Anyway here’s some information from the National Center for Transgender Equality on how you can support trans people, and here’s a direct link to their donation webpage, and here’s their page for national/federal and state advocacy efforts and actions if you wanted something specific to get involved in.
Here’s the Human Rights Campaign’s resources page about transgender people and issues , and here’s their Get Involved page to help find ways to volunteer and lobby and advocate in your area.
Also, here’s the National Network to End Domestic Violence’s page about the Violence Against Woman Act , their Action Center, and their Donation page.
I don't know if I'll make it, but watch how good I'll fake it.
I don’t know if Richard Reeves has been idiotic again but I’m always down for an opportunity to drag him and his ridiculous stupidity.
oh no girlies, I don’t think we can pop-six-squish-uh-uh-cicero-lipschitz our way out of this one
(via omnidudes)
I was about to match with this cute UN employee but he put “Hoping to settle down with someone serious and fun who is smart, kind, adventurous, GGG, and self-examined.”
It’s the GGG that makes me hesitate. Am I being too hesitant and too repressed? Is it needed right off the bat?
Am I just doing this wrong? I’m also not really looking (yet) to hook up so is that skewing things?
I couldn’t help but wonder…
Anonymous asked:
Ukraine is chipping off the Soviet symbol on the Motherland Monument's shield to replace it with a Ukrainian trident, which... like wow Russia you really did fuck up
I mean, it was a matter of time. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner, tbh
The new congressional maps in NY could help the Democrats pick up 5 House seats. The republicans appealed the most recent ruling by state courts overturning the previous maps and now its going to the Court of Appeals, the highest court in NYS.
Amid a desert landscape a visionary unveils an invention that will forever change the world as we know it.
That’s the climactic scene of the Christopher Nolan biopic Oppenheimer, about the eponymous J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s also the opening scene of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by indie auteur Greta Gerwig, which opened on the same day as Oppenheimer.
Despite the two films’ radically different subject matter and tone—one a dramatic examination of man’s hubris and the threat of nuclear apocalypse and the other a neon-drenched romp about Mattel’s iconic fashion doll—they have far more in common than just their release date. Both movies consider the complicated legacies of two American icons and how to grapple with and perhaps even atone for them.
In Oppenheimer, the desert scene depicts the Trinity test, the world’s first detonation of a nuclear bomb near Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. A brilliant but flawed theoretical physicist and the rest of his team work frantically to develop the weapon for the United States before the Nazis can beat them to the punch; they then gather on bleak, lunar-white sands near their secret laboratory to test the terrifying creation.
The countdown timer ticks to 00:00:00, the proverbial big red button is pushed, and a blast ignites the sky—a blinding white flash that quickly morphs into a towering inferno. Everything goes silent as Oppenheimer stares in awe from behind a makeshift protective barrier at what he has created.
Suddenly, he begins experiencing flashes of a different kind, premonitions of the human horror and suffering his weapon will wreak. Nolan is unambiguously signaling to the audience that this is a pivotal moment for the world, and for Oppenheimer personally, as what was once merely a theoretical idea has become monstrously real. The fallout, both literally and figuratively, will be out of Oppenheimer’s control.
Barbie’s critical desert scene comes not at the film’s climax but at its very beginning. The movie opens with a parody of the famous “The Dawn of Man” scene from Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As a red-orange sunrise breaks across a rocky desert landscape, a voiceover (from none other than Dame Helen Mirren) begins: “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls.” On screen, underscored by the ominous notes of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” little girls sit amid dusty canyon walls playing with baby dolls.
“Until…” Mirren says. And then comes the reveal: The little girls look up to see a massive, monolith-sized Margot Robbie, dressed in the black and white-striped swimsuit of the very first Barbie doll. She lifts her sunglasses and winks. The little girls are stunned—and, like the apes in the classic sci-fi movie, they begin to angrily dash their baby dolls against the ground.
This is Barbie’s mythic origin story: Once upon a time, little girls could only play with baby dolls meant to socialize them into wanting to be good wives and, eventually, mothers. Then came Ruth Handler, who in 1959 decided to create a doll with an adult woman’s body, adult women’s fashions, and adult women’s careers so that little girls could dream of being more than just wives and mothers. And the rest is history. Thanks to such iterations as doctor Barbie, chef Barbie, scientist Barbie, professional violinist Barbie, and beyond, Barbie opened up young girls to a world of possibilities and, Mirren says, “All problems of feminism and equal rights [were] solved.”
Well, not so fast: Mirren adds one final, snarky beat: “At least,” she says, “that’s what the Barbies think.”
Thus Gerwig introduces the central tension that animates the movie: Handler set out to create a feminist toy to empower and inspire young girls. But we sitting in the audience in 2023 know that things worked out a little differently. In the intervening years, Barbie would come under fire from feminists and other critics for a whole host of sins: encouraging unrealistic and harmful beauty standards that contribute to negative body image issues, eating disorders, and depression among pre-adolescent girls; lacking diversity and perpetuating white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity; objectifying women; promoting consumerism and capitalism; and even contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
And here is the core parallel between Barbie and Oppenheimer: Two iconic American creators who ostensibly meant well but whose creations caused irreparable harm. And two iconic American directors (Nolan is British-American) who set out to tell their stories from a very modern perspective, humanizing them while also addressing their harmful legacies.
But while Nolan obviously had the much harder task—no matter how much harm you think Barbie has done to the psyches of young girls over the years, there’s simply no comparison to the human toll of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the environmental impact of decades of nuclear testing, or the cost of the nuclear arms race—oddly enough, it’s Gerwig who ends up taking her job of atonement far more seriously.
As its opening scene shows, the Barbie movie lets the audience know right from the start that it’s self-aware. It knows that Barbie is problematic. And it’s going to go there.
And it does—almost to the point of overkill. The basic plot of the movie is this: Barbie is living happily in Barbie Land, a perfect pink plastic world where she and her fellow Barbies run everything from the White House to the Supreme Court and have everything they could ever want, from dream houses to dream cars to dreamy boyfriends (Ken)—the last of which they treat as little more than accessories.
But suddenly, things start to go wrong in Barbie’s happy feminist utopia, and to fix it, she is forced to journey into the real world—our world—accompanied by Ken, who insists on going with her. When she does, she realizes that contrary to what she believed (as Mirren told us in the opening scene), the invention of Barbies didn’t solve gender inequality in the real world. In the real world, Barbie is confronted not only with the dominance of the patriarchy (she discovers, for instance, that Mattel’s CEO is a man, played by Will Ferrell), but also with the fact that young girls seem to hate her.
In a crucial early scene, Robbie’s Barbie encounters ultracool Gen-Z teen Sasha (played by Ariana Greenblatt), who delivers a scathing monologue about everything that’s wrong with Barbie, the doll and cultural symbol—basically a checklist of all the criticisms lobbed at Barbie over the years, from promoting unrealistic beauty standards to destroying the planet with rampant capitalism. Barbie is crestfallen.
Meanwhile, there’s a subplot involving Ken’s parallel discovery of patriarchy, and how awesome and different it seems to be from his subjugated life in Barbie Land. Ken proceeds to go full men’s rights, heading back to Barbie Land and seizing power. He transforms Barbie’s dream house into Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, where Barbies serve men and “every night is boys’ night!”
Barbie enlists the help of Sasha and her mom (played by America Ferrera)—a Mattel employee who secretly dreams up ideas for new, more realistic Barbies such as anxiety Barbie—to unseat Ken and restore female power in Barbie Land. Along the way, Ferrera’s character delivers the film’s other major feminist monologue, about how hard it is being a woman in the real world.
The monologues are unsubtle, as are the repeated mentions of concepts like the patriarchy. In every scene and nearly every line, the movie hits the audience over the head with the pro-feminism message. Gerwig knows what her job is—to atone for Barbie’s sins (and, yes, help Mattel sell more dolls)—and she makes sure everyone knows that she has fully understood the assignment.
But it’s in the film’s quieter, more tender moments that Gerwig’s background as an indie filmmaker and her true talent shine through, and where she’s able to communicate the message in a subtler, but ultimately more impactful, way. The scene where Barbie in the real world sees an elderly woman for the first time (old people and wrinkles don’t exist in Barbie Land, obviously) and is stunned at how beautiful she is, wrinkles and all. Or the scenes where Barbie talks quietly with her deceased creator, an elderly Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), who explains that the name Barbie was an homage to Handler’s daughter, Barbara, who inspired her to make the doll.
The overall result is a movie that, even if a bit ham-fisted in its over-the-top messaging, doesn’t shy away from the uglier parts of Barbie’s legacy. It looks them right in the face, wrinkles and all.
I said above that the Trinity test scene is the climactic scene in Oppenheimer, but that’s not really the case. For a movie about the complicated life and legacy of the man credited with creating the world’s most destructive weapon, it should be the climax. You might imagine it would follow with a denouement of the inventor confronting the reality that his creation is used to kill tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and sparks an arms race that threatens to destroy all of humanity.
These scenes are in there, but they are given short shrift next to the other story Nolan wants to tell: that of how Oppenheimer, once considered an American hero, was mistreated by his country in the postwar years. As McCarthy-era fears of communist infiltration grip the country, Oppenheimer’s previous ties to the Communist Party (he never joined the party himself, but he had close family members and friends who were members, and he supported various left-wing causes) are mysteriously brought to the FBI’s attention despite already being well documented. His security clearance is revoked, and his career working with the U.S. government on nuclear issues ends.
It is this storyline—not the apocalyptic destruction of two Japanese cities—that is given the most pathos. Much of the movie’s three-hour run time—and nearly all of its third act—centers on what we are clearly meant to see as the great evil that was done to this man who did so much for his country. The real climax of the film is not the Trinity test, nor even the bombings of Japan (which are not even shown in the movie), but rather the moment we learn who betrayed Oppenheimer by handing over his security file to the FBI.
This is the shocking revelation that is meant to induce gasps in the audience, not the images of charred and irradiated bodies. In fact, those images aren’t even shown to us, the viewers. In the scene where Oppenheimer and his team are shown photos of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the camera stays tight on Oppenheimer’s face as he reacts to the images—a reaction that consists of him putting his head down to avoid seeing them.
It is an act of cowardice on Oppenheimer’s part, yes, but also on Nolan’s. Indeed, the only glimpses we get of the macabre effects of the atom bomb take place in Oppenheimer’s fevered imagination, and even then, they are brief flashes used for shock value: skin flapping off the beautiful face of an admiring female colleague; the charred, faceless husk of a child’s body Oppenheimer accidentally steps on; a male colleague vomiting from the effects of radiation. Of the Japanese victims, there is nothing. They remain theoretical, faceless.
Nolan has said that he chose not to depict the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to sanitize them but because the film’s events are shown from Oppenheimer’s point of view. “We know so much more than he did at the time,” Nolan said at a screening of the movie in New York. “He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio, the same as the rest of the world.”
But in reading the numerous interviews he’s given about the movie, it’s also clear that Nolan fundamentally sees Oppenheimer as a tragic hero—Nolan has repeatedly called Oppenheimer “the most important person who ever lived”—and Oppenheimer’s story as a distinctly American one. “I believe you see in the Oppenheimer story all that is great and all that is terrible about America’s uniquely modern power in the world,” he told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It’s a very, very American story.”
That Nolan’s film devotes so much runtime to Oppenheimer’s point of view and how he was tragically betrayed by his country is partly due to the fact that the film is not an original story but rather an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the great scientist, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That book also places Oppenheimer being stripped of his security clearance at its center. But that didn’t mean Nolan had to do the same in his adaptation. That was a choice. And the end result is what military technology writer Kelsey Atherton aptly described as “a 3 hour long argument that the greatest victim of atomic weaponry was Oppenheimer’s clearance.”
At a time when Americans are struggling to reckon with their country’s past and how it has shaped the present—from fights over how (or even whether) to teach children about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow; to debates, including in these very pages, over the role (or lack thereof) of NATO expansion in Russia’s decision to wage war on Ukraine; to retrospectives on the myriad failures of the U.S. war in Afghanistan; and beyond—the fact that the two biggest films in theaters right now are attempting to confront the legacies of two American icons, the nuclear bomb and Barbie, is understandable and perhaps even impressive.
But the impulse to look away from the ugliest parts of those legacies remains strong, and Oppenheimer never fully faces them.
Russian war criminal Igor “Strelkov” (Shooter) Girkin is wanted by many courts. Unfortunately for him, one of them is in his own country. The former soldier, sentenced in absentia in 2022 in The Hague for his role in the MH17 catastrophe, was arrested Friday in Moscow for the 2nd paragraph, article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “public calls to carry out extremist activities” due to statements he’s made in his recent role as a nationalist provocateur.
Out of all the things Girkin could be plausibly charged for—and there are many—this is perhaps the emptiest possible. Under the Putin regime’s definition of “extremism,” anyone in modern Russia could be guilty, and quite probably it was chosen because it’s the easiest one to pin on him. Criticism of the government used to be relatively safe, as long as you did it from the right—but Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup has changed the Kremlin’s attitude. It’s no longer content to just go after the so-called liberal opposition like the imprisoned Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza: A lot of heads are now on the chopping block.
I have a personal enmity toward Girkin, mixed with a weird respect. Because of my work as a journalist and my podcast about the attitudes in the Baltics concerning Russian aggression, his friends have harassed me, threatened me, and even tried to fabricate a criminal case against me in Russia. Yet, at the same time, his military analysis has been eerily accurate. Girkin has called out Russia’s failure to fully mobilize or make full use of its manpower. He criticized the long siege of Mariupol, saying that it would be harmful in the long run by preventing strategic advances while Russia still had the initiative, and he opposed the “meatgrinder” tactics that threw men against hardened Ukrainian defenses. If the Kremlin was capable of listening to criticism like his, Ukraine would be in a far worse position than it is today.
Girkin’s career, and his crimes on Moscow’s behalf, makes him an unlikely figure to end up on the wrong side of the state. But his own strategic talent, and his ability to call out the military disasters of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, got him there regardless.
Girkin was born on Dec. 17, 1970, in Moscow. Both of his grandfathers fought for the Soviet Union during World War II; however, likely due to his later career in the Federal Security Service (FSB), almost nothing is known about his parents. His passion for military affairs led him to pursue studies at the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives.
Girkin joined the Russian Armed Forces shortly after the Cold War, straight on the path of becoming an officer—because his university course had included military training in the ‘war department’, a part of almost every higher education institution in the Soviet Union and which still exist in modern Russia, he held the military rank of lieutenant right from the start. He served in the 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motorized Rifle Division, an elite unit notable for its World War II service, helping to overthrow secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, and taking part in the 1991 August coup against Gorbachev.
While serving there, he developed a profound, albeit somewhat misguided, admiration for the Soviet military heritage. Yet at the same time, in the early 1990s, he also became an enthusiast of the Russian monarchy, whose last members were murdered by the Soviets. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Girkin found himself navigating a changing political landscape. He transitioned to the newly formed Russian Armed Forces and, in the subsequent years, fought in various conflicts, most notably during the Transnistrian conflict (March-July 1992), First Chechen War (1994-1996), and the Second Chechen War (1999-2000).
Girkin’s military acumen and unwavering loyalty to the Russian cause earned him recognition and promotions within the ranks. That’s particularly remarkable in context: Slacking off and nepotism were the norm at the time, and actually putting in some effort was seen as showing off and viewed with disdain. As he specialized in intelligence work and was genuinely competent, he was noticed by the FSB, which often recruits from the military.
By the early 2000s, he had risen to the rank of colonel in the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Throughout his tenure, he was involved in covert and intelligence operations, contributing to his reputation as a formidable figure in the intelligence community inside Russia. At about the same time, he started to appear as a public figure in the Russian-speaking part of the web, criticizing what he called the liberal wing of the government, such as the head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, and various other figures that he thinks are serving Western interests, calling for a patriotic shift in the government, toward what Strelkov calls true Russian values.
All that prepared him for the dirty tricks needed for Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. He’s proud of it, too, and his pro-war friends take pride in what he did. Girkin was the commander of the so-called separatist forces in the Donbas back in 2014, which, in truth, were Russian-funded and -supported mercenaries sent to Ukraine to cause trouble and facilitate conflict—a fact that he’s admitted himself. First, in April 2014, he appeared in Sloviansk, a city in eastern Ukraine, while in command of the supposed separatist forces—Putin’s infamous “little green men.” And after that from May 16, 2014, until Aug. 14 he also formally served as the minister of defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
His role mixed military action and public propaganda aimed both at Russians and the outside world. Girkin became a leading proponent of the “Russian Spring” movement, advocating for the secession of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions from Ukraine and their integration into the Russian Federation. One of his jobs was to make it appear as if the movement had sprung up naturally, when, in fact, it was a wholly Russian government-funded affair. And he did his work diligently.
He forced the Crimean parliament, at gunpoint—literally, he was physically present in the room when this happened—to hold the independence referendum that caused Russia to annex the peninsula and served as the first minister of defense of these “people’s republics” in Donetsk that would later form into Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, when actively leading their forces into battle against the Ukrainian military. This led to the MH17 incident, where he gave a direct order to fire upon the passenger plane that was flying over Ukrainian territory at the time, via a Russian-provided Buk surface-to-air missile system. Troops under his command followed through, the plane was shot down, and 298 people were killed. He had publicly stated that “We did warn you — do not fly in our sky,” had misidentified it as a Ukrainian transport plane, and boasted about it on his social media channels afterward—of course, those posts were soon deleted, and he’s been denying his involvement ever since, claiming innocence and that it was a Western provocation, using Ukraine as a proxy for it.
In his personal politics, Girkin is a Russian monarchist and an irredentist. He despises the West and lives under constant delusions of grandeur. He’s stated in interviews and on his social media that the United States is “planning to destroy the entire Russian Federation,” and in many of his videos that he publishes on his Brighteon account he mentions “respectable Western partners” mockingly, making claims about how homosexuality is enforced in the West and that if Russia loses this war, then it won’t have traditional family structures anymore, only ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two’ as he claims is true in the U.S.
All that was a good match for the triumphalist mood in Russia following the relatively easy and painless conquest of Crimea. But Girkin’s reputation, despite his initial successes in eastern Ukraine, suffered during his tenure as a separatist leader thanks to allegations of human rights abuses and military miscalculation – the latter being attributed to him by the pro-Putin Russian war supporters. He failed to win the fight for hearts and minds, and instead of being viewed as a liberator, as he wants to see himself, many of the people of the regions he occupied consider him to be nothing more than someone who contributed to their ongoing misery.
Of course, the feelings are mutual. He personally hates Ukrainians and also the Dutch. Ukrainians, he argues on both his Brighteon videos and his Telegram channel, are all actually Russians that have been “tricked by the West” to think they have their own language and culture, and the Dutch he hates because they had the audacity to rebel against their Habsburg monarch, their “rightful king,” and desired their own rights and liberties. Girkin also despises the United States and everything it stands for, believing that the U.S. is responsible for everything awful that has ever happened to Russia. Since he doesn’t speak or understand English, he gets his info by reading news articles from far-right sources in the West, created by authors that would make Alex Jones look sane, using Google translate or being told about them by his fellow angry patriots, especially by the self-proclaimed futurologist of the club, Maxim Kalashnikov, who acts as the expert on all matters relating to western politics in their club.
By late August 2014, Girkin had left Ukraine—but he didn’t stay uninvolved. His primary platform has been his Telegram channel with 868,992 subscribers where he lays out his ideas and publishes his videos, which are uploaded primarily on Brighteon. Occasionally, he uses VKontakte (a Russian equivalent to Facebook) as well as radical Russian YouTube channels, such as Roi TV (Wasp TV). He has been invited as an “expert” onto many of the far-right Russian YouTube and Telegram channels for interviews. His audience mostly consists of people who are Russian nationalists or are nostalgic for the loss of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire—or both. They are united by the fact that they see the corruption in modern Russia and Putin’s incompetence and believe that somehow this is caused by the ruling elite actually being in league with the West and only caring about enriching themselves.
This is also the focus of his political movement that was officially created earlier this year—this “Club of Angry Patriots,” which, supposedly, will unite what they refer to as the progressive and healthy forces of Russia, with their goal being the utter destruction of Ukraine, both as a nation and as an ethnic identity, “winning” over the West, and building what they consider to be the best possible Russia.
Their vision, as can be summarized together from all their various disjointed statements and beliefs, is of a police state even worse than the one run by Putin, where effectively neo-Nazis in the form of national Bolsheviks would reign freely and share absolute rule with monarchists, radical communists, and every other marginal radical extremist in Russia under a single banner. They also believe that Russian people would honestly elect such people in fair, open elections. Of course, most of them are also rampant antisemites, but that doesn’t stop them from calling themselves antifascists as well.
And yet while Girkin’s politics are evil, his strategic acumen is strong. As a veteran, he knows military matters quite well. Girkin’s a great source for Western observers of the war because of this—he doesn’t spew nonsense and outright lies about HIMARS systems being destroyed, or downed Storm Shadow missiles or constant military victories like Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson Igor Konashenkov—if you add up all of the statements made by Konashenkov over the duration of the conflict, then Russia claims to have destroyed more HIMARS than were ever delivered to Ukraine. In reality, they have not managed to destroy any of these weapons systems.
Girkin admits defeats and is objective about Russian prospects. He’s called out the Kremlin on the need of the Russian army to provide proper training and equipment for its conscripts, the shortage of manpower, the lack of drones and modern communications equipment, and, of course, the constant, massive corruption that plagues the Russian military.
But the problem is that, at this point, the only man Girkin hates more than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Putin. He’s hated him since 2014, after he was forced to retreat from eastern Ukraine and leave Donbas. Girkin felt betrayed by the Kremlin, believing that his idea of “Novorossiya” would have come true if he had had more support. Because of this, Girkin thinks that Putin is a weak leader and wholly incompetent. He’s become more and more aggressive about this lately. In the Telegram posts linked above, he mixes nationalism with misogyny. In those he says: “Miserable whining, complaints about partners, appeals ‘for all good against all bad’—that’s there as much as you want. But for a very, very long time now, the president’s rhetoric does not even remotely resemble the traditional ‘masculine standard’ and ‘In general, concluding my reflections, I have to regret that Putin is not a woman. A weak-in-character and not very smart woman could have had talented favorites. […] It also depends on luck, actually (often quite the opposite has happened), but there would have been at least a chance.”
While he argues that Putin should not be removed from power, as that would lead to a complete collapse of Russia, he thinks that “Russia won’t take six more years of this idiot being in power.”
For a long time, Girkin was able to get away with these kinds of comments because the security state didn’t go after the far right. For all his noise, too, he wasn’t a successful figure; he frequently complained of being broke and seems to have genuinely struggled to get by. He has even boasted about it, saying that he’s more honest than the people in the Russian administration, as he’s poor and that it shows he hasn’t been stealing from the Russian people, as Putin’s oligarch friends have been doing.
But today, Girkin’s not the only figure on the Russian right to be targeted. Recently, an administrative case was started against Vladimir Kvachkov, a close (and extremely antisemitic and overall insane) associate of Girkin’s, and during the protest against Girkin’s arrest—to which a whole two dozen people arrived—the formal head of this Club of Angry Patriots, Pavel Gubarev, was also detained. Finally, the ax has fallen even on the pro-war pundits who make the mistake of criticizing the powerful.
Part of the reason for this is Prigozhin’s revolt—after the sudden events in late June, Putin’s become much more paranoid. At this point, any criticism, no matter how genuine and constructive, is seen as a precursor to some other coup or rebellion, and any disagreement is seen as a direct threat—up to the point of firing generals who are viewed as competent by their men just because they spoke up about their difficult situation on the front. Currently, Putin values only absolute loyalty and sycophancy.
But another reason is the nature of the security state itself. Russia is out of liberal opposition. Putin jailed, killed, or forced into exile anyone and everyone who tried to oppose him. But, as in the Soviet era, the siloviki (enforcers) need to be paid for something—and if there aren’t any student protesters to be beaten up in Red Square, that means the pro-war Putin critics are in trouble. The machinery of oppression needs feeding, and a security state doing a markedly poor job against Ukrainian intelligence has to go for easy victories.
They seem surprised that the system could turn against them. The Angry Patriots in their own statement wrote: “Igor Ivanovich openly and reasonably criticized the actions of the authorities, including the president, but the freedom of speech that the state provided testified that the country’s leadership complied with Article 29 of the Russian Constitution. Today, confidence in this has been undermined—we see that processes are taking place in our country that demonstrate the departure of the representatives of the authorities from the basic values.”
These same groups, of course, spent years cheering on the repression of liberals.
But Putin may be in trouble. Girkin’s Club of Angry Patriots is slowly becoming a formidable force in the Russian political sphere—somehow, they’ve acquired marginals and extremists from all sides and colors around them. Communists, national Bolsheviks (who wear red armbands and glorify racial purity, yet call Ukrainians Nazis), failed economists, imperialists, and chauvinists. And to all of them, Girkin has become a symbol of this true Russian patriotism. If Putin wanted to shut him up, he should have done it a long time ago. Currently, Girkin’s arrest will only serve as a symbol of martyrdom for his movement’s followers, some of whom already serve in the armed forces.
Unfortunately for the Club of Angry Patriots, they forgot to trademark the name in the European Union, and now I own it. I trademarked the name of Girkin’s organization in English and Russian and both of his logos so that he couldn’t open cells in the West. Using this, admittedly ridiculous, branding I’ve raised around $20,000 for the Ukrainian war efforts. (And if any of my readers want to use it, I’ll happily grant the right to anyone who supports Ukraine.)
Inside Russia, the club may be facing more serious problems than a Latvian journalist with a sense of mischief. One possibility for the near future is that Putin’s control keeps tightening and Russians’ sense of relative freedom, by autocratic standards, starts to slip away. Russia becomes the next North Korea, any freedoms whatsoever are suppressed, and they lose the war because sycophants do not make for good generals. That brings its own renewed chaos for the motherland; losing states aren’t happy places. Another is that the right fully turns on him—making his rule look weaker than ever. Internal strife seems inevitable.
The fact that Girkin, who can’t even afford a dentist or a car, has been arrested as a threat shows that Putin is no longer clearly in control and that the old KGB officer is slowly succumbing to paranoia. After all, if such a man seems to be a serious threat to a leader, then clearly something has been broken in the structures of power. Girkin himself might not deserve to be in a Russian jail—but he does deserve to be in The Hague.
Kaplan Street is one of the main thoroughfares leading into and out of Tel Aviv. It was built along the outline of a German Templar colony, whose pro-Nazi descendants were expelled from British Mandate Palestine during World War II. During the 1960s and 70s, it was filled with Israeli governmental and cultural institutions, such as the Jewish Agency and the Israel Journalists Association. These days, Kaplan is the street where, every Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protest the attempted judicial coup led by the coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Contrary to the common version in the global press, the protesters are not only the scions of the old, privileged establishment. Those gathering on Kaplan are a big tent, including both the financially comfortable and the struggling. While some of the protest movement leaders are military elites or tech moguls, many others are not. The most vulnerable of them are set to become the main casualties of Netanyahu’s judicial coup. That’s because their children, who study in the public school system, may witness its slow collapse due to funds being redirected to the religious and ultra-Orthodox institutions.
Their kids, who—unlike most ultra-Orthodox Jews—serve a full term in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), will sit idle at home because in Israel, there is no public transport on the Sabbath. Single mothers will have their state support reduced in favor of ultra-Orthodox families with multiple children. People who live in peripheral areas will have to struggle against an ultra-Orthodox takeover of their towns. The first step will be a political takeover of the municipalities, followed by massive benefits to the ultra-Orthodox population. According to reports, this process is already happening in cities such as Tiberias, Safed, Arad, and Mitzpe Ramon.
They are Jews, Palestinians, men, women, native Israelis, and immigrants who arrived from developing countries via the Law of Return. The common denominator for all of them is the struggle against turning into a so-called donkey.
In Jewish tradition, the Messiah’s Donkey refers to the donkey upon which the Messiah will arrive at the end of days. In Israel, the phrase refers to the doctrine ascribed to the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook: The secular Jews, who represent the material world, are an instrument in the hands of God whose purpose was to establish the state of Israel and begin the process of redemption. Upon Israel’s establishment, the secular Jews would be required to step aside and allow the religious to govern the state.
Kook, who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine from what is now Latvia in 1904, is considered one of the spiritual fathers of religious Zionism. According to him, the Zionist enterprise was a new historical development of the era of redemption. Nevertheless, Kook was terrified of secularism. He believed that secular education had “sinned greatly against the spirit of Israel” and represented “the beginning of the decay and the basis of all bad assimilation.” Kook sought to settle the contradiction. The secular Zionists, he wrote, are allowed to be the bricks of the building of redemption, “but when the secret of the righteous is to be revealed,” it would be easy to differentiate “between God’s servants and those who are not.”
Unlike Kook, Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion was an atheist. He came from a religious background and respected Jewish heritage. At the end of the 1950s, a Bible study group gathered in his house, and the prophets were his favorite biblical characters. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion did not attend synagogue and used to travel on the Sabbath. He made compromises with ultra-Orthodox parties only because of political constraints. It turned out to be a disaster for secular Israelis.
Kook’s prediction is about to come true, with one difference: Israel will not be a theocracy. It will be a country using religious law to allow profound corruption. In the past six months, there have been many reports on improper political appointments within the Likud party and its religious partners. Some of the coalition members have past criminal convictions, and there are reports of improper past conduct by others. And the country’s transformation into a corrupt religious state won’t only strengthen its ideological rivals—Israel is also a potential international drug trade route; such a shift may boost organized crime.
Over the next decade, the government plans to increase the budget of ultra-Orthodox educational institutions by 40 percent. This will make Israel the first country in the developed world that incentivizes schools that barely teach core subjects such as math, science, and English. The governmental supervision of ultra-Orthodox schools is weak, leaving vague information available about their curriculum. But according to sources in the education ministry, these schools teach primarily religious topics: the Talmud, Mishna, and Torah.
English, math, and even Hebrew are studied at an elementary level. In addition, more than $600 million of the coalition budget will be dedicated to empowering Jewish identity among students in the state education system, IDF soldiers, university students, and residents of secular and liberal cities. Aryeh Deri, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, a convicted tax evader and one of the most powerful politicians in the coalition, plans a series of laws that might allow the ultra-Orthodox to take over secular towns politically.
Meanwhile, secular Israelis will pay six times more in taxes than the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute only 8 percent of the Israeli workforce. Their children will be obligated, as they are today, to serve a full term in the army (three years for men and two for women), while so-called national-religious men can serve in the army for a reduced term and most ultra-Orthodox are exempt.
Despite these facts, since the country’s founding, the secular population has been deprived of some basic liberties. This is because Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.
“The liberals are beginning to realize that they will be used as the donkey up to the moment Israel is subjected to religious law,” said Yair Nehorai, a lawyer and the author of The Third Revolution, a book documenting the teachings of the rabbinic mentors of the messianic movement. “But this realization,” he noted, “is too difficult.”
“They will no longer be the majority in the country within a few decades, and they will have to say: This is not my country,” Nehorai said.
The idea of dividing Israel into cantons, which for years has been received with mockery due to the country’s small size and security challenges, has been gaining more and more traction over the past few months, and liberals are angrily calling to separate “Israel” from “Judea.” For some, Judea means the occupied territories. For others, Judea represents all ultra-Orthodox and messianic Jews, whether they live in Bnei Brak (in Israel proper) or Hebron (in the West Bank).
Sagi Elbaz, the author of Emergency Exit: From Tribalism to Federation, the Road to Healing Israeli Society, told me that these cantons will begin with the liberal Israeli cities. “A secular rebellion manifested itself, for example, when the municipalities of Tel Aviv and several other liberal cities launched a network of bus routes that operate on the Sabbath,” he explained.
Until recently, Kaplan Street appeared to welcome protesters of all stripes. Next to No. 8, where the offices of the tech company Fiverr are located, CEO Micha Kaufman hands out free water bottles. Not far from Kaplan 17-19 stand the protesters of the “Anti-Occupation Bloc,” forcing passers-by to acknowledge the elephant in the room with signs such as “No Democracy with Occupation.” Kaplan 22 looks like the mother base of “Women Building an Alternative,” whose photos dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel A Handmaid’s Tale have gained worldwide publicity. Next to them are the members of “The Pink Front,” who have ironically swapped the Israeli blue-and-white flag for a pink-and-white one.
At the end of Kaplan and on the adjacent Namir Street, you can find the unironic blue-and-white. And khaki. This is the center of activity for “Brothers in Arms—Warriors Journeying to Save Democracy,” a grassroots umbrella organization that includes several reservist groups.
Israeli researchers have often noted that, compared to developed Western countries, Israel struggles with establishing a free and open civil society, as the Israelis are attached at the hip to their army. Despite this, the veterans demonstrating on Kaplan are not all the same: Some served in the special forces. Others spent three unremarkable years, mostly killing time. Some veterans abused their power over the Palestinians. Others were discharged with physical and mental scars.
Some believe that serving in the occupied territories is a critical security goal. Others feel that they were forced to go there, but never came out in public to say so. Some of them committed acts of heroism. A few others proved their heroism by refusing to commit acts that they have deemed immoral.
Brothers in Arms, the embodiment of the liberal side of the “People’s Army,” has the most leverage of any group in the Israeli protest movement. Now, with the coalition resuming its legislative blitz, special forces veterans have declared that hundreds of them will stop volunteering for reserve duty. The number of objectors is rising. Former directors of special intelligence operations have warned that units across the IDF, the Shin Bet and Mossad are angry and in a state of unrest.
Reserve Col. Ronen Koehler, one of the Brothers in Arms coordinators, told Foreign Policy that until mid-March, “we were just another activist group.” But in the time since, “we received a flood of phone calls from reservists who were expecting us to tell them what to do about their service.” There were questions from high-ranking commanders who have an in-depth understanding of Israel’s strategic infrastructure: What if you are ordered to shoot in a way you were never ordered to before, and you are experienced enough to know that you shouldn’t do it? What happens if a submarine crew is not sure that the person who sent them to sea is trustworthy?
“The flood of phone calls made us realize that something bigger than our protest activities was happening here,” said Koehler, who served as a submarine captain and is a former vice president at Checkpoint, a U.S.-Israeli hardware and software products company.
The government reached the same realization. A secret report that was submitted to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant caused a temporary halt of the judicial coup at the end of February, but it has now resumed with the passage of a law limiting judicial review on Monday—sparking even larger protests.
As successful as the protests have been, liberal civil society and the army veterans struggle to see eye to eye. For various reasons, some practical (to attract right-wing voters) and some ideological, the occupation is barely mentioned in speeches along the Kaplan encampment, and the number of Palestinian-Israelis joining the protests is low.
Recently, the Anti-Occupation Bloc, which usually demonstrates far from the main stage, decided to pass through the main avenue. The protesters carried a massive sign reading: “We Must Resist Settler Terror.” Some of the Brothers in Arms tried to forcefully remove the sign. After a time, they published a half-hearted apology, and a few days later, they met with Anti-Occupation Bloc representatives to settle matters peacefully.
Some protest participants hate each other, while others love each other. Some are caught in love-hate relationships. “We should be glad about the greatest achievement we got: the creation of a new kind of centrist identity,” Koehler said. “This center includes various shades, from the capitalist, hawkish right that believed in Netanyahu so far but not anymore, through the liberal center and up to the social-democratic left.”
“The protest doesn’t have intrinsic content yet,” Nehorai admitted. “But when a serving coalition is acting in a frenzy, it makes us feel, every minute of every day, that we are connected. The liberal camp is a country that is just being formed.”
All Israelis are facing legislation that will grant unlimited power to anyone the government chooses; they could be white-collar criminals, rehabilitated members of organized crime families, cocaine addicts, or messianic fundamentalists.
A growing number of Israeli liberals, especially younger ones, will soon start negotiating the cargo loaded on their backs, the identity of the hand holding the reins, and the direction of travel. And ultimately, they will refuse to continue being used as donkeys.
The United Nations is the custodian of billions of dollars of international assistance meant for the hungry and needy of Afghanistan, where around half the population is said to depend on outside help just to stay alive. Yet the agencies entrusted with delivering that aid have been “effectively infiltrated” by the terrorist-run Taliban, who regard foreign charity as just another revenue stream, according to a report prepared for the U.S. government that has not yet been made public.
Tapping into charities and international aid to siphon money is nothing terribly new for the Taliban, who have been doing so since their first rise to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. But that approach has taken on extra significance since the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021, when terrorists, drug traffickers, and illegal traders were catapulted to power. The result has been fewer opportunities for Taliban leaders, and rank-and-file fighters, to cash in on illicit activity, making the collection plate grab all the more vital.
The detailed, and devastating, analysis of Afghanistan’s political and economic situation two years after the fall of Kabul was commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government arm for foreign aid, and obtained by Foreign Policy. The report confirms that aid is being systematically diverted through Taliban-controlled hands and raises serious questions about the presence in Afghanistan of U.N. agencies charged with delivering that aid to those who need it.
The “Taliban appear to view the UN system as yet another revenue stream, one which their movement will seek to monopolize and centralize control over,” the report says.
The report casts doubt on the world body’s ability to control the flow of aid, including about $2 billion from the United States alone since Aug. 15, 2021, when the Islamic Republic collapsed. And it comes as concern is growing that Western governments, including the Biden administration, favor moving toward recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate authority in Afghanistan, rather than attempting to hold them to account for brutal policies that have trampled the Afghan people and again transformed the country into a haven for global terrorism.
With at least 19 agencies present in Afghanistan, the U.N. has effectively been operating illegally since a December edict from the Taliban banned the employment of women in NGOs; nondiscrimination is fundamental to the U.N. Charter. The USAID report says many nongovernmental organizations are now paying women to stay home, while the Taliban have ordered them to send their male relatives to ostensibly work in their place, even as the displaced women continue to do the heavy lifting. Afghanistan represents the biggest single-country appeal, for $3.2 billion this year (down from an earlier $4.6 billion), though the U.N. complains that, amid reports of corruption and complicity, it has received less than a quarter of the money. The United States is the biggest financial supporter of the U.N.
Donor reluctance to stump up the cash is understandable, given the contents of the report, which was submitted to USAID in May by the U.S. Institute of Peace. It flies in the face of claims that the Taliban are no longer the unreconstructed and unaccountable group that ran Afghanistan into the ground between 1996 and 2001. Assertions from U.N. and government officials that rifts within the Taliban could be exploited to force a reversal on policies such as confining women to their homes and banning girls from secondary education are also debunked; the report concludes that “the Taliban remain strongly, surprisingly cohesive.” Just as the political center of gravity has shifted south from Kabul to Kandahar, the decision-making power has drifted more into the orbit of Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada—there is little meaningful opposition.
The playbook of Taliban interference with foreign aid includes intimidation and coercion of local U.N. staff and, as with other NGOs, pushing for “ever-increasing degrees of credit and control over the delivery of aid, especially the more tangible forms of aid,” the report says. NGOs are forced to sign memoranda of understanding with ministries that are being taken over by agents of the Taliban’s secret service, the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI). The GDI official responsible for oversight of NGOs is believed to be responsible for a massacre of opponents in Nangarhar, according to the report.
The Taliban recipe for overcoming opposition, like the Romans and British before them, has been to divide and conquer, and it still pays dividends—in an aid-flooded Afghanistan, handsome ones. The report notes that U.N. agencies and NGOs lack collective bargaining power as they enter bilateral agreements complying with conditions for Taliban oversight and control. This “removed much of the leverage other agencies had once the precedent of acquiescence was set,” the report says.
The report also sheds some light on Taliban finances, describing the group as adept at tax collection and basic budget management—some iffy diversions by the supreme leader aside—thanks in part to the retention of a large core of Republic-era civil servants. Despite the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, Taliban revenues of about $2 billion a year are roughly what the old government managed. What’s less clear is where that money goes. The report estimates that about 40 percent of the national budget is allocated to the security sector, as former military commanders, who retain control over “men with guns,” are a critical constituency. The rest is rather more opaque.
The “Taliban are clearly generating income—but it isn’t at all clear what they are spending it on,” the report says.
In the meantime, as much as the Taliban remain reluctant to actually become a competent governing body, they are happy to be seen as such. That is one reason why NGOs that deliver high-profile goods and services such as health care are much more likely to be tolerated by the Taliban than civil society groups that deliver things that either smack of Western influence or can’t be packed in the back of a truck. The problem with the Taliban’s control of money is that it insulates them from any of the innumerable, and so far futile, calls to lessen their oppression of women or add some inclusivity to their government or fully rehabilitate former political opponents.
“The myriad means of profiting from engagement with the UN system and the aid sector, aside from formal taxation, mean that even though the investment amounts are greatly reduced from the 20 years of U.S.-led intervention, foreign aid is a major economic prize to be contested,” the report says.
Washington has spent, depending how you count it, a few decades, a few years, or the last year defending against potential Russian cyberattacks, especially given the intensity of online conflict after the renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But China recently gave Washington a stark reminder that it remains a highly capable adversary.
Beginning in mid-May, a Chinese-based hacking group infiltrated more than two dozen organizations, including some U.S. government agencies, such as the State and Commerce departments, as well as the email accounts of U.S. officials such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The hackers had free rein for a month. All the while North Korea remains an advanced, persistent threat, hoovering up sensitive information and stealing cryptocurrency to fund its missile and nuclear programs.
All of those concerns made the rollout this month of the Biden administration’s long-awaited cybersecurity plan all the more timely, coming just days after public acknowledgement of the Chinese hack. The only problem is that the big implementation plan is long on aspirations—if notably less ambitious than the road map laid out this spring—and short on the very kinds of details that could make greater cybersecurity a reality during the administration’s remaining time in office.
The implementation plan, published this month, lays out concrete steps to protect U.S. pipelines, electrical grids, the water supply, and other key infrastructure from being ground to a halt by devastating cyberattacks and to prevent hackers from infiltrating the emails of senior U.S. government officials, as China has done.
That includes leaning more on the private sector companies that actually build and run those systems, such as Amazon and Microsoft, as well as working with allies around the world to take down bad actors more proactively. The implementation plan sets concrete timelines to achieve each goal of the cybersecurity strategy and assigns a host of agencies—including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI—with oversight and coordination of specific efforts.
However, several gaps still remain that could continue to leave U.S. government and private systems vulnerable to being attacked. “Many of the strategy’s most difficult and revolutionary goals … have been pared down or omitted entirely,” experts at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative wrote in a report published last week, pointing to specific provisions around data privacy, digital identity, and cloud risk that were part of the initial strategy but found scant mention in the implementation plan.
Much of that may be down to political realism, Maia Hamin and Stewart Scott, associate directors at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and two of the report’s co-authors, said in an interview. Big swings by the executive branch that look to overhaul technology regulation are unlikely to be passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, likely prompting the Biden administration to temper some of its targets.
“The difference in what the strategy talks about and what the implementation plan talks about says a lot about what they think is implementable in the near term,” Scott said. “There’s some more proactiveness there, but there’s a lot of the way to go on getting it done.”
Another potential wrinkle is that many of the implementation plan’s deadlines stretch into 2025—after next year’s presidential election—and it’s unclear whether a new administration would adopt the same cybersecurity priorities and plans.
One key vulnerability that the recent breach revelation exposed is the government’s increasing shift to cloud-based services for its technology needs. That shift in many ways is positive, necessary, and unavoidable, according to Hamin: Cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have the technical capabilities and resources to better manage online systems, making them more efficient and cost-effective. But it also consolidates service providers and attack surfaces in a way that potentially opens a clearer infiltration pathway for adversaries such as China.
“The more you centralize high-value data and workloads in the cloud, the more it becomes a target for adversaries,” she said. “These are things that if you successfully hack or attack identity and access management, you can get the keys to the kingdom.”
China remains the most sophisticated adversary the United States faces on that front, with espionage dominating its priorities and modus operandi far more than the infrastructure-targeted ransomware attacks favored by Russian cyberwarriors or the cryptocurrency thefts perpetrated by their North Korean counterparts.
“[Chinese] cyberoperations are conducted at a considerably greater scale and with a wider targeting scope compared to all other state-backed activity” that the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future tracks, said Jonathan Condra, the firm’s director of strategic and persistent threats. China’s relative absence from attacks that take down U.S. infrastructure should be seen as a matter of preference rather than inability, he added. “It is far more likely that these tools, the associated vulnerabilities, and the malware have been kept in reserve for use in the case of direct military confrontation.”
It’s not just government targets that Washington needs to be concerned about. Much of Chinese cyber-espionage has focused on stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies, particularly those in the critical technology space, and those efforts in particular may get a fillip from the numerous trade barriers—including on semiconductors and technology investment—that Washington is imposing on China.
“As the rift between the two countries grows and additional retaliatory punitive measures are enacted, the political and economic incentives for China to utilize cyber-espionage as a means of accessing key technologies for strategic sectors will increase,” Condra said. “China undoubtedly poses the most significant threat.”
Early in the morning of July 16, 1945, before the sun had risen over the northern edge of New Mexico’s Jornada Del Muerto desert, a new light—blindingly bright, hellacious, blasting a seam in the fabric of the known physical universe—appeared. The Trinity nuclear test, overseen by theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, had filled the predawn sky with fire, announcing the viability of the first proper nuclear weapon and the inauguration of the Atomic Era. According to Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the “Father of the Bomb,” Robert’s response to the test’s success was plain, even a bit curt: “I guess it worked.”
With time, a legend befitting the near-mythic occasion grew. Oppenheimer himself would later attest that the explosion brought to mind a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu scripture: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” Later, toward the end of his life, Oppenheimer plucked another passage from the Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Christopher Nolan’s epic, blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer prints the legend. As Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) gazes out over a black sky set aflame, he hears his own voice in his head: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The line also appears earlier in the film, as a younger “Oppie” woos the sultry communist moll Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). She pulls a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from her lover’s bookshelf. He tells her he’s been learning how to read Sanskrit. She challenges him to translate a random passage on the spot. Sure enough: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (That the line comes in a postcoital revery—a state of bliss the French call la petite mort, “the little death”—and amid a longer conversation about the new science of Freudian psychoanalysis—is about as close to a joke as Oppenheimer gets.)
As framed by Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, Oppenheimer’s cursory knowledge of Sanskrit, and Hindu religious tradition, is little more than another of his many eccentricities. After all, this is a guy who took the “Trinity” name from a John Donne poem; who brags about reading all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital (in the original German, natch); and, according to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus, once taught himself Dutch to impress a girl. But Oppenheimer’s interest in Sanskrit, and the Gita, was more than just another idle hobby or party trick.
In American Prometheus, credited as the basis for Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin depict Oppenheimer as more seriously committed to this ancient text and the moral universe it conjures. They develop a resonant image, largely ignored in Nolan’s film. Yes, it’s got the quote. But little of the meaning behind it—a meaning that illuminates Oppenheimer’s own conception of the universe, of his place in it, and of his ethics, such as they were.
Composed sometime in the first millennium, the Bhagavad Gita (or “Song of God”) takes the form of a poetic dialog between a warrior-prince named Arjuna and his charioteer, the Hindu deity Krishna, in unassuming human form. On the cusp of a momentous battle, Arjuna refuses to engage in combat, renouncing the thought of “slaughtering my kin in war.” Throughout their lengthy back-and-forth (unfolding over some 700 stanzas), Krishna attempts to ease the prince’s moral dilemma by attuning him to the grander design of the universe, in which all living creatures are compelled to obey dharma, roughly translated as “virtue.” As a warrior, in a war, Krishna maintains that it is Arjuna’s dharma to serve, and fight; just as it is the sun’s dharma to shine and water’s dharma to slake the thirsty.
In the poem’s ostensible climax, Krishna reveals himself as Vishnu, Hinduism’s many-armed (and many-eyed and many-mouthed) supreme divinity; fearsome and magnificent, a “god of gods.” Arjuna, in an instant, comprehends the true nature of Vishnu and of the universe. It is a vast infinity, without beginning and end, in a constant process of destruction and rebirth. In such a mind-boggling, many-faced universe (a “multiverse,” in the contemporary blockbuster parlance), the ethics of an individual hardly matter, as this grand design repeats in accordance with its own cosmic dharma. Humbled and convinced, Arjuna takes up his bow.
As recounted in American Prometheus, the story had a significant impact on Oppenheimer. He called it “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” He praised his Sanskrit teacher for renewing his “feeling for the place of ethics.” He even christened his Chrysler Garuda, after the Hindu bird-deity who carries the Lord Vishnu. (That Oppenheimer seems to identify not with the morally conflicted Arjuna but with the Lord Vishnu himself may say something about his own sense of self-importance.)“The Gita,” Bird and Sherwin write, “seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy.” Its prizing of dharma, and duty as a form of virtue, gave Oppenheimer’s anguished mind a form of calm. With its notion of both creation and destruction as divine acts, the Gita offered Oppenheimer a frame of making sense of (and, later, justifying) his own actions. It’s a key motivation in the life of a great scientist and theoretician, whose work was marshaled toward death. And it’s precisely the sort of idea Nolan rarely lets seep into his movies.
Nolan’s films—from the thriller Memento and his Batman trilogy to the sci-fi opera Interstellar and the time-reversal blockbuster Tenet—are ordered around puzzles and problem-solving. He establishes a dilemma, provides the “rules,” and then sets about solving that dilemma. For all his sci-fi high-mindedness, he allows very little room for questions of faith or belief. Nolan’s cosmos is more like a complicated puzzle box. He has popularized a kind of sapio-cinema, which makes a virtue of intelligence without being itself highly intellectual.
At their best, his movies are genuinely clever in conceit and construct. The one-upping stage magicians of The Prestige, who go mad trying to best one another, are distinctly Nolanish figures. The tripartite structure of Dunkirk—which weaves together plot lines that unfold across distinct periods of time—is likewise inspired. At their worst, Nolan’s films collapse into ponderousness and pretension. The barely scrutable reality-distortion mechanics of Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet smack of hooey.
Oppenheimer seems similarly obsessed with problem-solving. First, Nolan sets up some challenges for himself. Such as: how to depict a subatomic fission reaction at Imax scale or, for that matter, how to make a biopic about a theoretical physicist as a broadly entertaining summer blockbuster. Then he sets to work. To his credit, Oppenheimer unfolds breathlessly and succeeds making dusty-seeming classroom conversations and chatty closed-door depositions play like the stuff of a taut, crowd-pleasing thriller. The cinematography, at both a subatomic and megaton scale, is also genuinely impressive. But Nolan misses the deeper metaphysics undergirding the drama.
The movie depicts Murphy’s Oppenheimer more as a methodical scientist. Oppenheimer, the man, was a deep and radical thinker whose mind was grounded by the mystical, the metaphysical, and the esoteric. A film like Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life shows that it is possible to depict these sort of higher-minded ideas at the grand, blockbuster scale, but it’s almost as if they don’t even occur to Nolan. One might, charitably, claim that his film’s time-jumping structure reflects the Gita’s notion of time itself as nonlinear. But Nolan’s reshuffling of the story’s chronology seems more born of a showman’s instinct to save his big bang for a climax.
When the bomb does go off, and its torrents of fire fill the gigantic Imax screen, there’s no sense that the Lord Vishnu, the mighty one, is being revealed in that “radiance of a thousand suns.” It’s just a big explosion. Nolan is ultimately a journeyman technician, and he maps that personality onto Oppenheimer. Reacting to the horrific, militarily unjustifiable bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima (which are never depicted on-screen), Murphy’s Oppenheimer calls them “technically successful.”Judged against the life of its subject, Oppenheimer can feel like a bit of let down. It fails to comprehend the woolier, yet more substantial, worldview that animated Oppie’s life, work, and own moral torment. Weighed against Nolan’s own, more purely practical, ambitions, perhaps the best that can be said of Oppenheimer is that—to paraphrase the physicist’s actual reported comments, uttered at his moment of ascension to the status of godlike world-destroyer—it works. Successful, if only technically.
Wearing a baseball cap and thick, black-rimmed glasses, Cameron Chell is part defense contractor, part tech executive. His company, Draganfly, used to mainly work with emergency services in North America, selling drones and the accompanying software that could deliver medical equipment, or film traffic accidents from above. But since last February, the Canadian has pivoted his business to cater to a market more than 8,000 miles away: Ukraine.
Now, there are 40 Draganfly drones in Ukraine, repurposed for search-and-rescue missions in bombed-out buildings, landmine detection, and other military tasks that Chell declines to detail. The company has demonstrated its tech to the Ukrainian Air Force, the Ministry of Defence, as well as President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s fundraising initiative, United24. “There isn’t a branch of the government we haven’t worked with or interacted with in some way.” Sometimes he gets texts from Ukrainian contacts, saying a friend of a friend needs a drone for their unit, can he help? Draganfly obliges, of course, for a discounted fee.
Since Russia invaded, military aid has been flowing into Ukraine. The US has committed $39 billion since the war started, the UK $37.3 billion, and the EU $12 billion. Chell and his company are part of a scramble of international tech companies rushing into the country to try and benefit. Business has been so good, he’s set up a field office in Ukraine with four full-time employees. But Draganfly is operating in Ukraine not just to support the cause or to collect the cash. It’s also come for the data.
The war in Ukraine presents an unprecedented opportunity for military tech companies. The scale of the fighting and the sheer number of weapons systems and high-tech sensors deployed have created a vast amount of data about how battles are fought and how people and machines behave under fire. For businesses that want to build the next generation of weapons, or train systems that will be useful in future conflicts, that is a resource of incalculable value.
“Everybody could have the same AI engine. The only differentiator now is how good are the data inputs that you have,” says Chell. “Making sure that it’s your sensors collecting that data, and feeding it into your software, is absolutely important. It’s more important than ever to be present.”
There is an old, much derided, cliché that data is the “new oil”—not only because of its cash value, but because of how it will fuel so much of the future economy. Just as large language models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are trained on hundreds of billions of words, AI products in the defense world also have to be fed vast amounts of data. A company selling drones that can autonomously identify tanks, for example, needs to train its software on huge numbers of images: tanks covered in camouflage, tanks obscured by bushes, tanks deep in mud. It needs to be able to recognize the difference between a military tank and a civilian tractor, as well as what type of tank it’s looking at, so it knows friend from foe. For a company like Draganfly, which is selling drones with landmine-detection software, staff need to train their AI on thousands of images, so their system can tell the difference between a rock formation and a modern mine.
“Ukraine is the only place in the world where you can get that data at the moment,” says Ingvild Bode, associate professor at the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.
Draganfly is far from the only company to have noticed the potential of Ukraine to gather data. Chell is among a wave of international AI executives traveling to and from the conflict to test and train their products. German AI company Helsing says it has staff regularly traveling to the country. Data analytics company Palantir has opened an office in Kyiv and is offering its services pro bono. “You have to ask yourself, why are they doing that?” says Bode. “There are a number of reasons, and the value of the data will absolutely be one of them.”
Some international companies working in the conflict zone are using their experiences in Ukraine to refine the products they are selling back home. Seattle-based BRINC has designed “Lemur” drones, which are designed to be able to break through windows to access buildings. In the US, they’ve been marketed to police to use in active shooter scenarios. But in Ukraine, they’re being used to help search for survivors after missile attacks, according to the company’s founder, Blake Resnick. The company recently released its Lemur 2 model, which “does utilize some feedback that we’ve gotten from Ukraine,” he says. The new model can make floor plans of a building as it flies around and can maintain its position in the air, even when the pilot takes their hands off the controller. These ideas might have grown out of BRINC’s work in Ukraine, but according to the company’s YouTube advert, they’re now being marketed to police forces back in the US.
The “data is the new oil” cliché might illustrate data’s value. But it also speaks to the way data can be extracted from a country without benefiting the people who live there. In the first year after the invasion, Ukraine was so welcoming to American tech companies that even startups whose pitches had been rejected at home by the Pentagon got the green light to be trialed by Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines. But that warm welcome is starting to chill, as Ukrainian government officials recognize how valuable their battlefield data would be if it remained in Ukrainian hands.
“You can’t even imagine how many foreign companies are already using Ukraine as a testing ground for their products: AI companies like Clearview, Palantir; anti-jamming systems; everything that has a software component is in Ukraine right now,” says Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister for digital transformation.
Ukraine is very aware of the value of its data, Bornyakov says, cautioning that companies shouldn’t expect to arrive in the country and get access to data for nothing. “This experience we’re in right now—how to manage troops, how to manage them smarter and automatically—nobody has that,” he says. “This data certainly is not for sale. It’s only available if you offer some sort of mutually beneficial cooperation.”
Instead, Ukraine wants to use the data that’s being gathered for its own defense sector. “After the war has finished, Ukraine companies will go to the market and offer solutions that probably nobody else has,” Bornyakov says.
Over the past few months, Ukraine has been talking up its ambitions to leverage its battlefield innovations to build a military-tech industry of its own.
“We want to build a very strong defense tech industry,” says Nataliia Kushnerska, project lead for Brave1, a Ukrainian state platform designed to make it easier for defense-tech companies to pitch their products to the military. The country still wants to partner and cooperate with international companies, she says, but there is a growing emphasis on homegrown solutions.
Building a domestic industry would help protect the country from future Russian aggression, Kushnerska says. And Ukrainians have a better understanding of the dynamics of the battlefield than their international counterparts. “Technologies that cost a huge amount of money, made in [overseas] laboratories, are coming to the front line, and they’re not working,” she says.
Brave1—which was exclusively open to Ukrainian companies for its first two months of existence—is not the country’s only attempt to build a homegrown industry. Kushnerska describes secret tech conferences, attended by Ukrainian tech executives and Ministry of Defense officials, where discussions can take place about what the militaries need and how companies can help. In May, Ukraine’s parliament voted through a series of tax breaks for drone makers, in an attempt to encourage the industry. Those government efforts, combined with the huge demand for drones and the motivation to win the war, is creating entire new industries, says Bornyakov. He claims the country now has more than 300 companies making drones.
One of those 300 companies is AeroDrone, which started out as a crop-spraying system based in Germany. By the time of the full-scale invasion, the company’s Ukrainian founder, Yuri Pederi, had already moved back to his home country. But the war inspired him to pivot the business. Now the drones, which can carry heavy loads of up to 300 kilograms, are being used by the Ukrainian military.
“We don’t know what the military are carrying,” says Dmytro Shymkiv, a partner at the company, who used to be deputy chief of staff for Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president who preceded Zelenskyy. He might plead ignorance to what AeroDrone drones are transporting, but the company is collecting vast amounts of data—up to 3,000 parameters—on each flight. “We are very much aware of what’s going on with every piece of equipment on board,” he says, adding that information about flying while being jammed, or in different weather conditions, can be repurposed in other industries or even other conflicts.
Aerodrone offers a glimpse of the future companies Bornyakov is describing. Armed with that data, the company sees a wide range of options for its future once the war is over, both military and civilian. If you can fly in a war zone, Shymkiv says, you can fly anywhere.