Author: Patrick Clarkin

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War as an Extreme Environment: The Case of Gaza

In graduate school, my advisor Mike Little recommended I take a class outside of the Anthropology Department, since our class offerings were slim that semester. He suggested I go over to Biology and sign up for David Murrish’s class “The Biology of Extreme Environments,” which explored how different species adapted to their worlds. Dr. Murrish kindly accepted me. On the first day of class, before getting into any subject matter, he asked the students for examples of extreme environments.

People suggested some of the ones you’re probably thinking of—deserts because of their heat, polar regions, the deep oceans, etc. I recall one student suggested outer space. I raised my hand and asked, “What about war?” Dr. Murrish smiled and said with a chuckle, “You anthropologists… always looking at the social side of things!”

Of course, biological anthropologists recognize that there is a natural world to which species adapt, which existed long before humans ever evolved roughly 300,000 years ago (Hublin et al 2017). Not everything about human biology can be attributed solely to “the social side of things.” In Mike Little’s classes we learned about his research with Quechua people in highland Peru and Turkana pastoralists in northwestern Kenya, and they how they adapted biologically to stressors in their respective environments: hypoxia, cold, aridity, seasonal rainfall (Leslie and Little, 1999; Little et al., 2013). But Dr. Murrish’s question that day made me think about other types of extreme environments that we create for ourselves, and war certainly applies.

I didn’t get to explore war much further that semester, but the idea percolated. A couple of years later for my dissertation, I eventually explored how the Second Indochina War impacted the growth and body composition of Hmong refugees living in the US and French Guiana (Clarkin 2008). From there I thought about war as an environment in a general sense, including the various stressors they can create and the ways these things leave a mark on human biology and get “under the skin,” particularly among the very young who are still growing.

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Civil War Counter

After seeing a flurry of recent examples (early August 2024), I decided to start a running tally of people calling for, or alluding to, a coming civil war in the U.S.

I first wrote about this topic five years ago with the essay “Red States versus Blue States: Who Would Win a Civil War in the U.S?” Unfortunately, it is the most read thing on this site, by far. That isn’t because the essay is brilliant (really, I think I can do better). Instead, I think it’s because some Americans are anxious or even eager about the prospect of widespread political violence. The essay happens to show up in Internet search results, which brings people here.

The upshot of the essay was that we should reframe the question away from who would “win” a war. By deriving lessons from wars around the world, the one thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that a second civil war here would be devastating for everyone. Whatever resentments people feel – and we all have them – it is an understatement to say that war and political violence are not only unethical, but stupid and impractical, and something best avoided.

For that reason, it is highly irresponsible for politicians, authority figures, and celebrities to encourage the idea or throw it around recklessly. I think we need to confront the fact that people keep vocalizing this fantasy because there is an established pattern that dangerous speech and incitement like this can lead to actual violence. I’ll keep adding to the list as new examples arise. There will likely be more to follow. I may even go back in time to dig up older examples, though I know that will be an exhausting task.

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●June 15, 2024 Steve Bannon asked a conservative crowd “Are we at war?,” adding “Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024? It’s very simple: victory or death!”

●July 3, 2024 Referring to plans to overhaul the federal government, The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Heidi Beirich, said Roberts’ comments were “a bit terrifying but also elucidating.”

●July 22, 2024 At a political rally in Middletown Ohio, state Senator George Lang said civil war would be necessary if Donald Trump loses the election in November:

“I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind.”  

Lang later apologized.

●August 5, 2024 (Honorable mention, UK version) Self-proclaimed expert on everything, Elon Musk wrote on X/Twitter that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, following widespread rightwing riots. Prime Minister Keir Starmer replied that there was “no justification” Musk’s comments.

●August 6, 2024 Actor Jon Voight stopped chewing on his pencil long enough to post a video on X/Twitter titled “Civil War”

“This is the war of our lifetime now. We the people are in trouble if this nation picks Kamala Harris. We must stop this crime that is happening. It’s a war crime that Obama’s directing and Kamala Harris will be the cackling hyena that just listens and repeats.”

He has not apologized.

Related post: Who Would You Like to Kill?

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“I suffer from everything!” (a boy in Gaza)

I recently saw the video below of a boy in Gaza describing how excruciating his life is, to the point that he wishes for death. I shake my head at how the world (particularly my country, the United States) allows this to continue. These people are beyond the breaking point, and it is a moral failure to allow innocent people to live exist under these conditions, for months on end.

(In case the video is taken down or lost to time, here is the given translation…)

“My only wish is that the Zionists leave us alone, and I get to live out my childhood! And that’s it!! Nothing else!


“I’m tired of everything! Everything! I’m wishing that I could just say ‘O Lord!’ and I die, and then come back to life again! Come to another life!”


I’m wishing that I could just die, I’ll die and be done with all this here! It’s what I want!
Because we’re tired of this! We’re tired! We’re tired! We’re being tortured!


We’re being tortured! By Allah, my uncle, we are being tortured! By Allah, we are being tortured! I haven’t lived my own childhood! We’re just children and we’re being tortured! We’re young (children) and we’re (always) filling (containers with) water (everyday) and I never used to even think about water, or anything else!


I suffer from everything! From everything from water, from everything, from food, from drink, from everything! We go through torture just to get anything! We’re being tortured!”

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Who Would You Like to Kill?

“I think the human race needs to think more about killing, about conflict. Is that what we want in this 21st Century?”
 – Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003)

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“How careful should we be, that we do not mistake the impressions of gloom and melancholy, for the dictates of reason and truth. How careful, lest borne away by a torrent of passion, we make shipwreck of conscience.”
 – John Adams (November 29, 1770)

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“We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you,” the young woman threatened the Bakersfield City Council. “The entire nation is coming for you. And we will stop, at no end, until you are in the ground. You’re a traitor to this nation,” said the man’s voicemail left for the Arizona Secretary of State. “I hope they kill your children,” shouted the murdered child’s relative at their alleged killer in a Houston courtroom. Gay people should be “lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head,” preached the Texan pastor. “Yes I do, I support genocide. I support killing all you guys, how about that?” the campus safety officer told a group of protesters at CUNY.

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I’ve been thinking for a while about how people determine when violence is acceptable. For that reason certain news stories jump out to me, particularly those close to home in the increasingly angry United States. I don’t have all the answers, but I think that within many (or most?) of us is a something akin to a black box of violence, when anger reaches a point that people feel compelled to threaten, harm, or even kill. As Lincoln wrote: “Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled.” Yet how this all operates under the hood is somewhat nebulous, and I think people have their own idiosyncratic formula for what makes their blood “hot” and what they decide to do about it. The hope is that bringing these subconscious inclinations closer to the surface might give us a better understanding, and possibly control, over them.

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Hotel Rwanda

I keep thinking about this scene from Hotel Rwanda (2004), about indifference to suffering and atrocity.

“How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?”

“I think if people see this footage they’ll say, ‘oh my God that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners.”

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Becoming Monsters

I’ll keep this brief. Shortly after the July, 2005 London bombings, U2 performed in Milan and dedicated the song Miss Sarajevo to its victims. Bono prefaced the song with these words:

“We’d like to dedicate this next song to those who lost their lives in London last week and who are maimed and injured today. And we would like to turn our song into a prayer. The prayer is that we don’t become a monster in order to defeat a monster. That’s our prayer tonight.”

The song has been one of my favorites for a long time (see here). Lately, I’ve been thinking of this particular version because it’s a reminder to try not to lose our humanity while pursuing justice and standing up to great wrongs.

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The Long Reach of Famine in Gaza

Childhood growth is a mirror for “the material and moral condition” of a society.           

   – Dr. James Tanner, pediatrician and auxologist (1986:3)

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In 2015, Lital Keinan-Boker and colleagues published a study in The Israel Medical Association Journal that examined whether the Holocaust during WW2 had impacted the long-term health of older Israeli adults (mean age 69 years). They were working within the framework of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm, a body of evidence that shows that an array of stressors including malnutrition early in life (prenatally and/or during infancy) can increase risk for various chronic diseases in adulthood.

The study design compared people who were born between 1940–1945 in Nazi-occupied countries in Europe (which they categorized as the ‘exposed’ group; n=653) to those in Israel to Europe-born parents (‘non-exposed’; n=433). After adjusting for confounding variables, Keinan-Boker et al concluded that those born in Europe during WW2 were significantly more likely to have dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. As they wrote, “The results of the current study on fetal and early childhood exposure to malnutrition and hunger and the subsequent long-term outcomes are in accordance with previously published data from research on non-Jewish populations.”

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Replenishing Empathy: Gaza and Sudan

“Empathy is a finite resource. You can run out. As a normal, psychological response, you cannot give yourself of again and again and again without replenishing.” — Emmett Fitzgerald

I keep thinking of the psychologist Paul Slovic’s term “compassion fade,” or our inability to sustain empathy as greater numbers of people require aid. Slovic has pointed out that we have a much easier time empathizing with single individuals than with nameless statistics. So when we hear of numbers like 108 million people being displaced globally, 13,000 killed in the war in Sudan, or 30,000 people killed in Gaza, it doesn’t fully register with us. As the numbers go up, and the people with power seem unwilling to stop it, we can feel numb.

But when I see a single innocent girl in Gaza —not much older than my daughter— crying  that she just wants her leg back again, any numbness instantly fades away.

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The Civilian Costs of the Soviet-Finnish Wars

The Civilian Costs of the Soviet-Finnish Wars

The Finnish-Soviet wars will seem like an esoteric topic and a slight departure from the things I usually write about. I am doing this because of my interests in war and health in a general sense, particularly how conflict-related stress and malnutrition may affect long-term health. It’s important to remember that not all places are affected by war equally, and local details are essential. This is just a place for me to make some notes about how Finnish civilians, especially food supplies, were affected by the different wars from 1939-45. The main source is Olli Vehviläinen’s 2002 book Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia, in particular Chapter 7, “A Society Under Stress.” I’m also including some relevant photos from Thérèse Bonney’s 1943 photo-essay book “Europe’s Children.”

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Killing Each Other’s Children

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.”

–Jimmy Carter Nobel Lecture, Oslo, (December 10, 2002)