By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
My journey towards understanding human contradiction began on a railway platform in Krasnodar, in the Kuban region, where I boarded a train bound for Moscow in January 1989. As a Nigerian student on a Soviet scholarship, I traversed a world suspended between idealism and decay – a duality that would shape my understanding of civilizations. From the iron-clad order of Soviet bureaucracy to the chaotic vibrancy of Istanbul’s bazaar, my periodic trips made me witness firsthand how systems designed to uplift often alienate, and how unity and fragmentation dance in uneasy tandem.
The Soviet Union, in its twilight years, was a living museum of paradox. Grand statues of Lenin loomed over breadlines; university debates on Marx’s utopianism echoed through campus and hostel halls where as students we secretly traded Levi’s jeans, Western goods, cigarettes and foreign currencies. In Voronezh, Krasnodar, Rostov, Minsk, Donetsk, Novorossiski, and Moscow, I shared several rounds of vodka and black bread with Afghan War veterans, babushkas, free rollers and random friends who whispered of disillusionment, their medals and other mementos clinking like hollow promises. And on several train journeys, I met with babushkas, kind hearted and simple, who recited Pushkin by heart, their resilience a large writ of the Russian and human spirit’s refusal to surrender to despair.
These experiences became my lens for interpreting a world beyond my physical travels. Though my footsteps never touched the soil of Brazil’s favelas or Myanmar’s conflict zones, my mind wandered there through books, films, and late-night conversations with global comrades. The Durants’ The Lessons of History and Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations became my intellectual compasses, framing chaos into patterns. This essay is not a chronicle of places I’ve been, but recollections from lived experiences, scholarly inquiry, and the stories of others who shared with me their truths.
[Present Reflection of Excerpts From My Diary: Krasnodar-Moscow Train, December 1990]
The compartment reeked of stale vodka and unwashed socks. Outside, you see the endless coat of white snow, the train’s wheels clacking as a dirge for the dying Soviet dream. A Red Army conscript, barely 19, slid a dog-eared copy of Huxley’s Brave New World across the table to me [hadn’t read the book yet by then], he saw me reading Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folks. “You’re the book man,” he slurred, breath sour with vodka and despair. “Explain this: ‘The propagandist is a man who canalizes an existing stream. In a land where no water exists, he digs in vain.’”
I stared at his calloused hands – hands that had likely crushed dissent in Vilnius or Tbilisi – now trembling over Huxley’s words. Around us, the carriage hummed with the static of state radio: “Comrades, the Party ensures prosperity!” crackled from a speaker caked in nicotine stains. The irony was palpable. Here was a regime that had dammed entire rivers of truth, yet its people were dying of thirst. Huxley’s metaphor cut deeper than he knew. The Soviet propagandist’s genius lay not in inventing lies, but in redirecting the murky currents of collective longing – for stability, for purpose, for a reprieve from the cold. But what happens when the streams dry up?
That conscript’s question haunts me still. Today, as autocrats from Abuja to Ankara mimic the Kremlin’s playbook, Huxley’s axiom illuminates the anatomy of modern disinformation. Propaganda does not create reality; it weaponizes latent fears and hungers. In the ’90s Soviet Union, be it Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar or Voronezh, the “stream” was the residue of WWII pride and the visceral memory of Nazi tanks at the gates. By the time I left, that stream had become a toxic trickle – destructions masquerading as water. I saw it in the eyes of pensioners trading icons for Foreign butter, cheese, milk and anything else they can get, muttering, “Lenin promised light, but we got shadows.”
Yet Huxley’s warning transcends politics. Consider Silicon Valley’s algorithmic evangelists today, mining our anxieties to sell micro targeted salvation. Or Lagos megachurches peddling miracles to the jobless – digital collection plates passed under the banner of “faith.” These too are propagandists, canalizing streams of dread and desire that their own systems helped poison. The Durants glimpsed this in their critique of Rome’s bread-and-circus decay: “When the reality fails, the spectacle begins.”
That night on the Trans-Siberian, the conscript drunkenly paraphrased Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people!” To which I retorted, “And propaganda is the vodka.” We laughed and drank some more, but the truth curdled in my throat, afraid I might be arrested. Three decades later, Huxley’s “canalized streams” have become raging torrents – QAnon’s blood libels, Modi’s WhatsApp nationalism, Boko Haram’s apocalyptic screeds. All feed on the same desiccated ground: crumbling institutions, economic betrayal, the existential thirst for belonging. The propagandist’s shovel strikes where the earth is already cracked.
I often wonder what became of that conscript. Did he drown in the Afghan heroin epidemic? Join Putin’s kleptocracy? Or perhaps he’s among the 22,000 Russian soldiers now fertilizing Ukrainian soil (BBC, 2023), his bones proof of Huxley’s grim calculus: when the streams run dry, even the diggers become dust.
–
Laurence Rees’ “The Nazis: A Warning from History” lies open on my ibook reader in my home office in Lagos, from its pages a chilling observation jumps out for me: “The Third Reich was not a sudden eruption of madness, but the gradual erosion of moral guardrails under the weight of fear and manufactured resentment.” Parallels gnaw at me. On Al Jazeera, I once watched a Fidesz rally in Budapest where Orbán framed refugees as “Muslim invaders” – a script lifted from Goebbels’ playbook, swapping “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for modern scapegoats. Rees’ dissection of how Weimar’s economic collapse birthed Nazi pageantry also mirrors Nigeria’s own descent: when my journalist friend, Abubakar Sadiq, interviewed former Boko Haram recruits in Maiduguri, their stories revealed not ideological zeal, but the lure of stipends in a nation where 43% of youth are unemployed (NBS, 2023). Desperation, as Rees notes, is the kindling for demagogues.
Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus” amplifies this unease. His warning that dataism – the worship of algorithms as arbiters of truth – threatens to reduce humanity to “hackable animals” resonates with what we know about Silicon Valley. At a blockchain conference, a CEO boasted, “Smart contracts will replace corrupt judges!” Yet in many slums across America, you will encounter a lot of people suffering for things as senseless as biometric ID locking them out of subsidized services – a glitch deemed “statistically irrelevant” by distant coders. Harari’s thesis crystallizes here: when we outsource morality to machines, we risk repeating the Nazis’ dehumanization, just sanitized through binary code. The Durants’ axiom that “history repeats because human nature changes with geological slowness” feels tragically vindicated.
Rees and Harari converge on a critical insight: “systems don’t collapse – they are hollowed out”. The Nazis didn’t abolish German institutions; they perverted them, turning courts into theatrics of terror and science into eugenic factories. Similarly, in Abuja, Lagos and across Nigeria, I witness government officials and legislators weaponize “anti-corruption” drives to jail rivals while looting bailout funds – a perverse mimicry of due process. Harari’s dystopia also looms in China’s Social Credit System, where compliance is gamified into privileges, much like Hitler’s “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength Through Joy) apparatus rewarded conformity with vacations. The veneer of functionality remains, but the soul is gutted.
Yet these books also offer a lifeline of sorts: “the power of narrative resistance”. Rees documents how Pastor Niemöller’s sermons and Sophie Scholl’s leaflets sustained pockets of humanity amid Nazi horror. Harari, meanwhile, argues that “humans rule the world because we alone believe in fictional truths – justice, human rights, democracy.” In Ukraine, we see this firsthand: farmers using TikTok to document Russian atrocities, their viral videos a digital kind of White Rose. The Durants’ belief that “civilization is a stream with banks” finds modern expression here – stories are the levees against the flood of dehumanization.
The lesson is clear: whether facing jackboots or algorithms, our survival hinges on “curating better fictions”. The Nazis sold racial destiny; dataism peddles fatalistic determinism. Against these, we must resurrect the old tales – not of empires, but of communal dignity. In the Niger Delta, where Shell’s pipelines strangle ancestral farmlands, I joined women singing protest songs older than Nigeria itself. Their melody, Harari might note, was a “shared fiction” of resistance – one no algorithm can predict or erase. Rees’ warning that “apathy is the ally of tyranny” meets its rebuttal here: in the stubborn human refusal to let the story end.
– –
The stench of burning crude oil hung thick over the Niger Delta as I stepped onto the rain-slicked pier at Kono waterside, hoping to board a boat to Opobo. Fishermen mending nets frayed by neglect, their canoes scarred by encounters with Shell’s patrol boats. “They take our oil and leave us poison,” said Chief Baridakra, my host, his voice a gravelly mix of defiance and defeat. This was home – a Nigeria where 1.6 million barrels of oil daily fuel not progress, but a $400 billion corruption labyrinth (NNPC, 2023).
Here, institutional rot wears a human face. A teacher in Port Harcourt once showed me her paycheck – stamped with the grinning visage of a state governor accused of embezzling $50 million. “He eats gold,” she spat, “while my students eat chalk.” The Durants’ warning that “civilization is not inherited but earned” rings brutally true here. Nigeria’s elites, like Rome’s patricians before them, feast while the plebs starve, blind to Cooper’s admonition that “hubris is the midwife of collapse.”
Though I never witnessed Brazil’s Operação Lava Jato Firsthand, the parallels emerged through documentaries and late-night news and debates in cableTV. Petrobras executives, much like Nigeria’s oil barons, treated public coffers as private piggybanks, diverting $2 billion to politicians and contractors (The Guardian, 2015). Similarly, footage of the U.S. Capitol insurrection – a mob scaling walls their ancestors built – revealed a universal truth: when institutions become instruments of theft rather than service, even the mighty falter.
Political theorist Ivan Krastev’s insight – that we face a crisis of belief, not just policy – resonates through my encounters. In Budapest’s dimly lit cafes, reminiscent of Communist era, Hungarian students, huddled together recount how Orbán’s regime weaponized disillusionment, trading democratic ideals for “illiberal stability.” A philosophy student, Éva, likened it to “selling our future to buy a mythologized past.” Her words mirrored the Durants’ observation that “the past is never dead” – a weapon wielded by autocrats from Modi to Putin.
The clatter of wheels on Cold War-era tracks accompanied heated debates in the dining car. A Georgian engineer, his breath reeking of brandy, slammed his fist: “Stalin was a monster, but at least trains ran on time!” His Turkish seatmate retorted, “And your ‘order’ starved millions.” This dichotomy – order versus freedom – haunts our age.
Across Budapest today, wherever you go, you are encountered with Orbán’s billboards proclaiming “Hungary First!” Their stark imagery evoked Soviet propaganda, yet crowds cheered. A young activist, risking arrest in a podcast I recently listened to, explained: “Fear of migrants pays for his palaces.” Cooper’s analysis of Assyrian rulers – who conjured external threats to justify iron rule – felt chillingly relevant.
Donald Trump’s resurgence in American politics – a man who once boasted he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing support – exemplifies the West’s accelerating dance with self-destruction. His policies, a volatile cocktail of ethno-nationalism, transactional cruelty, and institutional sabotage, mirror the playbooks of Orbán, Duterte, and Modi but are amplified by America’s gravitational pull on global order. I witnessed this decay firsthand during the 2020 U.S. election, watching from Lagos as armed protesters stormed Michigan’s Capitol, their Confederate flags and “Stop the Steal” banners a parody of revolutionary fervor. When the mob breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, smearing feces on statues and hunting lawmakers, it wasn’t just an insurrection – it was the Durants’ warning made flesh: “A great civilization is not conquered until it has destroyed itself from within.”
Trump’s agenda – less a platform than a series of vindictive impulses – prioritizes the dismantling of guardrails. His pledges to weaponize the Justice Department against rivals, deploy the military to suppress dissent (“I am your retribution”), and gut environmental protections to “drill, baby, drill” reflect Rees’ observation that authoritarianism thrives on institutional hollowing. Like the Nazis co-opting Weimar’s bureaucracy, Trump’s first term saw the EPA transformed into a fossil fuel lobbying arm, reversing 125 environmental regulations (Brookings, 2021), while his tax cuts gifted $1.5 trillion to corporations and the top 1% (Tax Policy Center) – a rigged competition echoing Nigeria’s oil elites. His rhetoric, framing migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” mirrors Orbán’s “Muslim invaders” hysteria and the Third Reich’s dehumanization playbook, canalizing what Huxley called the “existing stream” of white grievance.
The consequences ripple globally. Trump’s admiration for Putin and Kim Jong Un – strongmen who “rule their countries with an iron fist” – has emboldened autocrats from Bolsonaro to Sisi. His threat to abandon NATO (“a relic”) and undermine Ukraine aid fractures the postwar order that once restrained raw imperial ambition, much like the Late Bronze Age collapse Cooper describes, where fractured alliances invited chaos. In Nigeria, politicians now parrot his “fake news” mantra to dismiss corruption probes, while Russian bots amplify his claims of a “rigged system,” seeding distrust in democracies from Brazil to India. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer’s finding that 56% of Americans believe “government leaders are purposely trying to mislead” (up 18% since 2016) underscores Harari’s warning: when societies lose faith in shared fictions, they fracture into warring tribes.
Yet Trump’s most insidious legacy is epistemological: the erasure of truth itself. His 30,573 documented falsehoods as president (Washington Post) normalized what my Soviet-era professor called “the vodka of propaganda” – a numbing agent for civic reason. In Budapest, a Fidesz operative once smirked, “We learned from Trump: why bother hiding lies when you can gaslight an entire nation?” This epistemic rot metastasizes through policy: by appointing climate deniers to lead NASA and suppressing CDC COVID data, Trump didn’t just fail governance – he weaponized incompetence, proving Cooper’s thesis that elites often accelerate collapse through willful blindness.
America’s democratic erosion under Trump is not unique but uniquely perilous. As the Niger Delta’s oil curse funds instability across Nigeria, so Trumpism exports chaos – a nation that once styled itself a “shining city on a hill” now fuels global disillusionment. The Durants’ admonition that “the price of civilization is eternal vigilance” meets its antithesis here: a populace seduced by strongman spectacle, trading checks and balances for the dopamine hit of “owning the libs.” Yet in this darkness, glimmers of the old resilience persist. I think of the Michigan election worker who defended 2020’s count under siege, her trembling voice a digital-age samizdat: “I’m doing my job.” Like the Mapuche’s küme mongen or Kyiv’s piano amid rubble, her defiance whispers that the human spirit, though bent, remains unbroken.
– –
Though I never set foot in Duterte’s Philippines, a Filipino I met of all places, at Owerri a few years ago, in our conversation, unveiled the strongman’s appeal. “My uncle supports the drug wars,” she confessed. “He says, ‘Better a bloody street than a chaotic one.’” Psychologist Steven Pinker’s thesis – that stress breeds authoritarianism – explains this bargain. In Kano, Nigeria, a Tiv tailor once told me, “Boko Haram is evil, but at least they do something.” Desperation, I learned, makes tyranny taste like salvation.
A computer lab humming with Soviet-era machines hosted my first encounter with the “digital future in the late 90s”. I marveled at dial-up internet, unaware that Silicon Valley’s utopianism would birth new divides. Years later, watching a TED Talk where a CEO vowed “AI will end poverty!”, I recalled Nairobi’s Kibera slum – where a youth leader is quoted as saying, “Your world of apps isn’t ours.”
Mariana Mazzucato’s critique – that we mistake gadgets for progress – crystallized during a 2019 documentary on Shenzhen’s factories. Teenage migrants assembling iPhones recounted 16-hour shifts, their dormitories cages of despair. Yet in Zurich, a tech investor smirked, “Data is the new oil.” The Durants’ warning that “wealth begets power concentration” manifested in algorithms that mine attention spans like our Niger Delta crude.
Cooper’s account of Angkor’s collapse – a hydraulic marvel undone by ecological hubris – mirrors this blindness. A Cambodian FB friend Skyped me: “Our ancestors’ canals now bury landmine victims. While today’s. Silicon Valley builds digital temples just as fragile.”
The consequences of our collective hubris are not abstract forecasts – they are etched into the flesh of our age. In the Niger Delta, where oil spills have rendered farmlands barren for generations, I met a grandmother who still plants yams in poisoned soil. “Something must grow,” she insisted, her hands caked in soot and dirt. Her defiance is the uncomfortable global truth: when systems fail, the marginalized bear the weight of collapse, while the architects of crisis retreat into gilded insulation. The Durants, also warned that “history is littered with the wreckage of nations that persisted in the moral delusion that their luck would last forever.” Today, that wreckage takes the form of smoldering rainforests, hollowed-out democracies, and a generation scrolling through apocalypse memes on cracked screens.
The first consequence is the normalization of fracture. From Lagos to Los Angeles, the social contract has been replaced by a patchwork of survivalist bargains. In Nigeria, 63% live in multidimensional poverty (UNDP), the state’s absence birthed a shadow republic: vigilante militias mete out “justice,” underground networks pirate electricity, and churches sell divine intervention for large contributions of naira notes. Similarly, in my online conversations with a Venezuelan migrant in Istanbul, I learned how decades of petro-corruption collapsed into a parallel economy where doctors trade antibiotics for rice. Cooper’s analysis of the Bronze Age collapse – where trade networks shattered into localized scrambles – feels unnervingly contemporary. On the other hand, the Durants’ observation that “civilization is order” takes on tragic irony; our globalized order has birthed a chaos that mimics pre-civilized strife.
A second, more insidious consequence is the commodification of despair. Silicon Valley’s “disruption” ethos now peddles AI therapists and algorithmic salvation to a world it helped unravel. In a slum in Lusaka, a tech NGO once distributed VR headsets to “inspire” youths who lacked clean water – a grotesque pantomime of progress. Meanwhile, Russia’s troll farms monetize discord, far-right movements crowdfund border walls, and climate deniers spin extinction into lucrative clickbait. This is not just inequality; it is the industrialization of human fragility. The Durants cautioned that “the concentration of power follows the concentration of wealth,” but who could have foreseen billionaires auctioning seats on Mars rockets while several islands here on earth sinks?
Within this bleak calculus lies a third consequence: the rise of defiant reimagination. In Chile, I read of Mapuche activists, where ancestral wisdom fuels resistance to lithium mining. Their küme mongen philosophy – once dismissed as primitive – now informs UN sustainability debates. Similarly, Nigeria’s #EndSARS protesters weaponized social media against state brutality, their hashtags becoming digital shields. These are fragments of a global pattern: the Rohingya archiving lost villages through oral poetry, Indian farmers reviving seed banks, Detroit’s Black cooperatives building food sovereignty. Cooper’s fallen empires remind us that collapse often incubates reinvention – the Mongols emerged from steppe chaos to forge history’s largest contiguous empire, only to dissolve into cultural legacies that still shape Eurasia.
So what next? The answer lies not in utopian blueprints but in ethical recalibration. The Durants urged us to “rediscover the soul under the machinery of civilization,” and here, the peripheries light the way. In Ukraine, farmers have de-mined fields with sunflower seeds – a symbiosis of survival and beauty. In Kerala, India, a “knowledge economy” prioritizes social infrastructure over Silicon mimicry, cutting illiteracy to 2% (UNESCO). My Soviet-era professor, a survivor of Stalin’s purges, once told me: “When the center crumbles, the edges hold the DNA of what comes next.” This demands a paradigm shift: measuring progress not by GDP but by the dignity of the grandmother planting yams in oil-sludge, the Kurdish poet smuggling ballads in his bloodstream, the Lagos teen coding apps to track police violence.
The crossroads before us is not a binary of collapse or salvation but a spectrum of negotiated metamorphosis. As I write, wildfires scorch Canadian boreal forests once deemed invincible, and Niger’s coup leaders cite colonial resource theft as justification. The threads are all connected. Our task is to weave a new fabric from the fraying strands – not through the hubris of grand designs, but by amplifying what my Niger Delta elder called “the stubbornness of life.” For in the end, civilizations are not felled by barbarians at the gates, but by the blindness of those who mistake their walls for the horizon.
The Kurdish poet’s mouth trembled as he spoke of his banned manuscript. “They call me terrorist,” he said, “for wanting to teach this.” His verses, aching with ancestral memory, revealed globalization’s fatal flaw: it demanded cultural surrender. “You cannot digitize a mother’s lullaby,” he insisted, echoing Appadurai’s insight that people “would rather die than disappear.”
In Enugu, my childhood home, colonialism’s scars still bleed. The 1884 Berlin Conference – a map carved with racist scalpels – birthed Nigeria’s ethnic fissures. A Biafran elder on a recent visit, showed me his civil war bullet wounds: “Britain drew lines, but our blood refuses their ink.” Cooper’s analysis of Sykes-Picot’s Middle Eastern disaster – arbitrary borders birthing ISIS – proves that cartographic arrogance outlives empires.
Graphic images emerged on mainstream and social media as youths chanted “Soro soke!” (Speak up!) during the#EndSARS riots. Their phones – tools of a globalized world – captured police brutality, turning TikTok into a weapon. “They taught us fear,” a protester grinned, “we answer with truth.” Though I’ve never been to Lake Chad’s shores, Al Jazeera’s footage of its 90% shrinkage (UNEP) haunts me. A displaced fisherman’s interview stuck: “Boko Haram feeds on our hunger.” Cooper’s Greenland Norse – starving as glaciers advanced – came to mind. COP27 delegates’ pleas (“We drown while you debate!”) underscored the Durants’ maxim: “Civilization exists by geological consent.”
History, as the Durants teach, “is a fragment of biology.” Our species’ genius birthed Angkor’s spires and Silicon Valley’s servers – yet both crumble under hubris. But in Kyiv’s present rubble, a pianist plays Chopin; in Lagos, market women forge hope from chaos. These acts, small yet seismic, are our answer to Cooper’s fallen empires.
The ruins of empires whisper a singular admonition: hubris is the original sin of civilizations. From the Niger Delta’s oil-slicked creeks to Silicon Valley’s data temples, the thread of arrogance weaves through humanity’s triumphs and collapses. I recall standing in Moscow’s Gorky Park in 1991, watching Soviet statues topple – not to cheers of liberation, but to the muffled sobs of pensioners and war veterans clutching frayed ration cards. “We were promised the stars,” a retired cosmonaut muttered, his medal for spacewalking glinting in the dusk. The USSR, like Rome and the Khmer before it, conflated ideological might with invincibility, ignorant of the Durants’ warning: “Civilization is a precarious balance between human will and earthly limits.” In Nigeria, where oil pipelines bleed us to death, I witness this delusion repeat itself. A Shell executive once boasted to me in Port Harcourt, “We’ve harnessed the Delta’s soul,” oblivious to Cooper’s lesson from the Maya collapse: elites who mistake resource extraction for dominion are already writing their epitaphs.
Hubris thrives in the gulf between power and empathy. Consider the Roman optimates hoarding grain as plebeians starved, their marble villas insulated from suffering – a scene mirrored in modern Nigeria, where legislators’ convoys speed past slums, windows tinted against reality. During Hungary’s 2010 elections, I watched Viktor Orbán resurrect the myth of Magyar exceptionalism, vowing to “stop time itself” through illiberal edicts. His rhetoric echoed the Assyrian kings who staked divine right on conquest, only to drown in revolts. Yet hubris is not solely the vice of rulers. I have watched several Ted Talks and similar ones, where Tech gurus and Chain investors, in an attempt to convince or convert us, through lectures and sermons on “disrupting mortality” have pitched their sales, while refugees in the same city queued for food stamps. The Durants diagnosed this centuries ago: “When the educated class cultivates detachment, civilization becomes a corpse awaiting burial.”
The psychology of hubris is rooted in what my Kurdish poet friend in Diyarbakır called “the blindness of elevated ground.” Leaders and systems ascend until the masses below blur into abstraction. The Soviets demonstrated this in Chernobyl’s aftermath, prioritizing propaganda over evacuation – a miscalculation Cooper parallels with the Late Bronze Age collapse, where palatial elites ignored famine warnings. Modernity’s iteration is subtler but no less lethal: algorithms that reduce human complexity to data points, or politicians framing immigrants as “invasions.” In Abuja, a senator once justified slashing healthcare funding by claiming, “Poverty builds character,” a sentiment as old as Pharaohs hoarding Nile grain during droughts. Yet history’s corrections are relentless. The Aztecs, convinced their sun god demanded ever-grander sacrifices, fell to Cortés’s handful of adventurers. Their descendants, the Nahua, taught me a proverb: “The higher the pyramid, the longer the shadow it casts on its builders.”
Environmental hubris – the belief that nature’s patience is infinite – now threatens our species’ climax. Lake Chad’s carcass, reduced to 10% of its 1960s glory (UNEP), epitomizes this folly. On its cracked basin, A journalist friend met a Boko Haram recruit who’d once fished its waters. “When the lake died, the jihadists gave me a Kalashnikov and a purpose,” he shrugged, echoing Dust Bowl migrants lured by California’s mirage. Cooper’s account of Easter Island’s ecocide – chiefs competing to erect ever-larger Moai as forests vanished – mirrors COP summits where delegates peddle “green growth” fantasies while emissions soar. Even the Soviets, for all their industrial might, could not bend Siberia’s permafrost to collective farms; my university’s agronomist students wept over withered wheat, whispering, “We’ve angered the soil.” The Durants framed it cosmically: “Nature forgives no debt.”
Within hubris lies its antidote: the resilience of ordinary souls. Kyiv’s pianist playing Chopin in rubble, the Kano midwife delivering hope in blackouts, the Mapuche rebuilding forests one sapling at a time – these are the counter-narratives. In Moscow’s final Soviet days, I witnessed babushkas bartering Tolstoy novels or anything else they could lay their hands on for bread, their dignity intact as the state crumbled. “Culture is the seed,” one told me, pressing a first edition dog-eared Anna Karenina into my hands. The Durants called history “a race between education and catastrophe”; our epoch’s battleground is humility versus hubris. The Niger Delta’s militants, Silicon Valley’s whistleblowers, and Chile’s student protesters all grasp a truth empires forget: civilization persists not through monuments, but through the quiet insistence on shared humanity. As I write this, a Nigerian teen’s tweet pings my phone – a photo of her planting mangroves where oil once spilled. Her caption: “We are the reckoning.” The crucible of crisis, it seems, forges not just ruin, but redemption.
The Mapuche elders’ küme mongen (“living well”) philosophy, shared via a Santiago scholar’s Instagram post, offers a compass: “Not growth, but balance.” As I write, a Nigerian teen messages me her poem: “We are the lake’s revenge, the oil’s reckoning.”
Our task isn’t to perfect the world, but to mend it – stitch by stitch, soul by soul. In the crucible of crisis, human character is both the wound and the salve.
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma,AI-KO.
Political and Social Analyst, Cultural Curator
iagbeze@msn.com
Follow us on all social media platforms @dailyquery for news around the globe.
