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Neil Ferguson: 'I gave them an open goal to some extent' | Coronavirus | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...g-epidemiologist-faces-of-2020 epidemiology expert lessons pandemic
shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • he takes the responsibility of communication very seriously. It’s a moral obligation, he believes, if you’re advising on aspects of science that profoundly affect people’s lives.
  • Yet as he is at pains to remind us, advise is all he does. “You’d find it hard to find an interview clip of me saying the government should do this. I’m very careful.”
  • All the same, he’s not without his opinions about policy, which he tends to restrict to the past rather than making public suggestions about the future
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  • “It was slightly sad to me that the number one lesson from the first wave of transmission, which is that those countries that acted early had by far the best outcome and had lockdown in place for less time, was not remembered by the autumn.”
  • be believes Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel would have all gone for earlier lockdowns if they weren’t under enormous political pressure to keep their economies going.
  • By the same token, he acknowledges that no politician can hope to cancel Christmas, but there will be consequences in terms of a rise in transmission, though he thinks “it could be quite short-lived”.
  • he is excited about the “unprecedented levels of scientific collaboration and sharing of data” that have characterised research over the past year. In some ways, he says, the Covid crisis has been a “triumph of the scientific community and modern science”.
  • He would like to see the global commitment shown in the face of this pandemic replicated in dealing with climate crisis, which he says is going to kill many more people. The massive mobilisation of governments, funds and people we’ve seen “opens up vistas of possibilities that we maybe didn’t appreciate were even feasible at the beginning of this year”
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Opinion | Putin Can't Escape History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-russian-military-ukraine.html history crisis policy putin russia authoritarian
shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-Communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”
  • Nearly 30 years later, Vladimir Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern
  • Mr. Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.
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  • Before the announcement of the recent mass conscription, which was followed by the declaration of martial law in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, about 30 percent of Russians who were asked by a pro-Kremlin pollster to describe the predominant mood of people around them said they were anxious. Since the decree, that number has risen to 69 percent.
  • as the invasion has dragged on, Mr. Putin has had to shout “Wolf!” ever more stridently.
  • With little experience of democracy, Russians have traditionally been content to entrust their government to a strong “khoziayin,” or master, so long as he provides stability and seems to know what he’s doing. But if that contract is violated, as Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, warned in a quote every Russia knows by heart, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”
  • He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture — as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky — to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.
  • There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parceled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s — Mr. Putin’s — mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might
  • it is becoming evident that Mr. Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick invasion would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.
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This is what a 'multipolar' world looks like. It's chaos | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...lar-world-looks-like-its-chaos multipolar rules-based world order hamas israel enlightenment culture politics history crisis
shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel
  • though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.
  • But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.
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  • Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.
  • People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.
  • They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.
  • Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.
  • The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.
  • In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.
  • What does Hamas want?
  • Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.
  • The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.
  • The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.
  • Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.
  • there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.
  • ‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.
  • Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel
  • Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.
  • In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.
  • the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.
  • In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic
  • it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.
  • Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.
  • Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.
  • But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.
  • Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.
  • The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.
  • not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.
  • Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.
  • Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.
  • But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.
  • Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.
  • Danger of miscalculation
  • The Brics+ ideology
  • The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.
  • the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.
  • Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.
  • For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:
  • with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.
  • I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.
  • A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.
  • the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.
  • The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.
  • The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.
  • There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.
  • In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.
  • And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.
  • This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.
  • we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:
  • One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent
  • The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.
  • that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
  • Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.
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How the Ukrainian refugee crisis will change Europe | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ugee-crisis-will-change-europe politics crisis history
shared by woodlu on 30 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 30th had passed 4m. That does not count the 6.5m people displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.
  • Nearly a quarter of the population has been forced to move.
  • So far, the western response has been enlightened and generous. But that could change if governments mismanage the reception and integration of refugees, and disillusionment and fatigue set in.
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  • The Ukrainian exodus is nearly triple the size of the wave of Syrians and others who reached Europe in 2015.
  • Germany and Sweden were initially welcoming, but there was then a surge in support for anti-immigrant politicians all across Europe. This led to a hardening of Europe’s borders, a deal with Turkey to prevent Syrian refugees from proceeding to other parts of Europe, “push-backs” of asylum-seekers arriving by boat and challenges by politicians to the very idea of asylum.
  • In response to the Ukrainian crisis, Europe has rolled out welcome mats, both metaphorical and literal.
  • On March 3rd the European Union invoked for the first time its temporary-protection directive, giving Ukrainians the right to live, work and receive benefits in 26 of its 27 member countries.
  • Poland has taken in 2.2m. Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, was the first European leader to build a fence to keep out refugees in 2015, has admitted 340,000.
  • America is joining in. On March 24th President Joe Biden said his country would take in up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and contribute $1bn to help Europe cope with the influx. Canada, which has the world’s biggest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia, has said it will take as many Ukrainians as want to come.
  • Poland’s government encourages such generosity by offering hosts 40 zloty ($9) per day per refugee for two months.
  • Britain’s is giving £350 ($460) a month per household, although its forbidding bureaucracy has made it hard for many Ukrainians to come.
  • The contrast with the reaction to Syrians in 2015 is due not just to the lighter skin and Christian religion of most Ukrainians, though that is surely part of the explanation. It is also that welcoming refugees is part of a mobilisation for a nearby war in which NATO and Europe, although non-combatants, are passionately partisan.
  • Ukraine’s closest neighbours are already feeling strained. Moldova, which has received 370,000 refugees, equivalent to about a tenth of its population, is overwhelmed.
  • Newer refugees, who tend to be poorer and are less likely to have family already in western Europe, may also stay in larger numbers.
  • Parts of Poland, too, are buckling. Around 300,000 refugees have come to Warsaw, the capital, increasing its population by 17%. More than 100,000 are in Krakow, the second-largest city, which is usually home to 780,000 people. “[T]he more people, the worse the conditions will be,”
  • Countries on the route taken by refugees in 2015, from Greece to Belgium, have greatly improved their ability to register and process them.
  • Some, such as Germany, passed laws and set up institutions to integrate refugees.
  • For economies, refugees could be both a burden and a boon.
  • the EU’s four biggest countries will spend nearly 0.2% of GDP to support the influx, assuming 4m refugees come to the region.
  • Ukrainians already in Germany have higher qualifications than did Syrian refugees, which should help them find work. The relative abundance of work means that there is little risk that Germans will accuse the newcomers of taking their jobs.
  • The forecasters may also be overestimating how much work single mothers, traumatised by their flight from Ukraine and worried about the husbands they left behind, will be able to do, especially where day-care places are scarce and expensive.
  • If the war grinds on, economies slow and governments fail to provide the newcomers with housing, services and jobs, Europe’s welcome mats could be withdrawn.
  • Dissent can already be heard in some overburdened countries. In Romania a nationalist fringe contends that Ukraine, not Russia, is the enemy. In Moldova some Ukrainians’ cars have been vandalised. Filippo Grandi, the head of the UN’s refugee agency, fears that hostility will spread.
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As U.S. sends Ukraine military aid, a lobbying coalition is forged - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...aine-lobbying-military-aid-war lobbying ukraine mobilisation mass campaign crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”
  • As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.
  • One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom
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  • “We did things like bring over shrapnel from Ukraine, from cruise missiles that exploded in civilian areas, and put it on their desk and say, look, this is what we’re up against,” Murskyj said. “You know, this landed in somebody’s house, and now it’s in your office.”
  • “The intensity was high; there was energy in the air. And we realized that we needed to do everything that we possibly could to make this happen.” Murskyj said, adding that there were “dozens of organizations, and hundreds if not thousands of individuals, who worked hard” to get the legislation passed.
  • “I think the most effective thing [the Zelensky administration] did was, they listened, and then they gave the speaker space to work the issue,” said a person familiar with Johnson’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue. “They took him at his word after that meeting with Zelensky in December.”
  • Johnson indicated early on that he would support the legislation if his main questions were addressed, those involved in the talks said. Over time, he became an ally.
  • “Up until that point, it had really been an aggressive pressure campaign,” the person said. “And really, from my view, it was having the opposite effect because it was just making the people who were ‘never Ukraine-ers’ say, ‘They’re just eviscerating you; they’re not interested in giving you space or what’s in America’s interests.’”
  • For Johnson, a Southern Baptist, arguments from fellow members of the evangelical community were particularly important, those involved in the process said. The speaker met numerous groups of religious leaders from the United States and Ukraine who pushed him to pass the aid bill.
  • American evangelicals helped dispel a narrative circulating in the conservative media that Ukraine was persecuting Christian communities, pointing out that it was in fact Russia that was restricting religious freedom.
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