Category Archives: democracy

The politics of backlash

Roger Cohen writes: There is a global backlash against rising inequality, stagnant middle-class incomes, politicians for sale, social exclusion, offshoring of jobs, free trade, mass immigration, tax systems skewed for giant corporations and their bosses, and what Pope Francis has lambasted as the “unfettered pursuit of money.”

The backlash takes various forms. In the United States it has produced an angry election campaign. The success of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left owes a lot to the thirst for radical candidates who break the mold. Trump is unserious and incoherent; Sanders is neither of those things. But they both draw support from constituencies that feel stuck, reject politics as usual, and perceive a system rigged against them.

Hillary Clinton’s chief predicament, apart from the trust issue, is that she represents the past in a world where the post-cold-war optimism that accompanied her husband’s arrival in the White House almost a quarter-century ago has vanished. To embody continuity these days is political suicide.

In an interesting essay in the journal STIR, Jonna Ivin writes: “People want to be heard. They want to believe their voices matter. A January 2016 survey by the Rand Corporation reported that Republican primary voters are 86.5 percent more likely to favor Donald Trump if they ‘somewhat agree or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement, ‘People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”’ [Continue reading…]

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Is Donald Trump actually a fascist?

The Toronto Star reports: Google Donald Trump, and it won’t be long before the “f” word comes up.

The word is “fascist.” And it’s back in a way that hasn’t been seen for years, as opponents grope for a term that matches the repulsion that a majority of Americans feel for The Donald.

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox has all but called Trump a fascist — and used another “f-word” for his proposed border wall.

Historian Fedja Buric compared him with founding fascist Benito Mussolini. And New Republic editor Jamil Smith said it straight out: “yes, Donald Trump is a fascist.”

Trump even went too far for tub-thumping far right radio host Glenn Beck, who lumped him with “Adolph Hitler in 1929,” on ABC-TV.

But those who have made an academic study of fascism say although Trump and his Coalition of the Chilling may share some of the characteristics of past fascists, the jaw-jutting reality star doesn’t quite squeeze into the classic 20th-century mould. [Continue reading…]

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How to hack an election

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on the confessions of Andrés Sepúlveda, a political hacker who rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade: His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.

As a child, he witnessed the violence of Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas. As an adult, he allied with a right wing emerging across Latin America. He believed his hacking was no more diabolical than the tactics of those he opposed, such as Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega.

Many of Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors — the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated — and gather support for a reduced sentence.

Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative campaigning. They don’t like it — OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.” While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”

Sepúlveda provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an independent computer security firm said a sample of the e-mails they examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of his actions match published accounts of events during various election campaigns, but other details couldn’t be independently verified. One person working on the campaign in Mexico, who asked not to be identified out of fear for his safety, substantially confirmed Sepúlveda’s accounts of his and Rendón’s roles in that election.

Sepúlveda says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he turned down because he was too busy. On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says. [Continue reading…]

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As long as there is no real democracy in the Middle East, ISIS will continue to mutate

David Hearst writes: The betting is that neither the pro-Assad coalition nor the Saudi-backed one will prevail in Syria. The likeliest outcome of a ceasefire is a Syria permanently fragmented into sectarian statelets in the way Iraq was after the US invasion.

This could be regarded as the least worst option for foreign powers meddling in Syria. Jordan, the Emirates and Egypt will have stopped this dangerous thing called regime change. Saudi will have stopped Iran and Hezbollah. Russia will have its naval base and retain a foothold in the Middle East. Assad will survive in a shrunken sectarian state. The Kurds will have their enclave in the north. America will walk away once more from the region.

There is just one loser in all this – Syria itself. Five million Syrians will become permanent exiles. Justice, self-determination, liberation from autocracy will be kicked into the long grass.

The history of the region has lessons for foreign powers. It proves that fragmentation only leads to further chaos. The region needs reconciliation, common projects and stability as never before. That will not come from creating sectarian enclaves backed by foreign powers.

The Islamic State is a distraction from the real struggle of the region, which is liberation from dictatorship and the birth of real democratic movements. IS is not a justification for the strong men. It is a product of their resistance to change. History did not start in 2011 and it won’t stop now. The revolutions of 2011 were empowered by decades of misrule. There is a reason why millions of Arab rose – peacefully at first – against their rulers and that reason still exists today.

As long as there is no real democratic solution in the Middle East, the Islamic State group will continue to mutate like a pathogen that has become antibiotic-resistant in the body politic of the Middle East. Each time it changes shape, it will become more virulent. [Continue reading…]

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Zuma court ruling: South Africans witness a massive day for democracy

By Hugh Corder, University of Cape Town

The accountability of public governance in South Africa has come a long way since 1994. When the transitional constitution was hammered out in negotiations in 1993, the primary consideration was to establish an unshakeable commitment to government under law in terms of a binding constitution.

Founded on the “rule of law”, this means that no one is above the law and that everyone is formally equal before the ordinary courts. No-one, not even the president, may take the law into their own hands. One of the founding values of the constitution is the:

… supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.

The brand of democracy enshrined in the final constitution of 1996 emphasises participation by the people in a multi-party system of democratic government, to achieve “accountability, responsiveness and openness”.

Recognising the democratic deficit that South Africa faced because of the ravages of apartheid, additional mechanisms were introduced to strengthen participative democracy and popular accountability. One of them was the establishment of the office of the Public Protector.

The Constitutional Court’s judgment in Economic Freedom Fighters and Democratic Alliance v The Speaker of the National Assembly, the President and Others represents the exercise of judicial authority and expertise at the highest level by international standards.

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The painful lessons of Brussels seem hard to learn, so they continue

Rami G Khouri writes: The terror attacks in Brussels this week, beyond their inherent cruelty and criminality, in themselves are not particularly distinctive or noteworthy in the larger picture of Islamic State and other acts of terrorism, which have become common fare in this era of expanding violence across all continents. Terrorism database compilers are working overtime these months trying to take note of every such act — and that may be the real significance of what is going on these days: hundreds of thousands of desperate and dehumanized individuals transform their former local grumblings or security-forced passivity into a growing global network of terrorists and anarchists whose numbers are beyond the capacity of any intelligence system’s ability to monitor, arrest, prevent, or shut down.

The heart of this criminal universe mainly comprises Arabs or emigrants of Arab descent. The terror problem at its deepest core is the consequence of the dysfunction of mostly Arab societies that have been subjected to more than half a century of security-enforced docility and lack of citizen rights. Nearly 400 million human beings today across the Arab world were born with innate natural and human rights to freedom, identity, growth, and societal well-being, but they have not been allowed to manifest these dimensions of their full humanity.

Economic, political, environmental, and social constraints that have grown more severe in recent decades have sparked a terrible cycle of stagnation and de-development in the minds and capabilities of men and women — while shopping malls, water-pipe cafes, reality television, supermarkets, and cell phone shops have proliferated like mad across the Arab world, in a futile attempt to keep people busy and happy with material diversions. [Continue reading…]

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The Trump phenomenon is what the founders feared and Lincoln warned against

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Peter Wehner writes: “I think you’d have riots.” So said Donald J. Trump last week, when he was asked by CNN what he thought would happen if he arrived at the Republican Convention this summer a few delegates short of the 1,237 needed to win outright and didn’t set forth from Cleveland as the party’s nominee.

It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.

Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)

Of another protester, Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” In St. Louis, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful: “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” About protesters in general, he said: “There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.”

Talk like this eventually finds its way into action. And so on March 10, a Trump supporter named John McGraw, was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct, after a protester was sucker-punched as he was being hauled by security guards out of a Trump rally in North Carolina the day before. When interviewed afterward Mr. McGraw said, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”

And Donald Trump’s reaction? He said he was considering paying Mr. McGraw’s legal fees. “He obviously loves his country,” Mr. Trump added, “and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.”

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.

Mr. Trump’s comments, startling in a leading presidential candidate, have raised widespread concern about the path we find ourselves on. But concern about political violence, mob rule and unchecked passion is hardly new in American history. [Continue reading…]

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How did the far right gain so much ground in Germany?

By Sergi Pardos-Prado, University of Oxford

Some of the oldest and most established party systems in the world seem to be imploding. Unprecedented levels of electoral volatility, the collapse of the historical mainstream, and the emergence of new populist alternatives are part of a vertiginous process that is not always easy to comprehend.

A new wave of radical right parties is now proving capable of reshaping democracies that once seemed immune to them. The recent success of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the regional elections is just the latest example of the establishment being shaken at the ballot box.

In the March 13 elections, AfD, a party that was only founded in 2013, won seats in eight German state parliaments. It came second, winning up to 24% of the popular vote, in states such as Saxony-Anhalt in East Germany.

What explains the success?

Research on radical right politics has focused on the socio-demographic profile of anti-immigrant voters, and on national characteristics such as the state of the economy. While illuminating, both approaches have proved insufficient.

There is a high degree of certainty about the sociological profile of the anti-immigrant voter. They tend to be working class, low educated, unemployed, male, nationalistic, and somewhat authoritarian.

But all established European democracies have significant portions of the electorate sharing these characteristics. So this approach can’t explain why radical parties have emerged in France and the Netherlands, for instance, but not in Spain or Portugal.

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Turkey: Where press freedoms are on the decline and authoritarianism is on the rise

Hasnain Kazim, who has reported for Der Spiegel from Istanbul for the last three years and has now been forced to leave, writes: On our last day in Turkey, my family and I are not in the mood to go, but we have to leave the country. After several torturous months of uncertainty and concern, we have no other option. We fear for our safety.

The bags are packed. The furniture, books, clothing, everything is gone. My son has been taken out of kindergarten; it was a painful farewell for him too. Before we drive to the airport, I write down a list of telephone numbers for my wife: colleagues, diplomats, friends in Istanbul. These are in case I am detained at the airport and my family has to continue their journey without me.

Since the beginning of the year, the Turkish government has declined to grant me accreditation as a foreign correspondent, thereby denying me the ability to work. As a German journalist living in Turkey, I need a residency permit — and this permit is linked to my press accreditation.

Accreditations are normally approved at the turn of the year, but this year all German journalists have had to wait unusually long. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutolu repeatedly assured Chancellor Merkel at the beginning of the year that all German correspondents would receive their papers. The German side relayed this message to us on multiple occasions.

I never received any notification at all. Officially, my request hasn’t been declined, it is being “examined.” But neither the Turkish nor the German authorities believed that my accreditation would still be granted.

Even worse, I received warnings. Turkish state prosecutors, who are critical of the government and its interference in the judiciary, told me that, if I were to stay in the country, I could conceivably be charged under some pretense. Perhaps for “supporting a terrorist organization” or for “insulting the president.” These are common accusations in Turkey against journalists who are too critical of those in power. Thus far, only domestic journalists have faced them. [Continue reading…]

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Gregory Foster: A case for demilitarizing the military

General Lloyd Austin, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), recently testified before Congress, suggesting that Washington needed to up its troop levels in Iraq and Syria.  Meanwhile, in his own congressional testimony, still-to-be-confirmed incoming CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel, formerly head of U.S. Special Operations Command, seconded that recommendation and said he would reevaluate the American stance across the Greater Middle East with an eye, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman put it, to launching “a more aggressive fight against the Islamic State.”  In this light, both generals called for reviving a dismally failed $500 million program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to support the U.S. fight against the Islamic State (IS).  They both swear, of course, that they’ll do it differently this time, and what could possibly go wrong? 

Meanwhile, General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), pressed by Senator John McCain in congressional testimony, called on the U.S. to “do more” to deal with IS supporters in Libya.  And lo and behold, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had only recently presented an AFRICOM and Joint Special Operations Command plan to the president’s “top national security advisers.”  They were evidently “surprised” to discover that it involved potentially wide-ranging air strikes against 30 to 40 IS targets across that country.  Meanwhile, in Afghanistan — U.S. Special Operations units and regular troops having recently been rushed once again into embattled Helmand Province in the heartland of that country’s opium poppy trade — General Austen and others are calling for a reconsideration of future American drawdowns and possibly the dispatch of more troops to that country.

Do you sense a trend here?  In the war against the Islamic State, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have been engaged in the drip, drip, drip of what, in classic Vietnam terms, might be called “mission creep.”  They have been upping American troop levels a few hundred at a time in Iraq and Syria, along with air power, and loosing Special Operations forces in combat-like operations in both countries.  Now, it looks like top military commanders are calling for mission speed-up across the region.  (In Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it already seems to have begun.)

And keep in mind, watching campaign 2016, that however militaristic the solutions of the Pentagon and our generals, they are regularly put in the shade by civilians, especially the Republican candidates for president, who can barely restrain their eagerness to let mission leap loose.   As Donald Trump put it in the last Republican debate, calling for up to 30,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq, “I would listen to the generals.”  That might now be the refrain all American politicians are obliged to sing.  Similarly, John Kasich called for a new “shock and awe” campaign in the Middle East to “wipe them out.”  And that’s the way it’s been in debate season — including proposals to put boots on the ground big time from Libya and possibly even the Sinai peninsula to Afghanistan, bomb the region back to the stone age, and torture terror suspects in a fashion that would have embarrassed Stone Age peoples. 

Put another way, almost 15 years after America’s global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster writes today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom recognized, no less discussed or debated.  TomDispatch hopes to rectify that with a monumental post from a man who knows something about the realities of both the U.S. military and changing civilian relations to it.  Gregory Foster, who teaches at National Defense University and is a decorated Vietnam veteran, suggests that it’s time we finally ask: Whatever happened to old-fashioned civilian control over the U.S. military?  Implicitly, he also asks a second question: These days, who controls the civilians? Tom Engelhardt

Pentagon excess has fueled a civil-military crisis
How civilian control of the military has become a fantasy
By Gregory D. Foster

Item: Two U.S. Navy patrol boats, with 10 sailors aboard, “stray” into Iranian territorial waters, and are apprehended and held by Iranian revolutionary guards, precipitating a 24-hour international incident involving negotiations at the highest levels of government to secure their release. The Pentagon offers conflicting reports on why this happened: navigational error, mechanical breakdown, fuel depletion — but not intelligence-gathering, intentional provocation, or hormonally induced hot-dogging.

Item: The Pentagon, according to a Reuters exposé, has been consciously and systematically engaged in thwarting White House efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and release cleared detainees. Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to provide basic documentation to foreign governments willing to take those detainees and have made it increasingly difficult for foreign delegations to visit Guantanamo to assess them. Ninety-one of the 779 detainees held there over the years remain, 34 of whom have been cleared for release.

Item: The Pentagon elects not to reduce General David Petraeus in rank, thereby ensuring that he receives full, four-star retirement pay, after previously being sentenced on misdemeanor charges to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine for illegally passing highly classified material (a criminal offense) to his mistress (adultery, ordinarily punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice) and lying to FBI officials (a criminal offense). Meanwhile, Private Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning continues to serve a 35-year prison sentence, having been reduced to the Army’s lowest rank and given a dishonorable discharge for providing classified documents to WikiLeaks that included incriminating on-board videos of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed up to 18 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children, and of a 2009 massacre in Afghanistan in which a B-1 bomber killed as many as 147 civilians, reportedly including some 93 children.

What do these episodes have in common? In their own way, they’re all symptomatic of an enduring crisis in civil-military relations that afflicts the United States.

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I cheered as Trump supporters clashed with protesters. Then I felt shame

Matt Laslo writes: I was in Philadelphia for a funeral on Friday when Chicago friends started blowing up my phone after Donald Trump’s rally was canceled. The situation in Chicago devolved into chaos, with people on both sides wildly swinging at each other, others storming the stage, vitriolic barbs being lobbed by both Trump fans and enemies alike. I should have been mourning, but I was cheering.

Chicago is the city I grew up in. I cheer for its sports teams and rappers alike (though I’m never voting Kanye for president. Sorry, bruh). That’s partially why I was initially elated that my hometown – black, brown and white alike; male and female – finally stood up to Trump and what he represents to many: outright xenophobia and thinly veiled support of racists and bigots.

My initial reaction was wrong. I’ve allowed myself to be debased by Trumpian politics, and for that I’m ashamed. American politics should be about ideas, not about who can land a more ferocious uppercut. [Continue reading…]

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It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why.

Pippa Norris writes: Many American commentators have had trouble understanding the rise of Donald Trump. How could such a figure surge to become the most likely standard-bearer for the GOP – much less have any chance of entering the White House?

But Trump is far from unique. As many commentators have noted, he fits the wave of authoritarian populists whose support has swelled in many Western democracies.

The graph below from ParlGov data illustrates the surge in the share of the vote for populist authoritarian parliamentary parties (defined as rated 8.0 or above by experts on left-right scales) across 34 OECD countries. [Continue reading…]

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From Trump to Merkel: How the world is divided between fear and openness

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Ulrich Speck writes: Two major concepts define the political struggle in the west today. One can be termed “globalism”, which is currently most prominently represented by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The other is “territorialism”, a view that the very likely Republican candidate for the US elections in November, Donald Trump, represents.

At the core of the debate is the meaning of borders: should they be porous or tightly controlled? Are they mainly an obstacle to the free and productive flow of ideas, people, goods and information and should therefore be largely dismantled? Or are massive borders welcome and indispensable as a protection against all kinds of real or perceived threats such as competition and terrorism?

For globalists such as Merkel, interconnectedness is a good thing because it is what drives progress towards more prosperity and freedom everywhere. For territorialists such as Trump, interconnectedness is mainly a threat. What is good and healthy is attributed to the natives and what is dangerous comes from outside: unfair Chinese competition, dangerous Mexican immigrants and Middle Eastern terrorists. [Continue reading…]

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If you want a revolution, you have to vote for it

Derek Thompson writes: Because Generation Y is the largest generation in American history, it’s a big deal if it remains one of the most liberal generations ever. But there’s a huge, inescapable problem with the viability of Millennial politics today: Young people just don’t vote. Between 1964 and 2012, youth voter turnout in presidential elections has fallen below 50 percent, and Baby Boomers now outvote their children’s generation by a stunning 30 percentage points. Millennials might make a lot of noise between presidential elections, but in November, politicians remember what young people are: All throat and no vote.

The liberal revolution would require more than quadrennial thrills. It would require a sustained focus on filling congressional and Senate seats with liberals so that a left-leaning president can sign bills approved by left-leaning majorities. Instead, this generation hasn’t shown that it can sustain interest in politics through non-presidential elections. Voting among people under 30 in non-presidential elections is hovering around its lowest rate in the last half-century.

A lasting revolution would require even more than that. At a time when the federal government is dragging its feet on every issue, the most significant policy decisions often come at the local and state level. But Republicans control more than half of state legislatures and governor’s mansions, in part because Millennials simply don’t show up to vote. One study found that the median age of voters in mayoral elections is 60.You cannot create a national movement around critical local policies, like higher minimum wages, if city hall is elected exclusively by voters born before Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection. [Continue reading…]

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The Arab world and the West: A shared destiny

Jean-Pierre Filiu discusses his book, Les Arabes, leur destin et le nôtre, which aims to shed light on struggles in the Arab World today by exploring the entwined histories of the Arab World and the West, starting with Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, through military expeditions and brutal colonial regimes, broken promises and diplomatic maneuvers, support for dictatorial regimes, and the discovery of oil riches. He also discusses the “Arab Enlightenment” of the 19th Century and the history of democratic struggles and social revolts in the Arab world, often repressed.

Filiu is also the author of From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy, “an invaluable contribution to understanding the murky world of the Arab security regimes.”

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Umberto Eco’s definitions of modern fascism seem ever more prescient

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Christopher Dickey writes: Here in Europe, people know a thing or two about fascism.

It is not, as it was when Bernie Sanders was young, a term tossed around by left-wing activists to describe anyone opposed to progressive ideas, whether presidents or parents.

No, here in Europe, by various names — as Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism — it was the living, vibrant, vicious force that led directly to the most horrific global war in history. More recently, it took root and lingered as an active ideology in Latin America, providing a crude foundation for the repressive revolutions and dirty wars that raged from the ’60s through the ’80s.

Indeed, the fundamentals of fascism are with us today, in the killing fields of ISIS-land, in the madness of North Korea, and also, sadly, in battered democracies from newly militaristic Japan to xenophobic, isolationist parties in Europe. And, yes, in somewhat more subtle forms fascism can be found on the campaign trail in the U.S. of A.

When I saw last week that the great Italian intellectual Umberto Eco had died, I was reminded of a long essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books more than two decades ago. And, re-reading it now, it strikes me as an important guide to our thinking about this powerful, almost primal political force, its seductive strength and its inherent, enormous dangers. [Continue reading…]

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The largely unheard story of democracy developing in Syria

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Middle East Monitor reports: Until now the Syrian story has been a fabrication of assumptions and sensationalism spun by the media. Burning Country is an attempt to counter this, a chance for real Syrians to tell their own stories. As co-author Robin Yassin-Kassab puts it: “We felt that people had been coming at it from narratives of big stories that zoomed out so far they couldn’t hear the people on the ground that had made the revolution and were suffering the counter-revolution. We wanted to amplify those voices.”

Yassin-Kassab and fellow co-author Leila Al-Shami have weaved together the testimonies of revolutionaries, activists, refugees, fighters, democracy activists, pro-regime Alawites and Islamists with their own analysis to create an account of Syria that takes us back further than Ottoman rule and up to October 2015. Published by Pluto Press this year, the book describes how Al-Assad was once respected for adopting an anti-Zionist, anti-Western and pro-Arab rhetoric and today garners western sympathy for his so-called opposition to US-led imperialism, a position the authors describe as “populist opportunism”.

“I think his rhetoric was very anti-imperialist and that was in line with popular sentiment in the Arab street and I think for that reason he was popular for his foreign policy stance both inside Syria and more broadly around the Arab world,” says Al-Shami. “But that didn’t match up in practice and when you see the actions of the Baathist regime whether they’re under Bashar or his predecessor, his father, they certainly didn’t match that rhetoric. You had the massacres of Palestinians in Tel Zaatar camp in Lebanon, you had the intervention against the Black September movement in Jordan and then under Bashar you had collusion with imperialism because you had people that were basically deported, tortured by proxy, to the Assad regime under the US rendition programme as part of its ‘War on Terror’.”

Though the nationalist rhetoric did work among some sections of the population, Yassin-Kassab explains, most people living in Syria were unhappy under the regime. But prior to 2011 economic stability was more important than foreign policy and Hafez Al-Assad had achieved this stability by building roads and installing electricity in long neglected areas of the countryside and subsidising fuel and food. When Bashar succeeded his father, he retracted many of these benefits. “I think these things were important and when these things were pulled out everybody said, ‘look this nationalist rhetoric which we’ve gone along with is rubbish isn’t it?’ When they got hungry, which is what happened when Bashar Al-Assad came and did these neo-liberal reforms which were really crony-capitalist reforms and removed a lot of the safety nets that had allowed people to keep quiet. I think that’s more important, I don’t think they stayed in power because of the nationalist rhetoric.” [Continue reading…]

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Pankaj Mishra on Arundhati Roy: Hindu nationalists ​have many ways to silence writers

Pankaj Mishra writes: he governments of Egypt and Turkey are brazenly leading a multi-pronged assault on writers, artists and intellectuals. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month denounced his critics among Turkish academics as treasonous fifth columnists of foreign powers; many of them have been subsequently dismissed and suspended. Both Turkey and Egypt have imprisoned journalists, provoking international protests. But the suppression of intellectual and creative freedoms is assuming much cannier forms in India, a country with formal and apparently free democratic institutions.

Controlled by upper-caste Hindu nationalists, Indian universities have been purging “anti-nationals” from both syllabuses and campuses for some months now. In a shocking turn of events last month, Rohith Vemula, a PhD student in Hyderabad, killed himself. Accused of “anti-national” political opinions, the impoverished research scholar, who belonged to one of India’s traditionally and cruelly disadvantaged castes, was suspended, and, after his fellowship was cancelled, expelled from student housing. Letters from Modi’s government in Delhi to university authorities revealed that the latter were under relentless pressure to move against “extremist and anti-national politics” on campus. Vemula’s heartbreaking suicide note attests to the near-total isolation and despair of a gifted writer and thinker.

The extended family of upper-caste nationalists plainly aim at total domination of the public sphere. But they don’t only use the bullying power of the leviathan state – one quickly identified by local and foreign critics – to grind down their apparent enemies. They pursue them through police cases and legal petitions by private individuals – a number of criminal complaints have been filed against writers and artists in India. They create a climate of impunity, in which emboldened mobs ransack newspapers offices, art galleries and cinemas. [Continue reading…]

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