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Yemeni youth are among those whose lives have been entirely consumed by the six-year-long civil war. This comes as no surprise as youth and children represent more than 60% of the population. However, against all odds, young people in Yemen are rising out of the ashes of the conflict and engaging in activism to envision a better future for themselves and their country.

Youth activism and empowerment have a rich history in Yemen. Youth activism became a bustling part of civil society during the Arab Spring of 2011. At that time, demonstrations at change squares and protest camps gave young Yemenis a place to meet and discuss their hopes and demands for human rights. A number of youth-led organizations were founded, carrying out advocacy, media reporting and monitoring. 

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As the regime led by Ali Abdullah Saleh came to an end in 2012, the transitional government that took over Yemen made incredible steps to engage youth populations in the national dialogue. A technocratic cabinet was formed in 2014 that “drew heavily from youth leaders,” many of whom were given a generous amount of access to decision-makers. The institutional progress made during this time has since been abandoned. However, the spirit of Yemeni youth activists lives on in the actions of youth leaders today. 

Yemen’s war has spared no one, not even its children. The situation in the country worsens as fighting continues between the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed Yemeni government and Houthi rebels. The war has resulted in the complete breakdown of government services and the destruction of critical infrastructures, such as hospitals, schools and roads. 

What Are Youth Doing?

Although the war is not over, Yemeni youth activists are building support for their number one priority: peace. They are combining humanitarian initiatives with development components to create a sustainable approach to peacebuilding. This includes advocating for small businesses like food carts and home-delivery kitchens, using skills in social media to raise awareness for public health and safety issues, and designing graphics to show how to avoid contaminated water or where landmines may be located. 

Youth activists are creating a culture of trust and community, especially among vulnerable populations where networks of support might have otherwise collapsed during the conflict. In the event that funding no longer sustains humanitarian aid, these programs and businesses will continue to support Yemenis. Through the creation of opportunity and family support, Yemeni youth are keeping alive the fabric of society necessary to achieve long-term stability. 

The youth empowerment initiatives that Yemeni activists organize similarly seek peace. The most immediate goal of these initiatives is to offer an alternative to fighting in the conflict. These initiatives champion the central goals of youth empowerment: for young people to develop skills, awareness and opportunities that will positively impact their lives toward a future they have chosen. 

Yemeni youth activists are combating unemployment and providing livelihood opportunities, protecting young people from conflict and further polarization and also maintaining security. These activists have shown great adaptability and innovation in presenting an alternative future to young people where they are able to have agency over their lives. 

Involving Young Yemenis

Those in positions of power should not wait until the conflict is over to integrate young Yemeni leaders into the peacebuilding process. Integral work is being done by young activists every day. Not involving this group in the political process further marginalizes and silences the voices of community members suffering from the conflict. Yemeni youth are the future of the country and should have consistent access to decision-making. 

Engaging youth in peacebuilding efforts “serves to address their feelings of fear, isolation, hopelessness, stigmatization, and in turn, contributes to the overall security of the community.” Young leaders will not only be able to feel a sense of agency over their own lives but over the peace process as well. They become active players in their nation’s history rather than passive victims of war. When they become the leaders of Yemen, they will have developed the necessary skills to care for the people of Yemen. 

The war has blocked all forms of political participation for Yemeni youth, a critical space to share their ideas. It is essential that leaders and international actors do not silence them altogether. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Young Yemenis Lead the Way for Peacebuilding appeared first on Fair Observer.

Last week in this column we highlighted the fact that the mysterious phenomenon known as the Havana syndrome has become a regular feature of respectable media in the US. The variable set of reported symptoms, ranging from noises and headaches to alleged brain damage, has confirmed its status as a major source of fear and anxiety in the US at a historical moment in which, for once, there are no visible, active wars against an evil enemy to fill front pages.

Instead of a sense of relief, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has produced a disorienting vacuum. The September 11 attacks proved that the secret to unifying the nation is not just fear, but following up with the virtuous resolution to use excessive force against the evil forces that have come to the fore. There are still multiple military operations across Africa and in the Middle East every day that the media could report. But these aggressive initiatives against ill-defined groups of people fail to live up to the criteria that make a fear-inspiring story worthy to print. Stories of rebel groups in random African countries, even when identified as jihadist, simply don’t meet the fearmongering standards of modern journalism.

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The Havana syndrome conveniently fills a serious gap in the news cycle. But because no one has a clue as to what it consists of, where it comes from or even whether it is a thing, news outlets have been challenged in their continual effort to turn it into a compelling story. Fortunately, The New York Times and The Washington Post have risen to the challenge.

With no new case of a dramatic attack by an invisible enemy to report in the past week, the newspapers of record offer us a story with a different twist. Instead of health issues or revelations about the mystery itself, this story points toward institutional intrigue.

Julian E. Barnes and Lara Jakes at The New York Times report on the dramatic dismissal of the CIA’s top officer in Vienna. According to The Times, “agency leaders concluded he failed to take adequate steps to address a series of mysterious health episodes in Austria in which intelligence officers and diplomats fell ill with symptoms similar to Havana syndrome.” John Hudson and Shane Harris at The Washington Post note the strategic implications of this move: “The sidelining of the station chief in one of the largest and most prestigious CIA posts is expected to send a message that top agency leaders must take seriously any reports of ‘Havana Syndrome.’”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Take seriously:

Comply with an authorized stance or policy at the expense of objectively reasoning about the existing facts

Contextual Note

The story goes beyond the simple dismissal of a CIA officer. Reading between the lines, it reveals a drama both The Times and The Post have attempted to hide from view by treating it as something of a coincidence and refusing to connect the dots. The two papers report that simultaneously with the sidelining of the CIA officer in Vienna, the head of the State Department’s task force on the Havana syndrome was forced — or rather (apparently) encouraged — to resign. “The ouster of the Vienna station chief,” The Times reports, “came as Pamela Spratlen stepped down this week as head of the State Department’s task force studying the episodes.”

What ties these two events together? An astute reader may notice that Spratlen’s crime was identical to that of the CIA officer: skepticism. “Victims’ groups said Ms. Spratlen viewed the health incidents skeptically,” The Times reports. When, in the coming weeks, both personalities will be effectively replaced — one in Vienna and the other in Washington — we can reasonably assume that skepticism will be absent from their intellectual profile. Anyone guilty of that crime will understand the risk of being immediately canceled.

As usual, The Times article helpfully reminds readers that, concerning the syndrome itself, besides the fear factor, there is nothing to report. “The Biden administration,” it informs us, “has so far been unable to conclude what is causing the unexplained health incidents.” Then there’s this important piece of non-news: “The State Department did not make Ms. Spratlen available for comment and declined to comment on the criticism of her.” No identified cause, no designated agent, no consistency in the symptoms themselves. Add to all that the silence of the State Department and the story is clearly not about the Havana syndrome but about a struggle between opposing forces inside the government.

Historical Note

One day the entire history of the Havana syndrome will be summed up in a full-length book, probably in conjunction with UFOs, cancel culture, the role of the deep state and even other less contemporary themes, such as the McCarthyist communist witch hunt in the 1950s. It will undoubtedly include several dimensions that today’s newspapers are willing to evoke but not explain. It will reveal certain continuities that began with the original Cold War and are now playing out in the newly emerging Cold War 2.0 that traces its origins to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and Russiagate.

The Havana syndrome is already five years old, which means that even as it continues to develop in the coming years, it already qualifies as being more than simply an isolated moment in history. The Daily Devil’s Dictionary has been following the story these past few years, with articles that examine various features of the phenomenon here, here, here, here and here. We continue counting on The New York Times and other outlets to keep it churning over until either the mystery is solved or simply runs out of fuel.

The Times traces the basic facts as they appear today: “Well over 200 American officials have been injured in the health incidents since 2016, roughly half of them C.I.A. officers traveling overseas.” It claims that the numbers have been rising and that has had the effect of “increasing the pressure on the Biden administration to make conclusions about what is causing the illnesses and whether an adversarial intelligence service is responsible.”

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Whenever there is a “pressure … to make conclusions” within the government, the public can be reasonably certain that some premature conclusion will be reached, with inevitable consequences for the future. Everyone remembers the pressure exerted by the Bush administration to conclude that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and the chaos that ensued. CBS News describes the content of a recent conference call initiated by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that led to Pamela Spratlen’s resignation. “Diplomats who took part in the call described the conversation — in which Spratlen and [Brian] McKeon also participated — as ‘tense,’ and one called parts of it ‘offensive,’ criticizing what the person said seemed to be an entrenched disbelief among officials of victims’ symptoms,” CBS reports.

CBS News mentions that the name Havana syndrome, still preferred by the media, has been officially changed to “anonymous health incidents.” This change of name alone may have infuriated some of the victims, who prefer to think of themselves as targets of a malicious attack than mere individuals suffering from an unknown disease, or worse, an effect of mass hysteria. The news media have serious reasons to keep alive the idea of political intent rather than treating it as a medical curiosity.

Echoing the latest official narrative CBS reports that “current and former officials suspect symptoms may be the result of attempted surveillance by foreign intelligence services using microwave technologies to collect information.” Translated into non-diplomatic English, this clearly indicates that the current scientific hypothesis holds that, rather than the previously bandied idea of a directed attack, the symptoms may simply be due to exposure to a new generation of surveillance technology. What nobody dares to admit is that this includes another possible hypothesis: that the surveillance technology American officials are exposed to may be the government’s own technology used for the protection of its own premises.

Some elements of the story seem to point in that direction. The failure to move forward even in identifying the type of technology capable of producing these effects could simply be the reluctance to reveal the kind of technology the US has developed. 

Keeping that secret would be essential to national security. And nothing is taken more seriously than national security. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Surprise, the Havana Syndrome Is Back in the News appeared first on Fair Observer.

Earlier this month, the US, UK and Australia announced an unprecedented agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian Navy. The move provoked outrage from France, which had been negotiating the sale of conventionally-powered submarines to the Australians.

French ire led to the withdrawal of its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra. This was particularly surprising given France’s strong political and security ties — not to mention historical, as America’s oldest ally — to both nations. Inexplicably, President Emmanuel Macron did not recall his ambassador to London, prompting some to posit that after Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, it didn’t matter as much.

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It’s also very likely that Macron, who has been Europe’s strongest advocate on behalf of a stand-alone European defense capability — i.e., less dependence on the US — did not want to alienate Britain in his efforts.

Prenez un Grip!

Leave it to Britain’s blunt-speaking prime minister, Boris Johnson, to succinctly lend some reality to the blow-up among allies. Speaking in Washington, DC, Johnson suggested it was “time for some of our dearest friends around the world to prenez un grip about all this and donnez moi un break” — to get a grip and give him a break. A “stab in the back” was how the French publicly described the situation following the announcement of the agreement.

Johnson has it right. This was not a betrayal of the North Atlantic alliance, nor France’s especially close ties with Britain or America, or its strong relationship with Australia. While there are unquestionably important strategic elements of this deal, it is a commercial one. Australia wanted to boost its naval defense capabilities in the increasingly competitive and dynamic Western Pacific.

France’s conventionally-powered subs would not have been state of the art, requiring periodic surfacing for refueling, and wouldn’t be available until 2035. Moreover, Canberra and Australian politicians had already begun to express reservations over these deficiencies and the exorbitant cost.

Enter the Americans, who apparently invited the British to join. In the world of diplomacy and international affairs, all issues are understood to be open for discussion and negotiation. Business is something else, however. Allies and adversaries regularly compete for business and commercial deals. Governments back their businesses and even add sweeteners from time to time to clinch the deal. It’s understood; everyone does it. It’s business — not personal and not political.

The surprise here is that Paris seemed to be caught unaware of the American-British offer. The French should have suspected others might be talking to the Australians, especially as their own deal was beginning to sour. Their embassies in Washington, London and Canberra, doubtlessly staffed with some of their top diplomats and intelligence and military personnel, should have picked up on it. That is what embassies are for, among other things.

What Is It Good For?

Political sensibilities aside, is this the right undertaking for the three countries? A somewhat qualified answer would be yes. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly made clear America will compete with China in the Western Pacific and around the world. To date, America has shouldered the lion’s share of the security responsibilities in that region, though Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain and even France also play roles.

Providing the Australians with nuclear-powered subs greatly enhances their own defense capabilities and augments what the US and others are doing to shore up security in the Western Pacific.

It is a genuine security enhancement for the West, giving pause to the Chinese, who themselves possess about a dozen nuclear-powered subs, most dedicated to their ballistic missile submarine fleet. (It is important to note that the AUKUS deal will not provide Australia with nuclear weapons of any kind.)

So, Australian nuclear-powered submarines provide an excellent complement to both American and British nuclear-powered subs as well as those French nuclear submarines deployed to the region. Moreover, while the others deploy their submarines around the world, Australia will likely be confined to the Western Pacific, giving the Western allies a greater presence.

Other Asia-Pacific nations either hailed the deal or remained silent, the latter owing to sensitive trade and other economic arrangements with China they do not wish to jeopardize. After all, they saw what may have provoked all of this, namely China’s unusually harsh response to Australia’s call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, including the still unproven lab leak theory.

Canberra was blasted with a torrent of shockingly virulent verbal attacks from Beijing, which then accused Australia of “dumping” its wines on China and imposed daunting tariffs on future imports. The result was a precipitous decline in Australian wine exports to China, down as much as 96% in the final quarter of 2020.

The response shocked the Australians, who have maintained strong and important trade ties with Beijing and had sought to remain out of the US-China wrangling. But that all changed after Beijing’s tough-guy actions. Anti-China sentiment is now at a peak in Australia’s Parliament and among the population. More importantly, the overreaction drove Canberra right back into the waiting arms of its long-time ally, the US. Beijing’s so-called wolf-warrior actions against Australia were uncalled for and most definitely counterproductive.

A Win for Biden and the US

France’s ruffled feathers notwithstanding, the AUKUS deal leverages one of America’s strongest assets in the competition with China, namely its ability to forge alliances and partnerships with nations around the world, based not only on shared interests but very often on shared values. China has no such alliance network — Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and a handful of others hardly amount to what the US has managed in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

It is perfectly consistent with Biden’s repeated assertion that he will forge stronger ties with our allies and work to strengthen alliance networks. No one should be surprised with this natural evolution, a win-win for all involved.

One Asian nation whose response and views will be critical to US interests is India. India is a member of a new, American-initiated group known as the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the US. New Delhi has distanced the AUKUS deal from the Quad but otherwise remained neutral in its response, though commentary ranges from strong endorsement to equally strong criticism and warnings of an Indo-Pacific arms race.

The latter may be a bit exaggerated. Australia already has submarines, and soon these will be nuclear-powered, allowing them to remain submerged much longer or even indefinitely, depending on whether their fuel is high or low-enriched uranium. The latter would require surfacing about every 10 years or so to refuel.

But that still leaves the question of France. One might have and, indeed, should have expected some heads up to the French in advance of the announcement. France is a core indispensable member of NATO and one of America’s most important allies.

The countries have already begun to patch up their tiff. Biden and Macron spoke last week and will meet next month when Biden attends the G-20 summit. The US president endorsed his French counterpart’s call for greater European defense autonomy, “consistent with NATO” objectives and obligations. Macron returned his ambassador to Washington.

Nevertheless, Washington would be wise to find some way to include Paris in this deal. If its underlying basis is security and strengthening alliances, then why not include this vital ally? France already possesses significant blue-water naval capabilities as well as genuine interests in the Pacific, with territories in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna.

Moreover, the French could be brought in to supply or develop the nuclear-power trains for the Australian submarines using low-enriched uranium, which fuel France’s nuclear subs. (Britain and the US use high-enriched uranium.) The use of low-enriched uranium would also help keep AUKUS from potentially running afoul of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is better to have France on board the AUKUS fleet than not. The most awkward bit: What to do with the added “F”?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Is the Ruckus Over AUKUS? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Whether financial crisis, migration or the coronavirus pandemic, the past decade has shown that Germany cannot easily implement its international goals without the European Union. This fact is hardly taken into account in the German cybersecurity strategy adopted on September 8.

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Germany’s positioning in European and international cybersecurity policy is listed as the last of four prioritized fields of action. These fields are largely of a domestic nature. This also applies to the German discourse on the topic of IT security: representatives of digital civil society, the Association of the Internet Industry (eco) and some computer science professors criticize the planned development of an active cyberdefense, including the possibility of digital counterattacks — so-called hackbacks.** However, they primarily discuss domestic federal competence or fundamental rights issues such as the separation requirement.

European Imperatives

There are four reasons why the EU would have to be much more involved in order for the strategy to work.

First, the number of serious cybersecurity incidents affecting EU services of general interest continues to rise. Diplomatic action, travel restrictions and asset freezes — for example, Russian intelligence officers blamed for cyberattacks — have proved cumbersome, incoherent and ineffective in the past. A purely national perspective means that EU member states do not react uniformly to cyber incidents.

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Secondly, the EU is not only the framework for German policy, but it is also inextricably intertwined with it through the direct effect of European law. The 2014 ruling on data retention by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) not only formulated requirements for data protection, but also for data security. In the same way, the EU Cybersecurity Act of 2019 is a regulation and thus obliges all member states to implement it.

However, the importance of EU law and the case law of the ECJ is underestimated in the German cybersecurity strategy. Yet these are central reference points for German legislation. On the other hand, Germany cannot impose cyber sanctions against third countries or their so-called proxies without the European Union.

Thirdly, the German government cannot reduce the EU to a coordinating role, if only because internal market protection is inconceivable without the European Commission acting as a safeguard of EU treaty obligations. The security and stability of the EU is not the task of the member states alone. For example, the European Commission will set up a joint cyber unit by 2023 to take joint action against attackers. Part of the necessary investment will be provided through the Digital Europe program. The development of cyberdefense capabilities will be financed by the European Defence Fund. In her state of the European Union address on September 15, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also announced a cyber resilience act to define common standards.

Fourth, transnational cybercrime cannot be solved effectively on a purely national level. Europol and the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) are regarded by other states as role models in the international fight against cybercrime precisely because of their transnational investigative successes. The call for a European investigative agency modeled on the Federal Bureau of Investigation is therefore becoming louder in cybersecurity policy.

Overall, it is clear that cybersecurity in the EU is no longer a national matter, but must be understood as a component of its shared sovereignty.

Germany in a Global Context

However, the necessary integration in the German cybersecurity strategy is not limited to the EU. It must also be coupled with strong transatlantic cooperation between the European Union and the US within the newly established Trade and Technology Council. Far too often, transatlantic cooperation is thought of in terms of national bilateralism between Germany and the United States.

The first argument in favor of this is that alliance solidarity obliges the German government to maintain an active cyberdefense even in peacetime. However, a demanding technical, legal and political attribution can neither be coordinated without the European External Action Service nor realized without US cooperation.

For this, Germany must in turn act in close coordination with its EU partners such as France, the Netherlands, Denmark or Sweden. Germany’s transnational critical infrastructure in itself effectively precludes it from going it alone in cyberdefense, not least because the expertise for sophisticated technical solutions is not sufficiently available in Germany.

A convincing security strategy, therefore, requires close cooperation with international experts as well as the knowledge imparted at the EU level via Europol in coordination with cybersecurity research centers and the European Union Agency for Cyber Security (ENISA). Sustainable influence on global standards and norm-setting in the multi-stakeholder forums of Internet governance can also only be successful in the long term if democratic states coordinate among themselves in data protection and data security policies.

In the face of increasingly complex global politics, the new German government should promptly Europeanize the cybersecurity strategy so that it sees itself as part of the EU cyber strategy 2020 and, in a global context, serves to cooperate with its democratic allies.

*[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy. **Dr. Matthias Schulze was part of this initiative.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Weak European Reflex in German Cybersecurity appeared first on Fair Observer.

Before the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade that protected a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy without government intervention, many women found themselves in a desperate position. If a woman, especially a low-income woman, wanted an abortion, she often had to risk her life to get one.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion was so dangerous that in 1965, roughly 17% of deaths relating to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortions. The shocking statistic is unsurprising given that in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of illegal procedures ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.

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Women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and women of color were disproportionately affected by strict regulations as many couldn’t afford to travel to places where they could obtain a legal abortion. The levels of morbidity and mortality among this demographic were astounding. While childbirth-related deaths among white women as a result of abortion stood at one in four in New York City in the early 1960s, the number was one in two for nonwhite and Puerto Rican women.

Born out of this predicament was the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, also known as the Jane Collective, founded by Heather Booth as an underground service headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The main goal of the “Service,” as it became known, was to assist women in gaining access to safe and affordable abortions. Many women who were part of Jane were taught to perform abortions for others in need and did so successfully without a medical license. 

Laura Kaplan, a member of Jane and author of “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” was not surprised when Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law one of the country’s strictest abortion rules, banning the procedure from as early as six weeks into pregnancy, but she was angry: “I am outraged by this, but even more than Texas, I am the most angry at the Supreme Court’s decision to let this blatantly unconstitutional ruling stand.”

The six-week mark stipulated by the new legislation means that many women will be barred from accessing abortion services before they even realize they are pregnant. The legislators went a step further by incentivizing private citizens to report and sue providers or anyone helping a woman get an abortion for $10,000.

Under the new law, the government doesn’t enforce the bill — the private citizens of Texas do. This provision was designed to make the law harder to contest in court, but lawsuits are expected. The US Department of Justice has already mounted a legal challenge, positing that it stands “in open defiance of the Constitution.”

At the same time, several Latin American countries are loosening their restrictions on abortions. “Predominantly Catholic countries like Argentina and Mexico are making progress, while we are moving backwards,” says Kaplan. 

Could there be a return of Jane in Texas now that abortion rights are being curtailed? “Women are not going to let women suffer,” says Kaplan. “We didn’t back then.” Starting in 1969, Jane groups popped up all over the country, with women finding their way to one of the services when they were in need.

After New York state legalized abortion, it changed the landscape. White middle-class women could get on a plane and get to New York, but it meant that many young, poor and many women of color were left behind. Kaplan thinks history may repeat itself: “Women with the most need didn’t have access to abortion and that will happen again.”

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It’s important to note that after abortion was legalized, less than 0.3% of women, regardless of age, experienced serious complications post-procedure. If the real debate is about the preservation of life — and, indeed, the sanctity of life — we have to look beyond the life of the developing fetus and to the life of the mother as well. 

Any rational policy should look at promoting access to birth control and prioritizing the health of the mother by assuring that she has access to safe procedures. Outlawing abortion doesn’t work — the story of the Jane Collective has shown that. It won’t change people’s motivation to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

As a democratic society, we don’t want to throw ourselves back to an underworld that offers subpar care, creates a greater public health problem and endangers the health of women.

*[The Wider Lens provides commentary on trending stories in the world of health, covering a wide variety of topics in medicine and health care.]

The post Return of Jane: Would Stricter Rules Bring Back Illegal Abortion? appeared first on Fair Observer.

For most of the 20^th century, Westerners had one word to sum up any thoughts they may have had about China: inscrutable. Several decades of globalization have radically changed that perception. Fully integrated into the world economy, China plays a dominant role today and is expected to become the world’s largest economy by the end of the decade. Westerners may find it worrisome, but they no longer see China as inscrutable.

For Western thinkers, when an entity finds its place in a system, the system’s structured categories serve to situate and ultimately define the substance of the entity. Now that China is subjected to the rules of the global economy, analysts believe they understand it. Influenced by the analytical model inherited from Aristotle’s metaphysics that distinguishes between substance (or essence) and accidence (or variable features), today’s analysts dismiss anything that the system cannot account for as accidents. Accidents can always be corrected in the name of efficiency. 

Despite its manifest peculiarities, for Westerners China has become a member of the tribe. Analysts assess its behavior according to the rules and laws of the tribe. For the past two centuries, beginning with David Ricardo and Karl Marx, Western thinkers have tended to reduce their understanding of social reality to economic relationships. In so doing, they fail to build into their model two dimensions they relegate to the category of Aristotelian accidence: culture and politics.

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At best, the analysts attribute to culture and politics a supporting role in the great cause of economic organization. They fail to notice that cultures not only differ in the way they treat time, space and social relations but also in how they measure value. In particular, they neglect the value cultures attribute to the individual and collective patterns of behavior that form the basis of political systems. This leads to major errors of interpretation. We can see the result in failed military campaigns, from Vietnam to the Middle East. Similar failures occur in the domain of economics.

As if to illustrate the principle, the European Chamber of Commerce has just produced a report expressing its severe critique of what it sees as the erroneous path China’s President Xi Jinping appears to be taking. The august institution, focused on the logic of trade, believes that some of Xi’s salient measures violate a totally rational rulebook that members of the global economic community must always abide by.

Reuters reports that in reaction to Xi’s current campaign for “common prosperity,” aiming to reduce wealth inequality in China, the chamber recommends that “China should abandon a top-level strategy promoted by President Xi Jinping to increase self-reliance, or risk harming innovation and growth prospects.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Self-reliance:

In Western thought, a virtue for individuals and a vice for nations

Contextual Note

Addressing the same topic, Stephen McDonell, the BBC’s correspondent in Beijing, offers a slightly different analysis, one that seeks to explore certain cultural factors. McDonell cites some of the salient features of  Xi’s “common prosperity” program. “Under this banner,” he writes, “targeting tax evasion by the wealthy makes more sense, as do moves to make education more equitable by banning private tutoring companies. The ongoing crackdown on the country’s tech giants can also be seen as part of the plan.”

Unlike the European Chamber of Commerce that worries about the violation of capitalist orthodoxy, McDonell acknowledges a certain coherence in the Chinese plan. He cites the historical reality of the “chasm of income disparity” that has provoked Xi’s initiative.

It’s a criterion that has meaning even in the West, where people have been grappling with the realization that modern capitalism, refashioned by the neoliberals since the 1980s, has produced an increasingly obscene and unmanageable wealth gap that appears built into the system’s logic.

Economists such as Thomas Piketty have focused on that question while going beyond mere economics to take on board the cultural and political (or ideological) underpinnings of the phenomenon.

The thought of most commentators on the economy typically stumbles over its own cultural logic. Like the European Chamber of Commerce, McDonell himself fails to make the cultural leap and relies on Western criteria to complete his analysis. He notes that Xi’s authoritarianism allows him to rewrite the rules at any given moment.

Then he asks the $64,000-question Western analysts always consider fundamental: “How can anybody reliably make investment decisions if they don’t know what the ground rules will be in a month’s time?”

Historical Note

McDonell’s question makes immediate sense for his Western readers since the notions of investment and risk are at the core of all thinking about the economy. But in his own potted summary of the history of communist China’s economic ideology, the BBC journalist offers a number of clues that would explain why this question troubles the Chinese far less than anyone in the West. 

McDonell points to the Chinese government’s management of the narrative around its “concept of socialism.” During its phase of integration into the global capitalist economy, the government “put its faith in trickle-down economics.” McDonell then raises a serious question. “So does Xi Jinping really believe in this idea of a communist project?”

In other words, China painfully shifted from Mao Zedong’s totalitarian version of Marxist doctrine to Milton Friedman’s trickle-down economics under Deng Xiaoping, inaugurating a period of prosperity. Does it make any sense to imagine it might shift again, this time to a new version of Marxist egalitarianism?

To answer this question, McDonell delves into the history of Xi himself and that of his father, who was jailed in 1978 for his commitment to economic liberalization. This allows him to puzzle over the question of whether Xi’s apparent conversion to communist ideals is sincere or merely opportunistic. 

In August, the Daily Devil’s Dictionary suggested that Xi’s motivation might simply be the desire to “remake his image as a populist hero at home” in an effort to consolidate his power and ward off the risk of a future winter of discontent. Most commentators now agree that the “common prosperity” reforms are the real thing and not just political rhetoric.

That explains why the European Chamber of Commerce appears worried. It also explains why the BBC is dedicating a three-part series to elucidate “how Beijing is rewriting the rules of doing business and the global implications of this.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times quoted former US government analyst Christopher Johnson, who pertinently observed that “Xi sees doing something on income inequality and the wealth gap in China as vital in this struggle of global narratives with the U.S. and the West in general.” This dimension of the question adds interest to the drama currently playing out in the US Congress concerning President Biden’s $3.5-trillion infrastructure bill.

Some Republicans see this as proof that Biden is a Marxist. If adopted, the bill would contribute to limiting the huge and widening wealth gap, but it would not attempt to reign in the power of finance and Big Tech, as Xi’s plan intends to do. There is a strong likelihood that Congress will reject the Biden plan. Democracy seems to be having trouble competing with autocracy.

There is another irony in this story about China’s goal of self-reliance. In US culture, self-reliance is a core value. It has come to be identified with capitalism itself and has spawned the culture of individualism that dominates the Western world. The myth of the self-made man sums up the spirit of individualistic capitalism.

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Chinese culture has always rejected self-reliance. While it values prosperity as a goal, Chinese culture sees it as the result of a collective effort, not of individual initiative. One achieves prosperity through one’s family and guanxi, or network of relations, but never on one’s own.

The European Chamber of Commerce fears that a nation representing 20% of humanity might decide to go it alone, not because that would be a bad thing in itself, but because it would remove one-fifth of the world’s trade from the global marketplace. They claim it would stifle innovation. But its effect would more likely be to disrupt the thinking of those who see humanity as collections of individual consumers of standardized products. After all, for Western economists, every self defines itself by what it consumes and how it produces profit for others.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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When he was trying to win the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon famously told his chief of staff that he wanted Communist leaders — in the Soviet Union, in North Vietnam — to think that the US president was a mad man, that he was capable of doing pretty much anything up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. Fear of an unpredictable, erratic leader would bring the communists to the negotiating table and render them more conciliatory.

Nixon’s was, of course, a calculated craziness. “When the wind is southerly,” Tricky Dick certainly could distinguish “a hawk from a handsaw,” as Hamlet famously put it.

Half a century later, America has had to deal with a different kind of crazy in the White House. Although Donald Trump has insisted that he’s a “stable genius,” all the evidence suggests otherwise. After Trump lost the 2020 election, even those in his close circle of advisers began to question the president’s sanity. There was a distinct possibility that a real mad man now held the reins of power and that he was willing to do pretty much anything to stay in the Oval Office, up to and including a coup.

Competing Doctrines in a New Cold War

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Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was one of the most prominent members of this group of the concerned. In their new book, “I Alone Can Fix This,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report how Milley considered Trump’s declaration of fraud after the November elections a “Reichstag moment,” with the president potentially using false charges of electoral misconduct to subvert the democratic process and remain in charge. Milley began to strategize on how to prevent Trump from using the military toward that end.

According to another recent book, “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Milley went further. On two occasions, just before the elections and after the January 6 insurrection, he called his Chinese counterpart to provide reassurances that the United States wasn’t planning on starting a war. He also told advisers to keep him informed of any presidential decisions around the use of nuclear weapons.

Those specific dangers have passed. Trump is out of the White House. The right-wing coup didn’t take place. But now Milley, who has continued on in his position into the Biden administration, finds himself at the center of controversy because of these recent revelations. Trump, not surprisingly, has called Milley’s actions “treasonous,” a charge repeated by Republican politicians and the right-wing media as part of their demand that Milley be fired.

The Vindman Argument

Almost everyone else has been quietly relieved that someone like Milley was in place to put a policy straitjacket on the madman in the Oval Office. Interestingly, it’s not just right-wing lunatics who have voiced reservations about Milley.

Alexander Vindman came to public attention during the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. Here was military rectitude personified: a lieutenant colonel working at the National Security Council who went through all the proper channels to voice his concern about the pressure Trump was putting on Ukraine to launch an investigation into corruption charges involving Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Vindman gave testimony twice to Congress at great personal cost. When the Senate acquitted Trump, Vindman was booted off the National Security Council and forced out of the Army as well. Here, in other words, was someone who threw himself into the line of fire in order to call attention to presidential misconduct. You’d think he’d feel some affinity for Mark Milley. Not so.

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Vindman argues that Milley should have simply resigned. He should have “publicly expressed his concerns and joined other senior leaders, including Cabinet officials, who stepped down after Jan. 6, which would have been a proactive move against further abuse of power,” Vindman maintains. “Instead, the reporting suggests, Milley blustered to subordinates, raised grave concerns with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, sometime in the same period, sought to circumvent or subvert the chain of command.”

But wait, wouldn’t resignation have given Donald Trump exactly what he wanted, an opportunity to replace Milley with someone more pliable? Vindman disagrees: “I am befuddled by the notion that only Milley was standing between a madman and Armageddon. That is the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. That is not the way the U.S. military operates. Any one of the other chiefs of staff or the vice chairman would have stepped up and continued to serve as a guardrail.”

This all sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny. Let’s first address the China question. Military officials routinely contact their counterparts as part of efforts to avoid war and deescalate conflict. “I didn’t consider that abnormal at all,” former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen said about Milley’s communications with Chinese officials.

Now let’s add some information from The Post columnist Josh Rogin to the effect that Milley wasn’t acting alone. Pentagon chief Mark Esper, who was also reaching out to China with reassurances, even went so far as to delay the deployment of US ships as part of a planned exercise to make sure that the Chinese got the message.

Exceptional Circumstance

OK, then what about Milley’s insistence that he be involved in any decision to use nuclear weapons? In The Washington Post, Carrie Lee portrays this action as a breach of the chain of command, because a mere adviser to the president like Milley does not have such authority. US presidents can unilaterally order a nuclear attack and the rockets will fly a few minutes later.

But Milley’s intervention wasn’t unprecedented. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger did something similar late in Nixon’s term when he was worried that the president had gone well beyond playing crazy and had descended into despondency and drunkenness. 

Garrett Graff writes in Politico: “Defense Secretary James Schlesinger recalled years later that in the final days of the Nixon presidency he had issued an unprecedented set of orders: If the president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon.”

As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, Milley didn’t go as far as Schlesinger. He only asked to be consulted, which he was fully entitled to do.

Let’s face it: This unilateral launch authority is insane. Just because such a mechanism was established during the Cold War doesn’t mean that it should endure. By all means, let’s have a reasonable discussion about how to constrain this power of the president. But in the meantime, let’s not insist on protocol in the exceptional circumstance that the president goes off the rails.

By Carrie Lee’s argument, Stanislav Petrov should have been fired for defying the requirements of the chain of command. In 1983, sitting in a bunker near Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was obligated to notify his superiors that nuclear missiles were on their way toward the Soviet Union. The computer system monitoring incoming attacks provided him with not one but five separate warnings. But Petrov hesitated to confirm the attacks because something felt wrong about the notifications.

As it turned out, the computer had made a mistake. Fortunately, Petrov did not blindly follow protocol.

The same argument concerning “exceptional circumstances” and “gut instincts” applies to Milley’s outreach to domestic politicians around his fears of a coup. It was on November 10 that Milley felt his presentiments of a possible putsch. The occasion was a security briefing on a “Million MAGA March,” which would draw thousands of Trump supporters to Washington five days later.

This mid-November march turned out to be a dud in terms of turnout. But on November 10, the situation was perilous. The president, refusing to concede the election, was making unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Earlier that summer, Trump had talked about putting Milley in charge of a military crackdown on civil rights protests and bruited the possibility of shooting demonstrators, all of which Milley pushed back against.

A month after the elections, Trump himself would toy with the idea of declaring martial law to overturn the results. And, of course, on January 6, a MAGA march turned into an authentic insurrection. So, yes, Trump was increasingly out of control and dictatorial. Milley was not imagining things.

Milley made the decision to talk to policymakers on both sides of the aisle. And what was his message? Did he rally the anti-Trump forces? Did he come up with his own plot to counter what Christopher Caldwell, in a frankly ridiculous piece in The New York Times, dismisses as little more than “mayhem”?

No, Milley had a different message. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he told the policymakers. “We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America. It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t break.” In other words, Milley was promising an anodyne adherence to the rule of law, not its subversion.

Institutional Craziness

A madman is, by definition, someone who is not playing by the rules. But what happens when the rules themselves are mad? The president’s unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons is one such example of institutionalized insanity. The two-decade war in Afghanistan was another case of extended craziness. And what of the decision, year after year, to bestow upon the Pentagon another $700 billion when so many urgent needs are not being met at home and abroad?

Mark Milley’s record of standing up to that kind of crazy is not so good. He’d never previously questioned nuclear protocols (that I know of). He tried to persuade Biden to keep US troops in Afghanistan in an emotional but not terribly substantive appeal earlier this year. He has never shown any Eisenhower-like skepticism of the military-industrial complex.

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It took considerable courage to stand up to Trump and his coterie of yes-men in the waning days of that presidency. I’m glad that someone was available at the time who knew how to put on a straitjacket and tie it tight.

But right now, this country needs a different kind of courage to address a different kind of crazy. We dodged the bullet of a military coup. But we’re still dealing with the reality of a military that has way too much money and way too much power. The military stood up to Trump, but who will stand up to the military?

*[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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In recent months, I have had the privilege of helping curate an exhibition, “This Fascist Life: Radical Right Movements in Interwar Europe,” which is running from October 2021 to February 2022 at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Just as the Science Museum’s new show, “Our Future Planet,” promises to inspire us to become climate activists and more and more museums are trying to “decolonize” their offering by exposing how imperialism shaped their collections and our society as a whole, “This Fascist Life” aims to help visitors understand the radical right in order to combat it.

Pax Romana, a Fascist Peace

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You’ve probably seen Nazi flags, war medals and photos of Benito Mussolini before, but that is not what this exhibition is all about. Rather than focus on fascist regimes, with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich taking pride of place as the epitome of all evil, “This Fascist Life” focuses on fascist movements — radical-right groups that rarely seized power but nonetheless encouraged mainstream politicians to adopt racist and chauvinistic policies, transforming city streets into arenas of fighting and bloodshed.

Displays of Fascism

So much of British national identity has been shaped by the war against Nazi Germany that it is easy to forget that the United Kingdom had its fascists as well. Newspapers, printing blocks and sheet music from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are on display, alongside material from the Britons’ Publishing House and the Imperial Fascist League.

Many of the objects are from the Wiener Holocaust Library’s own collection, while others come from the Searchlight Archives at the University of Northampton or were purchased specifically for the exhibition. The widespread popularity of the blackshirts, as Mosley supporters were known, in Britain and the blueshirts in Ireland reminds us how easily radical-right movements were able to mobilize men and women who were disgruntled by poverty and taxes, and felt that their national values were being undermined by internationalism and humanitarianism.

Racism and anti-Semitism played their part too, and the books and pamphlets on display are full of hate speech toward Jews and immigrants.

Every country in Europe had one — usually several — fascist movements in the 1930s. Chauvinism and an ideology of national rebirth were not the only motivating forces that attracted people to join. In fact, in many cases, movements existed for several years before publishing substantial ideological statements. For war veterans and young men, fascist movements often provided an excuse to socialize with friends and possibly to have a bit of fun by beating up communists and Jews or by vandalizing a synagogue.

These movements gave young women a chance to get involved in political systems that otherwise excluded them while still displaying the conservative cultural values they cherished, turning their backs on left-wing ideologies such as feminism.

Fascists promoted sport and physical fitness as the key to creating the “new men” who would rule their countries in the future. Joining thus involved playing football, cycling, boxing, gymnastics or basketball, and movements in Britain and France ran summer camps and sporting competitions for their members. Uniforms — in some cases homemade — transformed fascists into walking advertisements for their movements, and they paraded through city streets demonstrating their strength and unity.

Transnational Phenomenon

Reflecting recent trends in historical research on fascism, the exhibition emerges out of a collaborative project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that brings together experts on interwar fascism in 18 different countries across Europe. Specialists on Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Romania and Sweden are giving talks at the library in conjunction with the exhibition, showing that fascism was a truly transnational phenomenon in the interwar years.

Even while they claimed to be fighting to put their own countries first, fascists wrote to fascists in other countries, traveled to meet them, shared news in right-wing magazines and organized international conferences for the radical right. When the Second World War broke out, fascists in many countries collaborated in the mass murder of Jews and Roma that became known as the Holocaust.

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Whereas so often pictures and films of Nazi rallies at Nuremberg or of shouting crowds in Italy make fascism seem surreal or from another world, the images, objects, books, newspapers and posters on display in the “This Fascist Life” exhibition bring us back to reality. Fascists met in villages as well as cities, attracted the young and the old, men and women, workers and artists, peaceful patriots and violent thugs.

People joined for a variety of reasons, many of them petty, and became swept up in the excitement of movements that promised to create whole new worlds on top of the ruins of this one.

The Wiener Holocaust Library’s mission is “to oppose antisemitism and other forms of prejudice and intolerance … through an active educational programme.” Understanding the attraction and tactics of fascist movements in their heyday provides us with the knowledge and tools we need to diffuse the power of the radical right in the 21^st century.

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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On August 31, President Joe Biden formally drew to a close the war in Afghanistan, touting “the extraordinary success” of the withdrawal of US troops after 20 years of fighting. Despite the incorrect “assumption — that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown,” Biden noted he had “instructed our national security team to prepare for every eventuality — even that one.” Yes, that’s right: The chaos we witnessed in the scramble to leave Kabul was all part of a plan.

In the speech, there was, of course, the now-customary blame spread between the Afghan government and former President Donald Trump, but Biden did say that he “takes responsibility for the decision” to evacuate 100,000 Afghans, thereby implicitly distancing himself from the messy withdrawal itself.

Apparently deciding to withdraw all US troops is one thing, the consequences of that decision, another. Americans were assured that ties with our international partners were strengthening. Biden even spoke of the United Nations Security Council passing a resolution carrying a “clear message” that laid out international expectations for the Taliban.

Biden’s Misjudgments in Afghanistan

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But by the time he did so, the president had already relinquished any leverage the US might employ to make those prospects real. No doubt the Taliban sat upright when they heard a threat as empty as those Washington had made to the Houthis in Yemen, who have paid them rapt attention.

Appearing a little defensive, President Biden underlined: “Let me be clear: Leaving August the 31^st is not due to an arbitrary deadline; it was designed to save American lives.” This implies that the original withdrawal date of September 11 was decidedly non-arbitrary—  before the withdrawal descended into bedlam.

Biden, who campaigned on his foreign policy experience and the global relationships he had cultivated over his long career, now finds himself saddled with a fiasco that has been compared to the US withdrawal from Vietnam and will be remembered for bodies in free fall, eerily reminiscent of 9/11.

While President Biden and his supporters say this was inevitable and the decision to withdraw forces was made out of necessity, the broader view suggests that misjudgment, mishandling and a lack of foresight were the culprits of the botched evacuation.

A Series of Missteps

When the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was announced by then-President Trump, NATO partners felt blindsided. At the time of Biden’s withdrawal announcement, 35 other NATO member states, led by Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, collectively had approximately 7,000 personnel in Afghanistan, according to official figures. They were understandably angry at not being consulted.

After Biden became president, a review by his administration reaffirmed the withdrawal, also without consulting with allies. While assurances of regional US support force were proffered, few doubted assets outside Afghanistan would be substantially less effective than America’s in-country posture. Where could the naysayers have developed such an idea? Perhaps they were listening to what our own military was saying at the time.

On April 20, Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie Jr. addressed the difficulties of an “over-the-horizon” approach when he said at a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee that “It’s difficult to [strike a target] at range — but it’s not impossible to do that at range.” General McKenzie also said of post-withdrawal peacekeeping and power-projection capabilities: “I don’t want to make light of it. I don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses and say it’s going to be easy to do.”

Leading up to the hearing, on April 9, the director of National Intelligence released a report that contained “the collective insights of the Intelligence Community,” stating that “prospects for a peace deal will remain low during the next year” because “the Taliban is confident it can achieve military victory.” In bold lettering, the report made clear that “the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.”

Two months later, in mid-June, an assessment prepared at the request of General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Kabul could fall six months after the US military left.

Almost from the moment the withdrawal encountered problems, the president alluded to inaccurate intelligence estimates, but weaknesses in the withdrawal plans became evident early on. Indeed, signs emerged in classified assessments sent over the summer that things were not going well.

The most damning of these was a State Department dissent cable, signed by 23 embassy officials and sent on July 13, that described the Taliban’s movement and the impending collapse of the Afghan government. Although the cable was immediately reviewed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, it was largely ignored. 

In addressing the dissent cable, President Biden concluded this assessment was outside the broader consensus, but even the rosiest estimates maintained the Afghan government would fall in 18 to 24 months — just long enough for a September 11 commemoration and the mid-term elections.

The most optimistic estimate tacitly acknowledged that the Taliban would capture remaining US weapons and supplies, and that forfeiture of materiel to the enemy was inevitable. In effect, the decision to pull out consciously contemplated the inadvertent arming of the Taliban within no more than two years.

Between Nation Building and Giving Up

Oft stated, though, it is that the speed of Taliban advance was unanticipated, that intelligence agencies were equally caught off guard by the departure on July 12 of the top US commander, General Scott Miller. Perhaps most shocking to the intelligence community and US allies was the withdrawal from the Bagram Air Base on July 2, in the dead of night and without notifying its new Afghan commander.

This had enormously destabilizing consequences, especially on Afghan military capabilities and morale. Intelligence agencies were put in the position of having to guess not only what the Taliban and the Afghan government would do, but also what decisions President Biden would make.

Abandoning Bagram, which had two runways as opposed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport’s one, was shocking to many. To reduce the number of US soldiers required to defend the embassy and the airlift, operations were limited to the HKIA. This consolidation was later seen as an error, but the military preference for keeping Bagram with its larger, more defensible perimeter became infeasible because of troop constraints placed by Washington.

Blindly optimistic despite signs of looming problems, Biden maintained on July 8 that “The Taliban is not … the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy … of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Biden’s statement was buttressed by a false choice: either walk away from Afghanistan or stay in a situation that would, as the president described it, add casualties and put “American men and women back in the middle of a civil war,” meaning that the US “would have run the risk of having to send more troops back into Afghanistan to defend our remaining troops.”

As Congressman Dan Crenshaw pointed out, “There are a lot of foreign policy options between nation building and giving up. We found the proper balance in recent years — maintaining a small force that propped up the Afghan government while also giving us the capability to strike at Taliban and other terrorist networks as needed.”

Vulnerabilities grew as contractors withdrew, removing air support that had been the lifeblood of the Afghan military. With the Afghan army unable to resupply and pay forces, particularly those at the edge of the Taliban’s advances, morale imploded. On August 13, John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, stated that the Afghan military still held advantages against the Taliban, notably, “a capable air force.”

But by early July, reports had already come in that Taliban fighters were executing pilots, and the Pentagon still had not formulated a plan to keep Afghan aviators flying after US withdrawal. Recognizing the air-power advantage was all for naught once the planes stopped flying, a mere three weeks before he fled Kabul, then-President Ashraf Ghani pled with Biden for air support — to no avail.

Dwindling food and munitions, a lack of reserve support and tardy soldier pay all contributed to reduced capabilities and a weakened willingness to fight. In some cases, the Taliban would offer government fighters safe passage and the equivalent of a month’s salary to lay down their arms. Whatever plan was in place, it is now clear that the issue was not one of “a perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan … that things aren’t going well,” as Biden suggested to Ghani. Once the Afghan military lost air support, it was lights out.

Political Choices

Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed he had no choice but to comply with Trump’s deal signed with the Taliban in Doha last year, but it wasn’t at all obvious he was committed to that course of action when he ordered a review of the withdrawal. His own secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, visited Afghanistan in mid-March, saying he was there “to listen and learn,” promising that “It’ll inform my participation in the review that we’re undergoing with the president.”

Biden has reversed Trump’s policies in many other areas, making changes that have led to a surge of immigration at the southern border, setting a two-decade record. He has rejoined the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement, and is seeking to negotiate a deal with Iran similar to the discarded Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Leaving Afghan Allies Behind Is a Threat to US Security

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If, as this administration maintains, the US left Afghanistan because the Taliban have been weekend over decades of war and it was a time to seek an exit, why is Washington negotiating with Iranians who chant “death to America” at every turn and are more capable than ever?

Prior to the August 26 explosion at Kabul’s airport that killed over 170 civilians and 13 American service members, there had been no US combat fatalities in Afghanistan since February 2, 2020. That, alongside the choice of an emotionally significant withdrawal date of September 11, suggests that the decision was a largely symbolic political statement and the plans for how to execute this mission were engineered backward with devastating consequences.

A US force amounting to 2,500 — or 3,500, as per European and Afghan officials — was a small footprint, yet it held valuable assets such as the Bagram airfield, strategically located between eastern Iran and western Pakistan. Giving up those assets, in conjunction with the collapse of the Afghan government, led to a substantial reduction in US intelligence capabilities by early July, a trend that has only accelerated to the point that the US has now lost 90% of its intelligence collection capabilities.

In a mountainous, disparate place like Afghanistan, where the tribal loyalties are fierce, the human component is everything. Over-the-horizon strikes seldom work, particularly if you don’t know who the target is — or should be.

The likelihood of creating a terrorist safe haven seems to grow by the day. Weighted against damage to US credibility and prestige, not to mention the threat to the homeland, it is hard to imagine how a nominal support force could not be justified, considering the much greater deployment of US troops in places like Germany and South Korea.

If the objective is to withdraw from “forever wars,” then why pull so few soldiers from an unstable part of the world where the Taliban and al-Qaeda (who the US Department of Defense say keep a cozy relationship) plot against the West only to leave tens of thousands of troops stationed residually from World War II and the Korean War? If the objective is to maintain stability, as it appears to be in South Korea, then why abandon the progress made in Afghanistan?

Inconsistent Principles

Some have praised President Biden for the consistency — others would say obstinacy — of his decision, but the principle of withdrawal and the manner in which it was conducted has been inconsistently applied. In the primary debate in October 2020, then-candidate Biden had this to say about the Trump administration’s decision to pull out troops from Syria that undermined the position of America’s Kurdish allies:

“I would not have withdrawn the troops and I would not have withdrawn the additional thousand troops who are in Iraq…

It has been the most shameful thing that any president has done in modern history — excuse me, in terms of foreign policy. And the fact of the matter is, I’ve never seen a time — and I’ve spent thousands of hours in the Situation Room, I’ve spent many hours on the ground in those very places, in Syria and in Iraq, and guess what? Our commanders across the board, former and present, are ashamed of what’s happening here.“

In a speech in Iowa the same month, Biden blasted Trump for creating a humanitarian crisis and undermining national security. “The events of this past week … have had devastating clarity on just how dangerous he is to our national security, to our leadership around the world and to the lives of the brave women and men serving in uniform.” Trump, he said, “sold out” the Kurds and gave the Islamic State (IS) “a new lease on life.”

“Donald Trump, I believe — it’s not comfortable to say this about a president — but he is a complete failure as a commander in chief,” Biden said. “He’s the most reckless and incompetent commander in chief we’ve ever had.”

The White House appears to be reeling from the uniformly negative coverage, but more than a few must be thinking, “Et tu, Biden?” While the president rejects criticism of his Afghanistan departure and shows no signs of altering his position, America’s weakened posture in the world is being exploited by its enemies.

Already the Chinese, the Russians and the Iranians are asking countries to question US reliability. Moscow has objected to setting up US military bases outside Afghanistan that might have effected a less chaotic withdrawal. Meanwhile, China, no doubt giddy at seeing US forces vacate Bagram just across their border and likely eager to control it themselves, seized a propitious moment to threaten Taiwan, suggesting resistance to reunification is futile.

If the withdrawal from Afghanistan is to “focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations,” then the US should seize upon the opportunity to reassure Taiwan and reiterate our constancy. Thus far, we have only heard posturing as Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, seeks nods for his cause against China’s intractable “two lists and three bottom lines” that would have Washington abandon its allies in democratic Taiwan.

All We Left Behind

When met with concerns about partners questioning America’s credibility on the world stage, Biden deflected by saying: “The fact of the matter is I have not seen that. Matter of fact, the exact opposite … we’re acting with dispatch … committing to what we said we would do.” The president appears not to be watching much TV or reading the news. According to numerous reports, America’s NATO allies are furious, and snubbing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson isn’t winning him any more friends in the “mother of parliaments.”

Meanwhile, Europe, Pakistan, India and others are worried about terrorists entering the regional vacuum, not to mention fleeing Afghan refugees looking for a haven at a time when the absorption of Syrian refugees has strained government resources. Many of these countries are anticipating another massive influx of refugees. As for those the US has evacuated, conditions were reportedly squalid and, according to an email from supervisory special agent Colin Sullivan, “are of our own doing.”

Although conventional thought by the administration held a swift withdrawal would prevent greater destabilization to the government of Afghanistan, it was fanciful to maintain we could get everyone out in such haste. A now-common complaint by president Biden’s defenders is that the US didn’t start evacuating Afghan allies when Trump ordered the withdrawal. Yet that is wholly inconsistent with what Biden did.

While Biden announced the withdrawal on April 14, the airlift did not begin until July 30, and the withdrawal deadline was moved from September 11 to a more politically palatable but hastier August 31. Since then, cable news and any number of articles have focused on those the US left behind, including an Afghan who served as an interpreter and rescued Biden when his helicopter was stranded during a snowstorm in 2008.

The administration prefers to focus on the hundreds of US citizens who still remain in Afghanistan, but how many special immigrant visa (SIV) holders or those who “earned them” through their bravery and assistance have been left behind? By some estimates, a quarter of a million Afghans helped the US during the war, and rumors now circulate that the Russians are collecting the data of all calls going to the US that is being handed over to the Taliban.

The Taliban is not known for paying friendly courtesy calls. Secretary Blinken recently said that we have “now learned from hard experience that the SIV process was not designed to be done in an evacuation emergency.” But how to square that with repeated complaints from the administration about the SIV backlog and the 14 steps required to gain one or the delay between announcing withdrawal and airlifting people out? All of this seems to make US departure appear at once precipitous and callous.

A Common Excuse

A common excuse made by the Biden administration is that many people do not want to leave. This was echoed time and again, but it conflicts with the thousands of people who have assisted with private efforts to extract America’s friends. Whatever the reasons for the poorly executed withdrawal, for those who did make it out, thanks may be given not necessarily to the US government but to the informal band of wealthy donors, veterans and CIA analysts who formed groups such as the Commercial Task Force in the Peacock Lounge of the Willard Hotel.

In that one instance, about 5,000 people were evacuated. Other groups have sprung up to guide refugees to safety or give them passwords to write on posters that would help them gain entry to the airport. Biden acknowledged the “network of volunteers,” and although many do not like hearing it, these groups have in many ways been more effective with fewer resources than the federal efforts.

Afghanistan: A Final Nail in the Coffin of American Foreign Policy

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For all of the president’s attempts to claim that “we planned for every contingency” and that “the buck stops with me,” the private efforts were no less necessary in the face of a self-reinforcing view that an ill-conceived, poorly-executed plan during the fighting season is proof of its necessity. When Biden said on August 16 that “the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision,” it was a justification as inversely logical as the withdrawal.

While there were no helicopters on the roof of our embassy, officials there were nevertheless evacuated in situ. Originally, the Pentagon maintained that the embassy evacuation was “a very narrowly focused, temporary mission to facilitate the safe and orderly departure of additional civilian personnel from the State Department. … Once this mission is over … we anticipate having less than 1,000 U.S. troops on the ground to support the diplomatic presence in Kabul, which we all agree we still want to be able to have.”

We now know the embassy, one of America’s largest, is shuttered, with Taliban graffiti scrawled on it, and policy is run out of Qatar. While Biden is unlikely to have any “mission accomplished” signs up, US efforts have been reduced to “a new diplomatic mission” that will apparently work in concert with the Taliban.

As it stands now, the Taliban head the government in Kabul, Islamic State Khorasan is making moves, US “collaborators” are being hunted down and the Haqqani Network is ascendent. It is striking to hear the same people who cite the $2-trillion cost of the war in Afghanistan are also those who push for the abandonment of US labors, willfully or otherwise ignoring the promise of a renewed terrorist safe haven.

It does not take much imagination to picture the Biden administration in the same position that President Barack Obama found himself in when he pulled out of Iraq. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz reminds us: “Mr. Biden should have known to expect this because something similar happened 10 years ago when we withdrew our forces from Iraq. Lacking U.S. air support and advisory capabilities on which the Iraqi army had grown to depend, it collapsed under an assault by Islamic State. Three years after the withdrawal, President Obama had to rush 1,500 troops back to Iraq to assist in the fight to drive out ISIS. By 2016 that number had grown to 5,000.”

A Question of Competence

Criticism assails President Biden from all quarters, with a few observing that he had planned a 10-day vacation to Camp David as the withdrawal was reaching a crescendo. Top Obama adviser, David Axelrod, has said: “you cannot defend the execution here. This has been a disaster. … It is heartbreaking, it is depressing, and it’s a failure. And he needs to own that failure.”

Nor is Biden finding many friends among former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, and Princeton’s Robert George, both of whom have some unflattering opinions that echo that of Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Secretary Gates wrote that Biden is someone who has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Trust in America and in Joe Biden’s judgment is at a low ebb, and it is difficult to understand how the president developed a reputation for competence. On July 8, he said that “The mission was accomplished in that we … got Osama bin Laden, and terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world.” This elides the fact that it was Biden who dissented in planning the operation that would kill bin Laden.

While Biden was not right about bin Laden, bin Laden might have been correct about Biden. When deciding not to target Biden when he was vice president, bin Laden described him as “totally unprepared for that post [of president], which will lead the US into a crisis.” Contrary to the president’s belief, it also seems that terrorism may soon be “emanating from that part of the world” again.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of blame to go around. A commander in the Afghan army, General Sami Sadat, has kind words for neither Biden nor Trump, nor did former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster pull any punches when he said in mid-August that “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

Indeed, President Trump’s former defense secretary, Mark Esper, called the Doha agreement with the Taliban “conditions-based” and said Trump “undermined” his own plan when the drawdown continued despite a lack of progress by the Taliban on the agreement’s provisions. The Biden administration would have been well within its right to renegotiate the drawdown in light of the Taliban’s unwillingness to honor its end of the bargain.

What Biden had hoped would be an orderly, triumphant return of the US military — a hope still maintained by the Department of Defense as late as July 6 — turned into the posturing fecklessness of a nakedly political stunt.

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Biden has repeatedly telegraphed his punch with, however awkwardly denied, artificial deadlines that were tethered to very little outside of political opportunism. This was never more obvious than when September 11 was set as the withdrawal deadline. In choosing that date, his hand was tipped, and a plan to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan was revealed as a political stunt, an unnecessary capitulation masquerading as destiny, vainglory turned tragedy.

An Ignominious Retreat

The Economist writes of the US withdrawal: “If the propagandists of the Taliban had scripted the collapse of America’s 20-year mission to reshape Afghanistan, they could not have come up with more harrowing images” — a withdrawal where “Mr. Biden failed to show even a modicum of care for the welfare of ordinary Afghans.” In the wake of this irresponsible and costly withdrawal, there is a now burning conviction by America’s enemies that if God wills it, their adversaries will be vanquished.

That is a devastatingly effective emotional tool and recruiting argument that all but assures we will see this enemy again in closer quarters. When President Biden paid his respects on September 11, it was against a backdrop of triumphant marches elsewhere for the jihadist cause.

While some may sigh with resignation at the “inevitable” calamity unfolding, they ignore a great number of facts and forget the indiscriminate brutality the US attempted to excise when it entered Afghanistan. They shrug at the lost lives of brave US and Afghan soldiers (2,500 and 66,000 respectively) who fought for that cause. To claim all of this was preordained is to foreclose a possible, if uneasy, calm and greet with resignation — a decidedly un-American trait — the reversion to greater violence and the tribalism that all but precluded loyalty to a central government in Kabul.

To declare the withdrawal just with rhetorical genuflections toward those who died is to forget the sacrifices of the dead, which in many cases were made for causes beyond themselves or even their country. It invites feuding terrorist groups to reconstitute and gain strength.

Accusing the Afghan government of not defending the gains of the past 20 years is at once to blame the victim and to banish the memory of what was there before the US entered and what will surely reappear in its absence. It is to debase women’s lives by accepting as banal the butchery Bibi Aisha survived, whose June 2010 Time magazine cover shocked the world and hung above my desk for years as a reminder of the inhumanity we were fighting.

It is to indict exiled President Ashraf Ghani in the face of impossible odds for remembering history and the fate of another ousted president, Mohammad Najibullah — the last Afghan leader to see the Taliban roll into Kabul in 1996. Najibullah was captured by the Taliban, castrated and, according to Robert Parry, had his severed genitals stuffed in his mouth before being strung up from a lamppost. 

Although it may be said by the current administration that withdrawal was necessary and an earlier, better coordinated drawdown would have destabilized the Afghan government and the country, we have to ask what is more destabilizing: rolling up the carpet or yanking the rug from underneath a mission that brought stability so costly in blood and treasure?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Afghanistan Fiasco: The Buck Stops With Biden appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Daily Devil’s Dictionary will never tire of covering a story about health and sickness that the serious media keeps returning to as if it was a worthy rival of COVID-19. For five years, this story has kept major media’s editorial board buzzing, not because its secrets are being progressively revealed or that it tells us something we need to know about the world we live in, but because, like the gentleman thief, Arsene Lupin, it so intriguingly escapes the increasingly intense efforts the military, scientists and reporters have deployed to bring it to justice.

Competing Doctrines in a New Cold War

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What is this page-turner that has been regularly featured by US media, with two separate cases just in the past month? It’s called the Havana syndrome. Its name suggests a tropical thriller written by Agatha Christie, a case only Hercule Poirot will be able to solve. The reader has no idea how many chapters there will be because they just keep coming, always in a new location. After Cuba, China and even Washington, the latest cases were in Vietnam and now India.

With suspense constantly building, readers of the news eagerly anticipate the day in an unspecified future when they will learn not only the identity of the culprit, Agatha Christie-style, but especially the nature of the weapon itself. The Havana syndrome has effectively replaced in the public’s psyche the much more prosaic mystery of the monster of Loch Ness that enchanted previous generations. In the age of artificial intelligence and terrorist threats, paleozoological mysteries can no longer compete with technological mysteries.

The New York Times covered the elusive conundrum again on September 20. The Times has been on the case persistently in recent years, apparently motivated by the hope that Russia will be identified as the culprit, meaning there may even be a link with Russiagate. The Times follows a now well-established pattern of neo-Cold War logic adapted to the age of Donald Trump. If a villain is hiding in the shadows, Americans have been trained since the Cold War to believe it must be Russia. But that may be changing.

Now, with a new Cold War brewing, suspicion can be transferred to the Chinese. On the other hand, a good detective aware of Mossad’s success at using artificial intelligence (AI) to assassinate an Iranian scientist, might begin to suspect the Israelis. But that wouldn’t even cross the mind of a Times journalist, because the Israelis are friends.

Initially, the victims who complained of the syndrome were low-level diplomats or CIA operatives. But now the stakes have been raised as members of the entourage of high-level officials and seasoned diplomats are being targeted. The Times’ national security reporter, Julian E. Barnes, recounts the latest iteration: “An intelligence officer traveling in India this month with the C.I.A. director reported symptoms consistent with the so-called Havana syndrome, signaling a possible escalation in the mysterious incidents that have affected American officials since 2016, current and former officials said.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Escalation:

A useful military term signifying a sudden deliberate increase of offensive force that creative journalists can apply to non-military situations, suggesting the presence of evil intentions on the part of mysterious actors

Contextual Note

After warning of escalation, Barnes is careful to state what every honest article on the Havana syndrome must acknowledge: that, despite the persistent obsession with Russia, “intelligence agencies have yet to come to any firm conclusions.” In fact, nobody really knows anything. “Theories abound, including that the injuries are byproducts of surveillance technology or that they are deliberate attempts to inflict harm, but all remain unproven so far,” he writes. In other words, nothing new under the sun. So why print the article? Because it reminds readers that they need to be worried and reassures them that the opportunity will exist to tune into the next episode.

The syndrome is a journalist’s dream. It has been called an “act of war,” while at the same time, its mystery is so deep and the facts around it so confusing that even if an article reveals nothing new, it keeps the sense of worry alive. The public needs its daily dose of fear and few stories have the capacity of the Havana syndrome to fulfill that need. A week ago, between reporting the Vietnam incident in August and India’s in September, The New York Times featured an article with the title, “Pentagon Asks Personnel to Report Any Symptoms of Mysterious Ailments.” It served no other purpose than to confirm the need to feel afraid.

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Establishment journalism loves stories that present a continuing series of fear-inspiring facts that no one can make sense of, but about which the hope exists that the political, military and scientific authorities will decipher their meaning and apply a solution. It’s the formula of a Hollywood catastrophe movie. Now, after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the growing realization that military campaigns are doomed not just to fail but also to aggravate the problems they set out to solve, the media need to restore confidence in the government’s and the defense industry’s capacity to respond to less conventional sources of fear.

Historical Note

The world is entering a new phase of history in which human intelligence has less and less access to facts or even authentic emotions. Society requires its media — including social media — to feed it the stories that structure an increasingly artificial understanding of the world. The intelligence of reporters of the news in the media has itself already become artificial. The stories they produce are crafted to the needs of a targeted audience. But soon it will no longer be the dialogue between journalists and their editors in the news bureaus that produces the news we read. AI will more efficiently do both the strategizing and the writing. The journalist’s job will be to find a way of tweaking the story to make it appear human.

In the coming decade, AI will increasingly become the tool nations use to accomplish their strategic goals designed to further their own interests while awaiting the singularity, when AI will dictate and control the purpose of nations themselves. 

Technology is already proving to be the secret to conducting even acts that until now only enterprising humans could accomplish. The New York Times tells the edifying story of “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” perhaps the first high-profile assassination managed and executed by AI.

Israel demonstrated this innovation in November 2020 when it sought to eliminate an Iranian nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Instead of employing its well-trained assassins to carry out the job, it mobilized an AI system to pilot a lethal weapon targeting the scientist.

The Iranians had warned Fakhrizadeh of the constant danger that Israel represented for Iranian scientists. The Times article recounts how Fakhrizadeh refused the very idea of living his life in a state of permanent terror due to threats from a foreign country. The article describes the scientist’s choice of lifestyle in these terms: “Mr. Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. He craved small domestic pleasures: reading Persian poetry, taking his family to the seashore, going for drives in the countryside.”

That sounds innocent enough, but Israel knew there was a job to be done and would not be deterred by sentiments. “Convinced that Mr. Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years,” The Times reports. The fact that Israel was “convinced” in its gut that the scientist was up to evil business was enough to justify mobilizing AI to do a job some human beings might be loath to do.

The Times describes in detail how the Israeli hit squad, situated more than 1,000 miles away, set up a Nissan pickup truck equipped with a 7.62-mm sniper machine gun and used AI to pull the trigger and kill Fakhrizadeh, who was driving his own car. If Israel’s AI can actually eliminate living human beings at a distance, it stands to reason that the media’s AI will soon be capable of carrying out its essential work that consists of stoking the public’s paranoia without requiring human journalists. After the forever wars, the forever Havana syndrome story may define the media’s future.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Media Is Suffering From the Havana Syndrome appeared first on Fair Observer.

US President Joe Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return.” He promised that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” Biden said. 

But the US is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled, “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.” The article was a rare acknowledgment in the American corporate media that the US has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis. 

Competing Doctrines in a New Cold War

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The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the US defeat in Afghanistan should be ringing alarm bells inside the head of every American, warning us that we have allowed our government to spend trillions of dollars waging war, chasing shadows, selling arms and fueling conflict all over the world, while ignoring real existential dangers to our civilization and all of humanity. 

The world’s youth are dismayed by their parents’ failures to tackle the climate crisis. The BBC reports that a new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in 10 countries around the world found that many of them think humanity is doomed and that they have no future. Three-quarters of the young people surveyed said they are afraid of what the future will bring, and 40% said the crisis makes them hesitant to have children. They are also frightened, confused and angered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis. As the BBC reported, they “feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.” 

America Lags Far Behind

Young people in the US have even more reason to feel betrayed than their European counterparts. America lags far behind Europe on renewable energy. European countries started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 40% of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20% of electric power in the US. 

Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24%. The United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2% more than it did in 1990. In 2019, under the Trump administration, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than ever before in its history.

NATO, our politicians and the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic promote the idea that the United States and Europe share a common “Western” culture and values. But our very different lifestyles, priorities and responses to this climate crisis tell a tale of two very different, even divergent economic and political systems. The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is not controversial in Europe. But in America, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving “disinformation” campaigns by fossil fuel companies and other vested interests. While the Democrats have been better at listening to the scientists, let’s not forget that, while Europe was replacing fossil fuels and nuclear plants with renewable energy, the Obama administration was unleashing a fracking boom to switch from coal-fired power plants to new plants running on fracked gas. 

Why is the US so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? Why does each US car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely-accessible public transportation, as Europe does? 

We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, health care, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries?

One answer is the enormous amount of money the US spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.

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The US spends far more of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the military than any of the other 29 NATO countries — 3.7% in 2020 compared to 1.77%. While the US has been putting intense pressure on NATO countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only 10 of them have done so. Unlike in the US, the military establishment in Europe has to contend with significant opposition from liberal politicians and a more educated and mobilized public.  

From the lack of universal healthcare to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries, the US government’s under-investment in everything else is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities. This leaves America struggling to get by on what is left over after the US military bureaucracy has raked off the lion’s share — or should we say the “generals’ share”? — of the available resources.

Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 amount to only about 30% of the money spent on militarism. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years and is not enough.  

Climate vs. the Military

On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget if we are to correct the US government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden administration has so far failed to do. 

The reality of America’s 20-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the US claims that the recent arms build-up by China now requires Washington to spend even more. China spends only a third of what the US spends. What is driving China’s increased military spending is its need to defend itself against the ever-growing US war machine that has been “pivoting” to the waters, skies and islands surrounding its shores since the Obama administration.

Biden told the UN General Assembly that “as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate a dangerous arms race with China that the US started in the first place, reveals just how far Biden has to go to live up to his own rhetoric, on diplomacy as well as on climate change.   

The United States must go to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps the UN and less-developed countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, quickly convert to a net-zero renewable energy economy and help developing countries to do the same. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.

That will require the United States to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia. Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures and the militarism that led to them would free up the US to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post US Militarism’s Toxic Impact on Climate Policy appeared first on Fair Observer.

A news story that falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the death of an American doctor was the most viewed article on Facebook in the US for the first three months of 2021. Instead of going public about the platform promoting such misinformation, Facebook held back on publishing the report until The New York Times disclosed its existence. Facebook was reportedly worried that it would “make the company look bad.”

This is the latest in a string of attempts by Facebook and other technology companies to avoid accountability for the spread of misinformation, violent extremist content and incitements to terror on their platforms.

In response, last month, an international summit was held in Bergen, Norway, to commemorate the 77 victims of the terror attacks in Oslo and Utøya on July 22, 2011. Since then, radical-right extremism has become an increasing transnational threat, with a 320% rise in the number of global attacks in the last five years.

Can Alt-Tech Help the Far Right Build an Alternate Internet?

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At the summit, closed-door workshops, discussions and Q&A sessions facilitated open and robust dialogue among leading global stakeholders committed to fighting radical-right terrorism and extremism. These included representatives from Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, the British, US, New Zealand and Norwegian governments, the UK’s communication regulator OFCOM, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, the UN, the EU and more.

The “22 July at Ten” organizers published the Bergen Plan of Action, outlining five steps for a collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach among governments, tech platforms and civil society organizations aimed at helping tackle the spread of violent extremist content and mitigating the rising rates of online radicalization.

Black Box

While many researchers no longer subscribe to the technologically deterministic view that social media is the sole cause of radical-right extremism, there is evidence that it does, in fact, rapidly accelerate the process. An internal Facebook report from 2016 found that 64% of people who joined an extremist group on the platform did so because the company’s algorithm suggested it. This explains why many online communities, including white and male supremacist groups, can act as gateways to more extreme groups and ideologies.

By design, Facebook algorithms prioritize content that gets more clicks, which in turn amplifies inflammatory content and increases the echo chamber effect. Apparently, it’s just not in Facebook’s interest to make judgments on the quality of the content shared on the platform, given that its business model is centered on maximizing revenue from adverts. After Facebook’s 2016 report, for example, alterations to the “recommender algorithm” were turned down as they were deemed “anti-growth.”

The first step of the Bergen Plan of Action calls for a tougher and more comprehensive approach to countering violent extremism through an approach that involves the whole of society, including governments, the corporate sector and civil society organizations.

Sessions with the US Department of State raised valid concerns regarding how this would work in practice, not least given tech companies’ well-documented resistance to publicizing information about their algorithms and transparency in general. The seemingly impenetrable black-box nature of their recommendation engines has been used to relinquish responsibility from their role in spreading extreme content.

While much is yet to be resolved, the Bergen Plan of Action has the potential to provide vital independent, peer-reviewed research, allowing internet users to make better decisions about the information they consume and share online. The fourth step of the Bergen Plan of Action recommends establishing a global network of civil society organizations in order to facilitate sharing methods for tackling all stages of online radicalization. Specialist tools such as Moonshot’s Redirect Method could be used to identify and safeguard vulnerable individuals, directing them toward safer content and trained counselors.

Another important aspect of the global network is to avoid the duplication of research across international counter-terrorism organizations.

Whole of Society

A further focus of the conference was on the role of content moderation. Historically, tech companies have repeatedly abdicated responsibility for removing radical-right content. Social media platforms received fresh criticism after their failure to remove the extremist messaging that helped incite the violence at the US Capitol on January 6.

During the Bergen conference, representatives from Google and Facebook discussed the challenges of creating a global definition of terrorism that does not impinge on the right to free speech, especially the First Amendment to the US Constitution. However, 10 years after the tragic events of July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik’s “2083” terrorist manifesto is still one of Norway’s top Google search results. This alone, argues Matthew Feldman, the director of the Centre for Analysis Radical Right, shows that Google’s approach is inadequate.

The Bergen Plan of Action proposes that an independent body of moderators should be used across all tech companies to better enable transparency and accountability surrounding moderation. Moderators would also be supported with counseling and mental-health resources since the nature of the content they’re exposed to can be immensely distressing.

Likewise, policy decisions would be backed up by transparent, externally verified data to show measurable impacts of each policy. The benefits of this approach are showcased by Twitter’s deplatforming of Donald Trump. Within a week of the former US president being banned, false claims of election rigging fell from 2.5 million to 688,000 — a 73% decline.

In this plan, moderators would also be trained to recognize terrorist and violent extremist content in a multitude of languages and cultural contexts. This would provide a humanistic approach to deciphering extreme rhetoric and discourse — an obvious improvement on the current, overly-automated process responsible for the majority of content removal.

An independent group of experienced moderators could better navigate more nuanced issues of cancel culture and free speech in marginal or highly-charged cases while also retaining engagement from marginalized users and minimizing polarization.

As expressed by former Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma, tackling the spread of harmful content online comes down to conviction: “If you want to understand how non-accidental any of this is, think about pornography. How often do you randomly encounter porn on Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube, or wherever else? Not that often.”

Getting tech companies to endorse the Bergen Plan of Action may well be the biggest challenge to its success. It will require a recentering of Big Tech’s efforts around duty of care to users instead of growth and profit. Yet a whole-of-society approach necessitates their involvement.

Policies that offer social media companies financial incentives have shown promise, as have ones the mete out punishments, such as the Network Enforcement Act in Germany that fines social media companies up to €50 million ($58.7 million) for failing to quickly remove violent extremist content.

Ultimately, a multi-stakeholder solution — including governments, tech platforms and civil society — that can be meaningfully adopted by each sector is an ambitious but vital task to prevent future events like the Capitol Hill insurrection and radical-right terrorist attacks like the 2011 tragedy in Norway.

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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This past week, the geopolitical landscape reached a new Monroe Doctrine moment. This is occurring nearly two centuries after US President James Monroe’s famous pronouncement warning Europeans to stay away from the continent on which the former British colonists were busy rolling out their plan of continental expansion inspired by their belief in “manifest destiny.”

In 1823, the focus was on the Atlantic Ocean and the relations between Europe and Latin America. In 2021, the zone in question is the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Given the degree of globalization the world economy has achieved in the past 75 years, the brewing showdown between the multicultural East and a decidedly monocultural English-speaking West has far more unanticipated and potentially disturbing consequences for the entire globe than Monroe’s claim to dominance over a largely undeveloped hemisphere. This looks like a clash between two manifest destinies.

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Multicultural Europe — the traditional core of the West — may once again find itself the primary victim of a new US-led alliance announcing a modernized doctrine targeting China. France was the first to pay when it received the bombshell news of the creation of AUKUS, a security alliance bringing together the US, the UK and Australia. France cried scandal and recalled its ambassadors to the US and Australia upon learning that a multibillion-dollar contract signed in 2016 to supply Australia with submarines had been canceled. China reacted with even bolder force when it announced its version of the Monroe Doctrine. Chinese President Xi Jinping “urged heads of state to ‘absolutely resist external forces to interfere [in] countries in our region at any excuse, and hold the future of our countries’ development and progress firmly in our own hands.’”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

External forces:

Ambitious nations with a dominantly white European population that believe access to markets and global economic control is their God-given privilege

Contextual Note

Europe has expressed its solidarity with France, meaning that the crisis will be making waves far into the future. On the Pacific side, after China’s predictable reaction, North Korea followed suit, declaring the AUKUS alliance “extremely undesirable and dangerous” and predicting that it “will upset the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region and trigger off a chain of nuclear arms race.”

This would seem to indicate that equipping Australia with nuclear-powered submarines could ring the death knell for any existing hope of containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. When considered alongside the Biden administration’s failure to honor its promise to overturn Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, this is beginning to look as if a remake of the Cold War arms race of the 1950s may be in the offing. When confusion reigns, nostalgia comes to the rescue.

The strategists behind AUKUS clearly designed it as a showdown between the English-speaking and liberal-thinking West and the rising powerhouse in the East, China. But the scenario gets complicated when considering that the West itself is divided into what may emerge as two camps: the English speakers and the others. The others have long been quietly resisting Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” that posited the imminent global triumph of the neoliberal political and economic model produced over the past three centuries by the English-speaking world. This may turn into a secondary showdown, a subplot of the East-West showdown.

In this Monroe Doctrine redux, the English-speaking believers in neoliberal imperialism have initiated the action. But at the same time, they find themselves in the role of the jaded European colonial powers two centuries ago toward whom Monroe was flexing his muscles. This time around, China is the rising power claiming the right not only to frame the law in its own backyard, but to identify and exclude trespassers.

The proximity of this event with the official end of the US engagement in Afghanistan, signaling a growing disinterest in the dramas of the Middle East, reveals two parallel trends. The US has clearly decided to build the Chinese threat into something similar to the artificially-magnified Soviet threat that defined the post-WWII world order.

That means the two-decade obsession with Islamist terrorism can now be placed on the back burner in the interest of stimulating a new Cold War mentality toward a rival power capable not just of occasionally felling tall buildings, but of bringing down the capitalist order. But it also serves a short-term interest. With no visible hot wars to justify the nation’s dependence on a militarized economy, it will ensure that investment in military technology and material preparedness will remain at the core of an economy that fears no threat more than world peace.

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Declining empires always follow the same pattern. Rather than investing in a transition that could ensure their enduring influence and prosperity in a more complex world, they push their bravado to the limit at the cost of undermining their own cultural and economic integrity.

Historical Note

According to the official record, the Monroe Doctrine warned “European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or puppet monarchs. The doctrine was conceived to meet major concerns of the moment, but it soon became a watchword of U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere.”

President Theodore Roosevelt officially invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify sending troops to Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), Nicaragua and Haiti in the first decades of the 20^th century. This was a period of active foreign policy in which the US was just discovering its capacity to build an economic empire. That series of military campaigns south of the border have earned the moniker, “The Banana Wars.” They produced one famous military hero in the person of Major-General Smedley Butler. His heroic action also took him as far away as the Philippines and even China, as he participated in quelling the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  

Butler’s place in history turned out to be exceptional and even instructive. Too instructive, in fact, for the taste of an expanding empire, which has done its utmost ever since to erase his saga from the annals of official history. 

In 1933, thanks to Butler’s impeccable reputation as a military superhero, a group of American businessmen (including George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush) tried to cultivate a special friendship with Butler. They were concerned that newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt might be tempted to adopt policies in contradiction with the trend in Europe toward fascist systems of government favorable to moneyed interests. Their plan, usually referred to as the Business Plot, involved overthrowing Roosevelt and placing Butler in the role of charismatic military dictator.

Butler immediately denounced the plot and agreed to testify before a congressional committee. The press played its expected role, deriding Butler’s claims — thanks to the fact that the final report of the committee was never made public. That only happened in the 21^st century, decades after Butler’s name and reputation had been erased from Americans’ memory. 

The New York Times published a long obituary of Butler in 1940. It only mentioned the Business Plot in the final paragraph, calling it “another episode … when a Congressional committee investigated reports to the effect that General Butler had become mixed up in an attempt to form an American Fascist organization.” It also credited Butler with authoring a book published in 1933 with the title, “Old Gimlet Eye” that recounted his experience of 33 years in the military. 

Curiously, The Times neglected to mention another far more memorable book Butler authored and published in 1935. It bore the title, “War is a Racket.” The Business Plot apparently opened Butler’s eyes to the logic behind his decades of service in the military. In the book, he sums up his understanding of that service: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service … And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

The New York Times hasn’t changed. Back then, just as it does today, it decided which news was “fit to print.” Mentioning a book about Butler’s heroic activities in war and suppressing a mention of his denunciation of its logic appears perfectly consistent with what legacy media does today. The war economy must be defended from criticism at all costs. It stands as the last hope of maintaining the empire’s stability.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The raging debate around abortion rights in the United States has recently been reignited when Texas passed a law banning all abortions past the detection of a fetal heartbeat, usually at a six-week mark. The issue gained further traction after the Supreme Court failed to block the legislation, sparking fears among reproductive rights activists that similar actions by other states could piecemeal dismantle the framework of reproductive rights across the country.

Pew survey data from 2021 shows that while most Americans (59%) believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a sizeable minority (39%) still believe that it should not. More troubling, these trends have remained more or less stable over the last quarter of a century. In 1995, 60% of Americans supported the legalization of abortion while 38% didn’t; in 2009, only 47% supported its legalization while 44% did not.

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Compare these statistics with data on same-sex marriage. In 2002, 35% favored legalizing same-sex marriage, while 57% opposed it. Support has risen steadily over the years, with the tables now completely flipped, with 61% for and 31% against legalization. Why, then, has a controversial issue like legalizing same-sex marriage garnered so much public support, even among some conservatives, while abortion remains a source of profound division?

A Point of Division

Columnist Katha Pollitt argues that although both issues are highly polarizing, their underlying values are fundamentally different. Unlike abortion, same-sex marriage strengthens an age-old conservative institution — matrimony. Thus, even though the institution of marriage is rooted in patriarchy, queer-erasure, racial inequality and exclusivism, most same-sex marriage proponents don’t advocate for its annihilation. Rather, they call for it to be more inclusive, welcoming and non-discriminatory.

The right of access to safe abortion, on the other hand, calls for a much more radical reclaiming of a woman’s bodily autonomy at the expense of the unborn child. Herein lies another crucial difference between the two issues. While opposition to same-sex marriage primarily stems from religious conservatives and moral crusaders, one could still argue that legalizing marriage for sexual minorities would in no way trample upon heterosexual people’s right to marry. This argument was explicitly laid out in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The question of abortion rights, however, implies that any substantive extension of reproductive rights for women would effectively entail a concomitant curtailment of the rights of unborn children. This is an issue that irks not just conservatives and moralists, but many women as well. Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, is a prominent example of this.

While articulating his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that legalizing same-sex marriage was at odds with the US Constitution not only because of the way traditional marriage was strictly understood but because it was, in his opinion, not the court’s duty to reconstitute the meaning of marriage for a certain group of people who were never deprived of their liberty in the juridical sense.

More significantly, the court stated that although the First Amendment allowed people of faith to expressly oppose same-sex marriage if they so wished, faith alone could not be used to deny equal rights to same-sex couples.

The political and legal debates around abortion are far more complex. Not only is abortion condemned by a majority of white evangelical Protestants (77%) and by a sizeable group of Catholics (43%), most of them also uphold the extra-judicial rights of the unborn by cleverly deploying science to refute pro-choice arguments.

The Rights of the Unborn

In “Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice,” Francis J. Beckwith, professor of philosophy and jurisprudence at Baylor University, argues that the fetus must be considered a “full-fledged member of the human community,” meaning it was entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other living being.

Beckwith’s arguments are not theological. Rather, they are grounded in legal theory and philosophy. In a scathing critique of Roe v. Wade, he posits this critique: “What is it, then, about that vaginal passageway that changes the child’s nature in such a significant fashion that it may be killed without justification before exit but only with justification post-exit?” Indeed, this question continues to haunt pro-choice advocates.

Some of Beckwith’s postulates were countervailed by Dean Stretton, who argued that the unborn fetus could not be accorded the same rights as the living. However, popular opinion on this issue remains split, with influential young conservatives like Meghan McCain and Candace Owens aggressively galvanizing support among women for the pro-life movement, effectively challenging the notion that it is primarily men who are trying to control women’s bodies.

Indeed, to frame the abortion debate solely through the lens of women’s rights may not be completely correct given that 37% of American women continue to oppose abortion. A more appropriate framing, perhaps, could be to challenge the extra-judicial status of the unborn child and to argue against extending constitutional protections to embryos and fetuses.

Indeed, if judicial conservatives like Clarence Thomas truly see themselves as textualists, then surely even they would appreciate the fact that the intended meaning of the Constitution was never to extend protections to those who even its framers didn’t recognize as “people.”

Science and the Pro-Life Movement

For decades, sexual minorities in the United States and around the world were vilified by the scientific community for embodying an “unnatural” and “abnormal” sexual identity. In 1973, homosexuality was finally delisted as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association after years of advocacy. Today, almost all globally recognized and respected psychiatric bodies have followed suit.

Meanwhile, the genetic origins of homosexuality are being studied. While there exists little to no scientific consensus about whether sexual orientation is biologically determined or socially constructed, public support for homosexual people has doubled in the past three decades, more so than for any other group over the same period in the United States. This is reflected in the increasing support for same-sex marriage over the years.

With abortion rights, however, not only is public opinion more divided, but there is ongoing discourse within the realms of science, religion and philosophy about what constitutes human consciousness and “being”— a key question at the heart of the abortion debate. While delivering the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun took the stand that even though a right to privacy was not explicitly enshrined in the US Constitution at the time, the appellant (Roe) was entitled to it while seeking an abortion. However, such a right could not be absolute and had to be curtailed by the state to protect potential life.

Furthermore, the court refrained from answering the question of when and where life began. Instead, the court saw itself as rightfully positioned to interfere with a woman’s pregnancy only at the point of viability, when the fetus would be able to survive outside the womb. This point was determined to be after the first trimester. In other words, even though the majority opinion upheld a woman’s right to abortion, the court also carefully balanced its decision to protect potential life.

In a later Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe v. Wade was upheld in a bitter 5-4 decision (as opposed to 7-2 in Roe), but new legislative standards were introduced to safeguard potential life. This decision also overruled Roe’s rigid trimester system, giving individual states the power to restrain a woman’s right to abortion even in the first trimester, subject to a number of restrictions.

Both pro-life and pro-choice activists were disappointed by the Casey ruling because it was seen as an unholy compromise by both sides. On the one hand, Casey reaffirmed Roe, but, on the other, it wiped away the blanket first trimester abortion protection. The court also observed that because of scientific and medical advancements, the point of viability could no longer be biologically fixed at the first trimester.

Overturning Roe

The conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court is set to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which directly challenges Roe v. Wade, later this year. Given the lack of ethical, moral, spiritual and scientific consensus on what constitutes conscious existence, it is plausible that the court may either overturn its landmark 1976 ruling or water it down by expanding the constitutional protections of the unborn and reassessing the constitutional meaning of potential life and viability. 

Abortion rights activists are right to worry — the Supreme Court has overturned its own judgments in the past. Moreover, in her confirmation hearing, Judge Amy Coney Barrett underscored that she did not view Roe v. Wade as a super-precedent, meaning that if she and her conservative-leaning colleagues on the court deemed it appropriate, they could collectively overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case.

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According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, all jurisdictions in North America and Western Europe have at present decriminalized abortion in some form. In an unexpected twist, Mexico’s supreme court struck down a restrictive abortion law in the northern state of Coahuila just a few days after the neighboring US state of Texas passed its near-total abortion ban. The Department of Justice has sued the state of Texas over the new legislation, but the measure is forcing migrants in Texas to consider returning to Mexico to access safe abortion.

As the US Supreme Court reconvenes to hear the ongoing Dobbs case, it will be interesting to observe how this new bench defines personhood. Remember, the judges in Roe v. Wade defined a person strictly in the postnatal sense. If personhood is indeed extended to include the unborn, then women in America could face anything from a near-total to complete abortion ban similar to the kind currently in force in Texas.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Even as a 13-year-old, I had strong views on education. I had the opportunity to study in two countries with entirely different education systems. I began my education in India and studied for five years in Ahmedabad. My father then moved to the United Kingdom and I studied in a London-based school for a year.

In India, I disliked school and grew to hate exams. My time in the UK transformed my school experience. I loved my classes and going to school. When I returned to India, I decided not to go to school. Instead, I studied at home and curiously missed not having to write exams at the end of the year.

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I can speak about the Indian schooling system with confidence. My experience has been corroborated by others. The Indian schooling system seems to have common problems across the country and needs major reform. I stayed in London only briefly and do not know as much about British schooling. Some experiences may be unique to the particular school I attended.

My Indian Experience

When I went to school in India, I studied diligently and my teachers liked me. I participated in many extracurricular activities such as dance and art that I tremendously enjoyed. On the whole, however, I did not like school and was unhappy.

One of the reasons for my unhappiness was my school’s rigid dress code. Every day, I was supposed to turn up wearing an impeccable uniform. My hair had to be shiny, well-oiled and held together by a black hair tie. Every morning, teachers would scrutinize uniforms before class. They expected students to follow the school dress code diligently. We were warned of the dire consequences if we violated the code. For example, they threatened to paint the nails of boys who grew them long.

Ironically, teachers imposed these rules most strictly on those too young to dress themselves. The 6-year-olds who came to school were terrified of being publicly humiliated and punished for something outside their control. I found this system of punishment archaic and problematic. To me, the rules my school obsessed about did not seem relevant. I felt the school was trying to fault students for the smallest of details.

Another reason why I did not enjoy school was the poor behavior of certain teachers. They mocked some students by giving them humiliating names. These teachers also casually swore at us if we erred. Although I was never a target of this, I found such behavior disconcerting. 

My physical education teacher often behaved this way. He gave us demeaning names, swore at us and imposed severe punishments, such as running around the playground and performing squats. This teacher also hit children who frustrated him. Because of this teacher, I did not like the physical education classes and stayed away from sports. My mother and I lodged a complaint against him but nothing came out of it. The school principal claimed to be against the teacher’s methods. However, she did nothing. To this day, the teacher remains unchanged. 

I have vivid memories of the vice principal too. On one occasion, she interrupted class to announce a new rule: No student would speak any language other than English at school. She told us menacingly that, if students broke this rule, they would be fined. Immediately after making this announcement, the vice principal started conversing with the class teacher in Gujarati. The fact that the class teacher taught us English exaggerated the irony of the situation. The vice principal was also infamous for being rude and condescending not only toward students, but also their parents and even grandparents.

Insults, threats and hypocrisy made school unpleasant. I eagerly looked forward to afternoons when I could leave school and return home. At night, I felt anxious because I feared the morning when I would have to get ready and leave for school. Often, I missed school by claiming to be unwell.

I must point out that my school enjoyed a great reputation. It is deemed to be one of the best in Ahmedabad. Schools in my city and in much of India are run according to the same norms. My friends in other schools had similar experiences. Changing schools seemed futile. After going away to the UK and experiencing British schooling for a year, I came to realize exactly why I had disliked school in India. The problem was much bigger and systemic than the occasional rude teacher.

My British Experience

I moved to the United Kingdom because my father chose to do a degree there. When we moved, the school year had already begun. Few schools were admitting students. We went to different schools to see if they would admit my elder sister and me. My sister visited two or three schools before finding a place in one. I was unexpectedly admitted into the first school we stepped into. The school administrator told me that I would start the next day.

This news came as a surprise to me. A bigger shock awaited when the administrator revealed that my teacher was to be a “he.” In India, I had found male teachers to be the most aggressive, insensitive and rude. I feared this would be the case in the UK as well. I was already anxious about going to school in a new continent. Knowing that my new teacher would be male added to that anxiety.

On my first day at school, I arrived late. My mother and I lost our way in a new city. To my surprise, the teacher was waiting for us. He was friendly and kind. Within minutes of meeting him, I calmed down. I was ashamed of the preconception I had formed of him. My teacher had turned out to be very different. He asked three classmates who had volunteered to be my “buddies” to show me around. They broke the ice and I felt welcomed on the first day at school.

I found my British school to be completely different from my Indian one. Teacher–student interactions were more friendly, open and informal. Students called teachers by their first names. This was rare even for UK schools and took some getting used to. 

In India, schools are hierarchical. Teachers are patronizing even when they are polite. Students are almost always belittled. They have to address their teachers as “sir” and “madam” as a sign of respect. However, teachers rarely reciprocate the respect, which I have always believed to be unfair. Students are the most important people in any education system, deserving of respect in return.

In the UK, I liked addressing my teacher by his first name. In my view, this formed a closer connection and an amiable learning atmosphere. My British teacher often sat down with us and shared what was planned for us academically. We could ask questions freely and he would respond to them diligently. He had high expectations from us and made us think. In the UK, I realized that schools could maintain discipline without condescension. The teacher–student relationship can be one of mutual respect.

In India, schools obsess about discipline. Students have to comply with a laundry list of rules and are punished even for minor violations. Corporal punishment is now rare in urban areas but still occurs. Some parents even support this form of punishment. They believe in the archaic dictum, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

The discipline enforced in Indian schools seems to have surprisingly little impact. When they leave school, the people of India are hardly rule-conforming; in fact, they are rebellious. This is most evidently seen on the roads of India where drivers blatantly ignore traffic rules. Painting zebra-crossings, for example, is wasteful. The drivers of India have unanimously decided to ignore them, despite being instructed otherwise when obtaining their licenses.

In the UK, my school did have rules and imposed them. However, they were fewer, less controlling and more sensible than those in India. The teachers were authoritative when necessary but never authoritarian. 

In India, even when teachers acted in our best interest, they did so in an intimidating manner. One teacher once asked us if we had social media accounts. Those who raised their hands were told there would be “legal action” against them because no one under 18 was supposed to have social media accounts. The teacher was trying to protect us from online dangers, but the aggressive approach did not inspire trust. It was in the UK that I discovered the dangers of cybercrime when we were taught about it at school. Our Indian school could have done the same instead of threatening students. Schools in India choose to scare children out of problems where they could reason with them instead.

In India, I hated school and lied about being sick to stay at home. In contrast, I loved school in the UK. For the first time, I wanted to go to school even when I was ill.

Contrasting Approaches to Learning

In India, textbooks were treated like the Bible and teachers followed them completely. Once they taught a chapter, we had to answer questions at the end of it. Most of the time, the teacher would simply dictate the answer to us and all we had to do was write down what they said. Older students had the liberty to write down answers on their own, but there was little need for originality. Copying down relevant sections of the chapter could fully answer most, if not all, questions. 

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Questions were invariably formulaic as well. For example, this question was posed at the end of chapter six of the class eight geography textbook of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT): “The world population has grown very rapidly. Why?” Teachers expected students to pull out an excerpt from the chapter verbatim. This was deemed to be the correct answer: “The main reason for this growth was that with better food supplies and medicine, deaths were reducing, while the number of births remained fairly high.” The five other questions that followed had to be answered similarly by quoting relevant lines from chapter six.

To answer questions, teachers told us to put brackets around appropriate sentences in chapters and write down the respective question numbers next to them. Once we had matched questions with answers, we simply had to copy both of them down in our notebook. This process of answering questions was tedious and almost pointless. Preparing for exams was similarly mind-numbing. All we had to do was memorize what we had written in our notebook and reproduce the answers during the exams.

Only creative writing offered an escape from the monotony. Even here the topics teachers gave out for essays and stories were again mostly formulaic. Books were available that had essays and stories on these topics. All that most students did was memorize from them and present the material as their own. The “writing” in “creative writing” was anything but creative.

In India, school involved little learning. I did not make inferences, analyze topics or interpret things originally. We were not encouraged to think critically and express our opinions. I realized that the Indian education system does not foster critical thinking or creativity.

In the UK, school was rich in learning. We were divided into sets with different teachers depending on our level of understanding of the subject. We began every class by writing down the learning intention in our notebooks. 

I remember my math classes well. Sometimes, we played mathematical games. We had to use formal methods and the language of mathematics to explain our strategies, making us vocalize our way of thinking. 

I enjoyed my English classes as well. In class, we were supposed to make inferences about the theme of the text and explain our reasoning. I also learned to structure arguments in the point, evidence and explanation format, popularly known as PEE. I learned not only to write but also to edit my writing. Teachers would mark our work and students would do a “response to marking” exercise. This meant students could improve their work iteratively.

In the UK, answers would ask for a contribution by the student, which resulted in a collaboration. The experience was individualized. We also discussed things in detail during class, which meant we heard many points of view. We learned how to justify our opinions instead of merely asserting and how to challenge an idea or defend it. We made our case and debated issues. Listening to opposing arguments expanded our mental horizons.

The books we used in Britain were a world apart from textbooks in India. For instance, “Key Stage Three English” is a reference book from the UK. It has an extract from Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and then poses the following question: “The writer presents the reader with a strongly negative view of Unoka. He is clearly a flawed character with very few redeeming qualities.’ How far do you agree with this statement? You should include: your own perceptions of Unoka; the techniques the writer has used to influence your perceptions; evidence from the text to support your ideas.”

Such questions demand original thinking and make the students express their own thoughts. These questions also make students more rigorous in their thinking as they have to read the text carefully and engage deeply with the author. Opinions and assertions are not enough. Students have to construct arguments based on logic and facts. During my time in the UK, I had to learn how to analyze, understand implications and form judgments. I got an excellent education.

Contrasting Attitudes Toward Examinations

In India, success in examinations is the holy grail. People believe that examinations are accurate measures of capability, but they fail to recognize how problematic they are. Examinations reward rote learning. Little more than a sharp memory and handling time pressure is needed to guarantee a good result. Indians do not realize that some of the most original thinkers have struggled in tests. Nobel laureate in physics Roger Penrose was “very slow” and “didn’t necessarily do very well” in his tests.

Students in India take a lot of examinations and are under enormous pressure to perform well in them. So, the purpose of studying is mostly to do well in exams and not to learn. When I was in India, examinations were the main incentive to study. Schools prepare students for the end-of-year tests, succeeding in which is painted to be the goal of the academic year.

In the UK, we had examinations too. In Year 6, students take the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs). These are similar to nationwide board exams in India, but there is less pressure in Britain compared to India. In India, students taking board exams are expected to give up all extra-curricular activities. For many months, they are supposed to focus only on their studies.  The SATs were different. Teachers prepared us for them and we took mock tests, but there was no syllabus given and no memorization was needed. Coming from India, I asked my teacher for a syllabus but was told there was none. The atmosphere before the SATs was strangely calm and, for most of the year, school was normal.

I understand that this comparison of the UK and India might be unfair. India is a poorer country with a much larger population and there are only a few good schools and colleges. As a result, competition for places is intense. Therefore, Indians care deeply about examinations as they are a gateway to success. This nurtures a culture in which Indians obsess about examinations even when they do not really matter, such as those taken in lower grades. The system is examination-centric, not student-centric.

My Return to India

When my father’s stint in the UK ended, we returned to India. I had no intention of rejoining my much-hated old school. I enrolled in another school but quickly realized that it was worse than my previous one. After only a day at the new school, I rejoined the old school.

On the very first day at the old school, I found myself comparing it to my time in the UK. I found the school greatly problematic and it made me deeply unhappy. As a result, I did not attend school for three weeks and had to summon a lot of courage to return.  To make matters worse, I had returned in the middle of the academic year and needed to catch up.

Few teachers were supportive. In fact, most teachers demanded an impossible feat. They wanted me to write up everything that had been done over six months in my notebooks while simultaneously keeping up with their teaching. I tried to find the superhuman strength necessary for this task and wrote persistently to catch up. This caused exhaustion and I started missing school. This only added to the burden because I had to catch up with the days I missed. 

By the time the annual examinations approached, I was almost worn out. We were to be tested on everything taught throughout the year, but the extra writing was hindering my exam preparation. My parents requested my teachers to exempt me from the extra writing assignments. I did not make the request because that would have been deemed rude. 

In any case, I had no interest in taking the annual examination. In the UK, I had learned much of what the school was teaching and testing. I was putting in so much effort in copying out what I had missed, but I was learning nothing. I concluded that a school that taught me nothing was pointless, so I decided not to return until the new academic year began when I would be learning something new.

My parents opposed my decision. According to them, one could not skip ahead. They had followed the norm their entire lives and had turned out just fine. They did not want me jeopardizing my future. They also did not believe that I already knew what was being taught. On their insistence, I reversed my decision of not going to school and took the year-end examinations. My results were splendid but the experience of taking the examinations was horrible. On the day the results were announced, I broke school rules, dressed boldly and showed up in my colorful clothes instead of the school uniform. I was making a statement on what I had decided would be my last day in school.

My decision not to go to school worried my parents. To add to their worries, I did not study at all for four months. I spent this time playing games, creating art and enjoying myself. School had made me angry and I loathed the idea of taking tests. So, I took a break. My father was worried about me not studying and repeatedly requested me to restart and not fall behind my peers. I dismissed his concern.

My Homeschooling Experience

After four months, I started getting bored. Around this time, I was asked a math question. To my surprise, I could not answer it. I realized my four months of inactivity had taken a toll. The idea of intellectually falling behind my ex-peers shocked me, which motivated me to start studying again. I began with a mathematics textbook that my parents had bought for me and was able to finish the entire year’s syllabus in two months. I was amazed at my achievement and it made me realize that I did not need school. Teaching myself was much more fun, so I decided to become a homeschooler. 

My decision worried my parents. They had thought me not attending school was just a phase. In India, homeschooling is rare and rather stigmatized. Most people associate it with students who cannot keep up with their studies or are extremely uncomfortable in social settings. My parents had similar impressions. 

But my parents’ apprehensions did not affect me. I am competitive. I do not like my peers knowing more than I do whether they are from India or the UK. So, I started studying both the Indian and the British curricula. I asked my parents to order textbooks from both India and Britain. By the time these textbooks arrived, I had lost a few weeks of the academic year already shortened by the four months of inactivity. 

My challenge was to complete two curricula in less time than what students in the UK or India spent to cover one curriculum. The task was daunting, but my doubts were not enough to supersede my ambition. I started by making a plan. 

I wrote down all the subjects I planned to study, along with my learning goals for the year. I then planned out every single day for the next two months. I had never planned my studies before. Inevitably, I overestimated and underestimated the time I would take to study some topics and there were days I struggled to meet my goals. However, I disliked falling short and would work harder on such days to achieve my objectives. I did my utmost to keep to my schedule.

The line between studying and not studying became blurred at home. There were no school hours and I would sometimes study till late in the evening. My self-imposed deadlines were helpful as they made me avoid succumbing to laziness. Making a schedule for myself made me appreciate the work of teachers behind the scenes. Structuring student schedules is no easy task. Eventually, I learned to set better deadlines and began to understand how much time I would need to spend on various topics. 

Although doing two curricula simultaneously put me under pressure, it allowed me to learn more. I discovered that some topics were introduced to students in the UK but not in India and vice-versa in the same academic year. Some of the topics that overlapped were explained better in the UK curriculum, while others in the Indian one. This deepened my understanding.

Homeschooling required great self-discipline. I had to plan my studies for the year and then adhere to that plan in an environment not dedicated to studying. Distraction came easily. At one point, I began cutting corners because there was no one to stop me. I missed many targets and gave myself a written warning, a practice common in Indian schools. Fortunately, this worked. I learned to avoid laziness and largely stuck to my deadlines.

Homeschooling has given me more choice and made me more creative. I began learning French, an Indian classical dance named Kathak and to play the drums. 

There are downsides to homeschooling. I have felt lonely. I missed chatting with my fellow students and general social interaction. To counter this isolation, I started reading aloud. I often read in different rhythms and accents, imagining and emulating different teachers teaching me the subjects. I have increased my extracurricular activities; most of my evenings are booked.

Initially, I was secretive about being a homeschooler. Only my close family knew about it. I told my friends and old classmates I had changed schools. I told new acquaintances I was still in my old school. I did so to avoid the influx of questions and presumptions that would inevitably follow the revelation. 

Completing a year of homeschooling filled me with a level of pride and a sense of accomplishment that I had not experienced before. Academically, I had covered two curricula in a short span of time. I had experimented with different learning methods and discovered which ones most suited me. I had become more adventurous and willing to venture into new areas like linguistics. I had studied for myself and not for passing exams. This was a euphoric feeling. 

Examinations, National Policy and the Future

When I was homeschooling, almost everyone suggested I take some sort of exam. It seemed to me that this suggestion came from a lack of faith in my desire, discipline and capability to learn on my own. Therefore, I would not comply. 

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However, once I finished both curricula, I lacked a sense of completion. Strangely and surprisingly, I wanted to mark the end of the academic year with examinations. Perhaps the Indian education system had indeed left its mark on me. So, I asked my parents to set me examinations on both sets of curricula. They were reluctant to play the role of examiners, but I insisted. 

As novice examiners, my parents made errors in choosing the questions and setting time limits. Yet the examinations were rigorous and I fared well in them. Studying for these exams and sitting for them was satisfying because I had chosen to do so, unlike those taken in school. Moreover, taking the exams had been a mere afterthought, not the purpose of the learning I had done throughout the year.   

My problems with the Indian education system arose from its arbitrariness, focus on rote learning and lack of critical thinking. To my satisfaction, India’s National Education Policy 2020 acknowledges these shortcomings and calls for “greater critical thinking.” It goes on to say that the “overall thrust of curriculum and pedagogy reform … will be to move the education system towards real understanding … and away from the culture of rote learning as is largely present today.” 

Change begins with an admission of the need for it. India has admitted it has a big problem. Hopefully, it will now start taking steps to resolve it.

I do not know if I will continue with homeschooling. I may end up choosing the easier option. When teachers handle the planning and responsibility for conducting studies, life is simpler. Going to school would take a huge burden off my shoulders. I am also curious to see if India’s new policy will change anything. Regardless of what I do going forward, I am proud to declare that I homeschooled and, because of it, I changed for the better.

*[Note: The author wrote this article at the age of 13. She is now 14.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post An Indian Journey From School to Homeschooling appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, has committed to the strategy recommended by the progressive wing of her party to force through President Biden’s proposed $3.5-trillion spending plan for infrastructure. It covers much more than the basic $1.5-trillion nuts-and-bolts infrastructure package already approved by the Senate.

The key to success is linking the two bills together, thus avoiding that one might be passed and the other rejected. Various Democrats deemed “moderate” have promised to torpedo the effort, creating serious suspense in Washington this week.

Though not known for being progressive herself, Pelosi has the marketing sense to understand that the one positively attractive feature of Biden’s successful presidential campaign was his promise to be the Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the 21^st century. He promised to transform the economy and the political culture as FDR did in the 1930s, ushering the US out of the Great Depression.

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With that in mind, Pelosi recently boasted to Los Angeles Times’ Washington columnist Doyle McManus that Biden’s $3.5-trillion bill is “transformational.” As a serious journalist seeking to achieve “balance” (while pleasing his editors), McManus decided to interview someone more credible than an aging professional politician. Knowing where to seek the truth, the journalist contacted Democratic data scientist, political consultant and Obama loyalist, David Shor.

Asked about Pelosi’s characterization of the bill as transformational, Shor responded in the way true establishment Democrats have been trained to respond: “I would ban that word. Most people don’t want bold, inspirational change. They want bite-size things.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Bite-size:

The largest amount of knowledge or political thought that Democratic strategists, certain of their own elite status, believe the benighted class of consumers called voters are capable of digesting at any given time  

Contextual Note

The failure of the Democrats to learn any lessons from recent history seems mind-boggling at times. Could Shor have failed to notice that after Hillary Clinton referred to ordinary Americans tempted to vote for a candidate other than herself as “deplorables,” she lost the election to Donald Trump? Trump was judged at the time to be the most unlikeable, unelectable presidential candidate in the history of American politics.

Despite the party’s faith in the wisdom of data scientists like Shor, Clinton still managed to fail. Data analysts famously isolate particular issues for polling and collate all the individual responses. They separate reality into the bite-sized chunks they themselves feel comfortable with and then compare the results using sophisticated algorithms. Unfortunately, individual preferences analyzed in isolation do not always correlate with broader trends and collective social reality. 

Shor believes that politicians must choose between transformation and bite-sized reforms. Observers less influenced by raw data noticed that Trump, instead of choosing, managed to do two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. He offered his voters a few bite-size things — slogans instead of ideas — but he also projected the will to be radically transformational in an attack on political orthodoxy.

What this reveals, not just about the Democratic Party and the Los Angeles Times but also about the media sympathetic to the Democrats, is less their belief that people want only the slightest incremental change than their ingrained allergy to anything that claims to upset the status quo. They supported Biden because he wasn’t the transformational Bernie Sanders. They never assumed he would try to deliver on his own transformational promise.

Shor believes change consists of proposing a marginal advantage on specific issues, such as lower prescription drug prices. But that cannot be called change. It’s recalibration. It aims at a minor adjustment in a system of governing that the public increasingly perceives as a dangerously faulty, if not failed system.

As a data scientist working in the political sphere at the core of the American consumer society, Shor focuses not on what society needs but on what the narrowly defined data shows individuals want. After the “bite-sized things,” he mentions the benefits of promoting “easy-to-describe things that people like.” This underscores the basic fact that has come to define almost all political action in the US. It has lost all interest in defining and addressing the needs of a complex society subjected to multiple crises. 

Instead, modern political science focuses exclusively on devising strategies to win — rather than earn — the votes of individual consumers. Voters are thus seen as mindless consumers of political discourse rather than partners in a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Winning elections is the only goal political actors can be focused on for any length of time. Emphasizing bite-sized ideas makes both the data analysts’ and their jobs easier.

After citing the fact that the party of an incumbent president “almost invariably loses seats two years after a presidential election,” the article builds to a conclusion, offered as the LA Times’ own distilled wisdom. “Their best chance to defy those odds,” McManus writes, “probably lies in passing a much slimmer budget plan — one that focuses, as Shor advises, on measures with broad public support.”

Historical Note

Following the Second World War, US political culture underwent a radical change. Before Pearl Harbor, the culture of isolationism dominated among the political class. Even though since the late 19^th century the US had used its military to stretch its influence across Latin America and the Pacific, its participation in the European and Pacific theaters of war clearly demonstrated the advantages of building an economy around the idea of an aggressively offensive interpretation of defense.

The experience of having an ideological enemy, Nazi Germany, led the strategists in Washington to welcome the opportunity to focus a new phase of economic development around a largely fantasized ideological battle with Soviet communism.

Since that time, the US economy has been literally addicted to a well-funded, deeply militarized economy. It includes fostering an attitude of worship of the military and celebration of the technology spawned by the military-industrial complex. Dwight Eisenhower was the first — and also the last — president to acknowledge and describe this reality.

The military-industrial complex has only expanded since his famous 1961 speech. The fact that no president since Eisenhower has dared to evoke its name indicates how unbalanced its influence has become. This has produced a culture in which spending on the military is always justified while responding to public needs is seen as an unjustified extravagance.

Business Insider features an article by Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, in which she compares the actual cost of the war on terror with the transformations that could have been accomplished with only a part of that money. “Twenty years after 9/11,” she writes, “our thoroughly militarized foreign and domestic policies have come at a cost of $21 trillion over the last two decades, according to new research my coauthors and I published at the Institute for Policy Studies.”

The full report claims that if the money spent on the military had been allocated to other questions, the clearly transformational results would mean that Americans, but also many other earthlings, would now be living in a more human world.

According to Koshgarian, “$4.5 trillion could fully decarbonize the U.S. electric grid,” “$2.3 trillion could create 5 million $15 per hour jobs with benefits and cost-of-living adjustments for 10 years,” “$1.7 trillion could erase student debt,” “$449 billion could continue the extended Child Tax Credit for another 10 years,” “$200 billion could guarantee free preschool for every 3-and-4-year old for 10 years, and raise teacher pay,” and “$25 billion could provide COVID vaccines for the population of low-income countries.”

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Had the money been spent that way, the US would still boast the most powerful military force in the history of the world and remain in the uncontested leader in terms of military power. But America’s consistently declining moral standing in the world, due essentially to its foreign policy, would exist on a totally different plane. In the light of these figures, Shor’s recommending a plan “half the size of the $3.5 trillion” Biden and Pelosi are pushing seems not only not transformational but risky for the future of a nation that continues to deny its own most pressing needs.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Bite-Size Me: Why Democrats Fear Transformation appeared first on Fair Observer.

The grave humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is one thing. It speaks for itself. What is not spoken about are the implications it carries for Americans. The one element that is crucially being (publicly) ignored by the US government and the US media is that former employees and contractors of the US Embassy, US military bases, US intelligence and US non-profits are prime intelligence targets for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Iranian security services.

I hesitate to note the vulnerabilities here to avoid facilitating adversarial advances, but I hope that this will lead to further action by the US government to evacuate SIV/P1/P2/P3 applicants in order to avoid this. Failure to do so will lead to torture, interrogation and manipulation of our former allies in an attempt to extract full biographical data and identities of their former co-workers, including sensitive site exploitation as well as digital and document extraction.

This alone will provide a fiesta of data that is the gift that keeps on giving. Each lead will lend itself to another lead, and another, and another.

How America Won the War in Afghanistan

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Once all elements of the network are completed, the adversarial extraction of information will multiply. The ability to process and analyze this data to make it applicable is unlimited. In short order, the United States’ greatest adversaries will be able to compile details on all US personnel that has ever been stationed in Afghanistan.

This includes all passport and visa information of all US staff — soldiers, diplomats, spooks, etc., who are now at the mercy of the Taliban and whomever they opt to share the data with or sell it to. The Taliban now own all Afghan border information. They have my iris scans, fingerprints and passport data.

They also have all biographical data and personal information of every US staff member connected with Afghan local staff. Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, phone numbers, emails, professional histories, full names, etc. Keep in mind that we are friends with these people and have signed off with personal signatures and contact information on all their paperwork.

The TTPs (tactics, techniques and protocols) for US military bases and the US Embassy access are now also exposed. The people we left behind know the word-by-word polygraph procedures for gaining entry to our military, diplomatic and intelligence facilities. They know our security protocols, applications details and database methods.

This information is not only now available to the Taliban but is up for sale to the highest bidders such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — not to mention affiliate terrorist groups such as the Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS).

Information does not stagnate in these circles. It sells, spreads and grows. In short order, it will be in the hands of China. Beijing already has full data on all US individuals with security clearances since the early 2000s that it can now cross-reference. Couple this with hacked data available on the open market for a fraction of the cost, including Experian, Marriott and airline data leaks.

There is nothing to stop a letter showing up at my mother’s door threatening her if I do not cease and desist my work. There is nothing to stop me from being pulled into a secondary screening in any number of countries that will soon have access to this data.

There is nothing to stop my closest Afghan allies from being interrogated until they give up my biographical data, personal email, physical description and professional title. This will limit my ability to travel anywhere outside Western Europe, for example.

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Additionally, every single military, diplomatic and intelligence post around the world is now compromised, with the key details now available on how to gain employment while surpassing vetting and investigative procedures.

None of this speaks to the fact that the Taliban reportedly have access to our biometric databases that identify our Afghan partners. To be clear, many of our Afghan partners were embedded within the core of our diplomatic, intelligence and military units. Leaving these people behind is akin to leaving Americans with security clearances being at the mercy of Taliban interrogators.

Afghanistan is not some far-off place with no relevance. Afghanistan is here, in America — at home. It is closer to you than your television. Abandoning our Afghan allies is a grave national security violation that will haunt us for decades to come.

*[This article originally appeared on the author’s Medium page.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Leaving Afghan Allies Behind Is a Threat to US Security appeared first on Fair Observer.

Friedberg is an inconspicuous town with roughly 30,000 inhabitants in a rural district in the middle of Germany. It lies at the hinge of the metropolitan region of Frankfurt/Rhein-Main, where the European Central Bank is headquartered. In recent years, this town where urban and rural life collides has occasionally popped up in the national headlines, all because of a small pharmacy. 

In July, for the second time now, a group of around a hundred protesters had gathered on the square right in front of the pharmacy to demonstrate “Against Racism and Colonial Language.” They had followed a call by the United Colors Of Change to voice their disapproval at the name, Hof-Apotheke Zum Mohren — Court Pharmacy at the Moor’s.

Remembering Germany’s Dark Colonial History

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This particular pharmacy is representative of more than a hundred with the word “Mohren” in their name across the country. They are at the center of the heated and unrelenting debate around systemic and structural racism, and the question of how to deal with Germany’s colonial past. It isn’t just pharmacies that bear this particular designation; it also appears in names of streets, restaurants, food and drinks.

Interpretational Sovereignty

The German word “Mohr” derives both from the Greek “Moros,” meaning foolish but also stupid, and from the Latin term “Maurus,” meaning black and dark, which the Romans used to describe the inhabitants of the empire’s province of Mauritania.

For critics like the protesters in Friedberg, the use of this term not only represents the use of language with colonialist connotations; they regard it as an expression of underlying, structural racism that legitimizes and perpetuates historically established balances of power and inequalities in the present.

Calling for a change of name, their purpose is to overturn racist inequalities inherent in the German language. Yet first and foremost, they plead for an awareness that recognizes the power of language in the first place because “language creates reality and serves to establish and maintain social relations and systems and is the most important medium in people’s interactions with one another.” 

In this dispute over etymological sovereignty of interpretation, numerous renowned experts jumped to the protesters’ defense. According to Susan Arndt, professor of English and Anglophone literature at Bayreuth University, the racist provenance of the M-word resembles the N-word. Both are often used synonymously and influenced by the idea “that people can be divided by race [and] skin color or … that there are supposedly two races that have mixed.”

Anatol Stefanowitsch, professor at the Institute of English Language and Literature at the Free University Berlin, considers the term a problematic foreign designation since Africans never called themselves that way. It stems from a time “in which there was — to put it kindly — a great ignorance as far as the various tribes in Africa are concerned.”

Only a handful of the affected pharmacies in Germany reacted to the criticism by changing their names. The Hof-Apotheke Zum Mohren in Friedberg is not one of them. The owner of the pharmacy refers back to an alternative interpretation of the use of the term “Mohren” as a tribute to the Moors, who brought modern, advanced pharmacology from the Middle East to Europe.

Helmut Glück, a former professor of linguistics at Bamberg University, is one of the few linguists to undergird this positive interpretation. According to Glück, the presumptions held by other linguists and the demonstrators are “based on ignorance of the linguistic and cultural-historical background.” He warns against an alleged Jacobean terror of virtue: “Moor is an old word. It is not used today to insult black people.” Yet a denial that the word is an “expression of coloniality” and has always been used as a foreign designation is nowhere to be found.

As to the dispute over the name of the Friedberg pharmacy, positions are more entrenched than ever and neither side is ready to give in. Debate and the sentiments around this particular Apotheke can serve as a blueprint for popular opinion in the whole country. Indeed, the owner’s refusal to change the name “for traditional and emotional reasons“ has broad support among Friedberg’s citizens. More than 25,700 have signed a petition launched in 2018 to oppose the renaming. A countervailing petition advocating the renaming of the pharmacy only counts about 1,200 signatures to date.

Ignoring Colonial History

Protesters, however, consider a mere reference to tradition insufficient. Their aim is to shift the public perceptions of people and minorities affected by racism. It also is an act of solidarity with those suffering from systemic racism who shy away from exposing themselves and their experiences of racism for fear of being subjected to more abuse and prejudice.

These fears are not unfounded. The hatred that these protesters face casts a light on the smoldering xenophobia in Germany. According to Ousman Conteh, the organizer of the demonstrations, abuse and obscene gestures from passers-by are a regular occurrence. 

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Comments in the anonymous space of the internet surpass real-life incidents: “From hatred to incitement of the people … everything was there,” Conteh tells me in an email. He recalls very personal, racist slurs directed at him. One of these comments that “stuck in his mind” read: “If we are talking about changing his name, maybe he should start with himself. He bears the name of an entire terrorist group — Osman.”

This was not only a strikingly offensive but also a blatantly incorrect statement that underlines the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding the debate. This atmosphere was stoked and exploited by far-right politicians: “Even an AfD [Alternative for Germany] member of parliament commented that we should go back to Africa,” Conteh added.

Resistance to change the names of companies, institutions or products and recognizing structural racism is hardly unique to Germany. Nevertheless, the use of language is both a reflection of a society’s values and of how it deals with history. Indeed, in English-speaking countries, Germany is often regarded as a positive example of how to approach a difficult past, especially when it comes to the Third Reich. Nevertheless, this positive assessment of coming to terms with national socialism should be seen against the backdrop of a half-hearted denazification. 

Colonial history before the Nazi era in Germany has largely been ignored. For example, 117 years had to pass before Germany officially recognized the 1904 genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia. Restitution of looted art is proceeding hesitantly. There is no central memorial for the victims of German colonialism.

The lack of urgency and sensitivity toward Germany’s colonial past is also aided by the fact that the German colonial era is not addressed at all, or only sparsely, in school history curricula. Alice Hasters, a 32-year-old journalist and author of the much-discussed book, “What White People Don’t Want to Hear About Racism But Should Know Anyway,” told Deutschlandfunk that during her school years, terms such as “colonial times” and “race theory” were hardly mentioned.

In her opinion, this hasn’t improved up to date: “In the meantime, I’ve been back to a few schools and I don’t have the feeling that so much has changed … The curriculum is based on a white German standard. Anything that deviates from that is ignored.”

Attention Shift

Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs of change. Protests and public denunciations of racist names of colonial origin are just one indication of this. As it seems, they might have propelled Germany’s political parties to start addressing the country’s colonial legacy. The program of the coalition government led by Angela Merkel states: “No future without remembrance — the basic democratic consensus in Germany includes coming to terms with the Nazi reign of terror and the SED dictatorship, as well as Germany’s colonial history.“ 

A closer look at the election programs of Germany’s six main parties, days away from the general election on September 26, shows the increasing importance of the issue. Compared to the election programs for the 2017 general election, the word “colonialism” is mentioned more frequently, advocating a postcolonial culture of remembrance. The Social Democrats went from one mention of colonialism in 2017 to five mentions in 2021, the Greens from zero to 18, the Left party from four to 14, and the Christian Democratic Union from zero to a modest one.

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While the Liberal Democrats fail to mention colonialism both in 2017 and 2021, the far-right AfD is the only party to take an opposing stance. While it did not thematize colonialism in its 2017 election program, its 2021 manifesto states: “The debate about an allegedly necessary ‘decolonization’ of our culture, which goes hand in hand with a demonization of the ‘white man,’ calls into question the self-image of our cultural identity as a whole. The AfD is the only political force opposing this dismantling of our historical-cultural identity.”

Yet there is still disagreement among those who want to achieve greater sensitivity about the path and strategy for publicly addressing systemic, structural racism. Leila Slimani, a French-Moroccan journalist and author who writes about the conflict between France and the protectorate of Morocco in her most recent novel, “The Country of Others,” urges a preoccupation with the colonial past. She argues against removing monuments and erasing traces of colonial history: “We have to preserve the traces, otherwise we won’t be able to make our children understand this later.”

Nevertheless, traces such as the “Mohren” pharmacies have always been there in Germany, and debates about structural racism and colonialism only arose due to demands for the name change. At the same time, it seems fair to question whether equating words with monuments underestimates the real power of language. Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, wrote in a 1947 treatise on the language of the Third Reich: “Words can be like tiny arsenic doses. They are swallowed unnoticed, they seem to have no effect, and yet after some time, the poisonous effect is there.” 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post German Pharmacies at the Heart of an Anti-Racism Debate appeared first on Fair Observer.