He continued, “It is not a war between soldiers and soldiers. It is a war between a well equipped army on the one hand and women and children on the other.”

Lula is not the first world leader to compare Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Hitler over his actions in Gaza — Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made the same comparison.

Since Hitler murdered six million Jews, the comparison is hurtful. It could also be rejected on grounds of scale. Hitler not only killed all those European Jews, he also killed 6 million Poles. And consider Ukraine: “of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 – 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.”

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Brazil’s Lula likens Gaza war to Holocaust”

While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history and look to European fascism as a whole and not just the German National Socialists (who were peculiar in many ways).

FIRST: KEEPING PEOPLE STATELESS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY

For instance, the Fascists stripped citizenship from millions of people and made them stateless, without the rights that come from a direct relationship to a state of their own. Chief Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as “the right to have rights.”

Hitler took citizenship from German Jews but also from the Roma and from persons of African heritage.

Netanyahu keeps 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories stateless and without citizenship. So his policies in this narrow regard are similar to those of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In essence, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living under something like the Nuremberg Laws. Their establishments and homes are attacked by militant Israeli squatters with impunity in a sort of rolling Kristallnacht.

Note that by Israeli law, Israeli squatters in the occupied Palestinian territories have all the citizenship rights of other Israelis. So the lack of rights on the West Bank is not territorial. It is by ethnicity.

Netanyahu has boasted about derailing the Oslo Peace Accords and presents himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state from being established. He reiterated his opposition to any international diplomatic track that leads to a Palestinian state just this weekend.

SECOND: DEPRIVATION OF BASIC INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Another feature of Fascism, underlined by Robert Paxton, is the elimination of individual rights. Israel’s regime over the occupied, stateless Palestinians fully demonstrates this feature. Palestinians can be arrested under “administrative detention” without charge or trial or habeas corpus and held for months or years. We have seen a treatment of detained Palestinians in Gaza that constitutes war crimes. It is alleged that forms of torture are practiced.

THIRD: TOTAL WAR

Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants, who make up nearly all of the nearly 30,000 people so far killed, and who have been deprived of domiciles and sufficient food and potable water by the Israeli military.

Total war was adopted as a military strategy by fascist states, according to historian Alan Kramer. One academic summarized his argument: “Kramer indicated a very interesting question regarding the specificity of the kind of war implemented by fascist regimes during the thirties and the forties, characterized by its genocidal nature and opened, according to him, with the colonial war launched by Italy in Abyssinia [Ethiopia] in 1935. Kramer underlined that the specificity of this particular way of waging war typical of fascism would define itself by the final elimination of the «distinction between combatants and non-combatants», pointing how in the six years of this conflict between 350.000 and 760.000 Ethiopians were killed, victims of an asymmetric war based on the overwhelming use of air force, chemical weapons and politics of collective terror against any sign of real or imagined resistance.”

The fascist way of war eliminates the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and wreaks mass death on the latter to achieve military aims. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Netanyahu is waging total war on Gaza and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and a whole plethora of Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. This, even though half of Gaza’s population consists children.

Total war easily leads to genocide, of course, which is why the International Court of Justice has found it at least plausible that Netanyahu is waging a genocide in Gaza, attempting to destroy a people in part or in whole because of who they are.

So, no, Netanyahu is not a Hitler. But, yes, his policies bear a strong resemblance to those of inter-war Fascism.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A decade of revolt.” From Tunis to New York, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tehran, or Khartoum, the past decade was marked by protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. If the notion that history is an almost continuous march towards the progress of human kind (a popular view among Western intellectuals in the 1990s such as Francis Fukuyama) still had some currency, the last decade should have put this idea to rest.

That is because, in hindsight, it is difficult to be optimistic about the results of this decade of revolt. This is a feeling shared by many and examined in the book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” The author, Vincent Bevins, is a US journalist who was highly praised for his previous book, “The Jakarta Method”, which discusses the US support for human rights abuses during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism.

The question at the core of Bevins’ second book, “If We Burn”, is a very straightforward one: “How is it possible that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?”[1] With the temporal focus set on the 2010s, but having a global geographical scope, Bevins conducted around 200 interviews in twelve different countries with activists, politicians, and other people with key insights on this decade of mass protests.

“If We Burn” discusses many different cases of protests during the last decade, but special attention is paid to Egypt, Hong Kong, Chile, and, above all, Brazil. This is no coincidence because, from 2010 to 2016, Bevins worked as a foreign correspondent based in São Paulo for the Los Angeles Times. The chapters on Brazil are a pleasure to read, but the strong focus on the country is somewhat disproportionate when considering that the book is presented as a work of global history. An alternative approach would have been to focus on a smaller number of cases, perhaps narrowing it down to a few Global South countries.

Bevins appears a bit uncomfortable when moving away from the countries he knows best. For instance, when he refers to the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, Bevins writes that after coming to power in 2003, Turkey’s ruling party AKP embraced “more conservative Muslims and small business owners (as long as they were ethnic Turks).”[2] This is actually not the case, as the AKP has historically outperformed the main opposition party CHP – which has a much stronger Turkish nationalist discourse – in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

Notwithstanding this inaccuracy, and the fact that the geographical scope of the book often works against the final result, there is much to be praised in “If We Burn.” A key success of the book is that Bevins strikes the perfect balance between critically examining what protests achieved in terms of tangible results and remaining deeply respectful of the protesters and their sacrifices. Tunisian President Kais Saied might have entrenched himself in power after 2021 and established a dictatorship similar to the one headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, brought down by mass demonstrations in 2011. But this does not take anything away from the personal stories of people like Jawaher Channa, a university student who joined the protests against Ben Ali in December 2010. Jawaher explains to Bevins how she was tortured for her political activity in a Tunisian police station before the regime collapsed.

Bevins’ reporting allows us to see how relatively unknown people shaped and were shaped by this decade of protests. Take the example of Mayara Vivian, who was a teenager when in 2005 she joined the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) that demanded free transportation in Brazil. In 2013, Fernando Haddad, the mayor of São Paulo from the center-left Workers’ Party, announced a rise in the price of public urban transportation. Mayara and her colleagues at MPL mobilized the streets against Haddad’s decision, forcing the mayor to cancel the price increase. Mayara and other members of the MPL were even granted a meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers’ Party, who was trying to understand the growing discontentment with her government.

Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Click here.

The likes of Mayara would soon be replaced in the streets by right and far-right-wing groups. These protesters, in conjunction with sympathetic judges like Sergio Moro and media conglomerates like Grupo Globo, pushed for Rousseff’s impeachment on flimsy charges. Rousseff was ousted in 2016. Two years later,  Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate, was defeated in the presidential election by far-right and Brazilian dictatorship apologist Jair Bolsonaro. Mayara, then living in Santiago de Chile, wept while lamenting the election loss of the man she had opposed in the streets, explains Bevins.

Mayara soon joined the protests against the conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who was forced to accept the election of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. After two referendums, Chile still does not have a new constitution. What is has, though, is Gabriel Boric as president, someone who became famous in the student protests of the early 2010s. Boric represents like no other the difficult relationship between activism and institutional politics, which is often manifested in the tensions between protesters who want to use their leverage to gain political concessions and those who prefer to keep pushing for maximalist objectives. A congressman since 2014, Boric was seen as a traitor by many protestors when he agreed to a constitutional referendum as a way to resolve the conflict with the Piñera government in 2019. After he was elected president of Chile in 2022, many of those who perceived Boric as too compromising in 2019 saw his decision in a more positive light, observes Bevins.

A key topic covered in “If We Burn” is the importance of traditional and social media in defining the protests of the last decade. Their relevance was accentuated by the fact that these were mostly de-centralized protest movements with no clear spokespersons. The protesters who had the opportunity to present their views to the traditional media were not necessarily those who put their bodies on the line when it mattered or were more representative of the whole movement. Instead, those who were interviewed were usually the more Western-media friendly. Writing about the protests in Egypt that led to the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Bevins graphically explains that despite how bravely street youth had fought against the police, Western journalists “were not likely to grab a teenager who lived on the street, addicted to drugs.”[3] Equally relevant was managing the narrative in social media platforms. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, open fights emerged over who controlled the movement’s social media accounts.

“If We Burn” does not provide any conclusive answer on why so many protest movements failed to achieve their objectives during the 2010s, and this only makes the book better. Anyone claiming to have a perfect explanation for such a complex puzzle should be approached with caution. Still, Bevins presents reflections that help us make sense of what he calls ‘the mass protest decade.’ One of them is that horizontally structured, leaderless mass protests are “fundamentally illegible.”[4] As Bevins sees it, “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”, with the ensuing danger that the protesters’ goals will be misrepresented. [5]

Strongly connected to this idea is the fact that successful protests will lead to a momentary political vacuum. Influenced by the experience of Brazil, where reactionary forces took the streets against Rousseff using some of the protest repertoire of the MPL movement advocating for free public transportation, Bevins notes that “unclaimed political power exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on anyone who might want it.”[6] Therefore, he argues, a protest movement that believes in creating a better society needs to be ready to enter the political vacuum that will emerge if successful.

In the absence of a plan, someone else will step in, most likely with a very different agenda but equally relying on the power of street mobilizations. The greatest merit of Bevins’ latest book is that it leaves a deep imprint on the reader and will serve as a prompt for many fruitful discussions. We cannot know which kind of retrospective articles will be published by the end of 2029. Still, it is reasonable to assume that protests in the 2020s are likely to play at least as important a role as they did in the previous decade.

[1] Vincent Bevins, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., pp. 108-109.

[3] Ibid., p. 68.

[4] Ibid., p. 276.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.

Russia’s disastrous military performance so far in the war in Ukraine has weakened its military reputation in the eyes of Beijing, but also sharpened China’s desire not to see Moscow humiliated or Russian leader Vladimir Putin driven from power; Beijing fears regime change in Russia would leave it isolated and potentially faced with a pro-Western regime along its northern border.

China’s attendance boosted the profile of the summit,  something which pleased the US, and in may help smooth still-strained personal ties between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) and US President Joe Biden. The US, India, Brazil, the EU also attended the talks, as well as a number of Global South states like Zambia, Indonesia and Egypt. Moscow was excluded however.

Is China breaking with Russia on this issue? 

On the surface China’s change of direction by attending the summit would appear to move it away from Russia, whose invasion it has so far refused to condemn. However, while China has close economic ties with Ukraine which it wishes to preserve, its position on the conflict still mirrors the ambivalent attitude of many Global South states like South Africa, who have chosen to take a neutral stance or even tilted towards Russia somewhat. Li Hui, the Chinese special representative who attended the event, previously served as China’s ambassador to Russia for a decade, for example. Many Chinese see the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a proxy war between Washington and its ally Moscow, one which the US is also using to encircle China, for example by strengthening NATO countries’ ties to American allies in Asia like South Korea and Japan.

China’s attendance at the Saudi summit served several strategic purposes from Beijing’s point of view. It allowed Beijing to join Riyadh in burnishing its credentials with Global South countries as a peacemaker and to leverage improved relations into stronger economic ties down the line which provide it with an alternative to reliance on trade with an increasingly anti-China US-led global bloc. It was a concession to Ukraine to attend but at an event which would produce no final outcome that would put pressure on Russia.

Attendance further allowed China to support a Saudi initiative at no diplomatic cost to itself, building on the momentum it gained from its sponsorship of the Saudi-Iran peace deal earlier this year. Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat and returning foreign minister, helped broker that agreement. China’s relationship with Saudi Arabia remains a shallow and transactional one,  but, given each regime has its problems with the current US-led global order, this is often sufficient motivation for the two sides to cooperate for now.

Saudi Diplomacy-washing

The Saudi-led conference was billed as an event for Ukraine to reach out to countries outside the Western zone of influence, given Riyadh’s neutrality (it maintains ties with Beijing, Kiev and Moscow). More quietly it was also intended to help re-invent MBS as a responsible global statesman, part of a concerted effort to turn a page on his past history of erratic and dangerous decision making. Past highlights have included allegedly kidnapping Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, invading neighboring Yemen and his probable involvement in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

For its part, Russia has also annoyed Riyadh by failing to implement OPEC+ production cuts in recent months, and MBS may not have been averse to causing Moscow symbolic discomfort on the global stage by publicly hosting a large international forum to which Russia was not invited.

Is China using Riyadh as a back channel to Washington? 

China and the US are slowly rebuilding bilateral meetings between senior officials this year after Beijing suspended or cut off multiple official contacts in protest last August at then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. Relations between the two countries remain poor but at present both sides are attempting to put a floor under their relationship, in China’s case motivated by the need to support its flagging economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Embed from Getty Images
BEIJING, CHINA – AUGUST 31: Saudi Arabia Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shake hands during a meeting at the Diaoyutai State guest house on August 31, 2016 in Beijing, China. The deputy prince is meeting Chinese officials during his visit to boost bilateral ties between the two nations. (Photo by Rolex – Pool/Getty Images). FILE.

Given this situation, Beijing does not need to use Riyadh as a back channel to Washington; however Saudi Arabia is likely leveraging its burgeoning relationship with China — of which the Ukraine summit is the latest instance — in its bilateral relations with the US and Beijing will not object to Saudi Arabia’s attempts to balance itself between the two superpowers. China may one day wish to supplant the US as Saudis’ main political and security partner in the Middle Eastern region, but at present it is not unhappy for the US to continue to act as the leading power there, given that this ties down American military assets and political capital which might otherwise be used against China in East Asia.

Oil and Wheat

Commodities form another factor in Chinese and Saudi diplomatic calculations. Despite tensions over Saudi oil production levels, Saudi Arabia is no longer as important to the US as an energy supplier as it was in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Chinese economy is also currently faltering, which is likely to reduce Chinese demand for Saudi energy supplies this year (though it is still a major oil customer).

Ideally, Saudi Arabia would like to keep relations with both superpowers stable enough that it can sell to them (given softer demand from both for its main export at present) while preserving its freedom of manoeuvre when it comes to oil production levels. Moreover, given its recent raft of diplomatic activity with China, Saudi Arabia will probably be happy to balance this with renewing ties to Washington. The two sides have tried to mend fences since the fallout from the murder of Jamal Khashoggi strained ties with the Biden White House several years ago.

Embed from Getty Images
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (4th R) attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (3rd L) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on February 22, 2019. (Photo by HOW HWEE YOUNG / POOL / AFP) (Photo credit should read HOW HWEE YOUNG/AFP via Getty Images). FILE.

While working with China allows Riyadh to show Washington it can find alternative partners if pushed too hard on issues like human rights, Saudi Arabia still wants US help on many issues which matter too it. Washington in turn is now seeking assurances Riyadh will not get too close to China, despite the fact it was happy to see Beijing attend the latest round of Ukraine-related peace talks in Jeddah.

For its part, China will be keen that the Saudi talks create a constructive atmosphere that helps it achieve its goal of resurrecting the collapsed Russia-Ukraine Black Sea grain deal. China was the top purchaser of Ukrainan agricultural goods through the initiative before Russia withdrew from it in July. China places a high political priority on food security but is reliant on imports due to a lack of food self-sufficiency. \

Large parts of the country’s farmland was flooded this summer in the aftermath of Typhoon Doksuri, damaging crop production and causing officials to warn of further risks to agricultural output from pests and disease once the flood waters recided. Its public support for a third round of talks after Jeddah may in part be calculated to help its relationship with Ukraine, to help win it over at a later date should Beijing be able to persuade Russia to allow grain shipments to resume in the Black Sea.

He was, however, also dogged by questions about Ukraine and Russia.

He replied, “There is no doubt that we condemn Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s rights with the invasion, but it is of no use to say who is right or wrong. The war must be stopped.”

Resumenlatinoamericano reports that he complained that the current international mechanisms for peacemaking are broken. He said, “We live in a world where the UN Security Council, the permanent members, all of them are the world’s biggest arms producers, they’re the world’s biggest arms sellers and they’re the world’s biggest war participants.”

He pointed to the invasion of Iraq by the US without a UN Security Council resolution as an example of lawlessness by members of the UNSC. MEMO quotes him as saying, “”When the United States invaded Iraq, there was no discussion in the Security Council. When France and England invaded Libya and when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was no discussion either.”

He added,

“Why aren’t Brazil, Spain, Japan, Germany, India, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa [permanent members]? Those who currently make decisions are the winners of the Second War, but the world has changed. We need to build a new international mechanism that does something different. I think it is time that we start to change things and it is time that we make a G20 of Peace, which should be the UN”.

Lula has spoken before about his notion of a G20 of Peace, countries with the weight in world affairs to mediate peace agreements but which had the respect of both sides in major conflicts. These would include Indonesia, India, China and some Latin American countries.

He complained that the UN is no longer intervening effectively to resolve longstanding disputes.

“The UN was so strong that, in 1948, it managed to create the State of Israel. In 2023, it fails to create a Palestinian state.”

Lula was presumably referring to the 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution proposing a partition of British Mandate Palestinian into a Jewish and a Palestinian state. This resolution did not actually create Israel, though it gave the idea international legitimacy and supporters of Israel have often cited it for that legitimacy.

In fact, the UNGA is a deliberative body and had no authority to partition Palestine, which the 1939 British White Paper had promised to the Palestinians for a state of their own.

Pro-Israel propagandists often say that the Jewish community in Palestine accepted the UN partition plan whereas “the Arabs” did not.

This allegation assumes that it was virtuous to accord the UN General Assembly an authority it did not have. It is also incorrect, since the Jews in British Mandate Palestine fought hard in 1948 to subvert the borders proposed by the UNGA, much expanding the territory claimed for the new state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, over half of whom were ethnically cleansed. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, noted in his diary in May 1948 when Israel came into existence that it had no fixed borders, just as the US had not. He clearly envisaged a big expansion. Ben Gurion later launched the 1956 war on Egypt in a bid to seize Egyptian lands for himself. So nothing in the historical record would make a dispassionate observer conclude that the Israelis accepted the UNGA partition plan, despite its vast generosity to them far beyond what their land ownership (6%) or population (1/3) would have warranted.

As for the Palestinians, they never got their state, in large part because Israel illegally seized Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and have squelched Palestinian aspirations ever since, while sending in hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters to steal Palestinian privately-held land and build Jewish-only housing on it.

Lula is correct, however, that the United Nations has not played the sort of role in midwifing a Palestinian state in 2023 that its founders would have wanted for it. That is because the United States systematically vetoes any UN Security Council resolution that would advance the cause of Palestinian statehood.

That obstreperousness was what Lula was complaining about. He was saying that the Security Council can’t make peace in the world because the five permanent members are themselves serial aggressors and they are not honest brokers in the major conflicts the world faces.

His point is a smart one, that the architecture of international peacemaking envisaged by the framers of the UN in San Francisco in 1945 has proven inadequate to the task or been subverted by the warmongering of the five permanent members. Whether his proposed fix has any life in it remains to be seen.

Police cleared the building later on Sunday. Rosa Weber, chief justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, vowed Sunday evening to “make an example” of the “terrorists.” The rioters were partisans of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who at first accepted the results of the election but then reneged and claimed the polls were fraudulent. He left the country for Miami, which makes me think maybe the FBI should look into him for whether he has given material aid to acts of terrorism.

The Bolsonaro regime that Lula defeated in last fall’s polls was indeed an engine for rapacious businesses and oligarchs to rip people off, and to degrade the environment in order to make a quick buck. For people hungry to go on with this sort of barracuda capitalism and the profits it generates for the few, at enormous social cost, Lula’s return to power had been very bad news. He threatened a lot of interests by revoking, earlier this month, a decree of his predecessor creating layers of secrecy around some government and business activities. So of course the shadowy business interests threatened with transparency bought some mobs to interfere with the transition. Likewise, Bolsonaro was putting valuable state enterprises on the block to be sold to the oligarchs, and Lula reversed those plans, threatening the bonanza that vested interests had otherwise anticipated.

Just as an example of the interests that were threatened, consider the exploitation of the Amazon. Lula had signalled as hard as he could that protecting the Amazon rain forest is one of his highest priorities. On his first day in office on the 1st of this month, Lula issued six decrees, some of them aimed at reversing destructive policies by his predecessor, Bolsonaro, toward the Amazon.

Lula cancelled Pró-Mape. The climate denialist and predatory capitalist Bolsonaro had initiated this program, which had been designed to encourage what he called “artisanal mining,” Gabriel explains that in practice, this plan functioned to promote illegal mining on indigenous lands and in nature reserves. As a result, wildcat mining increased exponentially in native Brazilian areas among tribes such as the Yanomami and creating what Gabriel characterized as a crisis.

Lula brought back the Amazon Fund, restructured the National Environment Council, and struck down a Bolsonara measure that that hobbled the combat against illegal mining in the Amazon basin. He made the announcements when he swore in his new cabinet, according to Joao Gabriel at the Folha de S. Paolo

The Amazon Fund is donated to by, e.g. Norway to help fight deforestation, but the Bolsonaro government had crippled the fund by declining to appoint a governing council, without which the funds could not be disbursed. Given this obstructionism, Norway stopped donating. Now, however, they are back.

Lula’s action unleashes $600 million already available in the fund, and sets up the prospect for it to receive another $1 billion. That is big money aimed at stopping the illegal clearing of land for cattle ranching, stopping the wildcat mines, stopping the displacement of Brazil’s First Nations, and stopping billions of dollars from flowing into the bank accounts of the oligarchs.

And this is just one of the areas where Lula is planning to make big changes. As with the American oligarchs who are funding the new Far Right and Trumpism, in order to understand this phenomenon you have to follow the money. Climate denialism is not about mindless anti-science attitudes. It is about some narrow section of the population being denied the opportunity to make boatloads of money by screwing the rest of us, and the planet, over.

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was greeted with applause and cheers when he addressed the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 16, 2022. As he had in his campaign, Lula pledged to stop rampant deforestation in the Amazon, which his predecessor, Jair Bolsanaro, had encouraged.

Forests play a critical role in slowing climate change by taking up carbon dioxide, and the Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of the CO2 absorbed by all the land on Earth. These articles from The Conversation’s archive examine stresses on the Amazon and the Indigenous groups who live there.

1. Massive losses

The Amazon rainforest is vast, covering some 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers). It extends over eight countries, with about 60% of it in Brazil. And the destruction occurring there is also enormous.

From 2010 to 2019, the Amazon lost 24,000 square miles (62,000 square kilometers) of forest – the equivalent of about 10.3 million U.S. football fields. Much of this land was turned into cattle ranches, farms and palm oil plantations.

“There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters – financial, environmental and social,” wrote Washington University in St. Louis data scientist Liberty Vittert, explaining why she and other judges chose Amazon deforestation as the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade.

Forest clearance in the region threatens people, wild species and freshwater supplies along with the climate. “The farmers, commercial interest groups and others looking for cheap land all have a clear vested interest in deforestation going ahead, but any possible short-term gain is clearly outweighed by long-term loss,” Vittert concluded.

2. Legalizing land grabs

Much of the Amazon has been under state control for decades. In the 1970s, Brazil’s military government started encouraging farmers and miners to move into the region to spur economic development, while also setting some zones aside for conservation. More recently, however, Brazil’s government has made it easier for wealthy interests to seize large swaths of land – including in conservation areas and Indigenous territories.

Reviewing national laws and land holdings, University of Florida geographers Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, Cynthia S. Simmons and Robert T. Walker found that Brazil’s National Congress was expanding the legal size of private holdings in the Amazon even before Bolsonaro was elected in 2019.

In southern Amazonas state, Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, rates of deforestation started to rise in 2012 because of loosened regulatory oversight. The number and size of clearings that the researchers identified using satellite data increased after Bolsonaro took office.

“Because of policy interventions and the greening of agricultural supply chains, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell after 2005, reaching a low point in 2012, when it began trending up again because of weakening environmental governance and reduced surveillance,” they observed. “In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is long-standing.”

The Guardian: “How the Amazon has started to heat the planet | It’s Complicated”

3. Indigenous resistance

Road building in the Amazon, which increased dramatically during Bolsonaro’s tenure, brings development and related threats like wildfires into wild areas. University of Richmond geographer David Salisbury also saw it as an existential threat to Indigenous communities.

Indigenous residents of the Brazilian-Peruvian borderlands where Salisbury worked “understand that the loggers and their tractors and chainsaws are the sharp point of a road allowing coca growers, land traffickers and others access to traditional Indigenous territories and resources,” Salisbury reported. “They also realize that their Indigenous communities may be all that stands in defense of the forest and stops invaders and road builders.”

Several Indigenous women won office as federal deputies in Brazil’s recent elections, and Lula has pledged to protect Indigenous people’s rights. Salisbury saw it as crucial to ensure that Indigenous defenders of the Amazon receive “the support and educational opportunities needed to be safe, prosperous and empowered to protect their rainforest home.”

4. Five global deforestation drivers: Beef, soy, palm oil, wood – and crime

A small handful of highly lucrative commodities are the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions around the world. In Brazil, much of the land is cleared for raising beef cattle or cultivating soy. In Indonesia and Malaysia, palm oil production is spurring large-scale rainforest destruction. Wood production, for pulp and paper products as well as fuel, is also a major driver in Asia and Africa.

“Making the supply chains for these four commodities more sustainable is an important strategy for reducing deforestation,” wrote Texas State University geographer Jennifer Devine. But Devine also found a fifth factor interwoven with these four industries: organized crime.

“Large, lucrative industries offer opportunities to move and launder money; as a result, in many parts of the world, deforestation is driven by the drug trade,” she reported. In the Amazon, for example, drug traffickers are illegally logging forests and hiding cocaine in timber shipments to Europe.

“Promoting sustainable production and consumption are critical to halting deforestation worldwide. But in my view, national and industry leaders also have to root organized crime and illicit markets out of these commodity chains,” Devine concluded.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archive.

Jennifer Weeks, Senior Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

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

In his speech, Lula recognized that the conference’s invitation to him to speak even before his inauguration was an “acknowledgment that the world is in a hurry to see Brazil participating again in discussions about the future of the planet and all the beings that inhabit it — the planet that always warns us that we need each other to survive — that alone we are vulnerable to the climate tragedy.”

Lula’s life has been one of fighting for the collective good, whereas Bolsonaro had been about individual greed and selfishness, and the devil take the hindmost.

The president-elect of the world’s ninth-largest economy by nominal GDP lamented, “We spend trillions of dollars on wars that only bring destruction and death, while 900 million people around the world have nothing to eat. We are living in a time of multiple crises – growing geopolitical tensions, the return of the risk of nuclear war, food and energy supply crisis, erosion of biodiversity, intolerable increase in inequality.”

He said that what was needed to reverse the acceleration of global heating was better “leadership,” in achieving the goals set in climate agreements already concluded. He pointed out that the world’s poorer nations need help from the wealthy ones in addressing climate change, and noted that the wealthy nations were primarily responsible for the planet’s surfeit of CO2, but the poorer nations are most vulnerable to the resulting climate disruptions.

Some environmentalists have urged the countries with advanced economies to simply pay Brazil to maintain and restore the Amazon rainforest for its carbon-absorbing role (20% of this capacity has been lost in the past 50 years). Now would be the time to follow through on such a plan, which Lula is signalling he would welcome.

Lula lauded the recent election in Brazil, won by the Left, on the grounds that it would “help contain the advance of the authoritarian and undemocratic extreme right and of climate denialism in the world.” He added, “And also because not only the peace and well-being of the Brazilian people, but also the survival of the Amazon and, therefore, of our planet all depended on the results of the election in Brazil.”

Lula correctly links authoritarianism and the far Right to climate denialism, and ties his social democratic Workers Party to democracy, social peace, and climate activism. This entwining of environmentalism with the traditional Leftist emphasis on workers’ well-being marks an interesting ideological development that other social democratic thinkers should attend to. After all, workers’ lives cannot improve if their living conditions are degraded by mega-storms, floods, sea-level rise and drought.

Lula pointed to his own past record of achievement on the Amazon issue, saying, “Brazil has already shown the world the way to defeat deforestation and global warming. Between 2004 and 2012, we reduced the devastation rate of the Amazon by 83%, while the agricultural GDP grew 75%.”

I wrote at the end of 2020 about what happened after Lula left the presidency:

“The Amazon rainforest continues to burn down, another effect of global heating caused by humans driving gasoline cars and burning coal and gas for heating and electricity. The far right Bolsonaro government is also actively encouraging the clearing of the forest for agriculture and cattle ranching. The BBC reported deforestation surging to a 12-year high. A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020. Brazilian scientists have discovered that some non-rainforest forests (deciduous etc.) in Minas Gerais state have become net emitters of carbon dioxide instead of being carbon sinks. This ultimately could happen to the Amazon rainforest. This development would be an enormous catastrophe for each of us. The Amazon rainforest absorbs 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That is five percent of all annual CO2 emissions around the world.”

Lula also slammed the recent years of Bolsonaro’s right-wing dominance of Brazilian politics: “Unfortunately, since 2019, Brazil has faced a government that was disastrous in every way – regarding the fight against unemployment and inequality, regarding the fight against poverty and hunger — and in its disregard for a pandemic that killed 700,000 Brazilians, in its disrespect for human rights, in its foreign policy that isolated the country from the rest of the world, and also in its devastation of the environment.”

He pledged that his Brazil would cooperate with the developing countries, in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, with investments and technology transfer.

He pledged to reunite Brazil itself, the world’s 7th largest country by population, after what he characterized as profound polarization provoked by “fake news and hate speech.”

He also, however, wanted to reform global governance, seeking a seat on the UN Security Council and an end to the Great-Power veto on that body.

Lula is aware of the extreme importance of the Amazon rain forest as a carbon sink for the whole world. He observed, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon. We will not spare any effort to achieve zero deforestation and degradation of our ecosystems (biomas) by 2030, in the same way that more than 130 countries committed themselves by signing the Glasgow Declaration of Leaders on Forests.”

He continued, “For this reason, I want to take advantage of this Conference to announce that the fight against climate change will have the highest profile in my government. Let us prioritize the fight against deforestation in all our biomes. In the first three years of the current government, deforestation in the Amazon increased by 73%. In 2021 alone, 13,000 square kilometers were deforested. This devastation will be in the past. Environmental crimes, which grew in a frightening way during the government that is coming to an end, will now be fought without a truce.”

Lula’s pledges should be music to the world’s ears. But note that Bolsonaro’s political allies are powerful in the parliament still, and the new president could be blocked in some of his hoped-for initiatives. If the advanced economies want the benefit of the Amazon rain forest in the fight against the climate emergency, they need to support Lula’s new government with substantial monetary grants and investments.

The reason I say that da Silva’s victory is a win for the planet is that the fate of the Amazon rain forest hangs in the balance. Bolsonaro, was determined to destroy it by turning it into big agricultural estates, mines and other endeavors of barracuda capitalism. The Amazon and other rain forests are major carbon sinks, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But rain forests can be flipped by deforestation and wildfires, so that they end up emitting far more carbon than they absorb. With its extent reduced by 20% in the past 50 years, the Amazon is teetering on that precipice, and some environmentalists fear it may have fallen off the edge already. Certainly, a few more years of Bolsonaro’s depredations would spell doom for the rain forest and would exacerbate the climate crisis.

The issue is wrought up not only with planetary ecology but with a vicious class and ethnic struggle inside Brazil. The people who live with the Amazon and make use of its resources without destroying them are largely indigenous Brazilians. There are about a million of them, comprising 305 tribes.

Survival International explains, “The government has recognized 690 territories for its indigenous population, covering about 13% of Brazil’s land mass. Nearly all of this reserved land (98.5%) lies in the Amazon.”

Bolsonaro, a notorious racist, lamented that land had been reserved for “Indios,” as they are called in Portuguese. He saw the latter as uncivilized barbarians who had unfairly blocked the mining of tin, gold and other minerals in the river basin and who stood in the way of the expansion of the estates of militant Brazilian ranchers. He promised, “In 2019 we’re going to rip up Raposa Serra do Sol [Indigenous Territory in Roraima, northern Brazil]. We’re going to give all the ranchers guns.”

Bolsonaro’s racism combined with his capitalist rapaciousness and his desire for political backing from ranchers and mining concerns to make exploiting the Amazon a top priority. Just in the first two months of this year, space photography showed that 166 square miles of the rain forest was cleared. In the previous decade the average amount of land cleared in any two-month period was less than half that. Bolsonaro’s policies were accelerating the clearing.

In contrast, Lula wrote an op-ed for the French newspaper Le Monde this weekend in which he said, “Today, the urgency of climate, mounting inequalities and geopolitical tensions reveal the gravity of the crisis that affects our planet. Unfortunately, Jair Bolsonaro continues to aggravate this situation in embracing climate change denialism and attacking the institutions of our democracy, and in promoting intolerance. These characteristics of his government have made Brazil a new pariah on the international scene. This cannot go on.”

Reuters Brazil reports in Portuguese that Celso Amorim, the principal foreign policy advisor to Lula, told the wire service, “If elected, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should propose the holding of a summit of nations of the Amazon rainforest in the first half of 2023, to which developed countries interested in its conservation would also be invited.”

Reuters concluded from Amorim’s remarks that the “global repositioning of Brazil on the issue of the environment and the climate crisis will be a priority of the foreign affairs agenda in a possible new Lula government, in a context in which deforestation of the Amazon is at the highest level in 15 years.”

Since the Amazon is a regional, hemispheric and global issue, the international community needs to support Lula’s efforts. There needs to be substantial reforestation and attention to repairing its health and to protecting it from the wild fires (also caused by global heating) that have piled on human clearing efforts to reduce its extent.

Universities in western Canada began another school year under the cloud of two imminent threats: wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. These are not just local issues, but global issues, not only because they are happening all over the world, but also because some of their root causes — including ecological destruction and dispossession of marginalized, especially Indigenous, peoples — are not concerned with borders.

We know many wildfires aren’t just a result of drier conditions and rising temperatures from climate change, but also the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands and disregard for traditions that support ecological integrity, such as prescribed burns. And deforestation, which displaces human and other-than-human communities alike, makes pandemics like COVID-19 more likely.

Many universities have committed to addressing global challenges. But society-wide, our universities are ill-prepared to help deepen our collective capacity to face today’s interconnected “wicked problems” — those that are hyper-complex and cannot be solved with simple individualistic solutions. These problems include biodiversity loss and our global mental health crisis.

Deeper changes needed

As scholars of Indigenous studies, global education and food systems, we often get asked what kind of education and research are needed to address such wicked problems. This question usually comes from a well-meaning place; it’s also often motivated by a desire for ready-made alternatives.

But complex problems cannot be addressed with simplistic solutions. This is not due to educators’ or researchers’ lack of effort or ingenuity. Rather, our inability to address these problems with the depth of engagement required is a product of the educational models we have inherited and (mostly) reproduce.

We cannot solve wicked problems from within the same paradigms that created them. For example, many universities have embraced the UN Sustainable Development Goals for addressing climate change and sustainability. However, the goals have also been critiqued for presuming that we can continue to operate within an economic system premised on infinite growth.

Undoubtedly, proposals to shift away from dominant educational models and viewpoints prompts a follow-up question: If not this, then what?

Learning from mistakes

Our own research has led us to approach this question with caution. We have learned that if we jump too quickly to solutions, we rarely take adequate time to assess the mistakes that caused the problems. When this happens, we end up reproducing those mistakes and reproducing harm.

We first need to identify and learn from mistakes before we can move toward truly different educational futures.

This is a key insight from our community research collaborations with the Teia das 5 Curas network of Indigenous communities in Brazil. These communities offer a different diagnosis of the root causes of our current environmental and social crises, and propose different responses than those generally offered in mainstream academic debates. Yet Indigenous Peoples’ analyses remain under-addressed in research and practical approaches to wicked problems.

Indifference as denial of interdependence

The communities that make up the Teia das 5 Curas network suggest that the primary cause of both ecological destruction and colonial violence is an individualistic and extractive mode of existence rooted in a false assumption of separation — of humans from each other, and of humans from nature.

They argue that this denial of ourselves as interdependent beings, part of a living planetary metabolism, feeds indifference to the suffering of others that we also create. They also believe that what contributes to this problem is our intellectual and emotional incapacity to confront our complicity in a harmful, unsustainable system.

Indifference to violence against both Indigenous Peoples and the Earth is evident in events currently unfolding in Brazil, where the government has launched a co-ordinated attack against Indigenous rights and ecological protections.

Perceiving root causes

Despite centuries of genocidal efforts by governments around the world, many Indigenous communities have preserved their alternative social and educational systems. They have also preserved 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity, despite being only four per cent of the world’s population.

Increasingly, non-Indigenous researchers recognize the wealth of knowledge and practices held by Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, non-Indigenous scholars and policy-makers often selectively engage Indigenous knowledges and practices in order to bolster existing systems, or they romanticize Indigenous communities in unrealistic and unsustainable ways.

The challenge that stands before us is to unlearn colonial modes of engagement, so that we might learn how to ethically weave together the gifts of different traditions of human wisdom. Our collective survival depends on it.

The invitation

Indigenous communities, especially those in the Amazon, are putting their lives on the line to protect everyone’s future. The Huni Kui people of Acre are part of the Teia das 5 Curas network. As part of their Last Warning campaign against deforestation and the attack on their rights, the Huni Kui caution, “if we lose the forest, we lose our future.” This is true for all of us: further deforestation of the Amazon will accelerate global climate change.

Although the Last Warning campaign has many suggestions about how people can support this fight for our collective survival, its primary offering is an educational invitation and accompanying call to responsibility. This is an invitation for us to wake up from the fantasy of separation and to un-numb to the pain we inflict on one another and the planet in order to sustain modern consumerist lifestyles.

We are asked to expand our capacities to hold space for difficult, painful and uncomfortable things. These include the truth about our complicity in systemic violence and unsustainability, and how our socially sanctioned behaviours and desires contribute to the unfolding ecocide and genocide in Brazil and elsewhere.

Last Warning does not tell us how to shift away from our current paradigm and make space for a wiser one to emerge; it does not claim to have the answers. Instead, it offers a new educational compass — a way of orienting ourselves away from reproducing harm and toward fostering more generative possibilities for co-existence, without glossing over the difficult elements of this work.

Reorienting ourselves

This is a compass oriented by maturity (the imperative to grow up in order to become good elders and ancestors); discernment (how we can most generatively intervene in any context to foster collective well-being) and responsibility.

Responsibility here is understood as an affirmation of our interdependence, including the debts we have to specific communities and to the Earth. It also involves facing humanity in all of its complexities and paradoxes: the good, the bad, the broken and the messed up within and around us.

For those seeking simple, universal solutions to wicked problems, this educational compass is unlikely to offer much guidance.

But for those seeing the raging wildfires and shape-shifting COVID-19 pandemic as indications of a deeper systemic illness in our institutions and ourselves, this work may offer some guidance for the divesting from harmful systems so we might learn to co-exist differently.

Dallas Hunt, Assistant professor of Indigenous Literatures, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia; Cash Ahenakew, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples’ Well-Being and an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia; Sharon Stein, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, University of British Columbia; Vanessa Andreotti, Professor, Department of Educational Studies and Canada Research chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, University of British Columbia, and Will Valley, Associate Professor of Teaching, Sustainable Food Systems, University of British Columbia

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

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Amazonwatch: “Life as an Indigenous Earth defender”