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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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An amNY article, reporting on a new immersive exhibition in New York that recreates the 7 October 2023 attack on the Israeli music festival.

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An amNY article, reporting on a new immersive exhibition in New York that recreates the 7 October 2023 attack on the Israeli music festival.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does the Nova Music Festival Exhibition explore, and how does it do this? What can immersive experiences like this provide us with that other forms of presenting information fail to do? What do you think the exhibition organizer, Scooter Braun, means when he refers to the exhibition inviting us to ‘responsibly explore’ what happened? If you were designing an exhibition for Palestinians affected by the conflict, what artifacts would you include within it? To wrap up: How can art help to bring about rehabilitation after traumatic events?

KEY TERMS Remembrance, Empower, Responsibly explore, Rehabilitation

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Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images for The Nova Music Festival Exhibition

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A new exhibition in NYC will honor and remember the lives lost at the Nova Music Festival after the terror group, Hamas, brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 .

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition: October 7th 06:29am -The Moment Music Stood Still is now open and will run through May 23, 2024, in Manhattan's Financial District. It aims to be an in-depth remembrance of the terror attack that cut short a peaceful music festival in Israel, killing people of different ages and backgrounds.

Organized in part by American music exec, Scooter Braun, along with Nova Music Festival founders and other supporters, the exhibit is presented as a way to "empower visitors to responsibly explore the events of October 7 and its aftermath," according to its website.

Many people gathered to celebrate life and music at the festival in Re'im, Israel, on Saturday, Oct. 7, before it was brought to an end by Hamas terrorists, who invaded the country. The attacks resulted in 1,200 people killed, among them 370 festival-goers, as well as over 240 taken hostage, some of whom were subsequently released.

Personal items left behind during the attack

Artifacts from the tragic day will be on exhibit. Within a solemn space, visitors will see remnants salvaged from the festival grounds, including scorched cars, bullet-riddled bathroom stalls and personal belongings that were left behind.

Survivors of the attack will also be in attendance to share their first-hand testimonies as witnesses and victims.

Premiering in Tel Aviv for a span of 10 weeks, the Nova Music Festival Exhibition drew thousands who gave their respects to those who were killed in the attacks.

Braun, known for managing high-profile artists including Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande, worked with festival founders and other partners to bring the exhibit to the Big Apple. He called music a "safe space" and October 7 a day "tragically etched" into history.

"Bringing the Nova Music Festival to New York City honors those who were taken from us too soon, while reminding us of the progress we still need to make to bring the hostages home," Braun said. "The festival's message of peace for all sides will live on, despite the continued conflict abroad, as there are still innocent civilians being held hostage under horrific conditions in Gaza. We must not forget them, and we must bring back and reunite the innocent music lovers with their families."

Ofri Amir is one of the founders of the music festival. He worked with Reut Feingold, creator, director and writer of the exhibit, as well as others, to put it all together.

"I understood as part of our core values that we have to take care of our community and help lead in the rehabilitation of the Nova survivors, to commemorate the members of the tribe, and to make my voice heard to the whole world," Amir said.

What you need to know about visiting the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in NYC:

Where is the exhibit located?

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition in NYC is located at 35 Wall St., in Manhattan's Financial District .

What are the hours of operation?

The exhibit will run for four weeks, through May 23, 2024, and is open Sunday to Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Thursday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

How much are tickets?

Tickets are $1 with the option to add a donation.

How long does it take to explore the exhibit?

Organizers recommend visitors allocate at least an hour to walk through the exhibit.

For more information about the exhibit or to get tickets, visit the website.

Read more: Mets City Connect Uniforms: Tease Purple Debut | April 19

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Honoring Oct. 7 Victims: Nova Music Festival Exhibit in NYC

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Join us at the Nova Music Festival exhibit in NYC, honoring the memories of those lost on Oct. 7 due to Hamas, showcasing the power of music and remembrance.

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A BBC Future article, looking at how we become desensitized to awful events in the news, and how to avoid this happening. 

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A BBC Future article, looking at how we become desensitized to awful events in the news, and how to avoid this happening. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is ‘habituation’, and why does the article argue it can be harmful to us as we try to make sense of world events? What different forms can habituation take? How could political leaders take advantage of habituation? To wrap up: What are our personal responsibilities when it comes to resisting the normalization of violence and conflict?

KEY TERMS Habituation, Lead the news, Novelty, Zoom out, Longer term, Slow violence vs. slow resistance

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When people talk about "normalising" something in 2024, it's often with a positive slant. On social media and off, I've seen calls to normalise everything from postpartum bodies to having mental health conversations at work. The idea, of course, is to break down taboos that can be unhelpful, even dangerous.

But there's another kind of normalisation, and it's one that many people are far less aware of. It is less conscious, more pernicious - and can be harmful. This is the normalisation of trends, situations and events that really shouldn't be "normal" at all. You also might hear it referred to as "desensitisation", or "habituation".

Think of the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. The shocking events at the start of these conflicts were new and unexpected, elements which psychologists know draws the mind's attention. As time has passed, media coverage still happens, but these events are now less likely to lead the news in countries like the US, nor arise quite as often in the cultural conversation. Sadly, when a war has lasted months or years, research suggests that an extra week of fighting does not have the impact it did on day one.

How not to be manipulated

In today's onslaught of overwhelming information (and misinformation), it can be difficult to know who to trust. In this column, Amanda Ruggeri explores smart, thoughtful ways to navigate the noise. Drawing on insights from psychology, social science and media literacy, it offers practical advice, new ideas and evidence-based solutions for how to be a wiser, more discerning critical thinker.

This desensitisation also applies day-to-day life. Inner-city youth who grow up with violence are more likely to wind up thinking violence is normal, for example, while people expressed more anxiety about Covid-19 when the death toll was low than when it climbed into the hundreds of thousands. One particularly intriguing study, meanwhile, shows that people living in countries that are more exposed to the negative impacts of climate change actually see climate change as being lower-risk.

Other research shows that you can even become habituated to your own negative behaviour: when volunteers lied repeatedly in order to get more money, their lies became bigger and bigger over the course of the experiment - and the parts of their brain associated with emotions activated less and less. The takeaway, the researchers concluded, was that the more we do something, even something we know is wrong, the less uncomfortable with it we become.

Be exposed to anything enough, in other words, and that thing winds up being normalised. Even if it's bad.

Slow changes can happen without our awareness (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images)

Of course, this has upsides: to some degree, humans need to be able to adapt to new circumstances and situations, no matter how dire. Our species likely wouldn't have got very far - or, at least, wouldn't have had the emotional capacity to problem-solve, imagine, and create - if we'd walked around in a perpetual state of shock and anxiety.

But there are clear pitfalls. For one, this adaptability may be part of why humans have difficulty grappling with what sociologists call "slow violence" - those catastrophes that unfold without seeming urgency, making it difficult to recognise how much harm has been done until months or even years later. Think of the decades-long dumping of chemical waste that created Mississippi's "cancer alley", or the rise in global emissions.

It can also perpetuate a vicious cycle. The study on inner-city violence found that participants were more likely to perpetrate violence if they thought it was normal, for example. But this applies to larger, more complex issues, too. If someone doesn't think climate change is a big deal, why would they be motivated to do anything about it? If their awareness of humanitarian disasters is fading, will they still be as likely to share their concerns with representatives or donate to relevant charities?
How normalisation happens
When it comes to media consumption, this raises two questions: how can publishers cover a topic without desensitising their audience to it? And - as a smart, informed media consumer - how can you navigate the news to make sure you're not running that same risk?

Researchers have been exploring how being exposed to the same news issue over and over affects consumers. One study, for example, found that news consumers were more likely to become annoyed by coverage, and even to avoid it, when they felt like it was repetitive.

It's not just that viewers crave novelty, the researchers write. It's also that people get especially annoyed when they perceive that nothing's changing or improving. "Some users are particularly negative about the lack of progress and long, drawn-out coverage of the issue, which is in part traceable to the political actors involved", the researchers write.

Bad news on our screens can start to fade into the background eventually (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images)

This point is concerning. There are various subjects where ignoring them upholds the status quo and the powers-that-be. Think of how much less likely businesses and governments might be to take action on climate change, for example, if no one ever talked about it. Cynically, this could mean that the more leaders make minimal progress on an issue, the more bored with hearing about it people become. Theoretically, this could lead to that issue being covered less and less - and any pressure for progress on it falling apart, too.

Then there's the other issue, especially common when viewing news reports of other people suffering: if we feel too distressed by what we see, it can lead us to feel burnt out and want to shut out the coverage altogether.
How to avoid becoming desensitised
So what can we do? How can you stay on top of the news, without getting overwhelmed or desensitised? How can we navigate the many issues facing the world today, striking a balance between refusing to accept them as "normal" but also managing to carry on, ourselves?

When it comes to news consumption, researchers suggest consuming news more mindfully, such as at more specific times, when feeling overwhelmed by a particular crisis. Given the importance of novelty, I'd also suggest that, to stay well-informed, ensure your media diet is diverse. Even if it is a particular topic or crisis that you want to know more about, expand beyond the same outlet or even type of media. If you're following the Gaza-Israel war, don't just doom-scroll breaking news headlines; seek out foreign policy analyses and first-person essays, watch documentaries, listen to audio books, read poetry. And, crucially, consume perspectives from both sides of the war.

It's also important to remind yourself to zoom out. We'll be exploring this more in future columns, but for now, remember that a different angle on the present is to think longer-term. Perhaps that's looking backwards, trying to understand how we got here by swapping out some of your daily news coverage for, say, history books or documentaries. Or it might mean looking forwards - what might this mean for tomorrow? - and seeking out analyses that think about what our current decisions might mean for one, 100, and even 1,000 years from now.

We can become normalised to both humanitarian disasters faraway and events closer to home (Credit: Javier HIrschfeld/Getty Images)

What about our tendency to adapt to circumstances that affect us most directly, even those we shouldn't just accept as "normal"?

The first step is recognising that such habituation is happening at all. Take a moment to reflect: what things are you growing accustomed to, either in your household, your community, or your country, that, really, you wish you weren't?

Only then can you plan some actions. Some researchers suggest meeting "slow violence" with "slow resistance", or with "slow nonviolence", including incremental, everyday acts as simple as sharing knowledge about a topic.

The researchers behind the lying-to-get-more-money habituation study also suggest finding emotional distance from circumstances in order to view it with fresh eyes. If something you don't like about your own country is starting to feel "normal" to you, for example, you might talk to someone who lives in a different country, read about how the issue is handled elsewhere or (for those with the means) even travel abroad.

I'd also argue that, if there's an issue that is important to you, don't assume you'll feel as emotionally committed to it in a month, or a year, as you do now. Instead, turn taking action into a habit. Put in your calendar that you'll regularly spend five minutes writing to your political representatives, for example. Or set up a monthly, recurring donation to a charity that represents a cause you care about, instead of donating piecemeal when the motivation strikes. (Bonus: research has found that taking action on something distressing makes "burnout" on that topic less likely).

Perhaps above all, I'd keep one truth in mind: from the global slave trade to South Africa's apartheid, there are plenty of horrible situations that - for decades, even centuries - felt entrenched, impossible to change and that, at some point or another, would have been the "new normal".

But they did change. And circumstances we don't want to be part of our children's futures, or our own, can too.
*Amanda Ruggeri is an award-winning science and features journalist. She posts about expertise, media literacy and more on Instagram at @mandyruggeri.
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How the abnormal gets normalised - and what to do about it

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As we browse the news, it's easy to become desensitised to awful events. Amanda Ruggeri explores the psychology, and the steps you can take to avoid it happening.

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A Politico article, looking at the dangers of water conflict in the EU.

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A Politico article, looking at the dangers of water conflict in the EU.

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Brussels warns of water conflict danger in EU

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A document obtained by POLITICO shows the European Union will urge capitals to accelerate their preparations for a warming world.

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What don’t the news headlines tell us about the war in Ukraine? What insights can we gain by looking at the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers? How does Charlotte Higgins challenge the idea that art is “less immediate and instructive” than the news? Students can also check out this poem published in Sapiens, in which poet-anthropologist Josh Yarden attempts to bridge social and geopolitical divides via the arts. To wrap up: “Human “reality” does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations.” (Deborah Levy) Do you agree that to fully understand reality, we need to consult artistic as well as news sources?

KEY TERMS Homes and hearts, Behind the lines, Immediate and instructive, Witness to experience

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Russia's war against Ukraine has never been only about territory and artillery, about politicians and putative peace deals. Of course, that is the easiest and most acceptable register in which to consider unthinkable violence: as a geopolitical problem happening at a far distance. But Russia's aggression is an event of shocking magnitude in every individual life in Ukraine, and in lives elsewhere, too. The war is not only happening on the frontline but in homes and hearts. Deaths are mourned. Lives that were once straightforward have been propelled into directions that were never sought or wanted. Ambitions have been abandoned and plans have been cast aside. The war has crept like a mist into every chink of domestic life, into the tender, tremulous matters of love and sex, into the school day where cheerful young Ukrainian kids, alongside maths and English, get lessons on never, ever touching something that might be a mine.

"What we don't see in the news headlines is conversations around the kitchen table - families discussing, for example, how much fuel they would need if they suddenly had to flee to Warsaw," said Uilleam Blacker, associate professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London, at an event last week. To come close to the feeling and texture of war as it is lived behind the lines - and behind front doors - it is necessary to turn to the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers. Blacker was in conversation with Natalya Vorozhbit, one of Ukraine's most significant playwrights, and Molly Flynn, the editor of a new anthology of Ukrainian plays in English translation, which were all written in the wake of the Maidan protests a decade ago. Since then, Ukraine has seen an efflorescence of documentary theatre, often rapid and reactive, and centred on ordinary lives - work that has formed a kind of artistic parallel to Ukraine's vigorous civil society.

This writing has been grounded in realism, but not always in expected ways. Vorozhbit's play Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha, written in 2014, deals with a family coping with the death, in the war in the Donbas, of Sasha, a father and husband. The play starts after his death; his presence is initially a portrait on the wall. Then he begins to speak: a ghost, if you like. British author Deborah Levy once described how human "reality" does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, which are also real events in our lives. Through our daydreams and reveries, we can time travel, talk to, and be addressed by, the dead. Such things are not the material of sober reports or news bulletins, but they are as meaningful, and they are the territory of art.

A scene from 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov/AP

In Kyiv last autumn, I met a group of playwrights who were debating how to write in the thick of the full-scale war. In the immediate wake of 24 February 2022, it had felt difficult, and perhaps unimportant, to write at all, they told me: the focus was on how to survive. In the months that followed, though, there was an outpouring of documentary theatre, closely based on real accounts of stories of escape and survival. And last year, they told me, they detected a fresh turn in Ukrainian theatre. Some playwrights were using comedy in their work, some fantasy, some even forms of sci-fi. Playwright Oksana Grytsenko told me she was writing a play about Ukraine's toppled statues of writer Alexander Pushkin coming alive to join the Russian military. When life is turned on its head, surreality and metaphor might provide the only accurate way to express a situation. Similarly, poetry is flourishing in Ukraine: it is the medium capable of expressing how violence explodes meaning; how it cuts into and unravels the plot coherence of individuals' lives.

You might think that reading a poem about the war, or looking at a painting or watching a film, might somehow be a secondary experience, less immediate and instructive than, say, watching the news. I suspect the opposite is true: in the hands of a good artist, you can be plunged into the life of another human, all distance eradicated, all boundaries collapsed. This can be extraordinarily painful, as in the Bafta-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, whose director, Mstyslav Chernov, thrusts the viewer right inside the besieged city. Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk wrote a poem recently, which Blacker translated last week. It begins by considering a scene of recent horror and death. "Watching from afar, you can always stop in time, / not get too close, where the eye sees too much". Literature, she writes, can edge us towards a position where we can absorb what might otherwise be unendurable details: "The child's shoe, which flew into the air from the child's foot, / when they were mixed with the shards of glass and concrete, the women's broken fingernail emerging from the rubble, / the unblurred remains of the body". A poem can offer a way of seeing an unblurred reality, in its bright and painful glare, Kruk suggests: the boundaries of artistic form contain it, and make it - just - bearable to see.

I think a lot about the tender paintings by Lucy Ivanova I saw last month in an exhibition at the Jam Factory, a newly opened arts centre in Lviv. Using the simple means at her disposal - small canvases, sketchbooks - she painted the most intimate scenes: her husband Yehor scrolling through the news, or sitting on the edge of the bed; the two of them naked, she heavily pregnant, in the kitchen of a temporary apartment; later, her son Sava at five days old. These works of art are also a witness to experience and the foundations of cultural memory. This, too, is the war.

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Art shows the surreal reality of wartime Ukraine in a way the news never could | Charlotte Higgins

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Reading a poem about the war may seem less instructive than watching the latest bulletins. I suspect the opposite is true, says Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer

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A Conversation article, looking at why descendants of Holocaust victims are increasingly replicating Auschwitz tattoos. 

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A Conversation article, looking at why descendants of Holocaust victims are increasingly replicating Auschwitz tattoos. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the history of tattooing at Auschwitz? Why are many descendants of Holocaust victims choosing to tattoo the numbers their families were forcibly tattooed with at Auschwitz? How significant is it that the last of the ‘numbered people’ will soon no longer be with us? To wrap up: How can ‘embodied memorialization’ help to breach the silence that can affect us as a result of a traumatic past?

KEY TERMS Spark conversation, Identity, Legacy, Roots, Embodied memorialization, Independent meaning, Keeping the memory alive, Dehumanizing, Living memory, Language of the body

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Rony Cohen doesn't remember any particular moment when she first became aware of the number tattooed on her grandmother's arm. It was just always there.

Cohen says she felt as if she had experienced the Holocaust herself, in a different cycle of her own life. It featured in her dreams. It permeated family life, as did the self-imposed interdiction on talking about the past and the absence of relatives. The legacy of starvation was never far from the surface. Food was used to soothe. There was no waste. Her grandfather finished every crumb from every plate.

The impact the Holocaust has had through the generations runs deep. Quite how we remember the past and its legacy varies hugely. Cohen is one of a small but growing number of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who have replicated the Auschwitz death camp tattoo on their own body.

Read more: Why some descendants of Holocaust survivors choose to replicate a loved one's Auschwitz tattoo - podcast

Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the only camp where numbers were tattooed on those inmates not selected for immediate death. In replacing the person's name, this number has become the visual symbol of the crimes of the Nazis.

Cohen draws meaning from her tattoo in that it signifies her grandmother's history and her own identity as a descendant of Holocaust survivors. To her mind, replicating this number was a means of taking her grandmother, as a person, and her legacy forward. As a gesture and an indelible mark she carries with her, she says:

The number is my grandma. It's my past, my roots, my story. It's who I am.

A potent gesture

My research delves into the stories of those descendants who, like Cohen, have chosen to replicate a parent or a grandparent's tattoo on their own body. Of the 16 people I have spoken with, 13 are from Israel and three from the US.

As the number of remaining survivors of the Nazi concentration camps grows ever smaller and the Holocaust passes out of living memory, replicating an Auschwitz tattoo becomes an ever more potent gesture about embodied memorialisation and, crucially, familial ties and love.

The people I have spoken with have relayed complex and varied decision-making processes behind this potent gesture. Some waited until their survivor parent or grandparent had died. Some got the tattoo without seeking approval. Others discussed doing so with their relative, beforehand.

The replica tattoos they have each opted for vary in terms of font, colour and placement. Some have chosen to replicate exactly what the original looked like and where it was placed. Others have chosen to alter the designs in detail and colour, or to place it on a different part of their body. Each decision crafts the meaning of the new tattoo.

In the summer of 2022, I met with Orly Weintraub Gilad on Zoom. She had chosen to have her maternal grandfather Samuel Kestenbaum's number tattooed on her arm, but it was also for her maternal grandmother, Agi Kestenbaum. She had been in Auschwitz too, but was not tattooed because she was not expected to live.

Like Cohen, Weintraub Gilad doesn't remember a specific time when she first noticed her grandfather's number, but the stories about the Holocaust were a part of her life from childhood. She says her mother, who died eight years before we spoke, used to talk a lot about the Holocaust. "She knew everything," Weintraub Gilad says.

All four of her grandparents had survived the Holocaust. Her paternal grandparents died when she was in her late teens and even now, she says, her father doesn't talk about what they experienced. She says that when she asks her father questions, he doesn't know the answers.

Weintraub Gilad remains very close to her grandmother, who is 95 years old. The tattoo gives her the chance to continue what her mother used to do and talk about the Holocaust. "It starts the conversation and that's the purpose," she says, "that's the thing that my grandmother is so happy about. She knows that after she's gone, that I will talk."

The tattoo itself features her grandfather's number in a nest of leafy green vines. From different vines emerge letters, the initials of the names of Weintraub Gilad's husband and her children. But the resulting composition is as much about her family's history as it is about their collective future.

The choice of green vines and leaves came from her love of nature. Her grandfather's number was on his left arm, but Weintraub Gilad placed her own tattoo on her right arm. She says she wanted "to do it the same but different". One reason for choosing the right arm was because she did not want to see the number "on the side of the heart".

That same summer, I spoke with Yair Ron (Reisz), also on Zoom. He grew up in Israel, on a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors. "It was a very small community of people with same idea of communism," he recalls. "All of them were Holocaust survivors, so all of them have numbers."

Growing up, no one on the kibbutz had grandparents or spoke about their suffering. Ron's father, Jakub Reisz - whom everyone knew as Yakshi - said nothing about the Holocaust and, like many children of Holocaust survivors, Ron and his sister knew not to ask. Yakshi would talk about helping people escape from Slovakia to Hungary - but he never said a word about what he had experienced.

It was impossible to have a conversation about the Holocaust with my father. We were afraid to ask and afraid to hear. Maybe we didn't want to hear. And he told us that he don't want to tell, so we couldn't exchange any information about the Holocaust whatsoever.

Ron first noticed his father's number as a child. Just as it was normal not to talk about things - about families, generations, loss - it was also normal to him and his peers that adults had numbers on their bodies. Until he started venturing out into the local town as a teenager, he didn't really meet people from outside of the kibbutz - adults, that is, who didn't have numbers.

It seemed very natural to us that adults had numbers so we didn't pay very much attention to this. We didn't know other adults or people without numbers. The kibbutz was far away in the mountain, it was very isolated.

It was only after Yakshi's death that Ron started to piece together his story. Coming across a letter and diary that a friend of his father's had written, Ron discovered that both men had been deported from Slovakia to Auschwitz. They had then been taken to Nazi-run work camps, from where they were eventually liberated.

After their release, they started their journey back to Slovakia, via Prague. To pass through the British military area without being detained, identification was required. Neither man had any, so they tattooed what looked like Auschwitz numbers on their left arms. Ron shared what he had learned with his family. They were very proud of Yakshi, he says, praising his "creativity and thinking out of the box".

Ron first thought about getting Yakshi's number tattooed on his own body when he was around 50 years old, at the turn of the millennium. He discussed it with his father who, like most Holocaust survivors, was strongly opposed to the idea at first.

He says his relationship with his father was not an easy one. There were barriers between them. Ron ascribed these, in part, to Yakshi's experiences of the Holocaust and the trauma he lived with. But it was more complex than that.

Kibbutzim in the 1950s and 1960s, like the one Ron grew up on, were often organised around collective-socialist principles. Until the 1980s, children were raised separately from their parents and slept in a communal children's house. Research has shown variable attachment responses among those who grew up in this way - although it found little variation in attachment to fathers, compared with those who grew up in family homes.

Ron wonders, however, whether the fact that he and Yakshi did not enjoy a "normal" relationship is in some part due to growing up this way. Although he saw his father as a good man, the distance between them meant they could not speak about, as he puts it, "real feelings and thoughts".

Having the number on his own body, Ron says, allowed him to reflect on what it is to live "like a numbered person". As survivors die out, he dwells on the thought that soon there will be no numbered people. This, to his mind, makes the number an important thing to keep - a tool for keeping the memory alive.

Tattooing in Auschwitz

Serial number tattoos with symbols, shapes or letters were first introduced for prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in October 1941. More than 400,000 people would be tattooed there. The exceptions were ethnic Germans, Austrians, police prisoners and Polish prisoners deported from Warsaw during the 1944 uprising - plus Jewish prisoners held for a short time while waiting to be moved to other camps.

Prior to tattoos, identification numbers had been sewn on to the prison uniforms. Soviet prisoners of war were the first group to be tattooed after larger numbers started to die and the other prisoners took the deceased's clothing, making it impossible to keep accurate records.

Initially, the tattoos were placed on the left side of each prisoner's chest. Those who did the tattooing used a metal stamp with changeable plates fitted with needles that formed numbers, then rubbed blue ink into the bleeding holes. This technique enabled guards and prisoners to tattoo the number on a prisoner's body in a single action.

By the spring of 1942, all incoming Jewish prisoners selected for forced labour, rather than immediate death, were tattooed. In place of the metal plate, the tattooists now used a single needle to puncture the number into the prisoner's skin by hand, then rubbed in the ink.

The numbers were tattooed on the prisoners' left forearms. Shapes and letters were sometimes also used to differentiate between groups of prisoners. Some Jewish prisoners had a triangle tattooed under their number. Roma and Sinti prisoners had the letter Z appended to their number, the first letter of the (pejorative) German word Zigeuner, used at the time for these communities.

With Hungarian Jews arriving in increasing numbers, new sequences of digits were introduced in May 1944. These began with the number 1 and were prefaced first by the letter A; then, when more were needed, B.

In her 2001 autobiographical book, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, German studies scholar and Holocaust survivor Ruth Klüger describes the experience of getting forcibly tattooed in Auschwitz:

[After selection], we got our ID numbers tattooed on our left arms. A few female prisoners had been installed outside the building at a table with the necessary equipment and we stood in line, waiting our turn. The women knew their job, they were very fast. At first it looked as if the black ink would easily wash off, and indeed, water took most of it away, but then the fine points of the number remained: A-3537.

Klüger speaks about "the victims' skin" saving the Nazis from having to "produce dog tags". This underlines how dehumanising this Nazi practice of tattooing numbers on inmates was. As the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi puts it in his 1986 book, The Drowned and the Saved:

Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible mark, you will never leave here; this is the mark with which slaves are branded and cattle sent to slaughter, and that is what you have become. You no longer have a name; this is your new name.

An embodied public memorial

The Auschwitz number has marked out those who survived by making them ever recognisable to others. It is this recognition that mattered so much to Rony Cohen in getting her own tattoo:

I was proud to take my grandmother with me. To take her childhood, her missing her parents - those moments are in this number. Whenever someone sees it, they know this is Auschwitz. I want it to be noticed and understandable. No one should doubt what it is.

Cohen's grandmother and great uncle were of the cohort of siblings that have become known as "Mengele twins". The Nazi physician Josef Mengele had an interest in racial genetics. He first experimented on Roma and Sinti twins in what was known as the "Gypsy camp" in Auschwitz-Birkenau - then on Jewish prisoners who he picked from the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto in Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

From May 1944, subjects for Mengele's experiments were also picked from the unloading ramps at Auschwitz. Cohen recalled the story her grandmother had told her, about how she arrived in Auschwitz with her twin brother, aged eight, and her mother and aunts and all the other children of the family:

They saw the smoke from the crematorium. The family was walking and someone was saying: 'Twins, twins, twins - where's twins?'

Instead of hiding them, her mother said to her aunts, "Let's give them the twins". Her aunts thought she was crazy for suggesting that - but her mother thought she was saving her children. "I'm going to save your life now," she told her children. "Give mummy a hug and you're leaving now." This was the last moment Cohen's grandmother could remember being with her mother.

Having made it through selection and been forcibly tattooed, twins were sometimes given additional food which helped keep them alive. First-hand accounts describe how Mengele gave his victims chocolate before carrying out the most horrific experiments. He sewed twins' veins together, injected chemicals into testicles and spines, and inserted large needles into skulls.

This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

In the 1994 book, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, a chapter by historian Helena Kubica recounts the testimony of one man, Moshe Ofer, who was imprisoned with his twin brother. His testimony was collected by the Jerusalem tribunal that tried Mengele in absentia in 1985. Mengele killed Ofer's brother with his experiments.

Ofer describes how, after the experiments, the physician would bring gifts. The horror of that had never left him. "Even today," he says, "I can see him entering through the door and I am paralysed with fear."

Cohen's grandmother similarly recalled Mengele bringing food for the twins. It saved them physically, she said, but the psychological damage was immeasurable. As Cohen puts it:

My grandmother, since the Holocaust, she has a sleeping disorder. In her dreams, her parents come and all the horror comes. She always tells me: 'I can't forgive myself that I remember Mengele's face but I can't remember my parents' faces.'

Her brother - Cohen's great uncle - had his tattoo removed after saving enough money. Her grandmother, by contrast, still bears it on her left arm.

As a child, Cohen would ask questions. Sometimes her grandmother would make out that it was nothing. Sometimes she'd say she would tell her when she was older. Cohen describes herself as stubborn - she just kept asking.

When she was 12 or 13, for a school project on roots, she decided to do a video on her family's history. Cohen interviewed both her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather she describes as "tough", with "all the characteristics of a typical survivor". He was keen that Cohen pass on all the information to her mother because, he said, "Your mum never asked."

Cohen shared everything with her mother and her uncle - and it finally removed the elephant from the room. It made talking about the Holocaust possible.

At 17, like so many Israelis, Cohen went on a high-school visit to Poland, to the camps and the ghettos. Before leaving on this trip, she went to see her grandfather. He told her that going to Auschwitz would change everything:

When you stand there in those walls and you smell the death smell and you see the gas chamber, you will come back to Israel and you will tell me: 'I can't understand.'

"I can't understand," Cohen now says. "My grandfather was so right."

How Holocaust memorialisation has changed

The Auschwitz number tattoo was not always revered. After the second world war, survivors were often stigmatised. Public commemorations celebrated resistance and uprisings. The victims and survivors, by contrast, were portrayed as weak.

That early stigmatisation would follow some survivors throughout their lives, even when public perception started to shift. Some, like Cohen's great uncle, had their number removed. Others covered it up with long sleeves.

From the early 1960s, as French historian Annette Wieviorka shows in The Era of The Witness (2006), attitudes began to change - partly due to the testimonies heard during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961-62. The author Hannah Arendt reported from the district court in Jerusalem for the New Yorker magazine, thereby giving survivor voices a global platform. The trauma that emerged from Eichmann's trial reframed survival in itself as something heroic.

Then, in 1967, Israel responded to threats from Egypt and other neighbouring states with an offensive that allowed it to expand into and occupy the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Further afield, the conflict - known as the six-day war - built an affinity between Jewish communities in the US and Israel. Many American Jews began to both embrace their European roots and support Zionism.

Wieviorka's book highlights the third (and ongoing) phase of Holocaust memorialisation - what she terms the "era of the witness", which emerged in the 1970s. People started collating survivor testimonies, photographs and documentation. Through visits to Poland, to the camps and ghettos, families began to tell their stories.

For some, the visit to Poland triggered the idea of replicating the Auschwitz number on their own body. In the summer of 2022, I spoke with Zeev Forkosh. Now aged 38, he has multiple tattoos - but the idea for his first one came after going to Auschwitz.

The new information Forkosh learned during that trip, about what his grandmother had experienced there, sparked such powerful emotions that he decided to get a Holocaust memorial tattoo. He describes the large Star of David he wears on his back as entwined with "bones, flesh and a lot of clothes, like the Holocaust survivors".

Next, Forkosh decided to replicate his grandmother's number on his arm, explaining:

I will never forget this trip, so it's on my back now. But after a few years, I wanted to be more specific about my grandmother. I told the tattoo artist that this was for [her]. I'm a third generation of a Holocaust survivor. I think it's the most beautiful tattoo ever.

Talking of this number in terms of beauty underscores how reproducing the tattoo gives it new meaning. It is a gesture that, for Forkosh, turns the visual symbol of a genocide into a symbol of love and legacy, of commemoration and pride.

This marks a radical shift from survivors' own relationships with the number. They had no choice in the matter: the tattoo was forcibly placed on their bodies. For some whose descendants suggested replicating it, the answer has always been a categorical "no". Yair Ron discussed the idea with his father:

I tried to talk to him about the idea that I had to get the tattoo. He did not agree. 'Why?' he asked. 'You don't need to, it's not good. Let's forget everything.'

Ron kept trying: "It took a few years for us to talk about it. And then he agreed for me to do it."

He gave the tattoo artist a photo of his father's number. He wanted to replicate it as closely as possible. He wanted people to ask about it, to keep the Holocaust in living memory.

In Ron's mind, this replicated number represents continuity. It ensures there are still people "walking with the number". He says he wanted to experience what his father had experienced when his name was taken away.

Similarly, Rony Cohen says that deciding to replicate her grandmother's tattoo was so "she could walk with me for good - it's a statement for me". Cohen too wanted it in the same place as the original, so that everyone understood its meaning. She sees her body as becoming a conduit for her grandmother - a means to keep her legacy and life with her at all times.

In contrast to Ron, though, Cohen did not broach the subject with her grandmother. She just went ahead and got the tattoo, then wore long sleeves at family gatherings - much like some survivors had in previous decades. But for her, covering the tattoo wasn't because of stigma. Rather, she worried about the reactions it might trigger.

Eventually, Cohen decided to show the number to her grandmother. She videoed her response.

At first, her grandmother asks why Cohen has done it. Then she asks if it hurt. "I don't want you to do something that hurts," she says.

"No it didn't," Cohen replies.

To which her grandmother asks: "Why?"

Cohen is very clear that getting her tattoo was a personal act, a decision relating to her own history, not to a larger historical one. "I'm not a monument," she says. "I don't carry the Jewish nation on my back."

When the Holocaust passes out of living memory

Museums and memorials all over the world are dedicated to telling the story of the Holocaust. Since 2006, International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been marked every year on January 27.

But despite the proliferation of Holocaust-related art and culture, despite the books laying out the facts, research shows many people are ignorant of what happened. In 2021, the global Holocaust Awareness Survey found large gaps in people's knowledge.

In the UK, 52% of respondents could not specify that six million Jewish people had been murdered - a number which rose to 56% in Austria and 57% in France. Of the adults surveyed in the US and Canada, 45% and 49%, respectively, were unable to name a concentration camp or a ghetto. Among millennials in the US, only 49% could name a concentration camp or ghetto.

This matters because, as we reach the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 1945, there are very few survivors left to give a first-hand account of what was done to them. The Holocaust is passing out of living memory.

For those whose family history is tied up with the Holocaust, memorialising it is both public and private. The tattoo replicating the Auschwitz number is a form of memorial practice that speaks, viscerally, to their own family history - but also to the imperative to never forget.

I spoke with David Rubin in the summer of 2022. He bears his grandmother's number on his arm, the number depicted as if written on a piece of wood alongside a Star of David, a thorny vine of lilac-coloured flowers entwined around it.

Four of the flowers are open, representing his grandmother, Piroska "Perl" Levy, and her surviving sisters. To the left lie two closed flowers, for her two sisters who were killed. A lone flower completes the floral framing at the bottom, in memory of her brother, also killed.

To Rubin's mind, his generation is probably the last to speak about this. Getting the tattoo was a means of ensuring that the fourth generation - his children, his grandmother's great-grandchildren - will know what happened. "I wanted a story, instead of just a number," he says. The barbed wire has become the thorny vine in flower. "It's taking the bad thing and [re]creating it as a good thing."

Memorial tattoos are a way of expressing a life story. They are an external scar that embodies an internal one. The writer Eva Hoffman notes that even where there are silences in how families, including her own, reckon with their traumatic past, the "language of the body" still breaches those silences. It keeps the unspoken past ever present.

While descendants of Holocaust survivors did not experience the trauma directly, the intergenerational trauma is long-lasting. Rony Cohen was not the only grandchild of a survivor who told me they dream or have nightmares about the Holocaust.

In doing these interviews, I have found that replicating the Auschwitz tattoo is an expression of the love felt towards the survivor relative, and a way of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. It is an act of reclaiming a painful family history. And for some, it is about connections to a collective identity.

In this way, it is about the future too. When there are no more survivors to share their stories, these descendants who bear on their living bodies the numbers once forcibly tattooed on their relatives will stand as a living reminder of where racism and hatred can lead.
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Descendants of Holocaust survivors explain why they are replicating Auschwitz tattoos on their own bodies

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As the Holocaust passes out of living memory, such embodied memorialisation ensures people will still talk about what happened.

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A Vice interview, with the social media manager of Auschwitz, on visitor selfies, dealing with trauma, and learning from history.

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A Vice interview, with the social media manager of Auschwitz, on visitor selfies, dealing with trauma, and learning from history.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What general comments does Paweł Sawicki make about the people who visit Auschwitz, and the images they create? How important is social media in the work that Paweł Sawicki does, and what does this indicate about its role in helping us understand the past? What are his thoughts on moderation? How does he and the Auschwitz memorial seek to re-humanise the victims of the Holocaust? To wrap up: What are the challenges of using social media to understand and commemorate traumatic events from the past, and what are our personal responsibilities in overcoming them?

KEY TERMS Responsible, Visual expression of our time, Disrespectful, Moderation, Re-humanise

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Paweł Sawicki, 42, has spent the last 16 years working at one of the most depressing places on earth: This article originally appeared on VICE Germany. Auschwitz, the largest of Germany's concentration and extermination camps during WW2. Located in what was then occupied Poland, more than 1.1 million people died in this camp between 1940 and 1945.

Sawicki, who used to be a journalist, is responsible for the memorial and museum's social media accounts - he also gives guided tours and conducts interviews with survivors. We asked him what he thinks of people who take selfies at the site, why the memorial avoids TikTok and how he deals with Holocaust deniers.

There are about 5,000 new online comments every day, and I read every single one of them. Only a small few are from neo-Nazis or antisemites. In the last 24 hours, I've reported and blocked two Holocaust deniers. On a normal day, I'll block between five and 20 accounts. These aren't only Nazis, but often bots asking for money or if you want to get to know them. Above all, I always notice how positive the comments usually are. People often just comment with emojis, like hearts. These are small gestures, but they show that people are still deeply moved by the fate of the people in Auschwitz. Sometimes, visitors simply don't have enough awareness of the history of this place. Some smoke and throw their cigarettes on the floor. But when I tell them not to smoke they stop. A few years ago, some visitors posted photos of themselves balancing on the train tracks. We publicly asked them not to take such photos because it's disrespectful. Some teenagers who visit the memorial can't or don't want to show that the experience touches them, so they pretend it doesn't affect them, because classmates might otherwise interpret their grief as weakness. There are so many things to consider before jumping to conclusions, and I want to avoid that at all costs.

On the other hand, there are also visitors who take professional photos with expensive cameras and then write an inappropriate caption. When I see those posts, I report them. There are more than 500,000 photos on Instagram under the hashtag #Auschwitz. Most of them are very respectful and show that visitors have really engaged with the place. I generally think it's good when photos of Auschwitz are shared and I often use these for lectures. What was your most successful post?
For the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I had planned to break the 750,000 follower mark on X [formerly known as Twitter]. We called for people to follow the Auschwitz memorial account and famous actors such as Has your work changed since Elon Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, bought X?
Compared to the other platforms on which we are active, X has the highest number of problematic users. This is where I have the most work to do. Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, shared our account. An incredible number of people joined and we ended up with over a million followers. Again, it was great to see how people can create something so beautiful together.

Since Elon Musk, I have to fight more against antisemitic comments or those that deny the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is forbidden according to X's guidelines and I always report such comments, but usually nothing happens. I have also publicly criticised X for this poor moderation. I don't think it's right that this social platform allows people to spread hate speech - because that is exactly what Holocaust denial is, it has nothing to do with facts. In such moments, however, our followers also help us and report these accounts. Why aren't you on TikTok?
Studies show that TikTok polarises its users. The algorithm is programmed so that it's more likely than other apps to display radical content again if you've previously been interested in such content. The Auschwitz memorial is not a topic that should drive people to extremes. How much does your work drag you down emotionally?
Sometimes, very much. Every day, I see photos of people who were murdered. I look at the faces of children and babies. I'm a father of two sons and I can't understand how anyone could do anything to such defenceless beings. In September, I wrote a post congratulating survivor Sam Weinreich on his 104th birthday. Just three days later, I had to inform our followers in a new post that he'd passed. So I'm frequently confronted with death on many levels. But I am also honoured to be responsible for keeping the memory of these people alive. In fact, every two hours, I post a photo on X of a victim of Auschwitz who would have had a birthday that day. People who worked in Auschwitz sat in their offices all day and went home to their families in the evening. They petted their dogs, taught their children to swim and greeted their neighbours. The challenge is to realise that even normal people can be capable of terrible actions when they are part of such an ideology. It was part of the Nazi ideology to dehumanise Jews; that is why they were able to commit such crimes. We need to understand this so that something similar doesn't happen again in the future. The Auschwitz Memorial is here to re-humanise the victims of the Holocaust and keep their stories alive.

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I'm the Social Media Manager at the Auschwitz Memorial

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"If someone posts a selfie with a thoughtful and respectful caption, I think that's OK. Selfies are a visual expression of our time."

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A Guardian article, looking at how water is being used as a weapon of war - and why that means cooperation is more important than ever.

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A Guardian article, looking at how water is being used as a weapon of war - and why that means cooperation is more important than ever.

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As water becomes a weapon of war, we must focus on cooperation and peace | Peter Gleick

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Record increase in water-related violence shows how urgently we need to reduce these tensions between countries

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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What research did Brad Bushman carry out, what were his results, and how convincing do you find his evidence? What does the work of Yasmin Aldamen reveal about the role language plays in desensitization? How can social media affect (in both a negative and positive way) compassion fatigue? Overall, to what extent is it our responsibility to resist compassion fatigue in order to properly understand and interact with what’s going on in the world? How best can this be done?

Key terms Compassion fatigue, Overexposure, Empathy, Unstable emotion, Desensitize, Humanistic perspective

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February 23, 2023

Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

Many people have become desensitized to images of the suffering in Ukraine

It's easy to turn away from another news article or social media post about war and violence. After all, we're constantly bombarded with images of traumatic events when we're online.

The phenomenon, known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.

"I felt this after the invasion of Ukraine," said Jessica Roberts, an assistant professor of communication studies at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon. "When I first heard about the atrocities it was horrifying, but then I heard about another town and my reaction was less extreme."

Compassion fatigue does not have to be permanent. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2003 essay "Regarding the Pain of Others": "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."

So just how can we translate compassion into action? Here we take a look at how compassion can both fatigue and be rebuilt.

Compassion fatigue and violence numbness

Brad Bushman, a media researcher at Ohio State University in the US, has conducted experiments illustrating how violence in digital media formats like video games and films can desensitize people's responses to suffering or violence in real life.

In one study, Bushman and his colleagues had 320 students play either a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. After playing, participants were instructed to answer a questionnaire, but during this time they heard a fight break out in the hallway outside.

"In reality this was a recording of professional actors having a fight. We also had a research assistant outside the room kick a trash can and start groaning," Bushman told DW.

They then measured how long it took participants to help the groaning assistant. On average, it took people who played the nonviolent game 16 seconds, whereas those who played the violent game took 73 seconds.

What's more, said Bushman, those who played the violent video game reported the fight to be less serious than those who played the nonviolent game.

It would be too simple to conclude here that violent video games cause violence, but in Bushman's experiments, they did appear to temporarily change people's responses to violence in the real world.

"The consequence of seeing violent images is that you become numb to it and you think violence is no big deal. The real-world consequences are that you're less likely to help someone who's a victim of violence," said Bushman.

Compassion fatigue is a form of emotional protection

According to Bushman, the underlying psychological mechanism behind compassion fatigue is desensitization.

"Really, it's a kind of emotional or attentional filtering that protects us from suffering becoming too stressful or traumatic to cope with," said Bushman.

It's also possible to detect desensitization to violent images in people's physiological responses to stress.

"If you measure peoples cardiovascular arousal responses or startle brain waves (using electroencephalography), you see that people's physiological shock responses to violent images are dampened in those people who've just been playing a violent video game," said Bushman.

But, he argued, desensitization to violence and trauma can be an important adaptive strategy for people whose work involves frequent exposure to traumatic events, like soldiers, aid workers and doctors.

The problem arises when this desensitization is detected in the "ordinary" population.

"This adaptation is one of the mechanisms that actually drives further aggression and violence in society," said Bushman, referring to research showing how conflict in Israel and Palestine escalates violence in children.

Compassion fatigue toward refugees

Yasmin Aldamen, at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, emphasized the dangers of how compassion fatigue can lead to greater violence and hate speech in society. Aldamen's research focuses on the impact compassion fatigue and negative media representations have on Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan.

"We found that framing negative images and messages of refugees in the media opens the door for audiences to lose empathy for them or even have hatred for refugees," Aldamen told DW.

Sadly, this is not new or surprising. Violence toward refugees and migrants has existed as long as humans have fled conflict and been transplanted. But what is new is how quickly media and social media can drive compassion fatigue and subsequent hate speech and racism.

It's something we see time and time again, after refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with the crisis in Ukraine and with refugees fleeing conflict and climate change in North Africa.

"There's evidence showing that people give less aid money after a disaster over time. It's already happening with the earthquake in Turkey and Syria," said Roberts of Universidade Catolica Portuguesa.

Compassion fatigue is temporary and can be reversed

Compassion fatigue can be reversed, according to Roberts and Aldamen. They say you can rebuild your capacity for compassion over time.

"We can use social media to create empathy and compassion between people. In our research, we looked at Humans of New York, where a guy focused on the positive and relatable stories of people's lives, instead of their trauma. It helped to create great empathy, " Roberts told DW.

Aldamen has a similar mission. She is calling for media outlets and people on social media to change the way they represent refugees and other vulnerable populations.

"My study recommends reporting of the Syrian refugee crisis (and other crises) from a more humanistic perspective. Media outlets need to display some of the more positive stories from the refugee crisis to ensure that people do not suffer compassion fatigue to exposure to tragic stories," Aldamen told DW.

She also said it's important for news articles to involve calls to action on individuals or policymakers so readers can help those in need rather than observing a crisis they feel cannot be solved.

Here's how to donate to earthquake aid efforts in Turkey and Syria.
Edited by: Clare Roth Correction, February 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yasmin Aldamen. DW apologizes for the error.

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One year of Ukraine war: Why we get compassion fatigue - DW - 02/23/2023

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Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

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A Guardian article, looking at how a property in Sweden with a Cold War-era nuclear bunker is generating a lot of interest amongst house-buyers.

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A Guardian article, looking at how a property in Sweden with a Cold War-era nuclear bunker is generating a lot of interest amongst house-buyers.

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Above ground, the former school building - now a private home - fits with the typical scene of southern Sweden. Surrounded by farmland and red wooden houses common in this part of the country, it has a flagpole outside and looks like a large, but not especially extraordinary, house.

But below one of the outbuildings - which looks like a guest suite - of this 16m-krona (£1.2m) sprawling property in Ljungby, Småland, an unexpected world unfolds.

An (initially) unassuming stairway, labelled "mancave", reveals a 1.25-metre thick concrete roof, chunky orange metal doors and an operating airlock, behind which lies a fully functioning cold war bunker.

The 490 sq metre space across two floors comes complete with its own kitchen, bar, bedrooms, hygiene areas, power plant and carbon filter ventilation and is designed to withstand a direct hit from a 500kg aerial bomb.

Completed in 1970 as a civil defence command post - amid a wave of bunker and shelter building across Sweden to protect from feared nuclear attack by the Soviet Union - it has been privately owned since it was sold off by the local municipality in 2002 and is now run as a private event space.

But since going on sale last week, it has attracted interest from across Sweden and Europe, including from those who, two years into the war in Ukraine, are looking to acquire their own private wartime bunker in case of escalation across Europe.

A door to the bunker. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian

"This is a whole unique possibility," said the estate agent Micael Steneland as he showed the Guardian around the property, which boasts a "bunker and spa facility".

"There are very few who have thought of this before. They have probably thought and Googled 'private shelters' and then suddenly this one comes up - they don't even have to build it."

Earlier this week the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Nato countries risked provoking nuclear war if they sent troops to Ukraine. Emmanuel Macron had raised the possibility, which was quickly rejected by several western countries, including the UK, Germany and Sweden.

But despite this, Swedish preparations for war reaching Scandinavia are well under way.

Sweden started building shelters during the second world war, but most were constructed during the cold war. In 2002, with the cold war threat long gone, it stopped, thinking they would no longer be needed, and its network of 64,000 public shelters to accommodate 7 million people became largely obsolete (although they still theoretically remain functional).

But in the last two years, since the invasion of Ukraine and Sweden's subsequent Nato membership - expected to be completed within days - growing fears of a Russian attack on Swedish soil have prompted a surge of interest in such shelters.

Sweden's civil contingencies agency ( Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap, or MSB), whose responsibilities include civil defence and protection, has been increasing inspections of its shelters, which are supposed to be usable with just 48 hours' notice. They received 100m kronor (£7.7m) this year from the government, which has been taking a heightened interest in the subject and in January warned its population to prepare for the possibility of war, to go towards checks and preparation.

The bunker has its own bar. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian

Estate agents say they have seen increased interest in properties with bunkers and shelters built into rocks and underground in recent months. Meanwhile, companies have sprung up marketing private nuclear attack-proof shelters and personalised at-home shelter construction for the rich.

The cold war bunker in Ljungby, a two-hour drive from Gothenburg and Malmö, could accommodate 44 people with water, electricity, heat and clean air for two to three months, said owner Kenneth Clausen, 64. While not himself a "prepper" - part of a global movement of people preparing for apocalyptic crisis - the entrepreneur had slept overnight in the bunker, which he decorated in an eclectic array of styles, and was fascinated by its history. He flicked through a diary from the bunker's construction, a process that took just under a year, which showed handwritten notes from the first day of construction on 2 December 1969.

Most of Sweden's network of shelters, indicated with an orange and black triangle sign and mapped online, are under residential buildings, schools and sports halls and often double up as bike sheds or storage areas. But there are also larger-capacity shelters in big cities, such as Katarinaberget in Stockholm, also a car park, which can accommodate 16,000 people in an emergency.

The nearby Pionen, a cold war bunker used by the internet service provider Bahnhof, claims to be able to survive a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. In the event of war, it would be used to protect and operate critical private and public IT services.

Anders Johannesson, the MSB's unit manager for shelters, said awareness of civil protection in the event of attack had risen markedly in Sweden, particularly among owners of buildings with civic shelters. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine its website crashed and he had to hire more staff to deal with inquiries.

"What the shelters were planned for were the second world war and then came cold war and nuclear," he said. "Now when we see what Russia can do in Ukraine and what they threaten, it's time for our defence and civil defence to prepare so that if the worst happened we would be able to survive."

Sleeping quarters in the bunker. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian

While he acknowledged growing interest in private shelters, they were expensive and not safety tested by the MSB, he said.

Lars Hansson, who runs Bunkertours, a publisher and travel operator, said the government's warnings over war preparedness had been an "eye-opener" for many in Sweden, but he was not convinced that the shelter network was ready to be put into use with the appropriate personnel within 48 hours.

"There's no one who is prepared like they were 40 years ago," he said. Also, with an increased population - now 10.6 million - and new shelters not having been built, he was doubtful of capacity.

The psychologist Per Carlbring, a professor at Stockholm University, said Sweden's increased interest in war shelters was in many ways surprising, seeing as the county had no recent direct history of war or conflict. But, he added: "Seeking safety in shelters reflects a deep-seated desire for control and security in an unpredictable world."

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Swedish home with cold war bunker attracts buyers as Russia fears grow

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Underground building complete with bar and own power plant makes waves on property market amid Putin's threats

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A BBC article, looking at the very different version of the Ukrainian invasion being broadcast on Russian state TV. 

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A BBC article, looking at the very different version of the Ukrainian invasion being broadcast on Russian state TV. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The historian EH Carr once said, ‘Study the historian before you study the facts’. If we apply this to Russian state TV - and look at the source of the information, before we even consider what they are saying - what insights do we gain? How does power corrupt our ability to tell the truth? Is ‘independent reporting’ always more reliable? How important is it to have an objective understanding of historical context in order to understand contemporary events? Can the truth exist in societies where the media is subject to oppression and fear?

Key terms Fake, Manipulations, Emotive language, True information, Independent reporting

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So what are Russian TV viewers seeing of the war? What messages are they hearing over the airwaves? Below is a snapshot of what ordinary Russians would have picked up, on Tuesday 1 March, while channel-hopping across the country's key TV stations, which are controlled by the Kremlin and its corporate allies.

On Tuesday the normal running order is interrupted at 05:30 Moscow time [02:30 GMT]. The presenters announce that TV schedules have been changed "due to well known events", and there will be more news and current affairs. The news bulletin suggests that reports about Ukrainian forces destroying Russian military hardware are false, designed to "mislead inexperienced viewers".

"Footage continues to be circulated on the internet which cannot be described as anything but fake," the presenter explains as the viewer is shown photographs of what is described as "unsophisticated virtual manipulations".

There is no mention of reports of the ominous miles-long military convoy snaking its way from Belarus in the north to Ukraine's capital Kyiv, which, in the UK, leads the BBC Radio 4 news bulletin half-an-hour later.

"We start with the latest news from Donbas. LNR [Luhansk People's Republic] fighters continue their offensive, having travelled 3km, while DNR [Donetsk People's Republic] units have travelled 16km," the NTV presenter says.

The presenter is referring to the Moscow-backed rebels who have been in control of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics since Russia's intervention in east Ukraine eight years ago.

On Rossiya 1 and Channel One - Russia's two most popular channels, both state-controlled - Ukrainian forces are accused of war crimes in the Donbas region. The threat to civilians in Ukraine comes not from Russian forces, but from "Ukrainian nationalists", says the Rossiya 1 presenter.

"They use civilians as a human shield, deliberately positioning strike systems in residential areas and stepping up the shelling of cities in Donbas."

Channel One's presenter announces that Ukrainian troops "are preparing to shell residential houses" and bomb warehouses with ammonia, in "acts of provocation against civilians and Russian forces".

Events in Ukraine are not referred to as war. Instead, the offensive is described as a demilitarisation operation targeting military infrastructure or a "special [military] operation to defend the people's republics".

Across state-controlled TV, presenters and correspondents use emotive language and images to draw "historical parallels" between Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine and the Soviet Union's fight against Nazi Germany.

"They behave like fascists, in the very sense of this word: neo-Nazis put their hardware not just next to residential houses but where children take shelter in basements," adds the correspondent in a video report captioned "Ukrainian fascism".

Blaming Ukraine

The passage echoes the unproven claims made by Vladimir Putin last week that Ukraine was using women, children and the elderly as human shields.

While media in the West has been asking whether Putin's assault has struggled to make quick progress, Russian TV portrays the Russian operations as very successful. Regular updates give numbers of destroyed Ukrainian hardware and weaponry. More than 1,100 Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities have been disabled and hundreds of pieces of hardware have been destroyed, morning news reports say. There is no mention of any Russian casualties.

Russian morning news bulletins barely acknowledge its army's offensives in other parts of Ukraine. State TV correspondents are not reporting on the ground from places like Kyiv and Kharkiv, the two major cities that have seen shelling of people's homes. Instead, they are embedded with troops in Donbas.

But by the afternoon edition of the news, NTV finally mentions the news event that has dominated hours of coverage on the BBC by this stage - the shelling of the city of Kharkiv.

However, it debunks any reports that Russian forces are responsible, calling them "fake".

"To strike Kharkiv and say that it was Russia. Ukraine is hitting its own and is lying to the West. But is it possible to deceive the people?" it asks.

During a 17:00 bulletin, the Rossiya 1 presenter outlines what she says is Russia's "main objective" in Ukraine: "The defence of Russia against the threat from the West, which is using the Ukrainian people in its stand-off with Moscow."

To counter what is described as "fake news and rumours" about Ukraine which are circulating online", she announces that the Russian government is launching a new website where "only true information will be published".

TV stations are required by the media watchdog Roskomnadzor to follow the official narrative.

"I very much love Ukraine, I love Ukrainians. I have travelled across the country on multiple occasions. It indeed is a brilliant, wonderful country. And I think Russia is, of course, interested in it being a prosperous, friendly country... Our cause is just. We shall be victorious."

Increasing numbers of younger Russians tend to get their news from independent websites or social media, and the longer the war goes on, the more images and videos of dead soldiers and prisoners of war are surfacing. But the authorities are responding to this and turning the screws on independent reporting.

Roskomnadzor has ordered TikTok to remove military and political content in its suggestions to minors, complaining, "in most cases, these materials have a pronounced anti-Russian character". It also demanded that Google remove what it describes as false information about the Russian army's reported losses, and Reuters reports it has re-imposed a slowdown on Twitter's loading speeds over "fake reports" of Moscow's "special military operation", and restricted access to Facebook.

It has instructed media outlets to use information only from official Russian sources when reporting the invasion, demanding that they take down any reports referring to "a declaration of war" or "an invasion". It has threatened them with fines and blocking if they do not take action. The websites of the independent TV channel Dozhd and popular liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy have been blocked for alleged calls for extremism and violence, and "systematic spread of false information about the activities of the Russian military".

With additional reporting by Francis Scarr

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Ukraine: Watching the war on Russian TV - a whole different story

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So what are Russian TV viewers seeing of the war? What messages are they hearing over the airwaves? Below is a snapshot of what ordinary Russians would have picked up, on Tuesday 1 March, while channel-hopping across the country's key TV stations, which are controlled by the Kremlin and its corporate allies.

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A Moscow Times report on how the words ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ have been banned by the Russian authorities. 

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A Moscow Times report on how the words ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ have been banned by the Russian authorities. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This story highlights the power of language, how authoritarian states seek to control it, and whether a concept can exist without the words to signify it. Which words has the Russian government outlawed, and how does this relate to events in Ukraine and Europe? Do students feel that suppressing a word also suppresses the idea that is associated with it (much like what happens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)? What other words might be under threat by this, and other, regimes?

Key terms Unreliable, Untrue, Reliable, Official

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Russia's communications regulator on Saturday ordered media to remove reports describing Moscow's attack on Ukraine as an "assault, invasion, or declaration of war" or face being blocked and fined.

In a statement, Roskomnadzor accused a number of independent media outlets including television channel Dozhd and the country's top independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta of spreading "unreliable socially significant untrue information" about the shelling of Ukrainian cities by the Russian army and civilian deaths.

On Thursday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin unleashed a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has killed dozens of people, forced more than 50,000 to flee Ukraine in just 48 hours and sparked fears of a greater conflict in Europe.

Citing a request from the General Prosecutor's Office, the communications regulator said the media outlets that also include Echo of Moscow radio will be blocked unless they remove the "unreliable information."

"Roskomnadzor also launched an administrative investigation into the dissemination of unreliable publicly significant information by the above-mentioned media," the watchdog said.

The offence is punishable by a fine of up to five million rubles ($60,000), it said.

Roskomnadzor also said that "reliable information" could be found in "official Russian information outlets."

Moscow has not so far provided any details of Russian losses in the fighting in the face of statements from Kyiv that they have inflicted heavy casualties on Moscow's forces.

The invasion of Ukraine is taking place during an unprecedented crackdown on the Russian opposition, with top protest leaders assassinated, jailed or forced out of the country.

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Russia Bans Media Outlets From Using Words 'War,' 'Invasion' - The Moscow Times

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Russia's communications regulator on Saturday ordered media to remove reports describing Moscow's attack on Ukraine as an "assault, invasion, or declaration of war" or face being blocked and fined.

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A History Today article, looking at how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is as much about the past as it is about the present. 

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A History Today article, looking at how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is as much about the past as it is about the present. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does the article reveal about the close relationship between the two countries, and does that help clarify what’s going on? How far back do we need to go to understand a conflict? Does history only ever serve as a way of justifying contemporary agendas and points-of-view, or can it be used to provide an objective view of the present? Finally, what does Emmerson mean when he says, “history can be a kind of territory” - and how does this relate to both the current crisis, and other conflicts going on around the world?

Key terms Perceptions of history, Gospel truth, Historical perspective, Narrative, Contested, Justify, Emotional resonance, Legitimacy

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'.

I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people. One was decorated with an impressionistic painting of the 2004 Orange Revolution. I bought both. I doubt very much they were immediately replaced.

'Looking under Russia' is, perhaps, an appropriate metaphor for Ukrainian history.

Since the Pereiaslav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, Ukraine has only enjoyed statehood independent from Russia at moments of extreme geopolitical dislocation, such as in the final days of the First World War, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Russian nationalists today appear to view Ukrainian independence as a similar aberration, the consequence of what Vladimir Putin labelled the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Old habits die hard. For many Russians, Ukraine is like a phantom limb still felt to be there long after its amputation. The idea that Ukraine is really a nation at all strikes some Russians as odd. To the extent that perceptions of history condition politics, understanding the Russian view of Ukrainian history - and the Ukrainian view of Ukrainian history - is essential.

Though wrong, the idea that Ukrainian history is really just an annex of the sumptuous many-roomed mansion of Russian history is common. To some degree it is understandable. Ukraine and Russia have shared triumph and tragedy from the birth of Kyivan/Kievan Rus (the first proto-Russian state) through the wars against the Poles in the 17th century to bloody struggle against fascism in the 20th.

Shared beliefs

The historical links between the two countries, ancient and modern, are manifold and profound. The Orthodox churches of Ukraine and Russia share a patron saint - St. Vladmir or St. Volodmyr - whose statue (spelt the Ukrainian way) stands proudly on a street corner in west London. On the edge of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, a huge concrete museum complex inaugurated in the early 1980s commemorates the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Outside, a silvery figure of a woman, 200 feet tall, holds a sword aloft in one hand, and a shield with the emblem of the Soviet Union in the other. This is a memorial to shared sacrifice - eight million Ukrainians died in the war - and a shared victory. Seventy years after the end of the war, and nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such narratives are still powerful.

For a long time, Russians saw Ukrainians as being little more than country bumpkin relatives. Theories of Slavic ethnogenesis described the two peoples as siblings born of the same Slavic womb: the 'Great Russians' (Russians) on one hand and the 'Little Russians' (Ukrainians) on the other. Ukrainian literature, which began to emerge in the 19th century, was patronisingly viewed as the picturesque product of a peasant society, essentially subordinate to Russia's own literary canon, even when it produced such great poets as Taras Shevchenko. The fact that the flowering of Ukrainian national culture was strongest in western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made some Russians dismiss the whole thing as an anti-Russian ruse sponsored by external forces, a familiar refrain to those heard today.

In the Soviet period the idea of Ukrainian nationhood was viewed with similar suspicion, now additionally freighted with suggestions it was intrinsically counter-revolutionary. In April 1918, as Russia imploded in revolution, a conservative German-backed regime was set up in Kyiv. Its leader Pavlo Skoropadsky revived the title of Hetman, an ancient Cossack military title last held by a man who had died aged 112 in 1803, in a remote Russian monastery which the Soviets would subsequently turn into a gulag. Later, in the Great Patriotic War, some Ukrainians signed up with the Germans to fight the Soviets - some even joined the SS. Nationalist anti-Soviet actions continued into the 1950s - providing the basis in historical memory for the contemporary lumping together of even moderate Ukrainian nationalists with right-wing extremists as 'fascists' and 'bandits'.

In the Soviet era Ukrainian national identity was never completely subsumed into Russian or Soviet identity. Sometimes this could be useful to the Soviet state. In 1939, when Galicia, Volhynia and Bukovyna were annexed to Soviet Ukraine as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin's co-invasion of Poland, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet sent this message to Stalin: 'Having been divided, having been separated for centuries by artificial borders, the great Ukrainian people are reunited forever in a single Ukrainian republic'. In 1945, professions that Ukraine was not a Soviet vassal but in fact an independent Communist state allowed Ukraine to join the United Nations as a founder member alongside the USSR, thus giving Moscow an extra vote in UN proceedings.

Defining borders

The process through which the borders of modern Ukraine were defined, both in the west and on the Black Sea, was part and parcel of Russia's own headlong expansion through three centuries of Eurasian history. In the 1700s and 1800s, as the Russian geopolitical imagination became obsessed with the idea of turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake - perhaps even going so far as to seize control of Constantinople/Istanbul - the Ottoman Empire was bloodily and repeatedly pushed back from its redoubts on the northern side of the Black Sea. The Ukrainian provinces were the territorial beneficiaries. The country became ever more tightly integrated into the economics and politics of the growing Russian empire, serving as its breadbasket, and as its route to the sea.

At the end of the 18th century, German-born Catherine the Great founded the port of Odessa - and its hinterland of New Russia - with the help of a Spanish-Irish Neapolitan and, later, a French aristocrat. The city filled with Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews. Pushkin was sent there as punishment, and promptly started an affair with the wife of the city's Russian governor. Among countless others, Odessa would ultimately produce Trotsky and Akhmatova, two titans of Russian politics and culture, before becoming the site of some of the worst massacres of the Holocaust.

Further east, through war, colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, Crimea, the last remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde, was turned into the finest jewel in the Russian Empire. As proverbial pleasure garden for late imperial flings (as recounted by Anton Chekhov), then fantasy holiday camp for Soviet factory managers and key to Russia's southern flank (as base of the Black Sea fleet) Crimea became firmly embedded in Russians' psychological geography as their own private playground. Less than a century after the Tsars had conquered it, Stalin chose Crimea as the place to redraw the map of Europe once more in 1945.

Nine years later, when former Ukrainian party boss Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav/Pereyslav treaty, there was no thought that the internal borders of the Soviet Union would ever become international borders. It was only in 1991, as a result of an attempted coup (which took place, ironically enough, while Mikhail Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea) that the peninsula spun out of the ultimate control of Moscow, with the Soviet superstructure itself being legislated out of existence.

The idea that Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine essentially by accident is gospel truth among Russian politicians. It is but a short step to view Ukrainian possession of Crimea as historically illegitimate. And therein lies the beginnings of a dangerous game. What happens next? Perhaps Ukrainian independence itself, or that of the Baltic states, is equally seen as the consequence of a set of historical circumstances which some might now like to reverse.

A Ukrainian narrative

Where does a concern for history shade into revanchism? And how far does one's historical perspective extend back into the past? Visions of the Crimea as eternally Russian wilfully forget the Muslim population which Russian and then Soviet power displaced and deported - sometimes violently, always tragically, and with little historical recognition. As late as the turn of the last century, before the cataclysms of the 20th, the Crimean Tatars represented nearly half the people of Crimea. Khrushchev recognised the deportation of the Tatars as one of Stalin's crimes in his famous 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress. It was not until the 1990s that many were able to come back.

Russia's version of Ukrainian history, wrapped up in its own narrative of imperial rise and fall, from the Romanovs to the Soviets, helps explain Moscow's attitude towards its southern neighbour - not in terms of objective interests, though these are real enough, but in terms of emotion, in terms of who is right and who is wrong. What makes things truly bad, from the Russian perspective, is that Ukrainians by and large no longer share the Russian interpretation of their history. The past looks different these days from Kyiv (still more from Lviv). Instead of Ukrainians cherishing their supporting role in Russia's geopolitical greatness - which essentially means the power and prestige of the state - Ukrainians have come to cherish alternative narratives of their history, based around freedom and resistance. Rediscovering their past has been a critical part of asserting Ukrainian independence. Accepting the possibility of multiple histories, not just one, is a hallmark of democracy.

Episodes once viewed as the historical glue of the Russo-Ukrainian relationship have become contested. While Russians tend to see the Pereislav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654 as a moment of reunification for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, many Ukrainians see the same treaty as a temporary alliance between military leaders which the Russians subsequently interpreted to their advantage. In 2009, on the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava - perhaps the most important battle in Russia's 18th century history - then-President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko was blasted by Russia for suggesting that the Ukrainians who fought with the Swedes against the victorious forces of Russian Tsar Peter the Great were true patriots.

Similarly, while the famines of the early 20th century used to be viewed as a common experience of Soviet suffering, even as part of the forging of the Soviet industrial miracle, some now argue that the famines were, in effect, a Moscow-led assault on Ukrainians in particular. Some go so far as to suggest genocidal intent. The incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union in 1939 can still be seen in its traditional light: as the re-unification of the Ukraine under Soviet leadership. But for the old aged pensioners of Lviv - and increasingly for their grandchildren - it may be remembered as the beginning of a 50-year Russian occupation. And while Ukrainian nationalists in the Great Patriotic War used to be roundly condemned as nothing more than opportunistic, antisemitic fascist lowlifes - which some of them no doubt were - more savoury elements may now be rehabilitated, as in the modern Baltic states, as patriots caught in a vice between the equivalent totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. Some Ukrainians make what is, for many Russians, a sacrilegious parallel: Putin as Hitler.

For both Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of Ukrainian history is personal. As in all borderlands, the contradictions and complexities of the tangled past are reproduced over and over in the stories of families and in the identities of individuals. For the governments in Moscow and in Kyiv, history is political too. Narratives of the past can be spun to justify, oppose or defend different courses of action in the present. History can be a tool of influence - a tool of long-term psychological warfare even - used to manipulate the here-and-now, to give added emotional resonance to geopolitical imperatives or to claims of political legitimacy.

Bluntly put, history can be a kind of territory. In Ukraine, it is not just the country's land which is being tussled over. It is the country's past as well. If Russia and Ukraine are to live as respectful neighbours side by side, they will have to find a way to live with each other's history too.

Charles Emmerson is the author of Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 (Bodley Head, 2019).

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'. I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people.

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A Foreign Policy article, investigating the risk of conflict in Central Asia over water scarcity.

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A Foreign Policy article, investigating the risk of conflict in Central Asia over water scarcity.

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In Turkmenistan, household faucets are running dry and locusts are devouring crops. In Kazakhstan, a state of emergency has been , a thirsty crop that's drained the Aral Sea. The Taliban are digging a canal to divert water from the Amu Darya, the river border of five parched Central Asian states. Afghanistan and Iran have traded deadly fire over cross-border water sharing. Some experts declared as the Caspian Sea shrinks to a puddle. In Uzbekistan, the end of an international slave-labor boycott has boosted demand for that the first shots of long-predicted "water wars" may already have been fired.

Almost 2 billion people rely on rivers that arise in the Tibetan Plateau and the Hindu Kush, among them the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Long-term neglect, mismanagement, and overuse of water resources, coupled with a yearslong drought that's baked the steppe hard, have rattled governments finally coming to terms with the reality of climate change. The presidents of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan will meet in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in August for their annual get-together, with water high on the agenda. In a region where political power is often tied to control of resources, there's one resource that is in increasingly high demand.

One of the few things water experts can agree on is that the threat is existential and the solution must be collective. Optimists point to 30-plus years of peace among the states that gained independence with the end of the Soviet Union as evidence that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan can work together. Others, like Omair Ahmad, managing editor of the Third Pole, a platform for information on the Himalayan watershed, described the water worries as a "diplomatic minefield."

If only China could offer some leadership, he suggested, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could offer the most fruitful forum. But China, the SCO's driving force, has its own water-management issues, and doesn't put a lot of stock in green projects when it comes to its big Belt and Road infrastructure initiative in Central Asia. "There is no domestic appetite [in China] for anything but a big win," he said.

Central Asia's water woes offer anything but a big win. For the Aral Sea, once the world's biggest inland sea shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, there's no hope of revival, said Akram Umarov, an associate professor at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. "The Aral Sea is dead-we cannot save it," he said.

Waters from the Syr Darya in the north and the Amu Darya in the south are drawn to irrigate agricultural production, mainly cotton, before reaching the Aral. No place in the region has introduced water-efficient technologies, there is limited coordination of management systems, and no systemic approach to overall water networks including smaller rivers and lakes has been implemented. "Water inefficiency is dramatic, and water waste is huge in the region," Umarov said. "There are lots of talks but there is no implementation."

None of this is entirely new, though the severity of the region's water stress is. Central Asia's history of water mismanagement "goes back to [Joseph] Stalin," Ahmad said. "Soviet modernization was on steroids, and they didn't take into account the traditional manner of water management," instead opting for massive projects that showcased "the power of politics over nature." After independence, the Central Asian states were largely taken over by kleptocrats who, like those in Russia, seized control of resources. "Those things have an impact because you're not really looking at the land in terms of good water management, rather than for extracting goods for personal wealth and political power," Ahmad said.

The Soviet Union wasn't the only country using development to demonstrate human dominance of nature: Dams were de rigueur in the mid-20th century rush to economic transformation in the United States and elsewhere. More recently, China's damming of rivers flowing from the Tibetan Plateau in the decades since its development began in earnest has exacerbated tensions with downstream neighbors now dealing with the consequences of deforestation, silting, floods, salinization, and drought.

"It's a problem that will continue to get bigger and bigger because of climate change, because of the mode of development and governance," Ahmad said.

Part of the problem is that countries in water-stressed areas of the world continue to place their economic bets in the worst places. Hyper-thirsty alfalfa is widely grown in the drought-wracked U.S. Southwest, often at the behest of Saudi investors. Egypt built its modern economy on water-intensive cotton production, making its fight with upstream Ethiopia over the fate of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam even more consequential. Uzbekistan, too, has for decades opted for cotton, specializing in the crop during the Soviet years, when it was harvested by citizens in what Human Rights Watch "one of the world's largest, most exploitable state-run forced labor programs." The practice continued into independence and led to an 11-year boycott by more than 330 companies in the United States and elsewhere. The end of the boycott last year led to new investment meant to boost yields, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But growing more cotton almost certainly means more water stress.

There are transboundary agreements and cooperation agreements dating back decades that were largely moribund but are now being revived, Umarov said. These include the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea and the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination Commission of Central Asia. There will probably be new ones.

"An understanding of the problem (means) water is now always on the agenda of all negotiations between the states," Umarov added. But there's a delinquent in the mix: The Taliban now control Afghanistan, which shares the Amu Darya border with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The extremists are proving just as intransigent on water as they are on women's rights, having recognized it as a major issue for drought-stricken Afghanistan's mostly rural population.

Regime-controlled media outlets regularly report on the c onstruction of dams and " water supply projects." Firefights over the western border with Iran erupted in May, with deaths on both sides, over sharing the Helmand River, a source of bilateral strife for at least 150 years, which rises in the Hindu Kush to Kabul's east, waters southern Afghanistan's farms, and is vital to farmers in Iran's southeast. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on Monday that bilateral talks were making some progress.

But the Taliban are doing more. Central Asian neighbors are grappling with the Taliban's decision to build a massive canal, without consultation with other riparian states, that could reduce the flow of the Amu Darya by half. The Taliban want to turn northern desert into farmland with the Qosh Tepa canal, which Uzbekistan fears will cut into its own resources for agriculture. But a dearth of engineering expertise after 50 years of brain drain means that workers are effectively digging a big hole to run water from the river to farmland, said Iskandar Abdullaev, a professor of environmental science at the Centre for International Development and Environmental Research at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

"There's no proper planning, no engineering, no regulation, no measures to protect seepage, so more or less half of the water will be productively delivered, and half will go to the desert," he said. "There are a lot of concerns. I don't see how this canal is going to be operated or efficiently used."

The Taliban's intransigence, he said, could force Central Asia's arid states to take action to save the water they do have. "There's no way to ask them [the Taliban] to stop-they will not. It's their territory. The Amu Darya flows into Afghanistan and out."

That's going to force a day of reckoning between neighbors already leery of each other.

" It's not easy to deal with the Taliban, but it's not too late," he said. "This is just the start of the serious interaction between Central Asia and Afghanistan on water issues."

Correction, Aug. 2, 2023: A previous version of this article misidentified the country with which Egypt is in a dispute regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. It has been fixed.

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The Water Wars Are Coming to Central Asia

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Things have been bad for decades, but the Taliban threaten to make them worse.

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A Wired article, looking at the use of TikTok during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

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A Wired article, looking at the use of TikTok during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does the article summarize the essential characteristics of each big social media platform - and what are the implications of each of these in terms of their ability to provide us with information about the Russian invasion? Why has TikTok become such a popular platform by people sharing accounts of what’s going on? What are the pros and cons of relying on the platform to find out the truth - consider the comparative rate at which fake and reliable news travels on social media? How has TikTok tried to ensure it conveys objective information, and how successful has it been? Why does scale present problems for social media platforms such as TikTok?

Key terms Visual, Instant, Firehose, Fact-checking, Distorted news, Collectively, Weaponized

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As Russia's invasion of Ukraine plays out online, the platform's design and algorithm prove ideal for the messiness of war-but a nightmare for the truth.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war-but it is the first to play out on TikTok. The 2011 Arab Spring was fomented and furthered on Twitter and Facebook. Clips of Syrian children choking from chemical weapons filled social media timelines in 2018. And the Taliban's capture of Kabul, with all the chaos that wrought, was live-tweeted into our homes last year. Images of unspeakable horrors supplanting the banality of status updates and selfies is nothing new. But the current conflict is a very different kind of social media war, fueled by TikTok's transformative effect on the old norms of tech. Its more established competitors fundamentally changed the nature of conflict, but TikTok has created a stream of war footage the likes of which we have never seen, from grandmothers saying goodbye to friends to instructions on how to drive captured Russian tanks.

So much of TikTok's success comes down to both how visual it is and how instant it is. From memes and dance crazes to the storming of the US Capitol, it captures and clips the world with an immediacy other platforms can't. As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, it became a boon for open source investigators trying to track troop movements, and has provided immediate, quickfire footage of what's happening as Ukrainians fight for their future.

TikTok's rise is-and always has been-a result of how easy it is to use. Its in-app editing and filters make it easier than any other platform to capture and share the world around us. If Facebook is bloated, Instagram is curated, and YouTube requires a shedload of equipment and editing time, TikTok is quick and dirty-the kind of video platform that can shape perceptions of how a conflict is unfolding. And as anyone who's browsed social media in the last week knows, what happens on TikTok rarely stays on TikTok.

"As an analyst of what's happening in Ukraine at the moment, I'm getting 95 percent of my information from Twitter," says Ed Arnold, research fellow in European security at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). "Before that, 90 percent of your information would come from official sources, like intelligence sources." But among the flurry of tweets, Arnold has noticed a strange trend: A significant chunk of the videos being shared are emblazoned with the TikTok watermark. "It's odd," he says.

But it makes sense. TikTok is ubiquitous, user-friendly, and a lot of younger people use it, says Arnold. As of July 2020, 28.5 million of Russia's 144 million people used TikTok, according to internal data seen by WIRED. (Data for Ukraine was not available.) "Out of all the social media, TikTok is the one that is most visual[ly engaging]," says Agnes Venema, a national security and intelligence academic at the University of Malta.

TikTok is a firehose of content. Internal documentation presented by the company, dating back to June 2020, suggests at least 5 million videos are posted per hour. Getting specific content in front of eyeballs on the For You page is the job of TikTok's algorithm. It's the thing that can propel nobodies into superstardom overnight, and can also mean that shaky footage of the aftermath of a Russian missile attack can potentially be seen by millions of people within minutes of being uploaded.

TikTok's algorithm feeds people videos it believes they are hungry to see. And there's plenty of appetite for videos about war right now: In the eight days between February 20 and February 28, views on videos tagged with #ukraine jumped from 6.4 billion to 17.1 billion -a rate of 1.3 billion views a day, or 928,000 views a minute. (Content tagged #Украина, Ukraine in Cyrillic, is almost as popular, with 16.4 billion views as of February 28.)

Many of TikTok's most viral Ukraine videos have been shared by Marta Vasyuta, a 20-year-old Ukrainian currently based in London. When Russia invaded, Vasyuta found herself stranded outside the country and decided to co-opt her TikTok profile, which only had a few hundred followers, into a platform to share footage of the conflict from Telegram with the wider world. "If you post a video from Ukraine, it will be likely for only Ukrainians or Russians to see it," she says. That quirk is a result of how TikTok often localizes videos it shows on its For You page. Hoping that her location in London would help footage from Ukraine sidestep the algorithm, she began posting. Until she was blocked from posting by TikTok late last week-something she thinks may have been caused by Russian bots mass-reporting her profile-she had gained 145,000 followers. (A message from TikTok shows Vasyuta was temporarily barred from posting for three videos and one comment that breached the platform's community guidelines. TikTok did not respond to a request for clarification on what rules were broken.)

Despite the suspension, plenty of Vasyuta's videos have a half-life far beyond TikTok, thanks to the ease by which videos can be downloaded and reshared on other social media platforms.

Sharing videos off-platform has long been a tool deployed by parent company ByteDance to help promote TikTok. One of Vasyuta's TikTok videos, showing bombs raining down on Kyiv, has been seen 44 million times on TikTok-and shared beyond the app nearly 200,000 times. Where it's gone is difficult to tell-TikTok's method of sharing removes the ability to trace a video back to its source-but a search of Twitter shows plenty of videos shared from TikTok on the platform.

But that immediacy and reach on and off TikTok comes at a price. Emotive videos can cause people to overlook whether or not information is legitimate. Couple that with a younger, sometimes less media-literate audience, and it's a recipe for trouble. "Disinformation is really aimed at trying to elicit an emotional response," says Venema, "It's the stuff that gets you outraged, that gets you emotional, that tugs on the heartstrings. Combine those two, and that's why there's so much of it."

How emotion can help create a viral hit is best shown in one video showing a soldier in military fatigues, gently coasting down to the grain fields below with a grin spread across his face. The video, posted to TikTok and reshared on Twitter, racked up 26 million views on the app and purported to give a glimpse into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Except it didn't. The video dated back to 2015, and was originally posted on Instagram, fact checkers found.

To combat this problem TikTok has partnered with independent fact-checking organizations to try and combat disinformation, but has struggled to slow the spread of fake or distorted news on its platform more than some of its more established social media competitors. The reason? Again, it comes down to TikTok's design.

Prior research has shown that fake news travels six times faster than legitimate information on social media-in large part because of its ability to trigger a strong emotional response. TikTok's design, which throws users headlong into an immersive, endless stream of snappy content, is designed to monopolize attention. Even legitimate information can work by appealing to outrage-and there are few things more outrageous than what's going on in Ukraine at present. "It's called collective sensemaking," says Claudia Flores-Saviaga, who studies disinformation, crowdsourcing, and social computing at Northeastern University. "That is something very normal during crisis events like wars or natural disasters." And with tools like duetting and stitching, which allow people to easily become creators themselves by responding to existing videos, TikTok encourages everyone to collectively make sense of what's going on-or muddy the truth.

So far, pro-Ukrainian profiles have dominated the discourse on TikTok. However, videos of invading Russian forces causing destruction also plays into the hands of Putin, warns Flores-Saviaga. "Social media is definitely being weaponized," she says. That includes dis- or misinformation, designed either to intimidate or to profit from the enormous appetite for war content. And it's here that TikTok is struggling to keep pace.

From bogus livestreams to video game clips being repurposed as on-the-ground footage of the invading forces, TikTok has come under scrutiny for its inability to police content. US non-profit Media Matters for America has highlighted numerous instances of the app being abused to amplify false content. TikTok did not answer questions about the scale of fake content on its platform relating to the war in Ukraine, or how far content around the conflict had been shared off-platform. TikTok also did not respond to questions about how many moderators it employs and how many videos and livestreams the app has taken down. Sara Mosavi, a TikTok spokesperson, says the company continues to "monitor the situation with increased resources to respond to emerging trends and remove violative content, including harmful misinformation and promotion of violence," but declines to give specific details.

The system can also be gamed by potentially silencing accounts like Vasyuta's that have been favored by the algorithm. If TikTok's features have inadvertently made it ideal for sharing videos of war, critics argue it needs to be more open about how it's handling the war. When Ukraine was last invaded in 2014, Vasyuta was barely a teenager. Her country has now been in a state of war for eight years. "And I'd guess that 90 percent of the people who've seen my TikToks didn't know about that," she says. She's watched on as TikTokers post live streams from Russian cities and speak out against Putin's invasion. "Everyone knows the truth," she says. "Now it'll be really hard for the Russian government to continue lying. They're saying these are Ukrainian soldiers bombing the cities in Ukraine. That they 'just came to save us'. We don't need to be saved. We need to be heard."

The issue is that Vasyuta couldn't post on TikTok for nearly three days because of an error in the moderation of her videos. She was banned from posting, and it's not clear why. Vasyuta's suspension was only lifted early when WIRED contacted TikTok about it.

Social media has long struggled with scale. But just as TikTok's popularity has soared, collapsing the time taken to reach a billion users from eight years (in the case of Instagram) to four years, while also accelerating the speed at which video clips can go viral, so it has also found itself running into the same old problems.

When TikTok has worked correctly, it has helped the world understand the horrors going on in Ukraine. But when the app's systems have been gamed by bad actors, it has tainted the world's understanding of the war and sowed confusion far beyond the normal fog of war. Part of that, says Flores-Saviaga, could be a result of TikTok's inability to process the scale of information it has created. She points out that on a platform where millions of videos are posted each day, an algorithm and content moderation system with 99 percent reliability would still let vast numbers of videos slip through the net. Fixing it is a million-dollar question, says Flores-Saviaga. "There needs to be a balance," she says. "And this type of balance is why a lot of disinformation is slipping through the radar."

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As Russia's invasion of Ukraine plays out online, the platform's design and algorithm prove ideal for the messiness of war-but a nightmare for the truth. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war-but it is the first to play out on TikTok.

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An Atlantic article, which looks at the way in which the invasion has revealed that many of our political and historical assumptions about Europe and the world were completely misguided and inaccurate.

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An Atlantic article, which looks at the way in which the invasion has revealed that many of our political and historical assumptions about Europe and the world were completely misguided and inaccurate.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Anne Applebaum is a highly respected journalist and historian, and here offers us a clear analysis of the paradigm shift in Europe as a result of the invasion. How has it changed the way Europeans see themselves, and the political structures that hold them together? In what way has a dissonance between academic realities and actual realities been revealed? How do political crises change our ‘collective imagination’ about ourselves? What does this event highlight about where we should seek out our information about the world?

Key terms Assumptions, Shifts, Illusions, Definition of itself, Collective imagination, Alternative information

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When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West's assumptions about the world became unsustainable.

About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

History has accelerated; the impossible has become possible. Shifts that no one imagined two weeks ago are unfolding with incredible speed.

As it turns out, nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. They do not, as some academics have long imagined, have eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react the way they are supposed to react. Last week, nobody who was analyzing the coming war in Ukraine imagined that the personal bravery of the Ukrainian president and his emotive calls for sovereignty and democracy could alter the calculations of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the Russian president's sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.
Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine
And yet all of that has happened. Volodymyr Zelensky's courage has moved people, even the hard-bitten CEOs of oil companies, even dull diplomats accustomed to rote pronouncements. Vladimir Putin's paranoid ranting, meanwhile, has frightened even people who were lauding his "savvy" just a few days ago. He is not, in fact, someone you can do business with, as so many in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington falsely believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator happy to murder hundreds of thousands of neighbors and impoverish his nation, if that's what it takes to remain in power. However the war ends-and many scenarios are still imaginable-we already live in a world with fewer illusions.

Look at Germany, a nation that has spent nearly 80 years defining its national self-interest in purely economic terms. If the government of some distant place where Germans buy and sell things was repressive, that was never the Germans' fault. If military aggression was reshaping the outer borders of Europe, that was peripheral to Germany, too. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, although she talked a lot about liberal and democratic values, in practice worried far more about creating good conditions for German business, wherever it was operating. That economy-first attitude infected her nation. Not long after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, I joined a panel discussion in Germany about "the greatest threats to Europe." Because of the timing, I talked about Russia and assumed the others would too. I was wrong. One of the other panelists called me a warmonger. Another argued vociferously that the greatest threat was a proposed trade agreement that would have allowed Americans to sell chicken washed in chlorine to German supermarkets.

I remember that detail because I hadn't known about the great chlorinated-chicken discussion that was then engulfing Germany, and I had to go home and look it up. But I've had some version of that experience many times since. I was on a German television program two weeks ago, along with three German politicians who were, even then, arguing that-despite the thousands of troops and armored vehicles gathering on the borders of Ukraine-the only conceivable solution was dialogue.
Eliot A. Cohen: Cometh the hour, cometh the man
On Saturday, in a 30-minute speech, the current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, threw all of that out the window. Germany, he said, needs "planes that fly, ships that sail, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions": Germany's military should reflect its "size and importance." The German government has done an about-face and will even send weapons to Ukraine: 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. More incredibly, this 180-degree turn has the support of an astonishing 78 percent of the German public, who now say they approve of much higher military spending and will gladly pay for it. This is a fundamental change in Germany's definition of itself, in its understanding of its past: Finally, Germans have understood that the lesson of their history is not that Germany must remain forever pacifist. The lesson is that Germany must defend democracy and fight the modern version of fascism in Europe when it emerges.

But the Germans are not the only ones who have changed. Across Europe people are realizing that they live on a continent where war, in their own time, in their own countries, is no longer impossible. Platitudes about European "unity" and "solidarity" are beginning to have some meaning, along with "common foreign policy," a phrase that, in the European Union, has until now been largely fiction. In theory the EU has a single spokesperson for foreign policy, but in practice European leaders have given that job to people who know little about Russia, and whose fallback position when Russia misbehaves is always the expression of " deep concern." The previous European high representative for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, was more interested in EU relations with Cuba than with Kyiv. The current holder of that office, Josep Borrell, stumbled through a meeting with his Russian counterpart last year, and seemed surprised to be treated with disdain.

But now everything is suddenly different. "Deep concern" has been exchanged for real action. Less than a week into the invasion, the EU has not only announced harsh sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and individuals-sanctions that will also affect Europeans-but has also offered $500 million of military aid to Ukraine. Individual European states, such as France and Finland, are sending weapons as well, and applying their own sanctions. The French say they are drawing up a list of Russian oligarchs' assets, including luxury cars and yachts, in order to seize them.

Europeans have also dropped, abruptly, some of their doubts about Ukraine's membership in their institutions. On Monday, the European Parliament not only asked Zelensky to speak, by video, but gave him a standing ovation. Earlier today the parliamentarians, from all across the continent, voted to accept his application for EU membership for Ukraine. Accession to the EU is a long process, and it won't happen immediately, even if Ukraine emerges intact from this conflict. But the idea has been broached. It is now part of the continent's collective imagination. From being a distant place, badly understood, it is now part of what people mean when they say Europe.

Ukraine itself will never be the same again either. Events are happening so rapidly, with moods and emotions changing every hour of every day, that I can't guess what will happen next, or predict how people will feel about it. But I am certain that the events of this week have changed not only the world's perceptions of Ukraine, but Ukrainians' perceptions of themselves. In the long run-up to this war, the conversation in Washington and Berlin was always focused on Putin and Joe Biden, Sergey Lavrov and Antony Blinken, NATO and Russia. This was the kind of talk that academics and pundits liked: big topics, big countries. In this conversation Ukraine was, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer put it in 2014, nothing more than "a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia." But the Ukrainians have now put themselves at the heart of the story, and they know it.

As a result, thousands of people are making choices that they too could not have imagined two weeks ago. Ukrainian sociologists, baristas, rappers, and bakers are joining the territorial army. Villagers are standing in front of Russian tanks, shouting "occupiers" and "murderers" at Russia soldiers firing into the air. Construction workers on lucrative contracts in Poland are dropping their tools and taking the train back home to join the resistance. A decade's worth of experience fighting Russian propaganda is finally paying off, as Ukrainians create their own counternarrative on social media. They post videos telling Russian soldiers to go home to their mothers. They interview captured teenage Russian conscripts, and put the video clips online. Electronic highway signs leading into Kyiv have been reconfigured to tell the Russian army to "fuck off." Even if this ends badly, even if there is more bloodshed, every Ukrainian who lived through this moment will always remember what it felt like to resist-and that too will matter, for decades to come.

And what about Russia? Is Russia condemned always to be a revanchist state, a backward-looking former empire, forever scheming to regain its old role? Must this enormous, complicated, paradoxical nation always be ruled badly, with cruelty, by elites who want to steal its wealth or oppress its people? Will Russian rulers always dream of conquest instead of prosperity?

Right now many Russians don't even realize what is happening in Ukraine. State television has not yet admitted that the Russian military has attacked Kyiv with rockets, bombed a Holocaust memorial, or destroyed parts of central Kharkiv and Mariupol. Instead, the official propagandists are telling Russians that they are carrying out a police action in Ukraine's far-eastern provinces. The audience gets no information about casualties, or war damage, or costs. The extent of the sanctions has not been reported. Pictures seen around the world-the bombing of the Kyiv television tower today, for example-can't be seen on the Russian evening news.

And yet, there is a strong, consistent drumbeat of alternative information. Yury Dud, a celebrity blogger with 5 million Instagram followers, has posted a photograph of a bombed-out building in Ukraine. The YouTube channel of Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian dissident leader, has been equally clear to its 6.4 million subscribers. Members of his team are denouncing the war alongside the extension of his prison sentence, both part of the same story of internal and external repression. Millions of Russians know, because they have friends and relatives in Ukraine, that Putin has invaded a neighbor whom they don't consider their enemy. Some have called those friends, weeping over the telephone, to apologize.

What could happen in Russia if the story became better known, the details clearer? What if Russians are eventually able to see the same graphic images that we see? What if the price of this pointless violence becomes tangible to them too? The unpopularity of this war is going to grow, and as it gets bigger, the other Russia-the different Russia that has always been there-will grow larger, too. The Russians who flooded the streets in 1991 to cheer the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians who protested fake elections in 2011, the Russians who turned out in large numbers all across the country to protest the arrest of Navalny in 2021, the Russians, rich and poor, urban and rural, who don't want their country to be an evil empire-maybe their numbers will expand enough to matter. Maybe, someday, they will change the nature of their state too.

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ongoing coverage of the russian invasion

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personal bravery of the ukrainian president

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bombing of the kyiv television tower today

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buffer state of enormous strategic importance

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When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West's assumptions about the world became unsustainable. About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism .

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A Guardian article, exploring the differing responses to the invasion of Ukraine, and what motivates them, from countries all over the world. 

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A Guardian article, exploring the differing responses to the invasion of Ukraine, and what motivates them, from countries all over the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The invasion of Ukraine has provoked incredibly strong reactions from those of us witnessing the distressing events. One assumption many of us make is that those reactions are shared by everyone - and we view events from the same moral and political perspective. How does this article refute that idea? What reasons do countries have for not taking a stance against the invasion? Does this support the idea that morality is relative to cultural (and political) context? Which force shapes a country and its people more - politics or ethics?

Key terms Geopolitical, Pseudo-leftists, Multipolarity, Holiday from history

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n 2 March, as the number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia's brutal invasion reached 1 million, the United Nations security council called an emergency session of the general assembly. There, 193 nations reviewed a resolution on Russia's "aggression against Ukraine" and voted overwhelmingly to approve it: 141 votes in favor, 35 abstentions and just five votes against. Even some of Russia's closest allies on the continent - Serbia, for example, or Hungary - voted to condemn the invasion. "The message of the general assembly is loud and clear," said the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

What exactly is that message? In recent days, many commentators have pointed to a global map of the UN resolution to demonstrate the unity of the west and the world in taking on the Putin government. But to make sense of the geopolitical consequences of the Russian invasion, we must look beyond the diplomatic theater of the general assembly to examine how these nations are actually engaged with the war in this phase of rapid escalation. And to do that, we should start with a very different map of the world - a map of global participation in the sanctions set against Russia by the United States and its allies.

The contrast between these maps could not be more striking. The US, the UK, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, the EU: beyond this fortified coalition, very few nations have chosen to take part in the economic warfare set against the Putin government. On the contrary, many of the world's largest nations - including China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and even Nato ally Turkey - have refused to join in. "We will not blindly follow the steps taken by another country," said Indonesia's foreign ministry representative at a recent press conference.

Latin America has been equally steadfast in its commitment to neutrality. "We do not consider that [this war] concerns us," said the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. "We are not going to take any sort of economic reprisal because we want to have good relations with all governments." Argentina may have voted to condemn Russia's actions at the UN, but its foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, was adamant about his country's non-participation in the new sanctions push: "Argentina does not consider that they are a mechanism to generate peace and harmony, or generate a frank dialogue table that serves to save lives."

The Latin American position has been echoed in Africa. "For five centuries, we have been pawns in the hands of the warring European states, bent on looting Africa of its human and natural sources," says Pierre Sané, president of the Imagine Africa Institute and former secretary-general of Amnesty International. Sané tells me that the Ukrainian embassy in Senegal has been recruiting "volunteer" mercenaries from countries like Senegal and Ivory Coast to fight in the war. "Should this war in Ukraine escalate, we say and we say it loud: do not bring it to our shores."

Amid the Russian army's brutal advance into Ukraine, a slew of letters, articles and Twitter commentary has addressed the "western left" for its apparent unwillingness to take on the Putin government. The invasion of Ukraine has been described as a " test" to root out the " pseudo-leftists " who fail to respond with force and conviction to support the west in its effort to isolate, undermine and eventually topple Putin in defense of the Ukrainian cause.

But the map of sanctions suggests that the true rift is not between left and right, nor even between east and west. On the contrary, the map reveals a rift between north and south, between the nations that we call developed and those we call developing. And by revealing this tectonic shift, the map can tell us something important about geopolitics in the coming age of multipolarity.

The rapid rise of China and the US reaction it has provoked have prompted many commentators to predict a coming cold war. Few expected Vladimir Putin to kick it off so suddenly. "Putin's invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans' 30-year holiday from history," writes the former CIA director Robert Gates for the Washington Post. The immediate eviction of Russian representatives and Russian culture from the institutions of the west suggest the long slumber of the cold war may indeed be over: "Putin's war has provided the cold shower needed to awaken democratic governments to the reality of a new world."

The good news for Gates is that the Biden administration has already found its cold war footing. Its flagship Summit for Democracy strives to unite " the nations of the free world" - a remarkable homage to the era of anti-Soviet mobilization - while isolating autocracies like Russia and China. That is, with the usual exceptions: Saudi Arabia's oil, for example, grants the nation a free pass to the "free world", as made evident by the recent delegation dispatched by the Biden administration to secure the kingdom's support to keep the oil flowing through the war effort in Ukraine.

In the age of unipolarity - in the long 30-year holiday that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union - the nations of the world were given a rather simple choice: side with the United States, or stand alone. Some nations sought to band together in collective acts of resistance to this hegemonic power. But the consequences were all but inevitable: invasions, coups and extensive sanctions to isolate their economies from the world at large.

As new powers generate new poles, however, the options available to US neighbor nations are no longer restricted to compliance and resistance. A third option emerges: neutrality. "Neutrality does not mean indifference," says Pierre Sané. "Neutrality means continuously calling for the respect of international laws; neutrality means that our hearts still go to the victims of military invasions and arbitrary sanctions never imposed on Nato countries."

Back in the first cold war, neutrality had a name: non-alignment. As the United States clashed with China and the Soviet Union in the skies above Korea, Jawaharlal Nehru and Josip Broz Tito refused to take a side. "The people of Yugoslavia cannot accept the postulate that humanity today has only one choice - a choice between a domination of one or the other bloc," Yugoslavia's minister of foreign affairs, Edvard Kardelj, told the UN in 1950. "We believe that there exists another road." The Non-Aligned Movement was born five years later, uniting more than 100 nations around the world around principles of non-interference and peaceful coexistence.

Today, nations around the world are called again to take sides - between Russia and the west, and very soon between the west and China. But as the map of sanctions attests, the cross-pressure between these great powers may once again spark a movement for non-alignment, demanding a more universal application of international law against demands for unilateral exception.

There will no doubt be consequences for this neutral position. Non-aligned nations in the first cold war were frequently victim to aggression, invasion and economic embargo. The same risks to neutrality are visible today. Lithuania recently canceled a shipment of Covid vaccines to Bangladesh for its refusal to condemn Russia at the United Nations. The US, for its part, has already passed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (Caatsa), giving license to punish countries with sanctions for trading with the other side.

But as great powers prepare for a new century of war, the call for non-alignment will only grow louder. Our task is to understand that call now as Tito and Nehru understood it then: not as "neutralism" or "passivity, as is sometimes alleged". As they wrote in a joint declaration in 1954: "It represents the positive, active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security."

This article was amended on 28 March 2022 to clarify that the embassy Pierre Sané referred to as recruiting "volunteer" mercenaries from countries like Senegal and Ivory Coast, was the Ukrainian embassy in Senegal.

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The west v Russia: why the global south isn't taking sides | David Adler

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n 2 March, as the number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia's brutal invasion reached 1 million, the United Nations security council called an emergency session of the general assembly. There, 193 nations reviewed a resolution on Russia's "aggression against Ukraine" and voted overwhelmingly to approve it: 141 votes in favor, 35 abstentions and just five votes against.

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A BBC article, looking at how emojis are being used to avoid the increasingly restrictive censorship laws introduced in Russia. 

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A BBC article, looking at how emojis are being used to avoid the increasingly restrictive censorship laws introduced in Russia. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How are Russians using emojis, and other coded phrases to communicate their resistance to the war? What does this indicate about the inherent meaning of words, and how they can be substituted for other representations of concepts and ideas? What does this reveal about the relationship between power and language?

Key terms Coded phrases, Self-censor

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On 24 February, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, an image started to spread on social media - a picture of the Russian poet Pushkin, the number seven and rows of the "person walking" emoji.

To those in the know, the meaning was clear - a location (Pushkin Square, in Moscow), a time and a call to protest against the government's actions.

The emojis made reference to a code used for years in Russia to refer to protests - one so well known to the authorities, it is barely a code at all, according to human rights group OVD-Info.

Why use code?

Unauthorised protests have been banned in the country since 2014 and breaches of the rules can lead to up to 15 days detention for a first offence. Repeat offenders can receive prison sentences of up to five years.

Since then, it has been common for activists to use various coded phrases to organise online.

"It's like, 'Let's go for a walk to the centre,' or, 'The weather is great for a walk,'" Maria says. This is what she will text her friends to let them know she plans to attend a protest.

What started as a way to evade government censors has almost become an inside joke or a meme, Maria tells BBC News.

Nevertheless, the consequences of not using this language can be serious.

Alexander attended a protest in Moscow, having posted about it on social media.

The following morning, plain-clothes officers picked him up outside his girlfriend's building and took him to the local police department. He was detained for several days and compelled to sign a document listing what the authorities said he had done.

We cannot be certain his attendance at the protest or his social media activity led to Alexander's detention. He was later arrested for a second time, while using the Moscow Metro, on a day he had not been attending a protest.

BBC News has learned of other detentions based solely on social media activity, including one woman arrested for a tweet.

On 24 February, she posted: "I haven't walked in the centre for a long time," and quoted another account's tweet containing a more explicit call to rally.

Five days later, she was arrested while taking a train.

She believes she was detected by facial-recognition software active on the Moscow Metro system - and in her court hearing, a document containing her tweet was presented, showing the authorities had taken a screenshot of it almost immediately after she had posted it.

In another case, Niki, a blogger, described how a close friend's brother had been detained twice - once for a few hours after attending a protest and a second time, for a whole week, for sharing the details with his friends on VK, Russia's equivalent of Facebook.

Almost 14,000 people have been detained across Russia since the conflict began a fortnight ago, mainly for attending protests according to OVD-Info - which provides legal advice.

So far, most have been held for a matter of hours or days.

Is the situation changing?

A law was introduced in Russia on Friday 4 March, with the stated aim of tackling "fake news" about the military but it is expected to be used to crack down even further on anti-war protests - including prison sentences of up to 15 years, significantly longer than previous sanctions.

For young people such as Maria, this has "already changed things, because now I'm afraid to go to protest and also I'm afraid to post about this 'special operation' [Russia's invasion of Ukraine]".

And there are clear indications arrests have increased since the new law was introduced, OVD-Info says.

Where are Russians now posting?

The shuttering of independent media outlets, blocking of Facebook and restrictions on Russians posting on TikTok have taken away key routes to access information, OVD-Info co-ordinator Leonid Drabkin says, and people will self-censor out of fear.

"Now if you go to your Instagram, there are like 10 times fewer posts," he says.

Many of his contacts have deleted their social-media profiles altogether.

And coupled with the stringent penalties, this has already affected the number of people "brave enough to protest".

Some contributors' names have been changed to protect their identities.

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The Russians using emojis to evade censors

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On 24 February, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, an image started to spread on social media - a picture of the Russian poet Pushkin, the number seven and rows of the "person walking" emoji. To those in the know, the meaning was clear - a location (Pushkin Square, in Moscow), a time and a call to protest against the government's actions.

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An LA Times article, looking at how the LA Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name, and developing a clearer mission in order to fight hatred and intolerance. 

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An LA Times article, looking at how the LA Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name, and developing a clearer mission in order to fight hatred and intolerance. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does the way ideas are communicated change our perception of them? What is more important: the message, or the way it is conveyed?

Key terms Rebranding, Universal gesture of communication

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The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name and logo. The new Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, it announced on Friday, aims to prioritize history and education centered on fighting hatred and intolerance toward all communities.

"We're a Holocaust museum and this puts the Holocaust name first,"museum Chief Executive Beth Keansaid.

The name change may seem subtle, but it has big ideas behind it, both ideological and practical.

"We feel like we're on the path to be a world leader on the Holocaust and relevant issues of inclusiveness and diversity," Kean said. "LAMOTH was a mouthful and led to this awful acronym, that stuck for so long, that was meaningless and confusing. Holocaust Museum Los Angeles is clear-cut. For us, it's a simple but powerful way of pivoting from being Los Angeles-centric to Holocaust education-centric for Los Angeles and the world."

The museum's new name is part of a broader rebranding that began in late 2018 and includes a new logo and website, both put into effect on Friday.

The old logo was an abstract architectural image incorporating the LAMOTH acronym. The new logo, by Colorado designer Brett Aronson, depicts a palm pressed against a barbed-wire fence. The open hand is meant to be a universal gesture of communication, Kean said, "a symbolic gesture in the fight for justice and overcoming adversity, which is more important in the country and the world than it's ever been. It also says [of hatred], 'Stop. Enough!'"

(Holocaust Museum Los Angeles)

The new website is more contemporary-looking and easier to navigate, with more gallery photos, richer exhibition presentations and added educational resources for teachers.

When the coronavirus crisis first hit and the museum closed in March, it paused the rebranding project. But as the pandemic went on, the museum felt the timing was more appropriate than ever to put forth a more clearly defined mission that prioritizes not only education but inclusiveness and taking action as well.

"We didn't want to wait because of what's happening right now in the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise in anti-Semitism," Kean said, adding that incidents of anti-Semitic assault rose 56% from 2018 to 2019, according to a 2019 Anti-Defamation League audit. "We thought: 'Why not get started now?"

After the death of George Floyd, and as part of its new mission "to inspire humanity through truth," the museum launched a monthly Zoom conversation series, "Building Bridges," in partnership with other local organizations that, collectively, represent the African American, Latin American, Asian American and Jewish communities. One ofthe first guests was LAPD Chief Michel Moore. "We asked him tough questions about policy changes," Kean said.

Another reason to rebrand? "To amplify our voice," Kean said, "because a post [Holocaust] survivor world is right in front of us. We need to do a better job, we need to amplify our impact and do better at educating."

In April, the museum hosted a virtual remembrance ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of liberation and the end of the Holocaust.

On Oct. 21, the museum will mount a virtual gala, hosted by Melissa Rivers and featuring a slew of celebrities - Gal Gadot, Billy Crystal, Morgan Freeman, Jack Black, Sidney Poitier and Ben Stiller among them - each of whom will be seen in pre-recorded messages touching on the importance of combating hatred and bigotry. Proceeds from the event will go toward the museum's free, virtual educational programs.

"It's about 'how can we get our message across in these difficult times?' and this was a good opportunity," Kean said. "We're calling it '45 Minutes of Inspiration.'"

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Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust changes its name, putting history first

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The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust changes its name and logo to put history first and take a stand against hatred and intolerance.

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A Conversation article, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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A Conversation article, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is humility the most essential step in the search for truth?

KEY TERMS Polarized deadlock, Epistemic humility, Dangerous, Power holders, Certainty, Absolute truth, Open to being wrong

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A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone's conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure - why everything seems so irreparably wrong.

As religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of "epistemic humility," or intellectual humility - that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one's own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people's fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.

But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe epistemic humility presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening - and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.

Knowing you don't know

If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief - even though his friend had confirmed it with the Delphic oracle, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world.

This nascent humility - "No, get out of here, I'm definitely not the wisest" - helped spark what became arguably the greatest philosophical life of all time. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his " Apology of Socrates."

The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he "knew that he didn't know."

This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim.

This is the birth of "epistemic humility" in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one's blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.

Provoking the powerful

But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people - especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.

In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state's culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry were closely related to religion, and their creators were treated as mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral truth.

What's more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of "fail fast, fail better," with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.

By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief - whether it's belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.

Take Euthyphro, for example, one of Socrates' principal interlocutors. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.

Or take Meletus, the man who eventually brought Socrates to trial on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato's account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this "good patriot," as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.

It's frustrating to read the Platonic dialogues, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates' life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.

Paying the price

The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It's the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens' youth - the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.

He is brought up on two very serious charges. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger - which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods - again, he didn't do that; poets and playwrights did.

What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture's influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence.

Socrates taught that being humble about one's own views was a necessary step in searching for truth - perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians' sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.

"Humility like darkness," wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, " reveals the heavenly lights." Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one's ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do - as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the "heavenly light" about what we still don't fully understand.

Being humble about one's position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth - the idea of truth - matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.

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What Socrates' 'know nothing' wisdom can teach a polarized America

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Athens was deeply polarized over big-picture questions, and Socrates was never hesitant to question both sides' assumptions - or his own.

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A Big Think article and podcast, looking at how political partisanship can affect our ability to remember things accurately. 

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A Big Think article and podcast, looking at how political partisanship can affect our ability to remember things accurately. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does it argue that “memory is a tricky thing” and what examples does it give to support this? How does the phenomenon of false memories occur, and what relationship does this have with our cognitive ability - and how are we sometimes vulnerable to ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’? What effect can political partisanship have on our capability to recall past events objectively? Overall, do we need to escape our political affiliations in order to ensure our memory functions accurately?

Key terms False memories, Cognitive ability, Pseudo-profound bullshit, Partisanship

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Memory is a tricky thing. We like to believe our memory is accurate, but a lot of people (maybe you!) remember meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Only one problem: Bugs Bunny isn't a Disney character.

Darker versions of this phenomenon exist. The infamous case of " Sybil" - a woman diagnosed with multiple personality disorder - is considered by some to have been an instance of a shrink fostering false memories in a patient in the hope of getting good material for a book. George Orwell commented on the possible political use of false memory in his novel 1984, in which the population of Oceania incorrectly remembered that they were always at war with Eurasia, rather than Eastasia.

Now, a study published in Political Psychology looks into this phenomenon further and examines how partisanship influences false memories.

Politics ruins your memory

The researchers carried out two surveys on two different groups of test subjects. Each survey began with a section on the subjects' demographic, political, and psychological traits alongside a short cognitive ability test. The surveys then moved on to a series of vignettes describing events or policies that were either real, misattributed, or outright fabricated.

For example, a "misattributed" story described how Eric Holder (an official in the Obama administration) spoke with MSNBC about negative news coverage of the administration. This event didn't happen, but a similar one did: Bill Barr (a Trump administration official) met with Fox News president Rupert Murdoch. A "fabricated" story described how the Trump administration allowed waste to be dumped into the Great Lakes. Each survey included 18 stories like these.

The authors' most striking finding was that, while most respondents (correctly) did not recall events that did not occur, 30% of them did - and what they misremembered was suspiciously aligned with their political affiliation. For instance, Democratic test subjects were more likely to recall (incorrectly) that the Trump administration intentionally polluted the Great Lakes, while Republicans were more likely to recall (incorrectly) that Trump signed a particular G.I. bill (which was actually signed by Obama).

Why do we have false memories?

What causes false memories? By sifting through the data they collected, the authors found that false memories were linked to cognitive ability - or, rather, the lack thereof. Similarly, being prone to perceive " pseudo-profound bullshit " as deeply meaningful also predicted acceptance of false stories. Narcissism also plays a role; confidence and nonsense often go hand-in-hand.

Furthermore, the researchers found that partisanship influenced the recollection of false memories. Members of one political party were more likely to "remember" events that never happened, provided that the event made their party look good and the other party look bad.

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Politics ruins everything, including your memory

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A new study shows that political partisans are more likely to remember things that didn't happen - as long as it fits their narrative.

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A Guardian article, reporting that Lima’s mayor has shut a museum that promoted toleration and forgiveness of Peru’s violent past.

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A Guardian article, reporting that Lima’s mayor has shut a museum that promoted toleration and forgiveness of Peru’s violent past.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What has happened in Lima, and in what way is it part of a cultural battle going on in both Peru and other countries? What does this story reveal about the way our political (and religious) standpoints inform the way we interpret history? Should we try to rebalance this effect? Overall, offer students this quote: “Historical memory is a fundamental value of all democracies” What does this mean, and do you agree? Support your answer with reference to this or another example.

KEY TERMS Dialogue and reconciliation, Denial, False narrative, cultural battles, Power, Historical memory

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It was supposed to be a museum of memories: a place of dialogue and reconciliation where Peruvians could commemorate the victims of a brutal internecine conflict which killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and 1990s.

Since its controversial inception in 2015, the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion has received about 60,000 visitors a year.

But Lima's ultra-conservative mayor, Rafael López Aliaga, has now presided over the museum's closure in a move that human rights activists fear reflects a growing denial of the mass killings carried out by the armed forces in the conflict. The Mao-inspired Shining Path were not alone in committing atrocities.

The official reason for the sudden closure of the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion, known by its Spanish acronym Lum, was due to the museum's failure to meet municipal safety norms.

But López Aliaga, founder of the far-right National Renovation party and a member of the ultra-conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, has long voiced his opposition to the museum, which was opened eight years ago in the face of protests from far-right groups.

He has alleged that the Lum peddles a "false narrative" about the period of violence between 1980 and 2000 in which nearly 70,000 people were killed by both the Shining Path rebels and the armed forces, according to Peru's truth and reconciliation commission.

In January, the former presidential candidate said the museum was an "offense to the nation" and should be put under the control of the armed forces, insisting it was time to "take control of the narrative". The museum was closed last week by the municipality of Miraflores, a district of Lima whose mayor, Carlos Canales, also belongs to López Aliaga's political party.

"It took me by surprise," said Eduardo González Cueva, a Peruvian sociologist and human rights consultant working at the International Centre for Transitional Justice in New York. He believes the move fits into a wider trend of rightwing denialism of crimes committed by state forces in Latin America - and even the global push by radical conservatives to take control of cultural battles.

"López Aliaga is immersed in this kind of extremist position but he also knows that this is an act of opportunism that makes sense in terms of feeding the narrative of his base," he added.

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, a professor of Latin American history at the University of Kent, said the mayor's party had managed to "seize power at the local level ... in addition to coinciding with a weak government that is supported by the military and the most recalcitrant sectors of the right".

News of the closure came on the day that Amnesty International was due to launch a hard-hitting report at the Lum criticising the armed forces' disproportionate use of force in recent violent protests.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in the same week, Lima's mayor hosted the second annual meeting of the Foro de Madrid, organised by the thinktank of the far-right Spanish political party Vox.

The group, which claims its mission is to defend democracy in Latin America from the "threat of communism", praised Peru's government for deterring a supposed leftist destabilisation plan in recent months of unrest which claimed more than 67 lives.

"This is the current political juncture we are living in Peru right now," said González Cueva.

"Extremist positions can attempt to take over the narrative because the government has given itself to the public dissemination of extremist fantasies," he added.

In January, Peru's President Dina Boluarte barred Bolivia's former president Evo Morales from entering the country as she accused foreign interests of stirring up deadly protests in support of the jailed former president Pedro Castillo.

"Historical memory is a fundamental value of all democracies," tweeted the European Union in Peru last week, describing the Lum as a place where citizens could "inform themselves and reflect on what Peru suffered, so that it will never be repeated". Germany was the major donor for the museum's construction.

Peru's minister of culture, Leslie Urteaga, admitted other museums also lacked up-to-date safety certificates, although no others had been closed, and said her ministry was working with Miraflores's municipality to reopen the Lum as soon as possible.

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Mayor closes museum of memories in battle over story of Peru's violent past

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Far-right mayor claimed Lima institution peddled false narrative of 1980-2000 conflict in which guerrillas and army killed 70,000

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A Project Syndicate article by Ian Buruma, exploring the ‘history trap’ of using lazy parallels to understand the past. 

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A Project Syndicate article by Ian Buruma, exploring the ‘history trap’ of using lazy parallels to understand the past. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why is historical manipulation particularly common at the moment? To what extent are all sides responsible? What are the pros and cons of ‘detecting historical parallels’ in order to understand the world? What is the significance of the two quotes in the article, by George Santayana and LP Hartley? Overall, how can being aware that things never repeat themselves in the same way help us to avoid falling into the ‘history trap’?

Key terms History trap, Malicious distortion of history, Lazy parallels, Exploited and manipulated, Wrong conclusions, Ignorance

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An Atlantic article, exploring the extent to which strong leaders misuse history to consolidate their positions of power. 

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An Atlantic article, exploring the extent to which strong leaders misuse history to consolidate their positions of power. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Which examples does it give of leaders retelling the past in order to serve a current agenda? How credible are their versions of history? What methods do they use to control our understanding of the past? Why does the author draw on George Orwell when discussing these examples? As an extension, what further examples could students find of reconstructing historical narratives (perhaps from cultures and societies not controlled by autocrats)? Overall, how do students feel we can protect the truth about the past - or do they feel that such a thing does not exist?

Key terms False retelling, Autocratic rewriting of history, Historical nihilism, Credible, Absurd fiction, Official account, Truth

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The Russian leader's invasion of Ukraine is founded on a false retelling of history. He's not the only strongman revising the past.

Sitting in the basement of a community center in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, listening to shells being dropped all around us, I watched as a young woman sought to explain the violence to her son. "Who is bombing us?" she asked in Russian, before prompting, "Is it fascists?" The 4-year-old nodded vigorously. "Yes, yes," he said. "Yes, it is fascists."

It was January 2015. Russian-backed separatists had taken control of the city nine months earlier, declaring it the capital of their new Donetsk People's Republic. Yet fighting continued and the truth is, when we were in that basement, none of us knew who was responsible for the shelling: The Ukrainian army was dug in on the city's outskirts, and separatists were firing from positions close to us.

None, that is, but for the mother I saw speaking with her boy. By "fascists," she later told me, she was referring to Ukrainian government forces.

If you got your news from Russian state television, which many people in that predominantly Russian-speaking city and about 90 percent of Vladimir Putin's domestic audience did, there was no doubt about who was to blame: Viewers were told that the conflict in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk was the fault of a "fascist junta" that had seized power in Kyiv and the Western intelligence agencies who were pulling the strings. Russian media published innumerable stories about how these forces had plunged Ukraine into violence and chaos.

President Vladimir Putin's announcement this February that he was ordering Russian troops into Ukraine to carry out a "denazification" campaign-an absurd claim, given that, for a start, Ukraine's leader is Jewish and had relatives killed in the Holocaust-drew on those lies from years prior, lies that I saw warping reality in that basement in 2015. Then, I was Moscow correspondent for Britain's Sky News. Now I am based in Washington, D.C., for The New Statesman, but the memory of that moment has lingered. Listening to Putin's speech on the morning of his invasion, when he declared that he was saving innocents from "genocide" and compared his actions to the heroic struggle Russians waged during World War II, my initial response was disbelief. Then I realized I had heard this argument before.

The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries.

Yet we must not assume that this autocratic rewriting of history, driven largely by a desire to consolidate power, affects only a dictator's domestic population (though it does). In fact, these retellings matter far beyond, encompassing expansive territorial ambitions and aggressive foreign policies that threaten neighboring democracies, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan-and Ukraine-and whip up nationalist fervor against the United States and its allies.

As Putin is currently demonstrating, these questionable historical narratives in faraway autocracies are a problem for democracies too.

During his "re-education" in 1984, George Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, is asked to repeat the Party's slogan about the past. "Who controls the past controls the future," he responds obediently. "Who controls the present controls the past." Though their individual approaches to controlling that past differ significantly, Putin, Xi, and Kim share an obsession that Orwell would have recognized.

Since he first came to power more than two decades ago, Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to in Russia, to the status of a national religion and positioned himself as the heir to that legacy, and the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats. He calls the Ukrainian leadership "fascists" to remind his compatriots of the enemy they faced, insisting that they are confronting a resurgent menace.

He does not, however, invoke the terror and the strategic blunders that the country's wartime leader Joseph Stalin committed. Instead, Putin has sealed off the official version of history from scrutiny, passing new laws that make it a criminal offense to challenge the authorities' account or to question the true scale of Soviet heroism. He has also closed down independent organizations that sought to preserve the memory of Soviet-era atrocities. He is interested in remembering only the aspects of history that serve his current political needs.

In this, Putin shares the same outlook as Xi. They clearly both understand World War II's wider resonance, and the importance of maintaining firm control over their countries' histories more broadly. Xi has identified "historical nihilism," which essentially means anything that challenges the regime's version of history, as a crucial factor in the Soviet Union's collapse, and he has made plain that keeping a tight grip on history is essential to ensuring the future of the Chinese Communist Party's rule.

Like Putin, Xi has passed new laws to protect the party's version of history from scrutiny and silenced dissenting views. He has introduced new memorial days to commemorate World War II and followed the Russian leader's example in 2015 by staging a bombastic Victory Day military parade to mark the anniversary of the end of the war, the first time such an event had been held in Beijing, with Putin as his guest of honor. He has also extended the length of the war, moving the start date back to 1931 to incorporate what had previously been treated as a separate regional conflict with Japan. Though the change has a credible historical basis, the longer time frame also serves a useful political function by including the earlier period when Communist troops played a more active role in the fighting.

As Xi tells the story now, China fought first and for the longest of any of the Allied nations in the war. According to this version of history, Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries are the ones who rallied the population to fight back against the foreign aggressors and demonstrated why the party must always be in power, and why China must build up its military strength. I saw this weaponization of history in person while reporting from China: During a visit to a high school in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui in March 2018, 16-year-old Yang Yuzhe-one of an array of thoughtful, genuinely emotional teenagers in a history class I sat in on-told me of how she had thought "China was always a very strong country, but I didn't know the recent history." After studying China's modern history, however, Yang continued, "From then on, I knew that China must be strong again." Those views are echoed across much of Chinese social media today, as the country's rivalry with the United States grows and the leadership amplifies the idea that modern China must once again be prepared to fight back against its enemies.

Though China's version of history is at least credible, if tailored to serve the Communist Party's needs, across the border in North Korea, the Kim regime relies on an absurd fiction and outright lies. For three-quarters of a century, it has claimed victory in two great wars, insisting that its first president, Kim Il Sung-the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong Un-"liberated" the country from Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, when in fact he was in the Soviet Union at the time. He then apparently secured a subsequent "brilliant victory," over the United States in the Korean War in 1953, which in this version of the past, the U.S. and South Korea are said to have started.

The Kim family's fiction dominates daily life in North Korea. On a reporting trip there in 2016, I saw the enormous "Arch of Triumph" built in the heart of the capital, which is engraved with the date "1945" to commemorate the first Kim's purported victory over Japan. His grandson's top officials drive around in a fleet of gleaming black Mercedes with the prefix "727" on their license plates to mark the supposed victory over the U.S. on July 27, 1953, the date the Korean War armistice was signed. Even as many of his citizens regularly go hungry in his impoverished and isolated country, Kim has invested ample resources in rebuilding and substantially expanding the country's war museums. Preserving the regime's version of the past is evidently more important than providing for the population's basic needs.

"But how can you stop people remembering things?" asks Winston in 1984. "How can you control memory?" One might well ask the same question of Putin, Xi, and Kim and their own efforts to control the past. They cannot determine what individual citizens think or the individual memories they hold, but they can decide what is presented on the evening news and the information that is available on the internet, and they can make it dangerous to challenge the official line in public.

In Russia, now, it is illegal to call the war in Ukraine a war. Russian schoolchildren are being taught that their soldiers are " defenders of peace" who are " liberating" grateful civilians. Putin quotes from the Bible and invokes the Great Patriotic War to underline the righteousness of his cause as he insists that he is fighting " for a world without Nazism." There is evidence that this approach is working. The mayor of the Ukrainian town of Melitopol has recounted how, in March, he was abducted by Russian troops who told him they had come to "free Ukraine from Nazis." Russian soldiers scrawled the words for the children on a missile that hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk-a grim irony, as that very strike killed children among the many evacuees who were waiting for a train. Xi and Kim must be encouraged by how well Putin's popular support and his propaganda have held up. And that could set a very dangerous precedent, not just for those who live in these societies, but for those on the receiving end of more aggressive policies abroad-people who live in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the countries that surround the South China Sea.

The impulse to rewrite history and appeal to glorious myths to rally popular support is not limited to autocrats. But the real danger arises when the official account becomes the only permitted version of history, as is now the case in Russia, China, and North Korea. Though the leaders of these regimes differ in their approach to the past, all three claim that it is their nation that is under threat, and that they must strengthen their military capabilities and ramp up their political control to defend their citizens.

"Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth," Winston is told in Orwell's novel. The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea take a similar view, and that has consequences for all of us.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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mayor of the ukrainian town of melitopol

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Putin Isn't the Only Autocrat Misusing History

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The Russian leader's invasion of Ukraine is founded on a false retelling of history. He's not the only strongman revising the past.

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A Conversation article, examining the history behind Russia’s claim that they have entered Ukraine in order to rid it of Nazism. 

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A Conversation article, examining the history behind Russia’s claim that they have entered Ukraine in order to rid it of Nazism. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What claims have been made to justify the invasion of Ukraine? How do these stand up to historical scrutiny? What else do we learn about the present conflict by looking at the past? What role does the selection of evidence play in our understanding of the past? Do students think that it is possible to understand politics and current events without a full understanding of history?

Key terms Justifies, Selective telling of the past

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Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a " denazification " of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to "protect people" who had been "subjected to bullying and genocide ... for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine."

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine's new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin's authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine's Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom " Servant of the People," from which his party's name was derived.

AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was " an ordinary Soviet Jewish family" was barely noted during the election. "Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it," he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky's election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. " How could I be a Nazi?" Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. "Explain it to my grandfather."

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups - Russians, Jews, and Poles - broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland's borders.

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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin's selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state's historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

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Putin's claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history

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A Holocaust historian explains why Ukrainian history needs to be understood in terms of both past violence against Jews as well as the state's pluralistic vision.

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A History Today article, looking at how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is as much about the past as it is about the present. 

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A History Today article, looking at how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is as much about the past as it is about the present. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does the article reveal about the close relationship between the two countries, and does that help clarify what’s going on? How far back do we need to go to understand a conflict? Does history only ever serve as a way of justifying contemporary agendas and points-of-view, or can it be used to provide an objective view of the present? Finally, what does Emmerson mean when he says, “history can be a kind of territory” - and how does this relate to both the current crisis, and other conflicts going on around the world?

Key terms Perceptions of history, Gospel truth, Historical perspective, Narrative, Contested, Justify, Emotional resonance, Legitimacy

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'.

I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people. One was decorated with an impressionistic painting of the 2004 Orange Revolution. I bought both. I doubt very much they were immediately replaced.

'Looking under Russia' is, perhaps, an appropriate metaphor for Ukrainian history.

Since the Pereiaslav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, Ukraine has only enjoyed statehood independent from Russia at moments of extreme geopolitical dislocation, such as in the final days of the First World War, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Russian nationalists today appear to view Ukrainian independence as a similar aberration, the consequence of what Vladimir Putin labelled the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Old habits die hard. For many Russians, Ukraine is like a phantom limb still felt to be there long after its amputation. The idea that Ukraine is really a nation at all strikes some Russians as odd. To the extent that perceptions of history condition politics, understanding the Russian view of Ukrainian history - and the Ukrainian view of Ukrainian history - is essential.

Though wrong, the idea that Ukrainian history is really just an annex of the sumptuous many-roomed mansion of Russian history is common. To some degree it is understandable. Ukraine and Russia have shared triumph and tragedy from the birth of Kyivan/Kievan Rus (the first proto-Russian state) through the wars against the Poles in the 17th century to bloody struggle against fascism in the 20th.

Shared beliefs

The historical links between the two countries, ancient and modern, are manifold and profound. The Orthodox churches of Ukraine and Russia share a patron saint - St. Vladmir or St. Volodmyr - whose statue (spelt the Ukrainian way) stands proudly on a street corner in west London. On the edge of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, a huge concrete museum complex inaugurated in the early 1980s commemorates the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Outside, a silvery figure of a woman, 200 feet tall, holds a sword aloft in one hand, and a shield with the emblem of the Soviet Union in the other. This is a memorial to shared sacrifice - eight million Ukrainians died in the war - and a shared victory. Seventy years after the end of the war, and nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such narratives are still powerful.

For a long time, Russians saw Ukrainians as being little more than country bumpkin relatives. Theories of Slavic ethnogenesis described the two peoples as siblings born of the same Slavic womb: the 'Great Russians' (Russians) on one hand and the 'Little Russians' (Ukrainians) on the other. Ukrainian literature, which began to emerge in the 19th century, was patronisingly viewed as the picturesque product of a peasant society, essentially subordinate to Russia's own literary canon, even when it produced such great poets as Taras Shevchenko. The fact that the flowering of Ukrainian national culture was strongest in western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made some Russians dismiss the whole thing as an anti-Russian ruse sponsored by external forces, a familiar refrain to those heard today.

In the Soviet period the idea of Ukrainian nationhood was viewed with similar suspicion, now additionally freighted with suggestions it was intrinsically counter-revolutionary. In April 1918, as Russia imploded in revolution, a conservative German-backed regime was set up in Kyiv. Its leader Pavlo Skoropadsky revived the title of Hetman, an ancient Cossack military title last held by a man who had died aged 112 in 1803, in a remote Russian monastery which the Soviets would subsequently turn into a gulag. Later, in the Great Patriotic War, some Ukrainians signed up with the Germans to fight the Soviets - some even joined the SS. Nationalist anti-Soviet actions continued into the 1950s - providing the basis in historical memory for the contemporary lumping together of even moderate Ukrainian nationalists with right-wing extremists as 'fascists' and 'bandits'.

In the Soviet era Ukrainian national identity was never completely subsumed into Russian or Soviet identity. Sometimes this could be useful to the Soviet state. In 1939, when Galicia, Volhynia and Bukovyna were annexed to Soviet Ukraine as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin's co-invasion of Poland, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet sent this message to Stalin: 'Having been divided, having been separated for centuries by artificial borders, the great Ukrainian people are reunited forever in a single Ukrainian republic'. In 1945, professions that Ukraine was not a Soviet vassal but in fact an independent Communist state allowed Ukraine to join the United Nations as a founder member alongside the USSR, thus giving Moscow an extra vote in UN proceedings.

Defining borders

The process through which the borders of modern Ukraine were defined, both in the west and on the Black Sea, was part and parcel of Russia's own headlong expansion through three centuries of Eurasian history. In the 1700s and 1800s, as the Russian geopolitical imagination became obsessed with the idea of turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake - perhaps even going so far as to seize control of Constantinople/Istanbul - the Ottoman Empire was bloodily and repeatedly pushed back from its redoubts on the northern side of the Black Sea. The Ukrainian provinces were the territorial beneficiaries. The country became ever more tightly integrated into the economics and politics of the growing Russian empire, serving as its breadbasket, and as its route to the sea.

At the end of the 18th century, German-born Catherine the Great founded the port of Odessa - and its hinterland of New Russia - with the help of a Spanish-Irish Neapolitan and, later, a French aristocrat. The city filled with Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews. Pushkin was sent there as punishment, and promptly started an affair with the wife of the city's Russian governor. Among countless others, Odessa would ultimately produce Trotsky and Akhmatova, two titans of Russian politics and culture, before becoming the site of some of the worst massacres of the Holocaust.

Further east, through war, colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, Crimea, the last remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde, was turned into the finest jewel in the Russian Empire. As proverbial pleasure garden for late imperial flings (as recounted by Anton Chekhov), then fantasy holiday camp for Soviet factory managers and key to Russia's southern flank (as base of the Black Sea fleet) Crimea became firmly embedded in Russians' psychological geography as their own private playground. Less than a century after the Tsars had conquered it, Stalin chose Crimea as the place to redraw the map of Europe once more in 1945.

Nine years later, when former Ukrainian party boss Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav/Pereyslav treaty, there was no thought that the internal borders of the Soviet Union would ever become international borders. It was only in 1991, as a result of an attempted coup (which took place, ironically enough, while Mikhail Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea) that the peninsula spun out of the ultimate control of Moscow, with the Soviet superstructure itself being legislated out of existence.

The idea that Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine essentially by accident is gospel truth among Russian politicians. It is but a short step to view Ukrainian possession of Crimea as historically illegitimate. And therein lies the beginnings of a dangerous game. What happens next? Perhaps Ukrainian independence itself, or that of the Baltic states, is equally seen as the consequence of a set of historical circumstances which some might now like to reverse.

A Ukrainian narrative

Where does a concern for history shade into revanchism? And how far does one's historical perspective extend back into the past? Visions of the Crimea as eternally Russian wilfully forget the Muslim population which Russian and then Soviet power displaced and deported - sometimes violently, always tragically, and with little historical recognition. As late as the turn of the last century, before the cataclysms of the 20th, the Crimean Tatars represented nearly half the people of Crimea. Khrushchev recognised the deportation of the Tatars as one of Stalin's crimes in his famous 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress. It was not until the 1990s that many were able to come back.

Russia's version of Ukrainian history, wrapped up in its own narrative of imperial rise and fall, from the Romanovs to the Soviets, helps explain Moscow's attitude towards its southern neighbour - not in terms of objective interests, though these are real enough, but in terms of emotion, in terms of who is right and who is wrong. What makes things truly bad, from the Russian perspective, is that Ukrainians by and large no longer share the Russian interpretation of their history. The past looks different these days from Kyiv (still more from Lviv). Instead of Ukrainians cherishing their supporting role in Russia's geopolitical greatness - which essentially means the power and prestige of the state - Ukrainians have come to cherish alternative narratives of their history, based around freedom and resistance. Rediscovering their past has been a critical part of asserting Ukrainian independence. Accepting the possibility of multiple histories, not just one, is a hallmark of democracy.

Episodes once viewed as the historical glue of the Russo-Ukrainian relationship have become contested. While Russians tend to see the Pereislav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654 as a moment of reunification for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, many Ukrainians see the same treaty as a temporary alliance between military leaders which the Russians subsequently interpreted to their advantage. In 2009, on the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava - perhaps the most important battle in Russia's 18th century history - then-President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko was blasted by Russia for suggesting that the Ukrainians who fought with the Swedes against the victorious forces of Russian Tsar Peter the Great were true patriots.

Similarly, while the famines of the early 20th century used to be viewed as a common experience of Soviet suffering, even as part of the forging of the Soviet industrial miracle, some now argue that the famines were, in effect, a Moscow-led assault on Ukrainians in particular. Some go so far as to suggest genocidal intent. The incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union in 1939 can still be seen in its traditional light: as the re-unification of the Ukraine under Soviet leadership. But for the old aged pensioners of Lviv - and increasingly for their grandchildren - it may be remembered as the beginning of a 50-year Russian occupation. And while Ukrainian nationalists in the Great Patriotic War used to be roundly condemned as nothing more than opportunistic, antisemitic fascist lowlifes - which some of them no doubt were - more savoury elements may now be rehabilitated, as in the modern Baltic states, as patriots caught in a vice between the equivalent totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. Some Ukrainians make what is, for many Russians, a sacrilegious parallel: Putin as Hitler.

For both Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of Ukrainian history is personal. As in all borderlands, the contradictions and complexities of the tangled past are reproduced over and over in the stories of families and in the identities of individuals. For the governments in Moscow and in Kyiv, history is political too. Narratives of the past can be spun to justify, oppose or defend different courses of action in the present. History can be a tool of influence - a tool of long-term psychological warfare even - used to manipulate the here-and-now, to give added emotional resonance to geopolitical imperatives or to claims of political legitimacy.

Bluntly put, history can be a kind of territory. In Ukraine, it is not just the country's land which is being tussled over. It is the country's past as well. If Russia and Ukraine are to live as respectful neighbours side by side, they will have to find a way to live with each other's history too.

Charles Emmerson is the author of Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 (Bodley Head, 2019).

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'. I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people.

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This Guardian article considers how denial about the facts of the Srebrenica massacre are gaining ground. 

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This Guardian article considers how denial about the facts of the Srebrenica massacre are gaining ground. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why, first of all, are some people trying to create a ‘new historical reality’ about what happened? Should such accounts be ‘cancelled’? To what extent are the divided politics responsible for the way this event is viewed and understood? Bigger questions that we might arrive at include, can we ever access the truth about the past? Or is history always subject to bias?

Key terms Truth, Biased, Fabricated myth, New historical reality, Cancel culture, Divided politics

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At the genocide memorial centre outside Srebrenica, thousands of simple white gravestones stretch across the gently inclined hillside for as far as the eye can see.

Nearby, over a number of days in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys. It was the worst crime of the Bosnian war, and remains the only massacre on European soil since the second world war to be ruled a genocide.

Even today, remains of victims are still being found and identified. Owing to a cover-up operation to hide the crimes by digging up and dispersing the contents of mass graves, there are cases in which partial remains of the same individual have been found at as many as five sites several miles apart. At a 25th anniversary commemoration on Saturday, at least eight more victims will finally be laid to rest at the cemetery.

A quarter of a century after the events, however, the truth about what happened at Srebrenica is being subjected to a growing chorus of denial, starting in Bosnia itself and echoing around the world, moving from the fringes of the far right into mainstream discourse.

Coffins containing remains of newly identified victims before their burial. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

In Srebrenica, the denial starts with the mayor. The current population of around 7,000 is one-fifth of the pre-war total, and there are now more Serbs than Bosniaks, a reversal of the situation before the war and genocide. Four years ago, Srebrenica elected its first Serb mayor, Mladen Grujičić, and official rhetoric changed overnight.

Grujičić, 38, an energetic former chemistry teacher, has no time for talk of genocide. "No Serb would deny that Bosniaks were killed here in horrible crimes ... but a genocide means the deliberate destruction of a people. There was no deliberate attempt to do that here," he said in an interview at his office in the centre of Srebrenica.

He was 10 when the war started. His father was killed during the war in a village not far from Srebrenica. Grujičić pointed out that there were victims on all sides during the conflict, which tore apart multi-ethnic Bosnia after the collapse of Yugoslavia.

But what about the international courts that have forensically sifted the evidence and come to the conclusion that the systematic slaughter around Srebrenica in July 1995 did constitute genocide, unlike other crimes during the war? "Unfortunately, all these courts have been biased against the Serbs and this has only deepened divisions here," he shrugged. He has not once during his time in office visited the genocide memorial, which is a five-minute drive from the town hall.

Mladen Grujičić, the Srebrenica mayor. Photograph: Elvis Barukcic/AFP/Getty Images

His views are in line with those of most Serb politicians in Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity that makes up half of Bosnia's complicated post-war political system. Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, has called the Srebrenica genocide "a fabricated myth", and the Republika Srpska authorities have set up a commission to investigate the events. Its report, due later this year, is expected to whitewash the crimes of Bosnian Serb forces.

"This is the next phase, even worse than genocide denial: to try to create a new historical reality," said Serge Brammertz, who spent nearly a decade as chief prosecutor at the UN international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.The tribunal convicted the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić and the military commander Ratko Mladić of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mladić's appeal is still under way.

The genocide has long been an inspiration for far-right extremists and Islamophobes. The Christchurch mosque attacker last year played a song glorifying Karadžić just prior to the assault, and years earlier Anders Breivik also sought inspiration in the Balkan wars and Serb ultra-nationalism.

Recently, however, questioning the genocide has been gaining more mainstream approval. Most infuriating for survivors was the award of last year's Nobel prize for literature to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. He had delivered a eulogy at the funeral of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and made a number of revisionist statements about the events of the Bosnian war that have led to accusations of genocide denial.

Remains found in a mass grave in the eastern village of Kamenica, believed to have been transferred from Srebrenica. Photograph: Danilo Krstanovic/Reuters

In a press conference before the prize-giving ceremony, when Handke was asked whether he accepted that the Srebrenica massacre had happened, he dodged the question, calling it "empty and ignorant" and comparing it to hate mail he said he had received containing soiled toilet paper.

Emir Suljagić, who runs the sombre genocide memorial centre at Potočari, just outside Srebrenica, said: "I am not a fan of cancel culture but if there's one thing that should cancel you, surely it's genocide denial, it's speaking at Milošević's funeral."

The memorial centre is located in the former headquarters of the Dutch UN battalion that in July 1995 failed to protect the people gathered in Srebrenica, which had been declared a UN safe zone. Suljagić, who survived because he worked as a translator for the mission, spoke of the trauma for returnees who have to live in places where the crimes took place. He told a story from his years working as a journalist, covering war crimes trials in The Hague.

Suljagić was watching two former Bosnian Serb soldiers give evidence against their commander at one trial. The men testified under pseudonyms and with their voice and appearance altered, but as they recounted their role in a massacre, Suljagić pieced together their identities from information given to the court. He had been to school with both of them. He assumed they had been given immunity for their role in the massacre in exchange for testifying against their commander.

"Nine years later, I'm in the parking lot of the local supermarket and one of those guys comes out and recognises me and says: 'Hi, how are you doing?' They both live locally. And I'm thinking: 'Do I tell him? Do I tell him I know?' In the end, I said nothing, but I still see them occasionally."

An aerial view of the memorial centre. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

With survivors and perpetrators living side by side, and given the country's divided politics, it is hard to imagine closure and reconciliation coming soon. Hasan Hasanović, who lost his twin brother and his father in the genocide, said it would be possible to talk about progress when school trips of Serb pupils come to tour the genocide memorial, where he works as a guide.

Schooling, like so much in Bosnia, is still divided along ethnic lines. Pupils are split into separate classes for "national subjects" such as history, and while the Bosniak textbooks cover the genocide, the Serb textbooks gloss it over. There is little hope of a unified curriculum in the country in the foreseeable future. "The main nationalist parties that continue to benefit from social division have no interest in changing a divisive status quo," said Valery Perry, of the Democratization Policy Council in Sarajevo.

At Srebrenica's elementary school, teachers avoid discussing the war at all, said the headmaster, Dragi Jovanović. "Even adults, when we sit together, we simply do not touch these topics ... We are trying not to hurt people's feelings, and at this point you can't educate the children without hurting their feelings," he said.

How, then, would he respond to a pupil who asked why there was such a vast cemetery on the outskirts of town? "I have never been asked such a question," he said.

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Genocide denial gains ground 25 years after Srebrenica massacre

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Even as remains continue to be identified, denialism is moving from far-right fringe into mainstream

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A CNN article, asserting that Xi Jinping is rewriting history in order to consolidate his own position as leader of China. 

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A CNN article, asserting that Xi Jinping is rewriting history in order to consolidate his own position as leader of China. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A good starting point (of course) is the Orwell quote at the end of the article - "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." This is sometimes difficult to make sense of, so what does it mean, and can students think of any examples? Then move onto the article - how does this align to Orwell’s words? What does it reveal about the relationship between politics and history, and the manipulation of the latter by those involved in the former? What challenges does this indicate for those seeking the truth about the past? Check out this article from the New Yorker, looking at the same issue.

Key terms Curated, Control over narratives

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Editor's Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

As Chinese leader Xi Jinping looks set to seeka third term in power, he is seemingly preoccupied with the past, not the future.

When more than 300 members of China's political elite gather in Beijing this week their main task will be to review a draft history resolution that defines the ruling Communist Party's "major achievements and historical experiences" since its founding 100 years ago.

The agenda of the most crucial Central Committee meeting before the twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle next fall is carefully and deliberately chosen. It speaks of the importance Xi attaches to party history, and his own place in it.

In some ways, that obsession with history can be seen as rooted in a tradition dating back to ancient China. For centuries, Chinese imperial courts appointed historiographers to document the rise of an emperor, which often involved compiling - and rewriting - the history of his predecessor.

To the Chinese Communist Party, history - or rather, certain curated versions of it - can be extremely useful.

China's alleged "historical claims" to disputed territories and waters, for instance, have been used by Beijing to bolster its case for contemporary sovereignty, while the narrative attached to the so-called "century of humiliation" by foreign powers - from the First Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 - has become a central source of legitimacy for the party.

In the eyes of the party's leaders, losing control over these narratives can bring disastrous consequences. The collapse of the Soviet Union - a stern cautionary tale cited time and again by Xi - is in part attributed to " historical nihilism," or the ruling elite's rejection of Soviet heritage.

As a result, the Chinese Communist Party vigilantly guards its own history - by airbrushing the darker chapters of its tumultuous past and erasing particularly sensitive episodes from public memory.

But the upcoming "history resolution" is not only about reshaping the party's past. More importantly, it's a way for Xi to codify his authority and supremacy in the present - and project his long-lasting power and influence into the future.

Since its founding, the party has only issued two such resolutions, put forward by Xi's two most powerful predecessors - Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

Mao's resolution in 1945 established him as the unchallenged authority within the party, after a three-year "rectification" campaign that brutally purged his political and ideological opponents. Deng's resolution in 1981, meanwhile, acknowledged Mao's errors in launching the Cultural Revolution - a political campaign that plunged the country into a decade of chaos and torment (although it concluded that Mao's contributions to the Chinese revolution "far outweighed" his mistakes). But by admittingtoand moving on from past mistakes, Deng was able to usher in a new era of reform and opening up.

By issuing his own resolution, Xi seeks to further entrench his status as a towering leader on the same level as Mao and Deng. Already, he has managed to establish his own eponymous political theory and have it written into the party's constitution, a privilege previously only reserved for Mao and Deng.

Xi sees himself as responsible for taking on the mantle of Mao and Deng's epoch-making legacies, brushing past his two immediate predecessors. In that version of party history, Mao led China to "stand up" against the bullying by foreign powers, Deng helped the Chinese people to "get rich," and Xi is now leading the country on a triumphant path to "become strong."

And to continue to do that, the rationale goes, he needs to stay in power for at least a third term, to steer the country through what he terms the "window of opportunity" for China to catch up with - if not surpass - the West in national strength.

For now, few details about the resolution are known - barring the expectation that it will most likely be passed by party elites this week. The document's title indicates a more celebratory and forward-looking tone than the previous two resolutions, which focused on clarifying the problems or mistakes of the immediate past.

But regardless of the finer details, the consensus among political observers is that the resolution will further cement Xi's authority and place him firmly at the helm of the party for the foreseeable future.

"The essential function of all of this verbiage, make no mistake, will center on the person and power of Xi Jinping, defining his leadership as the way forward, on the basis of an understanding of history that defines his core agenda," wrote David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

As George Orwell's famous quote from "1984" puts it: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

And for Xi, it seems like he's about to control all three, at least for now.

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Xi Jinping is rewriting history. But it's the future he wants to leave his mark on | CNN

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Editor's Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping looks set to seeka third term in power, he is seemingly preoccupied with the past, not the future.

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A Conversation article, exploring what it means that the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight. 

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A Conversation article, exploring what it means that the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and why was it set up? What determines the position of the hands on the Doomsday Clock? What does the article mean when it says the Clock doesn’t represent an objective risk assessment, it represents a ‘vibe’?  To wrap up: How should we measure and express existential threats to humanity?

KEY TERMS Visual metaphor, Sense of urgency, Vibe, Powerful image, Subjective, Inspire

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Once every year, a select group of nuclear, climate and technology experts assemble to determine where to place the hands of the Doomsday Clock.

Presented by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor for humanity's proximity to catastrophe. It measures our collective peril in minutes and seconds to midnight, and we don't want to strike 12.

In 2023, the expert group brought the clock the closest it has ever been to midnight: 90 seconds. On January 23 2024, the Doomsday Clock was unveiled again, revealing that the hands remain in the same precarious position.

No change might bring a sigh of relief. But it also points to the continued risk of catastrophe. The question is, how close are we to catastrophe? And if so, why?

Destroyer of worlds

The invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 ushered in a new era: the first time humanity had the capability to kill itself.

Later that year, Albert Einstein, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists, established the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in the hope of communicating to the public about the new nuclear age and the threat it posed.

Two years on, the Bulletin, as it came to be known, published its first magazine. And on the cover: a clock, with the minute hand suspended eerily only seven minutes from midnight.

The artist Martyl Langsdorf sought to communicate the sense of urgency she had felt from scientists who had worked on the bomb, including her physicist husband, Alexander. The placement was, to her, an aesthetic choice: "It seemed the right time on the page ... it suited my eye."

Thereafter, Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch was the gears behind the clock's hands until his passing in 1973, when the board of experts took over.

The clock has been moved 25 times since, particularly in response to the ebb and flow of military buildups, technological advancement and geopolitical dynamics during the Cold War.

Nuclear risk did not abate after the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as the total number of nuclear weapons shrank. And new threats have emerged that pose catastrophic risk to humanity. The latest setting of the clock attempts to gauge this level of risk.

A precarious world

In the words of Bulletin president and chief executive Rachel Bronson:

Make no mistake: resetting the Clock at 90 seconds to midnight is not an indication that the world is stable. Quite the opposite.

The Bulletin cited four key sources of risk: nuclear weapons, climate change, biological threats, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

Two ongoing conflicts - Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Palestine - involve nuclear-weapon states. Longstanding bulwarks of nuclear stability, such as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and Russia, are barely functional. North Korea and Iran retain their nuclear ambitions. And China is quickly growing and modernising its nuclear arsenal.

The impacts of climate change are worsening, as the world suffers through its hottest years on record. Six of nine planetary boundaries are beyond their safe levels. And we are likely to fall short of the goal set by the Paris climate agreement - keeping temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Dramatic climatic disruptions are a real possibility.

The COVID pandemic revealed the global impacts of a biological threat. Engineered pandemics, created using synthetic bioengineering (and perhaps soon aided by AI tools), could be more viral and lethal than any natural disease. Add to the challenge the continued presence of biological weapons programs around the world, and the shifting disease risk due to the effects of climate change, and biothreats will be a regular battlefront for many countries.

Finally, the Bulletin recognised the risk that comes with advances in AI. While some AI experts have raised the prospect of AI itself being an existential threat, AI is also a threat multiplier for nuclear or biological weapons. And AI could be a vulnerability multiplier. Through AI-enabled disinformation, democracies might struggle to function, especially when dealing with other catastrophic threats.

Subjective and imprecise, but does that matter?

The Doomsday Clock has its detractors. Critics argue that the setting of the clock is based on subjective judgements, not a quantitative or transparent methodology. What's more, it is not a precise measurement. What does "90 seconds to midnight" actually mean?

With the clock now set at its highest ever level, it naturally brings into question why we face greater risk than, say, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What would it take to get closer than 90 seconds to midnight?

Read more: Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, but can we really predict the end of the world?

Fundamentally, these criticisms are accurate. And there are plenty of ways the clock could be technically improved. The Bulletin should consider them. But the critics also miss the point.

The Doomsday Clock is not a risk assessment. It's a metaphor. It's a symbol. It is, for lack of a better term, a vibe.

A powerful image of nebulous threats

From the very beginning, when seven minutes to midnight "suited the eye", the Doomsday Clock was an emotional and visceral response to the nuclear moment. Which is why it has become a powerful image, drawing the eyes of the world every year.

Global catastrophic threats are nebulous and complex and overwhelming. With just four dots and two hands, the Doomsday Clock captures the sense of urgency like few images can.

There are better and more actionable ways to assess risk. A handful of countries, for example, conduct national risk assessments. These are formal and regular processes by which governments assess a range of threats to the country, prioritising them on a quantitative scale and building response plans for the highest risk vectors. More countries should conduct these assessments, and be sure to catalogue global catastrophic threats.

Or take the World Economic Forum's annual Global Risk Report. Based on a survey of around 1,500 experts from across academia, business, government and civil society, it captures the greatest perceived threats over the following two and ten years. Following a similar method, the United Nations is currently conducting its own survey of global risk.

The Doomsday Clock does not replace efforts to understand and assess the greatest threats we face. If anything, it should inspire them.

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The Doomsday Clock is still at 90 seconds to midnight. But what does that mean?

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The Doomsday Clock is not a precise risk assessment, it's a flawed but powerful metaphor for the catastrophic risk humanity faces

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How is AI affecting the way we interact with democracy?

KEY TERMS Truth and trust, Information ecosystems, Verified information, Facilitate dialogue, Incentives, Distrusted information

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he YouTube clip I return to most often is David Bowie being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 1999. Bowie is talking about what the internet might do: "I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think that the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying."

"It's just a tool, isn't it?" condescends Paxman. "It's an alien life form," insists Bowie. "Is there life on Mars? Yes, and it's just landed here."

At the time of that Bowie interview I was writing a university dissertation titled Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace: the Challenge the Internet Poses to the Constitution of the United States. It was a heady time. The peak of internet utopia, with tech idealists promising that the decentralising nature of the internet would radically reform power dynamics, and democracy could be reborn.

Fast forward 25-odd years and we know the opposite has happened: truth and trust have been eroded, democracy has failed to reform for the digital age and the relationship between those in power and those who elect them is strained to breaking point. It's at this moment that we are seeing the proliferation of generative AI, and understandably the response has been a mixture of hysteria and hope.

The hysteria about killer robots risks masking the real societal impacts that industrial revolutions inevitably have, sifting winners and losers, and disrupting ways of living in more subtle and sometimes pernicious ways. But there is hope for democracy in the AI revolution - if we put the right guardrails around it.

If we make AI work for democracy, then in 10 years' time our information ecosystems could be vastly improved to support democratic decision-making. We could train AI to value verified information, and serve it in ways that make the most complex information more accessible to more people.

Jim Knight, then minister of schools, launches a technology campaign in a London school in 2008. Photograph: Adrian Brooks/Imagewise/PA Wire/PA Photos

Politicians could be more trusted to do the right thing by people, because they've learned new ways to involve people in decision-making. AI citizens' assemblies could help people and politicians to navigate through the trade-offs required to tackle the big problems. These concepts are not entirely outlandish. Polis is one such tool, developed in the US and used to shape policies most extensively in Taiwan, including to design regulation for Uber. Deceptively simple, Polis maps people's views according to consensus, rather than division, and gives people options to suggest policy ideas. In the UK, we at Demos have worked with the Cabinet Office on Polis projects to engage experts and the public in the 2021 integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy. Andrew Gray, an independent candidate in July's Selby and Ainsty byelection, is using it to power all his policies, declaring himself the first AI-powered politician.

In a decade's time we could repair the relationship between state and citizen. It could facilitate dialogue between MPs and constituents, enabling elements of direct democracy to supplement our representative system. AI could also allow for the better use of citizens' data to target public services, interventions and support people on a more human level. AI could be used to guide people to access help from the state.

But this will only happen if we make it happen. Because right now the incentives to develop generative AI are all commercial, with investors steering the development of the technology in ways that threaten to further leave democracy behind - not least because the talent, expertise and infrastructure follows the money, rather than where it could be used for common good.

The Labour peer Jim Knight, who has been close to the latest digital bills going through parliament, makes a startling point: there are four legislative processes regarding digital under way at the moment, if you include the AI white paper published earlier this year. None of them mention protecting or promoting democracy as an explicit aim. Instead, they are concerned with online safety, digital markets and data protection. Democracy is the elephant in the room.

Without focusing explicitly on the potential for AI to improve democracy - or at least do no harm - it will most probably corrupt. Distrusted information will proliferate, further eroding trust. But without explicitly updating our democracy to encompass more participatory activities that could be facilitated through these technologies, we will increasingly be left in a system that is centuries out of date, trying to govern in a world that moves at completely different speeds and in completely different ways. We have to learn this time.

Polly Curtis is chief executive of the cross-party thinktank Demos

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Artificial intelligence is powering politics - but it could also reboot democracy | Polly Curtis

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Generative AI can involve citizens directly in decision-making, but not while developers' incentives are only financial, says Polly Curtis, chief executive of Demos

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A New Humanist article, exploring the implications of voters in a democracy “getting it wrong”. 

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A New Humanist article, exploring the implications of voters in a democracy “getting it wrong”. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do we understand politics more objectively if we accept the concept of ‘false consciousness’?

KEY TERMS Propaganda and outright deception, Irrational, Truths, False consciousness, Power, Systematic falsehoods, Explanation

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When politicians use propaganda and outright deception, we must acknowledge that voters cannot always make the right decision at the ballot box

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A Conversation article, questioning the popular perception of Buddhism as a religion devoted solely to peace. 

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A Conversation article, questioning the popular perception of Buddhism as a religion devoted solely to peace. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Are students surprised by its links to violence - such as the large number of Buddhists in the British army? How has our understanding of Buddhism been shaped by colonization and the ‘framing’ of its identity? Thinking more broadly, is our understanding and awareness of world religions based on image or reality? Is this a problem - and if so, how can we overcome it?

KEY TERMS Reputation, Framing, Stereotype, Generalisations

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When teaching an undergraduate class on "Buddhism and Violence", I usually start by asking students to rank religious groups in the order of how many followers they have in the British army. Typically Christians are at the top of students' lists and Buddhists at the bottom.

This reflects an unconscious bias many of these students have regarding Buddhism - they assume that all Buddhists are peaceful and that a Buddhist isn't likely to embrace a career that may well involve violence at some point.

So they're always surprised to find out that there are more Buddhists in the British Army than Muslims and Sikhs put together - despite the relatively small number of Buddhists in Britain.

But why do so many people in the west associate Buddhism with peace?

According to historian Professor Jonathan Walters, the roots lie with colonialism and Christian missionaries. In encountering different beliefs among colonised peoples, missionaries adopted a strategy of framing other religions in such a way that Christianity could be presented as superior and attractive.

In their eyes Islam was too aggressive and focused on strict adherence to rules. Buddhism was too other-worldly, pacifist, and passive to the point of stagnation. Christianity was placed in the Goldilocks spot between the two.

The framing still has serious traction and leads to a certain cognitive dissonance when, for example, Buddhists make the headlines for the wrong reasons.

Avoiding "onslaught on living beings" and instead cultivating loving-kindness towards them is at the heart of Buddhist ethics; it's the first of five moral precepts, and the one that you have to take if you opt to take any of them at all. The Buddha discouraged violence and counselled kings to find alternative ways of resolving problems. Selling weapons is considered an inappropriate livelihood for a Buddhist.

Buddhist violence

But Buddhists have been involved in violent conflicts pretty much since the religion first emerged. Justifications for such actions have typically been based on defending the Dharma (the Buddhist teachings), occasionally demonising or dehumanising the enemy to make it less karmically wrong to kill them.

A particularly uncomfortable example of this is found in the fifth century Sri Lankan quasi-mythological Mahavamsa chronicle, in which monks reassure a king that out of the millions he'd just slaughtered only two were Buddhists and the others were more like animals than humans.

When it comes to "Buddhist violence", as with any perceived religious conflicts, religion is only one factor in a complex situation. Often ethnic identity is the real issue - it just happens that one of the ethnic groups in question has historical Buddhist affiliations, the others do not.

At one point the Sri Lankan conflict of 1983-2009 saw three different civil wars playing out at once, as much as anything along ethnic and political lines: Sinhalese vs Tamils, Sinhalese extremists vs the Sinhalese government, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam vs other Tamil militant groups.

While it was not as simple as Buddhists, Muslims, and Tamil Hindus fighting each other, the conflict nevertheless saw the rise of Jathika Chintanaya or "Nationalist Thought" which promoted an exclusively Buddhist vision for Sri Lanka which is influential today in organisations such as the Bodu Bala Sena ("Buddhist Power Force").

Tensions between Buddhist and Muslim ethnic groups in Rakhine State in Myanmar spilled over into riots in 2012 and eventually led to the displacement of more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to neighbouring Bangladesh. While it explicitly describes itself as non-violent and not responsible for these events, the Buddhist nationalist 969 Movement has nevertheless stoked anti-Muslim sentiments in Myanmar and framed Muslims as a threat to national identity. It's important to note, meanwhile, that these nationalist movements do not speak for all Buddhists - lay or monastic - in either Sri Lanka or Myanmar.

Buddhist monks actually bore arms and fought in the Korean defence against Japanese invasions of the late 16th century. While military service is not prohibited in Buddhist texts, a soldier's life is considered problematic because of the likelihood of dying in battle, psyched up for killing and fixated on violence. Ideally, a Buddhist wants to die with a calm mind which is more likely to be attracted to a positive rebirth. A violent mind could lead one to Buddhism's realms of hell.

It's not only war and external threats that provide examples of Buddhist violence. Corporal punishment was a feature of the pre-modern Tibetan legal system. In 1997 three Tibetan monks were murdered in Dharamsala - the police linked the suspects in the case to an ongoing controversy within Tibetan Buddhism. Thailand retains the death penalty, last using it in 2018.

Peaceful at its core

At the end of the class I always fear that students will fixate on the more sensationalist and violent material covered: that one extreme view will replace another. However, the pacifist stereotype of Buddhism is not without foundation.

Witness the Dalai Lama's continued opposition to violence when it comes to the issue of Tibetan independence, the peace activism of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, or the efforts of Navayana ("Ambedkarite") Buddhists in relation to social justice in India, lifting millions of Dalits out of the structural violence of the "caste" system.

But then Buddhism is at least as internally diverse as Christianity or Islam - and, as such, we should be wary of making generalisations. After all, few Christians would like the perception of their religion to be based solely upon images of the Quakers or of the Westboro Baptist Church.

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Where did Buddhism get its reputation for peace?

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When teaching an undergraduate class on "Buddhism and Violence", I usually start by asking students to rank religious groups in the order of how many followers they have in the British army. Typically Christians are at the top of students' lists and Buddhists at the bottom.

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An FT article, arguing that art can help us overcome division and conflict by helping us to focus on what we all have in common.

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An FT article, arguing that art can help us overcome division and conflict by helping us to focus on what we all have in common.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How did an experience in Berlin make Enuma Okoro reflect on a question that has ‘interested her almost obsessively’? What characterizes American artist Jenny Holzer’s work, and how does it make us reflect on our similarities with others? How does the work of Dali and Dadi explore the theme of finding common ground with others? To wrap up: How can art give us “a sense of our shared humanity”, and is this its most important purpose?

KEY TERMS  Emotional respite, Cultural differences vs. shared humanity, Fellow human beings, Dualistic thinking, Common ground

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Let's pause for breath and consider our shared humanity

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In our age of division and conflict, it requires reflection to focus on all that we have in common. That's where art can help