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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Oppenheimer saw immediately that any nation with adequate resources would be eventually able to build a weapon, and that something as gargantuan as an H-bomb had no possible military function. It could only be a mechanism for genocide.

As he tried to use his immense stature to positively influence nuclear policy, he was quickly steamrolled by McCarthyism and national overconfidence. The Christopher Nolan film dramatizes Truman’s smug certainty that the U.S. had a monopoly on the bomb, including the soon to be built H-bomb. Almost immediately spies spirited the technical knowledge for both fission and thermonuclear weapons to the Soviets. The U.S. monopoly dissolved, and the arms race Oppenheimer feared had begun.

In 1959 my Princeton roommate and I were pressed into service in an odd effort to provide sufficient bodies for a birthday party for one of the Oppenheimer children.

Becoming aware of our interest in art, Oppenheimer invited us into a small windowless room to show off a radiant Van Gogh, one of the late paintings of the fields outside the asylum of St. Remy.

Was it possible that this soft-spoken reed of a man with melancholy eyes was the legendary force that had corralled a vast and fractious team of scientific egos into building (in one of the all-time great euphemisms) a world-ending “gadget”?

The birthday ended sadly. Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, alcoholically blurry and drink in hand, descended from upstairs into the entryway as we were departing. “What the hell are you staring at?” she said to me, only she didn’t say “hell.” Hell was what the Washington establishment had visited upon her husband by removing his security clearance as the price for his misgivings about what he had wrought, including his refusal to fully assent to the H-bomb project. Kitty had been ravaged alongside him.

The biography on which the film is based quotes a section of an essay Oppenheimer published in The New York Times on June 9, 1946 laying out his ideas for the control of nuclear weapons:

“[Our plan] proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”

Idealistic? Perhaps. But if anyone then could have peered down the time stream, they might have given it a shot, to avoid what Oppenheimer knew loomed ahead. What do we see ahead of us? An accelerating drift toward a twin nuclear/ecological waterfall, the avoidance of which requires a spirit of cooperation equaling that of Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos.

Were he alive today, he would be appalled by just how many nuclear weapons had been built by the early 1980s. But he would be happy that arms control treaties had reduced their numbers. He would be relieved that so far they have not been used on people again. He would rejoice in the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And surely he would be over the moon about the success of the Webb telescope, a multinational scientific feat as positive as the bomb was negative.

Insufficiently acknowledged by sovereign powers, both authoritarian and democratic, nuclear and non-nuclear, is the fact that sovereignty has already eroded far more than it ever would have been through any international agreement to renounce nuclear weapons. Sovereignty is an administrative necessity that protects national identity, sometimes existentially (e.g., Ukraine does not belong to Putin), but is now increasingly transcended by the reality that we live on one small planet facing challenges that can only be solved transnationally.

Specific to weapons and war, sovereignty is growing more and more shaky in the context of inadvertent computer and human error. Our security depends upon the professionalism of the Russian military, and vice versa. So too with all the nuclear powers, even as they spend vast sums to renew their nuclear weapons. No expert or general, however tactically brilliant, would be in full control of a slide into the kind of catastrophe that nearly occurred during the Cuban crisis of 1962, and could happen again in a conflict with China over Taiwan or Putin v NATO on Ukraine.

Even on the level of conventional war, Mr. Putin is discovering he will have to destroy Ukraine in order to “save” it. Let’s pray that he understands that escalating to nukes won’t help him.

Our distracted political culture in the U.S. does not encourage dialogue around such difficult issues. The popularity of Nolan’s film is an opportunity for citizens to ask probing questions of the presidential candidates that spur fresh thinking on nuclear policy. For example, would Former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s idea of standing down our entire aging fleet of land-based ICBMs be destabilizing “appeasement” of Russia and China, or a unilateral initiative that could elicit further positive responses?

The anguish of Robert Oppenheimer, who unleashed destruction beyond measure… and then tried his best to stop its further spread… reminds us that America bears special responsibility for creating the kind of world he hoped for, where the nuclear curse is finally lifted.'

#J. Robert Oppenheimer #Kitty #Putin #Princeton #Van Gogh #Christopher Nolan #United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons #Los Alamos #Ukraine

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Drug companies defend vaccine monopolies in face of global outcry (Washington Post) Abdul Muktadir, the chief executive of Bangladeshi pharmaceutical maker Incepta, has emailed executives of Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax offering his company’s help. He said he has enough capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of coronavirus vaccine a year to distribute throughout Asia. He never heard back from any of them. The lack of interest has left Muktadir worried about prolonged coronavirus exposure for millions of citizens of Bangladesh and other low-income nations throughout Asia and Africa who are at the back of the global queue for shots. Drug companies have rebuffed entreaties to face the emergency by sharing their proprietary technology more freely with companies in developing nations. The companies are lobbying the Biden administration and other members of the World Trade Organization against any erosion of their monopolies on individual coronavirus vaccines that are worth billions of dollars in annual sales. The fights over vaccine supply are not just over a moral duty of Western nations to prevent deaths and illness overseas. Lack of supply and lopsided distribution threaten to leave entire continents open as breeding grounds for coronavirus mutations. Those variants, if they prove resistant to vaccines, could spread anywhere in the world, including in Western countries that have been vaccinated first.

Colorado marks latest mass tragedy after 10 killed (AP) A shooting at a crowded Colorado supermarket that killed 10 people, including the first police officer to arrive, sent terrorized shoppers and workers scrambling for safety and stunned a state that has grieved several mass killings. A lone suspect was in custody, authorities said. The attack in Boulder, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of Denver and home to the University of Colorado, stunned a state that has seen several mass shootings, including the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. Monday’s midafternoon attack was the seventh mass killing this year in the U.S., following the March 16 shooting that left eight people dead at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

COVID-19 strikes Brazil’s Congress as third senator dies (Reuters) A third senator has died of COVID-19 in Brazil, raising questions around precautions taken in the country’s Congress where as many as one-in-three lawmakers has been infected with the virus devastating Latin America’s largest nation. Senator Major Olimpio, a former policeman who backed and later fell out with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, was declared brain dead on Thursday by doctors at a Sao Paulo hospital where he had been in intensive care for three weeks. Brazil has become the epicenter of the pandemic, with by far the highest current daily death toll anywhere in the world. “People are very scared, and they are afraid to go to work,” said Silvio Ribas, a press secretary for Senator Lasier Martins, a 78-year-old politician who was released from hospital on Thursday after two weeks fighting COVID-19. At least 145 of the 513 members of the lower house have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past 12 months, along with 31 of 81 senators, according to a survey by news portal Poder360.

Spain hopes number of foreign tourists will rebound to half pre-pandemic level this year (AP) Spain hopes the number of foreign tourists visiting its sun-kissed islands and picturesque villages can rebound this year to half pre-pandemic levels, Tourism Minister Reyes Maroto said on Monday. “Maybe the ideal goal is ... to get half of the tourists we had in 2019. This, for the industry, would be an achievement,” she said in an event held by Europa Press news agency. In 2019, Spain had the world’s second highest number of foreign visitors at more than 80 million. This plummeted by more than 80% to 19 million tourists in 2020, the lowest level since 1969, as a result of the travel restrictions imposed to curb the pandemic. Tourism accounted for around 12% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 and one job in eight.

Court orders French celebrity magazine to pay homeless man €40,000 (Le Parisien/France) Since its founding in 1949, the iconic French weekly Paris Match has published countless photos of the rich and powerful—and every now and then, a paparazzi shot might cost them. Last week, instead, the magazine was ordered to pay serious money to a homeless man for running a photograph of him without his permission. A court in Nanterre, west of Paris, ordered Paris Match to pay 40,000 euros to the man for running his picture. “Everyone, no matter their degree of celebrity, their wealth, their present or future occupation, has a right to privacy and enjoys exclusive right over their image which allows them to oppose its use […] without prior authorization,” the court wrote in its decision. The photo, published without the man’s consent in January 2018, showed the unnamed 48-year-old smoking crack cocaine on a metro platform in the French capital’s 18th arrondissement. Unlike other people in the photograph, his face was unblurred, the daily Le Parisien reports. Alerted by friends who recognized him in the Paris Match article, the homeless man sued the magazine: In May 2019, the magazine was ordered to pay him 10,000 euros in damages, but failed to remove the photograph from its website and app, resulting in an additional 30,000-euro fine last week. Le Parisien quoted the man as saying that he used some of the money to “help out friends” and that he now may be able “to get [his] wife and children back.”

Merkel Seeks Four-Week Lockdown Extension in German Setback (Bloomberg) Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed keeping German lockdown restrictions in force for another four weeks after Covid-19 cases rose beyond a level that may prompt government action to avoid health-care overload. The plan would extend and slightly tighten existing curbs through April 18, according to a chancellery draft seen by Bloomberg. Merkel and regional government leaders will discuss the proposals on Monday during talks on how to proceed with the lockdown amid an upward curve of infections in Europe’s biggest economy.

Russia’s top diplomat starts China visit with call to reduce U.S. dollar use (Reuters) Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov began a visit to China on Monday with a call for Moscow and Beijing to reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar and Western payment systems to push back against what he called the West’s ideological agenda. Lavrov, on a two-day visit to China, is expected to hold talks with his Chinese counterpart at a time when both countries’ ties with the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden are badly strained. U.S. and Chinese officials on Friday concluded what Washington called “tough and direct” talks in Alaska, while Russia’s ambassador arrived back in Moscow on Sunday for consultations after Biden said he believed President Vladimir Putin was a killer. Russia is also braced for a new round of U.S. sanctions over what Washington says was its meddling in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which Moscow denies. Speaking to Chinese media before the start of his visit, Lavrov said Moscow and Beijing were compelled to develop independently of Washington in order to thwart what he said were U.S. attempts to curb their technological development. “We need to reduce sanctions risks by bolstering our technological independence, by switching to payments in our national currencies and global currencies that serve as an alternative to the dollar,” Lavrov said, according to a transcript of his interview released on Monday. “We need to move away from using international payment systems controlled by the West.”

Turkey’s turmoil (Foreign Policy) U.S. President Joe Biden joined with Europe to condemn Turkey over its decision to annul its ratification of an international treaty on preventing violence against women. Turkey’s exit from the treaty, known as the Istanbul Convention, brought thousands to Turkey’s streets in protest of the move. Turkey was one of the initial signatories and the first nation to ratify the convention. In a White House statement, Biden called the action “deeply dissappointing” and a “disheartening step backward.” The Turkish presidency released a statement on Sunday saying the convention had been “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality.” Turkey’s currency was also rocked on Saturday after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired central bank governor Naci Agbal. The Turkish lira fell 15 percent against the U.S. dollar after the news broke.

In Myanmar’s hinterland, army uproots ethnic Karen villagers (AP) In the jungles of southeast Myanmar, the army was shooting and otherwise oppressing civilians long before last month’s military coup. This largely unseen repression continues even now. In the country’s remote southeast, an army offensive has driven as many as 8,000 ethnic Karen people to flee their homes in what aid groups say is the worst upheaval there for nearly 10 years. They’re now living in the jungle, with fears growing for their health and security, and no prospect of an early return. This crisis in the borderlands has been overshadowed by the deadly crackdown on the mass movement protesting the military’s takeover of power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. But it also is a reminder of the brutal force Myanmar’s army has long used against civilians, and in particular the country’s ethnic minorities.

Think Covid’s Messed Up Your Travel Plans? Try Getting Into China. (NYT) Leave your partner and children behind. Quarantine for up to a month. Get inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine from China, if you can find one. And prepare yourself for an anal swab. For the past year, people trying to go to China have run into some of the world’s most formidable barriers to entry. To stop the coronavirus, China bans tourists and short-term business travelers outright, and it sets tough standards for all other foreigners, even those who have lived there for years. The restrictions have hampered the operations of many companies, separated families and upended the lives of thousands of international students. Global companies say their ranks of foreign workers in the country have dwindled sharply. At a time of strained tensions with the United States and other countries, China is keeping itself safe from the pandemic. At the same time, it risks further isolating its economy, the world’s second-largest, at a moment when its major trade partners are emerging from their own self-imposed slumps. Other countries have their own travel restrictions, though few are as tight.

Dozens of towns isolated by flooding in Australian state (AP) Hundreds of people have been rescued from floodwaters that have isolated dozens of towns in Australia’s most populous state New South Wales and forced thousands to evacuate their homes as record rain continues to inundate the country’s east coast. Around 18,000 people had been evacuated from flooding in New South Wales by Monday and emergency services feared up to 54,000 people could be displaced with rain forecast to continue until Wednesday. A year ago, vast swathes of New South Wales had been charred by unprecedented wildfires following years of drought that gripped most of the state. Some of the same areas were now being by inundated by one-in-50-year and one-in-100-year rain events. New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said up to 38 parts of the state had been declared natural disaster areas. “I don’t know any time in our state’s history where we have had these extreme weather conditions in such quick succession in the middle of a pandemic,” Berejiklian told reporters. “So, they are challenging times for New South Wales.”

Israel revokes permit of Palestinian foreign minister (Washington Post) Israel on Sunday revoked the VIP permit of the Palestinian foreign minister after he returned to the West Bank from a trip to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Israeli and Palestinian officials confirmed. The move appeared to be Israeli retaliation for Palestinian support for the ICC’s war crimes investigation against Israel. A Palestinian official said Foreign Minister Riad Malki was stopped Sunday as he entered the West Bank from Jordan through the Israeli-controlled crossing. Malki’s VIP card was seized, the official said. Losing the VIP status makes it harder for him to move through Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank, and traveling abroad will require Israeli permission. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, announced earlier this month that she was opening an investigation into possible war crimes by Israel committed in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza Strip.

Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place (Economist) In the middle of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (eez) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry gps-based automatic identification systems (ais) that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed to comply. This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking into Ecuador’s waters to plunder its fish. Both local officials and China’s ambassador to Ecuador denied this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador’s eez on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting ais. HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications. HawkEye’s satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of a large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and launch. HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them, in 2018. They are now in an orbit that takes them over both of Earth’s poles. This means that, as the planet revolves beneath them, every point on its surface can be monitored at regular intervals. Quilty Analytics, a research firm in Florida, expects the number of radio-frequency (rf) intelligence satellites of this sort in orbit to multiply from a dozen at the beginning of January to more than 60 by the end of next year.

Whoopsie, container overboard (Wired) Since November, at least 2,980 containers have fallen off cargo ships in the Pacific Ocean, in at least six incidents that have outfitted Davy Jones’ Locker with stocks of vacuum cleaners, frozen shrimp, some Kate Spade swag and more. Rising imports and bad weather have led to the above-typical cargo losses, as the 2,980 lost in the past few months is over twice the annual amount lost from 2008 to 2019. Bad weather is the main cause: the Essen attributed its 750 lost containers to “heavy seas,” the Eindhoven lost 260 containers after a blackout in the middle of a storm, and the Apus lost over 1,800 containers in gale force winds and large swells, one of the worst losses ever.

#headlines #news

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xtruss · 3 years

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Political thought

The threat from the illiberal left

Don’t underestimate the danger of left-leaning identity politics

— September 4th, 2021 Edition | The Economist

Something has gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.

Nowhere is the fight fiercer than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to strike down a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about. For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control. By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

This difference in method has profound implications. Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents. Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish. Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group. Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”. He was right. Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals—and, in that, it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means. And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

If classical liberalism is so much better than the alternatives, why is it struggling around the world? One reason is that populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen. Just look at Britain, where politics in the past few years was consumed by the rows between uncompromising Tory Brexiteers and the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

In short, it is hard work to be a genuine liberal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their last ideological challenger seemed to crumble, arrogant elites lost touch with liberalism’s humility and self-doubt. They fell into the habit of believing they were always right. They engineered America’s meritocracy to favour people like them. After the financial crisis, they oversaw an economy that grew too slowly for people to feel prosperous. Far from treating white working-class critics with dignity, they sneered at their supposed lack of sophistication.

This complacency has let opponents blame lasting imperfections on liberalism—and, because of the treatment of race in America, to insist the whole country was rotten from the start. In the face of persistent inequality and racism, classical liberals can remind people that change takes time. But Washington is broken, China is storming ahead and people are restless.

A Liberal Lack of Conviction

The ultimate complacency would be for classical liberals to underestimate the threat. Too many right-leaning liberals are inclined to choose a shameless marriage of convenience with populists. Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion. Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies. Classical liberals must rediscover their fighting spirit. They should take on the bullies and cancellers. Liberalism is still the best engine for equitable progress. Liberals must have the courage to say so. ■

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patrickwritessometuff · 4 years

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The Rising Resurgence of Authoritarianism in the Democracies in Southeast Asia

Abstract: This is a comparative study into the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia exploring the recent rise and surge of authoritarian and populist leaders in these countries. This study will explore all three countries’ recent histories, the rise of their current leaders, and their current status quo with an institutionalist perspective.

The introduction defines what Authoritarianism is and the various forms it takes on and summarizes the current governments of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand with the next subsequent sections exploring the recent history and current status quo of these countries and delving deep into their leaders while touching upon the repeating patterns of authoritarianism in these countries’ history. The conclusion delves deep into the reasons and economic and social factors that led to the Southeast Asian authoritarian leaders coming into power.

Introduction: Authoritarianism and Its Various Flavors:

Authoritarianism seems to be in vogue for many leaders of the 21st century. The rise of Populist and Authoritarian strong-man leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and China’s Xi Jinping on the international stage feels like a response to the years of Neoliberal hegemony most of the world has enjoyed after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. No region feels more like it is sliding towards Authoritarianism than Southeast Asia. Authoritarianism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica “as any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people.” Authoritarian leaders frequently wield control unilaterally and independently of established bodies of law, and they may not normally be replaced by voters who freely select between different competitors in elections. In authoritarian regimes, the right to establish opposition political parties or other alternative political forces to fight for power with the ruling party is either restricted or just plain nonexistent. What is in common with authoritarians is the use (or abuse, as some of their critics would say) of institutions like Legislative, Judiciary, the Military, and Law Enforcement to curb resistance and dissent against the State and the Regime. Authoritarians seek only to retain their power and influence. Human rights and democratic institutions are damned.

Not all authoritarian leaders are built the same or have the same political and social beliefs, nor does any political system have a monopoly on authoritarianism. On one side of the political spectrum is Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who was a free-market-oriented populist ultra-nationalist with ties to the libertarian capitalist United States, and on the other side of the spectrum is Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, a Marxist-Leninist nationalist with ties to the communist Soviet Union.

Southeast Asia’s recent additions to the list of Authoritarian leaders almost exclusively seem to lean more into conservative right-wing authoritarianism. Philippines’ Duterte is a law-and-order oriented populist authoritarian who has been waging war against criminality, corruption, and crime. Meanwhile, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha is a royalist military hardliner who seeks to bring Thailand back to the late fifties. Indonesian’s Joko Widodo, once lauded as a liberal reformist, the “Obama of Indonesia” and “a new hope” for Democracy in a country that has always struggled with authoritarianism, has actually started a turn into authoritarianism through his own Duterte inspired hardline War against Illegal Drugs and the appointment of his political rival Prabowo as Minister of Defense along with former regime members of former Indonesian dictator Suharto.

Thailand: A Royal Mess Thailand’s slide to Authoritarianism began in 2014 when a Military Junta called the NCPO or the National Council for Peace and Order led by Prayut Chan-o-cha, overthrew and toppled the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s first female Prime Minister and sister of previous Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. (Kongkirati 2018) Even before the Military coup that unseats Yingluck, the country was already under deep turmoil after the proposal of a very controversial amnesty bill that would have pardoned various politicians, including Yingluck’s brother Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s former neoliberal Prime Minister under self-imposed exile after charges of corruption. During this time, the conflicts between pro and anti-Shinawatra forces have been ongoing for the past few years ever since Thaksin put himself in self-imposed exile. (McCargo 2015)

This bill received unanimous opposition across Thailand’s political spectrum, including pro-Thaksin leftist and liberal groups like the “Red Shirt” movement, because it would have also provided amnesty for murder charges relating to the 2010 Military crackdown. The bill was thrown out, but the damage was already done; political violence and anti-Government protests continued throughout the country, with the biggest being “Bangkok Shutdown,” where the anti-Thaksin faction locked down parts of Bangkok in protest. All 150 of the opposition MPs resigned, and Yingluck had to dissolve Parliament and call for snap elections, but violence continued in the polling places (McCargo 2015). This continued unrest led to the military coup and the rise of the NCPO as the current ruling class. The battle between the two pro and anti-Thaksin factions also continues to this day. (Chambers 2015)

This coup and the subsequent military dictatorship effectively harkened back to the rule of Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat (who came into power under similar circumstances in a military coup) styled military authoritarian rule of the late Fifties and early Sixties. It also brought back the old model of “Thai-style Democracy” in which the alliance between the Thai Monarchy and the Military dominates the country’s politics with an ultra-conservative discourse. With the coup, the Military has effectively established itself as the new ruling elite, enhancing its influence on politics, budget, and size. (Kongkirati 2018) Another aspect of Thailand that has been recently gained even more power because of the coup is the monarchy. King Vajiralongkorn’s ascent into the throne in 2016 has been worrying for a lot of people in Thailand as some have viewed him unfit for the throne. Unlike his father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who was a well-loved monarch, Vajiralongkorn has had his fair share of controversies, including his decision to rule the country from Germany. (Farelly 2017)

In Thailand, insulting, defaming, or threatening the King, Queen or heir-apparent, heir-presumptive, or regent is subject to something called Lèse majesté laws. This makes it so that doing so is illegal and a national security issue and will land the one doing it in jail. There have been concerns from human rights groups that these Lèse majesté laws are being used and abused by the military ruling class to curb dissent against the monarchy and the military. Other forms of legislation, such as the Computer Crimes Act and sedition laws, have been invoked by the authorities to deal with alleged damage and insults to the monarchy.

The 2019 Thai general election in accordance with the 2017 Constitution was supposed to bring some sort of status quo change into the country but because of the elections’ controversial results leading to Prayut and his allies to retaining their country, everything seems to be back to square one. More recently as of the writing of this paper, the country is once again amidst political turmoil, which began in 2019 after the disputed elections that ended with Prayut Chan-o-cha’s return to power as Prime Minister. A Pro-Democracy movement reminiscent of the ones that emerged during the Hong Kong protests has been growing and shows no sign of stopping despite the rise of COVID19. This movement has been demonstrating for several months, demanding the need for a new constitution and curbing of the King’s powers, using modern pop culture references from the Hunger Games and Harry Potter to be able to indirectly criticize the Monarchy.

Philippines: “Change is Coming” and the Rise of Duterte “Change is Coming.” That was the political slogan of then-presidential Candidate Rodrigo Roa Duterte, known by his nicknames Digong and Rody; this was the slogan that carried him through the Presidential Race in 2016. A Presidential race he ended up winning.

Duterte has already built up a reputation as an effective law-and-order politician for his tenure as Mayor of Davao City, a position he held on and off for over twenty years. Before becoming a politician, he served in the city prosecutors’ office for almost a decade. His career in politics started out as the city’s Vice Mayor, appointed by Former President Cory Aquino after the 1986 People Power Revolution. (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018) He made his name as one of the negotiators in the 1989 Davao Hostage Crisis, where sixteen inmates who had escaped from the Davao Penal Colony took fifteen hostages in the Davao Metropolitan District Command Center.

During his tenure, he was able to transform Davao City from a city caught between Moro Rebellions and Communist Insurrections to one of the safest cities in the Philippines. This success at a lower level contributed to his reputation as an effective political leader (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018). Though his methods and alleged ties to the so-called Davao Death Squad have drawn controversy from Human Rights Groups.

Duterte presented himself as an outsider in comparison to the mostly Luzon-based political elites that he was running against in the elections, people from established political families like Mar Roxas and Grace Poe (Kreuzer 2020). He leaned into this perception of himself as the outsider and encouraged it.

For a lot of his voters, that was his appeal, he was the guy who called out “Imperial Manila” for ignoring and imposing their rules on Visayas and Mindanao. He criticized the current political establishment at the time for its perceived failures in handling the Mamasapano Massacre and the response to Typhoon Haiyan. This left the Benigno Aquino III’s Liberal Party’s reputation tainted and continued to haunt them well into the 2019 Senate elections where none of their eight “Otso Diretso” candidates won a seat at the Senate.

Duterte also allied himself with other political elites that could help further his own political ascent, with close political allies including Bongbong Marcos, son of former president Ferdinand Marcos and Alan Peter Cayetano, son of former senator Rene Cayetano. Major Political Parties like Partido Demokratiko Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan (PDP Laban) and the Nacionalista Party also allied themselves with Duterte in the 2016 Election with Duterte running as the Presidential Candidate for PDP Laban.

During the elections, Duterte continued his run as a law-and-order candidate with an anti-Illegal drug platform promising to eradicate drug trafficking operations and a push for a charter change to Federalism, a form of government Duterte supports and one that would give more freedom to the smaller regions and more autonomy from “imperial Manila.” . (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018)

The first big challenge to Duterte’s presidency happened on May 23, 2017, when what is now known as the Battle of Marawi or the Marawi Siege began. This five-month long conflict between the Philippine military and members of the Maute-ISIS group lay siege to the entire city of Marawi acted as a trial by fire of sorts for Duterte and ended up with the destruction of Marawi.

His tenure as President has been wracked with controversies upon controversies, the biggest one probably being his bloody tokhang campaign against illegal drugs which human rights groups have slammed for being allegedly prejudiced against the poor and lower classes, as of this writing the war on drugs has already had 5,810 suspects killed in official anti-drug operations (Kreuzer 2020.)

His approach to the territorial dispute in the West Philippine Sea and China in general has also been criticized, with some accusing him of cozying up to China instead of fighting against them for the disputed territory. He has welcomed Chinese investors to invest in the country. His pro-China rhetoric has been concerning for some people who believe that China is just another imperialist power who seeks to colonize and take advantage of the Philippines. His sponsored anti-terror bill has been decried as unconstitutional and draconian by activist groups and the opposition. And some aspects of it, particularly it’s constitutionality and if it does break the writ of hebeas corpus is still being hotly debated.

His ties to Former Senator Bongbong Marcos, the rest of the Marcos family and some of late dictator’s allies have also been heavily scrutinized. His support for the burial of dictator Ferdinand Marcos with military honors in the Libingan ng Bayani (Cemetery of Heroes) has spurred nationwide controversy and protests with claims of historical revisionism especially from the Martial Law victims and their relatives. (Kreuzer 2020)

Despite all his controversies however, he continues to enjoy high approval ratings from polls and surveys. In 2020 in a Pulse Asia Research Inc. survey, Duterte received a 91 percent approval rating in both trust and performance, the highest out of any government official. This collective support indicates that Duterte’s exercise of political power is not seen by most Filipinos as a threat to their independence or democracy as a whole, but rather as a source and a symbol of social security (Kreuzer 2020).

Indonesia: Joko Widodo Jokowi is probably the least authoritarian of the three heads of state. Still, his Duterte-esque and somewhat draconian anti-drug policies makes him still count as authoritarian. There are a lot of parallels between him and President Rodrigo Duterte. Like the Philippine President, Joko Widodo (widely known as Jokowi) started out as the Mayor of a medium sized City called Surakarta in Central Java in the wake of Indonesia’s democratization and decentralization initiatives (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018). Widodo was a furniture exporter who at the time had little to no experience in politics before running for Mayor in 2004, but against all odds he won. Thrust to the position of local leadership, he pushed for a reformist agenda which appealed to pro-poor and pro-investment constituencies. He cracked down on corruption and reduced the red tape that hampered investments. He also implemented healthcare and education policies that expanded access to the poor (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018).

In 2014 Jokowi won in the Presidential race against former general Prabowo Subianto, Prabowo was a controversial military man, with ties to Indonesian dictator Suharto and had already been under fire from Human Rights groups for alleged human rights abuses (Bland 2019). Jokowi was the first Indonesian President to not be from an elite political or military background. As a President, he continued his push for pro-poor initiatives including a national universal healthcare policy that he promises would cover the entire population of Indonesia. His focus for most of his two terms has been infrastructure and development . (Kimura, Kuhonta 2018).

Some of the issues he’s faced during his tenure has been conservative Islamic parties which continue to spread discrimination regarding other ethnic groups in the country, Jokowi’s handling of these issues have been controversial to say the least, his critics say that Jokowi has allowed human rights, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities to weaken since he was elected in 2014. Law enforcement has been politicized, with the detention and jailing of government opponents on questionable charges. In the face of criticism from conservative Islamic parties, Jokowi has blinked, legitimizing anti-pluralistic ideologies that undermine the rights of minorities in Indonesia and emboldening the proliferation of divisive identity politics. (Bland 2019) And with politically surrounding himself with influential retired generals, he has promoted an increasing political position for the military, threatening to undermine the trends that followed the fall of Suharto in 1998. (Heydarian 2019)

This appointment of former Military officials, some tied to the late dictator Suharto himself has led to concerns about Indonesia falling back to an authoritarian dictatorship. Especially when one of those military officials include his former political rival Prabowo Subianto, someone with an allegedly already spotty record in human rights. (Heydarian 2019) There is also the issue of Jokowi’s drug war. Inspired by Rodrigo Duterte’s own violent campaign against illegal drugs, Jokowi began his own campaign. He once said in his words, “Be firm, especially to foreign drug dealers who enter the country and resist arrest. Shoot them because we indeed are in a narcotics emergency position now.”

In 2019 his presidency faced several protests. From the May 2019 Jakarta Protests and riots where rival Prabowo Subianto refused to accept his defeat against Jokowi which led to large scale protests. These Protests started on the day the election results were officially declared on 21st of May. Tense demonstrations around the buildings of the electoral agencies were accompanied by rioting in many areas on the night of May 21. As a result of the protests, eight individuals were confirmed dead, with hundreds wounded. The use of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was also restricted to prevent protesters from being able to organize and talk to each other. Another protest later that year also took place in Indonesia Papua as a reaction to the detention of 43 Papuan students from Surabaya for perceived disrespect of the Indonesian flag, with the Government of Indonesia implementing an internet blackout throughout the whole region. Clashes between demonstrators and policemen resulted in casualties, killing more than 30 people in both the clashes and the riots. Another protest again in 2019, From 23 September 2019, a series of widespread demonstrations led by students occurred in major cities in Indonesia to rally against proposed laws diminishing the power of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) as well as several bills, including a revised criminal code punishing extramarital sex and defamation against the president. The protesters were mostly students from over three hundred universities, the police reported that in the capital city of Jakarta that at least 254 students and 39 police officers were wounded and were being treated in hospitals. Two students were killed in Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi, one of whom was reportedly shot during a violent altercation. In Jakarta, further three demonstrators were killed.

Conclusion: By looking through the recent histories of each country and the repeating patterns between all three, there appear to be multiple factors that recur throughout two or three of them, which likely contributed to the rise of these Authoritarian leaders.

The first one is an apparent nostalgia for previous dictatorial and authoritarian regimes from a sizeable number of the population. Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia all have similar histories involving authoritarian dictatorships; the Philippines has Ferdinand Marcos’ regime, which ran from 1965-1986, Indonesia has Suharto’s dictatorship which was from 1968-1998, and Thailand has Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat’s military dictatorship from 1959 to 1963. The first two still being relatively recent enough to have an influence on the popular consciousness and politicians (or family members of those politicians) with ties to those regimes still being alive, while the third was instrumental in bringing the Monarchy back to the forefront again in politics where it continues to be until now.

In the Philippines, this manifests as Marcos apologia and revisionist history about the Marcos regime and the Martial Law time period, which Duterte seems to exploit through keeping close ties with the Marcos family and allowing the late dictator’s burial in the Libingan ng Bayani. In Indonesia, Jokowo’s attempts to centralize power, push for further infrastructure and development coupled with the appointment of dictator Suharto’s old allies into key positions in the government like Prabowo Subianto also has opened comparisons to the late Indonesian dictator. At the same time, Thailand’s Prime Minister seems to be pushing for a return to Sarit Thanarat’s military dictatorship, where the Monarchy and the Military are in control of the majority.

Another thing to consider is the new form of propaganda made possible by the advent of the internet and social media, with all three heads of state have had allegations of using troll farms and fake news sites and blogs to spread propaganda thrown against them in their elections. Fake news and misinformation about the Marcos Regime also continue to make its way through social media. Combating authoritarianism also means combating against this form of propaganda, either through proper education or curbing the avenues in which this kind of misinformation flows through.

The second one is the failure of modern neoliberal democratic regimes and institutions to address systemic problems and concerns like corruption and poverty, causing the populace to lose faith in the neoliberal system. The descent of Thailand to authoritarianism can be traced back to its inability to probably address and resolve the issues of the Thaksin Shinawatra corruption charges, the 2010 Military crackdowns, and various other connected issues and events; the Amnesty Bill was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Jokowo’s early liberal presidency quickly degenerated to semi-authoritarianism.

The rise of Duterte can be traced back to the disillusionment of the Filipino lower and middle classes with the Aquino administration, several years of apparent economic prosperity that never trickled down to or actually benefited the lower classes, some of which continued to live in poverty. President Duterte and Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha managed to zero-in on to this disillusionment in the system, criticizing the neoliberal democratic status quo and the political establishment that run it while presenting themselves as stronger and more effective alternatives to the system.

It seems like it’s pretty clear that the neoliberal democratic system from most countries in Europe and the United States have failed to bring these countries out of poverty and also haven’t fixed issues of corruption, leading to lower and middle classes looking for alternatives outside the elite political establishment.

As for actual solutions, there appears to be no easy ones, Authoritarian leaders are just the response to the of the socio-political problems and civil unrest these specific nations are dealing with. They represent a dissatisfaction with the current neoliberal status quo, which manifests as a search for an alternative or as nostalgia for previous dictatorial authoritarian leaders.

References: Bland, B. (2019). Politics in Indonesia: Resilient Elections, Defective Democracy. Lowy Institute for International Policy. pp. 2-7. Chambers, P. (2015). Civil-Military Relations in Thailand since the 2014 Coup: The Tragedy of Security Sector "Deform". Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Retrieved October 20, 2020. pp. 2-9 Farrelly, N. (2017). Thailand’s Triple Threat. Lowy Institute for International Policy. Pp. 6, 14-15. Heydarian R. (2019). A revolution betrayed: The tragedy of Indonesia’s Jokowi. Al Jazeera. Kimura, E., & Kuhonta, E. (2018). Jokowi and Duterte: Do Local Politics Apply? East-West Center. Pp. 1-2. Kongkirati, P. (2018). HAUNTED PAST, UNCERTAIN FUTURE: The Fragile Transition to Military-Guided Semi-Authoritarianism in Thailand. Southeast Asian Affairs, pp.363-376. KREUZER, P. (2020). A PATRON-STRONGMAN WHO DELIVERS.: EXPLAINING ENDURING PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR PRESIDENT DUTERTE IN THE PHILIPPINES. pp. 18-27. McCargo, D. (2015). THAILAND IN 2014: The Trouble with Magic Swords. Southeast Asian Affairs, pp.337-358.

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THE GOAL OF LEADERSHIP AND THE CRISES OF DEMOCRATIC DYNASTIES IN AFRICA

By Enikesomowo Kponu March 6, 2020

+2347011346932

[email protected]

The consequences of colonial inputs in Africa has played long in the dark room of blames. This follows the resultant characteristics which marred the the post colonial African States from the down end of the Cold War. Most Africans took to disgustful interpretations of colonial linkages on the continent, throwing positions to colonial disdains coloured by the early African " necessitated elites ". Such derogatory colourations affirms the terribleness of Westernization and or Europeanization on the continent and energizes the need for African endogenous development. This culminated in nationalistic and unification political as well as formations as OAU, ECOWAS, AU among many others. The accompanied aftermath was the supposed deliverance of the continent from colonial tutelage and ascendancy that gave epileptic model to the continent's culture, politics and economy marking the common traits of the continent. This birthed inevitable socio-political and economic challenges the continent and her " necessitated elites " has been confronted with since the 1950s and 1960s when Africa started recording the melody of Independence till present time. The effect also has created the massive gap between the role of leadership and the goal of leadership in the continent. This poses serious political questions bordering the role and goal of leadership as well as the development of the continent.

THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP

The role of leadership in its historicity has been restless search by leaders for modules, model and objects that would be instrumental to the development questions of societies. This underpins the concrete incessant efforts of individuals and groups who recognizes the need to better collective coexistence and to catch up with the rapidly dynamic reality of the world. Historically, leaders who inherit this essence pushes ideas that are instrumental for the better living and development of their respective States. This reality stunt in global politics became intensified since the Cold War dividing the world into the two ideological camps of the West and East and endures technically till date. Franklin D. Roosevelt floated America during the 2nd world war, Vladimir Putin antagonistically led the Soviet East, Adolf Hitler fronted the pace of encroachment by the Westerners, Winston Churchill represented the strength of Britain. Political figures as Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stanlin, Neville Chamberlain alongside others were emblems of their respective country's interest. Such " pull " and " push " forces that followed from the war motivated States to into the current of globalization and later nuclearization. Today, China, North Korea, U.K, U.S.A, India, Pakistan, France, Isreal, Russia, with others are at the edges of globalization and nuclearization leaving no room for African States. Though South Africa would rather match the profile, her apartheid regime discredits her from the list. South Africa had such strength under her alien rule. Pierre William Bother (1974) started the lead in South Africa and about six nuclear programmes were on record. She however, gave them in up in (1989) in conformity to UN's codes. The Conversation signals Egypt as the only African State that is nursing a concrete nuclear plan. Mr Singer comments " African States are weak States in a world characterized by power. Palmer Parkins defines Europe as an idea this no doubt points to the reason why is increasingly expanding but African leaders had and are doing little to this essence.

THE GOAL OF LEADERSHIP

Ultimately, the goal of societies have been the relay of catching up the concrete reality of a changing world. World Economic Forum agree that globalization traces its root to Xi'an, China, such compelling forces emitted by globalization triggers global interests in the world market.This amountedly, created the variants in waves of globalization occasioning the industrial, enlightenment and science revolutions all in the bid to better the human condition. BBC wote " Britain was able to attact a huge and rapidly expanding international market". Such waves provoked social reality, elevating economies contrary to all reason. Consequently, the adoption of Westernization and Europeanization as synonymous to globalization poses a big question to the developing African economy. TIME reports some elementary growth in Rwanda's economy under Paul Kagame in 2015. Freedom house noted that only 20% of nations qualify to be " free ". The question again turns to Africa if she is qualified or not. The both questions of the role and goal of leadership particularly in the modern caption of it equate itself with the world's social and political demands which demand answers from leadership that champion the course of development in any society.

THE CREATION OF DEMOCRATIC DYNASTIES IN AFRICA

The phenomenon of power elongation and power absolutism is not restricted to Africa alone, Asia and the Americas qualify also for this category. The 32nd president of America Franklin D. Roosevelt served four terms in office though " necessary ", crowning him the longest president America ever had. Prasad served as the longest following India's indepence. In central Asia Emomali Rahmon worn over four terms, Fidel Castro monopolized power in Cuba, Albania's Enver Hoxha, Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, China, Tajikistan acquired the tittle " leader of the nation " in (2015), allowing Emomali Rahmon to run unlimited terms, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is supreme in Iran. However, the degree of such phenomenon in Africa makes the continent unique in this sense. Findings show that the continent has the highest cases of power tenacity with the strongman Teodore Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea as who is still holding power as the world's most tenacious president with other African leaders following side by side. This is more or less democratic dynasties in the modern sense. Nearly all States in the world today align with some form or elements of democracy, even monarchies take solace in some democratic elements. African political figures as Pual Biya of Cameroon, Denis Sasson of Congo, Ugandan Yoweri Museveni, Omir Al Bashir of Sudan and a bulk of others makes the continent peculiar in terms of power monopoly. The character of power monopolization in democracies only defends the doctrine of monarchical absolutism. Such properties of traditional absolutism manifest in the characters of modern democracies perpetuated by leaders and this is on the increase in Africa. Virtually all African leaders fight to hold onto power for life and to secure political power their circle. Consequently, this need is felt in the way the " necessitated elites " who were miserly distributed as at the early phase of Independence handled their States and supervised transition of government. Kwame Nkuruma declared his rule for life in (1964), Pual Biya counted 42 years in power and is still counting, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Muhammar Gadafi of Libya was forced out of power. Though not limited to Africa, Africa has the highest profile of the phenomenon started by early leaders which the necessity of independent gave them political power. Democratic dynasty may mean the extension or transcendence of political power or influence between outgoing and incoming regimes. African leaders stay put to power and knowing that all will die someday master and supervise government transitions to enable them continue to exert political influence in the political arena. Thus, African leaders leave political power to " transcender elites ". Though Africa alone is not in this, president George W. Bush was son to former president Goerge H. W. Bush . National Constitution Centre confirmed that presidents in America gave political positions to family members in White House, John Adam and his son John Quincy Adam (1797) , President Adam gave strategic position to his son in-law William Stephen in (1800). Fidel Castro entrusted power to his brother Rauls. However, this event is seemingly a norm in the political landscape of Africa. BBC caption (2015) reflect the intensity of power struggle in Africa. Family or democratic dynasties created out of democracies undermine the essence of the state and as such " transcendent elites " try to maintain political political power by playing to influences of those they inherited power from. In Nigeria the popular name is " Jagaban " for those who are seen as the power brokers. This negative influence stems from local to national realms. Wendy Luhabe (2015) interview highlighted a point that the black oppress and suppress the black. The reason is not far fetched , the ruling elites portrays the inherited genes of the " necessitated elites" in the attempt to stay in power, which is detrimental to role and goal of leadership. The politics of democratic dynasties seems to be the defining characteristics of the African continent after 150 years of the continent's independence. Joseph Kabila, Faure Gnassingbe, Robert Mugabe forms the chain of family dynasties with other leaders in the continent. Of the 54 countries in Africa, all are some sort of legal democracies except Morocco, Swaziland and Lesotho that still have monarchs as head of States.

WHY DOES AFRICAN LEADERS STAY PUT TO POWER

On this question most Africans throw their weight on the legacies of colonialism, J.P Nettl would blame his " inherited elites ", others would rather fault the Africans that forced power from the colonizers (necessitated elites). However, from findings three reasons for this ill characteristic are identified.

Feudalist Cognitivism :

Monarchies are feudalist States, African indigenous political systems were simple to complex monarchies. Zululand, Uganda, Oyo, Benin and others were expanded kingdoms that allowed for some limits of absolutism on the part of traditional elites. Colonialism forcing the metamorphosis of traditional politics shifted political power to the few educated (necessitated elites) who in turn saw the post independent States among other things as a lab for testing the " civil power ", whether such power equates that of the Monarchies that existed. There was the need to test the reality of civil political power whether it can equate the traditional absolutist. Louis xiv remarked " je sui le tat " " le tat je sui moir " ( I am the State, the State is me). African leaders at independence saw their respective States through the eye of the colonizers, they would have to test if civil power could be enjoyable like in monarchies therefore, African leaders saw themselves as supreme and their rules unchallengeable. They thus became power intoxicated and never want to lose such enjoyable political asset. And in that light African leaders become determined to enjoy absolute political power for life. In the 1950s Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria dethroned and banished Oba Adeyemi ii the alaafin of Oyo and his son, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Ghana's Kwame Nkuruma, Muhammar Gadafi, with a chain of others qualify for this camp. Problem of Reconstruction : African leaders found it difficult accepting the reality of the revolutionary changes staged on the continent through colonialism. The distortions in culture, politics and economic formations by the colonizers threw the problem of how to reconcile the gap between that which existed and the new order enforced by colonialism. The new set of leaders not really knowing much about nation building in the context of Westernization carried on with the same strong fist from where the colonizers stopped with the believe that only them build the continent. Juv'enal Habyarimana of Rwanda is a good example as Rwandan elites were blamed for the 1994 genocide.

Problem of Reconstruction:

African leaders found it difficult accepting the reality of the revolutionary changes staged on the continent through colonialism. The distortions in culture, politics and economic formations by the colonizers threw the problem of how to reconcile the gap between that which existed and the new order enforced by colonialism. The new set of leaders not really knowing much about nation building in the context of Westernization carried on with the same strong fist from where the colonizers stopped with the believe that only them can build the continent. Juv'enal Habyarimana of Rwanda is a good example as Rwandan elites were blamed for the 1994 genocide.

Ego of Self :

The context of colonialism which saw the shift in power to the hands of the tiny privileged educated population on the continent made such " necessitated elites " develop the feeling of specialty. Such feelings made them believe they were and are the only qualified people who would build the continent. The feeling that only them have the architectural blueprint on the shape the continent or their respective States should take made them want to rule for life and in the case of them having to leave office then the need to plant successors through which the would continue to exert political influence and maintain political relevance in the continent. They believe only their ideoloy can and must work on the continent. African leaders also see the civil post colonial States as rewards for their nationalistic prowess and so believe such labour must not be in vain. Idiamin Dadar of Uganda, Muhammar Gadafi of Libya, Paul Biya, and nearly all African leaders are in this group.

ELEMENTS OF DEMOCRATIC DYNASTIES

Since the post colonial African States are mainly democracies the African elites or ruling class develop mechanisms for perpetuating their remaining in office and or maintaining political relevance even after leaving office. Findings reveal that African leaders ensure their enduring political power through these mechanisms.

Hoarding of the constitution :

The frame and spirit of the country's constitution are in the hand of the leaders. The leaders make sure majority of the parliament are strategically positioned by them. That makes it easier for the constitution and parliament to the manipulated. All such key institutions like the judiciary, military, and parliament are dominated by the leader. He let down one and set up another who would be under his whims and caprices. The leader see state institutions as his properties which could be tempered with at will. Faure Gnassingbe (2020) influenced the parliament of Togo to perpetuate his rule for a third term, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria pushed for it but failed. There is romour of president Muhammadu Buhari eying a third term.

Election handling :

Election processes are cheated in such senses as thuggery, bribery, inflation and deflation of population figures, snatching of ballot boxes, threats and self imposition. Charles Taylor of Liberia, Nigeria's Ibrahim Babangida, and the host of others are in this category.

Undertaking of soft social projects :

Considering the very high profile of resources in the of Africa, the development pace is more than slow if it must be ranked. There is the character of substandardness in terms of delivery of social demands. The continent is marked with poverty, weak infrastructures, pitiable living conditions and condemnable social response from the State. Leaders deliver to the people poor social services, they build learning institutions their children can not go for learning, they have good hospitals yet they never approach for medical attention, epileptic power supply to mention but a few. However, this weak delivery of social demands produces appealing effect on majority of the population who are poor. The masses believe what they have seen is the best of social conditions one can experience. Therefore, they are to a large extent comforted with the little they experience. Such effect make the citizens who are poor see the leader as demigod and are willing to do anything for such leader. Citizens make such common remarks " things are not that bad " " they have tried " " all will be well " " God is in control " which go a long way pacifying them. This appeal also prevent the majority masses from hearing, seeing and submitting to social reality. All African leaders are victims of this category as the continent has much but reap little.

Replacement :

government transitions are doctored and supervised by the ruling class or elites and they insure the buck of governing pass onto elites within their circle. This could be family and or party and successors maybe immediate children, friends or party loyalists. Through such structures power continue to remain in a circle.This is of much importance to the political class cause they would want civil power transitions to not to reflect totipotency which they feel will may perhaps hunt them with time. The " transcendent elites " have no choice than to continue with the Ideology of those who installed them.

Inducement of state bureaucracies :

Administrative bureaucratic structures are induced by leaders. Inducement may take the form of strategic appointments, bribe packages , pumping of money to military and police chiefs as well as national and local leaders of social and civil associations, royal fathers and pressure groups. This in effect build legitimacy and trust for the ruling class and it becomes deficult for mobilization of resistance against the ruling elites.

Compartmentalization of power :

power blocs are formed connecting to the ruling class and may be as many as possible. How compartmentalization of political power works is visibly simple. From findings, Mr A and B, as well as C and D are directly connected to Mr President or the ruling class but have huge dependencies who see them as godfathers. The connected to Mr President has dependencies from national to local enclaves, same go to Mr C, D, x, Y, Z that serves as power blocs for and within the ruling party. This manifests during elections in the continent were the electorates seem not have any businesses to deal with the personality of the leader but is more concerned with the Mr A, B, C, X, Y, Z that are connected to the leader through which they get their crumbs. Still, it is difficult to form resistance with this structure. And again this confers. legitimacy of some sort to the system of power monopoly in the context of Mr X, Y, Z commonly called " Party Vote Mobilizers ".

Ideology of Enlightenment :

The ruling elites seem to have the negative ideology of non or poor enlightenment of the masses. There is a popular saying " a mind that knows is a mind that is free ". Political leaders in the continent thus, undermine the place of positive political enlightenment of the masses and rather capitalize on the poor ignorant masses. This is see in the way they treat aducation in their respective States. Most African States give little priority to the development of education in their countries. The children of the ruling elites most times does not receive learning from institutions established by their own father. The reason is near the fact that advance learning require such conditions as exposure, learning facilities, good weather and environmental conditions, knowledge liberty and freedom among other motivations. The deprivation of the political knowledge of the citizenry makes them develop the prime feeling of political apathy which without doubt makes them apolitical. Hence, citizens are not concerned about whether or not a leader is holding onto power for life, they believe it's not their business that they will survive with or without such tenacious leader. Thisignorance allows the dubious ruling elites to easily manipulate electorates during elections which results in electorates fighting during election because of money given to them by the so called power blocs. In the 1980s the Nigerian government supervised school curriculums and even lectures to achieve this end.

IMPLICATIONS OF DEMOCRATIC DYNASTIES IN AFRICA

The challenges associated with democratic dynasties as mechanism for governance in the continent are much and devastating. The character of " transcendent elites " fighting to demonstrate the political will of their political ancestors or godfathers is detrimental to the development of the continent. Emphatically, the socio-political and economic arena suffers the most. Leaders continue to see the state as their personal property, that is through the eyes of those from whom they inherited power. Thus , they continue to lavish the common wealth of the State giving little consideration to economic and socio-political development. Leaders prefer the luxury of awesome cars, mansions, private Jets, unimaginable salary schemes, parties and unpresedented vacations abroad. The attendant effect is that the African economy remains at the base of world economic strata with such characteristics as poor delivery of social demands, incumbent and past leaders can not be held accountable and or probed given the principles of democratic family dynasties among others.The continent is " legally recognized but not politically and economically relevant in global politics. All African leaders fall prey to this ignominious acts. Indicators show that the fate of Africa will grow worse in the near future given the rapid pace of the of the common ills rampaged the continent which is not near good for the role and goal of leadership in the current dispensation of globalization.

#Goal #leadership #dynasties #Africa

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/nord-stream-2-sen-rand-paul-fights-sanctions-on-russian-pipeline

The people of Kentucky are being taken for a ride #MoscowMitchMustGo #RussianRand #TraitorTrump

Rand Paul Fights Sanctions on Russian Pipeline

Betsy Woodruff, Political Reporter |

Updated 07.27.19 3:46AM ET, Published 07.26.19 9:00PM ET| Daily Beast | Posted July 27, 2019 9:44 AM ET

Advocates for a massive Russian natural gas pipeline project have a powerful, quiet ally in Congress: Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and close friend of President Donald Trump. He has quietly worked against sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project, which would dramatically expand Russia’s shipments of natural gas to Germany. Critics say it would also dramatically expand Russia’s influence in Western Europe while harming Ukraine. The Trump administration has weighed sanctioning the project, but has yet to do so. And Trump himself has criticized it.

On Thursday, the senator postponed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s mark-up of legislation that would have put sanctions on the project, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the committee’s proceedings. And while Paul hasn’t publicized his opposition to the proposed sanctions, he sent Senate colleagues a letter before the mark-up explaining his stance. The letter, which The Daily Beast obtained, argues that the legislation in question—a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeanne Shaheen—doesn’t clearly state which entities would be sanctioned.

“This means that, ultimately, we are voting blind as to who will be sanctioned under this bill,” Paul wrote in the letter. “Congress would once again pass on our authority to the Executive Branch, thus abandoning our constitutional responsibility to make laws.”

He echoed that reasoning in comments to The Daily Beast. “Congress has not only become trigger happy, but sanction happy. If this legislation goes into force, we would be sanctioning European allies,” Paul said.

Though the letter criticizes the legislation for being vague about the sanctions’ targets, it also says the sanctions would directly impact two specific companies—one Italian, and the other Swiss.

“These sanctions would not be felt by the Russians, but by companies from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden, and Italy, as well as their investors,” Paul wrote.

Paul isn’t alone in that view. Last year, Agnia Grigas of the Atlantic Council told Foreign Policy that sanctions on the project could drive a wedge between the U.S. and Western European allies.

“I strongly urge you to oppose this legislation,” Paul concluded in his letter.

Paul is working with aide Jim Webb, who joined his office last year, to gin up opposition to the project, according to a Senate source with knowledge of the office’s strategy. Richard Burt, the Washington lobbyist leading the effort to protect the pipeline, has a longstanding relationship with Paul, and Politico called him one of the senator’s “main foreign policy advisor[s]” in 2014. Burt also advised Trump during the 2016 campaign on a major, Russia-friendly foreign policy address.

Russia’s state-controlled natural gas export monopoly, Gazprom, is building the near-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Its completion would let Russia double its natural gas shipments to Germany. Shortly before Trump’s friendly press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2017, he ripped German Chancellor Angela Merkel for embracing the project. Noting that Germany is a member of the NATO alliance, created to stave off Russian aggression, Trump said, “We have to talk about the billions and billions of dollars that’s being paid to the country we’re supposed to be protecting you against.”

Paul has long criticized interventionist foreign policy, and was one of just two senators to vote against the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which sanctioned Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Its only other Senate opponent was Sen. Bernie Sanders.

An aide to a senator who publicly opposes the Nord Stream 2 project said Paul’s letter contains errors.

“The letter is very shouty and very wrong,” said the aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “It misspells a bunch of things repeatedly, including Nord Stream. It says the bill is economic warfare but it’s against two companies. It says no one knows who’s getting targeted, then it complains about targeting those two companies. It says Europe supports Nord Stream, but everyone except Germany opposes it.”

The legislation in question would sanction ships involved in building the pipeline. Russian state media says construction of the pipeline is nearly complete.

“This pipeline has the tremendous potential to compromise energy security throughout the continent for decades,” said Shaheen, a Democrat, when she introduced the bill.

Russia’s influence in the U.S. and the West has come into sharp relief over the past several years, since the Kremlin interfered in the American 2016 presidential campaign and the Brexit vote in the U.K. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last week, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller said the Kremlin is currently working to meddle in the 2020 campaign season.

And much of the conversation about Russia’s 2016 interference focuses on sanctions. During the Obama administration, the United States sanctioned numerous Russian officials for the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Those sanctions enraged the Kremlin, which dispatched envoys to lobby Washington to have them lifted. Those sanctions were the topic of the now-notorious June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s campaign chief Paul Manafort, son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.

Since Trump’s election, the U.S. has leveled more sanctions against the Kremlin—sometimes haphazardly. When the Treasury Department sanctioned the Russian aluminum conglomerate Rusal and its parent company En+ Group, global aluminum markets veered into chaos. Treasury then made a deal with the company to reduce oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s control over it, and lifted the sanctions. But the decision to roll them back drew vocal opposition on the Hill, and 42 senators voted to keep them in place. Several months after that effort failed and the sanctions were lifted, news broke that Rusal would make a major investment in an aluminum plant in eastern Kentucky—the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and of Sen. Paul.

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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Oliver Stone’s series of interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin – conducted between July 2015 and February 2017 – has garnered a lot of attention, albeit in most cases not for the right reasons. In a much-noted appearance of Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, the liberal host attacked Stone for not confronting the Russian leader for his alleged crimes – which simply shows that Colbert didn’t bother seeing the interviews, because Stone most certainly did question Putin about this and other related matters. A review in Salon follows a similar pattern: the reviewer apparently did view at least some parts of the interviews, but predictably focused on the most superficial material: Putin loves Judo, he’s not a feminist, and won’t be marching in any Gay Pride events. Shocking!

In the present atmosphere of Russophobic hysteria, no honest account of what is happening in Russia or what Putin is really all about is likely to be taken at face value. What’s astonishing, however, is that this four-part documentary was even made at all– and shown on Showtime, where it is currently playing. Less surprising is the fact that the interviews contain several news-making revelations that the “mainstream” media has so far largely ignored.

It gets interesting right from the beginning when Stone delves into Putin’s early career. As a KGB officer stationed in East Germany, then the German Democratic Republic, he describes the GDR as entirely lacking the “spirit of innovation,” a “society [that] was frozen in the 1950s.” Hardly what one would expect from the caricature of a Soviet apparatchik Western profiles of Putin routinely portray. And also right from the beginning there is a tension between Stone, with his often archetypal liberal-left views, and Putin, whose perspective – if it has any American equivalent – might be called paleoconservative.

When Stone tries to identify Putin with Mikhail Gobachev, the Soviet liberal-reformist leader – “he has a resemblance to you in that he came up through that system. Very humble beginnings” – Putin rejects this outright with laconic disdain: “We all have something in common because we’re human beings.” Gorby, a favorite of American liberals, is seen by Putin as someone who “didn’t know what [he] wanted or know how to achieve what was required.”

Putin is routinely described by Western journalists as someone who wants to restore the old Soviet system, or at least restore the empire that extended over the countries of the Warsaw Pact, but what isn’t recognized is that he opposed the failed coup that sought a Soviet restoration: he resigned from his KGB office when the coup plotters briefly took over. And so Stone asks him, “But in your mind, did you still believe in communism? Did you believe in the system?” Putin answers: “No, certainly not. But at the beginning I believed it … and I wanted to implement it.” So when did he change? “You know, regrettably, my views are not changed when I’m exposed to new ideas, but only when I’m exposed to new circumstances.” Here is Putin the pragmatist, the man of action, who wants results and not theories: “The political system was stagnating,” he says, “it was frozen, it was not capable of any development.” Just like East Germany, which he had recently come from. And therefore he concluded that “the monopoly of one political force, of one party, is pernicious to the country.”

Still, Stone insists that “these are Gorbachev’s ideas, so you were influenced by Gorbachev.” Yet Putin contradicts him: “These are not ideas of Gorbachev,” who was merely trying to reform a system that was rotten at its very core: “The problem is this, this system was not efficient at its roots. And how can you radically change the system while preserving the country? That’s something no one back then knew—including Gorbachev. And they pushed the country towards collapse.”

It was the country versus the system – the latter was destroying the former. So how to preserve the Russian nation in the midst of so much turmoil? That was the problem that Russia faced as the Communist colossus was falling, and it is still the conundrum at the heart of Putin’s concerns. Putin greatly resents Gorbachev because the would-be Soviet reformer was pushing the system toward its ultimate demolition without regard for the consequences.

And why was this a disastrous course in Putin’s view? Not because the old Communist dream was exposed as a nightmare, but due to the fact that the nation – as opposed to the system – was dismembered. “To start with,” says Putin, “the most important thing is that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, 25 million Russians – in the blink of an eye – found themselves abroad. In another country.”

Imagine waking up one morning and finding that you’re not a citizen of the United States, but instead come under the control of some foreign entity that never existed in your lifetime. That’s what happened in the old Soviet Union. And the consequences of that historic implosion are still reverberating some thirty years later.

A key part of the mythology surrounding Putin is that he’s a power-mad dictator, the reincarnation of Stalin, and yet the facts – little known, of course, and not reported in the Western media – give us quite a different perspective. For example, I’ve never heard a single news story about Putin’s career report the fact that he initially refused President Boris Yeltsin’s first offer to appoint him Prime Minister. He didn’t trust Yeltsin, with good reason, and to underscore the dangers inherent in the office at that point he says: “And there was only one thing I was thinking about back then: Where to hide my children?”

This is not someone who wants power for its own sake. Indeed, Putin comes across as a modest man, driven by a sense of patriotic duty rather than lust for power, prestige, or pelf. He looks askance at praise, such as when Stone says: “You’re credited with doing many fine things in your first term. Privatization was stopped. You built up industries … a real son of Russia – you should be proud. You raised the GDP,” etc. etc. A Stalin type would simply have accepted this adulation, and yet Putin disputed Stone’s key point:

“Well, it’s not exactly like that. I didn’t stop privatization. I just wanted to make it more equitable, more fair. We put an end to some schemes – manipulation schemes – which led to the creation of oligarchs. These schemes that allowed some people to become billionaires in the blink of an eye.”

Here, again, we see the tension between Stone’s left-wing economic views, and Putin’s perspective, a theme played out in the entire course of these interviews: Putin continually insists that he is for private property, and that the “privatization” schemes he denounces were all due to the oligarchs’ connections to the state apparatus, which handed them control of entire industries for pennies on the dollar. The oligarchs were made possible by government control of industry and a rigged system, the exact opposite of a market economy. Putin clearly understands this when, later in the interview, he says:

“Do you know who was not happy with the new laws [which opened up the bidding process for state-owned industries]? Those who were not true businessmen. Those who earned their millions or billions not thanks to their entrepreneurial talents, but thanks to their ability to force good relationships with the government – those people were not happy.”

I said there was some real news buried in these interviews, which has gone unreported for the most part in Western media, and toward the end of the first interview there’s a real shocker when Stone says:

“Five assassination attempts, I’m told. Not as much as Castro whom I interviewed – I think he must have had 50 – but there’s a legitimate five that I’ve heard about.”

Putin doesn’t deny it. Instead, he talks about his discussion with Fidel Castro on the subject, who told him “Do you know why I’m still alive? Because I was always the one to deal with my security personally.” However, Putin doesn’t follow Castro’s example. Apparently he trusts his security people: “I do my job and the security people do theirs.” What’s interesting is that the conversation continues along these lines, in the context of attempts on Castro’s life. Stone is surprised that Putin didn’t take Castro’s advice on the security question, saying “Because always the first mode of assassination, from when the United States went after Castro, you try to get inside the security of the president to perform assassination.” “Yes,” replies Putin, “I know that. Do you know what they say among the Russian people? They say that those who are destined to be hanged are not going to drown.”

While I’m not prepared to interpret this Russian proverb, or its relevance to what is an astounding revelation – five assassination attempts! – Putin’s willingness to contradict or correct Stone, and the absence of any objection to this line of questioning on his part, looks very much like an endorsement of Stone’s contention. To my knowledge, CBS – which owns Showtime — is the only major media outlet in this country (aside from a brief mention in Newsweek ) that reported it, and then only perfunctorily.

So who tried to kill Putin? From the context of this interview, the clear implication is that it was the US, or its agents, but we don’t know that for a fact. Indeed, the whole subject is something Putin – while he doesn’t deny it – doesn’t want to pursue to the end. This is, I think, in large part because – and this will astonish you – he’s very pro-American. This comes out in the beginning of the second interview, the next day [July 3, 2015], when, in the midst of a discussion about US intervention in Iraq in 1991, and Gorbachev’s withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, a clearly frustrated Stone – who is not getting the expected answers from Putin – explodes:

“Let’s lay it on the line here. I mean, I was in the Vietnam War,. We sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam. That was outrageous and condemned by the whole world. After the détente with Gorbachev, Reagan and the United States put 500,000 troops into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

To this, Putin raises his eyebrows — ever so slightly – and says:

“I know that you are very critical of the American government in many dimensions. I do not always share your point of view. Despite the fact that, with regards to the American leadership, we do not always have the relationship we would like to have with them. Sometimes decisions have to be taken which are not entirely approved of in some parts of society.”

After some confusion about what they’re talking about – Putin is referring to the 1991 invasion of Iraq by George Herbert Walker Bush, not the invasion and subsequent occupation by his son – Putin says “President Bush was quite right to do what he did, he was cautious. He responded to aggression and then stopped when the time was right.” The point here is not that Stone is wrong, but that the caricature of Putin as reflexively opposed to everything the United States does is inaccurate. Another indication of where Putin is really coming from is his habit – throughout the entire series of interviews – of referring to the US government as “our partners.” This really sticks in Stone’s craw, until he finally says:

“So stop referring to them as partners – ‘our partners’ – you’ve said that too much. They’re being euphemistic. They’re no longer partners.

“Putin: But dialogue has to be pursued further.”

The Russian President maintains this tone throughout. It’s almost wistful: speaking of “our partner,” Putin exudes the air of a disappointed lover, one baffled by the constant rebuffs, the refusals, the outright disdain coming from the object of his affections. He constantly refers to the mutuality of interests that exists, the common goal of fighting Islamic terrorism, and he simply cannot believe that Washington continues to deny this. He just cannot understand it: why, we could be so happy together!

Indeed, Putin chides Stone more than once for his “anti-Americanism” – a charge Stone comes back to late in the interviews, and heatedly denies – and this underscores my point: here is someone who is not the enemy he is portrayed as being. Despite the coordinated campaign demonizing him in Western circles, despite the relentless eastward advance of NATO, despite the new cold war being waged at home and abroad by American politicians, Putin is stubbornly pro-American. And that is the most surprising aspect of these interviews, one I’ll get into in more depth later as I continue this series.

Editorial note: This is the first part of a multi-part series on Oliver Stone’s “The Putin Interviews.” Future installments will continue throughout the week. Read the entire interviews, including unaired content, by buying the book.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #the putin interviews #oliver stone

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newscitygroup · 5 years

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Silencing the Beast of Bolivian Populism

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

The risible tension between the tailored elitism of the Bolivian bourgeoisie and the restive pueblo of indigenous peasants was memorably captured in the 2005 film Our Brand Is Crisis. The documentary colorfully exposes the sleazy underbelly of American political influence. Yes, the very thing our wizened mandarins in Washington have been raising such a clamor over since the wrong candidate was elected by the dull, unseeing demos. Congressional luminaries like the walleyed Adam Schiff, presiding like a demented pontiff over his carnival of moral outrage, continually effect, with little effect, the most astonished reactions to claims of Russian meddling.

(As an aside, it should be noted that ‘meddling’ is the softer form of ‘interference’, which itself is the diminutive of ‘active measures.’ We are delusional by degrees. The meddler crowd have in them a trace of lost sanity. The active measures of adherents are simply lost. It is something like the difference between Tucker Carlson and John Brennan: one faintly aware of a bright reality, the other living wholly and adventurously in a world of windmills and apparitions.)

Schiff and his tentpole pals have evidently no awareness of America’s storied track record of international regime-change efforts. They’ve not watched Our Brand Is Crisis nor seen serpentine Clintonite James Carville teach amoral Bolivian careerists to massage the narrative against young Evo Morales. They succeed in planting an elite-groomed handmaiden of American capital in the presidency, leaving the riveting provocateur Morales to wait another couple of years. The cocalero with the sheaf of sable hair and the sun-warmed smile would soon be carried into power on the backs of rural campesinos. His 12-year reign atop the scrum pile of Bolivian politics led to hemispheric growth records, near eradication of deep poverty, and a shunning of the economic hitmen and finance jackals of extractive neoliberalism.

But that is all over now. Carville worked his fell magic once, but the sight of Morales winning a fourth term was too much for the beltway puppeteers to abide. And so, a coup d’état. But when one looks at the state of our corporate media and its recent coverage of Bolivia, it is understandable why asylum escapees like Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are so madly unmoored from the fact-based universe. Here are some of the particulars:

* In its celebrated fashion, the deeply reactionary New York Times delivered a raft of obfuscation to readers following the coup d’état in La Paz. It claimed the vanishment of Evo Morales from power signaled the ‘End of Tyranny.’ The merest familiarity with Bolivian politics would disabuse any reader of this cookie-cutter trope applied with utter failure of imagination by the soi disant ‘paper of record.’ A man, like Hugo Chavez, who won election after election by wide margins because he followed the will of his people, can hardly be characterized as a dictator. Unless of course, you live in a deconstructionist world of moral and material relativity.

* Likewise, the Times chirped its standard line that there was “mounting evidence of electoral fraud” and that the recent election was “widely seen as rigged”. Yet no evidence has actually surfaced of fraud, let alone fraud committed by Morales’ own party, the Movement Toward Socialist (MAS). Only the Washington-funded OAS raised ‘grave’ concerns about the election, rehearsing the standard beltway tactic of seeding doubt in the institutional integrity of foreign electoral processes. One tactic to that end was conducting early reporting of results before votes from rural strongholds of MAS support were counted.

* The Grey Lady also parrots the de rigeur step-plan from the regime-change playbook, which is for ‘reputable’ western institutions to clamor for ‘fresh elections’ even though the actual election just had was legitimate. It just produced the wrong result again. The EU’s High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy aped Hillary Clinton after the 2009 Honduran coup, calling for “new credible elections” that express the “democratic will” of Bolivians. As though this hadn’t just been done.

* This is exactly how it went down in Honduras in 2009 and what was attempted in Venezuela in the last two years. In fact, here’s a shortlist of Washington-backed coups in the last several decades. According to journalist Sarah Abdallah, this is the 20th Washington-backed coup d’état in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1954.

* Morales was said to “defy term limits” to run for a fourth term last month. However, the supreme court overturned the term-limit legislation long before the election. Like it or not, his campaign was strictly legal.

* Many of the objections to suspension of term limits come from supporters of ‘democracy’ who fundamentally misunderstand that socialists like those of the MAS are more interested in establishing a dictatorship of workers instead of a duopoly of elites. Because it is really one or the other. There is no mythical middle ground; the state serves one class or another. The so-called democracies of the western world feature the institutional trappings of the textbook democracy but have cleverly resided control of the economy in an autocracy of monopoly capital. This situation leaves the majority facing neoliberal outcomes including, as Medea Benjamin expertly put it, “…high rents, stagnant wages, cradle-to-grave debt, ever-rising economic inequality, privatized healthcare, a shredded social safety net, abysmal public transportation, systemic political corruption and endless war.”

* Meanwhile, US interference, from funding false polling to supporting the tiresome street theater of protest, to training all of the coup plotters, has been exposed as it is nearly everywhere a beltway-backed putsch occurs. It follows the same unimaginative script first laid out by Gene Sharp in his destabilization handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy. Create violent protests in the streets, make outsized demands including a change of government, and hope for government repression. Then let western media handle the rest. First, it will portray any government response as a ‘brutal crackdown’ and a shift toward ‘authoritarian measures’. It will also assume that protests, of whatever size, represent the collective will of the people. These protests implicitly replace elections as the true avatar of popular intent, particularly as doubt is cast upon ‘incorrect’ election results.

* None of the mainstream publications appeared to declare the coup to be a coup. The Times predictably substituted various terms to evade the damning ‘coup’ usage. Morales had “resigned” and “steps down” and “quit” and “lost his grip on power.” None bothered to mention he was forced out by the military with backing from the US. There were plenty of “accusations” and “allegations” being circulated about Morales and the election that were never validated. This is simply another way of saying that MSM supports coups.

* And, of course, lurking silently in the background is the ever-present bounty: unbeknownst to almost everyone, Bolivia has stupendous reserves of lithium, that lightest of metals so excellent for the electric cars of tomorrow.

* Evo Morales even offered to redo the elections to satisfy the histrionic outcries from Washington puppet protestors. He offered to bring all sides together in dialogue to plot a path forward. As the regime-change playbook prescribes, attempts at dialogue are to be ignored or brushed aside.

* Jeanine Anez, the legislator who appointed herself president of Bolivia in Morales’ absence, has been suitably whitewashed by the Times and lapdog mainstream media, which has avoided any discussion of her anti-indigenous racism and clear class prejudice against Morales’ Movement Toward Socialist (MAS).

* Anez may be legitimated once the Congress approves Morales removal. No doubt they will be given that the coup police are aggressively preventing leading MAS representatives from even entering the halls of power. President of the Senate Adriana Salvatierra was driven back by ferocious police when she tried to enter her rightful workplace. The visuals are conspicuous: On the one hand, unarmed popular representatives, looking like average civilians, harmlessly approaching their workplace. On the other, the designed-to-intimidate wardrobes of la policia, the neofascist all-blacks with their spit-polished boots, trusty truncheons, and smoked visors.

* Now, as was entirely predictable, right-wing police are rounding up indigenous members of the MAS, literally smoking them out of their dwellings, carting them off in rickety paddy wagons, like some Dickensian scene from Victorian London. It has all the hallmarks of a right-wing purge rooted in a centuries-old racist impulse of colonial power.

* It’s inspiring to see indigenous citizens, like a stout, brave matron wrapped in a hand-knitted shawl, lecturing the jack-boot neofascist brigades, lined up in stony silence. Reminds you that for all the official histories about our ‘postcolonial’ world, the usurpers are still suppressing the indigenous. Just with guns not swords.

* Fortunately, Morales has been sheltered in Mexico. One half expected to see him unearthed in a ditch by bloodthirsty regime-change fanatics wound tight by Washington propaganda and greenbacks, a la Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. There’s a reason leaders like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad fight so vociferously for their survival and those of their allies. They understand the personal brutality that awaits them should they relent.

Grim Alternatives

When you see one socialist project after another unraveled by the naked avarice of western capitalist vanguards, it makes you wonder what the alternatives are? Siege socialism is real and very poorly understood. As soon as a country like the USSR or China erect defenses against the siege of the imperial capital, such as capital controls or denying NGO status to various organizations, the western press cries, “Authoritarianism!” and issue calls for ‘free-market reforms’. Naive westerners, awash in commodities and comforts in the comparative calm of the metropole, post pious demands for freedoms for the distant oppressed nations, ignoring the unexampled crimes of their own nations–and their nation’s role in triggering foreign unrest. Few can truly articulate what freedoms violent Hong Kong mobs are missing as they clamor unwittingly for a return to some sort of proxy British colonialism. Nearly every form of western subversion of left-leaning governments is supported by the entire US establishment: the steady-state, both parties, and its media. Identity politics liberalism and the freedom of markets is the Janus-faced disguise that hides the reality of global class warfare.

Mass Deception

There is clearly no bottom to the guile and mendacity of the corporate media in preserving its hallowed neoliberal ideology. Here’s George Orwell on the complex relationship between serving as a purveyor of false historical narratives and believing one’s own lies:

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

—George Orwell, 1984

In the film version of Our Brand Is Crisis, an uber-confident Sandra Bullock rolls into a conference room to declare her ingenious device for swinging the election from the populist to the strongman. As she warms into her oratory, the brilliance of which becalms everyone in the room, she argues that the candidate mustn’t change, only the narrative. The population must be made to fear the populist (i.e., champion of their cause) by stirring up notions of chaos and collapse. The narrative thus becomes “crisis” rather than “hope” and the strongman is duly elected to thwart a mythic national implosion. It may be nauseating to see how cavalierly the publicists shape their storylines, but plotlines of this sort are being massaged every day. How many refer to the Hong Kong terrorists and vandals as ‘pro-democracy protesters’? We all do, reflexively. They are anything but, just as the ‘voluntary resignation’ of Evo Morales was anything but a willful concession, and was rather a coup d’état designed to speed Bolivian wealth and power into the nervy grip of the neoliberal north.

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newstfionline · 8 years

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Misreporting Iraq and Syria

By Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, February 3, 2017

The nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria has been the reporting of the siege of East Aleppo, which began in earnest in July and ended in December, when Syrian government forces took control of the last rebel-held areas and more than 100,000 civilians were evacuated. During the bombardment, TV networks and many newspapers appeared to lose interest in whether any given report was true or false and instead competed with one another to publicise the most eye-catching atrocity story even when there was little evidence that it had taken place. NBC news reported that more than forty civilians had been burned alive by government troops, vaguely sourcing the story to ‘the Arab media’. Another widely publicised story--it made headlines everywhere from the Daily Express to the New York Times--was that twenty women had committed suicide on the same morning to avoid being raped by the arriving soldiers, the source in this case being a well-known insurgent, Abdullah Othman, in a one-sentence quote given to the Daily Beast.

The most credible of these atrocity stories was given worldwide coverage by Rupert Colville, the spokesman for the UN High Commission for Human Rights, who said on 13 December that his agency had received reliable reports that 82 civilians, including 11 women and 13 children, had been killed by pro-government forces in several named locations in East Aleppo. The names of the dead were said to be known. Further inquiries by the UNHCHR in January raised the number of dead to 85, executed over a period of several days. Colville says the perpetrator was not the Syrian army, but two pro-government militia groups--al-Nujabah from Iraq and a Syrian Palestinian group called Liwa al-Quds--whose motives were ‘personal enmity and relatives against relatives’. Asked if there were other reports of civilians being executed in the final weeks of the siege, Colville said there were reports of members of the armed opposition shooting people trying to flee the rebel enclave. The murder of 85 civilians confirmed by multiple sources and the killing of an unknown number of people with bombs and shells were certainly atrocities. But it remains a gross exaggeration to compare the events in East Aleppo--as journalists and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic did in December--with the mass slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994 or more than 7000 in Srebrenica in 1995.

All wars always produce phony atrocity stories--along with real atrocities. But in the Syrian case fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen since the First World War. The ease with which propaganda can now be disseminated is frequently attributed to modern information technology: YouTube, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter. But this is to let mainstream media off the hook: it’s hardly surprising that in a civil war each side will use whatever means are available to publicise and exaggerate the crimes of the other, while denying or concealing similar actions by their own forces. The real reason that reporting of the Syrian conflict has been so inadequate is that Western news organisations have almost entirely outsourced their coverage to the rebel side.

Since at least 2013 it has been too dangerous for journalists to visit rebel-held areas because of well-founded fears that they will be kidnapped and held to ransom or murdered, usually by decapitation. Journalists who took the risk paid a heavy price: James Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 and executed by Islamic State in August 2014. Steven Sotloff was kidnapped in Aleppo in August 2013 and beheaded soon after Foley. But there is tremendous public demand to know what is happening in such places, and news providers, almost without exception, have responded by delegating their reporting to local media and political activists, who now appear regularly on television screens across the world. In areas controlled by people so dangerous no foreign journalist dare set foot among them, it has never been plausible that unaffiliated local citizens would be allowed to report freely.

In East Aleppo any reporting had to be done under licence from one of the Salafi-jihadi groups which dominated the armed opposition and controlled the area--including Jabhat al-Nusra, formerly known as the Syrian branch of al-Qaida. What happens to people who criticise, oppose or even act independently of these extremist groups was made clear in an Amnesty International report published last year and entitled ‘Torture Was My Punishment’: Abduction, Torture and Summary Killings under Armed Group Rule in Aleppo and Idlib. Ibrahim, whom al-Nusra fighters hung from the ceiling by his wrists while they beat him for holding a meeting to commemorate the 2011 uprising without their permission, is quoted as saying: ‘I heard and read about the government security forces’ torture techniques. I thought I would be safe from that now that I am living in an opposition-held area. I was wrong. I was subjected to the same torture techniques but at the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra.’

The fact that groups linked to al-Qaida had a monopoly on the supply of news from East Aleppo doesn’t necessarily mean that the reports in the press about the devastating effects of shelling and bombing were untrue. Pictures of flattened buildings and civilians covered in cement dust weren’t fabricated. But they were selective. It’s worth recalling that--according to UN figures--there were between 8000 and 10,000 rebel fighters in East Aleppo, yet almost none of the videos on TV ever showed any armed men. Western broadcasters commonly referred to the groups defending East Aleppo as ‘the opposition’ with no mention of al-Qaida or its associated groups. There was an implicit assumption that all the inhabitants of East Aleppo were firmly opposed to Assad and supported the insurgents, yet it’s striking that when offered a choice in mid-December only a third of evacuees– 36,000--asked to be taken to rebel-held Idlib. The majority--80,000--elected to go to government-held territory in West Aleppo. This isn’t necessarily because they expected to be treated well by the government authorities--it’s just that they believed life under the rebels would be even more dangerous. In the Syrian civil war, the choice is often between bad and worse.

The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron. By essentially handing over control of the news agenda to local militants, news organisations unwittingly gave them an incentive to eliminate--through intimidation, abduction and killing--any independent journalist, Syrian or non-Syrian, who might contradict what they were saying. Foreign leaders and the international media were at one time predicting slaughter on the scale of the worst massacres in postwar history. But, shamefully, by the time the siege came to an end they had completely lost interest in the story and in whether the horrors they had been reporting actually took place. Even more seriously, by presenting the siege of East Aleppo as the great humanitarian tragedy of 2016, they diverted attention from an even greater tragedy that was taking shape three hundred miles to the east in northern Iraq.

The offensive against Mosul, the biggest city still held by Islamic State, began on 17 October when Iraqi army troops, with the support of US-led air power, entered the city’s eastern districts. Expectations of a quick victory were soon disappointed when Iraqi soldiers began to suffer heavy casualties as small but highly mobile IS units of half a dozen fighters moved from house to house through hidden tunnels or holes cut in the walls to set up sniper positions, plant booby traps and bury IEDs. Local people whose houses were taken over say that the snipers were Chechens or Afghans who talked in broken Arabic. These fighters were supported by local IS men who also helped hide the suicide bombers who were to drive vehicles packed with explosives. There were 632 vehicle bombs during the first six weeks of the offensive. An IS squad would use a house until it had been pinpointed by Iraqi government forces and was about to be destroyed by heavy weapons or US-led airstrikes. Before the counterattack came they would move on to another house. IS has traditionally favoured fluid tactics, with each squad or detachment acting independently and with limited top-down control. Adapted to an urban environment, this approach allows small groups of fighters to harass much larger forces, by swiftly retreating and then infiltrating captured neighbourhoods so they have to be retaken again and again.

The Iraqi and US governments had every reason to play down the fact that they had failed to take Mosul and had instead been sucked into the biggest battle fought in Iraq and Syria since the US invasion in 2003. It was only in the second week of January that Iraqi special forces reached the River Tigris after ferocious fighting: with the support of US planes, helicopters, artillery and intelligence they had finally taken control of Mosul University, which had served as an IS headquarters for the eastern part of the city, along with the area’s 450,000 inhabitants. But reaching the Tigris was far from being the end of the fight. On 13 January, IS blew up the five bridges spanning the river. The city’s western part is a much greater challenge: home to 750,000 people, many of whom are thought to be sympathetic to IS, it’s a larger, poorer and older area, with closely packed streets that are easy to defend. Only the aid agencies, coping with the heavy civilian casualties and the prospects of a fight to the death by IS, appreciated the scale of what was happening: on 11 January, the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq, Lise Grande, said the city was ‘witnessing one of the largest urban military operations since the Second World War’. She warned that the intensity of the fighting was such that 47 per cent of those treated for gunshot wounds were civilians, far more than in other sieges of which the UN had experience. The nearest parallel to what is happening in Mosul would be the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995, in which 10,000 people were killed, or the siege of Grozny in 1994-95, in which an estimated 5500 civilians died. But the loss of life in Mosul could be much heavier than in either of those cities because it is defended by a movement which will not negotiate or surrender and kills anybody who shows any sign of wavering. IS believes death in battle is the supreme expression of Islamic faith, which fits in well with a doomed last stand.

Figures for wounded civilians in Mosul over the last three months may well exceed those for East Aleppo over the same period. This is partly because ten times as many people have been caught up in the fighting in Mosul, whose population according to the UN is 1.2 million; 116,000 civilians were evacuated from East Aleppo. Of that number, 2126 sick and war-wounded were evacuated to hospitals, according to the WHO. Casualties in the Mosul campaign are difficult to establish, partly because the Iraqi government and the US have been at pains to avoid giving figures.

A large number of losses were inflicted even before Mosul was fully surrounded: the last passable main road to Syria, down which have come food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas since IS captured the city two and a half years ago, was closed in November by Shia paramilitaries. Tracks are still open, but they are dangerous and often can’t be used during the winter rains. As a result, prices in the markets in Mosul have soared: the cost of a single egg has jumped five times, to 1000 Iraqi dinars. In the main vegetable and fruit market there are only potatoes and onions for sale, and at high prices. As cylinders of cooking gas run out, wood taken from abandoned building sites is selling at a premium. The siege is likely to be a long one: if IS is going to make a stand anywhere, it is better from its point of view to do so in Mosul, where the Iraqi government and the US military may be more restrained than elsewhere in Iraq in the use of their firepower. The precedents are ominous: in 2015-16 airstrikes and artillery fire destroyed 70 per cent of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, which had a population of 350,000. IS has every reason to fight to the end in Mosul: aside from being the second biggest city in Iraq, it has iconic significance for IS. It was here, in June 2014, that a few thousand of its fighters defeated an Iraqi government garrison of at least 20,000 soldiers; and it was on the back of this miraculous victory that IS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared his caliphate. Those who are trapped in Mosul aren’t optimistic about their chances: ‘What we feared is happening,’ a woman in her sixties who gave her name as Fatima, told the online newsletter Niqash, which published an account of conditions in the city. ‘The siege is starting for real. From now on every seed and every drop of fuel counts because only god knows when this will end.’

Despite the ferocity of the fighting in Mosul, and warnings from the UN about casualties in the city potentially surpassing those in Sarajevo and Grozny, international attention has been almost exclusively directed at East Aleppo. It wouldn’t be the first time in the region that the Western press corps turned out to have been watching the wrong battle: I was in Baghdad in November 2004 when most Western journalists were covering the end of the siege of Fallujah. The Marines ultimately captured it, but the American generals understandably played down--and the media scarcely noticed--that while US troops were fighting in Fallujah, in central Iraq, insurgents had seized the much larger city of Mosul, in the north. That victory turned out to be significant, because the US army and the Iraqi government never truly regained uncontested control of the city, with the result that the predecessors of IS survived intense military pressure and re-established themselves, waiting until the revolt in Syria in 2011 gave them fresh opportunities.

There are many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently. When civilians are killed or their houses destroyed during the US-led bombardment of Mosul, it is Islamic State that is said to be responsible for their deaths: they were being deployed as human shields. When Russia or Syria targets buildings in East Aleppo, Russia or Syria is blamed: the rebels have nothing to do with it. Heartrending images from East Aleppo showing dead, wounded and shellshocked children were broadcast around the world. But when, on 12 January, a video was posted online showing people searching for bodies in the ruins of a building in Mosul that appeared to have been destroyed by a US-led coalition airstrike, no Western television station carried the pictures. ‘We have got out 14 bodies so far,’ a haggard-looking man facing the camera says, ‘and there are still nine under the rubble.’

#media #Aleppo #Mosul #Islamic State #misreporting Iraq and Syria

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courtneytincher · 5 years

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Trump Channels Reagan on Path Toward Arms Control

Donald Trump has already disrupted the global regime for managing nuclear arms. Should he succeed in winning a second term in the White House, he might well transform that regime entirely. And transformation is long overdue.Past is PrologueNuclear arms control aims to diminish the likelihood of nuclear conflict. There are two very different views of how to do this: one focuses on process, the other on outcomes.In the early years after World War II, Washington briefly toyed with the idea of “atomic diplomacy.” After all, America had a monopoly on atomic weapons, so maybe the United States could use the threat of nuclear attack to press the Russians to be reasonable. That notion didn’t last long.After Stalin got the bomb and the Cold War turned frigid, America started to build out its arsenal. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to heavily invest in a nuclear deterrent, figuring strategic forces were cheaper than conventional ones. John Kennedy followed as president, in part by a campaign promise to fix “the missile gap.”In reality, the U.S. nuclear arsenal outmatched the Soviets’ in the early 1960s, but we built more weapons anyway. Moscow scrambled to catch-up, even risking deploying nuclear weapons in the Western Hemisphere sparking the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.That crisis helped both Washington and Moscow figure out that a winner-take-all arms race maybe wasn’t the best idea. Both sides started giving more serious thought to managing, rather than winning, the arms race. In 1963, America, the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater or in space. Kennedy considered the test-ban one of his greatest foreign policy achievements.Paul Nitze, who had helped fashion the case for building out the U.S. nuclear arsenal, became one of the leading proponents for arms control. Nitze served on the delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) from 1969 to 1973. (On the other hand, he opposed the ratification of SALT II in 1979.)This is where the visions of arms control really started to diverge. One side argued it was the regime itself that was crucial, that as long as the two sides were talking and working within an arms control framework, it was possible to mitigate the threat of nuclear war. The other side focused more on outcomes, arguing that arms control was only useful if there were actually “controls” that were honored and diminished threats.The reality is that, through the 1980s, arms control didn’t eliminate one nuclear weapon.Then came Ronald Reagan.Reagan believed in outcomes over process.And he truly believed that nuclear weapons were the scourge of mankind. He wanted to make them irrelevant to strategic competition. Hence his commitment to missile defense and real weapons reductions. This is all described well in Paul Lettow’s Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2006).It is worth mentioning Reagan, not only because he represents a different strand in the DNA of arms control, but because he is a formative influence on Trump. Trump rose as a prominent businessmen and public figure during Reagan’s presidency and in many respects has modeled his strategic thinking on Reagan’s. This is reflected in Trump’s adoption of Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra, as well as his sweeping vision of making nuclear weapons irrelevant.It is also worth noting the sharp contrast between the Reagan-Trump approach and that of the last administration. The arms control debate became almost moribund in the 1990s. Developments in India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran led nuclear experts to fret far more about nuclear proliferation. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive attitude towards the West, however, put arms control back on the agenda. Obama responded with an approach that pleased traditional arms control advocates but accomplished little.Obama was a process guy. He shared the hope of a world without nuclear weapons, embracing an approach called “global zero,” under which the United States would try to foster denuclearization by minimizing America’s reliance on a strategic deterrent. He signed the New START and ignored Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement.Unfortunately, all this accomplished was to contribute to a strategic imbalance: Russia and China expanded and modernized their nuclear arsenals while America allowed its deterrent to atrophy. Even before the end of Mr. Obama’s presidency, it was clear that the campaign for global zero was a bust. The Age of TrumpTrump has been pretty consistent in how he has tried to address all the big national security challenges—and yes, his approach has been rather Reaganesque. On the one hand, he demonstrates a capacity to defend U.S. interests. On the other, he offers a diplomatic option as a means to achieve a stable, sustainable resolution of conflict. Reagan, too, took this approach when, for example, he deployed INF systems in Europe as a precursor to negotiating the complete elimination of that class of weapons with the Soviet Union.Like Reagan, Trump believes that in a strategic arms competition America is best off if it establishes that it can defend itself through a mix of offensive and defensive assets. The United States must demonstrate a missile defense that can protect against nuclear attack as well as the capability to retaliate with modernized nuclear weapons. While Trump hasn’t yet built out missile defenses to deal with strategic threats, clearly that is the direction he is headed. Meanwhile, the administration has actively pursued modernizing the triad (bombers, missiles, and submarines) and the U.S. nuclear arsenal. On the arms control front, Trump has called out Putin for cheating on the INF treaty. Furthermore, in response, Washington withdrew from that agreement this year. It is also likely that, if re-elected, Trump will withdraw the United States from the New START—a treaty that unfairly advantages the Russians. None of this means that Trump is anti-arms control or wants a new arms race. Rather, he is following Reagan’s proven formula of defense. He wants to show a credible nuclear deterrent and then set about putting into place arms control agreements that actually reduce threats.Here is the Trumpian wrinkle. Trump knows there is no hope of erecting a realistic global arms control regime that doesn’t include China. The size, scope, and future of China’s nuclear arsenal are nothing if not opaque. Given that China is now a global power with global interests, that reality alone ought to be concerning. Gaining greater transparency on China’s arsenal will be key to achieving strategic stability in the future.Washington also has to think about its allies. Extended deterrence is a key component of the U.S. security umbrella in Europe and an important factor in regional stability. This will be increasingly true in the Indo-Pacific as well, where American key strategic partners and allies include Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and India.China’s arsenal ought to be troubling Russia as well because both countries possess a lot of nuclear weapons that can reach each other. Though Beijing and Moscow cooperate today, the China-Russia détente may be much less stable than many believe. Having an arms control regime without the three largest powers participating makes about as much sense as having two musketeers. It’s anachronistic to think a U.S.-Russia strategic agreement alone will seriously contribute to stability, let alone to reductions in nuclear forces.Bold FutureOne can make the case that Beijing has zero interest in U.S.-Russian-Chinese arms control—and today that makes sense. There is also an argument that we should not expect Putin to be reasonable on these issues anytime soon, which is also the case.But none of this is to say that working towards a global arms control framework is a bad idea. Arguably now is exactly the right time to start thinking about what this framework might look like, what it might accomplish, how it might be implemented. Don’t expect bold moves from either Moscow or Beijing until they know if Trump is coming back. If he doesn’t, they won’t know exactly what they will be dealing with. If he does come back, they know very well what to expect.If Trump is successful in resetting the geopolitical table in great power competition, one could envision a future time when it would make sense for both Russia and China to limit nuclear competition rather than enter a debilitating arms race that they well might lose. When that moment comes, America should be ready. Trump is setting the stage for that future.A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research into matters of national security and foreign affairs.Image: Reuters

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smilystore · 5 years

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Vladimir Putin has dominated Russia for 20 years. Will he ever step down

On August 9, 1999, Russian history changed forever. Then-President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, his former head of domestic intelligence, as acting prime minister.

It seemed likely to be a short-lived appointment. Putin’s predecessor had lasted only a few months in the job, and Yeltsin had seen three other prime ministers come and go following the financial crash of August 1998.

At the time, Putin possessed none of the aurae of a world leader. Before joining the Yeltsin administration, he had a largely behind-the-scenes career as an adviser to St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. He then moved to Moscow to work for the Presidential Property Management Department, an unlikely springboard to national office.

But within less than six months of making him prime minister, Yeltsin unexpectedly handed Putin the presidency on New Year’s Eve, 1999. That historic surprise set in motion Putin’s extraordinary rise to become the undisputed leader of Russia.

The numbers speak for themselves. In August 1999, when he became prime minister, independent pollster Levada Center put Putin’s approval rating at 31%. By January of 2000, after taking over as president, it was 84%. According to Levada, it has never dipped below 60% since then.

What explained Putin’s surge in popularity over those crucial early months?

One factor was clear: Putin’s muscular response to domestic terrorism. In September of 1999, a string of mysterious apartment bombings killed hundreds of people in several cities around Russia and paralyzed the country with fear.

It was a 9/11 moment for Russia. And, much like President George W. Bush, who would promise retribution against al Qaeda in his bullhorn speech to emergency rescuers at Ground Zero in New York after September 11, 2001, Putin delivered the kind of tough talk that many Russians wanted to hear.

“We will pursue terrorists everywhere,” Putin vowed, as Russian forces bombed the capital of the breakaway republic of Chechnya. “If they are at the airport, at the airport. That means pardon my language that if they’re on the toilet, we will waste them out in the outhouse.”

Russian investigators concluded the attacks were perpetrated by Islamic extremists. But Putin’s opponents most famously, exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky and former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko went on to promote the dark conspiracy theory that Russian security services had a hand in staging the apartment bombings as a provocation aimed to force military action in Chechnya.

Berezovsky was found dead in his countryside mansion in the UK in 2013, an apparent suicide. Litvinenko died of after being poisoned by polonium-210 in London, a murder that a UK inquiry concluded was likely directed by Putin.

Regardless of the perpetrator, the bombings represented a turning point in Putin’s career: It brought the nation behind him and built popular support for his rule.

Equally important, it allowed the Kremlin’s formidable spin machine to mold Putin’s image as a powerful leader. In 1999, Russians were collectively traumatized by the collapse of the USSR and the transition to a market economy. Putin’s decisiveness was presented as a contrast to Yeltsin’s erratic rule.

Not long after becoming acting president, Putin flew to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in a Su-27 jet. A Kremlin news release at the time noted that he had piloted the plane himself during part of the flight.

The myth-making machine would work tirelessly over the next two decades to refine that image of Putin as a man of action.

The 1999 military campaign in Chechnya also created the template for Putin’s way of war. Russian forces leveled the rebel capital of Grozny. Images of the ruined city would look strikingly similar to besieged Syrian cities such as Aleppo, which would come under intense bombardment by Russian warplanes after Putin launched a military intervention there 2015.

Putin’s war on terrorism at least initially found common cause with the West. After the 9/11 attacks, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush. The Russian government acquiesced to a US military presence in Central Asia to support of the invasion of Afghanistan; it subsequently allowed US troops and equipment heading for Afghanistan to cross Russian airspace, something unthinkable during the Cold War.

The Kremlin leader, however, was wary of US intentions. He criticized the expansion of the NATOalliance, opposed the US plans to development ballistic-missile defense, and in what would come to define Russia’s relations with the world seized Crimea in 2014.

The annexation of Crimea came at a cost: Russia was hit with economic sanctions by the US and its allies. Those sanctions hit the pocketbooks of ordinary Russians, but it did little to diminish Putin’s prestige. Putin also stuck to a policy of strict fiscal discipline: Earlier this summer, the Russian Central Bank confirmed that foreign-currency reserves had topped $500 billion.

In contrast to 1999, the Kremlin’s grip on Russian media is tighter today. A steady crackdown on press freedoms over Putin’s tenure means there is very limited critical coverage — at least domestically of his policies.

Russian state media have done little to mark Putin’s two decades in power. But after 20 years in office, some cracks are beginning to show in his façade as a leader. While Putin still enjoys high ratings, they are now nowhere near the level was seen after Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 provoked a wave of patriotic sentiment.

In recent weeks, a new wave of street demonstrations over municipal elections has presented a new challenge to the Kremlin. While the protests pose no direct threat to Putin’s monopoly on power, Russia’s small and fragmented opposition has used their marches to express discontent with what they see as a president who has stayed too long in office, as well as with a ruling elite that seems to have run out of fresh ideas.

Foremost on the minds of Russia’s political class is the fact that no clear successor has emerged for Putin. By law, Putin must step aside after his next term ends in 2024. But many observers speculate that Putin may engineer a way to keep himself in office, much like President Xi Jinping of China, or like the former president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who formally stepped aside but who still holds formal levers of power.

In unsanctioned street-art festival in the city of Yekaterinburg earlier this year, a street artist named Filipp Kozlov who goes by the handle Philippenzo — painted a grainy graffiti image of ballerinas dancing Swan Lake, an allusion to the ballet that was famously broadcast during the coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.

“For 20 long years, we’ve been waiting with hope for the ballet,” the subversive caption read, in a clear reference to Putin’s two decades in power.

by Nathan Hodge

The post Vladimir Putin has dominated Russia for 20 years. Will he ever step down appeared first on Smile store.

source https://smilystore.com/2019/08/09/vladimir-putin-has-dominated-russia-for-20-years-will-he-ever-step-down/

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williamsjoan · 6 years

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The GPS wars have begun

Where are you? That’s not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position.

Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities.

That’s a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here’s the book-length treatment).

Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry.

Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia’s GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou (北斗 – “Big Dipper”) navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

Now, though, China hopes to accelerate the launch of Beidou satellites and provide worldwide positioning services. As Financial Times noted a few weeks ago, China has launched 11 satellites in the Beidou constellation just this year — almost half of the entire network, and it hopes to expand by another dozen satellites by 2020. That would make it one of the largest systems in the world when fully deployed.

A Long March-3B carrier rocket carrying the 24th and 25th Beidou navigation satellites takes off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on November 5, 2017 in Xichang, China. Photo by Wang Yulei/CHINA NEWS SERVICE/VCG via Getty Images

China is not just putting satellites into orbit though, but demanding that local smartphone manufacturers include Beidou positioning chips in their devices. Today, devices from a number of major manufacturers, including Huawei and Xiaomi, use the system, along with GPS and Russia’s GLONASS as well.

That puts American smartphone leaders like Alphabet and particularly Apple in a bind. For Apple, which prides itself on providing one unified iPhone device worldwide, the disintegration of the monopoly around GPS presents a quandary: Does it offer a unique device for the Chinese market capable of handling Beidou, or does it add Beidou chips to its phones worldwide and run into trouble with U.S. national security authorities?

The complexity doesn’t stop there. China may be the most aggressive in launching its alternative to GPS and also the most bullish in providing worldwide coverage, but it is not alone in pursuing its own system.

Japan has made launching a space program a national priority to compete with China and rejuvenate its economy, and one critical component of that program is building out a positioning system. The Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (準天頂衛星システム), which has cost ¥120 billion ($1.08 billion) to date, is designed to augment GPS with more coverage of Japan and also trigger an estimated ¥2.4 trillion ($21.58 billion) in economic benefits.

Using this new system comes at a huge cost due to lack of manufacturing scale. As the Nikkei Asian Review noted a few weeks ago, “The high price of receivers is a hurdle, however. Mitsubishi Electric on Thursday began selling receivers accurate to within a few centimeters — at a price of several million yen, or tens of thousands of dollars, apiece.” The additional location accuracy in Japan may well be necessary for autonomous cars, but auto manufactures will need to lower costs quickly if they want to include the technology in their vehicles.

Like Japan, India has similarly pursued a GPS-augmenting system known as IRNSS, and it has now launched seven satellites to increase coverage of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, which is expected to leave the European Union in March following the referendum over Brexit, will most likely lose access to the EU’s Galileo positioning system, and is planning to launch its own. As for Galileo itself, it is expected to be fully operational in 2019.

In short, the world has moved from one system (GPS) to arguably seven. And while Chinese manufacturers increasingly have GPS, GLONASS and Beidou installed on one chip, that scale may only work in a country the size of China. In Japan, where the smartphone market is saturated and the population is less than a tenth of China, the scale required to lower prices may well be harder to find. It will be even tougher in the United Kingdom, for the same reasons.

Theoretically, one positioning chip could be designed to incorporate all of these different systems, but that might run afoul of U.S. national security laws, particularly in regards to GLONASS and Beidou. Which means that much as the internet is fragmenting into disparate poles, we might soon find that our smartphone positioning chips need to fragment as well in order to handle these local markets. That will ultimately mean higher prices for consumers, and tougher supply chains for manufacturers.

The GPS wars have begun published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years

Link

Where are you? That’s not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position.

Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing, and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities.

That’s a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check this article out, or for the comprehensive history, here’s the book-length treatment).

Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the US and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. It’s Beidou (北斗 – “Big Dipper”) navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

Now, though, China hopes to accelerate the launch of Beidou satellites and provide worldwide positioning services. As the Financial Times noted a few weeks ago, China has launched 11 satellites in the Beidou constellation just this year — almost half of the entire network, and it hopes to expand by another dozen satellites by 2020. That would make it one of the largest systems in the world when fully deployed.

China is not just putting satellites into orbit though, but demanding that local smartphone manufacturers include Beidou positioning chips in their devices. Today, devices from a number of major manufacturers including Huawei and Xiaomi use the system, along with GPS and Russia’s GLONASS as well.

That puts American smartphone leaders like Alphabet and particularly Apple in a bind. For Apple, which prides itself on providing one unified iPhone device worldwide, the disintegration of the monopoly around GPS presents a quandary: does it offer a unique device for the Chinese market capable of handling Beidou, or does it add Beidou chips to its phones worldwide and run into trouble with U.S. national security authorities?

Like Japan, India has similarly pursued a GPS-augmenting system known as IRNSS, and it has now launched seven satellites to increase coverage of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, which is expected to leave the European Union in March following the referendum over Brexit, will most likely lose access to the EU’s Galileo positioning system, and is planning on launching its own. As for Galileo itself, it is expected to be fully operational in 2019.

Theoretically, one positioning chip could be designed to incorporate all of these different systems, but that might run afoul of US national security laws, particularly in regards to GLONASS and Beidou. Which means that much as the internet is fragmenting into disparate poles, we might soon find that our smartphone positioning chips need to fragment as well in order to handle these local markets. That will ultimately mean higher prices for consumers, and tougher supply chains for manufacturers.

via TechCrunch

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fmservers · 6 years

Text

The GPS wars have begun

Where are you? That’s not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position.

That’s a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check this article out, or for the comprehensive history, here’s the book-length treatment).

China is not just putting satellites into orbit though, but demanding that local smartphone manufacturers include Beidou positioning chips in their devices. Today, devices from a number of major manufacturers including Huawei and Xiaomi use the system, along with GPS and Russia’s GLONASS as well.

That puts American smartphone leaders like Alphabet and particularly Apple in a bind. For Apple, which prides itself on providing one unified iPhone device worldwide, the disintegration of the monopoly around GPS presents a quandary: does it offer a unique device for the Chinese market capable of handling Beidou, or does it add Beidou chips to its phones worldwide and run into trouble with U.S. national security authorities?

Like Japan, India has similarly pursued a GPS-augmenting system known as IRNSS, and it has now launched seven satellites to increase coverage of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, which is expected to leave the European Union in March following the referendum over Brexit, will most likely lose access to the EU’s Galileo positioning system, and is planning on launching its own. As for Galileo itself, it is expected to be fully operational in 2019.

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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