A Convergence of Calamities: Record Numbers of War-Displaced to Be Dwarfed by Those Driven From Their Homes by Climate Change

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch

11 November 20

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Let’s face it, Election 2020, that wild ride to hell and back, took up every inch of space on the media landscape, vote by vote, one outrageous moment after the next, one edge-of-the-seat state count after another. In these last weeks, if you happened to be anywhere in the United States, it wouldn’t have been hard to believe that there was no world out there, nothing but Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Mitch McConnell, and outrageous presidential statements and lawsuits to the horizon and back. 

As it happens, however, a world beyond The Donald, his crew, and the chaos they continue to create does exist. Believe it or not, elsewhere on this Covid-19-icized planet of ours, things are still happening. Of course, if you live in this country and aren't among the 47% of Americans who voted for you-know-who, you may be feeling somewhat cheerier this week. Even if you're still living amid soaring coronavirus cases and thinking about what will surely be some kind of a future gridlocked Washington, the world out there has probably remained far away indeed.

You’re likely not focusing right now on just what a shaky state so much of it is in. It's still roiled by a series of wars this country sparked in 2001 and never managed to deal with successfully as terror movements and violence of every sort only continue to spread beyond our shores (even as our wars come home in their own strange and unexpected ways). As TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse makes clear today, in the process of all that, almost unimaginable numbers of people have been uprooted from their homes and turned into displaced people, their lives transformed into a hell on Earth. And here, as Turse suggests, is the true horror of it: bad as such a world may look today (if you happen to be looking at all), it’s likely to prove mild indeed compared to what’s coming down the pike.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.

They found themselves, as I did, on a hot, dusty road slowly being choked by families who had hastily hitched up their donkeys and piled whatever they could -- kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots -- into sun-bleached carts or bush taxis. And they were the lucky ones. Many had simply set out on foot. Young boys tended small herds of recalcitrant goats. Women toted dazed toddlers.  In the rare shade of a roadside tree, a family had stopped and a middle-aged man hung his head, holding it in one hand.

Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Those people were streaming down the main road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population has almost doubled this year, due to the displaced. Across the country’s northern stretches, other Burkinabe (as citizens are known) were making similar journeys toward towns offering only the most uncertain kinds of refuge. They were victims of a war without a name, a battle between Islamist militants who murder and massacre without compunction and armed forces that kill more civilians than militants.

I’ve witnessed variations of this wretched scene before -- exhausted, upended families evicted by machete-wielding militiamen or Kalashnikov-carrying government troops, or the mercenaries of a warlord; dust-caked traumatized people plodding down lonesome highways, fleeing artillery strikes, smoldering villages, or towns dotted with moldering corpses. Sometimes motorbikes pull the carts. Sometimes, young girls carry the jerry cans on their heads. Sometimes, people flee with nothing more than what they’re wearing. Sometimes, they cross national borders and become refugees or, as in Burkina Faso, become internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in their own homeland. Whatever the particulars, such scenes are increasingly commonplace in our world and so, in the worst possible way, unremarkable. And though you would hardly know it in the United States, that’s what also makes them, collectively, one of the signature stories of our time.

At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world.

By the end of June, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an additional 4.8 million people had been uprooted by conflict, with the most devastating increases in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Yet, as dismal as these numbers may be, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change.

Already, shocking numbers have been put to flight by fires, derechos, and super storms, and so much worse is yet to come, according to experts. A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Worse Than World War II

Women, children, and men driven from their homes by conflict have been a defining feature of modern warfare. For almost a century now, combat correspondents have witnessed such scenes again and again. “Newly routed civilians, now homeless like the others with no idea of where they would next sleep or eat, with all their future lives an uncertainty, trudged back from the fighting zone,” the legendary Eric Sevareid reported, while covering Italy for CBS News during World War II. “A dust-covered girl clung desperately to a heavy, squirming burlap sack. The pig inside was squealing faintly. Tears made streaks down the girl’s face. No one moved to help her...”

The Second World War was a cataclysmic conflagration involving 70 nations and 70 million combatants. Fighting stretched across three continents in unparalleled destructive fury, including terror bombing, countless massacres, two atomic attacks, and the killing of 60 million people, most of them civilians, including six million Jews in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Another 60 million were displaced, more than the population of Italy (then the ninth-largest country in the world). An unprecedented global war causing unimaginable suffering, it nonetheless left far fewer people homeless than the 79.5 million displaced by conflicts and crises as 2019 ended.

How can violence-displaced people already exceed World War II’s total by almost 20 million (without even counting the nearly five million more added in the first half of 2020)?

The answer: these days, you can’t go home again.

In May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. By the beginning of September, the war in the Pacific was over, too. A month later, most of Europe’s displaced -- including more than two million refugees from the Soviet Union, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Poles, and others -- had already returned home. A little more than a million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, still found themselves stranded in camps overseen by occupying forces and the United Nations.

Today, according to UNHCR, ever fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that, in its multiple iterations, is now in its sixth decade.

War on (of and for) Terror

One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University’s Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other “most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.” In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in -- specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen -- have displaced between 37 million and 59 million people.

While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of “security assistance” into that country, its displaced aren’t even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there’s a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya’s autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso’s desperate state today. “Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I’m conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized,” Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso’s defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. “While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region.”

Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. “The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.

In 2005, Burkina Faso didn’t even warrant mention in the “Africa Overview” section of the State Department’s annual report on terrorism. Still, more than 15 separate American security assistance programs were brought to bear there -- about $100 million in the last two years alone. Meanwhile, militant Islamist violence in the country has skyrocketed from just three attacks in 2015 to 516 in the 12 months from mid-2019 to mid-2020, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

Compounding Crises to Come

The violence in Burkina Faso has led to a cascade of compounding crises. Around one million Burkinabe are now displaced, a 1,500% increase since last January, and the number only keeps rising. So do the attacks and the fatalities. And this is just the beginning, since Burkina Faso finds itself on the frontlines of yet another crisis, a global disaster that’s expected to generate levels of displacement that will dwarf today’s historic figures.

Burkina Faso has been battered by desertification and environmental degradation since at least the 1960s. In 1973, a drought led to the deaths of 100,000 people there and in five other nations of the Sahel. Severe drought and hunger struck again in the mid-1980s and aid agencies began privately warning that those living in the north of the country would need to move southward as farming became ever less feasible. By the early 2000s, despite persistent droughts, the cattle population of the country had doubled, leading to increasing ethnic conflict between Mossi farmers and Fulani cattle herders. The war now tearing the country apart largely divides along those same ethnic lines.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns -- droughts followed by flash floods -- increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

Sitting at the edge of the Sahara Desert, the country has long faced ecological adversity that’s only worsening as the frontlines of climate change steadily spread across the planet. Forecasts now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food -- a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

On the Road to Kaya

I don’t know what happened to the mother and two children I spotted on the road to Kaya. If they ended up like the scores of people I spoke with in that market town, now bulging with displaced people, they’re facing a difficult time. Rents are high, jobs scarce, government assistance all but nil. People there are living on the edge of catastrophe, dependent on relatives and the kindness of new neighbors with little to spare themselves. Some, driven by want, are even heading back into the conflict zone, risking death to gather firewood.

Kaya can’t deal with the massive influx of people forced from their homes by Islamist militants. Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people -- nearly the population of China or India -- likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

In the decades ahead, ever more of us will find ourselves on roads like the one to Kaya, running from the devastation of raging wildfires or uncontrolled floodwaters, successive hurricanes or supercharged cyclones, withering droughts, spiraling conflicts, or the next life-altering pandemic. As a reporter, I’ve already been on that road. Pray you’re the one speeding by in the four-wheel-drive vehicle and not the one choking in the dust, driving the donkey cart.

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Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves. This article was reported in partnership with Brown University’s Costs of War Project and Type Investigations.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Mainstream Media Has Missed the Real Story About Latinx Voter Turnout

By Democracy Now!

11 November 20

 

bout 160 million voters cast ballots in this election, setting a new record, and President-elect Joe Biden’s lead in the popular vote has jumped to over 5 million. Much of the increased turnout was powered by people of color, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election. “The main story is that in an election which saw historic turnout, people of color — and especially Latinos — had an unprecedented increase in voting,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. “After decades of political experts talking about the growing Latino vote, this year it actually happened.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Joe Biden’s lead in the popular vote has jumped to over 5 million as President Trump continues to refuse to concede. About 160 million voters cast ballots. This is a new record. Much of the increased turnout was powered by people of color, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election. Well, Juan, your analysis has been absolutely critical. That’s right, Democracy Now!’s Juan González has been closely looking at how the historic turnout in the Latinx community has impacted the race. Lay it out for us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Amy, the cascade of stories continues, claiming a surprising turn by Latino voters toward Donald Trump. The New York Times this week, front page, quote, “How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters.” Then, the L.A. Times, “Latino voters tired of being taken for granted by baffled Democrats.” CNN and others claiming there’s no such thing as a Latino bloc. And even The Intercept saying in one of their stories that “Nonwhite Voters Are Not Immune to Right-Wing Populism.”

Well, I said last week, and I’ll repeat it again, the key narrative of this election is not whether there was a small shift in the percentage of Latinx voters in some areas of the country turning toward Trump. The main story is that in an election which saw historic turnout, people of color — and especially Latinos — had an unprecedented increase in voting. And they, not white voters, represented the bulk of that increase. Virtually none of the reports have mentioned this, that for the first time in U.S. history Latinos’ turnout appears to have reached comparable levels to the rates for white and Black Americans. Twenty-point-six million Latinos went to the polls in this election. That’s 64% of the 32 million eligible Latinx voters, while in previous election cycles the turnout had been routinely below 50%. In raw numbers, 8 million more Latinos voted this year than in 2016. That’s a 63% increase over the last presidential elections.

Now, I’ve updated and tweaked the chart from last week, and it shows that the biggest increase in both percentages and actual votes from four years ago came from Latino voters. Their jump in number of ballots cast nearly equaled that among white — the increase among white and Black voters combined. The next biggest jump, in percentage term, came among African American voters, who increased by 20%, Asian Americans by 16%, while white voters increased by just under 6%.

Now, some of these numbers, I should note, are different from what I displayed last week, in part because there’s been some little-noticed changes to the Edison national exit poll in the past few days compared to what was released on Election Day by all the networks. For instance, the original version estimated that whites were 65% of the electorate, while the latest figures say that they were 67%. And the poll also increases turnout for African Americans and Asians. Well, the Edison poll has always been flawed, and numerous analyses have shown its past samples were skewed to oversampling Cuban Americans, undersampling both Black and Latino inner-city polling sites, and also undersampling voters whose primary language is not English, all of which means it tends to undercount Latino voters for Democrats.

But the basic contours of the sampling remains the same, and it’s inescapable. After decades of political experts talking about the growing Latino vote, this year it actually happened. Hispanic voters felt compelled like never before to go to the polls, because COVID-19 fell them more than other groups, because of the constant demonization of Latinos by the president, because of the barbaric family separation policies, or because of the threats to healthcare, even, for some conservative Latinos, because of their hopes of finally turning back Roe v. Wade. One thing is sure: Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties will underestimate or ignore Latino voters from now on. This should be cause for widespread celebration as a long-awaited democratization of the vote.

But what about those who claim that Trump made major, unexpected inroads among Latino voters nationwide, as reflected by 66-to-32% split of the Latino vote between Biden and Trump? Some say that Latinos could be deserting the Democratic Party. Those of us who’ve been around the block a few times have heard this narrative before. In reality, these results are in the general ballpark of previous presidential campaigns.

I want to put up, hopefully, a chart here of how Latinos split their vote over the last 30 years in presidential elections. The Republican share of voters has varied, from a low of 27%, when Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama in 2012, to a high of 44%, that George Bush got in his second presidential run in 2004. Even John McCain, when he ran against Obama in 2008, got a similar percentage of the Latino vote as Trump did this year. And the high point, the Bush victory in 2004, we should note, is the last time a Republican candidate got a majority of the popular vote.

But the big difference now is that the Latinx vote is so much larger. When you get two-thirds of a vote, that has tripled in size in just a few years, you begin to achieve critical mass. No wonder Lindsey Graham is warning that if these elections aren’t changed somehow, Republicans will never win the White House again.

What about those places like the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and South Florida, where Trump made real inroads in largely Latino districts in the actual vote? What about those pundits who claim Latinos are so diverse and diffuse as a population that it is erroneous to consider them a single community? First, on South [Florida] and the Rio Grande Valley, yes, actual vote results show that Trump had significant increases in his support there. Florida is not surprising, given the influx of conservative refugees from Nicaragua and Venezuela in recent years, but the Rio Grande Valley is.

In Hidalgo County, along the border, which is 90% Latino, Trump went from 27% against Hillary Clinton to 40% against Joe Biden. In Maverick County, which is 95% Latino, he went from 20% against Clinton to 45% against Biden. Those are significant numbers. The Valley, however, has changed rapidly during the Trump era. Always a socially conservative rural area, it has seen enormous job growth in recent years as a result of the militarization of the border, which brought thousands of new jobs to the area for Border Patrol officers, for workers on private construction of the wall with Mexico, for immigration detention centers. In addition, the Valley has replaced the San Diego sector as the epicenter of undocumented migrant crossings and the failed immigration system of the United States. All of that, no doubt, helped turn its residents for Trump.

But in the big cities of Texas, where most Latinos live, there’s another story. San Antonio’s Bexar County, for example, 60% Latino, saw Biden’s margin of votes climb, from 54 to 58%, though we’ll need better figures on how much of that was in the Latino community. It seems clear, however, that Latino turnout in states like Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania helped Biden win those key battleground states.

And then there’s California and New York. The Latino share of the vote that went to Biden appears to be breathtaking in those states: 77% in California, 72% in New York. Now, some argue that those are reliable blue states anyway, so those Hispanic voters are not really critical. Really? Aren’t those enormous Latino margins year after year what has made those states reliably blue? And the same for New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and, lately, Colorado.

Then there are these nonsensical questions as to whether a Latino community actually exists. Let’s be clear: Latinx identity in the United States is a social construct, created both by the dominant society, that needed to define and categorize and other — other — and by the marginalized group itself, organically, from the ground, by disparate Latin American migrant groups who were forced to unite in order to survive in a hostile society and whose children gradually intermarried to create a new social construct: the Latino in America.

More than 20 years ago, I said in my book Harvest of Empire that Latinos had become — were becoming a new third force in American politics. They largely vote Democratic, but a significant portion is susceptible to Republican candidates if those political leaders address even a few of their concerns. Since then, Latin Americans from educated and middle-class backgrounds have migrated to this country in growing numbers, and a good portion have adopted typical American conservative views. Some of that community, though still a minority, have been drawn to right-wing populism, to national chauvinism, and even to racist views.

All of this fixation on Latinos, however, ignores the fundamental question of this election, which very few political observers I’ve seen have dared to tackle: Why the heck did 58% of white Americans vote for Donald Trump, including 55% of white women? With the United States consolidating itself as the world’s most powerful imperialist nation and the economic gap in the country widening, right-wing movements have only grown at home, and the defeat of Trump will not halt their growth. The key to building a progressive majority is to keep mobilizing more young Latinos to vote, burying the small percentage increases in support for right-wing candidates under an avalanche from people of color, organized labor and their allies. And that’s my take on this election.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Juan González, a just amazing deep dive into the numbers, so critical to understand this at this point, because, so early on, this is what shapes the narrative. And, you know, on Tuesday, the leading journalist Maria Hinojosa tweeted, quote, “I’m listening to The Daily on what went wrong w the polls.” She’s referring to The New York Times’ Daily podcast. “And,” she goes on, “just wow. With the issue that more white folks voted for trump right in front of us, the FIRST thing they do is talk abt Latino voters. It sounds like WE ARE THE ONES RESPONSIBLE for all of this! Two white guys on us.” Maria Hinojosa continued, “So Nate Cohen says 'the polls struggled w Latino voters.'” And she says, “The polls? How abt hiring the right Latino pollsters?? Of course we exist. This is so typical. It’s never WE GOT IT WRONG. This time and four years ago-wrong. How abt 'We did not do our jobs.'” If you can talk about that, getting it wrong, Juan? You’re not only diving deep into the numbers, but you’re deconstructing the narrative that’s already coming out of this election.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, the poll — there’s one main poll. Of course, AP now has their own poll, but the numbers are pretty similar. But these pollsters have always had flaws, as the group Latino Decisions pointed out last time, because, remember, in 2016, the same narrative, that Latinos had moved unexpectedly toward Trump, was put out. People forget that. Four years ago, it was the same narrative. But when Latino Decisions did their analysis — and they had a much more extensive polling of the Latino community, plus they looked at the actual numbers — it came much later. It came months later after the election. And they showed that it was impossible, in some areas, in several areas of the country, for the Latino vote for Donald Trump to have been as high as the exit poll, the Edison exit poll, was claiming.

And they clearly pointed out to what were the failings of the poll. One is that it has historically oversampled the Cuban American community in the overall Latino numbers. Two is that it does not — it has not really gone into overwhelmingly African American or Latino communities — it tends to do its polling on the day of Election Day in communities that are more racially mixed — and also that it historically underrepresents those people who don’t speak English. As a result, the poll is, by its construction, skewed. And so, Latino Decisions saw significant differences between the exit poll and the actual Latino vote.

Now, we don’t have the full numbers yet. There are places like New York and California where they’re still counting. There are millions and millions of votes, especially in the blue states, that have not yet been counted. So, this 5 million gap that Biden has is only going to grow. It’s not going to get smaller; it’s going to keep growing. And my estimate is it could possibly reach like 8 million, the difference in the vote. But so, I think that we’re not going to get a full picture until we do the combination of the polling and the actual vote counts, precinct by precinct, around the country, to get a better sense of what has happened. So, it’s going to take some time.

And mark my word: Six months from now or a year from now, when we have better data, we’re going to have to reassess what’s happened, but I’m willing to go on what we have already, what we have already, to say that the key story here is not small shifts in percentages, it’s raw increase in turnout. That is the key. That is the key. And once you look at the raw increase in turnout, you see that it is Latinx voters, African Americans, Asian Americans that are propelling the change in the electorate in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the coming days, we’ll also be looking further into the Native American vote. I want to encourage people to go back to democracynow.org to see Juan González’s original analysis last week in Part 1 of his analysis of the voters of this country.

Next up, we’re going to look at the election results in Puerto Rico. And then we’ll look at the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act. Is the conservative body going to vote to preserve it? Stay with us.