#if anything Russia turning towards Europe and becoming more European was one of the factors that brought on the war

[bakerstreetdoctor]

Okay, I finally started the book I bought. Well. It is obvious that it was written in the first half of the 20th century 🥴 (if you know what I mean)

[armeniaitn]

As Lukashenka Turns To Geopolitics, The West Faces Learning Curve In Belarus

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/as-lukashenka-turns-to-geopolitics-the-west-faces-learning-curve-in-belarus-51800-24-08-2020/

As Lukashenka Turns To Geopolitics, The West Faces Learning Curve In Belarus

With hundreds of thousands of protesters flooding the streets of Minsk in recent days as Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka put the military on high-alert warning of a foreign-backed plan to oust him, the standoff in Belarus shows no signs of subsiding.

The embattled strongman has been back-footed by the massive, unprecedented demonstrations demanding he resign in the wake of the August 9 presidential election the protesters view as fixed.

And with nowhere else to turn to, he has gone looking to the Kremlin for support.

Lukashenka — in power for more than a quarter-century — has in recent days even accused European Union countries of plotting a “color revolution” to topple him and warned that NATO is massing troops on Belarus’s western border.

The military alliance flatly rejects the charges in what appears an attempt by Lukashenka to elevate his full-blown domestic crisis into a geopolitical one reminiscent of standoffs between Russia and the West across the former Soviet Union.

Despite Lukashenka’s rhetoric, the events in Belarus remain domestically driven.

EU flags and ambitions of Western integration have not been a factor in the demonstrations that have spread across the country, with protesters and opposition figures such as exiled presidential candidate Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya repeating that the protests are motivated by the desire to freely choose a leader and are not part of an anti-Russian or pro-Western movement.

But with poor relations and high suspicions between Moscow and the West, the EU and Russian responses to ongoing developments in Belarus are being shaped — for better or worse — by past experiences in Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia.

“Everybody knows the Russian playbook after 2014 and is concerned about it, but the West and Russia are being far more careful now than before,” Paul Stronski, a former director for Russia and Central Asia on the U.S. National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL. “The protests in Belarus are not geopolitical and the West isn’t looking to change that.”

Walking A Tightrope

European leaders have been quick to express solidarity with the protesters, but the EU has offered a calibrated response to the crisis that suggests the bloc’s leaders are wary of antagonizing the Kremlin to avoid military intervention by Russia on Lukashenka’s behalf.

While eager to defend democratic values, fair elections, and the rule of law, European leaders have hedged their response. EU foreign ministers have called the election results fraudulent, agreed on sanctions, and demanded the release of protesters unlawfully detained, but have not backed the opposition’s call for new elections.

Instead, the bloc has urged dialogue between the government and the opposition to foster a “peaceful transition of power.”

“The tone from the EU suggests a clear acknowledgement of a Russian role in the outcome and that there is still some hope that it’s possible to engage with Russia constructively,” Joerg Forbrig, the director for Central and Eastern Europe at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, told RFE/RL.

Crisis In Belarus

Read our coverage as Belarusians take to the streets to demand the resignation of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and call for new elections after official results from the August 9 presidential poll gave Lukashenka a landslide victory.

Finding a constructive solution with Russia on the stalemate in Belarus would involve the EU overcoming the lack of trust that cratered relations with Moscow following its 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine.

But the events in Belarus vary markedly from those in neighboring Ukraine in 2014, which were a direct response to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to abandon European integration and reforms in favor of the Moscow-led Eurasian Union. This led to the EU and Ukraine’s future political orientation becoming a central factor of the protest movement that led to Yanukovych’s departure and Russia’s intervention.

In Belarus, the situation remains different, with the focus on the erosion of rights and opportunities during Lukashenka’s 26-year reign as president.

This has led some commentators, such as former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, to argue that the 2018 revolution in Armenia — where mass demonstrations led to the resignation of longtime President Serzh Sarkisian — is a more instructive example for Belarus.

In an August 18 op-ed, Bildt said Armenia offered the best template for current developments in Belarus, where fresh elections could pave the way for a new government. While Armenian protests pushed out Sarkisian, the new administration led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has retained the country’s pro-Russian policies.

“To ensure a smooth process, Belarus’s external orientation should be kept off the table,” Bildt wrote. “The election and broader struggle must be solely about democracy within the country, and nothing else.”

“Russia doesn’t always intervene if a previous partner loses an election. They can live with power transfers and Armenia is the best recent example of that,” said Forbrig. “Russia is still shaping its approach in Belarus and has shown in the past it can be adaptable.”

Looking For A Toolbox

But unlike Sarkisian in Armenia, Lukashenka shows no signs of leaving office on his own accord and shouted at protesters during a visit to a factory that “there will be no new election until you kill me.”

Despite the nationwide protests against his rule, Lukashenka still appears to enjoy overwhelming support among the military and security services and, unlike in Armenia, the Belarusian authorities had no qualms about using force against their citizens, violently breaking up demonstrations, detaining people in mass, and reportedly torturing protesters.

With Lukashenka making it clear he intends to hang on to power and no clear path towards a political transition on the horizon, the EU has few other policy options than the sanctions and support that it has already offered.

Maryya Sadouskaya-Komlach, a Belarusian journalist and program coordinator at Free Press Unlimited, told RFE/RL that she believes the EU was not making enough use of the preexisting mechanism it already possesses, in particular the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), an organization founded by the bloc to support civil society and political activists. The EED has been notably quiet during the weeks of protest in Belarus, which Sadouskaya-Komlach thinks sends a signal of indifference to the protesters.

Meanwhile, sanctions appear to be the main option in the EU’s toolbox, but with Belarus being sanctioned in some form or another by Europe since 1997 and not having changed course by now, the utility of the sanctions seems limited. “The EU wants to use targeted sanctions as a symbol of its tough actions against Lukashenka, but it is instead a symbol of its policy failure,” Sadouskaya-Komlach said.

A Confused Kremlin

The current situation is also a policy conundrum for the Kremlin.

Regardless of how the current situation ends, Moscow will retain significant influence in Belarus.

The economy relies heavily on Russia, which effectively subsidizes Minsk with low-cost oil and gas shipments and the two countries are well-integrated — a union that the Kremlin is keen to deepen.

Furthermore, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lukashenka have a famously tense relationship, with the Belarusian president eroding his own standing with the Kremlin by resisting Putin’s push for deeper economic union.

But Lukashenka’s dominance of Belarusian politics creates a quandary for Russia.

Unlike in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has spent decades cultivating pro-Russian politicians, parties, and oligarchs, Belarus has few alternatives for Moscow to support. Similarly, Tsikhanouskaya, who is in exile in Lithuania, and her campaign, which allowed members of Belarus’s traditional Western-funded opposition to dominate the postelection Coordination Council, are viewed with suspicion by Moscow.

“This can’t be a situation like Armenia because Lukashenka won’t give up,” Angela Stent, a former U.S. national intelligence officer on Russia and a professor at Georgetown University, told RFE/RL. “I can’t see him giving up peacefully, let alone negotiating him leaving the country or holding new elections.”

For the time being, Moscow appears to be backing its problematic partner in Minsk as he tries to cling to power.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently warned that the situation in Belarus was a “continuation” of the tug-of-war between Russia and the EU over Ukraine in 2014 and claimed that the thus far very peacefully protesting opposition wants “bloodshed.”

“No one wants a repeat of Ukraine in 2014 and no one wants to do anything that will provoke Russia,” Stentsaid. “There is a very limited toolbox for the West here.”

Read original article here.

[electionsintheworld]

Elections and Nationalism - Andy Wilson

Because many of us were not alive to witness how these behemoths of international interconnectivity manifested, it would sometimes seem as though they are innocuous. However, the rise of isolationist and nationalist tendencies stemming from the elections of great western powers threaten this stability.  

Typically, such trends are observed when the U.S. turns away from it’s founding liberal principles. This can be examined thoroughly when reviewing the recently elected U.S. administration.

Trump has started rejecting these principles as he has honed in on historically protectionist attitudes. These sentiments are responsible for his growing antipathy towards multilateral agreements like NAFTA, which follow the same justifications of the implementation as other historically protectionist policies, such as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act (June 17, 1930). In summation, this act attempted to protect domestic farmers and manufacturers by passing a series of tariffs resulting in a 20% tax on multiple imported goods. Subsequently, it invited other nations to do the same. Within two years nearly a dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies.[1] Channeling these sentiments, Trump has threatened similar protectionist policies that have caused other nations to respond in kind. While this political rhetoric energizes a candidate’s base, it has similar effects on the nations such policies touch. 

Already, Mexico has already threatened retaliatory measures towards Trump’s suggestion of increasing tariffs on Mexican imports by proposing their own tariff on American Textiles, a $6.5 billion trade industry.[2] While these contentions usually become resolved, they leave scars of xenophobia behind. 

When these formal relationships begin to deteriorate, it reverberates down to micro-levels. The populations within these states, which are most affected by such measures, perceive it as an attack on their own identity. This subsequently creates resentment within their nation, thus manifesting their own isolationist and nationalist sentiments. Such a trend can largely be seen in Muslim majority nations, which after decades of anti-middle eastern policies., increasingly led to these populations having an unfavorable view of the United States and causing them to embrace their own nationalist ideologies.[3]

 Immigration policy is a large contributing factor to this. When candidates from western powers gain traction from resisting the tides of immigration, historical trends show that other states will follow. No better context demonstrates this than the growing resistance from far-right nationalist candidates in the U.S. towards asylum seekers escaping conflicts in the Middle East, and the paralleling restrictive immigration policies of the 1920’s. Many political parties within Europe, in both instances, looked to U.S. policy to justify their own.

An early examination of this trend can be seen after the Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, which saw the rise of scientific racism and xenophobia lead to the rejection of international cooperation within the U.S., and causing other European powers to adopt similar policies.[4]  This trend is still evident today. In the recent Austrian presidential election, Norbert Hofer, of the Freedom Party of Austria, called for restricting Austria borders (primarily to Muslims), and protested liberal trade agreements made with the European Union; all policies which mirror those of President Trump.[5]   

An analysis of the 2015-17 elections indicate that these isolationist sentiments are fielding an unprecedented number of far right, ultra-nationalist candidates. From extremely starch conservative nationalists in Europe, like French candidate Marine Le Pen and Dutch candidate Geert Wilders, to rising nationalist tides in Russia, and South Asian states like India’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) groups, the global community is seeing a noticeable resurgence of these sentiments.[6] The election of Donald Trump has established American policy as the new torch bearer for the legitimacy of this nationalist political wave. For example, May Norbert Hofer’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party came close to winning the presidency with 49.7% of the vote, one of many nationalist candidates in Europe who almost won in 2016.[7]

An omen that should be recognized is the dichotomy between this push for isolationism and the rise of nationalism. As resentments form against global interconnectivity, nationalistic tendencies will materialize. Trends have shown that this will then spread. Europe saw this trend occur multiple times after the Napoleonic wars, the first of which in the late 19th century with the dissolution of feudalism, and again in the 1930’s with the rise of fascist regimes in places like Italy, Germany, and Spain.[8] Without the trust built between nations from interconnectivity, they will return to a state of nature, threatening the fragile global tranquility we have spent generations fostering.

The success of these complex, multilayered, institutionalized relationships, is predicated on the participation of the United States in the process. If the United States allows their own politics to relegate itself to a hermetical hegemon, it will eventually seep into the elections of even more nations. If history has shown us anything, this is a dangerous precedent.

[1]The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2 Aug. 2016, <www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act>

[2] Gillespie, Patrick. “Mexico Warns Trump on Tariffs: We’ll Respond ‘Immediately’.” CNNMoney, Cable News Network, 14 Jan. 2017, <money.cnn.com/2017/01/14/news/economy/donald-trump-mexico-tariffs-response/index.html.>

[3] Rosentiel, Tom. “Arab and Muslim Perceptions of the United States.” Pew Research Center, 9 Nov. 2005,

<www.pewresearch.org/2005/11/10/arab-and-muslim-perceptions-of-the-united-states/>

[4] Massey, Douglas S, and Karen A. Pren. “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America.”Population and development review 38.1 (2012): 1–29. Print.

[5] Ulansky, Elena, and William Witenberg. “Is Nationalism on the Rise Globally?” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 31 May 2016, <www.huffingtonpost.com/elena-ulansky/is-nationalism-on-the-ris_b_10224712.html.>

[6] “League of Nationalists.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 19 Nov. 2016

<www.economist.com/news/international/21710276-all-around-world-nationalists-are-gaining-ground-why-league-nationalists>

[7] Hirsh, Michael, et al. “Why the New Nationalists Are Taking Over.” POLITICO Magazine, 27 June 2016, <www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/nationalism-donald-trump-boris-johnson-brexit-foreign-policy-xenophobia-isolationism-213995.>

[8] Germani, Gino. Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism. Transaction Books, NP: 1978.

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/boris-johnson-brexit-deep-state/

Boris Johnson, Brexit and the Deep State

by Nick Griffin for Ooduarere viaThe Saker Blog

Nick Griffin, a life-long opponent of the European Union and former Member of the European Parliament, explains why – after three years of believing that the rulers of Britain would block Brexit, he now believes it is more likely than not to be delivered.

Are the British people really going to get Brexit? For years, the answer given by well-informed realists has had to be ‘No!’ The UK’s ruling elite was so thoroughly Europhile that they would do whatever it took to block the will of the British people, and Brussels would go along with this deceit, just as they did when the French, the Dutch and the Irish were sold out to the EU by their own masters.

But today I’m going to tell you that it is now more likely than not that Brexit WILL happen. Indeed, assuming the new Boris Johnson regime manages to cling on to power, or is forced into a general election in which Johnson reaches some sort of deal with Nigel Farage, it is now virtually guaranteed.

Of course, there is a faint possibility that the whole Johnson business is a giant game of three-dimensional chess, and that he’s running an elaborate scam with no intention of getting Britain out. But, realistically, if that was the plan, there would be absolutely no purpose in delaying such a betrayal, still less in raising so many expectations.

To encourage and then dash such hopes would be ludicrously self-defeating, so we have to assume that Johnson and Co are serious and that – barring a series of events outside of their control, they WILL deliver Brexit.

So what has changed? Has the Europhile British elite suddenly had a change of heart and decided to do the decent thing by the people who pay their inflated salaries?

Of course not. Leopards don’t change their spots. But, in the case of the UK elite, it was always divided into two leopards, with very different spots. One of them, for years now the stronger animal, was blue with yellow, spots – a thoroughly European beast.

The colours of the, until recently, smaller animal are harder to discern. At first glance, they could be seen to resemble the American flag although, of course, that’s just part of the camouflage. Look closer and the thing’s coat actually looks more like a mass of intertwined dollar signs and Israeli flags!

Even within the USA, opinion has been divided on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Obama, for example, more or less ordered the Brits to vote to Remain – a factor in the decision of quite a few of them to vote to Leave! The neo-cons, by contrast, have become much more hostile to Brussels – particularly since the EU started to display alarming degrees of sympathy for the Palestinians.

It wasn’t always like that. During the Cold War, the US elite was more or less unanimously in favour of British membership of the EU, which right from the start was consistently promoted by the CIA as a block to balance the Soviet Union.

When the Communist regime collapsed in 1989, the US power elite gradually shifted its position on the EU. It moved from fervent support to a sort of agnostic, nothing to do with us boredom. But then it gradually became clear that the European Union was steadily becoming the pawn of the German industrial complex.

Even worse, the Germans were beginning to cosy up to Russia. Within just a few years, the combination of German manufacturing, the European market and Russia’s raw materials were clearly presenting a future threat to the global hegemony of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the American military-industrial complex.

On top of this, the in-built liberal-socialist majority within the EU was making it an increasingly large stumbling block to the globalist privatisation free-for-all favoured by the ultra-capitalist ideology promoted by the extremely influential followers of Ayn Rand.

Franco-German moves to create a European Army were seen as a challenge to NATO and to its Stateside leadership, and only served to strengthen the arguments of the anti-EU faction within the US elite.

All this led a significant section of the US Deep state to move towards hostility to the European Union, and to put in place measures to undermine it. From about 2008, this included the relentless media promotion (and, no doubt, funding) of dissident, Euro-sceptic political movements, particularly UKIP in Britain and the Five Star Movement in Italy.

Extremely well-funded globalist and neo-con think tanks, particularly the Henry Jackson Society and the London-based Policy Exchange, began to organise. Their mission – to lay the theoretical groundwork for a globalist, economically liberal, Atlanticist faction within British politics to challenge the pro-EU majority.

To cut a long story short, that faction has just grabbed control of the British ship of state! The Europhile elite have not changed their minds, the highly honed survival instinct of the British Conservative party, which has made it the oldest political party in the world, has simply handed the reins of power to a different bunch of politicians, in hock to a different foreign power. The UK just lurched even further out of the orbit of the Brussels bureaucrats and even closer to the Anglo-Zionist Empire.

Johnson and his gang really do appear committed to delivering Brexit, but before those who voted for it in the first place get too excited, it has to be said that, in delivering the letter of what the people voted for, this bunch will go on to drive a coach and horses through the spirit of that vote.

Because the British people voted Brexit fundamentally in a collective cry of anger and pain over being turned into marginalised outsiders in their own country. Brussels rule was conflated not just with losing our traditional weights and measures, but with the destruction of the old industries – fishing, coal, steel, ship-building – and the devastation of the working class communities that relied on them.

And, of course, with mass immigration, including that from former British colonies in the Third World, an influx which if anything was slowed down by the more recent arrival of generally far more assimilable East Europeans, courtesy of the EU.

On top of that was all the unease of millions of normal people over the political elite’s Gaderene rush to embrace social ultra-liberalism, in particular dripping wet law and order policies and a mania for LGBTQ+ triumphalism. Relentless newspaper headlines about crackpot rulings by the European Court of Justice led to ‘Europe’ getting the blame for a breakdown in law and order and in traditional justice.

Finally, with the majority of the political class urging people to vote to Remain, voting to Leave became a way of punishing the political elite, not just in Brussels, but in Westminster as well.

And yet, looking at the new Boris Johnson cabinet, and listening to his first few speeches as new Prime Minister, it is already all too clear that, while we are going to get Brexit, it certainly will not be the Brexit that the majority of Brits thought they were voting for!

To illustrate this, let’s take a brief, non-exhaustive look at some of the key players in the Johnson regime.

Let’s start with the man himself, noting the speed with which he spoke out about his pride in his partial Turkish Muslim and east European Jewish ancestry and the way in which, if ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ rear their heads, he automatically finds himself thinking in terms of those ancestral loyalties, rather than what is good for Britain – as the British people are surely entitled to insist on in their Prime Minister.

Then, in one of his final campaign speeches, Johnson told the LGBT+ Conservatives (the tautology neatly sums up the state of the party and, more generally, Britain’s ruling political and media classes) that he has their back:

“I will continue to champion LGBT+ equality, get tough on hate crime and ensure that we break down barriers to a fairer society,” Johnson said, according to the group.

“We must do more to ensure that trans rights are protected and those who identify as trans or intersex are able to live their lives with dignity,” he continued, noting that he was one of the first senior party leaders to support same-sex marriage.

Following his meeting with the queen to officially accept the premiership, Johnson specifically mentioned the LGBTQ+ community in his speech outside No. 10 Downing Street.

“[The U.K.’s] brand and political personality is admired and even loved around the world for our inventiveness, for our humour, for our universities, our scientists, our armed forces, our diplomacy for the equalities on which we insist — whether race or gender or LGBT …….. and for the values we stand for around the world,” he said

Once upon a time, British political leaders justified going to war by speaking of making the world safe for democracy. Boris Johnson started his premiership by committing Britain to a global struggle to make the world safe for buggery!

Nor is this fixation with LGBTQ+ new. Although the never-satisfied ‘gay’ lobby is whining about a couple of throwaway ‘homophobic comments’ he made decades ago, Johnson voted in 2003 to repeal Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, by which Margaret Thatcher prohibited local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or “pretended family relationships.”

This vote opened the door to the indoctrination of school-children with homosexual propaganda. Johnson also voted for civil partnerships for homosexuals and attacked the institution of marriage as ‘bourgeois convention’.

Johnson has also wasted no time reiterating his support for an amnesty for huge numbers of illegal immigrants and boasting of sharing the views of pro-immigration Labour party MPs. Ominously, he has also refused to pledge even to attempt to stick to the upper limits on immigration promised – but of course not delivered – by his predecessor Theresa May.

With Brexit making it harder for Poles and Hungarians to come to Britain, it is already clear from Johnson’s waffle about making the UK ‘open’ and ‘welcoming immigrants’, that, far from stopping immigration as millions of voters expected, Johnson’s Brexit will merely swap Polish immigrants for more Pakistanis, Bulgarians for Botswanans.

Johnson probably will set Britain free from Brussels, but he is also openly committed to speeding up the process by which the duly ‘liberated’ Brits are replaced in their own country by a further flood of immigrants. And the social liberals posing as Johnson’s fake conservatives will urge the stupid Brits to suck it up and celebrate their added diversity.

We’ve already seen the start of this process in Johnson creating what he refers to as a “cabinet for modern Britain” – wording that The Guardian’s Kehinde Andrews rightly described as a “euphemism for non-white”.

Leading Johnson’s Great Replacement charge will be Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has spoken gushingly of how the new government will “ continue to push for a dynamic, global Britain that is outward looking ……Our vision is for a truly global country – one where we welcome the brightest and best, where we are more outward facing, and where we decide who comes here based on what they have to offer.”

The Brits can’t say they weren’t warned. Because capitalism demands not just cheap labour, but also an endless supply of new consumers. Even the worse educated and least assimilable featherless biped on the planet thus has plenty to offer big business. The door is going to open wide to them all.

Patel was forced to resign two years ago after holding secret meetings with Israeli ministers. The meetings included a visit to an Israeli army field hospital in the occupied Golan Heights, where wounded Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters were patched up and sent back to continue fighting against the pro-Christian government in Syria. Patel asked officials within her department to look into whether British aid money could be funneled into this medical centre.

The same dangerous obsequiousness to Israel has also been shown by Johnson’s new Chancellor, Sajid Javid. Two years after becoming MP, Javid told the Conservative Friends of Israel annual lunch that as a British born Muslim if he had to go and live in the Middle East, he would not go to a Muslim majority country: “There is only one place I could possibly go. Israel. The only nation in the Middle East that shares the same democratic values as Britain”.

He is talking, let us remind ourselves, about the last openly racist state on the planet, whose supporters around the world insist on the right of Jews to have their own exclusive homeland, at the very same time as denouncing any attempt by any white nation to restrict immigration or preserve traditional ethnic identities as ‘neo-Nazi’. And the state which has done more than any other –except Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Barak Obama’s White House – to fund, arm and aid the Islamist head-cutters at war in Syria.

In her resignation letter Patel admitted she “fell below the high standards that are expected of a Secretary of State.” Not for the first time! In the past she has been criticised for taking trips to Bahrain funded by that country’s repression Salafist regime, and attending a conference in Washington paid for by the Henry Jackson society.

As already noted, the Henry Jackson operation is one of the best-funded and most dangerous of all the trans-Atlantic neo-con think tanks. It constantly agitates for hostility to Russia, Iraq-war style meddling in the Middle East on behalf of Eretz Israel and Big Oil, and for a poisonous mixture of ultra-right-wing economics and social liberalism – including the privatisation of national assets and the promotion of LGBTQ+ agendas at the expense of traditional values.

The same sort of poison is promoted in Britain by the closely connected Policy Exchange think-tank. This was founded by Michael Gove, who Johnson just appointed as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in many ways his political Chief of Staff in parliament.

Gove’s counterpart within the government itself is Munira Mirza, who Johnson just appointed Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit. She was previously Development Director at Policy Exchange and also worked on a range of its publications, including Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism.

As with all the other material coming out of the Johnson camp about multi-culturalism, this argued that the chief problem with Islam is that it hinders ‘integration’ – i.e. the process by which traditional British cultural and ethnic identity is replaced by the ultimate corporate dream of an atomised mass of rootless, identical consumers. And by which the traditional values once upheld by Christians and now defended mainly by Muslims are to be replaced by the anti-morality of the LGBTQ+ brigade and corporations greedy for pink pounds and rainbow dollars.

As with so many neo-cons on both sides of the Pond, Mirza started off as a Trotskyite. She was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. When it was dissolved in 1987 she followed other key comrades into the Living Marxism operation and then Spiked magazine, which has very successfully operated a policy of entryism into what passes for politica thought in Britain. Her Wiki entry quotes an article in the London Review of Books which noted that “Many of Munira’s ex party members have become influential in Conservative or Eurosceptic circles since the dissolution of their party, whilst remaining closely associated with each other’s endeavours.”

This includes the former party leader Frank Furedi, whose wife Ann is one of Britain’s most powerful abortionists. Strange ‘conservatives’ indeed! But, there again, one reading of these ‘ex’-Trotskyites’ new-found fondness for ultra-right-wing economics and privatisation is that the resulting exploitation and public anger will lead to the revolutionary crisis that eluded them when they were all wearing Che T-shirts in the late sixties! Or perhaps, it just pays better!

Coming back closer to Johnson, his campaign chief was Gavin Williamson. When Defence Secretary, Williamson was a notorious hawk against Russia and China, and for greater UK involvement in the Middle East. He also spoke out vigorously against Britain’s continued participation in Galileo, the global navigation satellite system created by the European Union. He is one of those pushing for a new UK system, compatible with the American GPS, and fully integrated with Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the UK. As with all such manoeuvres, it is hard to see where money gives way to ideology and power-politics and, of course, they are hopelessly entangled.

It is Williamson who has given one of the clearest glimpses into the Atlanticist obsession of the new regime: “Tthe cornerstone of European security is not the European Union, it is Nato. Let’s be absolutely clear. Our involvement in Nato is going to be there, long, enduring and for many, many defence secretaries after me.”

Another part of the Anglo-American elite can also be seen when you turn over another stone in the Johnson camp.

.Andrew Griffith, the new chief business adviser to Number 10 is a former Rothschild investment banker who joined Rupert Murdoch’s Sky in 1999, and became finance chief for the group in 2008.

Johnson has been spending up to 13 hours a day at Griffith’s lavish £9.5m townhouse,

A Johnson campaign source said Griffith had kindly opened up his home to let members of the transition team meet there. If paying the piper leads to the donor calling the tune, how much more power accrues to the Rothschild/Murdoch man providing the dancers with a 9.5 million pound house?

Finally, we just have time to consider Johnson’s new Chief Whip, Mark Spencer. Taking the new regime’s enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ issues towards its logical liberal intolerant end, he has said that Christian teachers who dare to voice opposition to same-sex marriage should be subject to ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’. In other words, legislation brought in supposedly to stop Islamist hate-preachers recruiting terrorists is to be used against Christians who stand by the teachings of the Bible!

So, yes, we can now expect Brexit from Johnson. But Britain is also going to get more mass immigration. And ruthless demonization of anyone who dares oppose it. More LGBTQ+ propaganda for children – and ruthless repression of anyone who dares oppose it.

More pressure for British participation in neo-con, Zionist and Salafist wars in Syria, Iran and Yemen. More insane and dangerous sabre-rattling against traditionalist and Christian Russia.

And more looting of what remains of Britain’s common wealth by the privatisation vultures. Finishing off the monetisation of the NHS is sure to surface as a great ambition for this corporate puppet regime sooner rather than later. Almost certainly a couple of months before Johnson delivers Brexit and obliterates Jeremy Corbyn in a snap general election.

It remains to be seen whether the globalist kleptomaniacs behind the new regime will also find a way to turn the removal of EU subsidies into an opportunity to arrange a massive transfer of farmland in Britain from farmers, workers’ pension funds and the old landed aristocracy and into the hands of global corporations. If that’s on the agenda too, remember where you heard it first!

All the above presupposes, of course, that the juvenile and utterly irresponsible anti-Russian, anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese sabre-rattling – of which the Johnson regime is as guilty as its predecessors – doesn’t actually start World War Three. Because, if it does, there’ll be nothing left to privatise and loot except the last tin of beans in the irradiated rubble.

Don’t get me wrong: This is not to condemn Brexit. The British people voted for it, and its delivery will be a Good Thing (not least because it has added, and will continue to add, to the instability in the EU which has disrupted the efforts of its bureaucratic rulers to maintain a firmly anti-Russian line, and because, however imperfect, Brexit is a blow for national sovereignty against a particularly nasty little imperial project.

All of us who, one way or another, helped set in motion or advance the process which defeated the pro-EU whores who had sold Britain to Brussels can be rightly proud of having done their bit to break the claws of the largest leopard in the London-based elite.

But you can also be sure that the British majority are going to be mightily disappointed with the new Johnson regime leopard and how Brexit turns out. They voted to restore the old Britain, particularly the Old England. What they will get instead is an even faster dissolution than we saw under EU rule.

They voted against ‘political correctness gone mad’ and in a bid to cling on to traditional values. What they will get is a quasi-Trotskyite cultural Marxist regime – all the more destructive for having the label ‘conservative’ – which grinds their faces – and especially the faces of their children and grandchildren – in LGBTQ+ filth.

They voted Brexit hoping to stop immigration. Instead, the next ten years will see an absolutely swamping change in Britain’s demographics, as the dying early Baby Boomers are replaced with Johnson’s ‘New Britons’ from all corners of the world.

They voted to kick out a Brussels Occupation Government. What they will get instead is a New York Occupation Government. Which is a polite way of putting it, for there is in fact really nothing American about America’s neocons.

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”, is how the Who put it. But it was all summed up even better by the great English visionary William Morris, in A Dream of John Ball, his revolutionary classic about the very first English Peasants’ Revolt against an alien elite:

“I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”

[mideastsoccer]

Civilizationism vs the Nation State

By James M. Dorsey

Edited remarks at Brookings roundtable in Doha

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr

Many have framed the battle lines in the geopolitics of the emerging new world order as the 21st century’s Great Game. It’s a game that aims to shape the creation of a new Eurasia-centred world, built on the likely fusion of Europe and Asia into what former Portuguese Europe minister Bruno Macaes calls a “supercontinent.”

For now, the Great Game pits China together with Russia, Turkey and Iran against the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The two camps compete for influence, if not dominance, in a swath of land that stretches from the China Sea to the Atlantic coast of Europe.

The geopolitical flashpoints are multiple. They range from the China Sea to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Central European nations and, most recently, far beyond with Russia, China and Turkey supporting embattled Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.

On one level, the rivalry resembles Risk, a popular game of diplomacy, conflict and conquest played on a board depicting a political map of the earth, divided into forty-two territories, which are grouped into six continents. Multiple players command armies that seek to capture territories, engage in a complex dance as they strive for advantage, and seek to compensate for weaknesses. Players form opportunistic alliances that could change at any moment. Potential black swans threaten to disrupt.

Largely underrated in debates about the Great Game is the fact that increasingly there is a tacit meeting of the minds among world leaders as well as conservative and far-right politicians and activists that frames the rivalry: the rise of civilisationalism and the civilizational state that seeks its legitimacy in a distinct civilization rather than the nation state’s concept of territorial integrity, language and citizenry.

The trend towards civilisationalism benefits from the fact that 21st century autocracy and authoritarianism vests survival not only in repression of dissent and denial of freedom of expression but also maintaining at least some of the trappings of pluralism that can include representational bodies with no or severely limited powers, toothless opposition groups, government-controlled non-governmental organizations, and degrees of accountability.

It creates the basis for an unspoken consensus on the values that would underwrite a new world order on which men like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Victor Orban, Mohammed bin Salman, Narendra Modi and Donald Trump find a degree of common ground. If anything, it is this tacit understanding that in the shaping of a new world order constitutes the greatest threat to liberal values such as human and minority rights. By the same token, the tacit agreement on fundamental values reduces the Great Game to a power struggle over spheres of influence and the sharing of the pie as well as a competition of political systems in which concepts such as democracy are hollowed out.

Intellectually, the concept of civilisationalism puts into context much of what is currently happening. This includes the cyclical crisis over the last decade as a result of a loss of confidence in leadership and the system; the rise of right and left-wing populism; the wave of Islamophobia and increased anti-Semitism; the death of multi-culturalism with the brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang as its most extreme expression; the Saudi and Russian alliance with ultra-conservative Christian groups that propagate traditional family values; and Russian meddling in Western elections.

Analysts explained these developments by pointing to a host of separate and disparate factors, some of which were linked in vague ways. Analysts pointed among others to the 2008 financial crisis, jihadist violence and the emergence of the Islamic State, the war in Syria, and a dashing of hope with the rollback of the achievements of the 2011 popular Arab revolts. These developments are and were at best accelerators not sparks or initiators.

Similarly, analysts believed that the brilliance of Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Towers and the Pentagon in Washington was the killing of multi-culturalism in one fell and brutal swoop. Few grasped just how consequential that would be. A significant eye opener was the recent attack on the mosques in Christchurch. New Zealand much like Norway in the wake of the 2012 attacks by supremacist Andre Breivik stands out as an anti-dote to civilisationalism with its inclusive and compassionate response.

The real eye-opener, however, was a New Zealand intelligence official who argued that New Zealand, a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance alongside the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada, had missed the emergence of a far or alt-right that created breeding grounds for violence because of Washington’s singular post-9/11 focus on what popularly is described as Islamic terrorism. That remark casts a whole different light on George W. Bush’s war on terror and the subsequent war against the Islamic State. Those wars are rooted as much in the response to 9/11, the 7/7 London attacks and other jihadist occurrences as they are in witting or unwitting civilisationalism.

“The global war on terror has become a blueprint for violence against Muslims. When there isn’t a shooting at a mosque, there’s a drone strike in Somalia. When one Friday prayer goes by without incident, an innocent Muslim is detained on material support for terrorism charges or another is killed by law enforcement. Maybe a baby is added to a no-fly list,” said human rights activist Maha Hilal. Scholars Barbara Perry and Scott Poynting warned more than a decade ago in study of the fallout in Canada of the war on terror that “in declining adequately to recognize and to act against hate (crimes), and in actually modelling anti-Muslim bias by practicing discrimination and institutional racism through “‘ethnic targeting,’ ‘racial profiling,’ and the like, the state conveys a sort of ideological license to individuals, groups and institutions to perpetrate and perpetuate racial hatred.”

The same is true for the various moves in Europe that have put women on the frontline of what in the West are termed cultural wars but in reality are civilizational wars involving efforts to ban conservative women’s dress and endeavours to create a European form of Islam. In that sense Victor Orban’s definition of Hungary as a Christian state in which there is no room for the other is the extreme expression of this trend. It’s a scary picture, it raises the spectre of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, yet it is everything but.

Fact is that economic and geopolitical interests are but part of the explanation for the erection of a Muslim wall of silence when it comes to developments in Xinjiang, the Organization of Islamic Countries’ ability to criticize the treatment of Muslim minorities in various parts of the world but praise China for its policy, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s alliance with a man like Victor Orban and his joining the right-wing chorus that has turned Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros into a bogeyman or the rise of militant, anti-Muslim Buddhism and Hinduism. In fact, the signs of this were already visible with the alliance between Israel and the evangelists who believe in doomsday on the Day of Judgement if Jews fail to convert to Christianity as well as the recent forging of ties between various powerful Islamic groups or countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the evangelist movement.

Civilisationalism is frequently based on myths erected on a falsification and rewriting of history to serve the autocrat or authoritarian’s purpose. Men like Trump, Orban, and Erdogan project themselves as nationalist heroes who protect the nation from some invading horde. In his manifesto, Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch attacks, bought into the notion of an illusionary invader. Muslims, he wrote, “are the most despised group of invaders in the West, attacking them receives the greatest level of support.”

He also embraced the myths of an epic, centuries-long struggle between the white Christian West and Islam with the defeat of the Ottomans in 1683 at the ports of Vienna as its peak. Inscribed on Tarrant’s weapons were the names of Serbs who had fought the Ottomans as well as references to the battle of Vienna. To Tarrant, the Ottomans’ defeat in Vienna symbolized the victory of the mythical notion of a world of inviolable, homogeneous nations. “The idea that (medieval societies) are this paragon of unblemished whiteness is just ridiculous. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so awful,” said Paul Sturtevant, author of The Middle Ages in the Popular Imagination.

Much like popular perception of the battle for Vienna, Tarrant’s view of history had little relation to reality. A multi-cultural empire, the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna in cooperation with Catholic French King Louis XIV and Hungarian Protestant noble Imre Thokoly as well as Ukrainian Cossacks. Vienna’s Habsburg rulers were supported not only by Polish armies but also Muslim Tartar horsemen. “The Battle of Vienna was a multicultural drama; an example of the complex and paradoxical twists of European history. There never has been such a thing as the united Christian armies of Europe,” said historian Dag Herbjornsrud. Literary scholar Ian Almond argues that notions of a clash of civilizations bear little resemblance to the “almost hopelessly complex web of shifting power-relations, feudal alliances, ethnic sympathies and historical grudges” that shaped much of European history. “The fact remains that in the history of Europe, for hundreds of years, Muslims and Christians shared common cultures, spoke common languages, and did not necessarily see one another as ‘strange’ or ‘other,’” Almond said.

That was evident not only in the Battle of Vienna but also when the Ottomans and North Africa’s Arab rulers rallied around Queen Elizabeth I of England after the pope excommunicated her in 1570 for breaking with Catholicism and establishing a Protestant outpost. Elizabeth and her Muslim supporters argued that Protestantism and Islam were united in their rejection of idol worship, including Catholicism with its saints, shrines and relics. In a letter in 1579 to Ottoman sultan Murad III, Elizabeth described herself as the “most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries.” In doing so, she sought to capitalize on the fact that the Ottomans had justified their decision to grant Lutherans preferred commercial treatment on the basis of their shared beliefs.

Similarly, historian Marvin Power challenges the projection of Chinese history as civilizational justification of the party leader’s one-man rule by Xi Jinping and Fudan University international relations scholar Zhang Weiwei. Amazon’s blurb on Zhang’s bestselling The China Wave: Rise of the Civilizational State summarizes the scholar’s rendition of Xi Jinping’s vision succinctly: “China's rise, according to Zhang, is not the rise of an ordinary country, but the rise of a different type of country, a country sui generis, a civilizational state, a new model of development and a new political discourse which indeed questions many of the Western assumptions about democracy, good governance and human rights.” The civilizational state replaces western political ideas with a model that traces its roots to Confucianism and meritocratic traditions.

In his sweeping study entitled China and England: The Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image, Powers demonstrates that Chinese history and culture is a testimony to advocacy of upholding individual rights, fair treatment, state responsibility to its people, and freedom of expression rather than civilisationalism, hierarchy and authoritarianism. Powers extensively documents the work of influential Chinese philosophers, writers, poets, artists and statesmen dating back to the 3rd century BC who employed rational arguments to construct governance systems and take legal action in support of their advocacy. Powers noted that protection of free speech was embedded in edicts of the Han Emperor Wen in the second century BC. The edicts legitimized personal attacks on the emperor and encouraged taxpayers to expose government mistakes. The intellectuals and statemen were the Chinese counterpart of contemporary liberal thinkers.

In a lot of ways, Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church have understood the utility of civilisationalism far better than others and made it work for them, certainly prior to the Russian intervention in Syria. At a gathering several years before the intervention, Russia achieved a fete that seemed almost unthinkable. Russia brought to the same table at a gathering in Marrakech every stripe of Sunni and Shiite political Islam.

The purpose was not to foster dialogue among the various strands of political Islam. The purpose was to forge an alliance with a Russia that emphasized its civilizational roots in the Russian Orthodox Church and the common values it had with conservative and ultra-conservative Islam. To achieve its goal, Russia was represented at the gathering by some of its most senior officials and prominent journalists whose belief systems were steeped in the values projected by the Church. To the nodding heads of the participating Muslims, the Russians asserted that Western culture was in decline while non-Western culture was on the rise, that gays and gender equality threaten a woman’s right to remain at home and serve her family and that Iran and Saudi Arabia should be the model for women’s rights. They argued that conservative Russian Orthodox values like the Shariah offered a moral and ethical guideline that guarded against speculation and economic bubbles.

The Trump administration has embarked on a similar course by recently siding in the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women with proponents of ultra-conservative values such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq and several African countries. Together they sought to prevent the expansion of rights for girls, women, and LGBT people and weaken international support for the Beijing Declaration, a landmark 1995 agreement that stands as an internationally recognized progressive blueprint for women’s rights.

The US position in the commission strokes with efforts by conservative Christians to reverse civilizational US courts decisions in favour of rights for women, minorities, members of the LGBT community, Muslims and immigrants and refugees. It is what conservative historian and foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan describes as the war within traditionally liberal society. It is that civilizational war that provides the rationale for Russian meddling in elections, a rational that goes beyond geopolitics. It also explains Trump’s seeming empathy with Putin and other autocrats and authoritarians.

The US alignment with social conservatives contributes to the rise of the civilizational state. Putin’s elevation of the position of the church and Xi’s concentration of absolute power in the Communist Party strengthens institutions that symbolize the rejection of liberal values because they serve as vehicles that dictate what individuals should believe and how they should behave. These vehicles enable civilisationalism by strengthening traditional hierarchies defined by birth, class, family and gender and delegitimizing the rights of minorities and minority views. The alignment suggests that the days were over when Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov trumpeted that the West had lost "its monopoly on the globalization process” because there was a "market of ideas" in which different "value systems” were forced to compete.  

Similarly, conservative American author Christopher Caldwell asserted that Orban’s civilizational concept of an authoritarian Christian democracy echoed the kind of democracy that "prevailed in the United States 60 years ago" prior to the civil rights movement and the 1968 student protests. Orban’s Hungary epitomizes the opportunism that underlies the rise of the civilizational state as a mechanism to put one’s mark on the course of history and retain power. In Orban’s terms, civilizational means not Christianity as such but those Christian organizations that have bought into his authoritarian rule. Those that haven’t are being starved of state and public funding.

Civilisationalism’s increased currency is evident from Beijing to Washington with stops in between. Trump’s and Steve Bannon, his former strategy advisor’s beef with China or Russia is not civilizational, its about geopolitical and geo-economic power sharing. In terms of values, they think in equally civilizational terms. In a speech in Warsaw in 2017, Trump declared that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the west has the will to survive” but assured his audience that “our civilization will triumph.”  Bannon has established an “academy for the Judeo-Christian west” in a former monastery in the Italian town of Collepardo. The academy intends to groom the next generation of far-right populist politicians.

It is initiatives like Bannon’s academy and the growing popularity of civilizational thinking in democracies, current and erstwhile, rather than autocracies that contribute most significantly to an emerging trend that transcends traditional geopolitical dividing lines and sets the stage for the imposition of authoritarian values in an emerging new world order. Interference in open and fair elections, support for far-right and ultra-conservative, family-value driven Western groups and influence peddling on both sides of the Atlantic and in Eurasia at large by the likes of Russia, China and the Gulf states serve the purpose of Bannon and his European associates.

Civilizationalists have put in place the building blocks of a new world order rooted in their value system. These blocks include the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that groups Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The grouping is centred on the Chinese principle of non-interference in the sovereign affairs of others which amounts to support for the region’s autocratic regimes. The SCO’s Tashkent-based internal security coordination apparatus or Regional Antiterrorist Structure (RATS) has similarly adopted China’s definition of the "three evils" of terrorism, extremism, and separatism that justifies its brutal crackdown in Xinjiang.

Proponents of the civilizational state see the nation state and Western dominance as an aberration of history. British author and journalist Martin Jacques and international relations scholar Jason Sharman argue that China’s history as a nation state is at best 150 years old while its civilizational history dates back thousands of years. Similarly, intellectual supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) project India as a Hindu-base civilization rather than a multi-cultural nation state. Modi’s minister of civil aviation, Jayant Sinha, suggests that at independence, India should have embraced its own culture instead of Western concepts of scientific rationalism. Talking to the Financial Times, Sinha preached cultural particularism. “In our view, heritage precedes the state… People feel their heritage is under siege. We have a faith-based view of the world versus the rational-scientific view.”  

Arab autocracies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have stopped short of justifying their rule in civilizational terms but have enthusiastically embraced the civilizational state’s rejection of western notions of democracy and human rights. One could argue that Saudi Arabia’s four decade long global propagation of ultra-conservative strands of Islam or the UAE effort to mould an Islam that is apolitical and adheres to the principle of obedience to the ruler is civilizational in nature.

Islamic law scholar Mohammed Fadel argues that one reason why Arab autocracies have not overtly embraced civilisationalism even though they in many ways fit the mould is the absence of a collective memory in post-Ottoman Arab lands. To explicitly embrace civilisationalism as a concept, Arab states would have to cloak themselves in the civilizational mantle of either pan-Islam or pan-Arabism, which in turn would require regional integration. One could argue that the attempt by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose their will on the Middle East for example with the boycott of Qatar is an attempt to create a basis for a regional integration that they would dominate.

The rise of the civilizational state with its corporatist traits raises the spectre of a new world order whose value system equates dissent with treason, views an independent press as the ‘enemy of the people’ and relegates minorities to the status of at best tolerated communities with no inherent rights. It is a value system that enabled Trump to undermine confidence in the media as the fourth estate that speaks truth to power and has allowed the president and Fox News to turn the broadcaster into the United States’ closest equivalent to state-controlled television.  Trump’s portrayal of the media as the bogeyman has legitimized populist assaults on the press across the globe irrespective of political system from China and the Philippines to Turkey and Hungary. It has facilitated Prince Mohammed’s effort to fuse the kingdom’s ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam with a nationalist sentiment that depicts critics as traitors rather than infidels.

In the final analysis, the tacit understanding on a civilisationalism-based value system means that it’s the likes of New Zealand, Norway and perhaps Canada that are putting up their hands and saying not me instead of me too. Perhaps Germany is one of the countries that is seeking to stake out its place on a middle ground. The problem is that the ones that are not making their voices heard are the former bastions of liberalism like the United States and much of Europe. They increasingly are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and recently published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

[usrussianrhetoric-blog]

Post Proposals

For your post this week, and in lieu of our physical class, let's proceed by way of Blackboard. Please post your latest draft of your research proposal. Make it as excellent as you can, following all directions, and using correct and complete MLA style for in text citation and your works cited. And please respond to an many of your peers proposals throughout the week as possible. Respond with your characteristic thoughtful suggestions, affirmations, etc., to get our work to the next level of excellence!  

Response:

TITLE: 

The Duality of Woman: Both Keystone and Superfluous  

AIM:

 While critiqued on a global scale, Russia’s newest law that has lessened the punishment for assault against women and children has been quietly dismissed as the actions of a backwards, underdeveloped nation. This discourse formation is problematic in every sense. Lack of examination of the power structure that has allowed this law to come into place allows this superpower to go unquestioned in its treatment of women and children. My goal is to explore the patriarchal structures in place in Russia that have allowed for the value of women and children to be disregarded in such a manner. I plan to examine the perceived connection between Russian Orthodoxy and the resurgence of conservatism in Russian politics that has allowed for the normalization of the rhetoric of abuse. The concept of “tradition” used by Russian Orthodox church must be parsed apart. Behind traditional values hide a narrative where physical violence is deemed not only a norm, but something expected in a reactionary sense or during discipline. In short, I am looking to answer a specific question; how have traditions been used to hide a deeply patriarchal society? And how was this patriarchal society the same one that was known for its women’s movement during the USSR? And to what extent do these two realms cross over? Finally, to include a the comedic reflexive portion of this project, I wish to turn the narrative upon the U.S. and examine what similarities the two societies share. This will allow a society that writes off Russian societal “norms” as backwards, nonsensical, or otherwise to reflect upon the similar motifs that run through both the U.S. and Russia.

REASONING & HISTORY: 

Recently, in Russia, a law was passed that decriminalizes first time, "less harmful" domestic battery, basically anything that does not put the person in the hospital. The amendment passed at 380 to 3. Russia's government is represented by an archaic structure called the Duma. The Duma is the lower legislative body of Russia and is based in elections. The group tends to vote conservative, supporting their claims with "tradition". Human Rights Advocates have been outspoken in their condemnation of Russia’s acts, yet no groups have been able to overturn the ruling. This law has become my object, and acts as a spring board to help me examine the past that has been obscured under the guise of tradition.

The moment I saw the first articles coming out about the domestic abuse law in Russia, I felt deeply unsettled for obvious reasons. Not only is Russia a world super power who has great influence over the policies of developing nations, but also because the rhetoric that was coming out in support of the new law sounded all too similar to what you would hear in my small southern town. Indoctrinated with strict patriarchal traditions, small towns are breeding grounds for the excusal of abuse within the home—as long as it didn’t lead to serious physical injury. But a lack of a broken arm doesn’t mean the violence doesn’t exist. In both Russian society and American, this is generally the case. Until it is overtly harmful, the violence is allowed to continue. While there are laws in place the cultural barriers in place make reporting domestic abuse even harder for victims. In this history, I plan to not only observe another country, but also look deeper into my own country's history of dealing with domestic violence and the corruption that exists.

Since the Cold War, looking deep into Russia and the USSR's propaganda and ideals on the treatment of women and subaltern groups often mirrors similar behaviors in the U.S. that often go unrecognized until the two are presented next to each other. In a sense, the U.S. and USSR interact through a chiasmus, not directly related but with enough similarities to draw some parallels. But while the United States didn’t kick off their feminist movement until the 70’s, the USSR prided itself on reinventing the Soviet woman during the 1920’s. Women were believed to be impowered, fulfilling the tenants of the New Soviet Woman. Women were always expected to run the household, raise the children, and look after their husband’s affairs while also heeding their tyranny and now, they were expected to take jobs as well. This duality of responsibility is explored frequently in Soviet era literature and is said to still plague the nation to this day.

PLAN: 

While looking to create a history that exists in the realm of rhetoric instead of usual history, I am looking to the writings of Foucault, Burke, and White to assist me in creating a discourse formation. In order to find the ruptures in this discourse, I have first found the uniting factors (Foucault). In this case, it is the power that women in Russia seem to have within their household, their daily lives, and in their work places—the rupture comes when one notes their exclusion from narratives of power. A second rupture appears with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church as a wielder of power. For a majority of the 20th century communist leaders like Lenin looked at religion as one of the most unsavory features of the peasantry. Suddenly it has reemerged and has returned to a status of power.

To understand what gave led to the creation of this history, I will be looking back to the traditional treatment of women and children in Russian society, as well as their roles in the household. The power structures formed centuries ago are reinforced in the modern era with calls from the Russian Orthodoxy to support tradition. The same speakers that support and validate this object are speakers who exist in a position where they benefit from the patriarchal system in place. The members of the Duma, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Orthodoxy all have their power reinforced by this law.

The discourse that has emerged must not only be recognized as ever shifting and in no ways shedding light on any proper “truth”, but it must also be turned in on itself in some way (Burke, White). In order to do so I plan to compare the emergent system in Russia with the present system in the U.S. because no matter how far removed or backwards the Russian model may seem to an American, the power dynamics are far too similar to go uncritiqued. Doing so would only further perpetrate the narrative of backwardness that the west has created around Russia and would excuse the power dynamics that are in play. I understand that there is no way to create a truthful narrative about this new law and the systems it exists within because something will always be lost in the articulation of my thoughts (Foucault, Burke). However, I will try to the best of my ability to properly represent the data I collect, and will feel no fear in growing the number of sources that I draw from.  And at the same time, I shall do my best to acknowledge where my own biases that stem from years of being exposed to propaganda against Russia begin and where the data ends.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Towards History. Beacon Pr., 1961.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge, 2002.

Kim, Lucian. “Russian President Signs Law To Decriminalize Domestic Violence.” NPR, NPR, 16 Feb. 2017,www.npr.org/2017/02/16/515642501/russian-president-signs-law-to-decriminalize-domestic-violence.

NPR gives a more broad overview of the issue, citing more numbers and including a video from a Russian news source with English subtitles. Once again, the news source is quite liberal.

Nechepurenko, Ivan. “Russia Moves to Soften Domestic Violence Law.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Jan. 2017,www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/world/europe/russia-domestic-violence.html?mcubz=3.

This article focuses on the American and Western European point of view, there is an outright condemnation of the actions of the Duma as well as voices from opposition of the law. The source is quite liberal.  

“Russia: Bill to Decriminalize Domestic Violence.” Human Rights Watch, HRW, 9 Feb. 2017, www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/23/russia-bill-decriminalize-domestic-violence.

This article comes from the Human Rights Watch, in my opinion it is more telling that the government is willing to actively support this law, while also being allowed to keep its seat in international organizations

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997.

Comments: This is a solid, smart, and important research proposal. Your aims are robust, and the articulation may tend to slip into more "plan for research" than "aims," so feel free to narrow and focus on just the aims--read and study again the template formula on definition of the "aims" section to make your edits and adjustments. The background you offer is at once personal (could benefit from citation of Spivak on examination of one's own subject position in writing history/producing knowledge) and rooted in your study of related discourses. Your plan for research is a smart and cunning design incorporating well all three theorists, as the turn to the U.S. offers the ironic, comedic turn so necessary for writing what White would call "genuine" history. Make sure to adjust writing for a general audience/reader, not one specially trained in our course.  Your discourses/digital archive is still developing with a stronger inclusion at this time of discourses related to Russian culture than U.S.  So make sure to include the discourses that you will use to show the U.S. normalization and norming of violence against women. Right now we seem to be flooded with civic discourses in the U.S. that illuminate these U.S. norms of patriarchy and violence.  Brock Turner gets a light sentence for raping a woman passed out behind a dumpster and is now appealing the conviction--lots of discourses there justifying the lack of punishment for Brock, displaying the deep seated ethos in the U.S. that values men more than women, and allows for violence against women for privileging the will of men. Roy Moore and his supporters are also circulating significant discourses on what they describe as the proper power of men over women. A young girl who killed her sex trafficker has been sentenced to life in prison rather than being seen as the child victim she was acting in self defense, that case is being circulated currently with lots of discourses showing U.S. disregard for violence against women.  Also discourses pointing out the problem in the U.S. of violence against women (see also Jimmy Carter's book of last year, for another example, which is not just U.S. centric, but shows that the U.S. is not at all free from this violence) all seem to be discourses important for your consideration in your digital archive, to show the U.S. social norms about women and violence.  Keep building your archive. I am eager for your presentation! I know it will be excellent, and have no worries, as all is always a work in progress. What you don't like about your presentation, if anything (as I expect I will like all of it), you can critique in your digital portfolio.  All is a learning process and open to revision before final grading.  Have confidence in your work. Be kind to yourself as you move through this experience, you are doing an excellent job!

Reflection: Overall, I very much agree with Dr. Mifsud on most of the points that she made in her commentary on this proposal. There was a good deal of blurring between sections, and my aims very much became part of my plan for research. But they were there, at the very least. As I went forward in preparing for the presentation, I would simply shift some of the information into the right section as I edited. While not perfect, this draft ended up preparing me for the final far better than the midterm ever could. But then again, it’s a process and it takes many different steps. I see a common theme in my posts that this post somewhat exemplifies. In her comments, Dr. Mifsud gives me a few examples of how to turn the dialogue onto the United States. This shouldn’t have had to happen--I knew what examples I wanted to use and instead of stating the opposing discourses, I simply outline them with a broad idea. I didn’t take the time to go into the specifics because the line between ‘purely a proposal’ and a ‘completed project’ was so foreign to me that I constantly found myself in this limbo between researching and actually doing the project. At this point even, I don’t think I understand the difference truly. Because in order to find the discourses you have to actually start to learn about the history. And once you begin down that road people begin to question them and start parsing apart the nuances of the history. So the answers start to appear quick quickly. 

I think one of the most beneficial things about this post was that we could review other student’s posts before we actually had to post our own proposal. I was able to read over Claire and Colin’s proposals and my understanding of how to phrase these proposals was expanded beyond compare. I realized that there really isn’t a template or anything along those lines, it comes down to which authors influenced you more in each section. As long as you include each of them in some way or another you’ve done what needs to be done. As I was writing this in the beginning I felt like I was grasping at straws. The ‘proper’ template for doing these projects was always just out of my reach. And that was incredibly frustrating for me in the beginning. However, I made it to the other side of this post with something workable.

As you can see in the section of this blog dedicated to the evolution of these proposals, my final proposal took a lot from Cory’s work and identified 3 concepts that the discourses in my history revolved around. I didn’t do that here because I was still confused about my history--looking at a discourse as if it was a history. Because of this view point, finding the statements was incredibly difficult for me. The view point I had about my history inhibited me from being able to word this proposal in a way that made it into an actual history. In my opinion, that explains some of the inconsistencies within this proposal as well as my rather large background and aims. I wasn’t trying to explore the discourses that surrounded domestic abuse in Russia, I was trying to explore the discourses that surrounded the law about domestic abuse. And even then, when you read into my proposal, I’m attempting to connect it to women and children, as was suggested to me in class. But I would go on to find that this would require a history of Russian women that would be fraught with statements and discourses that fed into domestic abuse in a way that one exists only because of the other. Looking back at the complexities of this history, I understand my confusion and find it somewhat warranted. But now that I’ve completed this project I think I could complete another proposal much clearer and efficient proposal.