neighbors going.”

And what exactly has been Washington’s response to this ongoing horror? Well, the State Department issued a toothless admonishment that the army and RSF “must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including obligations related to the protection of civilians.” And that was about it, other than ineffective sanctions applied to the leader of the RSF. Meanwhile, international efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting have collapsed, and humanitarian aid efforts have been hopelessly bogged down. Anyway, who has time for Sudan when arming and backing the Ukrainians has the attention of everyone who matters in the United States?

“Severe, Extreme, or Catastrophic Conditions”

Mind you, that paucity of interest is anything but unique to the crisis in Sudan. For example, U.N. World Food Program (WFP) Director Cindy McCain recently told ABC’s This Week that there isn’t enough food-assistance money for desperate Afghanistan, filled with starving people, to “even get through October.” In addition, the WFP has had to cut food aid to other countries in desperate need, including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. As for explaining that shortfall, McCain was blunt, blaming the rush of rich nations of the Global North to support Ukraine which, she says, “has sucked the oxygen out of the room.”

Typically, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that its famine-prevention program for war-ravaged Yemen is now receiving just 30% of the funds it needs, putting millions of Yemenis at risk. OCHA points to the peril facing Fatima, a 60-year-old woman living in the village of Al-Juranah. The program supplies her family with wheat, peas, and oil, but delivery is sporadic, a reality about which Fatima is all too matter-of-fact. “We receive a sack of wheat,” she says, “and sometimes we get only half a sack. They also give us roasted peas and oil. If this support stops, we will starve to death.” And sadly enough, that support is now anything but guaranteed.

Two years after a ceasefire in that brutal civil war fed by Saudi Arabia (with U.S. support), a conflict that received only the scantiest media coverage in this country, more than half of Yemenis — 17 million people — are food insecure. U.N. forecasters predict that without massive intervention, a quarter of those people will experience “acute food insecurity” by year’s end, with three-quarters of them reaching “crisis levels of hunger.” Such massive intervention is decidedly not in the cards, however, and the continuing neglect is having horrific consequences. National Public Radio’s Fatma Tanis did, in fact, report on this from a Yemeni hospital in August:

“We head next to the intensive care unit for newborns, often born with complications because of malnutrition. As we enter, a nurse pulls a sheet over a baby who just died. The parents aren’t here. Often, families use all their resources to bring their child to the hospital but can’t afford to return again. So the hospital has to take care of burials too, without them.”

The people of Syria are similarly striving to recover from the civil war that erupted in 2011 and was finally put on hold with a 2020 ceasefire, but only after a full decade of ferocious warfare and terrible suffering. Like the Sudanese and Yemenis, they remain largely unnoticed and uncovered these days in the American media. In addition to extreme water shortages, a catastrophic 55% of Syrians are officially in the crisis phase of acute food insecurity. In late 2022, OCHA reported that “severe, extreme, or catastrophic conditions” were affecting 69% — yes, you read that right! — of the country’s population. Furthermore,

“Basic services and other critical infrastructure are on the brink of collapse… Over 58 percent of households interviewed reported accessing only between three to eight hours of electricity per day, while almost seven million people only had access to their primary water source between two and seven days per month in June.”

Is the world paying attention? In one respect, Syria is more fortunate than Sudan or Yemen, enjoying its very own annual conference of donor nations. At this June’s conference, hosted by the European Union, donors pledged an increase in total aid, but the amount still fell $800 million short of what the U.N. was seeking for that country. Worse yet, just before the conference kicked off, the World Food Program announced that it would cut food aid to almost half of Syria’s 5.5 million current recipients just when they’re most in need.   

The Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in deep distress, finds itself in the global spotlight, but not for the suffering its people are experiencing. Its huge deposits of cobalt, copper, and other mineral elements essential to future renewable-energy economies have finally brought it some attention. However, the Global North, transfixed by those priceless minerals, has remained remarkably blind to the wave of human misery now sweeping the Congo.

Last month, Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just back from a trip there, told Democracy Now, “It’s the worst hunger catastrophe on Earth. Nowhere else in the world is there more than 25 million people experiencing violence, hunger, disease, neglect. And nowhere in the world is there such a small international response to help, to aid, to end all of this suffering.”

As in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, hunger and war have gone hand-in-hand in the Congo. Today, Egelend said, an almost unbelievable 150 or so armed groups vie for power in the cobalt-rich eastern part of the country. In the early 2000s, cobalt was valued for its role in mobile phones and laptops. The stakes are far higher now, with vastly larger quantities required to produce the lithium-ion batteries essential to the development of sprawling new power grids and a vast global fleet of electric vehicles.

Collateral damage radiating from the Congo’s ongoing violence includes a hunger crisis, an epidemic of sexual assault by combatants on tens of thousands of civilian women, and so much more. The U.N. sought $2.3 billion in humanitarian assistance for the Congo in 2023. It has, however, only received a measly one-third of that sum, enough to help just one of every 18 people now in desperate need.

On Democracy Now!, Egeland put his finger on the terrible calculations of global economics and diplomacy: “Congo is not ignored by those who want to extract the riches of that place. It is ignored by the rest of the world… As humanity, we’re really, really failing Congo now, because it’s not Ukraine, it’s not the Middle East.”

As a refugee from Sudan, Hadeel Mohamed worries every day about these kinds of terrible calculations being made in the North. As she puts it,

“This war has really opened our eyes to a lot of things. Although we saw the news of what’s happening in Yemen and Syria, and all these countries where wars erupted, we never really understood the depth of it. A worry of ours is that what’s happening to Syrian refugees is going to happen to Sudanese refugees… where your prospects are not going to mean anything… where you’re limited in your work transactions, you’re limited in your educational abilities.”

Because organizations like the U.N. and the International Red Cross were activated “quite late” in Sudan, she points out, some who fled the country, especially youth, “started forming groups to help people cross borders to get out, to find jobs, and to raise funds for food and water aid for those still in Sudan.” Hadeel herself is involved in such efforts. “But progress is a bit slow, because we’re still trying to rebuild our own lives in parallel.”

“If the war is not contained in Khartoum,” she adds, “the chances of it spreading are very high and we’ve seen a lot of spreading recently, whether it’s in Port Sudan or Madani or surrounding cities.” Violence has been raging for months in the Darfur region of western Sudan as well. The conflict could also be significantly prolonged by the desire of both sides to control northeastern Sudan’s vast gold deposits, which play a role analogous to that of cobalt in the Congo.

With no relief in sight, says Hadeel, the people of Khartoum, understand that lacking true humanitarian aid, “you really come back to more of community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” Nevertheless, for refugees, “there are only two possible outcomes here: either you go back and fight for your country and potentially die or you go on living and establishing yourself outside of Sudan.”

Meanwhile, on the Outskirts of Democracy…

Tyranny, civil war, systemic breakdown — it can’t happen here, right? Or can it? We privileged folk in the United States may still think we live in a democracy, but so many of us don’t. In truth, the 140 million poor and low-wage folks, Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, along with about one-third of White people, live on the outskirts of our “democracy.” Like the people of Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, they dream of being in a country where there’s equality and justice, and where democracy, while not complete, is at least not dying.

The United States never was, and by the looks of it, now has little chance of becoming a truly pluralistic, multiracial democratic system. If we were, we’d be spending every free hour raising hell to make sure the possibility of democracy doesn’t die in next year’s election. The media are replete with dystopian scenarios of its end and the rise of Trumpistan. We’re scared shirtless about that, too, and it’s a gut punch to realize that, if we had a truly functioning democracy, there’d be no way it could be toppled by a single guy like Donald Trump.

Ask a Sudanese or a Syrian or an Egyptian or an Afghan what it’s like to live under autocracy. Then ask marginalized Americans what it’s like to live on the outskirts of democracy. For the latter, democracy is like Sudan’s gold and the Congo’s cobalt. There may be a lot of it, but very few get any.

Copyright 2023 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox    

Tomdispatch.com

Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.

This was, of course, before ordinary people had even heard of email. Our entire editorial process was mediated through the U.S. Postal Service, with letters flying constantly between our two cities. On the upside, through 12 years and 48 issues, we only had to hold four in-person meetings.

All of which is to say that I’m old. That fact — and recent events in the lives of several friends — have brought to mind the first article I ever published in LesCon: “Who’s Going to Run the Old Dykes’ Home?” It’s a question that’s no less pertinent today, and not just for lesbians. My worldview was more parochial back then; I naively believed that someone — the state or their families — would look out for heterosexual elders, but that we lesbians were on our own. It turns out that we — the people of this country — are all on our own.

Playing Aging Roulette

These days, my partner and I seem to be doing a lot of elder care. Actually, I’ve long been a source of tech support for the octogenarian set, beginning with my own father. (“OK, you’re sure you saved the file? Can you remember what name you gave it?”) With our aging friends, we also help out with transport to doctors’ offices, communications issues (with landlines, cell phones, and the Internet), and occasionally just relieving the loneliness of it all.

In recent months, elderly friends of ours have faced losing their housing, their spouses, their mobility, or their cognitive abilities. I find it terrifying and ache because there’s so little I can do to help them.

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I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m daily reminded that getting older can indeed be frustrating and frightening. It pains me to know that my bones are weakening, that I don’t hear as well as I used to, that my skin’s drier and wrinkling, that my once familiar face in the mirror is growing ever stranger. I’m lucky that — like my father who used to say, “After 70, it’s all maintenance” — I’ve managed to maintain a fair amount of brown hair on my head. I especially hate the way words that used to leap down my tongue in merry cadence now frequently lurk sullenly in the backwaters of my brain.

In a piece about our aging political class, Robert Reich, secretary of labor for President Bill Clinton, has written charmingly about the “diminutions” that come with growing older and his own decision to stop teaching after decades of doing so. His take on anomic aphasia is similar to mine. He laments his trouble remembering people’s names, noting that “certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again.” I know what he means. For some years now, whenever I want to talk about cashew nuts, all I can initially think of is “carob.” Some devious gremlin has switched those words somewhere in the card catalog of my brain.

But even as I grieve for capacities lost and departing, I’m still not ready to come face to face with the only true alternative to aging: not some tech bro’s wet dream of eternal life, but the reality of death. I’m opposed to dying and, had the universe consulted me, I’d have left mortality out of its design completely.

No One Else Is Going to Do It for Us

Written more than 40 years ago, parts of my piece “The Old Dykes’ Home” are flat-out embarrassing now. Getting old seemed so strange and far off before I was even 30. When I imagined being aged then, I think it was with the piercing sorrow of Paul Simon’s song “Old Friends/Bookends”:

“Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy”

In other ways, my article was depressingly prescient about just how much this country would expect aging people to shift for themselves by the time I reached that strange period of my own life. Not only old dykes, but pretty much anyone who isn’t affluent, can find that old age brings economic desperation.

Yes, U.S. citizens and permanent residents over 65 can get medical attention through Medicare, but the standard program only covers 80% of your bills. Beginning in 2006, we gained access to some prescription drug coverage, but that requires sifting through an ever-changing menu of medications and the ability to predict today what meds you might need tomorrow.

Most people who live long enough will receive some monthly income from Social Security, although the amount depends in part on how much they were able to earn during their working lives. But we’re constantly staving off attacks on Social Security, including attempts to privatize it, reduce benefit amounts, or increase the age at which people can collect because Americans are living longer. That last proposal, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, is really another way of penalizing low-wage workers. As he wrote,

“Life expectancy has indeed risen a lot for the affluent, but for the less well-paid members of the working class, it has hardly risen at all. What this means is that calling for an increase in the retirement age is, in effect, saying that janitors can’t be allowed to retire because lawyers are living longer. Not a very nice position to take.”

Suppose the disabilities of age mean you can no longer safely live in your own home. Well, you’re on your own. Unless you can afford to move to some kind of assisted-living facility, you’re in real trouble. Your main alternative is to spend down most of what you own, so you qualify for the pittance that your state Medicaid program will pay a (most likely for-profit) nursing home to warehouse you until you die.

The threat of being old and unhoused is very real. A recent major study of unhoused people in California found that almost half of them are over 50 and 7% over 65. As housing costs continue to rise, we can only expect that more old people will find themselves on the street.

Back then, I wrote that, under capitalism, we could expect the “owners of wealth” to do very little for people who are no longer creating profits through their labor — or indirectly, by doing the work “to make it physically and emotionally possible for the paid laborers to go out in the world and work one more day.” Why, after all, should capital take any interest in people who are no longer a source of profit?

These are the people — old, disabled, permanently unemployed — who, according to the political philosopher Iris Marion Young, experience a particularly sinister form of oppression: marginalization. “Marginalization,” writes Young, “is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”

There were some other missing pieces in that article. I left out the fact that it’s easier to justify low pay for the art (and science) of caregiving when most of its practitioners are women. I failed to envision caretakers organizing on their own. I never imagined that, decades later, a National Domestic Workers Alliance would arise to represent the interests of the poorly paid, disrespected workforce of immigrants and women of color who largely do the work of caring for the aged in this country.

I had just lived through an episode in which on the bus to work I suddenly fainted from pain caused by a herniated disk in my back. I found myself lying on my bed for several months recovering while living on a monthly welfare check of $185 and food stamps. Still, the lesson I drew was that the solution to caring for people with chronic disabilities was what had then worked for me: drawing on a community of volunteers, a roster of almost 30 women who took turns shopping for groceries, doing my laundry, and ferrying me to doctors’ appointments. Why couldn’t that work for everyone?

That network of support existed, however, because I belonged to a lesbian community self-consciously constructing a parallel society tucked inside the larger city of Portland, Oregon. It was packed with institutions like a women’s bookstore, a drop-in community center, a women’s mental health project, and a feminist credit union, among others. I acted with a women’s theater company and, at times, worked as a secretary at a women’s law cooperative.

In reality, though, we weren’t nearly as independent as we thought we were. Most of those institutions were staffed by women paid through the Comprehensive Education and Training Act, passed during the presidency of Richard Nixon and continued under Jimmy Carter. When Ronald Reagan and his new brand of Republicans took over in Washington in 1981, those salaries disappeared almost overnight — and with them, most of our community’s infrastructure.

So, my answer to the problem of aging then was to endorse an ethic of volunteerism rooted in specific communities, like our lesbian one. “Feminists,” I wrote, “are rightly uneasy about asking each other to perform any more unpaid work in our lives than we, and centuries of women before us, have already done.”

Nevertheless, I argued, “the truth is… no one is going to pay us to take care of each other… and we can’t afford to believe the capitalist and patriarchal lie that we are cheating each other when we ask each other — even strangers — to do that work for free.”

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that I was then inching my way toward an ethos that could free the project of caring for each other from the claws of capitalism. But I was naïve about the amount of time and energy people would be able to spare outside of their day’s labor — especially as real wages were about to stagnate and then begin to fall. I didn’t imagine a time to come when people without much money would need to work two or even three jobs just to get by. I didn’t think, as I do now, that it would be better, instead, to focus on raising the status and pay of caring work.

Even back in the 1980s, however, I recognized the limits of volunteerism. I knew that I’d been lucky during my period of temporary disability. I was an outgoing person with quite a sizeable set of acquaintances. With a reasonable levity of spirit and a dependable store of gossip, I knew then that I could make taking care of me relatively pleasant.

But I also knew that no one’s survival should depend on having a winning personality. Instead, as I wrote at the time, we needed to “develop simple, dependable structures to serve those among us who require physical care.”

How hard could that be, after all? “A file of volunteers and a rotating coordinator could do the job,” I wrote then. Here, too, I was more sadly prescient than I even realized. In recent years, the market for aging care has indeed found a way to commercialize volunteer efforts like the ones I imagined in the form of Internet-based options like Lotsa Helping Hands and Mealtrain.

On Our Own?

My point back then was that, as lesbians, we were on our own. No one was going to run the Old Dykes’ Home if we didn’t do it ourselves. (Perhaps I should have foreseen then that someone might indeed run it, if they could make money doing so!) I figured we had 10 to 15 years to develop “formal networks of support to deal with illness and disability,” because eventually each of us would need such structures. We lesbians would have to look out for ourselves because we lived then “on the edges of society.” I didn’t realize at the time that we shared those edges with so many other people.

Building volunteer structures was, I thought, just the short-term goal. The longer-term project was something much more ambitious: to build “a world in which the work of caring for each other happens not at the fringes of society, but at its heart.”

I still believe in that larger goal, and not because it’s a lovely fantasy, but because it’s a response to a fundamental reality of life. It’s a fact that human beings, like all beings, live in a web of interdependence. Every one of us is implicated, folded into that web, simultaneously depending on others, while others depend on us. The self-reliant individual is an illusion, which means that constructing societies based on that chimera is a doomed enterprise, bound in the end (just as we’ve seen) to fail so many on whom — though we may not know it — we depend.

Aging really is a roulette game. My partner and I are gambling that good genes, regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and sufficient mental stimulation will keep our limbs, organs, and minds hale enough to, as they say, “age in place.” We plan to stay in the house we’ve occupied for more than 30 years, in the neighborhood where we can walk to the library and the grocery store. We don’t plan to get Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or congestive heart failure or (like yet another friend) take a life-changing fall down a flight of stairs. Having somehow forgotten to have children (and never wanting to burden even our hypothetical offspring in any case), we’re planning to take care of ourselves.

Talk about hubris!

The truth is that we have much less control than we’d like to believe over how we’ll age. Tomorrow, one of us could lose the disability lottery, and like so many of our friends, we could be staring at the reality of growing old in a society that treats preparation for — and survival during — old age as a matter of individual personal responsibility.

It’s time to take a more realistic approach to the fact that all of us lucky enough to live that long will become ever more dependent as we age. It’s time to face reality and place caring for one another at the heart of the human endeavor.

Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

Here’s the kicker: Russia is not on the invitation list.

It’s quite an embarrassment that all the BRICS countries except Russia are poised to attend the Saudi event. It’s also telling that Saudi Arabia, which has long collaborated with Russia on setting the price of oil, is deliberately snubbing its erstwhile petro-ally.

True, Saudi heir apparent Mohammed bin Salman has been looking for ways to salvage his international reputation after ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A very public effort to end the war in Ukraine could go toward rehabilitating the murderous prince (at least among those countries willing to excuse the heinous crime).

But the decision to work with Ukraine on such a summit is likely more about Saudi anger over Putin’s recent decision to destroy the grain deal that facilitated the delivery of Ukrainian agricultural products to global markets.

Wealthy Saudi Arabia is not so much worried about feeding itself in the wake of the deal’s demise. But it is worried about the impact of higher prices elsewhere in the region. The Arab Spring protests, after all, were triggered by the rising cost of basic commodities in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi influence in the region depends on the maintenance of a conservative political order anchored in despotic regimes that can manage the discontent of their own populations. In its blind ambition to destroy Ukraine, Russia is ignoring the more far-reaching consequences of its military policies.

It’s not just Saudi Arabia that’s angry about these consequences.

Recently, the Kremlin hosted a second summit of African leaders in Moscow. Back in 2019, 43 leaders showed up for the first such gathering. Last month, a mere 17 bothered to make the journey.

Here, too, multiple factors are at play. African leaders are understandably put off by Putin’s high-handed treatment of the African delegation led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that visited St. Petersburg in June, which turned into a dressing down of the visitors for their presumptuousness at including a Russian troop withdrawal in their peace plan.

But another major reason for the no-shows was Russia’s reckless rejection of the grain deal. African countries are particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of grain and have relied a good deal on relatively inexpensive Ukrainian imports.

At this point, Vladimir Putin is willing to suffer any number of self-inflicted wounds in order to beat Ukraine into submission. He will alienate a close ally like Saudi Arabia. He will anger an entire continent of people (where Russia already had a low reputation prior to the 2022 invasion). He will make it more difficult for millions of poor people to afford food. He will even complicate the efforts of Russian grain producers to bring their product to market.

Threats by Russian leaders to use nuclear weapons jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone on the planet, but such scenarios are highly speculative and constitute a future risk. The Russian campaign to undermine the world’s food supply, meanwhile, jeopardizes the livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable people in the here and now.

Russian Actions in Detail

Because of the grain deal inked last summer, Ukraine managed to get to market more than 20 million tons of wheat, corn, and other grains that had been stuck in the country’s southern ports. In all, Ukraine managed to export 36.2 million metric tons of food during the year the deal was in place. Over half of those exports went to the developing world.

These shipments brought down the prices of food, which had spiked immediately after Russia’s invasion last February. The end of the deal did not quite reverse all the progress in keeping food affordable but it did lead to the largest one-day increase in wheat futures since the war began in February 2022. According to The Washington Post, “Unless Russia reverses course, this will make low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East more dependent on slightly more expensive Russian wheat, which produces about 20 percent of the world’s supply.”

Image by Сергей Канавин from Pixabay

Russia didn’t just destroy the deal. It has also set out to destroy Ukrainian grain directly by bombing silos and other agricultural infrastructure. In this way, it has managed to remove 60,000 tons of grain from the global food supply. Most recently, it has begun to target ports and storage facilities along the Danube river, an alternative route to get Ukrainian products to market. The latest attacks pushed wheat prices up around 3 percent and corn prices around 2 percent on world markets.

Russia is thus deploying two strategies to undercut its agricultural competitor: prevent grain from getting to markets and destroying it in storage facilities.

It’s not just the Middle East and Africa that will be affected by Russia’s agricultural warfare. The biggest importer of Ukrainian foodstuffs over the last year was actually China, which received one-quarter of the shipments. So, add China to the list of countries pissed off at the Kremlin for its tactics.

And while we’re at it, let’s expand that list to include the UN and everyone at risk of starvation wherever they live in the world. Over the last year, Ukraine supplied the World Food Program with 80 percent of its grain, which was up from 50 percent before the war. With its strategy of bomb and blockade, Russia is literally taking the food out of the mouths of the hungry.

But what about the supposed advantages that Russia received from signing the deal in the first place?

A parallel deal facilitated by the European Union made it easier for Russia to export its own grain, despite the thicket of economic sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, Russia exported a record 45.5 million metric tons of wheat, with an even larger amount expected this year. As the world’s largest wheat exporter, Russia could even take advantage of the moment to raise export taxes.

The bottom line: Moscow doesn’t need the deal any longer, especially if its dual strategy of bomb and blockade effectively eliminates a chief competitor.

War and Hunger

The food-insecure portion of the global population has been hit by a triple whammy: pandemic, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. According to the World Food Program, the number of people facing acute hunger in 2019 was around 135 million. By 2022, that number had risen to 345 million.

Ukraine faces significant food insecurity as well. One in three families—or 11 million people—are vulnerable. In the 1930s, Stalin’s regime used hunger as a tool to suppress Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule and the collectivization of agriculture. Around 3.9 million people died during the Holodomor (death by famine).

Putin can’t use the same tools as Stalin did to punish Ukraine’s rebelliousness. But the current Russian government is certainly attempting to destroy or otherwise undermine Ukraine’s capacity to feed itself. By so doing, the Kremlin is also forcing millions of other people around the world to go hungry.

Russia is flexing its muscles because it thinks it’s self-sufficient. It is the world’s second largest producer of fossil fuels (after the United States), third largest grower of wheat, fifth largest producer of iron and of steel, and eighth largest manufacturer of cement. The world needs what it produces, and large importers of energy and grain like China and India are willing to overlook what’s happening in Ukraine despite the occupying army’s ongoing violations of international law.

But Russia’s self-sufficiency is illusory. If the war were taking place in the nineteenth century or even the 1950s, Russia could indeed ignore the world’s anger. It can feed itself, power its factories, build its infrastructure. But in today’s modern society, advancement—or even, treading water—requires high-tech. And here, Russia is falling behind, thanks to corruption, sanctions, and war-related brain drain.

So, Russia pisses off the world—Saudi Arabia, Africa, China, the UN—at its own peril. The only question is: how many people will have to suffer for Putin’s grandiose ambitions before their collective representatives force the Russian government to give back the land it stole?

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

In fact, the Times did have daily figures until March 23rd when, noting that data on the pandemic from state and local health officials was fast disappearing, it added: “After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, the New York Times is ending its Covid-19 data-gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish virus data from the federal government weekly on a new set of tracking pages, but this page will no longer be updated.” Still, if you do look at those weekly figures, there were 94,000 weekly cases reported in this country and — yes — 1,160 weekly deaths as of the moment I wrote this introduction. It’s true that, at least for now, those numbers continue to decline, adding ever fewer Americans to the — hold your breath for a moment — 1,123,836 deaths the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported on March 10th of this year when it, too, stopped collecting data.

And yes, there is indeed a new Covid booster (which I plan to get) for older adults and the immunocompromised, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that ever fewer Americans are even bothering. Of course, since Donald Trump and crew made the pandemic into a deeply divisive issue, for many of us, including significant numbers who died, not boosting or masking was part of our politics, not our health. Grimmer yet, the figures do show that Republicans died of Covid at a significantly higher rate than Democrats.

So, today, I felt a certain kinship with TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign Liz Theoharis when she reminded us of the devastation the pandemic brought our way and the even more devastating urge now to cancel what was done in the midst of its horror to help the poor. One thing should be clear from her piece today: however the Covid crisis ends, our crisis will certainly continue. Tom

The Pandemic Portal View

Lessons for Moral Standard-Bearers in a Sick Society

By Liz Theoharis

“In order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick.”

I can still hear those prophetic words, now a quarter-century old, echoing through the Church Center of the United Nations. At the podium was David, a leader with New Jerusalem Laura, a residential drug recovery program in North Philadelphia that was free and accessible to people, no matter their insurance and income status. It was June 1998 and hundreds of poor and low-income people had gathered for the culminating event of the “New Freedom Bus Tour: Freedom from Unemployment, Hunger, and Homelessness,” a month-long, cross-country organizing event led by welfare rights activists. Two years earlier, President Bill Clinton had signed welfare “reform” into law, gutting life-saving protections and delivering a punishing blow to millions of Americans who depended on them.

That line of David’s has stuck with me over all these years. He was acutely aware of how one’s own health — whether from illness, addiction, or the emotional wear and tear of life — is inextricably connected to larger issues of systemic injustice and inequality. After years on the frontlines of addiction prevention and treatment, he also understood that personal recovery can only happen en masse in a society willing to deal with the deeper malady of poverty and racism. This month, his words have been on my mind again as I’ve grieved over the death of Reverend Paul Chapman, a friend and mentor who was with me at that gathering in 1998. The issue of “recovery” has, in fact, been much on my mind as the Biden administration prepares to announce the official end of the public-health emergency that accompanied the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

For our society, that decision is more than just a psychological turning of the page. Even though new daily cases continue to number in the thousands nationally, free testing will no longer be available for many, and other pandemic-era public-health measures — including broader access to medication for opioid addiction — will also soon come to an end. Worse yet, a host of temporary health and nutrition protections are now on the chopping block, too (and given the debate on the debt ceiling in Congress, the need for such programs is particularly dire).

When the pandemic first hit, the federal government temporarily banned any Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cuts, mandating that states offer continuous coverage. As a result, enrollment in both swelled, as many people in need of health insurance found at least some coverage. But that ban just expired and tens of millions of adults and children are now at risk of losing access to those programs over the next year. Many of them also just lost access to critically important Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as pandemic-era expansions of that program were cut last month.

Of course, the announced “end’ of the public-health emergency doesn’t mean the pandemic is really over. Thousands of people are still dying from it, while 20% of those who had it are experiencing some form of long Covid and many elderly and immunocompromised Americans continue to feel unsafe. Nor, by the way, does that announcement diminish a longer-term, slow-burning public health crisis in this country.

Early in the pandemic, Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, warned that the virus was exploiting deeply entrenched fissures in our society. Before the pandemic, there had already been all too many preconditions for a future health calamity: in 2020, for instance, there were 140 million people too poor to afford a $400 emergency, nearly 10 million people homeless or on the brink of homelessness, and 87 million underinsured or uninsured.

Last year, the Poor People’s Campaign commissioned a study on the connections between Covid-19, poverty, and race. Sadly, researchers found the fact that all too many Americans refused to be vaccinated did not alone explain why this country had the highest pandemic death toll in the world. The lack of affordable and accessible health care contributed significantly to the mortality rate. The study concluded that, despite early claims that Covid-19 could be a “great equalizer,” it’s distinctly proven to be a “poor people’s pandemic” with two to five times as many inhabitants of poor counties dying of it in 2020 and 2021 as in wealthy ones.

Buy the Book

The pandemic not only exposed social fissures; it exacerbated them. While life expectancy continues to rise across much of the industrialized world, it stagnated in the United States over the last decade. Then, during the first three years of the pandemic, it dropped in a way that experts claim is unprecedented in modern global history.

In comparison, peer countries initially experienced just one-third as much of a decline in life expectancy and then, as they adopted effective Covid-19 responses, saw it increase. In our country, the stagnation in life expectancy before the pandemic and the seemingly unending plunge after it hit mark us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but even among some poorer ones. The Trump administration’s disastrous pandemic response was significantly to blame for the drop, but beyond that, our track record over the last decade speaks volumes about our inability to provide a healthy life for so many in this country. As always, the poor suffer first and worst in such a situation.

The Pandemic as a Portal

In the early weeks of those Covid-19 lockdowns, Indian writer Arundhati Roy reflected on the societal change often wrought by pandemics in history. And she suggested that this sudden crisis could be an opportunity to embrace necessary change:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway, between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

There was hope in Roy’s words but also caution. As she suggested, what would emerge from that portal was hardly guaranteed to be better. Positive change is never a certainty (in actuality, anything but!). Still, a choice had to be made, action taken. While contending with the great challenges of our day — widespread poverty, unprecedented inequality, racial reckoning, rising authoritarianism, and climate disaster — it’s important to reflect soberly on just how we’ve chosen to walk through the portal of this pandemic. The sure-footed decisions, as well as the national missteps, have much to teach us about how to chart a better path forward as a society.

Consider the federal programs and policies temporarily created or expanded during the first years of the pandemic. While protecting Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP, the government instituted eviction moratoriums, extended unemployment insurance, issued stimulus payments directly to tens of millions of households, and expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Such proactive policy decisions did not by any means deal with the full extent of need nationwide. Still, for a time, they did mark a departure from the neoliberal consensus of the previous decades and were powerful proof that we could house, feed, and care for one another. The explosion of Covid cases and the lockdown shuttering of the economy may have initially triggered many of these policies, but once in place, millions of people did experience just how sensible and feasible they are.

The Child Tax Credit is a good example. In March 2021, the program was expanded through the American Rescue Plan, and by December the results were staggering. More than 61 million children had benefited and four million children were lifted above the official poverty line, a historic drop in the overall child poverty rate. A report found that the up to $300 monthly payments significantly improved the ability of families to catch up on rent, afford food more regularly, cover child-care expenses, and attend to other needs. Survey data also suggested that the CTC helped improve the parental depression, stress, and anxiety that often accompany poverty and the suffering of children.

How extraordinary, then, that, rather than being embraced for offering the glimmer of something new on the other side of that pandemic portal, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2022 ended. The oppressive weight of our “dead ideas,” to use Roy’s term, crushed that hopeful possibility. Last year, led by a block of unified Republicans, Congress axed it, invoking the tired and time-worn myth of scarcity as a justification. When asked about the CTC, Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX) claimed that “the country frankly doesn’t have the time or the money for the partisan, expensive provisions such as the Child Tax Credit.” Consider such a response especially disingenuous given that Brady and a majority of congressional Republicans and Democrats voted to increase the military budget to a record $858 billion that same year.

In so many other ways, our society has refused to relinquish old and odious thinking and is instead “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred” through the portal of the pandemic.

There are continued attacks on the health of women and the autonomy of those who can get pregnant; on LGBTQ+ people, including a wave of anti-trans legislation; on homeless people who are criminalized for their poverty; and on poor communities as a whole, including disinvestment, racist police abuse, and deadly mass incarceration at sites like New York City’s Rikers Island and the Southern Regional Jail in the mountains of West Virginia. And while weathering a storm of Christian nationalist and white supremacist mass shootings, this country is a global outlier on the issue of public safety, fueled by endless stonewalling on sensible gun legislation.

To add insult to injury, economic inequality in the United States rose to unprecedented heights in the pandemic years (which proved a godsend for America’s billionaires), with millions hanging on by a thread and inflation continuing to balloon. And as pandemic-era protections for the poor are being cut, ongoing protections for the rich — including Donald Trump’s historic tax breaks — remain untouched.

Another World Is Possible

In the office of the Employment Project where I worked upon first moving to New York City in 2001, there was a poster whose slogan — “Another World Is Possible” — still stays with me. It hung above my head, while I labored alongside my friend and mentor Paul Chapman.

Paul died this April and we just held a memorial for him. He was an activist in welfare rights and workers’ rights, director of the Employment Project, and one of the founders of the Poverty Initiative, a predecessor to the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice that I currently direct.

Paul did pioneering work to bring together Protestant and Catholic communities in Boston, organized delegations of northern clergy to support civil rights struggles in small towns in North Carolina, and sponsored significant fundraisers for the movement, alongside his friend, theologian Harvey Cox. He also spent time in Brazil connecting with liberation theologians and others who went on to found the World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of social movements from across the globe whose founding mantra was “Another World Is Possible.” Over the course of his long life, Paul would do what Black Freedom Struggle leader Ella Baker called “the spadework,” the slow, often overlooked labor of building trust, caring for people, planting seeds, and tilling the ground so that transformative movements might someday blossom. His life was a constant reminder that every organizing moment, no matter how small, is a fundamentally important part of how we build toward collective liberation.

Paul explained many things, including that powerful movements for social change depend on the leadership of those most impacted by injustice. Right next to the WSF poster there was another that read: “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.” Paul spoke regularly about how poor and oppressed people had to be the moral-standard bearers for society. He was unyielding in his belief that it was the duty of clergy and faith communities to stand alongside the poor in their struggles for respect and dignity. As a young antipoverty organizer and seminarian, I was deeply inspired by the way he modeled a principled blending of political and pastoral work.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from him was about the idea of “kairos” time. Paul taught me that, in ancient Greece, there were two conceptions of time. Chronos was normal, chronological time, while kairos was a particular moment when normal time was disrupted and something new promised — or threatened — to emerge. In our hours of “theological reflection,” he would say that during kairos time, as the old ways of the world were dying and new ones were struggling to be born, there was no way you could remain neutral. You had to decide whether to dedicate your life to change or block its path. In some fashion, his description of kairos time perfectly matched Roy’s evocative metaphor of that pandemic portal and when I first read her essay I instantly thought of Paul.

In antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. The image of the vigilant archer remains a powerful one for me, especially because kairos time represents both tremendous possibility and imminent danger. The moment can be seized and the arrow shot true or it can be missed with the archer just as quickly becoming the target. Paul lived his life as an archer for justice, ever vigilant, ever patient, ever hopeful that another better world was indeed possible.

Despite our bleak current moment, I retain the same hope. However briefly, the pandemic showed us that such an American world is not only possible, but right at our fingertips. As the public-health emergency draws to an “official” end, it’s hardly a surprise to me that so many of those in power have chosen to double down on policies that protect their interests. But like Paul, it’s not the leadership of the rich and powerful that I choose to follow. As our communities continue to fight for healthcare, housing, decent wages, and so much more, I believe that, given half a chance, the poor, the hurting, and the abandoned, already standing in the gap between our wounded old world and a possible new one, could help usher us into a far better future.

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com