Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:

… [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general.

Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.

A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:

This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.

But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:

When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

All of which need to be destroyed.

I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals.

[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.

Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]

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It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.

Stone underwent her political change in recent years, and this phenomenon still has the power to surprise her. I experienced it over twenty years ago, and so I’m more used to the idea that most people will follow the tyranny du jour. From my observation, this mentality is more common on the left, but the right is hardly immune. It just takes a different form.

Many years ago I read Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay that appeared in Harper’s and was entitled, “Who Goes Nazi?”. It’s a catchy title, isn’t it? Thompson presents it as a parlor game, but a deadly serious one:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

I have many quarrels with Thompson, and I also disagree with some of what she wrote in the essay. That’s not the subject matter of this post, however. I’m introducing it here because I very much agree with her basic premise, which is that most people are susceptible to totalitarian leanings and to propaganda. In the essay it’s “Nazism” – after all, it was written in 1941. But it’s hardly limited to that; we’re talking about the totalitarian impulse, either “for your own good” which turns into evil, or for outright evil.

Some embrace it wholeheartedly and some half-heartedly, some think they are being virtuous, some are indifferent but go along to get along, some don’t pay any attention, and some do it out of fear. But to defy it takes a great deal of insight and courage.

In addition to the Thompson essay, I sometimes think of the Milgram experiment. This particular post from 2008 explains the phenomenon best. An excerpt:

If you’re unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments, here’s a summary. The gist of it was Milgram’s shocking (literally) finding that ordinary people in this country could be persuaded to inflict what they thought were painful electric jolts to “subjects” (actually, actors) in what was billed as a learning experiment, if an authoritative “researcher” (also an actor) told them it was okay.

This was true for most subjects even if the “victim” was screaming in pain and complained of a weak heart. It was also true if the “doctor” didn’t have a white coat, and was in a lab in a seedier part of town. No actual shocks were administered, but I recall that, in follow-up interviews, most of the subjects thought the shocks were real.

Milgram varied the details of the experiment over and over (read his book if you have time; it’s a masterpiece of its genre), but the results always pointed to the troubling fact that the majority of people failed to “question authority” …

“Authority” can vary. It can, for instance, be some online charlatan whom a person has come to trust. It can be a leftist professor, or a series of leftist professors, at a university. It can be the baying hounds of cancel culture, or the Furies of the “Me Too” witch hunt. It can be Jew-haters of all persuasions. It’s a shape-shifter exploiting a fact of human nature.

Our Founders believed it was possible to create a system of government that would be at least somewhat resistant to these forces. They did the best they could, and they were brilliant men. Perhaps they did the best possible. But no system can guard against the tendency well enough to make tyranny impossible, and the Founders were well aware of that, too.

[NOTE: Sasha Stone’s entire essay is worth reading, and there are some especially good short videos there.]

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I’ve watched many of Saad’s YouTube videos, and he’s a no-nonsense guy, a Jew who was raised in Lebanon and whose family was one of the last to leave. He’s been living in Canada although I think he’s in the US now. At any rate, here’s something about his book, from the description at Amazon:

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Saad unleashes a blistering critique of maladaptively irrational altruism that has gripped our culture. This mind parasite hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline. Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

Saad is a professor, but he seems to be very realistic as well. His thesis makes me think of Robert Frost – yes, that Robert Frost. For example, this post of mine from 2019 contains the following thoughts from Frost:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed.

Frost was writing about socialism in 1936, whereas Saad is writing more generally. But the principle is much the same. Empathy – similar to Frost’s mercy – is part of human nature and definitely has its uses. But taken to an extreme, and misapplied, it is dangerous and can lead to either failure of an economic system or cultural suicide or literal deaths, as well as restraints on liberty in the name of kindness.

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I’ve seen it for years and years and years online: the idea that the Boomer generation has screwed the younger ones. It’s often advanced by 40-somethings or younger, who feel insufficiently flush with cash and that the world hasn’t rewarded them in the manner they think they deserve. The idea that previous generations struggled and that many still struggle (I have friends my age with little savings, for example) is brushed aside. And the opinions of older people are shrugged off with the dismissive, “Okay, Boomer.”

It’s not unusual to wish that the Boomers would die already. Just shuffle off this mortal coil so that the young can get the spoils. And this is usually said with no sense of shame whatsoever.

I’ve seen most of this in the comments sections of blogs and MSM articles, as well as on social media of many kinds. It’s said not with humorous tolerance but powerful hatred and envy. But envy has now become perfectly okay, a kind of badge of virtue with “microlooters” and the like.

Now the New York Times is getting into the act:

The New York Times on old people:

“It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans… Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration… there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet… impose age ceilings on political offices… Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate… It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain.”

Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whom I interviewed once, always seemed generous and reasonable, even when our politics differed. But unless it’s an elaborate meta-joke, the above column and forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and Power in America advance some of the most intellectually vicious ideas I’ve ever seen. The Godwin’s Law factor alone is a shocker.

Moyn observes that people of years have accumulated money and influence and contrives to end the “tyranny of the old” by having “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property,” because reasons. The title of the Times piece, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” carries the obscene lefty connotation that no one really owns anything and the elderly, by dint of living too long to begin with, and having a generally shitty quality of life compared to the young, and voting incorrectly/selfishly (hilarious, in the context of open scheming to seize their savings) and wasting resources “playing for time” for “another day, month, or year among loved ones” makes them lousy stewards of what the author unironically calls “our inheritance,” i.e. their homes and bank accounts.

That’s by Matt Taibbi, who is 56 years old. Young to me, but not young.

Moyn’s work doesn’t surprise me at all – there’s a huge market for this sort of thing, based on the ideas I’ve seen widely disseminated online. Taibbi is absolutely correct that this is part of an attack on private property, based on the idea that one can decide who should own what and how much, and act accordingly by confiscating the goods of the supposedly non-virtuous.

NOTE: I’ve written on this topic of inter-generational rage before, but at the moment I can’t find the piece. But this post is somewhat relevant to the topic.

NOTE II: I saw the movie Zorba the Greek in a movie theater when it first came out in 1964. I was young, and I didn’t like it and have never looked at it again. But various scenes have stuck with me, and not in a good way. So, this one comes to mind. Of course, the people confiscating the dead woman’s goods here actually are dirt-poor, and they are of all ages and not just young. The deceased woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call rich, either. So the parallel isn’t very good, although the envy impulse is there. Here’s the scene, and watching it now it seems even more chilling than I recall:

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,,, [I]n every other aspect of [the lives of the Democrats I know who want Trump dead], they act within the general morality of our culture. They don’t beat puppies and babies, they don’t steal, they’ll lend a helping hand to their neighbors, etc. My BiL is extremely active in the Catholic Church. Yet…..when it comes to Trump, and now through the relentless propaganda, conservatives and republicans in general, the “violent minds” turn on. I keep wishing that someone well-versed in psychology could explain this phenomenon to me, and also provide a solution. I haven’t seen such. If it exists it might even save the country from some terrible consequences.

It does certainly seem like a contagion, but there seems to be no antibiotic to employ.

I have no solution. But I’ll have a go at an explanation. The analogy to contagion is a good one, although obviously there are no microbes involved. People come to believe Trump is a Hitler equivalent, tremendously evil and otherwise unstoppable politically, so it follows that he must be killed. The analogy to Hitler is not an idle one because there were indeed many failed attempts on Hitler’s life and most people consider those who tried to do so to be heroes. The fact that Trump bears no resemblance to Hitler is irrelevant, because most people don’t evaluate things for themselves and their sources – their trusted sources – say Trump is tremendously evil, Hitlerian, and out to destroy our country and must be stopped.

Why those sources are trusted is another story. It’s different for different populations. For older people, it’s the news media amplified by social media. For younger people, the source is other online platforms such as TikTok and Twitch (Hasam Piker is a huge Twitch personality, for example). For many of all ages, they live in communities where pretty much everyone thinks this way, whether it be a blue city or just their own family or their own ethnic group. Often a clergyman or church or synagogue group is part of the echo chamber (in which case Trump-hate is not a religious substitute but is considered consistent with their religion as a sort of “just war”), and of course many Democrat politicians and spokespeople, as well as celebrities, artists, authors, and public intellectuals.

In my case I am often the only Trump supporter friends and family members know. Some have cooled, but some have “grandfathered” me in, as it were, because they’ve known me so long and know I’m not evil.

In addition, some of my Democrat friends simply don’t care. It’s not that they don’t care about politics, but they don’t care in the same very personal way. They never talk politics to me and never mention my curious support of Trump; it simply is not an issue they take into the personal realm. They are my friends (at least so far), they’ve been my friends for years, and that’s that. Nor do they ever mention wanting to kill Trump or wanting him dead, although they’ve made a few remarks indicating they detest him.

What distinguishes these two groups from each other? I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute, plus the intensity with which they view it. But why do people belong to one group rather than another? I don’t know. I have found no specific characteristics that I can see that differentiate between the two groups: neither is predominantly male or female, neither is religious, nor do they differ in education or the way they habitually vote. They also do not differ in the intensity of their personalities in other areas of their lives.

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Adult children vs. parents, siblings vs. siblings — calling quits on one’s kin seems increasingly common.

In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 US adults, nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they “no longer have a relationship with” one or more immediate family members. An episode of the Oprah Podcast on the “culture of estrangement” brought the topic home to millions of listeners.

While polls, social media and news of high-profile celebrity splits highlight the prevalence and pain of family breakups, researchers’ growing but still limited attention has yet to quantify how much they’ve multiplied. There are, however, plenty of potential drivers in today’s divorce rates, political polarization, rising individualism, reliance on therapists and social media memes about toxic relationships, says Joshua Coleman, an author, researcher and psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It all comes at a time when more Americans are prioritizing mental health — and when the internet is helping people find connections outside the family, he adds.

It’s mostly the younger generation cutting off the older rather than vice versa – also not surprising. They’ve been taught to label even minor disagreements “toxic” – and that they’re in need of withdrawing in order to protect their fragile selves from them.

I see evidence of this in real life and online. And of course I’ve been writing about familial estrangement because of political differences for my entire blogging career. It happens with long-term friendships, too.

Much of the younger generation wasn’t ever taught that “honor thy father and thy mother” has any particular valence. That Commandment is an interesting one, too; it doesn’t say to “love” parents or even “like” them. But to “honor” them would seem to preclude breaking off relations, unless it’s at the request of the parents.

The entire article is of interest and worth reading, especially if you’ve suffered from this sort of estrangement or know anyone who has. I consider the phenomenon tragic, for the most part. Of course, if parents are truly dangerous (blatant sexual abuse or something else of a very extreme nature, with no repentance or change on the part of the parent), sometimes breaking off is the only answer. But what I see online are almost always more minor complaints or political disagreements causing rifts, usually with the adult children feeling very self-satisfied and virtuous about their act of cut-off.

From the author interview with Joshua Coleman at the link:

A: Yet another strong factor these days is politics. In the Harris Poll, 42 percent said politics was the biggest factor driving family members apart.

Q: It’s the kids who are mostly initiating these estrangements, correct?

A: That’s true. We don’t have good research on the parents, but we know they are in the minority, and that it’s usually for religious reasons or they disapprove of the child’s gender identity or maybe the person that they’ve married, or their values.

Q: Why do you think parents are so much less likely to cut off their kids than kids are to cut off their parents?

A: Sociologists use the phrase “the intergenerational stake,” to convey the idea that when you’re raising your children you make a big investment, in part in the interest of furthering your genetic line. That can lead parents to assume that when they raise children, they will be close to them throughout their lifetime. Yet that’s obviously not how it is for most kids. This may help explain why a classic study in 1999 showed that parents of young adult children reported closer relationships and fewer problems than the children perceived.

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My favorite:

The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side. In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater.

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The differences in color between the two photos stem from the settings used to take them, and where in space they were taken from.

NASA’s Flickr page, where the Artemis II crew’s photos live, shows the type of camera and the settings used to take the picture. Most of the settings are usual for taking photos, except for one. The ISO setting, which controls the camera’s sensitivity to light, is set to a staggering 51,200. For context, a common ISO setting for pictures taken on Earth is around 200.

The reason Wiseman had to use such a high ISO was that his spacecraft was on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning to the astronauts’ naked eyes, the Earth appeared much darker than it does in the photo. The sun is actually what’s causing the bright light on the bottom right of the Earth.

And here’s a post of mine from February of 2005, very early in my blogging career, on the subject of first seeing photos of earth from space:

I’m not so very old, but when I grew up and artists or scientists drew conceptual drawings of the earth from outer space, the globe was always pictured as just that–a globe like those spinning ones in school, tethered to their metal stands (only, of course, without the metal stands). No clouds at all. Despite the fact that we all should have known better–all we had to do was look up at the sky most days to see those voluminous clouds–no one did seem to know better.

I still remember the shock of seeing those first photos …

By now we’ve incorporated the clouds into our mental image of the earth. Here’s one of those early photos, though – the “Big Blue Marble” one:

And here’s my very favorite so far, the “Earthrise” photo taken in 1968:

If you’d like to see a history of photos taken of earth, please go here.

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That’s one of the reasons the news of nine people dead in an avalanche while back-country skiing in the Tahoe area filled me with dread and sorrow. Such young, vibrant people, their lives snuffed out in an instant – although such deaths are usually not instantaneous. The news reports didn’t tell us some things I’d like to know, such as whether they were all skiing at once, and where the survivors were positioned that allowed them to live, and why the decision was made to go despite avalanche warnings.

There was also a less-publicized death but no less horrible, of an 11-year-old girl in Utah, killed in another avalanche while back-country skiing with her family, and another in Utah of a father who was snowmobiling with his son. In both cases, family members tried to dig out the victims, but didn’t manage to save their lives. One can imagine the frantic desperate efforts, the terrible feelings of failure and grief and perhaps guilt.

Why do people engage in such activities? That’s not hard to imagine: it is beautiful in the mountains in winter, and ski resort areas can be terribly crowded. For a lover of nature, mountains, and outdoor activities in snow, back-country activities have a huge draw. And we all do plenty of other seemingly risky things, such as driving.

Then I learned that there have been many avalanche-related deaths in the Alps this year, and that although the number is high, the numbers are usually high (or what I would consider high):

Though the recent spike in avalanche deaths in Europe is worrying, it is not exceptional – according to European Avalanche Warning Services, 95 have died so far this season, compared to 70 in the whole of 2024-25 and 87 in 2023-24. The 2020-21 season, when 131 died, and 2017-18, when the figure was 147, seem comparable.

The articles I’ve read on the European deaths haven’t broken down the figures for back-country deaths, but my guess is that almost all are of that type. Here’s a video that goes into how and why avalanches occur, and how ski resorts prevent or at least reduce their occurrence. The second video is about the Alps avalanche deaths:

It seems to me that back-country skiing has increased in recent years, and that is the case (the article is from a year ago]:

Backcountry skiing has surged in popularity since the pandemic, but those wishing to leave the relative safety of busy resorts can find themselves at the mercy of an unforgiving wilderness. If something goes wrong — as it often does, with avalanches a constant threat — skiers do not have a first-aid team nearby, and rescue can take hours.

And yet Ennen, from Park City, Utah, says the peaceful isolation found up remote mountains is preferable by far to being stuck in lengthy lines at resorts, and he is willing to embrace risk for a sense of freedom.

“I love being in the mountains and surrounded by nature,” said Ennen, a 45-year-old cardiac anaesthesiologist. “It’s my time for my brain to relax and to decompress from the real world. When you’re skiing in a resort, you’re in a controlled environment but with an uncontrolled group of people.

“The backcountry is the opposite. You’re with a controlled group of people, your team, but in a very uncontrolled environment.”

It’s a decision an increasing number of people have been making. Advances in avalanche-related equipment, such as beacons, have probably helped give a sense of security- perhaps a false one? The Tahoe skiiers were thus equipped. In terms of relative risk, though, I don’t know what the figures are and I’m not sure there are figures for how many people back-country ski these days.

Writing this post made me think of the last verse of this poem by Emily Dickinson, which goes like this:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

RIP.

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