The Guardian: Cossack comeback: fur flies as 'fake' groups spark identity crisis

The subsequent dispute over what constitutes “true” Cossack identity goes beyond a simple matter of uniform. The attack on peaceful opposition activists has sparked concerns that the Cossacks’ romanticised past is being used to legitimise the actions of Kremlin-backed paramilitary groups. [...]

Inside Russia, Cossack patrols have now become a kind of volunteer morality police. In Krasnodar, the southern region where the attack on Navalny and his team took place, they were even put on the region’s payroll in 2012.

Their increased presence was widely seen as an attempt to keep in check an increasing number of migrants in the region bordering the Caucasus region. Even though they had no authority to conduct arrests or carry firearms, the message was that the Cossack figures alone would provide police with a tool of intimidation less constrained by the burden of public accountability.

read the article 

AP: Dozens in Russia imprisoned for social media likes, reposts

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin's interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn't immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

A 2002 Russian law defines extremism as activities that aim to undermine the nation's security or constitutional order, or glorify terrorism or racism, as well as calling for others to do so. The vagueness of the phrasing and the scope of offenses that fall under the extremism clause allow for the prosecution of a wide range of people, from those who set up an extremist cell or display Nazi symbols to anyone who writes something online that could be deemed a danger to the state. In the end, it's up to the court to decide whether a social media post poses a danger to the nation or not.

read the article 

Reuters: Merkel sees no reason to roll back Russia sanctions: spokeswoman

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sees no reason at all now to roll back sanctions against Russia in the Ukraine crisis, a government spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Tuesday some EU states were skeptical about extending sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis and it was unclear if the 28-nation bloc would decide to renew them.

read the article 

Vox: An expert on the European far right explains the growing influence of anti-immigrant politics

The core of the ideology of the radical right includes three features: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. [...]

So there is an aspect of color in it. But the key enemy has become Islam. That's done some good for some other minorities. If you look in the Netherlands, for example, Moroccans and Turks are perceived as Others, while Surinamese — who are black but not Muslim — have disappeared from the "Other" category. Today you can see some nonwhites among radical right parties, but they tend to be Christian or at the very least non-Muslim. [...]

And there's quite a lot of anti-Semitism in the East, even in countries that have very few Jews (like Poland). By contrast, anti-Semitism is almost absent on the radical right in Western Europe. If it comes from the right, it tends to be neo-Nazi groups, not radical right parties. [...]

I make a distinction generally between the extreme right, which opposes democracy as such, and the radical right, which accepts democracy but challenges some of the fundamentals of liberal democracy — particularly pluralism and minority rights.

read the article 

BBC4 Analysis: Protectionism in the USA

Edward Stourton examines America's long history of resistance to free trade, and asks why it has again become such a potent political force. Donald Trump's most consistent policy has been opposition to free trade agreements which he sees as unfair, particularly with China. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has been equally opposed, if for different reasons, while Hillary Clinton has had to tack away from her previous support for free trade pacts. Edward looks back to debates from the 19th century to the 1990s to shed new light on these forces. And he asks whether the protectionist impulse is a natural reaction to globalisation's wrenching changes.

listen to the podcast

The Los Angeles Review of Books: Salvaging the Future

Sherryl Vint’s 2015 Paradoxa issue, The Futures Industry, moves this vital conversation forward in a noteworthy way. Vint proposes that the future has become a site of crisis, both in the sense that real devastation looms on the horizon (as a consequence of climate change and economic instability) and also in the sense that we seem to have collectively lost the ability to imagine futures that offer plausible alternatives to the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of the apocalyptic present. Vint’s introduction to the issue contrasts the film Tomorrowland (2015) against artist-activist Banksy’s satirical Dismaland Bemusement Park (a dystopian anti–theme park that was open for one month in Somerset, England, in 2015): if Tomorrowland offers a strained nostalgia for seemingly innocent 1950s visions of the future, Dismaland bitterly exposes the exploitative corporate fantasies and totalitarian inclinations of the industry-oriented future imaginings of Disney’s Tomorrowland and the World’s Fairs that inspired it. [...]

O’Connell’s essay exemplifies the kind of work that Slavoj Žižek calls for in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009) when he suggests that, in order to challenge the seemingly unshakable future unfolding before us, we must “mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” If the future seems locked into a dismal trajectory, it is because our sense of the past is fixed and static: the present seems to be the inevitable product of a singular history just as the future seems to be the unwavering continuation of the apocalyptic present. In order to disrupt the paralysis of such totalizing inevitability, we need to view the past as a multitude of alternate possibilities rather than remaining locked into an unshakable historical determinism. According to O’Connell, fantastic postcolonial trains insert new potentialities into the past in a way that forces us to “reconsider the narrative of history’s triumphant resolution in the present moment as capitalist realist closure.” These narratives suggest that there are, and always have been, alternatives.

read the article 

Slate: Is America Really in an Anti-Establishment Rage?

And there’s evidence to back the claim that we’re living in the “year of the outsider.” More than 78 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress; nearly 65 percent say the country is on the wrong track; and upward of 47 percent of registered voters say they would consider a “generic third-party nominee.” Together, that is a clear vote of no confidence in our political system. [...]

The evidence for confusion is strong. The same people who disapprove of Congress will readily re-elect most members to the House and Senate, as they have in almost every election year in modern memory. The same Americans who say the country is on the wrong track also approve of President Obama’s performance 50 percent to 45 percent. Earlier this year, in a survey on public attitudes by ABC News and the Washington Post, just 24 percent of Americans described themselves as “angry” about the federal government, the lowest total in five years. Forty-seven percent said they were dissatisfied, which is similarly low compared with previous surveys. [...]

In practice, all of this means there’s no actual constituency for an independent candidacy or third-party movement since these frustrations lie at cross-purposes with each other. Anxious white Americans—Trump supporters—won’t sign on to a social-democratic agenda if it includes racial justice. (Which, given the role of nonwhites in sustaining left politics, it has to.) In turn, insecure millennials and older nonwhites won’t join a campaign devoted to restoring white dominance.

read the article 

Reuters: Far-right parties winning over some Jewish voters, top rabbi warns

"Not only from the Freedom Party in Austria but also from the side of, for example, the National Front in France ... and also (Geert) Wilders in Holland, they all seem to want us Jews to say they are acceptable," Goldschmidt said. [...]

He also condemned what he said was the tendency of far-right parties to conflate ordinary Muslims with Islamist militants."

(The) moderate Muslim is our natural ally. They are as much the victims of radical Islamism as we Jews. It is the populism, the generalization, which is dangerous and destructive.

read the article 

The Atlantic: America’s Profound Gender Anxiety

But why did bathrooms come next? These bills seem to be about something slightly different. They’re not objections to what people do—having gay sex, for example, or getting married to a person of the same sex. They’re objections to what people are, which isn’t tied to any particular act. It doesn’t really matter who transgender people have sex with, or if they have sex at all. What matters is their status: If a person is designated a boy or girl at birth, the objectors say, that’s what determines his or her gender for life. [...]

The two motivations—conviction and bigotry—are difficult to tease apart. Particularly in the United States, a country that remains more religious that its Western peers, faith and culture are in a feedback loop, complementing, responding, and reacting to one another. This is especially true when it comes to trans people in public bathrooms. Wisdom from the Bible can be brought to bear on any question, but on this issue, the ideas at stake are foundational. They are part of “the way of reading the Bible, going back to Genesis” said R. Marie Griffith, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s this belief that God created man, and out of man, he created woman. And these are really crystal-clear categories. There’s something very deep and fundamental about that for the Christians who have … a way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God.” [...]

But more broadly, this is also a question about gender roles. In a recent PRRI / The Atlantic poll, 42 percent of Americans said they believe society is becoming “too soft and feminine.” Thirty-nine percent said they believe society is better off “when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for,” including 44 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants. These numbers suggest nervousness about fluid gender identities—and that America isn’t even close to a consensus that men and women should choose the way they act.

read the article 

The School of Life: How Romanticism Ruined Love

The set of ideas we can call Romanticism is responsible for making our relationships extremely difficult. We shouldn’t give up on love; we should just recognise that it’s a skill, not an emotion.