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Ed Webb

America's Democracy Was Far Less Peaceful Than Political Scientists Pretended - 0 views

  • Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.
  • When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.
  • The Center for Systemic Peace’s widely used Polity scores, for instance, give the United States between a +8 and +10 from 1809 to 2016—a stable, indeed maximally scoring, democracy. That period includes the Civil War, when the losing side launched a violent conflict rather than accept the election results.
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  • The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone
  • The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis
  • Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.
  • Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.
  • A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself
  • American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century
  • Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means
  • Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries
  • just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.
  • Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy
  • social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)
  • it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad
Ed Webb

The American Empire Is the Sick Man of the 21st Century - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • classic Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagines a Galactic Empire, governed from the city-world of Trantor, that has maintained peace and prosperity for thousands of years but that is teetering on the brink of decline. The only person who sees this clearly is the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has mathematically determined that the core conditions for the Empire are unsustainable and will crumble over the course of centuries. As Trantor “becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize,” a disciple says as he absorbs Seldon’s calculations. “As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.” Asimov published these words in 1951, at the peak of U.S. global power. But they might as well be describing Washington in 2019, an imperial capital whose elite have transformed it into a great prize to be feuded over as surely as Asimov’s future empire did—and as other empires have done in the past.
  • much of the United States has experienced a steady decline while a handful of major cities, including Washington, have become hyperwealthy and almost unaffordable through the concentration of financial, tech, and media monopolies and their affiliated lobbyists. By now, many Americans know this story—but few think about what it means for their place in the world
  • Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers
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  • The near-universal understanding of the United States as a powerful, unified global actor is flawed and in need of revision. The United States is less a great power exerting its will and more an open-air market for global corruption, in which outside powers can purchase influence, shape political outcomes, and play factions against each other in the service of their own competing agendas.
  • Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.
  • the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.
  • The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.
  • While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders
  • what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.
Ed Webb

The Forgotten Cameroon War - 0 views

  • In 2005, parliament adopted a law requiring history teachers to discuss the “positive aspects” of colonization. Of course, this has always been done: many French colonial atrocities have been erased, and the driving forces of imperialism are rarely, if ever, critically examined. School curricula propagate a sugarcoated version of France’s bloody past.
  • French society as a whole perpetually extols its colonial history. All over the country, innumerable streets and headstones pay homage to the worst colonialists, the scholars who justified a white supremacist racial hierarchy, and the imperial army’s violent feats.
  • A significant majority of French people remain proud of their colonial past, unaware of the barbarous manner in which France conquered Algeria, Indochina, and Madagascar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ignorant of how it violently suppressed colonial resistance in Morocco, Benin, and Martinique, and having only a basic knowledge of the massacres that punctuated the last phase of the colonial era — from the carnage of the Thiaroye military camp in Senegal on December 1, 1944, to the mass killings in the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961.
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  • Among the omissions of French colonial historiography, the Cameroon war of the 1950s and 1960s is perhaps the most striking. Hardly anyone even realizes it took place. This secret war, which nonetheless claimed tens of thousands of victims, went almost unnoticed at the time, and its victors, the French and their local intermediaries, methodically erased every remaining trace in the following decades: the Gaullist regime installed a ferocious dictator in Yaoundé who hastened to wipe out all memory of the anticolonial struggle.
  • Tens of thousands of letters and petitions were sent to the United Nations to convey the UPC’s watchwords: social justice, an end to racial discrimination, total independence, and reunification — slogans that echoed the promise of the UN charter itself
  • European authorities quickly realized that the trusteeship system weakened the imperial edifice. If the Cameroonians managed to assert the rights the United Nations legally upheld, the wind of decolonization, already blowing in Asia, would arrive in Africa, causing surrounding colonies to crumble by contagion and destroying what remained of empire. For the French, who controlled the major part of the country, it became urgent to halt the growing liberation movement.
  • The Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC), founded in April 1948, centered the independence movement, which was gaining in popularity daily. Particularly well-structured and led by some remarkable militants, the UPC rapidly extended its influence and began to undermine the administering authorities, not only in the urban centers of Yaoundé, Douala, Dschang, and Édéa, but also in the countryside. Ever-larger crowds gathered to listen to speeches from UPC secretary general Ruben Um Nyobè, President Félix Moumié, and Vice Presidents Abel Kingue and Ernest Ouandié.
  • In 1972, the French government censored French Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti’s Main basse sur le Cameroun, the first work describing the atrocities of the independence war. The French government immediately banned it and destroyed all available copies.
  • In Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and elsewhere, African politicians cynically accepted French authorities’ assistance in establishing themselves in positions of responsibility that were, in reality, closely supervised. In Cameroon, however, the operation proved more difficult to carry out: UPC leaders refused to betray the political aims and popular aspirations they had upheld for years. As they continued the work of political mobilization within and beyond Cameroon’s borders, Paris decided to employ strong-arm tactics.
  • In Kenya in 1952, the British had bloodily repressed the Land and Freedom Army — which they pejoratively called “Mau Mau”— and seemed determined to maintain their grip on that country. Elsewhere, however, their strategy appeared to diverge. In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), London seemed prepared to negotiate independence with the nationalist movement lead by Kwame Nkrumah. Such weakness scandalized some French observers of colonial affairs. The British were going to give away their empire and abandon the unfinished work of colonialism! And all for the benefit of a handful of radicalized Africans who would inevitably deliver the continent to the communists.
  • The more aware French administrators, however, held a different view. Aware that traditional colonialism was done for, they saw Britain’s apparent laxness in the Gold Coast and elsewhere as a subtle way of controlling their colonies’ inevitable independence. According to this analysis, London was trying to reproduce in Africa what Washington and Moscow had realized in Latin America and Eastern Europe: converting these countries into vassal states by leaning on local elites as their collaborators and intermediaries.
  • A new piece of legislation, prepared as soon as 1954 and adopted two years later under the name of the “Defferre loi cadre,” or framework law, entrusted certain responsibilities to handpicked African elites who would keep the colonies within the French fold. By giving local autonomy and limited power to local leaders, this particularly perverse outsourcing of the state’s domestic administration undermined its full sovereignty.
  • In late trusteeship-era French Cameroon, Messmer’s mission was to keep the UPC underground and groom a local ruling class that could continue to favor French interests after independence. As he explicitly wrote in his memoirs, the idea was to give “independence to those who called for it the least, having eliminated politically and militarily those who had called for it most intransigently.”
  • From the moment independence was proclaimed, France intensified its war effort. The Sanaga-Maritime had been, in large part, purged between 1957 and 1959, and the conflict escalated in Wouri, Mungo, and the Bamileke region, where the Kamerunian National Liberation Army (ALNK) had been established in 1959. The French army repeated its villagization policy, set up militias, and disappeared prisoners. It added a vast campaign of aerial bombardment to its repertoire. The population endured intense psychological campaigns — torture was systematized, public executions proliferated, and the severed heads of alleged rebels were displayed at markets and public squares.
  • the two top French administrators in Cameroon had a shared interest in counterinsurgency. In part inspired by the psychological warfare developed in the United States and by British techniques used in various colonial arenas, a line of French officers during the 1946–1954 Indochina war elaborated the French counterrevolutionary war doctrine
  • aimed to install civilian-military structures capable of leading the masses physically and psychologically
  • The counterrevolutionary doctrine was exported simultaneously to two territories under French rule — Algeria, shaken by the National Liberation Front (FLN) movement, and Cameroon, where French officialdom described the UPC as a sort of African Vietminh. Smarting from Indochina, these officers arrived in Cameroon in 1955 with the firm intention of scouring out “communist subversion.”
  • December 1956 marked a major turning point. Pierre Messmer organized elections in which the outlawed UPC could not participate. This way, the high commissioner could validate the elimination of the main Cameroonian party and appoint “democratically elected” candidates better disposed to France. To prevent this, the nationalists organized resistance fighters through the National Organization Committee (CNO)
  • The French reaction became so violent that tens of thousands of families left their villages to take refuge in the surrounding forests and put themselves under the protection of the CNO maquis. Other armed organizations joined the fight, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to coordinate with the UPC.
  • Like the British in Malaya and Kenya and like the Americans later in Vietnam, the French began a process of so-called villagization. Security forces under French command mercilessly hunted down all those who refused to join military regroupment camps. The French army and its affiliated militias burned illegal villages and summarily executed outlaws extrajudicially. Those who joined the regroupment camps, willingly or not, had to experience the army’s total surveillance apparatus, endure endless screening sessions, and take part in countless psychological rehabilitation schemes.
  • We will probably never know the exact number of people massacred during these “cleansing operations.” We do know that the UPC’s charismatic Um Nyobè — a priority target — was one of the victims. A comrade was tortured until she revealed Um Nyobè’s location, and a military patrol quickly assassinated the nationalist leader.
  • The “troubles,” as the French authorities called them, affected all of southern French Cameroon, in particular the area from the port city of Douala to the coffee-growing Mungo and Bamileke regions. Because these regions bordered British southern Cameroon — where numerous UPC leaders had taken refuge — the French rebuked their British counterparts, accusing them of allowing their territory to be used by the nationalist combatants as a strategic withdrawal zone.
  • Under the French secret services’ watchful eye, UPC president Félix Moumié and a dozen others began a long revolutionary journey, settling successively in Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, and later, in Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola — in any African country that would grant them asylum.
  • From the Cameroonian perspective, the scheme had two obvious defects. For one, it called for independence prior to an election. For another, the Cameroonian leaders whom French authorities co-opted as allies had to sign a series of bilateral accords with Paris, some of them secret, that would legalize French control over the new state’s commercial, monetary, military, cultural, and diplomatic policies. This was, then, an illusory independence — the Cameroonian people were deprived of sovereignty, and their leaders remained under France’s supervision.
  • This controlled independence had numerous advantages for the French. Apart from defusing the real Cameroonian independence movement’s message, it allowed the French authorities to put an end to the international trusteeship system and shed UN oversight. Also, independence would accelerate British Cameroon’s emancipation, and Paris assumed the two parts of the country would quickly reunite. The latter aim was only half achieved — the northern half of British Cameroon joined Nigeria. Surely the most important outcome of Cameroon’s independence was that it freed France to repress movements deemed subversive as it wished.
  • The Soviets, suspected of trying to spread “world revolution,” were often accused of directing African independence movements from afar
  • It was only when Ouandié was arrested in 1970 and publicly executed in January 1971 that the nationalists accepted that armed struggle had definitively failed.
  • Supervised by French advisers, Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo — installed in 1958 — transformed his regime into a dictatorship. Well aware that he owed his power to France, he suppressed all civil liberties and progressively established a one-party system. Under the pretext of fighting “subversion,” he surrounded the Cameroonian people with a wall of silence. With its omnipresent army, brutal political police, and administrative detention camps, the regime became one of the most repressive in Africa to the benefit of the local apparatchiks and French businesses, who shared in the profits from the country’s economic exploitation.
  • “Françafrique” was born — the French version of neocolonialism, which allowed Paris to maintain its former African colonies not in spite of independence but, in fact, thanks to it.
  • According to the British embassy’s confidential report from the mid 1960s, the war caused from 60,000 to 76,000 civilian deaths between 1956 and 1964. At a 1962 conference, a journalist from Le Monde claimed 120,000 had been killed since 1959 in the Bamileke region alone. “Yet we are almost entirely ignorant of this even in France, the former metropole,” he added. For good reason: neither he nor any of his colleagues informed their readers about it.
  • To admit that repression continued — let alone that it intensified — would have highlighted the artificiality of independence and the illegitimacy of the pro-France regime. As a result, very few journalists were allowed in combat zones. Taken up in French planes to observe the conflict from above, they described it as an incomprehensible “tribal war,” thereby justifying French aid — “at the request of the Cameroonian government” — to end this “anachronistic” conflict. If the journalist from Le Figaro — one of the few French people to fly over the Bamileke region in 1960 — is to be believed, French intervention in Cameroon was a kind of humanitarian charity.
  • France’s military strategy included the deliberate portrayal of the conflict as a tribal or civil war. Heavily committed in Algeria — which was also monopolizing public attention — the French army sent very few of its own troops to Cameroon. As much as possible, they trained and supervised troops either from surrounding French colonies (Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Gabon) or from local paramilitary groups and self-defense militias within Cameroon
  • by stirring up ethnic rivalries, French instigators could hide behind their African subordinates when carnage ensured, attributing it to “innate African savagery.”
  • The French victory and Ahidjo’s installation as the postcolonial state’s first president not only muzzled all criticism of the regime, but also effaced the memory of the nationalists who fought to achieve real independence.
  • Not until the 1980s could Cameroonians begin to research their country’s violent decolonization, and even then they had to do it abroad.
  • in 2009, François Fillon responded to questions about France’s role in the UPC leaders’ assassinations by describing the accusation as “pure invention.” In fact, this aspect of the war is the best documented. Granted, in a July 2015 visit to Cameroon, François Hollande mentioned these “tragic episodes” for the first time. But his vague sentence barely paid lip service to these “episodes”; indeed, he appeared to not know what he was talking about. There has been no follow-up to these muddled ramblings.
Ed Webb

How Brexit marks the end of the British story | Latest Brexit news and top stories | Th... - 0 views

  • The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)
  • Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China
  • British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee
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  • There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair
  • The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors
  • the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others
  • a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties
  • the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.
  • Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.
  • the innate fragility and dysfunction of the UK's outdated and ramshackle constitutional order. The uncodified constitution - 'a series of understandings that no-one understands' - is very convenient for any party that commands a majority in the House of Commons, because they can do whatever they like, always getting their agenda enacted and controlling the business of the House of Commons itself.
  • no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)
  • Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.
  • "elective tyranny"
  • The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.
  • when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.
  • One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.
  • our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.
  • there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society
  • We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.
Ed Webb

'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views

  • “Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
  • Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
  • This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin
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  • It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.
  • Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.
  • just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.
  • what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that.
  • In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.
  • what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.
  • The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.
  • similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?
  • Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.
  • Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again
  • If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin?
  • We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.
  • Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.
  • The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
  • The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
  • if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
  • If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.
  • there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom, there was a whole host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his power, for doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz and the Holocaust finally penetrated.
  • Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing
  • we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again
  • Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  • If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it.
  • our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.
  • India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”
  • Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.
  • What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.
  • We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.
  • All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.
  • this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time.
  • What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.
Ed Webb

Alaa Abd El Fattah, Egyptian activist, celebrates the US election results - 0 views

  •  
    I don't expect we'll hear much of this perspective inside the US!
Ed Webb

The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam | naked capitalism - 0 views

  • despite defense contractor claims to the contrary, increased military spending has been accompanied by job losses in the US
  • the contracting fraud results in US taxpayers paying way more than it would have cost for US personnel to do the work…with the added insult that the tasks were performed by locals for a pittance
  • the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimed would create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry
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  • When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company
  • In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.
  • Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012
  • From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars
  • where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million
  • From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.
  • not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined.
  • “the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018” with an “operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017.” According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed’s profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed’s CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.
  • weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually
  • research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed “multiplier effect,” defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it’s about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished
  • As Brown University’s Costs of War project has reported, “$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.”
  • In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll
  • Reports from the industry’s own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis, it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier
  • add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington
  • since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.” 
Ed Webb

How to Think About Empire | Boston Review - 0 views

  • In your book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), you identify a few different pillars of empire: globalization and neoliberalism, militarism, and the corporate media. You write, “The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code of democracy. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.”
  • updates now would include the ways in which big capital uses racism, caste-ism (the Hindu version of racism, more elaborate, and sanctioned by the holy books), and sexism and gender bigotry (sanctioned in almost every holy book) in intricate and extremely imaginative ways to reinforce itself, protect itself, to undermine democracy, and to splinter resistance
  • In India, caste—that most brutal system of social hierarchy—and capitalism have fused into a dangerous new alloy. It is the engine that runs modern India
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  • The freer global capital becomes, the harder national borders become. Colonialism needed to move large populations of people—slaves and indentured labor—to work in mines and on plantations. Now the new dispensation needs to keep people in place and move the money—so the new formula is free capital, caged labor. How else are you going to drive down wages and increase profit margins? Profit is the only constant.
  • The assertion of ethnicity, race, caste, nationalism, sub-nationalism, patriarchy, and all kinds of identity, by exploiters as well as the exploited, has a lot—but of course not everything—to do with laying collective claim to resources (water, land, jobs, money) that are fast disappearing
  • So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is “Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi English? Kashmiri English? There are 780 languages in India, 22 of them formally “recognized.” Most of our Englishes are informed by our familiarity with one or more of those languages. Hindi, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers, for example, speak English differently.
  • In the Obama years, you had to ferret out information and piece it together to figure out how many bombs were being dropped and how many people were being killed, even as the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was being eloquently delivered. However differently their domestic politics plays out on home turf, it is a truism that the Democrats’ foreign policy has tended to be as aggressive as that of the Republicans. But since 9/11, between Bush and Obama, how many countries have been virtually laid to waste?
  • I don’t think in some of the categories in which your question is posed to me. For example, I don’t understand what a “global” novel is. I think of both my novels as so very, very local. I am surprised by how easily they have traveled across cultures and languages. Both have been translated into more than forty languages—but does that make them “global” or just universal?
  • I wonder about the term postcolonial. I have often used it, too, but is colonialism really post-?
  • You once wrote that George W. Bush “achieved what writers, scholars, and activists have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.” What did you mean by this, and ten years and two presidents later, is the American empire’s apocalyptic nature still so transparent?
  • In India today, storytelling is being policed not only by the state, but also by religious fanatics, caste groups, vigilantes, and mobs that enjoy political protection, who burn cinema halls, who force writers to withdraw their novels, who assassinate journalists. This violent form of censorship is becoming an accepted mode of political mobilization and constituency building. Literature, cinema, and art are being treated as though they are policy statements or bills waiting to be passed in Parliament that must live up to every self-appointed stakeholders’ idea of how they, their community, their history, or their country must be represented.
  • I recently saw a Malayalam film in the progressive state of Kerala called Abrahaminde Santhathikal (The Sons of Abraham). The vicious, idiot-criminal villains were all black Africans. Given that there is no community of Africans in Kerala, they had to be imported into a piece of fiction in order for this racism to be played out! We can’t pin the blame for this kind of thing on the state. This is society. This is people. Artists, filmmakers, actors, writers—South Indians who are mocked by North Indians for their dark skins in turn humiliating Africans for the very same reason. Mind-bending.
  • we are buying more weapons from Europe and the United States than almost anyone else. So, India, which has the largest population of malnutritioned children in the world, where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers have committed suicide, where it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman, is still being celebrated as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
  • The word “empire” has often been invoked as a uniquely European and U.S. problem. Do you see India and other postcolonial nations as adapting older forms of empire in new geopolitical clothing?
  • How can we think of empire now in the Global South, especially at a time when postcolonial nations are emulating the moral calculus of their old colonial masters?
  • India transformed from colony to imperial power virtually overnight. There has not been a day since the British left India in August 1947 that the Indian army and paramilitary have not been deployed within the country’s borders against its “own people”: Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Jammu, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand. The dead number in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. Who are these dangerous citizens who need to be held down with military might? They are indigenous people, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, communists. The pattern that emerges is telling. What it shows quite clearly is an “upper”-caste Hindu state that views everyone else as an enemy. There are many who see Hinduism itself as a form of colonialism—the rule of Aryans over Dravidians and other indigenous peoples whose histories have been erased and whose deposed rulers have been turned into the vanquished demons and asuras of Hindu mythology. The stories of these battles continue to live on in hundreds of folktales and local village festivals in which Hinduism’s “demons” are other peoples’ deities. That is why I am uncomfortable with the word postcolonialism.
  • When you think about the grandeur of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, it makes you wonder whether real protest is even possible any more. It is. It surely is. I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, when the largest Nazi march since World War II took place. The Nazis were outnumbered by anti-Nazi demonstrators, including the ferocious Antifa, by more than ten to one. In Kashmir, unarmed villagers face down army bullets. In Bastar, in Central India, the armed struggle by the poorest people in the world has stopped some of the richest corporations in their tracks. It is important to salute people’s victories, even if they don’t always get reported on TV. At least the ones we know about. Making people feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless is part of the propaganda.
  • I think we all need to become seriously mutinous
  • We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion
  • as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing.
  • In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.
  • How might we challenge dominant voices, such as Niall Ferguson, who put so much faith in thinking with the grain of empire? On the flipside, how might we speak to liberals who put their faith in American empire’s militarism in a post–9/11 era? Do you see any way out of the current grip of imperial thinking?
  • The “managed populations” don’t necessarily think from Ferguson’s managerial perspective. What the managers see as stability, the managed see as violence upon themselves. It is not stability that underpins empire. It is violence. And I don’t just mean wars in which humans fight humans. I also mean the psychotic violence against our dying planet.
  • I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.
  • Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.
  •  
    "It is not stability that underpins empire. It is violence."
Ed Webb

Johann Hari: And the Most Inspiring Good News Story of the Year Is... - 0 views

  • Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" - by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.
  • Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent -- but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?
Ed Webb

The Battle of Britain 2010 Edition and Living in the Shadow of Empire | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • an Imperial Parliament
  • The long story of the last thirty years is the continuation of the Empire mindset long after the Empire itself has disappeared off the face of the globe. Our political classes still see themselves at the heart of an imperial dispensation, the City and its grotesque distortions of the British economy, business and industry have come even more centrestage, and the strange obsession of our governing classes with Atlanticism has been more revealed as a fanaticism. Britain is still living in the shadow of Empire, and strangely enough, this is something more acutely grasped by those doyens of the New Right and neo-conservatism, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, than anyone on the centre-left.
  • we are shorn of illusion that socialism or progressive change can be built in the cradle of the Empire State
Ed Webb

The good ship Brexit's mission of free trade and empire | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • As Britain looks to make new trade deals, politicians are promoting a Brexit where multinationals rule over elected governments as well as over the people they are meant to represent. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Theresa May and co. have been clear in their ambitions for the global south. “The thriving economies of south and east Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are, and will become, ever more important,” said Fox in July as he gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He spoke of the “golden economic opportunities” presented by “the rise of the collective wealth of developing countries.”
  • The drive to boost trade links with African countries has been branded “empire 2.0”, reportedly by Whitehall officials themselves. This latest scramble to capitalise on the Commonwealth and other countries in the South is just an extension of what Britain has been doing for generations.
  • “A free trade area between Britain, a largely developed country and Africa, a poor continent, was always going to exacerbate inequalities, trade deficits, and the dependency of the latter on the former. ‘Free trade’ is really just the name given to the ideology that justifies this power imbalance,” wrote Africa Kiiza of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) last year.
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  • One of the most worrying aspects of new trade deals is the likely inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, or similar provisions, that allow corporations to sue countries for alleged ‘discriminatory’ practices that hamper their activities or profits.
  • Last month an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favour of the oil giant Chevron after it sued the Ecuadorian government. Chevron’s subsidiary Texaco have been accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic wastewater in the Ecuadorean Amazon, polluting rivers and lakes, over the course of nearly 30 years. Campaigners told Latin American broadcaster Telesur that high rates of cancer and other disease were affecting indigenous people in the area, which they attributed to oil pollution of their watercourses. Chevron had previously been ordered to clean up extensive environmental damage, by a court in Ecuador, as well as pay £7.4billion ($9.5billion) compensation to local people. This latest ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration found that Ecuador had violated its obligations under a bilateral investment treaty signed with the US and said that the previous judgment against Chevron had been gained through fraud and corruption. Ecuador must now pay compensation to Chevron.
  • “These mechanisms under free trade agreements will give more implications not only for the state policies in our countries, but also the sovereignty of the people themselves,” said Hertani. “The people cannot sue the investors. If there are human rights violations, there have been are several cases where the people lost. We never win against the multinational corporations.”
  • Countries like Indonesia, and many others in the global south, are rich in natural resources. Multinational companies have been plundering them to the detriment of people and the environment for generations and new trade deals could make it even easier for them to do this.
  • Inequality is getting worse, as highlighted in the recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Trade and Development report. They point at debt – which is more than three times the size of global output – as symbolic of this.
  • “This mantra of free trade has been really central to the whole British empire, to the British imperial project, for a very long time now. It’s a very bloody history and I’m worried that the kind of Brexit envisaged by the likes of Boris Johnson, and indeed Liam Fox and Jacob Rees-Mogg, is precisely to replicate those kinds of relations which we’ve never completely got away from, but which could be made even worse after Brexit.”
Ed Webb

How Do You Know If You're Living Through the Death of an Empire? - Mother Jones - 0 views

  • The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue. Carts full of olive oil failing to arrive at some nameless fort because of a dysfunctional military bureaucracy, a corrupt official deciding to cook the books and claim taxes were collected when they really weren’t, a greedy aristocrat bribing that official instead of paying his bill, an aqueduct falling to pieces and nobody willing to front the funds to repair it.
  • What shrank Rome down to a mere few tens of thousands by the year 550 was the end of the annona, the intricate state-subsidized grain shipments that brought food to the city first from North Africa and then from Sicily. The megacity of Rome was an artificial creation of the Roman state and its Roman-style successor. Rome suffered plagues and sieges in the 530s, but Rome had dealt with plagues and sieges before. What it could not survive was the cutting of its grain supply, and the end of the administrative apparatus that ensured its regular delivery. 
  • Those were small things, state-subsidized ships pulling up to docks built at state expense, sacks of grain hauled on squealing carts and distributed to the citizens, but an empire is an agglomeration of small things.
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  • every state and society faces serious challenges. The difference lies in whether the underlying structures are healthy enough to effectively respond to those challenges. Viewed in this light, it’s less the arrival of the massive earthquake than whether the damaged infrastructure is rebuilt; not the crushing battlefield defeat, but whether competent new recruits and materiel can be found to replace what’s lost; not the feckless, no-clothes-having emperor, but whether the political system can either effectively work around him or remove him from power altogether. Successful states and societies are resilient when faced with even serious challenges. Falling empires are not.
  • it’s far more likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of sweetheart deals for the ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies. And that’s to say nothing of the decades of pointless, self-perpetuating, and almost undiscussed imperial wars that produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and treasure, and a great deal of justified ill will.
  • Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say that it was just the icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before then, in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading, in local elections nobody was following, in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on, in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic.
  • The pull of the past is strong. The mental frameworks through which we understand the world are durable, far more so than its actual fabric. The new falls into the old, square pegs into round holes no matter how poor the fit, simply because the round holes are what we have available.
Ed Webb

A New History for a New Turkey: What a 12th-grade textbook has to say about T... - 0 views

  • Rather than simply serving as crude propaganda for Erdoğan’s regime, Contemporary Turkish and World History aspires to do something more ambitious: embed Turkey’s dominant ideology in a whole new nationalist narrative. Taken in its entirety, the book synthesizes diverse strands of Turkish anti-imperialism to offer an all-too-coherent, which is not to say accurate, account of the last hundred years. It celebrates Atatürk and Erdoğan, a century apart, for their struggles against Western hegemony. It praises Cemal Gürsel and Necmettin Erbakan, on abutting pages, for their efforts to promote Turkish industrial independence. And it explains what the works of both John Steinbeck [Con Şıtaynbek] and 50 Cent [Fifti Sent] have to say about the shortcomings of American society.
  • Turkey has long had competing strains of anti-Western, anti-Imperialist and anti-American thought. In the foreign policy realm, Erdogan’s embrace of the Mavi Vatan doctrine showed how his right-wing religious nationalism could make common cause with the left-wing Ulusalcı variety.[5] This book represents a similar alliance in the historiographic realm, demonstrating how the 20th century can be rewritten as a consistent quest for a fully independent Turkey.
  • Ankara is currently being praised for sending indigenously developed drones to Ukraine and simultaneously criticized for holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Contemporary Turkish and World History sheds light on the intellectual origins of both these policies
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  • Amidst the polarization of the Erdoğan era, what is striking in this book is the authors’ efforts to weave together the conflicting strands of Turkish political history into a coherent narrative. Illustrating Ernst Renan’s argument about the role of forgetting in nation-building, this account glosses over the depth of the divisions and hostility between rival historical actors, presenting them as all working side by side toward a common national goal
  • The book places added emphasis on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. Prefiguring the later treatment of Al Qaeda terrorism, the intention appears not so much to justify Nazism, but rather to present injustice as the causal force behind violence and cruelty in world politics.
  • the Holocaust instead appears here as one among several examples of Western barbarity
  • The foundation of the UN is immediately followed by a discussion of Israel under the heading “Imperial Powers in the Remaking of the Middle East.” (80-81) The Palestine problem, students learn, is the principal cause of conflict in the region. It began when the Ottoman Empire, “the biggest obstacle to the foundation of a Jewish state,” grew weak, leading to the creation of Israel.
  • Next comes a discussion of the post-war financial order and the International Monetary Fund. Students learn that “the IMF’s standard formula, which recommends austerity policies for countries in economic crises, generally results in failure, chaos and social unrest.” (81-83) An excerpt, which students are then asked to discuss, explains how the IMF prescribes different policies for developed and developing countries.
  • only in the context of the Cold War origins of the EU does the book engage in any explicitly religious clash-of-civilizations style rhetoric. The idea of European unity is traced back to the Crusades, while a quote about the centrality of Christianity to European identity appears under a dramatic picture of Pope Francis standing with European leaders. (112) The next page states that the EU’s treatment of Turkey’s candidacy, coupled with the fact that “all the countries within it were Christian” had “raised questions” about the EU’s identity.
  • Early Cold War era decolonization also provides an opportunity to celebrate Atatürk’s role as an anti-imperialist hero for Muslims and the entire Third World. (122-123) “Turkey’s national struggle against imperialism in Anatolia struck the first great blow against imperialism in the 20th century,” the authors write. “Mustafa Kemal, with his role in the War of Independence and his political, economic, social and cultural revolutions after it, served as an example for underdeveloped and colonized nations.” Atatürk himself is quoted as saying, in 1922, that “what we are defending is the cause of all Eastern nations, of all oppressed nations.” Thus, the book explains that “the success of the national struggle brought joy to the entire colonized Islamic world, and served as a source of inspiration to members of other faiths.” The section ends with quotes from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Habib Bourguiba about how Atatürk inspired them in their own anti-imperial struggles or was simply, in Nehru’s words, “my hero.” An accompanying graphic shows Atatürk’s image superimposed over a map with arrows pointing to all the countries, from Algeria to Indonesia, whose revolutions were supposedly influenced by Turkey’s War of Independence.
  • The authors also offer a balanced treatment of the fraught domestic politics during the period from 1945 to 1960 when Turkey held its first democratic election and experienced its first coup. (138-142, 144-146) They focus their criticism on the negative impact of U.S. aid, arguing that Washington intentionally sought to make Turkey economically and politically dependent, then sponsored a coup when these efforts were threatened.
  • Selçuk Bayraktar, the architect of Turkey’s drone program, said that as a student “I was obsessed with Noam Chomsky.” [16] During the 1980s and 90s, America sold Ankara F-16 jets and Sikorsky helicopters that were used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in southeast Anatolia. No one was more critical of this than left-wing scholars like Chomsky.[17] Now, Ankara is selling Bayraktar drones to Ethiopia, where they are being used to kill civilians and destroy schools in another violent civil war.
  • The narrative of national independence also helps smooth over Turkey’s Cold War domestic divides. Students are introduced to the ‘68 Generation and left-wing leaders likes Deniz Gezmiş as anti-imperialists protesting against the U.S. Sixth Fleet in support of a fully independent Turkey. (185-186)[9] In this context, Baskin Oran’s work is again cited, this time quoting Uğur Mumcu on the role of “dark forces,” presumably the CIA, in laying the groundwork for Turkey’s 1971 coup.
  • The book also offers a relatively neutral treatment of political activism during the ensuing decade, suggesting that rival ideological movements were all good faith responses to the country’s challenges. On this, the authors quote Kemal Karpat: “Both right and left wing ideologies sought to develop an explanation for social phenomena and a perspective on the future. A person’s choice of one of these ideologies was generally the result of chance or circumstance.” (202) Thus the authors imply that while foreign powers provoked or exploited these movements, the individual citizens who participated in them can be given the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the book takes a similar approach in discussing the 2013 Gezi protests: “If various financial interests and foreign intelligence agencies had a role in the Gezi Park events, a majority of the activists were unaware of it and joined these protests of their own will.”
  • Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology
  • a book which begins with a portrait of Atatürk ends with a photo of the Bayraktar TB2.
  • the book’s biases are less in the realm of wild distortion and more reminiscent of those that plague ideologically infused nationalistic history education in all too many countries
  • its exaggerated critique of European imperialism may be no more misleading than the whitewashing still found in some European textbooks
  • At moments, Contemporary Turkish and World History is better aligned with recent left-leaning scholarship than the patriotic accounts many Americans grew up reading as well
  • Throughout the 20th century, America defined itself as the world’s premier anti-imperialist power, all while gradually reproducing many of the elements that had defined previous empires.[11] Today, it often seems that Turkey’s aspirations for great power status reflect the facets of 20th century American power it has condemned most vigorously
  • Turkey’s marriage of power projection and anti-colonial critique have been particularly visible – and effective – in Africa. Ankara has presented itself as an “emancipatory actor,” while providing humanitarian aid, establishing military bases, selling weapons across the continent.[13] In doing so, Turkish leaders have faced some of the same contradictions as previous emancipatory actors. In August 2020, for example, members of Mali’s military overthrew a president with whom Erdoğan enjoyed good relations. Ankara expressed its “sorrow” and “deep concern.”[14] Then, a month later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu became the first foreign official to meet with the country’s new military leaders. “Like a brother,” he “sincerely shared” his hopes for a smooth “transition process” back to democracy
  • Among the 1930s cultural and intellectual figures given place of pride are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and John Steinbeck. Guernica is reproduced in an inset about Picasso, illustrating the artist’s hatred of war. (47) A lengthy excerpt from the Grapes of Wrath concludes with Steinbeck’s denunciation of depression-era America: “And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”
  • certain themes dominate Contemporary Turkish and World History. At the center of its narrative is the struggle for global hegemony, in military, economic, technological and artistic terms
Ed Webb

Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair - 0 views

  • British history has a problem with nationalism, and indeed the nation — they’re not supposed to exist, or they exist in very unusual forms. A central claim of my book is that something I call the British nation, corresponding to the territory of the UK, emerged after 1945, with a national economy, national politics, and a self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain. But it had a rather short life and was broken up from the 1980s.
  • Before the nation came both the empire and a set of places that were located in a global, free-trading space. What came after the nation? A fresh commitment to a globalist, and in particular European, liberal economic perspective.
  • Most recently, we’ve had a claim for the centrality of empire in twentieth-century British history, coming right up to the present. I think this very often involves a misrepresentation of what empire was, a failure to distinguish imperialism from nationalism, and an implicit continuity thesis that the empire as it was in 1914 remains a potent ideological force today.
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  • The imperialists certainly made the empire and in particular the white dominions central to politics and economics. In many ways, today’s anti-imperialists have followed them rather naively in this.
  • For the Conservatives, the white dominions in particular were central. They provided an image of the empire as a brotherhood of free white nations — a very important part of the overall story. But it was also important because the white dominions really were the important bits economically. That was where the investment went, and where a lot of the food for the United Kingdom came from.
  • India is a different matter. That was a place, of course, with a massive population. It was an important market for exports, but it was in a different league from the white dominions, and both were in a quite different position from what were strictly speaking called the colonies. It is very important to remember that before the 1940s — that is to say, in the great age of empire — trade with foreign countries was greater than with “British” countries, to use the language of the time. Liberals pointed this out again and again. They argued that the great glory of the British economy was not the empire but rather free trade. That meant trading with everybody and in practice trading a very great deal with Europe. That was where British bacon, British eggs, British iron ore, or British timber came from, and much else besides. Before the 1940s, the UK was a profoundly European economy, deeply integrated into trade and production within the European continent.
  • The UK was the largest overseas investor and the largest trader, but it was also the most industrial country in the world — far more industrialized than Germany or the United States at this time. It was more industrialized precisely because it was more globalized. It didn’t need to grow all its own food. The City was investing overseas in UK-owned enterprises, whose business was often to supply food to the UK, directly or indirectly. That in turn allowed the UK to be industrial and indeed to supply the railways, the factories, and the ships that made all this trade possible in the first place. In fact, the relations between overseas investment and industrialization were synergistic, at least in this period.
  • it’s striking how little impact decolonization had. Take the cases of India and Palestine in the 1940s: there were no major convulsions at home — nothing compared to what was happening in France during the 1950s.
  • there was actually a silent revolution brought about by “de-imperialization.” That was best exemplified by the extraordinarily rapid transition of the Conservatives from being the party of empire and Imperial Preference to being the party of free trade and of applying for accession to the Treaty of Rome in 1961. It is extraordinary that, just a few years after World War II, the Tory Party in government applied for membership of what was then called the Common Market.
  • There was a movement of people from the Caribbean in particular during the 1950s, but they were people coming from a colonial territory who had the same nationality as most people living in the United Kingdom. They were what were called “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” so they weren’t really immigrants. They were people moving within the space of British nationality. Interestingly, there were more immigrants, in the sense of aliens or semialiens, coming from Ireland and continental Europe in the 1940s and ’50s. Indeed, the dominant movement of population from the 1940s right up into the 1980s was outward rather than inward. The UK was a place of net emigration in that period. A lot of that emigration was to the Commonwealth, and Australia in particular.
  • It comes as a surprise to many people that in the 1950s, the United Kingdom was still the most industrialized economy on Earth. This doesn’t fit with the “declinist” images that have so affected our understanding of this period in particular. In terms of growth rates, poorer European countries and countries elsewhere were often growing faster than the UK economy — they were catching up. The German economy caught up with the UK and overtook it in terms of GDP per capita in the 1960s, and France did the same in the 1970s. But the overall result was that the West European economies, which had been quite different in 1945 or 1950, came to be very similar by the 1980s and ’90s or the 2000s when one includes poorer countries like Spain.
  • In the 1970s and ’80s, the UK became broadly speaking self-sufficient in the foods that it could grow itself, much as Germany, France, and Italy were self-sufficient in food. What had been the great factor distinguishing the United Kingdom from continental Europe disappeared as a result of a fundamental change in British political economy. The UK became an exporter of beef and wheat, which would have been unthinkable not just in the Edwardian years but in the 1950s as well.
  • The reality is that the 1970s saw a global crisis. There were important transitions and readjustments in the British economy. That decade was also a period of political radicalism and cultural inventiveness — a period of innovation, of a sort that conservatives didn’t like one bit. That’s essentially why the 1970s have this terrible reputation.
  • She did transform the British economy, but it’s important to note that she did not increase the underlying rate of growth. Since 1979, the British economy has grown more slowly on average than it grew between 1945 and the 1970s. In that sense, she most certainly did not reverse the British decline. Nor did she reverse the British decline in relation to all the other major economies in the world
  • while manufacturing employment did go down very radically, manufacturing output remained high. Indeed, peak manufacturing output in British history came in 2008 — it wasn’t the 1970s, let alone the 1870s
  • North Sea oil was certainly important because, together with the new self-sufficiency in food, it meant that the UK no longer had to import the two things that had dominated its import bill in the past: food and oil. That meant that the UK no longer needed to have a surplus in the manufacturing balance, which went negative in 1981.
  • Quite soon, you had a permanent negative balance of trade in the British economy — a quite extraordinary thing. A tiny negative balance of trade was the stuff of politics in the 1950s and ’60s, yet in the more recent past, a permanent deficit of 4, 5, or 6 percent of GDP has no impact whatsoever. What made this deficit sustainable? The emergence of a new kind of City of London. It was not the City of the Edwardian years. It was something quite different, like an enclave, which was about bringing money into the UK as much as taking it out. It was precisely those net flows of capital into the UK that allowed it to sustain the negative balance of trade.
  • The most important thing Thatcher did, apart from opening up the economy to Europe and the world, was to encourage the increasing inequality between capital and labor and between the regions. There was an extraordinary reversal of the move toward greater equality of income, wealth, and regional development that had been taking place from 1945
  • The loss of trust in government that arose from the obvious, systematic mendacity of the Blair administration around Iraq had and continues to have profound consequences. It generated a new, deep cynicism in politics
  • It’s striking that the Conservatives have increased their vote share in every election since 1997. The idea that Boris Johnson suddenly transformed the fortunes of the party is quite wrong. That’s one legacy of Blairism — not just Brexit, but also a new, revived, and dangerous Conservative Party. If Thatcherism begot Blairism, I think Blairism begot “Johnsonism” by a very different process.
  • The UK has been a place where global capitalism does its business. There’s relatively little we could straightforwardly call British capitalism
  • there aren’t the sort of connections between business and the Conservative Party that there would have been when they were all the same people. There are, perhaps, connections between particular kinds of business and the Conservative Party — particular hedge funds, for example, or Russian oligarchs. Between them, they’re pushing the Conservatives to be a party that’s pressing for an even greater degree of tax-haven status for the British economy, making it even more of a rentier, liberalized economy than it already is.
  • We have an extraordinary politics, in which a particular fraction of capital, allied with hard-right elements of the Conservative Party, are pursuing a policy that they don’t really understand and can’t really come to terms with.
  • We’ve had great programs of political-economic change, from mobilization in World War II to going into the European Economic Community. But those were planned and thought through — there weren’t any great surprises. This one hasn’t been. It hasn’t even really been improvised. It has just been a very peculiar mess.
  • the politics of the Brexiteers themselves aren’t the politics of Brexit voters. The Brexit vote is an old vote, just like the Conservative vote. One has to credit the Conservatives with realizing that their vote was an old one and doing everything they could to sustain that vote — for example, by keeping NHS spending and pension spending up, systematically targeting welfare at the elderly and taking it away from the young
Ed Webb

Thousands of Youths Are Compelled to Join Military's Junior ROTC - 0 views

  • JROTC programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.
  • A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households
  • parents in some cities say their children are being forced to put on military uniforms, obey a chain of command and recite patriotic declarations in classes they never wanted to take
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  • textbooks, the Times found, at times falsify or downplay the failings of the U.S. government. And the program’s heavy concentration in schools with low-income and nonwhite students, some opponents said, helps propel such students into the military instead of encouraging other routes to college or jobs in the civilian economy
  • While Pentagon officials have long insisted JROTC is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400-million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44% of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered JROTC.
  • military officials point to research indicating JROTC students have better attendance and graduation rates, and fewer discipline problems at school.But critics have long contended the program’s militaristic discipline emphasizes obedience over independence and critical thinking
  • Schools also have a financial incentive to push students into the program. The military subsidizes instructors’ salaries while requiring schools to maintain a certain level of enrollment in order to keep the program. In states that have allowed JROTC to be used as an alternative graduation credit, some schools appear to have saved money by using the course as an alternative to hiring more teachers in subjects such as physical education or wellness.
  • freshman enrollment in JROTC “often operated like a prechecked box: students were automatically placed in JROTC and they had to get themselves removed from it if they did not want it. Sometimes this was possible; sometimes it was not.”
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