Academic literature on the topic 'Muslim women – Crimes against – Soviet Union'

The paper is concerning the Soviet seizure of the cultural space of Transcaucasia and the establishment of „national“cinematography in the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1920s – 1930s. The Soviet power realizing the influential potential of cinema turned it into instrument of state propaganda. The three Transcaucasian film studios (in Tiflis, Yerevan, Baku) had a common task – to change the image of the East as exotic world and to alternate it with the image of the Soviet East. At the same time each of the film studios was entrusted a specific role in the Soviet cinema: The Georgian film studio as the first established Transcaucasian studio initiated the earliest agitation films glorifying the Soviet republic and the earliest heroic – adventure (western) films „Red Devils“ (“Krasnye dyavolyata”) (1923). But as the most prominent success of the Georgian cinema was labelled the movie „Eliso“ (1928), which according to the Soviet critique was considered as „ historically realistic narrative about the struggles against the colonial politics of Tsar’s autocracy“. The role of the non-Muslim Armenia and the Armenian film studio was to contribute for the removing the yashmaks from the face of the East. About the highly evaluated from the Soviet propaganda film „Namus“ (1925) „the father of the Trans-caucasian cinema“ Hamo Bek-Nazarov received the recognition of being the first one to show the true image of the East without make-up. Another task of the Armenian cinema which was successfully done was to ridicule and relegate the independent Armenian republic, governed by the party of Dashnaktsutyun (1918-1920). Baku film studio was called upon to turn into centre of movies influencing ideologically and artistically the audience of Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Persia, Turkey and other Eastern countries. It was proclaimed to be national proletarian centre for export of socialism to „ the foreign countries of the East“. By Azerbaijan movies anti-Islamic Soviet propaganda was implemented denouncing „the reactionary essence of the Muslim priesthood “. Such are movies „Bismillah“ (1925) and „Sevil“(1929, co-production with Armenian film studio). The movie „Sevil“ came out during the campaign for removing the yashmaks which was organized and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It got the recognition of contributing for the „liberating of women of the East“. The movie is significant of the cooperation between the Azerbaijani playwright, poet and screenwriter Jafar Jabbarli, the film studio in Baku today is named after him, and the Armenian director Hamo Bek-Nazarov, the film studio in Yerevan is also named after him. In the conclusions some myths about the Soviet Transcaucasian cinema are mentioned, myths already demystified. The Transcaucasian cinema from 1920s – 1930s was not a result of free and creative exchange of knowledge and experience but it was created in a capsulated world under the control of the Soviet power. That is way the whole story of this cinema from the beginning of the 20th century is full of examples for its use for narrow political aims.

The purpose of the work. The article is devoted to the fate of Volksdeutsche women after the end of the Second World War. The focus is on the history of women in southern Ukraine, a region of Ukraine where a large part of the German population is under occupation. The historiography of the problem covers works that cover the issue of gender history in the context of the topic: Larysa Belkovets, Lyudmila Burgart, Andriy Kotlyarchuk, Maya Lutai, Olena Styazhkina and others. The sources of the study were the NKVD investigative cases against women who accepted German citizenship, eyewitness accounts, and statistics. Results and scientific novelty of the study. The circumstances and reasons why women chose the status of Volksdeutsche have been clarified. In particular, the study found that this was not always a voluntary or conscious choice: women in difficult life situations chose a survival strategy that they thought could be successful. Volksdeutsche status did not guarantee a happy life, adequate nutrition or normal living conditions for the woman and her family. He was entitled to minimal assistance, but imposed many responsibilities on the Volksdeutsche, forcing them to accept Nazi crimes against civilians and send their children to Hitler's or the German Girls' Union, where they were raised in the spirit of Nazi ideology. German women seldom took an active part in collaborationism: they seldom worked as translators, teachers for Volksdeutsche and Ukrainian schools that did not last long in the occupied territories. In the south of Ukraine, the Volksdeutsche also included ethnic Swedes – residents of the Swedish colony Staroshvedske. For the Germans of southern Ukraine in the status of Volksdeutsche, the war ended first with the forced evacuation to Germany by the Germans, and then by the forced repatriation of Soviet troops home. As a result, Volksdeutsche women were tried on charges of treason and aiding the Nazis. Women made up the majority of special settlers in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan. However, many Germans managed to avoid repatriation and remain in European countries forever without Soviet influence.Key words: local history, gender history, Volksdeutsche, World War II, NKVD. Мета роботи. Стаття присвячена долі жінок-фольксдойче після завершення Другої світової війни. В центрі уваги історії жінок Південної України, регіону України, на території якого значна частина німецького населення опинилась в окупації. Історіографія проблеми охоплює роботи, в яких висвітлюється питання гендерної історії в розрізі теми: Лариси Белковець, Людмили Бургарт, Андрія Котлярчука, Майї Лутай, Олени Стяжкіної та інших. Джерелами дослідження стали слідчі справи НКВС щодо жінок, котрі прийняли німецьке підданство, спогади очевидців, статистичні матеріали. Результати та наукова новизна дослідження. З’ясовані обставини та причини, чому жінки обирали статус фольксдойче. Зокрема в процесі дослідження з’ясовано, що це не завжди був добровільний чи усвідомлений вибір: жінки, що опинялись в складних життєвих ситуаціях, обирали стратегію виживання, яка на їхню думку могла стати успішною. Статус фольксдойче не гарантував щасливого життя, достатнього харчування чи нормальних умов проживання для жінки та її сім’ї. Він давав право на мінімальну допомогу, проте накладав на фольксдойче чимало обов’язків, змушував примирюватися із злочинами нацистів по відношенню до мирного населення та віддавати дітей в гітлерюнг чи до Союзу німецьких дівчат, де їх виховували у дусі нацистської ідеології. Німецькі жінки рідко брали активну участь у колабораціонізмі: вони зрідка працювали перекла-дачками, вчительками для фольксдойче та українських шкіл, що недовго існували на окупованій території. На Півдні України до фольксдойче зараховували також етнічних шведів – мешканців шведської колонії Старошведське. Для німців Півдня України в статусі фольксдойче війна завершилася спочатку примусовою евакуацією в Німеччину німцями, а потім примусо-вою репатріацією радянськими військами додому. В результаті на жінок-фольксдойче чекали суди із звинуваченнями у зраді та пособництві фашистам. Жінки становили більшість спецпоселенців в Сибіру, на Уралі та в Казахстані. Проте багатьом німкеням вдалось уникнути репатріації і назавжди залишитись у країнах Європи поза радянським впливом.Ключові слова: локальна історія, гендерна історія, фольксдойче, Друга світова війна, НКВС.

AbstractThis article investigates internationally funded women’s empowerment initiatives in Tajikistan. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent Tajik civil war (1992–1997), this newly independent, Muslim-majority country has experienced an influx of foreign aid, including in the field of women’s rights. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article analyzes the growth and diversification of local, Western-funded women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) between 1991 and 2020, paying attention to their leadership and aims, as well as changing perceptions of donors’ interventions. It is argued that, initially, local activists were supportive of international projects, which promoted gender equality by supporting women’s integration into the new, capitalist economy. In the last decade, however, an increasing conditionality of funding and deteriorating donor-NGO relations has fueled local contestations of the international agenda. The donor-enhanced women’s empowerment model, which fosters individual responsibility and self-reliance, is increasingly criticized for aggravating the conditions of local women in the context of a growing economic insecurity characterizing the local capitalist economy. Against this resentment, an alternative women’s empowerment model, advancing gender equity based on complementarity of male and female social roles and stressing the importance of family as a safety net against economic precarity, is gaining prominence locally.

Defence date: 16 January 2009
Examining Board: Prof. Edward A. Rees (University of Birmingham, EUI) - supervisor Prof. Douglas T. Northrop (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor) - external supervisor Prof. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (European University Institute) Prof. Galina M. Yemelianova (University of Birmingham)
First made available online: 26 July 2021
The thesis examines four cases of sovietization (modernization) as realized in Central Asia and especially in Uzbekistan in the 1920s, with particular emphasis on the period between 1924 (the regionalization of Central Asia) and 1930 (the end of the last general purges of the 1920s). Showing how Moscow intended to transform the region along the lines of Soviet ideology with the idea of converting the Homo Islamicus speaking Muslim into Homo Sovieticus speaking Bolshevik, the cases embodied by the four main parts of the thesis represent the intersection of soft-line and hard-line policies and bureaucratic control. Women, as a surrogate of the proletariat and as communicators between the population and the establishment, are the central subjects that tie the four cases together. The first part focuses on visual propaganda and introduces the first level of soft-line control with state-sponsored posters being regarded as direct means for modifying the attitudes of Central Asians using images and slogans. The second part, devoted to the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, represents the second level of soft-line bureaucracy with nuances of hard-line control, highlighting the interconnections between a supposedly neutral international (front) organization and party-state and Red Army institutions. The third part of the thesis is devoted to gender policy with particular emphasis on the hujum, the reactions among the indigenous population that emerged in the form of resistance in the second half of the 1920s, and the counter-reactions by the establishment through the first stage of purges, illustrating the transition from soft-line to hard-line policy, and leading both chronologically and conceptually to the fourth part dealing with the general purges of the 1929-1930, which represent the highest degree of hard-line policy and further confirm that the Soviets intended to sovietize the region beginning with its women.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.