Over a century-and-a-half after his death, John Brown resonates in a nation that still has not addressed slavery, racial injustice, and white supremacy.
By David A. Love
LA Progressive, May 4, 2025
At a time when white supremacy poses an existential threat to society, we need the spirit of Malcolm X, and we need more white co-conspirators like John Brown.
In his commencement address at Howard University, President Joe Biden called white supremacy a “poison” and “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” The speech came days after the birthday of the abolitionist John Brown, who was born May 9, 1800, and days before the birthday of the legendary Black leader Malcolm X, who was born May 19, 1925. Both men knew that white supremacy was the problem, and they were killed trying to dismantle whiteness and save America, And we are still dealing with the problem today.
The family of Malcolm X has sued the F.B.I., the N.Y.P.D. and other government agencies for conspiring to assassinate the leader in 1965. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI formed COINTELPRO to discredit and disrupt the civil rights movement, and “Prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.”
Malcolm – who was forming Black coalitions across America and the world – had planned to take America to the United Nations and charge the country with human rights violations for its mistreatment of Black people. He made the “Afro-American problem” an international problem.
Sometimes, I have dared to dream … that one day, history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe.
“Sometimes, I have dared to dream … that one day, history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe,” Malcolm X wrote.
And Malcolm had some things to say about John Brown, the abolitionist driven by his Christian faith, personal convictions and love of humanity to end slavery. Brown was not a white savior; he was a co-conspirator who helped to liberate Black people. After coming into the public eye during the “Bleeding Kansas” civil war – which determined whether that state would enter the union as a free or slave state – Brown led a raid with white and Black folks on Harpers Ferry, a federal armory in Virginia (now West Virginia) in the hopes of sparking a movement to liberate the enslaved.
John Brown was hanged in 1859 for murder, insurrection and treason. Although they killed Brown, slavery remained an unresolved issue only to be litigated on the battlefield 16 months later. And as he predicted in his last words, ending slavery and purging the land of its crimes would be bloody.
“You had better – all you people of the South – prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily – I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled – this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet,” Brown said.
Black folks loved John Brown. “He done more in dying than 100 men would in living,” said Harriet Tubman, who thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived. And he died only 16 months before the Civil War. “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at least, begin the war that ended slavery,” said Frederick Douglass.
Viewed as a martyr and hero by many, John Brown was a lunatic terrorist to others. After all, a white man acting in the interests of the enslaved to overthrow the plantation police state was the greatest fear for white supremacist Southerners. “They’re trying to make it look like he was a nut, a fanatic,” Malcolm X said. “But they depict him in this image because he was willing to shed blood to free the slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom – in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts.”
Malcolm X suggested that if John Brown were still alive, he might have been accepted into his Organization of Afro-American Unity. And Malcolm viewed Brown as the standard for white allyship. “If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown?” Malcolm asked. “You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves.
“So if we need white allies in this country, we don’t need those kind who compromise. We don’t need those kind who encourage us to be polite, responsible, you know,” Malcolm added. “We don’t need those kind who give us that kind of advice. We don’t need those kind who tell us how to be patient. No, if we want some white allies, we need the kind that John Brown was, or we don’t need you. And the only way to get those kind is to turn in a new direction.”
W.E.B. Du Bois believed the memory of John Brown was a “mighty warning to his country,” and that the white abolitionist felt in his soul the wrong and danger of American slavery. According to Du Bois, “John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost today. The building of barriers against the advance of Negro-Americans hinders but in the end cannot altogether stop their progress.”
Over a century-and-a-half after his death, John Brown resonates in a nation that still has not addressed slavery, racial injustice and white supremacy.
“I think that the way most of us, certainly white America has been educated is to consider issues of violence against the Black community – whether it’s enslavement, police violence, street white supremacist violence, health care – I think were trained to see these as Black issues,” Martha Swan, the founder and executive director of John Brown Lives!, told the us. The Westport, New York, nonprofit organization uses education, history and the arts to achieve freedom, human rights and climate justice.
“One of the really important lessons of John Brown is he believed it was born on the backs of Black people, but it was the duty of white people to resist and work to abolish,” Swan added.
John Brown Lives! has continued the century-old tradition of John Brown Day, started by Black Philadelphians Doctor Jesse Max Barber and Doctor T. Spotuas Burwell, who laid a wreath on Brown’s grave in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York to honor “this great friend of the race.”
Swan noted that John Brown was not only antislavery, but he was also an egalitarian. “He was a friend to and with Black people. He believed in human equality and the dignity of all people, and that made him exceptional even among abolitionists.”
At a time when white supremacy is playing for keeps and trying to return the country to the good ol’ days for white America – with the repression of Black people and other people of color, women, L.G.B.T.Q.+ people and other marginalized communities – white America needs more white folks like John Brown.
“He really forces the question of what is violence,” Swan noted of Brown, particularly within the context of the violence America faces today through the laws that are enacted and the toxic rhetoric that is disseminated throughout society. “For most of his life he was engaged in peaceful nonviolence,” Swan added. “Whose violence do we condemn and whose violence do we condone or celebrate?”
John Brown gave his life for justice and raised his children to be antiracists. White people today must learn some lessons from him if they want America to survive.
April 10, 2025 – Around sunset on March 25, Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the grassroots Muslim Justice League in Boston, was winding down after a call with a group of attorneys. They had been strategizing their response to a widening pattern of “foreign student abductions”—unwarned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests based on allegations of support of terrorism, aka protest of Israel’s war on Gaza. “We’re a city with a lot of universities,” said Ahmad. “We knew it was going to happen here.”
And then it did. Not two hours after the meeting, Ahmad got an email from one of the lawyers, Mahsa Khanbabai, informing her that she’d just gotten her first student abduction case. Right then the phone rang. It was Danny Timpona, an organizer from Neighbor to Neighbor, a twenty-eight-year-old “base-building” organization that works on immigrant, racial, and environmental justice in cities across Massachusetts. Neighbor to Neighbor is helming a statewide ICE watch hotline called LUCE. On March 25 it was barely two weeks old.
“At about 5:30 a guy called in from Somerville, frantically saying, ‘Someone is being kidnapped,’” Timpona told me. The hotline operator asked the routine questions: What did you see? What is the address where you saw it? Did you witness it yourself or hear about it secondhand? They determined the report was more than credible—it was urgent. Within five minutes, LUCE’s rapid responders were on the scene.
When anyone can be summoned by the state to extract information, “people lose their social instincts.”
Timpona and Ahmad quickly established that the first abduction case and the kidnap victim were the same person: Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University PhD student on a valid visa who’d been surrounded by masked plainclothes officers, handcuffed, and hustled into an unmarked car. The officers did not show their IDs—which revealed them to be ICE agents—until after they’d taken her phone and backpack and restrained her. And, although a federal judge ordered that night that Öztürk could not be removed from the state or the country until a court ruled on jurisdictional matters, ICE had already driven her to a detention facility in northeastern Vermont and the next day to a notoriously brutal private ICE detention lockup in Louisiana; her visa had been revoked without notice four days before the arrest. Öztürk’s offense: coauthoring an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the university to divest from Israel.
LUCE’s rapid responders have three tasks: verify, document, witness. They were not rapid enough to do the last one; Öztürk’s abduction had taken less than two minutes. But they could verify and document. Canvassing door to door, they learned that two unmarked vehicles had been parked in the area for two days. Neighbors showed them phone videos, but most were illegible. Then someone contributed their building’s front-door surveillance video. In it, Öztürk’s face is recognizable, the agents’ efficient movements chillingly clear. “The fact that you can hear Rümeysa screaming makes it particularly horrifying,” noted Ahmad.
Öztürk was not rescued. Intervention is never the aim anyway, Neighbor to Neighbor’s executive director, Dálida Rocha, told me; especially under a Trump regime operating with new aggression and impunity, that’s too risky. In fact, verification and documentation are the most important parts of the process. They do nothing less than free the community for something like normal life. The chaos and randomness of ICE’s arrests under Trump II are causing terror in immigrant neighborhoods. Panic fuels rumors and misinformation, which in turn exacerbate panic. People worry: Should I take the kids to school, show up at work, shop at the bodega? The insecurity may become so overwhelming that they “self-deport”—which, of course, is the point of ICE’s terror campaign.
In one instance, someone thought they saw ICE agents lurking outside an elementary school; they made a TikTok, which went viral. Parents were scared. Through loose community networks, LUCE got wind of the rumor and sent verifiers, who chatted with teachers, parents, and neighbors and determined that ICE was not and had not been in the school’s vicinity. They relayed the intelligence back to LUCE and other trusted community leaders, who corrected the misinformation by word of mouth and social media. The TikTok was taken down—and relative calm was renewed. Reliable information allows people to assess risks rationally. In the context of collective action, all this builds “power over fear,” Rocha told me.
The video of the abduction obtained by LUCE proved invaluable far beyond Somerville. Released to the press, it became a major story, published, posted, and reposted around the world. Some who lived under authoritarian regimes saw a familiar tactic: a disappearance. No matter how long it takes to yield justice, witness must be borne, said Timpona: “Visibility is accountability.”
The coordinated response to Öztürk’s kidnapping exemplifies community self-defense and mutual aid at their best. Timpona and Ahmad were connected by a comrade in LUCE’s network of grassroots organizations. The frightened caller contacted a friend, who recommended the hotline, which he’d heard about by word of mouth. That the first impulse was to call a community organization, not the police, was itself a kind of win.
The Boston housing rights nonprofit City Life/Vida Urbana defines mutual aid as “networks of people in a community voluntarily supporting one another with resources and services, such as providing food and housing, financial support, education around and connection to government and social service systems, and more. It is based on the principles of solidarity and collectivism rather than profit and individualism.”
Mutual aid is the brigade of volunteers mucking out basements after a flood, the church basement food pantry staffed by retirees, the GoFundMe to pay the rent for a tenant about to be evicted. It can look like an easier alternative to politics, which requires not just generosity but toughness, not just tolerance but side-taking.
But mutual aid is more than glorified good neighborliness. The response to the Somerville abduction is a case in point: such projects can channel rage and fear into disciplined, concrete action, linking movements and bringing new individuals into them. Rather than sidestep politics, it can make politics happen. The LUCE group encompasses immigrant rights and tenants’ rights, prison abolition and workplace safety; it unites communities from Asian Pacific Islanders to Dominicans, Muslims to Unitarians.
And it links activists across distances. LUCE was born under the guidance of Siembra NC, an immigrant rights and anti–wage theft nonprofit, which also helped groups in Missouri, South Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas, and Texas establish hotlines and learn to run engaging and effective know-your-rights “parties.” And Siembra, in turn, has learned from other groups. At the top of its YouTube page is “LA Fights Back,” a witty riff on why ICE can’t find enough people to deport that lifts up the Los Angeles Community Self-Defense Coalition. The coalition conducts daily patrols seeking ICE vehicles, sends out social media alerts, and waits for defenders to arrive. One person with a bullhorn telling residents to bolt the doors can sometimes be enough to torpedo a raid. Siembra means seeding.
Immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first to organize.
Bridging racial and generational divides, coordinating ad hoc good works into workable systems, and cultivating leadership, mutual aid builds progressive movements for the long haul. As we learned from the COVID pandemic, the dynamics forged by crisis can last after the crisis has passed. A 2024 report authored by several community groups in East Boston found that the collective response to the needs of the community—distributing 5,000 cooked meals per week, donating everything from diapers to furniture, driving people to the hospital, convening healing circles and gratitude ceremonies—strengthened existing collaborations, sparked new ones, and “dissolved some silos.” Informants “emphasized the importance of relationships and trust as the building blocks of this work,” in which “practices of reciprocity and mutuality . . . shifted mindsets away from one-way dependence on charity towards recognizing that everyone has the capacity to give and to receive.”
For activists looking to history for inspiration, Communists and fellow travelers during the Great Depression offer plenty. Much of their local organizing centered around the twin scourges of unemployment and eviction. When landlords hired marshals to throw unemployed tenants and their belongings onto the street, nonviolent eviction resistance squads put their bodies in the way and the families back into their homes.
In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s unnamed protagonist comes upon two white men carrying the shabby belongings of an elderly Black woman onto the street, as she weeps, pleads, and pummels the chest of one of the men. The narrator is shocked, infuriated by the racism of the scene, then ashamed to be watching without intervening. As he is drawn into a spontaneous act of collective resistance, shock turns to exhilaration, racialized rage to cross-racial solidarity, and mutual aid to politics:
Stephen Jay Gould in 1990. ,Steve Liss / Getty Images
In the 1970s, a crop of books purporting to provide a scientific basis for gender inequality met sharp criticism from figures like Stephen Jay Gould. Decades later, these debates have fallen out of public memory, but right-wing pseudoscience persists
The issue of biological determinism is not an abstract matter to be debated within academic cloisters. These ideas have important consequences. . . . The most immediate impact will be felt as male privilege girds its loins to battle a growing women’s movement.
—Stephen Jay Gould, “The Nonscience of Human Nature,” 1974
January 12, 2025 – The American evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould’s column for Natural History magazine began as a way to balance the political convictions of his civil rights experiences with his desire to revolutionize evolutionary theory. As his career soared to new heights in later decades, his professional ambitions eventually eclipsed his leftist politics. But in the late 1970s, he was still using the column to address contemporary debates over science and politics. In the spring of 1976, he decided to weigh in on a controversy close to home with a column titled “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” which joined in the leftist criticism of the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
By then, he and Wilson had been colleagues in Harvard’s biology department for several years. At first glance, Wilson’s book might not have appeared to be the most likely candidate to spark leftist outrage. It was a long academic volume that synthesized empirical work on a host of animal taxa with the aim of clarifying a new program for the evolutionary study of social behavior. Wilson was convinced that the qualities of social life — e.g., aggression, cooperation, and hierarchies — were as much a product of natural selection as were physical traits. And in what would become an infamous last chapter, he extended this argument to the study of human societies. The book was far more empirically grounded in its treatment of human evolution than the popular works of Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Desmond Morris, which had fed into narratives of inevitable race war at the height of civil rights activism. Nevertheless, Sociobiology was at the heart of the most consequential debate between the leftist and liberal perspectives on science and American democracy of the era.
Wilson’s writings became a flash point as a new set of evolutionary models of sex difference clashed with the political demands of an intense phase of the American women’s movement. New legal triumphs that guaranteed the right to contraception for married couples, the right to abortion, and protections against sex-based discrimination were counterbalanced by a ferociously energetic conservative Christian movement that fought against the Equal Rights Amendment and any possibility of changing women’s place in American society. Even as women across the country reimagined their roles at home, at work, and at church — and pushed for the legal protections to do so — reactionary politics continually insisted on limiting what women could do and be.
It was in the midst of this political tumult that Wilson’s book (alongside other texts on the evolution of social behavior, including Richard Dawkins’s 1976 The Selfish Gene) promoted a new evolutionary narrative that claimed that contemporary American gender roles were the products of prehistoric adaptations encoded in humanity’s genes. Sociobiologists like Wilson and Dawkins envisioned a prehistoric past in which women gathered food and lived in family camps, while men went out to hunt and seek new sexual partners. In subsequent decades, scientists and nonscientists alike would deploy this narrative in both scientific and popular settings to rationalize gender disparities in STEM fields and the workplace and to naturalize rape. Gould’s criticism of Wilson was joined by critiques developed by other leftists from the sciences and the humanities, who viewed sociobiology as reactionary politics rather than sound science. And the sustained protest against the sexism of sociobiology over the next two decades would be led by the leaders of feminist science collectives, including Ruth Hubbard, a biologist at Harvard, and Ethel Tobach, a psychologist at the American Museum of Natural History.
Before sending his column on sociobiology to Natural History for publication, Gould sent a draft of it to Wilson. Wilson’s outraged reply and the subsequent exchange between the two men reveals far more than just the contours of their personal animosity. As expressed in his letters to Gould and in later publications, Wilson had a more classically liberal view of science’s proper role in American democracy. Liberals view science as truthful knowledge that serves as a foundation for an enlightened society to guarantee equality and enact rational governance. Thus, they consider science essential for democracy, but they do not prioritize a democratic approach to the actual practice of science. As liberals see it, even when science is only done and understood by a few elite white men, the reliability of its knowledge of the natural world enables it to be the foundation of an equitable society.
This understanding of science and democracy was unacceptable to Gould, as well as to other leftists in the radical and feminist science circles that protested Wilson’s book. Although their understanding of science for the people was by no means consistent, members of these movements shared a conviction that the elitism of science impeded its capacity to support democracy. For leftists, the inclusion of women and minoritized racial groups in the professional practice of science was essential if science was to contribute to a progressive society. Wilson, for his part, characterized the attacks by Gould and others in what became known as the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) as an attempt to restrict the freedom of scientific research and a worrisome sign of intellectual censorship.
By the end of the century, many public scientific liberals would castigate both Gould’s historical accounts of scientific racism and the feminist accounts of gender bias in science as “anti-scientific.” But the history of this late 1970s moment reveals that neither Gould nor feminist scientists saw their criticisms of sociobiology as anti-science. In fact, they understood the debate to be a conversation within the scientific community about the evidence for a new model within evolutionary science.
They believed that a better science, one that acknowledged the pitfalls of gender and racial bias, could be achieved through collective self-reflection on the motivations and practices of scientific work. And this better science could, in turn, be used to combat what these leftist academics feared were reactive and oppressive political actions. Their willingness to address the role of social influence in science and to publicly criticize current scientific research, however, set the stage for a new cultural divide. By the end of the century, sociobiology had claimed the mantle of scientific authority on human sexuality. And feminist and other leftist academics struggled to stave off accusations that their approach to scientific knowledge was itself anti-scientific.
Myrna Perez is an associate professor of gender and American religion at Ohio University. She is the coeditor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion and a series editor of Osiris.
Portrait of Zhuanzi, Daoist master of the Tang Dynasty
By Tang Aijun
Study Times, China
Jan 15, 2025 – On December 11, 2015, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out at the National Party School Work Conference: “Marxism is the ‘true scripture’ of us Communists. If we fail to study the ‘true scripture’ well and always think about ‘going to the West to obtain the scriptures’, we will miss out on important things!”
“Zhenjing” originally referred to the works of Taoist masters such as Zhuangzi in the Tang Dynasty. Later, its connotation and extension were continuously expanded to refer to Taoist and Buddhist classics. Now it is often used to refer to classic works or ideological systems that have withstood the test of history and have eternal charm.
General Secretary Xi Jinping used “Zhenjing” to metaphor Marxism, vividly pointing out that Marxism is a worldview and methodology that scientifically explains the world and actively transforms the world, and emphasizes that Marxism is the fundamental magic weapon that guides the Chinese Communists to continuously move from victory to new victory.
The “truth” of the “True Scripture” is reflected in both scientificity and truthfulness, as well as real usefulness. The reason why Marxism is like a “True Scripture” is that it reveals the general laws of human social development, reveals the special laws of the operation of capitalism, points out the way for mankind to leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom, and points out the way for the people to achieve freedom and liberation. The “True Scripture” is really useful and can transform the world.
For more than a hundred years, the Chinese Communists have used Marxism, a powerful ideological weapon, to work tirelessly to achieve national independence, people’s liberation, national prosperity, and people’s happiness, making China, an ancient oriental country, create an unprecedented development miracle in human history. Marxism, the “True Scripture”, has brought both “material achievements” and “spiritual achievements” to the Chinese nation – it has changed the passive mental state of the Chinese nation. The Chinese people have continuously strengthened their ambition, backbone, and confidence in the comprehension of the “True Scripture”, and demonstrated their spiritual self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-improvement in the historical initiative of practice.
After finding the “true scriptures”, we must persist in applying them. If we do not grasp the “true scriptures” well and always think about “going to the West to get scriptures”, we will miss out on important things.
The “going to the West” criticized by General Secretary Xi Jinping refers to some party members and cadres who are unwilling or even disdainful to learn and master the basic principles of Marxism, always want to seek the so-called truth from Western theories, and blindly admire Western theories. Those who always think about “going to the West to get scriptures” are actually people who take Western theories and Western discourse as their criterion. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized, “If we use the Western capitalist value system to tailor our practice and use the Western capitalist evaluation system to measure my country’s development, it is fine if it meets Western standards. If it does not meet Western standards, it is backward and outdated, and we must criticize and attack it, and the consequences will be disastrous!” In this regard, we must have a clear understanding that it is absolutely not advisable to always think about “going to the West to get scriptures”.
Grasping the “true scriptures” is a compulsory course for Communists. At the same time, it is also very necessary to master the “true scriptures”. For party members and cadres, they must work hard to truly learn, understand, believe in and use Marxism.
The first is to “read the scriptures well”. Party members and cadres should carefully read the works of classic writers such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and be willing to spend time reading the “true scriptures”. Mao Zedong said: “You can go without food for a day, you can go without sleep for a day, but you cannot go without reading for a day.” He said, “I have read The Communist Manifesto no less than a hundred times.” This is the attitude we should have towards the “true scriptures”.
The second is to “understand the scriptures well”. We must not only read the classics, but also understand the truth and principles in the “true scriptures”. General Secretary Xi Jinping summarized the “four laws” at the conference commemorating the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth: the materiality of the world and its laws of development, the naturalness, historicity and related laws of human social development, the laws of human liberation and free and all-round development, and the essence of cognition and its laws of development. Marxism has a theoretical quality that keeps pace with the times and is an open theoretical system that is constantly developing. The Chinese Communists treat science with a scientific attitude and pursue truth with the spirit of truth. They always adhere to combining the basic principles of Marxism with China’s specific reality and with China’s excellent traditional culture, and promote the sinicization and modernization of Marxism. Therefore, in order to understand the “true scriptures”, party members and cadres must not only understand the basic principles of Marxism, but also understand the principles, theories and philosophies contained in the scientific theory of the sinicization and modernization of Marxism.
The third is to “use the scriptures well”. “What is valuable is that it can be used.” We must constantly improve our ability to use Marxism to analyze and solve practical problems, and constantly improve our ability to use scientific theories to guide us in responding to major challenges, resisting major risks, overcoming major resistance, resolving major contradictions, and solving major problems, so that the “true scriptures” can lead us to win new and greater victories.
With each passing day and at an accelerating pace in recent years, it becomes increasingly obvious that we are witnessing a new era of rise of the far right on a global scale, similar to the era of the rise of fascist forces between the two world wars of the twentieth century. The label “neofascism” has been used to designate the contemporary far right, which adapted to our time, out of its awareness that repeating the same fascist pattern witnessed in the past century was no longer possible, in the sense that it was no longer acceptable to the majority of people.
Neofascism claims to respect the basic rules of democracy instead of establishing a naked dictatorship as its predecessor did, even when it empties democracy of its content by eroding actual political freedoms to varying degrees, depending on the true level of popularity of each neofascist ruler (and thus his need or not to rig elections) and the balance of power between him and his opponents. There is today a wide range of degrees of neofascist tyranny, from near absolute in the case of Vladimir Putin to what still retains a space of political liberalism as in the cases of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.
Neofascism differs from traditional despotic or authoritarian regimes (such as the Chinese government or most Arab regimes) in that it is based, like last century’s fascism, on an aggressive, militant mobilization of its popular base on an ideological basis similar to that which characterized its predecessor. This base includes various components of far-right thinking: nationalist and ethnic fanaticism, xenophobia, explicit racism, assertive masculinity, and extreme hostility to Enlightenment and emancipatory values.
As for the differences between old and new fascism, the most important of them are, first, that neofascism does not rely on the paramilitary forces that characterized the old version — not in the sense that it is devoid of them, but it keeps them in a reserve role behind the scenes, when they are present — and, second, that neo-fascism does not claim to be “socialist” like its predecessor. Its program does not lead to the expansion of the state apparatus and its economic role but rather draws inspiration from neoliberal thinking in its call to reduce the economic role of the state in favour of private capital. However, necessity may make it go in the opposite direction, as is the case with Putin’s regime under the pressure of the requirements of the war he launched against Ukraine.
While twentieth-century fascism grew in the context of the severe economic crisis that followed World War I and reached its peak with the “Great Depression”, neofascism grew in the context of the worsening crisis of neoliberalism, especially after the “Great Recession” that resulted from the financial crisis of 2007-08. Whereas past century’s fascism endorsed the national and ethnic hostilities that prevailed in the heart of the European continent, against the backdrop of the heinous racist practices that were occurring in the colonized countries, neofascism flourished on the dung of racist, xenophobic resentment against the rising waves of immigration that accompanied neoliberal globalization or resulted from the wars that the latter fuelled, in parallel with the collapse of the rules of the international system. The United States played the key role in thwarting the development of a rules-based international system after the end of the Cold War, thus quickly plunging the world into a New Cold War.
Neofascism may seem less dangerous than its predecessor because it is not based on paramilitary appearances and because nuclear deterrence makes a new world war unlikely (but not impossible: the Ukraine war has brought the world closer to the possibility of a new world war than any events since World War II, even at the height of the Cold War in the time of the USSR). The truth, however, is that neofascism is more dangerous in some respects than the old. Twentieth-century fascism was based on a triangle of powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) that did not have the objective ability to achieve its dream of world dominance, and was confronted by powers that were economically superior to it (the United States and Britain) in addition to the Soviet Union and the global communist movement (the latter played a major role in confronting fascism politically and militarily).
As for neofascism, its dominance over the world is increasing, driven by the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency in a guise that is much more in line with neofascism than during his first term. Thus, the world’s greatest economic and military power is today the spearhead of neofascism, with which various governments in Russia, India, Israel, Argentina, Hungary and other countries converge, while the possibility of neofascist parties coming to power in the major European countries (in France and Germany, after Italy, and even in Britain) looms on the horizon, not to mention smaller countries in Central and Eastern Europe in particular.
If it is true that the possibility of a new world war remains limited, our world faces something no less dangerous than the two world wars of the twentieth century, namely climate change, which threatens the future of the planet and of humanity. Neofascism is pushing the world towards the abyss with the blatant hostility of most of its factions to indispensable environmental measures, thus exacerbating the environmental peril, especially when neofascism has taken over the reins of power over the most polluting people in the world proportionally to its number, namely the people of the United States.
There is no equivalent in today’s world to what the workers’ movement was like with its socialist and communist wings after World War I. Instead, the forces of the left are suffering from atrophy in most countries, after most of them merged into the crucible of neoliberalism to the point that they no longer constitute an alternative to the status quo in the eyes of society. Or else, they are unable to adapt to the requirements of our era, reproducing the flaws of the twentieth century’s left that led to its historical bankruptcy. All the above makes us uphold that the era of neofascism is more dangerous in some respects than the era of the old. The new generation remains the focus of our greatest hope, and significant sections of it have revealed their rejection of racism, such as that manifested in the Zionist genocidal war in Gaza, and their defence of equality of all sorts of rights, as well, of course, as their defence of the environment.
In the face of the global rise of neofascism, there is a vital and urgent need to confront it by bringing together the broadest ad hoc alliances in defence of democracy, the environment, and gender and migrants rights, with the variety of forces that embrace these goals, while working to rebuild a global current opposing neoliberalism and defending the public interest in the face of the dominance of private interests.
Authoritarians are known for their ability to come to power legally, then destroy the rule of law. Hitler is the best known example.1 If it is difficult to strike the right balance between preventing this and avoiding undue restrictions on political expression in any democracy, it is all the more difficult in Germany, where at every turn you are blackmailed by history.
Germans are highly averse to surveillance, having experienced not only Nazism but also the Stasi, one of the most oppressive intelligence networks the world has known. For the same reason, however, Germans are averse to political figures and parties who seek to undermine the freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung, or free democratic basic order. These are the constitutional principles enshrined in theGerman Basic Law, such as human dignity, equality before the law, the separation of powers, the rule of law, and minority rights.
The conflict between these two sensitivities has been called the democratic dilemma. The problem it entails is vexed: How can liberal democracies protect themselves from those who are willing to use their own liberal institutions to subvert it while remaining a liberal democracy?
Germany’s answer to this question devolves from the work of the political scientist Karl Loewenstein, who developed his ideas in response to the “seemingly irresistible surge” of interwar fascism. In 1937, he published Militant Democracy And Fundamental Rights in the American Political Science Review. I’ll quote from it at length, because it’s fascinating:
… Fascism is the true child of the age of technical wonders and of the emotional masses. This technique could be victorious only under the extraordinary conditions offered by democratic institutions. Its success is based on its perfect adjustment to democracy. Democracy and democratic tolerance have been used for their own destruction. Under cover of fundamental rights and the rule of law, the anti-democratic machine could be built up and set in motion legally. Calculating adroitly that democracy could not, without self-abnegation, deny to any body of public opinion the full use of the free institutions of speech, press, assembly, and parliamentary participation, fascist exponents systematically discredit the democratic order and make it unworkable by paralyzing its functions until chaos reigns. They exploit the tolerant confidence of democratic ideology that in the long run truth is stronger than falsehood, that the spirit assert itself against force. Democracy was unable to forbid the enemies of its very existence the use of democratic instrumentalities. Until very recently, democratic fundamentalism and legalistic blindness were unwilling to realize that the mechanism of democracy is the Trojan horse by which the enemy enters the city. To fascism in the guise of a legally recognized political party recorded all the opportunities of democratic institutions.
… If democracy believes in the superiority of its absolute values over the platitudes of fascism, it must live up to the demands of the hour, and every possible effort must be made to rescue it, even at the risk and cost of violating fundamental principles.
In the second part of the essay, Loewenstein undertakes a study of the measures European states had taken to defend themselves against the threat. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, the Irish free state, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia, he writes, had risen to the occasion. They had (so far) successfully resisted fascism by transforming themselves into militant democracies. How, exactly? The effective measures, he reports, were surprisingly similar:
The most comprehensive and effective measure against fascism consists in prescribing subversive movements altogether. … [As a rule], such legislation is formulated very carefully in order to avoid discrimination against any particular political movement, thereby maintaining at least nominally the democratic principles of equality before the law and due process under the rule of law. … The decision as to whether a group is to be declared illegal lies with the discretionary power of the government, subject in some countries to an appeal to the court of the last instance. … Reconstituting a prescribed party under any pretense whatsoever is a crime.
…. All democratic states have enacted legislation against the formation of private paramilitary armies of political parties and against the wearing of political uniforms or parts there of (badges, armlets) and the bearing of any other symbol (flags, banners, emblems, streamers, and pennants) which serve to denote the political opinion of the person in public. These provisions—too lightheartedly and facetiously called “bills against indoctrination haberdashery”—strike at the roots of the fascist technique of propaganda, namely, self-advertisement and intimidation of others. … many states provided rapid remedies for forbidden incitement and agitation against and baiting of particular sections of the people because of their race, political attitude, or religious creed—in particular, because of their allegiance to the existing republican and democratic form of government.
… Perhaps the thornist problem of democratic states still upholding fundamental rights is that of curbing the freedom of public opinion, speech, and press in order to check the unlawful use there of by revolutionary and subversive propaganda, when attack presents itself in the guise of lawful political criticism of existing institutions. Overt acts of incitement to armed sedition can easily be squashed, but the vast armory of fascist technique includes the more subtle weapons of vilifying, defaming, slandering, and last but not least, ridiculing the democratic state itself, its political institutions and leading personalities. … Democracies which have gone fascist have gravely sinned by their leniency, or by too legalistic concepts of the freedom of public opinion. Slowly, the remaining democracies are remedying the defect. … All such restrictions on the use of free speech and free press were greeted by fascists with the outcry that the democratic state was violating the very essence of its principles of freedom. But the measures proved effective in curbing the public propaganda of subversive movements and in maintaining the prestige of democratic institutions.
….Finally, specially selected political police for the discovery, repression, supervision, and control of anti-democratic and anti-constitutional activities and movements should be established in any democratic state at war against fascism. …
Fire is fought with fire. Much has been done; still more remains to be done. Not even the maximum defense measures in democracies is equal to the minimum of self-protection which the most lenient authoritarian state teams indispensable. Furthermore, democracy should be on its guard against too much optimism. To overestimate the ultimate efficiency of legislative provisions against fascist emotional technique would be a dangerous self- deception. The statute-book is only a subsidiary expedient of the militant will for self-preservation. The most perfectly drafted and statutes are not worth the paper on which they are written unless supported by indomitable will to survive.
He concludes on a discordant note, warning that liberal democracy’s time may have passed:
Perhaps the time has come when it is no longer wise to close one’s eyes to the fact that liberal democracy, suitable, in the last analysis, only for the political aristocrats among the nations, is beginning to lose the day to the awakened masses. Salvation of the absolute values of democracy is not to be expected from abdication in favor of emotionalism, used for wonton or selfish purposes by self-appointed leaders, but by deliberate transformation of obsolete forms and rigid concepts into the new instrumentalities of “disciplined” or even—let us not shy away from the word—“authoritarian” democracy.
… In this sense, democracy has to be redefined. It should be—at least for the transitional stage until a better social adjustment to the conditions of the technological age has been accomplished—the application of disciplined authority, by liberal-men, for the ultimate ends of liberal government: human dignity, and freedom.
I hope this introduction to Lowenstein persuades you to read the whole essay. It’s a serious and unsettling argument. It has a powerful logic, yet its conclusions are self-evidently dangerous. It’s an unmistakably German argument. I wish I could ask my grandfather what he thinks of it.
Future generations, I’m sure, will look back at Western democracies and deplore us for doing so little to defend ourselves. But the idea of defending ourselves this way would be anathema to our contemporaries. In the first place, we lack an indomitable will to survive: You’ll look in vain for any figure on our political scene who exhibits a passion to defend constitutional democracy equal to the lunatic vigor of those who wish to destroy it. More to the point, the vast majority of our citizens understand liberal democracy to mean, “I have the right to behave in any way I please, with no limiting principle.” If a large cohort holds that being required to vaccinate themselves against communicable disease is an intolerable violation of their rights, imagine telling them that until they adapt to the conditions of our technological age, they require the tutelage of disciplined liberal authoritarians. That would go down a treat.
But entertaining this thought is a detour. Suffice to say Loewenstein argued that democracies have not only the right, but the affirmative duty to ban organizations and parties that seek to subvert it.
The Taxonomy of Extremism
The democratic dilemma is vexed for every democracy, but particularly for Germany, where it is has hardly been an abstraction. After the fall of the Third Reich, Germany took Loewenstein’s ideas very seriously and, under the watchful gaze of the occupying powers, ensured that the Basic Law enabled the banning of parties that seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.
The law is not, however, insensate to the risk these powers pose. Banning a party is extremely hard to do so. The legal hurdles are high. It has been done only twice. In the 1950s, the Socialist Reich Party (the reconstituted Nazi party) was banned, as was the Communist Party of Germany. In 2003, efforts to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, or NPD failed on procedural grounds; in 2017, they failed because the court ruled that while it was assuredly true the NPD was unconstitutional in its attitudes and its goals, it was too insignificant to pose a threat. They would not ban the party simply for being obscene.2
Germany gives the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) highly circumscribed powers to monitor parties that threaten Germany’s constitution. In another effort to balance political rights against the obvious, Section 86a of Germany’s Criminal Code prohibits the use of symbols associated with unconstitutional organizations, including (especially) those of the Nazis. But because it is fearful of going too far, it doesn’t prohibit the use of symbols that everyone knows damned well are just a substitute.
The AfD has long been described as “far-right” in Germany’s public discourse and media, but only in 2021 did Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classify it as a “suspected extremist” organization, a designation that permits intelligence officers to wiretap party members and employ informants to monitor its activities. It arrived at this judgement from publicly available information, such as the party’s program and statements made by its members, following years of observation. The BfV was unequivocal about the party’s youth wing, the Junge Alternative, or JA, and about three of the party’s state branches (Germany has 16 states). These, it said, were “confirmed right-wing extremist.”3
Under German law, an “extremist” organization is defined as a group whose activities are directed against the free democratic basic order. Such a group seeks to abolish the fundamental principles of a liberal democracy, such as the sovereignty of the people, the separation of powers, and the protection of basic human rights. The BfV has a taxonomy of extremism: right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, Islamist extremism, und so weiter. Right-wing extremism is characterized by nationalism, antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia. The parts of the AfD that were confirmed as extremist organizations, according to the BfV, advocated an authoritarian state, undermined the separation of powers, and rejected pluralism in favor of a homogeneous national identity.
The German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk has reported that more than 100 people who work for the AfD lawmakers and members of its parliamentary group belong to organizations classified as “extremist.” (The Flügel faction of the party, which was officially disbanded in 2020 but is believed to remain influential, is known for being particularly extreme.)
The AfD denies that it is neo-Nazi party, and unlike Elon Musk, its leading politicians don’t bust out the Hitlergruß with billions of people watching. But this means only that they don’t want their party banned and they don’t want to go to jail. They don’t need to make things explicit: They are very capable of conveying their meaning without violating the letter of the law.
Germany’s federal elections will take place on February 23. The AfD is currently polling in second place. It expects to take about 20 percent of the vote. It will not govern, because all of Germany’s major parties have stated categorically that they will under no circumstances consider the AfD as a coalition partner. The concern, however, is fourfold. First, unlike many radical parties, the AfD has not mellowed with time. To the contrary, it grows more extreme with every change of leadership.
Second, this is not the insignificant NPD, but the biggest opposition party in Germany. It took 15.9 percent of the vote on June 9—its best result nationwide since its founding in 2013—and its vote share is growing. Inevitably, its noisy presence on the political scene normalizes views that are antithetical to the free basic democratic order.
Third, Russia is working assiduously to bring it to power.
Fourth, so is Elon Musk.
The Secret Meeting in Potsdam
In January 2024, the German nonprofit research group Correctiv reported that high-ranking AfD politicians, neo-Nazis, members of nationalist student fraternities, and sympathetic businesspeople had met in secret in a hotel near Potsdam to plan the forcible deportation of millions of immigrants and German citizens.
“The meeting was meant to remain secret at all costs,” wrote Correctiv:
Communications between the organizers and guests took place strictly via letters. However, copies of these letters were leaked to CORRECTIV, and we took pictures. Our undercover reporter checked into the hotel under a false name and was on site with a camera.
Roland Hartwig, personal aide to the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel—with whom Elon Musk recently giggled and stammered on a Twitter Space chat—was in attendance, as was the Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner.
Sellner is a real piece of work. He became involved in Austria’s neo-Nazi seen as a teenager, coming to the attention of the authorities at the age of 17, when he confessed to defacing a synagogue with swastikas to protest the conviction of British Holocaust denier David Irving. Since then, the police have picked him up regularly for such acts of hooliganism as disrupting a performance of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen—which treats the odyssey of African migrants to Europe—by throwing blood on the stage. He is barred from entering the United States and United Kingdom; he was arrested in Switzerland and released on the condition that he leave immediately and never come back. After the meeting in Potsdam, he was also barred from Germany.
In 2012, Sellner founded the Identitäre Bewegung Österreich, the Identitarian Movement of Austria, which the BfV categorizes as part of the Neue Rechte, or new right, and the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance classifies as a far-right and neofascist.
The Neue Rechte superficially distances itself from the neo-Nazi scene. The Identitarian Movement of Germany, for example, uses a yellow lambda, not a swastika, as its symbol, and its slogans are carefully phrased. By “carefully phrased,” I mean, for example, this:
Das EIGENE bedingungslos verteidigen! Die WEISSE HAND ist unser Zeichen gegen alle, die unsere IDENTITÄT zerstören. WIR sagen: Bis hierhin und nicht weiter.
which may be translated,
Defend what is OURS unconditionally! The WHITE HAND is our symbol against all those who destroy our IDENTITY. WE say: This far and no further.”
Note that they do not use words like Rasse and Volk so as not to immediately recall National Socialist slogans. The intentionally vague “Das Eigene”—“one’s own”—is a favorite on the German far-right. So is “identity.” The vagueness of these words provides legal deniability. It also. allows the slogan to appeal to a wider audience. Those who hear it are free to interpret it as a call to defend German culture or European values. The symbol of the white hand, however, speaks for itself.
The Identitäre Bewegung Österreich is relentlessly hostile to the United States and deplores everything they consider to be an outgrowth of American imperialism. They oppose Austria’s NATO partnership. They oppose international sanctions against Russia. They reject capitalism, communism, and socialism in favor of essentialist Third Position economics. Theycall for an “independent alliance of sovereign nation-states” with Russia. On their website and Facebook page, they cite Aleksandr Dugin, Dominique Venner, and Alain de Benoist as major influences.4
The author of the Christchurch mosque massacre, Brenton Tarrant, so admired Sellner that he sent him a considerable amount of money. Austrian investigators suspected that Sellner was Tarrant’s collaborator and raided his apartment in Vienna. After seizing his phone, computer and other devices, they discovered that he had deleted all of his exchanges with Tarrant 40 minutes before the raid, indicating that he had been tipped off.Sellner denied any involvement in the attacks. In 2019, a judge ruled that the searches had been unlawfully predicated and the investigation was dropped. (Continued)
The WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit in Berlin was bursting with innovative ideas for reaching net zero and on working together at an ever-greater scale
November, 2024 – Kraftwerk Berlin, the venue for the Energy Tech Summit with Octopus Energy, offered delegates a powerful lesson from history. Built by the East German government in 1961, the same year construction on the Berlin wall began, the vast turbine hall was hastily assembled to manage a crisis—the wall forced the Communist east and capitalist west to build grids that were not connected. Obsolete at reunification in 1989, it was a stark warning that walls and divisions are a choice the world can’t afford to make when faced with the urgent need to transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
“The biggest risk for Europeans,” Martin Schulz, former president of the European Parliament, told the room, “is political parties who tell citizens that lone nations are the future in a globalized, interdependent world.”
He pointed out that the European Union spent €60 billion in subsidies to citizens and businesses during the recent energy price spike. “What we need is to convince people that it is necessary to change the whole structure of the energy market—but how to create cheaper energy with so many political obstacles?”
Some of the solutions were discussed onstage. Zoisa North-Bond, the CEO of Octopus Energy Generation, spoke about the company’s Fan Club Tariff, which cuts bills for customers living near a wind farm by up to 50 percent when their local plant is producing excess power. “We’ve had 35,000 communities get in touch with us and ask for wind turbines,” she explained, citing the company’s community connection platform Winder. “It’s Tinder for wind, matching communities with wind turbines.”
Image may contain Kevin Magnussen Clothing Footwear Shoe Book Publication Adult Person Electronics and Speaker Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds envisions a future where the world drives electrically. Photograph: Craig Gibson
Luo Xi, head of project development at Geidco, the company behind China’s proposed global grid, explained that linking 80 countries with smart grid technology and significant renewable resources could increase clean energy consumption to 71 percent and reduce global CO2 emissions to half of 1990 levels.
Aaron Ubaa, energy system engineering manager at Nigeria’s solar power pioneer Starsight Power, described how renewables were bringing stability to the country’s erratic and inconsistent power supply. The barriers? Restructuring the national grid. Internationally? Sub-Saharan Africa should be energy rich with solar power, he explained, but “it’s going to start with trying to bring the policy makers on board to incentivize both private and public sectors to buy in.”
The day carried constant notes of optimism. Francis Kéré, a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, described the innovations devised in building a primary school in Burkina Faso that overcame poor lighting and ventilation through creating bricks from local clay mixed with cement that kept the heat out, and using a clay and brick ceiling to circulate cool air without needing air conditioning.
Niclas Dahl, managing director of Oceanbird, discussed how wind-powered cargo ships could reduce shipping emissions by 90 percent. Clean tech pioneer and serial explorer Bertrand Piccard delighted the room with his account of circumnavigating the world in his sun-powered airplane Solar Impulse, pointing out that “aviation has launched 600 electric airplane programs since we flew around the world using just some rainbows.”
Dirk Hoke, CEO of Volocopter, picked up his point. The German company builds electric vertical take-off and landing air taxis. “They are quiet, safer than a helicopter, and sustainable,” he explained. “When the Kaiser saw a car, he said it was temporary and would never replace the horse. And we know how that ended. The Chinese government decided in March to open the low-altitude economy, so it’s just a matter of time.”
Even the world of motorsports had encouraging news. Formula One driver Kevin Magnussen recalled that when he started driving just over 10 years ago, the engines were 2.4-liter naturally aspirated V-8 fuel-guzzlers. “Today, it’s hybrid engines, and we’ve actually got more horsepower than we did when I started.”
And yet Magnussen touched on one of the day’s issues—consumers adopting clean energy tech. “Electric vehicles are the biggest opportunity today, because cars are the vastest bulk of emissions in the transport sector, the emissions are still growing, and the replacement technology is already there,” Julia Poliscanova, senior director at clean energy lobby group Transport & Environment, pointed out. “The reason EVs haven’t been taken up as much, in our view, is not because people don’t want to buy them or because there are no charges, but because we still lack affordable mass market models.”
The public believes charging infrastructure is a problem, she added, which is true in some places and less true in others. The problem? Bureaucracy. She struggles to get an EV charger as she lives in a flat and the building owner finds the paperwork prohibitive.
It was a theme that echoed throughout the day’s transport sessions, although Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds pointed out that his drivers started every race with only 50 percent of the energy they needed to finish the race. Drivers used their brakes to regenerate the battery, showing how a full “tank” wasn’t as important as consumers thought.
All the same, consumer resistance came up frequently. Frank Siebdrat, COO of energy efficient heating and cooling company Tado, pointed out that his company had connected approximately 1 million homes in Europe. “The EU aims to be climate-neutral in 2050, and to do so, we need to think and act collectively,” he explained. “In order to be collective, we need to make technology affordable. One of the most affordable and effective tools to decarbonize homes is smart technology. And using that we have saved already 2 billion tons of CO2.”
When asked why they chose Tado, he said that customers’ main reason was, “I want to save money. The second reason is, I want to make the planet a better place. If we cannot fulfill the first one,” he stressed, “the second one becomes less relevant.”
China seems to offer many solutions. Although coal consumption is climbing, it will peak in 2026 as renewables come online, with MingYang Smart Energy president Qiying Zhang outlining how floating and fixed offshore wind turbines are replacing fossil fuels. In August the company installed the world’s largest single-capacity offshore wind turbine, the MySE18.X-20MW, in Hainan, which can generate 80 million kWh annually, offsetting 66,000 tons of CO2.
Meanwhile, the country’s road transport electrification is moving at pace, thanks to heavy government subsidies. “In China, there were 570,000 EVs bought in August, and if you’re not driving an electric car in China, you’re considered a very boring person,” Stella Li, vice president of Chinese EV giant BYD, told the room. The new Z9 GT offered “intelligent driving,” meaning the car could park itself—even sliding sideways into a tight space, thanks to its flexible rear axle.
“The epicenter of the energy transition is China, which has a beautiful historical symmetry,” Arthur Downing, director of strategy at Octopus Energy explained. “Until the 18th century, the center of the world economically was China. It was the first energy transition of the industrial revolution in Britain that shifted that economic center of gravity to Europe. So we’re coming full circle at a ridiculous speed.”
Ann Mettler, European vice president of Bill Gates’ sustainable energy organization Breakthrough Energy, and Sabrina Schulz, strategic expert in climate, energy, and biodiversity, agreed that while Europe was making progress, it was falling behind and needed a blend of public and private finance to catch up by connecting and renewing grids and considering decentralized or even virtual power plants. “Policy certainty and public guarantees on investment in, say, green district heating is an absolute condition for investors,” Schulz argued.
Sana Khareghani, professor of practice in AI at King’s College London, suggested AI could help, managing and optimizing energy grids and helping develop new batteries to store power for when it’s most needed—helping reduce reliance on the fossil fuel powered generators of last resort.
Towards the end of the day, a warning from Ukraine gave the discussion sharp context. Yuliana Onishchuk, CEO and founder, Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation, described how vulnerable a modern nation’s energy supply really is.
“It is very easy to attack repeatedly, leaving us with no power for up to 56 hours,” she explained. “This summer, by losing one nuclear power plant, we lost 20 percent of our generation capacity. 1,900 rocket attacks over the last two years in Ukraine robbed us of 35 GW of generation capacity, costing us €51 billion.”
She explained how Ukraine managed to “plug into the European Union’s energy system by the second week of the war, preventing a total countrywide blackout.” The government was moving towards shifting its energy dependency away from easily attacked nuclear power plants to renewables for at least 27 percent of its power. Meanwhile, apps informed citizens of when power may be on or off so they could prepare food for the blackout.
Sitting in the turbine hall of the derelict power station built because of political isolationism, it was a sobering moment. Then Kidus Asfaw, founder and CEO of Kubik, an Ethiopian construction company that creates a low carbon, low-cost building material rivaling cement using just recycled plastic, had two positive messages. His company’s energy was very cheap, he explained, because Ethiopia’s energy supply is almost 100 percent renewable, and coming from the global south he had faith in the younger generation.
“I recently had a client sign up who’s a cement manufacturer—so they are a competitor and yet he took our product,” he recalled with a smile. “I asked him why he did it. He said, “because my kid would kill me if I didn’t.” That does make me very optimistic, that young people want a better future.”
This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
