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Ed Webb

Nostalgia doesn't need real memories - an imagined past works as well | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...an-imagined-past-works-as-well

nationalism history memory psychology populism propaganda

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Jul 20 - Cached
  • nostalgia is neither pathological nor beneficial
  • nostalgia can bring to mind time-periods we didn’t directly experience
  • feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’
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  • How can we make sense of the fact that people feel nostalgia not only for past experiences but also for generic time periods? My suggestion, inspired by recent evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is that the variety of nostalgia’s objects is explained by the fact that its cognitive component is not an autobiographical memory, but a mental simulation – an imagination, if you will – of which episodic recollections are a sub-class
  • in the past decade, it has become clear that the brain’s default network supports mental simulations of other hypothetical events too, such as episodes that could have occurred in one’s past but didn’t, atemporal routine activities (eg, brushing teeth), mind-wandering, spatial navigation, imagining other people’s thoughts (mentalising) and narrative comprehension, among others. As a result, researchers now think that what unifies this common neural network isn’t just mental time-travel, but rather a more general kind of psychological process characterised by being self-relevant, socially significant and episodically, dynamically imaginative
  • the cognitive contents associated with their nostalgic states are the kinds of mental simulations supported by the default network – which include, but are not limited to, autobiographical memories
  • nostalgia can be associated with a possible past one didn’t experience, a concurrent nonactualised present, or even idealised pasts one couldn’t have lived but nevertheless can easily imagine by piecing together memorial information to form detailed episodic mental simulations
  • According to the traditional view, nostalgia is seen as a negative emotion: early medical reports described homesick patients as sad, melancholic and lethargic. The psychoanalytic tradition continued this view, and characterised nostalgia as involving sadness and pain.
  • distinction was later reformulated as depressive versus non-depressive nostalgia, with some even suggesting that the abnormal case of nostalgia is the depressive one, given that its pleasurable aspect is missing
  • My sense is that physicians of old got the order of causation backwards: nostalgia doesn’t cause negative affect but, rather, is caused by negative affect
  • it has been documented that certain negative experiences tend to trigger nostalgia, including loneliness, loss of social connections, sense of meaninglessness, boredom, even cold temperatures. This doesn’t mean that nostalgia is triggered only by negative experiences, but it does suggest that the negative affect can often be a cause, rather than an effect, of nostalgia.
  • the discrepancy between the emotion felt when attending to the act of simulating versus the content of the simulation can account for the perceived ‘bittersweetness’ of nostalgia
  • A possible solution is to think of the object of nostalgia’s desire as a place-in-time. This strategy allows for two possible readings. On one reading, what the individual desires is for her current self to travel back in time to where things were better than they currently are. This is painful because time-travel is impossible. On another reading, what the subject desires is for the past situation to be brought to the present; that is, she doesn’t wish to travel back in time to a past situation, but rather that the past situation could somehow replace the current one. Here, the object that could satisfy the nostalgic desire would be found not in the past but in the present, and what causes the pain is a different kind of impossibility: that of recreating the past in the present.
  • Neuroscience tells us that, when we imagine, we redeploy much of the same neural mechanisms that we would have employed had we actually engaged in the simulated action. When we imagine biking, we engage much of the same brain regions we’d have engaged had we actually been biking.
  • My proposal here is that what underlies the motivational aspect of nostalgia comes from a pleasurable reward signal that the subject momentarily experiences when attention is allocated to the simulated content.
  • Entertaining the kinds of mental simulations that elicit the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia generates a reward signal that seems to motivate individuals to turn their ersatz experience into a real one, in an attempt to replace the (actual) negative emotion felt when simulating with the (imagined) positive emotion of the simulated content.
  • First, I suggest that the cognitive component needn’t be a memory but a kind of imagination, of which episodic autobiographical memories are a case. Second, nostalgia is affectively mixed-valanced, which results from the juxtaposition of the affect generated by the act of simulating – which is typically negative – with the affect elicited by the simulated content, which is typically positive. Finally, the conative component isn’t a desire to go back to the past but, rather, a motivation to reinstate in the present the properties of the simulated content that, when attended to, make us feel good.
  • we’ve seen a resurgence of nationalistic political movements that have gained traction by way of promoting a return to the ‘good old days’: ‘Make America Great Again’ in the US, or ‘We Want Our Country Back’ in the UK. These politics of nostalgia promote the implementation of policies that, supposedly, would return nations to times in which people were better off. Unsurprisingly, such politics are usually heralded by conservative groups who, in the past, tended to be better off than they currently are – independently of the particular politics of the time.
  • Polish results show something very different: a large number of younger individuals avidly supporting nostalgic policies that would return their nations to a past they never experienced
  • the politics of nostalgia doesn’t capitalise on people’s memories of particular past events they might have experienced. Instead, it makes use of propaganda about the way things were, in order to provide people with the right episodic materials to conjure up imaginations of possible scenarios that most likely never happened.
  • These very same propagandistic strategies help to convince people that their current situation is worse than it actually is, so that when the simulated content – which, when attended, brings about positive emotions – is juxtaposed to negatively valenced thoughts about their present status, a motivation to eliminate this emotional mismatch ensues, and with it an inclination to political action
  • The politics of nostalgia has less to do with memories about a rosy past, and more with propaganda and misinformation. This suggests, paradoxically, that the best way to counteract it might be to improve our knowledge of the past.
Ed Webb

The Crisis of Government: Representation Vs. Mobilization - The WorldPost - Berggruen I... - 0 views

www.berggruen.org/...representation-vs-mobilization

democracy representation socialmedia analysis opinion government

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Aug 19 - Cached
  • for numerous reasons, mobilizational authority is currently undermining and challenging representational authority in new ways
  • Liberal modernity takes potentially controversial questions of truth and justice and hands them over to a small group of specialists to deal with so that the rest of us can live in peace. From the time of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes onwards, the basic compact is that liberal citizens trade shared meaning for security, including prosperity. But for the same reason, there is always a potential vulnerability here that surfaces periodically, as we’re witnessing today.
  • Nothing fuels populism as effectively as the sense of public corruption: the notion that this suspension of private interests is a sham. Today, especially in the age of leaks, social media, systematic scandals and tabloid intrusion, it seems intuitively obvious to many people that public life is a game being played by insiders.
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  • The central feature of contemporary populism is that it is anti-representational, both in a constitutional and an epistemological sense. It opposes representative democracy (favoring plebiscitary alternatives) and professional media (favoring social media or simple propaganda). In place of representation, it favors presentation. This is well-exhibited by a phenomenon such as the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests), the French mass movement against economic injustice, in which a political entity comes into being with very little representational consensus on aims, objectives or policies but is primarily constituted by its presence on the streets and on social media.
  • mobilizational authorities. Rather than a grammar of “believe me, this is true,” they work via a grammar of “follow me.”
  • Those whose power rests on a capacity to move people (emotionally and physically) make no claim to being honest or trustworthy; the fact that Trump or the Brexit leader Nigel Farage are liars is irrelevant to a person who is committed to following them
  • Modern populist movements offer what liberalism often cannot: common purpose, meaning and physical congregation for a mass of individuals.
  • the transformation of our media ecology over the past 20 years that has undermined the status of facts in public life — not so much through replacing them with lies or propaganda (although we see instances of this) but with streams of real-time content and data that are so relentless and voluminous that individuals are increasingly dependent on curatorial practices to orient them
  • By their nature, facts are static entities that fit with modern techniques of the printing press, bureaucracy and critical review. But our contemporary media environment is attuned to speed rather than public credibility.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Aug 19
       
      A critical point for understanding our current crisis.
  • even more moderate political controversies now routinely include questions regarding the politics of knowledge and challenges to elite consensus
  • Tighter media regulation, public investment in science for its own sake and support for public-interest journalism and education are all obvious ways in which a shared social reality can be bolstered. People don’t need to be trained in citizenship or national service; they need investment in the conditions of a shared world.
  • Fifty percent of Americans have experienced no increase in real income since the late 1970s. So in what sense is the story of national progress or growth true for these people?
  • Political alienation and disillusionment appear to relate to mortality and morbidity in curious ways. Psychologists have found that awareness of our own finitude can trigger a heightened demand for authoritarianism. The physical experience of pain makes us unusually receptive to messages that make sense of the world, in terms of heroes and villains.
  • Democracy and authority in the age of the digital platform are qualitatively different, allowing outrage to move virally and unpredictably. Being mobilized offers forms of embodied, emotional experience that being represented never does.
Ed Webb

The Messy Fourth Estate - GEN - 0 views

gen.medium.com/ssy-fourth-estate-a42c1586b657

opinion analysis media finance capitalism trust socialmedia socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Nov 19 - Cached
  • teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists willing to pick them up. They’re finding the so-called alt-right. I can’t tell you how many youth we’ve seen asking questions like I asked being rejected by people identifying with progressive social movements, only to find camaraderie among hate groups. What’s most striking is how many people with extreme ideas are willing to spend time engaging with folks who are in the tornado.Spend time reading the comments below the YouTube videos of youth struggling to make sense of the world around them. You’ll quickly find comments by people who spend time in the manosphere or subscribe to white supremacist thinking. They are diving in and talking to these youth, offering a framework to make sense of the world, one rooted in deeply hateful ideas. These self-fashioned self-help actors are grooming people to see that their pain and confusion isn’t their fault, but the fault of feminists, immigrants, people of color. They’re helping them believe that the institutions they already distrust — the news media, Hollywood, government, school, even the church — are actually working to oppress them.
  • Deeply committed to democratic governance, George Washington believed that a representative government could only work if the public knew their representatives. As a result, our Constitution states that each member of the House should represent no more than 30,000 constituents. When we stopped adding additional representatives to the House in 1913 (frozen at 435), each member represented roughly 225,000 constituents. Today, the ratio of congresspeople to constituents is more than 700,000:1. Most people will never meet their representative, and few feel as though Washington truly represents their interests. The democracy that we have is representational only in ideal, not in practice.
  • Journalism can only function as the fourth estate when it serves as a tool to voice the concerns of the people and to inform those people of the issues that matter. Throughout the 20th century, communities of color challenged mainstream media’s limitations and highlighted that few newsrooms represented the diverse backgrounds of their audiences. As such, we saw the rise of ethnic media and a challenge to newsrooms to be smarter about their coverage. But let’s be real — even as news organizations articulate a commitment to the concerns of everyone, newsrooms have done a dreadful job of becoming more representative
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  • local journalism has nearly died. The success of local journalism didn’t just matter because those media outlets reported the news, but because it meant that many more people were likely to know journalists. It’s easier to trust an institution when it has a human face that you know and respect. And as fewer and fewer people know journalists, they trust the institution less and less
  • We’ve also seen the rise of celebrity news hosts. These hosts help push the boundaries of parasocial interactions, allowing the audience to feel deep affinity toward these individuals, as though they are true friends. Tabloid papers have long capitalized on people’s desire to feel close to celebrities by helping people feel like they know the royal family or the Kardashians. Talking heads capitalize on this, in no small part by how they communicate with their audiences. So, when people watch Rachel Maddow or listen to Alex Jones, they feel more connected to the message than they would when reading a news article. They begin to trust these people as though they are neighbors. They feel real.
  • People want to be informed, but who they trust to inform them is rooted in social networks, not institutions. The trust of institutions stems from trust in people. The loss of the local paper means a loss of trusted journalists and a connection to the practices of the newsroom. As always, people turn to their social networks to get information, but what flows through those social networks is less and less likely to be mainstream news
  • As the institutional construction of news media becomes more and more proximately divorced from the vast majority of people in the United States, we can and should expect trust in news to decline. No amount of fact-checking will make up for a widespread feeling that coverage is biased. No amount of articulated ethical commitments will make up for the feeling that you are being fed clickbait headlines.
  • while the population who believes that CNN and the New York Times are “fake news” are not demographically representative, the questionable tactics that news organizations use are bound to increase distrust among those who still have faith in them.
  • There are many types of capitalism. After all, the only thing that defines capitalism is the private control of industry (as opposed to government control). Most Americans have been socialized into believing that all forms of capitalism are inherently good (which, by the way, was a propaganda project). But few are encouraged to untangle the different types of capitalism and different dynamics that unfold depending on which structure is operating.
  • Starting in the 1980s, savvy investors realized that many local newspapers owned prime real estate in the center of key towns. These prized assets would make for great condos and office rentals. Throughout the country, local news shops started getting eaten up by private equity and hedge funds — or consolidated by organizations controlled by the same forces. Media conglomerates sold off their newsrooms as they felt increased pressure to increase profits quarter over quarter.
  • the extractive financiers who targeted the news business weren’t looking to keep the news alive. They wanted to extract as much value from those business as possible. Taking a page out of McDonald’s, they forced the newsrooms to sell their real estate. Often, news organizations had to rent from new landlords who wanted obscene sums, often forcing them to move out of their buildings. News outlets were forced to reduce staff, reproduce more junk content, sell more ads, and find countless ways to cut costs. Of course the news suffered — the goal was to push news outlets into bankruptcy or sell, especially if the companies had pensions or other costs that couldn’t be excised.
  • the fragmentation of the advertising industry due to the internet hastened this process. And let’s also be clear that business models in the news business have never been clean. But no amount of innovative new business models will make up for the fact that you can’t sustain responsible journalism within a business structure that requires newsrooms to make more money quarter over quarter to appease investors. This does not mean that you can’t build a sustainable news business, but if the news is beholden to investors trying to extract value, it’s going to impossible. And if news companies have no assets to rely on (such as their now-sold real estate), they are fundamentally unstable and likely to engage in unhealthy business practices out of economic desperation.
  • Untangling our country from this current version of capitalism is going to be as difficult as curbing our addiction to fossil fuels
  • no business can increase ROI forever.ROI capitalism isn’t the only version of capitalism out there. We take it for granted and tacitly accept its weaknesses by creating binaries, as though the only alternative is Cold War Soviet Union–styled communism. We’re all frogs in an ocean that’s quickly getting warmer. Two degrees will affect a lot more than oceanfront properties.
  • strategically building news organizations as a national project to meet the needs of the fourth estate. It means moving away from a journalism model that is built on competition for scarce resources (ads, attention) to one that’s incentivized by societal benefits
  • Create programs beyond the military that incentivize people from different walks of life to come together and achieve something great for this country. This could be connected to job training programs or rooted in community service, but it cannot be done through the government alone or, perhaps, at all. We need the private sector, religious organizations, and educational institutions to come together and commit to designing programs that knit together America while also providing the tools of opportunity.
  • We need to work together to build networks that can catch people when they’re falling. We’ve relied on volunteer labor for a long time in this domain—women, churches, volunteer civic organizations—but our current social configuration makes this extraordinarily difficult. We’re in the middle of an opiate crisis for a reason. We need to think smartly about how these structures or networks can be built and sustained so that we can collectively reach out to those who are falling through the cracks.
  • we need to build large-scale cultural resilience
  • While I strongly believe that technology companies have a lot of important work to do to be socially beneficial, I hold news organizations to a higher standard because of their own articulated commitments and expectations that they serve as the fourth estate. And if they can’t operationalize ethical practices, I fear the society that must be knitted together to self-govern is bound to fragment even further.
  • You don’t earn trust when things are going well; you earn trust by being a rock during a tornado. The winds are blowing really hard right now. Look around. Who is helping us find solid ground?
Ed Webb

Police raids in Italy uncover weapons, propaganda and suspects who wanted to create an ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...italy-police-raids

Italy history fascism crime politics nazis parties

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Police in Italy say they raided the homes of 19 people who allegedly wanted to create an "openly pro-Nazi, xenophobic and anti-Semitic" party.Officers found firearms and propaganda celebrating Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during the series of raids across the country
  • Authorities had been monitoring "extreme right-wing local militants" during a two-year investigation led by the Anti-Mafia and Antiterrorism District of the Prosecutors Office of Caltanissetta and identified a "vast and jagged galaxy of subjects" who shared the same "ideological fanatism," police said.
  • one of the trainers in the group was a former senior member of the Calabrian mafia organization known as Ndrangheta and had been a former representative for the Forza Nuova neo-fascist party in the western region of Liguria
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  • Authorities believe members of the group made contact with neo-Nazi groups in England and Portugal in an attempt to be recognized. In August, a suspect spoke at a far-right conference in Lisbon
  • search warrants were carried out under the 1952 Scelba law that prohibits any attempts to recreate the defunct Fascist Party
  • Several Italian parties support fascist ideology and publicly align themselves with the tenets of fascism, but they cannot call themselves fascist. Under Italian law, people can be arrested for making fascist salutes, but it is not illegal to sell memorabilia with fascist symbols or the image of Mussolini.
Ed Webb

Italy Still Won't Confront Its Colonial Past - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ont-confront-its-colonial-past

Italy Libya Ethiopia Eritrea Somalia colonialism history memory

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Italy’s colonial past is largely absent from public debate in the country.
  • Last month, an anti-racist group in Milan asked for the removal of a statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli, pointing out that he bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a “temporary wife”—that is, a sex slave—when he was a young colonial soldier in the 1930s. It was no secret. Montanelli, a celebrity conservative journalist who also enjoyed a following among the left, repeatedly bragged about the episode until his death in 2001. He resorted to overtly racist tropes, describing the girl, whose name was either Fatima or Destà, as “a docile tiny pet” and stressing that he was repulsed by her smell. He dismissed the charges of pedophilia, claiming that African girls are different from Europeans: “At 14, they’re women; at 20 they are old.”
  • During Italy’s occupation of the Horn of Africa, it was fairly common for Italian soldiers to take local girls as temporary wives, a practice known as “madamato” (from the word “madama,” or mistress), which Italians authorities considered legal—and even encouraged—until 1937, when the Fascist regime outlawed it in the name of racial purity. Obviously the only possible union was between Italian men and African women: The local male population wasn’t even allowed to have contact with white women.
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  • In 1952, the Italian government commissioned a study of its past colonial activities from a group of 24 scholars, largely former colonial officials, including governors and geographers. The committee, known as “Comitato per la documentazione dell’Opera dell’Italia in Africa,” (Committee for the Documentation of the Italian Activities in Africa) continued its work until 1984, producing 40 volumes, most of them hagiographies.
  • Fascist troops conquered Ethiopia in 1936, with the help of chemical weapons, and took Albania in 1939
  • “Having colonies was seen as a way of being modern,”
  • It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment
  • widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed “the butcher of Fezzan,” put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation.
  • After the end of World War II, Italy’s new ruling class, largely composed of anti-Fascists, created two intertwined myths: the myth of the “good Italian colonialist” and the myth of the “good Italian soldier.”
  • The aim was to create a sense of cohesion between the new anti-Fascist government and the general population, by reassuring the latter they don’t share the blame of the dictatorship’s deeds
  • The myth of the good colonialist was devised as a propaganda tool to make the point that Italy should keep its colonies that were conquered before Fascism, which didn’t work out.
  • When Ethiopia requested the extradition of Graziani in 1949, Italy refused, despite the fact that he was included in a list of war criminals of the United Nations for the use of toxic gases and the bombing of some Red Cross hospitals.
  • In 1882, the Kingdom of Italy, which was founded only two decades earlier, invaded Eritrea, and seven years later, it conquered Somalia. Between 1895 and 1896 Italy also tried to conquer Ethiopia, but it failed spectacularly, with the Ethiopian troops inflicting on the Italian attackers the worst defeat ever suffered by a European nation in Africa. In 1911, the Italians took Libya.
  • Unlike other European countries, Italy never had prominent voices confronting its colonial crimes
  • “The French public might not have agreed with the position of Sartre or Fanon, but they knew who they were,”
  • colonial brutality is the subject of a classic of Italian cinema: Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination at the Academy Awards, chronicled the brutal French repression of Algeria. It posed no problem, because the bad guys were the French.
  • the Italian governement intervened in 1982 to prevent the distribution of a movie that would have put Italy’s colonialism in bad light: Lion of the Desert, chronicling Italy’s repression of the Libyan resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, was not aired until 2009, during a state visit by Muammar al-Qaddafi
  • As recently as 1997, Italy formally protested against the United Kingdom because the BBC aired a documentary, called Fascist Legacy, about Italian war crimes. The Italian state TV channel RAI bought a copy of the movie but never aired it.
  • in 2012, a mausoleum honoring Graziani, the war criminal, was erected near Rome. A court ordered it to be taken down, because it violated a law against “Fascist propaganda” (Graziani also headed the pro-Nazi army of the Salò Republic), but the order was never carried out. While it has been defaced and mocked with graffiti, the mausoleum still stands.
  • Italy decolonization was “a passive process, not an active one.” Italy did not go through a lengthy independence war, as France did in Algeria, nor did it witness a large-scale civil rights movement, as Britain did in India: Italy simply lost its colonies because it lost the war
  • there were “two types of removal: one from the authority but also one from the Italian people.” She points out that many Italian families have recent ancestors who fought in colonial wars in Africa. “If people were to check in their attics, they will likely find memorabilia of that period,” but they ignore it
  • a small but growing number of Italian authors who are tackling Italy’s colonial violence head on
  • Italian authorities should build monuments to the victims and start teaching about colonial violence in schools: “Many high school books still claim that Italy went to Africa to bring civilization.”
  • Despite the fact that Italy is fast becoming a multiethnic society, and despite the fact that its colonies came to an end almost 80 years ago, the country doesn’t seem ready to face its own past.
Ed Webb

All You Need to Know About the U.K. Proscribing the Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen Division ... - 0 views

www.lawfareblog.com/nazi-group-atomwaffen-division

UK Britain US USA terrorism nazis

shared by Ed Webb on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • On April 23, the U.K. officially proscribed the U.S. accelerationist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and its alias, National Socialist Order, as a terrorist organization. This designation follows Canada’s similar move in February and comes after the group’s members have been linked to five murders, explosions and hate crimes in the U.S. With group proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 carrying sentences of up to 14 years for members or those who invite support to the group, designation seems to be a step forward in the fight against white nationalism and right-wing terrorism. But because the group seems to lack a physical presence in the U.K., the move appears to be more for international solidarity and to provide tools to combat online propaganda than one of current and direct operational necessity.
  • Nearly one-third of terror plots foiled by British police since 2017 relate to right-wing ideology, and the youngest Brit ever sentenced for a terror-related offense was the U.K. head of the affiliated white supremacist group Feuerkrieg Division. As of Dec. 31, 2020, 42 (20 percent) of the people in custody for terrorism-connected offenses in Great Britain were categorized as holding right-wing ideologies
  • Once proscribed, a designated organization is subject to asset freezing and seizure, in addition to disruptive activity including the use of immigration powers like exclusion, prosecution for other offenses, encouragement of the removal of online material and EU asset freezes. In addition, the penalties for the proscription offenses of membership or support (Terrorism Act 2000, Sections 11 and 12) are a maximum of 14 years in prison and/or a fine; the penalties for the offense of wearing a uniform or publishing an image (Terrorism Act 2000, Section 13) are a maximum of six months in prison and/or a fine of £5,000 at most.
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  • Atomwaffen Division is the first U.S. organization on the U.K.’s proscribed terrorist group list
  • it might come as a welcome relief to some that the U.K. government has included another non-Islamist organization in its list of proscribed terrorist groups, especially after related controversies over the government’s counterextremism policy—referred to as Prevent—and the government’s definition of “extremism”
Ed Webb

Domestic politics, Idlib sway timing of Turkey's Syrian operation - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...-sway-timing-of-operation.html

US USA Trump diplomacy politics military Turkey Syria Kurds Erdogan AKP refugees

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.
  • the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.
  • Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting
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  • the Syrian refugee problem has proved increasingly costly for the AKP in terms of domestic politics
  • Across Turkey and in big cities in particular, most of the Syrian refugees live in close proximity to AKP voters, either in the same neighborhoods or adjoining ones. Under the impact of the economic crisis, tensions between locals and refugees have grown, contributing to a gradual disenchantment with the government among AKP voters
  • While announcing the launch of Operation Peace Spring, Erdogan said the campaign would “lead to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes.” The political motive underlying this pledge rests on the fact that the Syrian refugee problem is becoming unbearable for the government.
  • Syrians who could be forced to flee Idlib in the near future could perhaps be placed in tent cities in this “security belt” without being let into Turkey at all and instead transferred via Afrin and al-Bab, which are already under Turkish control.
  • Ali Babacan, the AKP’s former economy czar who has already quit the party, is expected to create a new party and join the opposition ranks by the end of the year. Ahmet Davutoglu — the former premier and foreign minister who, together with Erdogan, designed and implemented the failed policies that spawned the grave “Syria crisis” that Turkey is experiencing today, both domestically and in its foreign policy — is gearing up to get ahead of Babacan and announce his own party in November. These political dynamics have already triggered a spate of resignations from the AKP, and the formal establishment of the new parties could further accelerate the unraveling
  • The intensive employment of a nationalist narrative, in which the operation is depicted as a struggle of “national survival” against terrorism and quitting the AKP is equated to treason, would not be a surprise. 
  • already omens that this state-of-emergency climate, nurtured through the operation, will be used to further suppress the opposition, free speech and media freedoms. 
  • the web editor of the left-leaning BirGun daily, Hakan Demir, and the editor of the Diken news portal, Fatih Gokhan Diler, were detained on the grounds that their coverage of the operation amounted to “inciting hatred and enmity” among the people. The two journalists were released on probation later in the day.
  • prosecutors launched an investigation into the co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Pervin Buldan and Sezai Temelli, on charges that their critical comments about the operation constituted “spreading terrorist propaganda” and “openly insulting” the government. 
  • Erdogan already lacks any political ground to try to win over the Kurds, but Kurdish voters are likely to develop resentment against the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) as well over its support for the military campaign. This, of course, could be one of the side objectives the government seeks from the operation, given that the backing of HDP voters was instrumental in CHP victories in big cities such as Ankara, Istanbul and Adana in the local polls after the HDP opted to sit out those races.
  • Trump's threats to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Ankara goes “off-limits” in the operation offers Erdogan the chance to blame the economy’s domestic woes on external reasons and portray the ongoing fragility of the Turkish lira as an American conspiracy.
Ed Webb

By labeling Arabs an 'existential threat,' Bibi invokes a terrifying history of ethnic ... - 0 views

972mag.com/...144502

Israel Palestine israelpalestine Netanyahu politics elections government propaganda genocide

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a bitter struggle to prevent his challenger from establishing a government with support from the Arab-led Joint List party, has again accused Arab party leaders of representing an existential threat to Israel. On Sunday night, Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh responded by circulating a photo on social media of himself in pajamas, reading stories to his three doting kids. “At the end of a long day, I’ve got to put these existential threats to sleep!” he wrote, to viral delight.
  • Netanyahu’s frenzied anti-Arab diatribes are accelerating in pace and severity. In 2015 he warned that Arab citizens were voting “in droves.” Prior to the September election, his Facebook page stated that “Arab politicians want to destroy us all.” (Netanyahu said it was a campaign staffer’s mistake.) On Sunday, Netanyahu held an “emergency” meeting of Likud members (the emergency was not a rain of rockets but the possibility of a minority coalition backed by the Joint List). There he thundered that the rival Blue and White party was negotiating with the Arab MKs, who, he insisted, “support terror organizations and want to destroy the state.”
  • conflating Iran’s “existential threat” with Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel mimics the ideological rhetoric behind some of the worst ethnic violence in the world
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  • The conflation of genuine grievances with obsessive repetition of imminent existential threat should terrify everyone.
  • In a way, Netanyahu’s fantasies are even more egregious. They lack any basis of actual injury by Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, historical or present. This group is never involved in organizational terror, and individual incidents are exceedingly rare. The community has no secessionist tendencies, has participated in the Israeli political process for decades, and repeatedly states its desire for greater political, civil, and economic integration. The one demand that challenges Israeli Jews is symbolic: preservation of their battered Palestinian identity. The great political demand associated with that identity is their call to release Palestinians in the territories from a five-decade military occupation and allow their independence.
Ed Webb

As a lifelong Conservative, here's why I can't vote for Boris Johnson | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...-i-cant-vote-for-boris-johnson

UK Britain politics election opinion analysis Brexit conservatives conservatism radicalism corruption propaganda press

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Dec 19 - Cached
  • The Conservatives have become a vehicle for well-drilled fanatics who, like the Militant tendency forty years ago, infiltrate constituency parties in order to deselect MPs who offend doctrinal purity.
  • There is no more Conservative figure than Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general. His offence? Standing up for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. These are, it seems, hanging offences in Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
  • the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of institutions – church, monarchy, parliament, rule of law – against abstraction, ideology and ultimately political violence.
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  • waging a destructive war on the British system of government
  • This government is not simply un-conservative. It is an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative.
  • When I was political correspondent at The Spectator magazine under Boris Johnson’s editorship at the start of this century, we mercilessly analysed and exposed the constitutional vandalism of Labour’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now Johnson, counselled by his amoral, dangerous ‘senior adviser’ Dominic Cummings, has been doing exactly the same.
  • Cummings and Johnson are both creatures of big money – a point persistently missed by Britain’s client political press.
  • When his role came under threat in the early days of the Vote Leave campaign, Cummings boasted: “The donors are going to see them off.” Cummings is often framed as master of the dark arts. Dark money is more apt.The inside word is that big donors, some of whom have profited from Brexit instability, will soon be elevated to the Lords
  • Big cheques from obscure private sources are an important part of the explanation of how the Johnson clique seized control of the Tory party late last July.
  • What do these rich and unaccountable people want in return for this munificence? Nobody in Fleet Street asks. Britain’s supposedly independent and fearless press don’t want to ask, let alone know.
  • consistently place the end before the means – which means neglect of due process; readiness to mislead; and Leninist obsession with ideological rectitude. In particular, political lying has reached epidemic proportions in the few short months since Johnson and Cummings entered Downing Street.
  • We Conservatives are careful students of history. We know that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and sometimes capable of great evil. That explains why we have always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truths which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.
  • Michael Oakeshott, the greatest Conservative thinker of the twentieth century, noted that there was no Conservative ideology. Instead, there is a Conservative disposition which “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile”.
  • Brexit has mutated from a virtuous and even admirable attempt to reassert British sovereignty into a brutal assault on everything we stand for.
  • there is no way that I can as a lifelong Conservative vote for Boris Johnson’s revolutionary clique this week. Decent, middle-of-the-road Conservatives have no choice but to oppose this unremitting war on everything the party has fought to save and protect over the last 200 years. History will judge us accordingly.
Ed Webb

The Conflict in Ethiopia Calls Into Question Authoritarian Aid - Carnegie Europe - Carn... - 0 views

carnegieeurope.eu/...on-authoritarian-aid-pub-83515

Africa development authoritarianism Ethiopia Rwanda analysis aid

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In recent years, the impressive economic performances of Ethiopia and Rwanda have meant that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development. Beyond the obvious concern that donors become complicit in human rights violations, the main question facing authoritarian development in Africa has always been whether the economic gains achieved under repressive rule are sustainable.
  • if Ethiopia is no longer seen as a success story, then the case for authoritarian development in Africa falls apart. Already, the EU has suspended nearly €90 million ($110 million) in budgetary aid to the country because of concerns over the government’s handling of the conflict in Tigray. Growing evidence that authoritarian politics can have devastating developmental consequences will also give a shot in the arm to organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democracy that argue that the international community should be doing development democratically.
  • it has become more common for international donors and aid practitioners to question the value of democracy for development—and to suggest that authoritarian governments that can force through necessary reforms might be more effective in some cases.
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  • some of the continent’s more democratic states have failed to end corruption or deliver high levels of economic growth. On the other hand, Ethiopia and Rwanda achieved impressive successes, attracting international praise for reducing poverty and unemployment while consistently securing high economic growth
  • Ethiopia received almost $5 billion in foreign aid in 2018, while Rwanda received just over $1 billion. The figure for Rwanda is particularly striking when one considers that democratic Malawi, which saw a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in June 2020, receives considerably less aid per person: $70 for each Malawian in 2018, compared with almost $91 for every Rwandan
  • recent trends in academic and policy research have played an important role in the rise of authoritarian development. These trends provided donors with an intellectual foundation for investing in countries that, on the basis of their human rights records, the EU and the UK might have been expected to avoid.
  • researchers suggested that when patrimonial systems are tightly controlled, waste can be minimized and resources channeled toward productive investments to support developmental outcomes
  • The combination of the rise of China, democratic malaise in the West, and the economic struggles of many African democracies has led citizens and political elites to increasingly question the value of democracy for development
  • there is some evidence that the empirical data used to identify Ethiopia and Rwanda as success stories may not be as impressive as it was first thought
  • official figures are part of a broader propaganda campaign designed to sell the regime both at home and abroad
  • The Tiger economies of East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, entrenched the economic progress they achieved in the 1970s and 1980s by undergoing relatively smooth transitions to more open and inclusive—and hence legitimate and stable—political systems in the 1990s. The prospects for such transitions have always seemed less likely in Ethiopia and Rwanda, where opposition parties are not allowed to operate effectively and limited social and political cohesion remains a cause for concern.
  • While the jury is still out on Rwanda, the political foundations of economic development in Ethiopia appear to be crumbling. When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in 1991, it initially appeared to have broken out of Ethiopia’s damaging cycle of repression and rebellion. Rather than seeking to enforce one ethnic identity over the others, the EPRDF committed to giving the country’s different communities the freedom and self-respect they had always desired. The government enshrined a right to self-determination in the Ethiopian constitution. However, the reality was very different
  • the ruling party kept itself in power by rigging elections and repressing opponents. As a result, many ethnoregional groups felt that in addition to being politically marginalized, they were denied the opportunity to press their concerns through democratic channels.
  • although he quickly won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for moving to end a long-running dispute with Eritrea and promising a raft of democratic reforms, Abiy was unable to return Ethiopia to political stability. Most notably, the growing political marginalization of the TPLF left the former dominant clique increasingly frustrated. Tigrayan leaders ultimately quit the government, while Abiy disbanded the EPRDF and replaced it with his own political vehicle, the Prosperity Party. From that moment on, civil conflict between the federal government and the TPLF, whose role was now limited to control over the Tigrayan regional government, became increasingly likely.
  • Since civil conflict began in November 2020, Ethiopia has had a new set of developmental challenges. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, major infrastructure has been destroyed, and Abiy’s reputation as a reformer has been undermined. Moreover, there is a serious risk that even though federal government troops have regained overall control of Tigray, the TPLF will be able to wage guerrilla attacks that will continue to weaken political stability and investor confidence.
  • Abiy, like his predecessors, will use coercion to maintain political control, building up more problems for the future. Although negotiated and smooth political transitions are not impossible, they are less likely in heavily divided societies and have been rare in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Although Ethiopia and Rwanda are often mentioned in the same sentence, Ethiopia is the more important example for the argument that authoritarian government models would serve Africa better than democratic ones. With a small population, a distinctive history, and an intensely authoritarian government, Rwanda is not a promising case from which to generalize. By contrast, Ethiopia, with a large and extremely ethnically diverse population, provides a more compelling example.
  • The empirical evidence in favor of authoritarian development models in Africa has always been remarkably thin. The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth. Fast-forward to today, and there are very few authoritarian regimes with the potential to join Ethiopia and Rwanda as notable success stories. Instead, most studies have found that democratic governments perform better when it comes to providing public services or economic growth.
  • On its own, Rwanda’s small and aid-dependent economy cannot sustain the narrative that authoritarian regimes perform better on development—and if it does not, there is no justification at all for supporting repressive regimes.
Ed Webb

Yesterday's Terrorists and Insurgents in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia Are Today's Pu... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...providers-coronavirus-pandemic

analysis pandemics insurgency terrorism governance crime networks

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jul 20 - Cached
  • The coronavirus pandemic has opened up similar opportunities for a range of terrorists, insurgents, and criminal organizations. Across the world, they are already seeking to acquire political legitimacy through the provision of public health services, especially in countries and regions where the government has been either unwilling or unable to help.
  • it is not just terrorist and insurgent groups taking advantage of the crisis to demonstrate an effort toward effective governance. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs have worked assiduously to enforce a curfew in the notoriously ungoverned slums where they operate.
  • In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the term “ungoverned spaces” entered the popular lexicon when discussing areas that terrorist groups sought out in which to train, plan, and conduct operations. Areas that few in the West had ever heard about—South America’s Tri-Border Area, the Sahel in North Africa, and Southeast Asian archipelagos—were all tagged with this label. But the term itself is an unfortunate misnomer. No area is truly ungoverned. Rather, nonstate actors and substate groups provide alternative forms of governance to people in these places. And, more often than not, they do so through provision of services that reinforce their social status and lend them a sense of political legitimacy that governments in faraway capital cities lack altogether.
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  • By exploiting governance gaps, terrorists and insurgents gain valuable propaganda victories
  • by launching public health campaigns and dispensing information and advice on how to avoid being infected, terrorist and insurgent groups can position themselves as a trusted voice on these issues.
  • Good governance and competent public administration are the best medicine for pandemics and insurgencies alike.
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