The refugees pouring into Europe from the Middle East are facing a cold welcome, and not just in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared the migrants 

50,000 migrants have arrived in 2015 alone

, anti-migrant feelings are running dangerously high. Xenophobia is on the rise, and it channels a general unrest in Italy — an anger over a withering economy, and anxiety about Italy’s future.

Right-wing parties have spearheaded the anti-migrant revolt, from openly neofascist groups like CasaPound and Forza Nuova to the mainstream Northern League, 

 is more or less an open secret. This summer, 

 from the town of Casale San Nicola in an anti-immigration protest that turned violent, leaving fourteen government agents injured.

But even in more moderate circles, large numbers of Italians are watching the human wave with distrust. Nicholas Farrell 

summed up many of the Italians’ frustrations

: the scene along Italy’s coastline looks like 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, but more chaotic and with no end in sight. In the asylum camps, migrants receive not only room and board, but money, cell phones, and vocational lessons; many of the migrants, on top of that, have proven unwilling to abide by certain laws, often refusing to have their fingerprints taken. The police merely shrug their shoulders.

 with anti-immigration chain posts and memes, some joking that the Italian armed forces are the only military in the world that exists to assist foreign invasions. Others report stories of immigrants abusing their privileges, or worse – robbing, harassing, or threatening honest Italians.

These memes have the same hysterical ring, and the same whiff of unfounded authority, as British politician Enoch Powell’s 1968 “

. “In this country, in ten or fifteen years’ time,” the Tory parliamentarian said, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” Powell claimed that this line came verbatim from one of his constituents, an unassuming, blue-collar family man. It’s a line you could easily hear today, though, on the streets of Milan or Rome.

Italians on the left have had their hands full combatting the wave of xenophobia and racism. In a country with a deep and abiding Catholic tradition, they find a powerful ally in Pope Francis, who 

 to show greater hospitality toward the migrants and refugees.

Others in Italy have countered the anti-immigrant reaction from a pragmatic angle. Mass migration to Europe, according to their calculations, may indeed save the continent.

 that foreign labor and foreign families will prove crucial to maintaining the economy of 

a country whose population is in steep decline

. Currently, there are four working Italians for every pensioner; in 2050, if current population trends continue, there will be only two. Europe will need 42 million new workers by 2020, Ricci claims, to maintain the pensions that support an aging continent. Young workers and young families from abroad can provide that new blood.

Ricci also defends the fiscal impact of migration to Italy. Quoting 

 of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Ricci writes that immigrants are not taking money from the state, but actually filling the public coffers. In Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s government would be out some seven billion euro without the contributions of immigrants.

Ricci and Dumont’s arguments are strong, but the message has had little resonance on the Italian street.

Saddled with tremendous debt, and tethered to a currency whose value the government cannot adjust, Italy’s prospects have been bleak for more than a decade. 

Unemployment stands officially at 12.7 percent,

, many workers listed as employed cannot rely on a guaranteed long-term salary. Young Italians are fleeing in droves to Britain, Germany, and the United States.

It’s a humiliating state of affairs; many Italians feel continually betrayed, both by the Germans who hold the reins in the Eurozone, and by their own politicians, who are notoriously corrupt. With paltry or nonexistent wages, a hypocritical government that insists on austerity, and an inflated cost of living, it’s little wonder that so many Italians resent the migrants, who pay no rent and receive money without working.

It’s not a particularly well-informed position, of course. For one thing, it ignores the misery that the refugees are escaping, and the continued miseries of their exile in Europe.

Worse, it feeds on a strain of racism that has infected Italian politics for decades. Northern League politician Roberto 

Calderoli once famously referred to blacks as “bingo-bongos,”

 as though immigrants from Senegal or Cameroon arrived in Italy with bones stuck through their noses, or at best like the clownish black stereotypes in 

. Calderoli’s party came to power in the 1980s as a kind of white nationalist movement, promising to free northern cities of foreigners, especially blacks and Middle Easterners (as well as Southern Italians, who don’t quite make the cut in the League’s standard of whiteness).

 greeting its newly-elected mayor with fascist salutes. CasaPound, whose activists sparked the riot in Casale San Nicola, consider themselves 

Despite these spectacles, the anti-immigration mood in Italy is not primarily about race, or nation. It’s about economics, the way the Italian house is run: wages and pensions and education and tax. Europe is still in dire trouble. The trials of its migrants brings that much into focus.

Lavorano e fanno figli: così i migranti finanziano l’Europa

International Federation of the Red Cross

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A wilting economy and a bleak future are hardly conducive to hospitality for refugees and immigrants.

Unwelcome: Why is cosmopolitan Italy so anti-immigrant?

On the beach at Recife, a coastal city in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, you will be told not to wear jewelry or carry expensive electronic devices. 

 to avoid certain parts of town, like the 

 of Coque, a notoriously violent shantytown.

It’s good advice. As recently as 2008, 

the homicide rate in Recife was 90.9 for every 100,000

 residents. More people in this city were murdered, per capita, 

than in the entire country of El Salvador

, whose homicide rate in 2008 was about 70 for every 100,000. America’s, by comparison, was five.

The warnings about flashy jewelry, exposed cell phones, and careless ATM visits are standard in much of Brazil for tourists and citizens alike. From wholesale massacres to minor necklace-snatching, Brazilian cities are awash in crime — but by whom?

 compared the crime in Recife with the crime in another notorious crime capital — Rio de Janeiro, whose 

 have long been ruled by drug gangs so powerful and so well-armed that they have been known to 

. No such scenes unfold in Recife, where the firearm of choice seems to be the .38 pistol, and where drug traffickers cannot form anything like the entrenched, stable, para-states of Rio.

, “the problem is organized crime. Here, the problem is disorganized crime.”

The difference in crime between the two cities is structural and historical. In Rio, drug traffickers form a kind of shadow government, engaged in a social contract with the citizens of their 

 — Rio’s gangs deal in more than cocaine and sex; they provide subsidized electricity, repair roads, organize block parties, and feed hungry families in the slums they control, generally without sending a bill. Brazil’s government services are nowhere near as comprehensive, or as generous.

It’s a criminal culture that emerged long before the black economy in drugs and weapons took hold. Historically it was gambling — Brazil’s famous 

 lottery — that first bred Rio’s organized crime. The 

 gangs capitalized on the popularity of the game, and with the money they earned in running the numbers they began providing jobs and protection to the 

 dwellers around them, guaranteeing a community of loyal clients, and thus, income. Even after the cocaine explosion of the 1980s, Rio’s gang violence looks more like the axe-handle politics of Boss Tweed’s New York, or Sicily at the height of Mafia power, than crack-era Oakland.

It’s an exchange of services. The traffickers need consumers, recruits, and compliant neighbors. The 

 need electricity and jobs. It’s hardly a surprise how well-entrenched the traffickers’ control of Rio’s 

In Recife, on the other hand, there is no such exchange. That’s because Recife’s criminal caste never needed clients the way Rio’s did. In Recife, the criminals themselves were clients, a kind of bailiff class created by landowners and political bosses as hired muscle. Called 

 on horseback, beating or murdering at their patrons’ behest, and often at their own. Despised by the masses, and dependent on their patrons for money, they never accrued the social or monetary capital to form anything as stable as the Rio crime syndicates.

 gave up political enforcement for the more lucrative business of drug trafficking. But they could never rely on a community to protect them on the witness stand or on the street, and could not raise the funds to buy the high-end weaponry that the Rio traffickers carry.

The study cites another reason as well for the difference between Rio and Recife: the police. It seems that strong-handed policing in the 

 leads people to support the traffickers, while a lenient police force gains sympathy. Rio’s police are notorious for their brutality. A recent 

 found that the police have killed 1,500 Cariocas since 2010, almost always without any subsequent investigation. The victims have largely been 

 dwellers, overwhelmingly young, poor, and black. These grim statistics, as well as the omnipresence of masked, militarized policemen during the 2014 World Cup, have turned much of Rio’s poor against the government, and toward the shadow government of the traffickers.

In Recife, the police have not been militarized, which means that not only is there no arms race between traffickers and police, but that the terrifying image of ski-masked state murderers has much less purchase than in Rio. The Recife police not especially well-liked, especially since many officers indulge in crime or join clandestine death squads when out of uniform. But the institution, 

 institution, is not nearly as feared or hated. In the 

, people still maintain a cautious degree of trust toward the police.

There’s considerably more caution than trust, though, especially for the families of the slain.

Michael Jerome Wolff, “Building Criminal Authority: A Comparative Analysis of Drug Gangs in Rio de Janeiro and Recife,” L

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The brutal violence in Brazil’s favelas takes various forms. It’s always a symptom of poverty. Sometimes, it’s a substitute for the state.

What government? In Rio’s slums, drug gangs are the government.

 the Ireland’s Na Fianna Éireann (The Warriors of Ireland), a small youth group that holds fast to the doctrine of dissident republicanism. This militant current disavows the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; it upholds the struggle, generally conceded to be over, to unify the Republic of Ireland with the six counties of Northern Ireland. 

 are, in VICE’s words, “Ireland’s last true republican boy scouts.”

Founded in 1909, Na Fianna Éireann combines paramilitary drilling and ideological instruction with more traditional scouting activities. But the dissident republicans as a whole include more violent types as well, notably the Continuity Irish Republican Army (C-IRA), a splinter group from the now-inactive Provisional IRA whose members still consider themselves in a state of war with Great Britain.

For the C-IRA and other militants, 2015 has been a rather successful year. Over the last eight months, violence linked to dissident republicans has spiked, according to the 

Still, Na Fianna Éireann is tiny — about thirty members, VICE estimates, even as only half a dozen or so appear onscreen. The extensive footage of them on maneuvers, dressed in fatigues while aiming fallen tree branches in place of rifles, only makes their smallness more apparent. 

One of the boys is eleven years old, and looks about eight

Na Fianna Éireann’s spokesman in the documentary is an articulate young man of about eighteen, earnest but not glib. He takes his activism seriously, but stops short of mania. It’s remarkable: in a movement whose members rant on and on about the coming Bloody Sundays and the Irish blood that Britain continues to shed, only one person in the documentary fits the image of the raving, spit-spraying blowhard. That latter specimen is the bearded man speaking at this year’s 99th Easter Rebellion memorial. The rest seem intelligent, even charming.

Whether the dissident republicans are “right,” whether Northern Ireland should be part of the Republic of Ireland, and whether violence was or is a necessary means to that end, are important questions in their own right. Similarly, the paradox of a clearly intelligent man buying into clearly ridiculous beliefs is worth exploring we’ve seen it before, whether in Malcolm X in his Nation of Islam days, claiming that white people were the 

, or in the well-educated men who brought down the World Trade Center. In a minor way, we see this same paradox in the well-spoken youth of this documentary, who sincerely predict more massacres 

 Bloody Sunday in the near and continuous future.

But the more interesting question is “Why?” Why people — especially Europeans brought up in the age of Pixar and Barack Obama and the smartphone and the Celtic Tiger — should be attracted to hardline militancy.

Why should people — especially Europeans brought up in the age of Pixar and Obama and the iPhone and the Celtic Tiger — be attracted to hardline militancy?

, people’s motives for entering fringe politics, especially militant politics, vary wildly from case to case. A single explanation will never fit every individual.

Nevertheless, there is a strange rift underway across the globe, cracking the surface of politics and culture along the margins of the NATO West. The beaming, optimistic force of liberalism — business-friendly policies and Enlightenment values, whose touchstones now are American-approved government and sleek new Apple gadgets — is facing its equal and opposite reaction.

This trend against the Enlightenment values and freewheeling consumerism that America has long exported is certainly nothing new. But it’s growing more visible in places like Turkey and Russia and Europe’s debt-burdened South, in little corners of Ireland and in the broad territories held by the Islamic State.

The ideologies that comprise this anti-liberal current often have little in common. Vladimir Putin’s strongman nationalism hardly resembles Alexis Tsipras’ 21st century Marxism, which in turn looks nothing like the nightmarish neomedievalism of the Islamic State. But these ideologies, along with Ireland’s dissident republicans, Greece’s other radical movement — 

, seem to share little besides a common disdain for the chug-along, secular, business-friendly, democratic agenda of the European Union, NATO, and the United States.

One thing shared by these groups, so often nostalgic for empires or the romance of Lost Cause mythology, is a sense of human, corporeal satisfaction. The frustrations of American or EU-style liberalism are not limited to 

 by a smiling insistence on “cooperation,” or long, bloody wars waged in the name of Freedom. It is that Freedom itself, with its capital F, which is sometimes worse. Liberal ideology hinges on abstractions: human rights, freedom, justice. And abstractions are tenuous under the best of circumstances, rarely satisfying at the carnal, human level.

The first principle of politics is not a principle at all. It’s the human body, with a beating heart and churning guts and, perhaps lastly, a brain.

The high ideals of the France’s 1789 revolutionaries, who tried to reduce the universe into neat abstractions and user-friendly formulas, turned almost immediately into a kind of perverse worship of the human body, the roaring of the mob for fresh heads from the guillotine. And soon thereafter, that worship refocused on a specific body, 

. Today in Russia, Vladimir Putin has taken the lesson to heart. 

, revealing to the world his own animal humanity. His entire policy is encapsulated in that bold nude torso, and the Russians have responded energetically: despite problems at home and pressure from abroad, 

When the Greeks went to the urns this summer for the 

, they faced a choice between German abstractions — Money and Debt and Responsibility — and the body of a 

And for Western jihadis who move to the Islamic State, no spit-shined TED-talk trope will ever be as moving, as viscerally stirring, as 

, waving a war banner, or pointing one finger to the sky.

In the scheme of European politics, Ireland occupies a strange position. It’s a member of the infamously titled “PIGS” (for Portugal, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Spain), the Eurozone’s microcosm of the Global South; 

 than, say, Greece’s, but nevertheless, unemployment and public debt are high. And like Greece, and like Syria, Ireland has been shaped by a history of colonial exploitation, bloodshed, and hypocrisy.

A dissident republican in the VICE documentary appears in a slouch hat and Sam Browne belt, Irish Civil War-era regalia amid street scenes filled with iPhone typists and Facebook gawkers. The passersby, captured by the camera, could well be Germans or Americans; the reenactor, by the same token, could be one of the troopers at the Turkish presidential palace, carrying an Ottoman sword. Both are immune to the glib, rational, abstract rhetoric of the Obama White House, to the Silicon Valley aesthetic, to the finger-wagging of Berlin. The dissident republican, for better or for worse, is a soldier for the physical, the corporeal, the animal in politics. Though he’s a rare species on the streets of Dublin, he’s not in Moscow, or in Athens, or in Raqqa. And we cannot afford to ignore him.

VICE News, “The Republic’s Dissident Youth: Ireland’s Young Warriors,” July 23, 2015.

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Throughout the West, the beaming, optimistic forces of Enlightenment liberalism are facing an equal and opposite reaction — even among the Irish born in the age of the “Celtic Tiger.”

Ireland’s young militants and the global rise of fringe politics

Hunting is an ancient tradition in Russia, celebrated by Tolstoy and Turgenev, practiced with gusto by everyone from the czars to the Bolsheviks. But lately it’s been in decline: fewer Russians than ever, it seems, are interested in the sport. Or, at least, fewer than ever are applying for game permits. Poaching, on the other hand, has never been more popular. Russia’s 

 found that in 2012, poachers made off with 18 billion rubles’ worth of game, 2 billion more than the legal harvest.

Most of this poaching is carried out by organized crime, black market traffickers who prowl the forests of Russia’s 

: tiger pelts, illegal caviar, and bear bile, the latter used for traditional Chinese medicine, fetch enormous prices abroad.

But the black marketeers are not Russia’s only poachers, and poaching is more than an ecological disaster. It’s the embodiment of civil society in Putin-era Russia, a country where the cities thrive as the country decays, and where limitless power and desperate poverty stand side by side.

, the most visible poachers in Russia belong to a “VIP” elite: people with the money or political clout to poach with impunity. They may be major statesmen or local policemen or wealthy urbanites; whatever their background, they are the most flagrant breakers of the game laws. In 2009, the presidential envoy to parliament, a Moscow CEO, and several local officials 

 on a poaching foray. Other examples abound, and few result in prosecution, much less conviction.

The VIPs, for all the press they get, make up only about five percent of poachers; between a quarter and a third, on the other hand, are ordinary rural Russians. These poachers are almost exclusively blue-collar, typically low-income, and often unemployed. They do not make the headlines. And when caught, they go to jail.

The ordinary, invisible poachers have, by and large, resorted to their crime out of desperation. Of course, some go in for the thrill of outwitting game wardens, as poachers do in every country. But many more are simply frustrated hunters who cannot understand the regulations, or cannot afford a license. In Soviet times, state-sponsored shooting clubs kept hunting well-regulated and affordable; since all land was public, there was no shortage of space or game. Today, the game laws have become so byzantine, and so inconsistent in their balancing of regional and federal regulations, that many hunters simply ignore them. Hunting land, too, is increasingly ending up in private hands, making hunters into trespassers and thus into poachers. And licensing fees cost up to a half-month’s salary for many rural Russians, an impossible expense.

And for some of these Russians, hunting is far more than sport. Food is increasingly in short supply in the provinces, where unemployment and lack of infrastructure mean empty shelves at the grocery store. A handful of rifle cartridges costs less than butcher’s meat — an important consideration for the unemployed.

Russian poachers are divided along the same class lines as the rest of the country: one small, urban, incredibly wealthy class flaunts its position above the law, while a huge, rural class is 

. The country is following two opposite trajectories, equal only in intensity.

The same class that makes up most of Russia’s VIP poachers, and which undergirds President Vladimir Putin’s government, emerged immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, swelling in power with the privatization of oil and gas. They were, and remain, men of the city, uninterested in agriculture and the countryside. Since 1991, 13,000 villages in Russia have simply ceased to exist. The ones that remain face widespread unemployment, indifferent schooling, and rampant alcoholism.

The new titans of the 21st century — Brazil, Russia, China, India, and the Gulf states — all share this disparity. The 

 and luxury high-rises; in the country, even 

. The lavish stadiums that Brazil built for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, 

Luxury hunting is part of this equation, just as much as the flashy cars and dazzling architecture. Saudi Arabia’s elites, for instance, are currently driving 

the houbara bustard, a large game bird, into extinction

. And in Russia, hunting has particular resonance beyond 

. Putin has made rural sports like hunting, as well as his own 

 into icons of a strong, defiant Russia. The freedom to defy the law, particularly with a rifle in hand, fits remarkably well with the myth of the shirtless, hairy-chested maverick, facing down the world.

Poaching, in a perverse way, has become vaguely patriotic. At least, for Russia’s VIPs.

Illegal recreational hunting in Russia: the role of social norms and elite violators

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Russians are turning from legal hunting to poaching. Sometimes it’s a luxury sport. Other times, it’s just for survival. 

For most Russians, poaching is a crime. For VIPs, it’s a luxury sport.

Russia, more than most other countries, knows the difference between 

 — ethnic, cultural, geographic bodies — and sovereign 

. The Russian Federation alone contains dozens of discrete nations: ethnic Russians, of course, but also Yakuts in the east, Chechens and Ossetians in the Caucasus, ethnic Ukrainians, Russian Jews, and a widely dispersed population of Muslim Tatars. Each nation speaks its own language, practices its own religion, and follows its unique traditions. They are citizens of, and outsiders in, a Federation dominated by ethnic Russians.

This diversity poses a major obstacle to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political agenda. Since the early 2000s, 

Putin’s government has pushed for a strong, conservative patriotism across the Federation.

Russia, as Putin sees it, is on the rise, well on its way to resuming its old status as superpower. That new power needs shoring-up at home. Slavophile clubs, nationalist militias in Russia’s European enclaves, and an invigorated Orthodox Church are key buttresses in Moscow’s snarling ascent.

This new, aggressive Russian patriotism has resonated in some strange places — 

notably among Russia’s Tatar population,

 which constitutes 13 percent of the Federation’s population, and that only twenty years ago wanted nothing to do with the new Russia.

Descendants of the Asian horsemen who overran Russia in the Middle Ages, the Tatars are neither Slavs nor Christians, and their interactions with the Russians have long been tense. Even after the heyday of mounted marauding, the Tatars often befriended Moscow’s enemies, such as the Ottoman Empire; 

when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the SS recruited all-Tatar units

Moscow, in return, has treated the Tatars harshly. Stalin notably exiled the Crimean Tatars en masse to Central Asia. In the 1990s, Moscow shut down a popular Tatar push for independence. And today’s Crimean Tatars, allowed back only in 1988, 

widely resent last year’s Russian takeover of their homeland.

But Putin’s program declares itself to be patriotic, not nationalist. This is a critical distinction. A nationalist program would foster loyalty to the Russian nation — the ethnic Russians, at the expense of the Tatars (and the Ukrainians, and the Chechens, and the Federation’s other constituent nations). A patriotic program, on the other hand, directs the people’s devotion to the sovereign state of Russia. Nationalism pits nation against nation; patriotism unifies ethnic groups. At least, it purports to. The organ of Tatar patriotism under Putin is the 

, a government agency whose initials stand for Regional Tatar National-Cultural Autonomy. Housed in 

 of a wealthy Tatar, the RTNKA seeks to promote Tatar culture in tandem with loyalty to Russia. The organization's longtime president, Rasim Akchurin, summed up the agency’s patriotic mission in 2007:

I think that patriotism must not have any nationalist dimension. We must have a patriotism of Muscovites, patriotism of Russians [citizens of the Russian Federation] but not a Russian or a Tatar [ethnic] patriotism. … I am profoundly convinced about it. If I am ready to give my life, I will give it for the Russian, the Jew, the Armenian… for all the people who live here, because I am a real patriot. (75)

To this end, RTNKA publishes hagiographic titles like 

 (2007) and biographies of carefully selected Tatar luminaries, such as 

, a Lenin Prize laureate and Hero of the Soviet Union. RTNKA also hosts folk dance recitals and concerts, offers Tatar language lessons, and promotes a moderate, apolitical Islam. In all this, RTNKA assiduously avoids politics, especially questions of nation. Such discretion allows the Tatars to celebrate their native culture, and to proclaim the Tatars’ integral role in Russian history and in the fabric of Russian society.

It’s an optimistic vision: the Tatar nation fulfils itself while, even 

, aligning itself with the greater Russian motherland. And like most optimistic visions, it has its critics: a number of prominent Tatars balk at the RTNKA’s blithe patriotism, which does not take on the marginalization of Tatar culture by a rearing Russian nationalism. “My personal opinion,” said Tatar politician Refkat Galimov in 2011, “is that the [RTNKA was] created to mislead public and international opinion. Until the law… in Russia is changed and as long as the media and power institutions continue to stigmatise people of ‘Caucasian nationality’… the artificially created [RTNKA] will do nothing.”

The question at hand, beyond the Tatars, is whether Putin’s patriotic mission is really in good faith, or whether it’s Russian nationalism in disguise. There is an element of both at play: Tatar culture, after all, has seen something of a renaissance under the aegis of RTNKA and the Russian government. But in the context of 

government-funded nationalist biker gangs

Russian Orthodox clergy publicly damning their Ukrainian counterparts

, and Putin’s endorsement of aggressive irredentism among the Russians of Ukraine and Moldova, Russian patriotism does not seem that far removed from Russian nationalism. Under the rice of the Tatar pilaf, it seems, is a fat Russian pork chop.

“Patriotic Unity and Ethnic Diversity at Odds: The Example of Tatar Organisations in Moscow,”

Photo courtesy of  Shutterstock/Vereshchagin Dmitry

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In a rising Russia, patriotism is the order of the day. For some Tatars, Russia’s biggest minority, that’s good news. Others are refusing to buy in.

Do minorities have a place in Putin’s Russia?

Judicial corporal punishment, a court order that the guilty party be flogged or beaten, is a distant memory in the United States. It last happened in 1952, 

when a Delaware man was sentenced to twenty lashes

. Even then it was a rarity. To liberal, Western eyes, corporal punishment seems barbaric and medieval. And while French philosopher Michel Foucault found 

the whipping post preferable to the prison cell

In Namibia, though, popular opinion seems to concur with Foucault’s point, though not necessarily with his reasons. Traditional jurisprudence in Namibia has long recommended a beating with the 

, a whip made from palm branches, for everything from murder and rape to insolence toward elders. The 

 finds that as recently as 2009, many Namibians remember the 

 was good,” one Namibian told the author.

The reason behind this bizarre fondness for flogging is twofold. Part of it lies in Namibia’s colonial history. A German colony before World War I, the Allied Powers handed Namibia to the apartheid government of South Africa. (The South African police, incidentally, used a whip of their own, the infamous 

, now a symbol of the violence and degradation that defined the nation’s colonial history.) But Namibia is a vast country, and in some parts, particularly the remote Ovamboland, the South African courts were stretched too thin to attend to every case brought to trial. Consequently, the colonial courts farmed their work out. Low-level court cases fell to the discretion of local headmen and their village courts, whose favorite penalty was the 

The village courts had no say in Namibia’s colonial government, which was ruled from South Africa and exclusively white. Nevertheless, these courts were one of very few places where black voices mattered, where native Namibians had some say in the running of their own community. The 

 came to embody the dignity of a community that regulated itself, in spite of outside colonial rule. Prison, an institution imported from Europe via South Africa, does not have the same resonance. Prison is foreign. The 

’s popularity over prison is more material, and more ironic. In a country marked by a 

stagnant economy, huge income disparities, and regular food shortages

, the regular meals and rent-free beds of prison are less a punishment than a kind of reward. “Prison is useless,” one man told Jones, “because people will just go and eat nice food. They are even eating eggs and they have shelter and everything.”

 nostalgia may seem barbarous, but in the end it’s a longing for a kind of normality: a country in charge of itself, unravished by famine, spared the depredations of apartheid and colonial rule. It’s an ironic sort of longing, certainly, and it raises uncomfortable questions about the role of physical pain in judicial punishment. The Islamic State has made headlines for its 

, flog and otherwise inflict pain on their own citizens who break the law. Beatings and 

“rough rides” in the backs of vans are still routine

 in some police precincts throughout the United States. The 

Wielding the epokolo: Corporal punishment and traditional authority in colonial Ovamboland

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Traditional Namibian law stipulated floggings with a palm-branch whip. To many Namibians, it still makes more sense than prison. 

In Namibia, nostalgia for corporal punishment

The plan is so ambitious it sounds literary. It could have been one of the wonders of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s 

: colossal, fantastic, and deeply troubling.

The plan is to dig a second canal through Central America, to rival Panama’s. This new canal would cut 

 from Brito to Punta Gorda, three times longer than the Panama Canal and with more space 

. Construction will likely cost $50 billion. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, former chief of the Sandinista guerrilla movement, inaugurated the project in 

; the plan’s architect, and sponsor, is a Beijing-based businessman named Wang Jing.

, Mr. Jing has a net worth of about $8.2 billion dollars, earned mostly in telecommunications. He seems an unlikely friend of President Ortega, who began his career with 

 that “our revolution is profoundly anti-imperialist, anti-Yankee and Marxist-Leninist.”

The canal has few supporters. President Ortega has proclaimed that the canal will bring much-needed revenue, raising GDP by 10 percent in a country where over

 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line

 But scientists around the world have released 

 condemning the canal, which threatens to devastate the Nicaraguan environment. Almost a million acres of rainforest and mangroves face destruction, including pristine UNESCO reserves. The country’s largest drinking water reservoir will be compromised, and the list of endangered animals that the canal threatens includes the jaguar, the ocelot, and the harpy eagle.

Nicaragua’s indigenous population, too, has found itself in the path of the oncoming canal, without having been consulted — or promised compensation — by either the government or Mr. Jing’s Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Investment Development Company. And compensated or not, indigenous Nicaraguans will still have to deal with the heavy metals and other dangerous soil pollutants that the canal work will leave in its wake.

But with all eyes on the environment, few people are asking the obvious question: Ortega? With Jing?

Carlo Massimo