Time: Why a Forgotten KKK Raid on a Gay Club in Miami Still Matters 80 Years Later

Eighty years ago this month, on Nov. 15, 1937, a raid took place at La Paloma nightclub in an unincorporated part of Dade County (modern-day Miami-Dade County). Unlike at Stonewall, law enforcement was not behind this Miami-area raid. Instead, nearly two hundred women and men from the Ku Klux Klan—wearing long, white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and struck fear—burned a fiery cross on public property and inducted several dozen new members that night. They then stormed La Paloma, roughed up staff and performers, and ordered the nightspot closed. They had been trying to shut it down for some time. At La Paloma, women performed stripteases on stage. Performers then known as “female impersonators” entertained paying customers, and effeminate men (or “pansies”) made crude sexual jokes to the audience’s delight. Gender and sexual non-conforming people not only staffed the club, they also represented a part of its clientele. As one contemporary observer recalled, “Homosexuals in evening gowns, trousered lesbians, and prostitutes” were among those who forged community in spaces like La Paloma. [...]

In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences. La Paloma, for example, soon reopened and, according to its manager, offered “spicier entertainment than ever.” One of the new skits rehearsed for its reopening was a satire of the Klan’s raid at its club, including performers wearing the white hooded robes.

Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change and even revolution. There are dozens more examples of such raids: Turkish Baths (New York City, 1929), Cooper’s Donuts (Los Angeles, 1959), Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco, 1966), and Black Cat (Los Angeles, 1967), among others.

read the article

openDemocracy: The colonial roots of Trump’s discourse on Iran

The current US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is a staunch anti-Iran operator. She apparently played a significant role in shaping Trump’s position on Iran. Haley appears to be working on the deal, but she actually talks a lot about Iran without really mentioning the deal. Her sole relevant point is that Iran ‘might be cheating on the deal’, that Iranians have hidden nuclear sites and are violating the deal in secret, that Tehran has two faces, one shown to the world, one kept to itself.

The idea of hiding ‘real’ face also emerged in Trump’s belligerent UN speech: ‘The Iranian government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy.’ Iran hides its reality, and unless we rend the mask asunder, Iranians will not show their real faces to the world. For Trump and Haley, the problem with Iran is not what Tehran actually does. It is framed as a moral one. They are mad that Iranians act stealthily and deviously. [...]

The first wave of books about Persia, including travelogues and diplomatic accounts and novels, appeared in early 19th century. They constitute a seemingly disparate set of documents produced by quite different people. Yet, a closer look reveals that they largely consolidated various aspects of one image. A substantial portion of those texts attempt to capture the essence of ‘Persian character’. Despite the different experiences of their authors, they reached surprisingly similar conclusions. [...]

In his exhaustive study of Persian and Persians, Lord Curzon encourages close relationship with Persia, because according to him, the white ancestors of Persians moved to Europe and birthed the white race. Curzon implies that since Persians were not Semitic, they were not exactly the ‘other’ of the west. They were the poor, shunned cousin, corrupted by intermingling with other races. Therefore, Persians have always had the volatile status of being intimate and distant at the same time. Unlike the brazen imperial swaggering the British demonstrated in the Arab world, they were never quite sure how to deal with Persia.

read the article

Haaretz: Israel Is Shooting Itself in the Foot by Declaring Its Ties to Saudi Arabia, Expert Warns

Because the Saudi government is promoting vast projects involving infrastructure, green energy, cyber and so on, which are being implemented by foreign companies. They don’t allow the use of Israeli components or workers in these projects – but if the situation were to change, the Israeli economy could benefit to the tune of billions. That’s the estimate of experts, not mine. In any event, I think it’s a mistake for Israel to refer publicly – implicitly or directly – to the nature of its relations with Saudi Arabia. A statement such as “Israel’s relations with countries with which it has no relations of peace are unprecedented,” is extremely problematic, because it pushes Saudi Arabia into a corner in terms of the Arab world [in general], and endangers the cooperation as such. [...]

With all due respect to the desire to fight corruption, there were of course many opposition figures among those arrested; it’s not clear whether this is an authentic attempt to quash corruption or a case of political liquidation in a respectable guise. At the level of sheer vested interest, the prince wants to attract foreign investors, who of course do not want to invest in a corrupt country. On the other hand, corruption really is part of Saudi Arabia’s DNA, and the royal house is far from constituting a model of virtue in this regard. Last year, King Salman went on a vacation in Morocco that cost $100 million.  [...]

Exactly. Young Saudis are suffocating from the cost of living. It’s difficult for them to find housing, and I’m talking about rental, because buying is out of the question. It’s hard for them to find jobs, and they can’t marry, because the bride price is very high in Saudi Arabia, and they have nothing to offer the fathers, who ultimately sell their daughters. So bachelorhood is a growing phenomenon among both women and men, as is the phenomenon of Saudi men marrying foreign women. Sixty-four percent of the marriages of Saudi men to non-Saudi women are said to be to Filipinas. It’s a safe assumption that these are not passionate love marriages. [...]

But the present generation is itself angry at the religious establishment, which is disconnected from the people and speaks an archaic language, which limits them. Until recently, culture was unavailable in Saudi Arabia. There is no cinema, because it’s not considered modest, and because men and women are liable to sit together in the same hall. There is no music, because it’s not moral. All that remains for the country’s younger people is to watch on the internet as their brethren in the West enjoy all the abundance, and to be envious. Mohammed bin Salman understands that this pressure cooker has to have a release, and that people must be allowed to start enjoying themselves. He commissioned an American company to start building multiplexes. Gradually other cultural events are also starting to happen. Last month there was a motorized acrobatics show, and thousands of people flocked to it, there’s a huge thirst.

read the article

Vox: Why cities are full of uncomfortable benches

 When designing urban spaces, city planners have many competing interests to balance. After all, cities are some of the most diverse places on the planet. They need to be built for a variety of needs.

In recent years, these competing interests have surfaced conflict over an unlikely interest: purposefully uncomfortable benches.

Enter the New York City MTA. They’ve installed 'leaning bars’ to supplement traditional benches & save platform space. But designs like this carry an often invisible cost: they rob citizens of hospitable public space. And the people who experience this cost most directly are those experiencing homelessness. 

A few notes of thanks: First to Historian A. Roger Ekirch who kindly got me up to speed on the expansion of streetlights in historic western city districts.

Another thanks goes to author Veronica Harnish, who outlined some of the pitfalls that people experiencing homelessness face when choosing between sleeping rough or utilizing emergency shelters. You can read her blog here: http://car-living.blogspot.com/

A third thank you goes to the staff at the Unites States Interagency Council on Homelessness — they supplied the map in this video, as well as some aggregate statistics of the United States homeless population. Those numbers come from a variety of annual ‘Point-In-Time’ counts. 

Haaretz: Netanyahu Needs a War. He Needs It to Be With Iran. And He Needs It Soon

Netanyahu needs a war because he’s desperate, and because a war might answer two of his more immediate needs: First, an overarching, delaying-action distraction, and second, in the event a war should succeed even as his career fades, the single thing the prime minister wants the most in this life: a legacy.

He’s desperate now because he’s losing ground fast in the latest opinion polls. He’s desperate because after all these many years in power, obsessed by his place in history and his own wishlist comparisons with Winston Churchill, Netanyahu still has no legacy beside the number of all these many years in power. [...]

He’s desperate because police detectives and investigative journalists are closing in on him. He pretends that the allegations center on innocent favors traded for innocently modest luxuries. But the security-minded public knows only too well that Netanyahu may be involved in malfeasance in securing the purchase of several advanced German-built submarines – potentially Israel’s most potent strategic weapon in its continuing confrontation of Mutually Threatened Destruction with Iran. [...]

Citing Iran’s mounting presence in Syria, Netanyahu’s defense minister has demanded that the military budget be hiked by well over a billion dollars. The demand is particularly extraordinary in view of the fact that the army’s chief of staff reportedly sees no need for the increase. [...]

In the past, hardline Israeli leaders under the threat of police probes have opted for a dramatic shift to the left, hoping to ride a peace push to save their premiership. But Netanyahu has worked so long and so well to block any meaningful avenue toward peace that he has himself choked off much of his own room to maneuver.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Is Russia afraid of losing Syria?

The rest of Syria is either under the control of the regime or the US-allied Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). Thanks to two years of Russian intervention and attacks by ISIL and HTS, a significant part of the real armed opposition was liquidated, and we can say that the period of active hostilities has come to an end. The issues of peace and stability have become much more important to Syrians than problems of power and the future political order. [...]

Russia, however, does not have the financial capacity to invest heavily in Syria after the end of the conflict. In this context, its positions in Syria no longer seem so convincing. This has forced Moscow to realise that alliances with Tehran and Ankara in Syria might not be so beneficial in the future and that it needs to find new allies for the post-conflict period. As a result, the Russian government has upped its efforts on keeping the negotiating process under its control to make sure it is not ousted from its position as kingmaker in Syria. [...]

Particularly revealing in this respect was the "unexpected trick" with Bashar al-Assad showing up in Sochi. This was Assad's second trip out of his country since 2011; in 2015 he went again to Russia to meet Putin. For Moscow, the Syrian president is a kind of a "liquid asset", which the Russian leadership is trying to convert into diplomatic success. His visit was meant to reinforce Russia's monopoly over the Syrian file. It sent a clear message to the international community that Moscow holds the keys to Damascus and is the only patron of the regime able to push it to the negotiations table.  [...]

Despite its crucial role in the Syrian negotiating process, its resources and capabilities are clearly not enough to hold it. Russia needs another partner in Syria which is able to guarantee funds for reconstruction in the post-conflict period. And that partner needs to be willing to route the financial flows through Moscow.

read the article

Deutsche Welle: Ex-AfD leader Frauke Petry launches comeback tour

he Blue Party manifesto reads like a toned-down version of the AfD's Islamophobic, anti-migrant rhetoric. Where the AfD maintains that "there is no place for Islam in Germany," the Blue Party takes the softer line of denouncing "political Islam." [...]

Carrying her youngest child, only a few months old, on her hip and speaking in more muted tones than she has become known for, Petry couched her opposition to Islam in terms of support for Israel and her anti-migrant beliefs as a matter of border security. She added that she did not stand for the "ethno-patriotism" of the far-right, but rather of protecting one's own culture. [...]

She spoke of the need for real conservative politics in the age of Chancellor Angela Merkel's centrism, garnering scattered applause for her defense of supporting "classic" family models in the face of, from her view, too much ado about "gender politics" in Berlin. In contrast to the AfD, which tends to be more Moscow-friendly, she spoke of a need to balance relations between Russia and the US. [...]

Assembling this kind of group could be a clever calculation on Petry's part. She made clear in her speech that the Blue Party should be seen not as a normal political party, but as a grassroots movement with few career politicians, and as unbeholden to special interest groups as possible.

read the article

The Guardian: Brexiters nowhere to be seen as UK raises white flag over EU divorce bill

Faced with such an ultimatum, Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, said he believed Britain had little realistic choice but to cave in on money, citizens’ rights and the Irish border if it wanted to get to phase two talks on trade. “It is dressed up as a negotiation, but it’s really been a story of the British taking time to realise that they have got to accept what the EU demands of them,” he said. “The EU is intelligent enough not to pursue this in a humiliating way, but the truth is that we have to accept.” [...]

Meanwhile, the prime minister prepared the ground among her Brexit hardliners in government, first at a subcommittee of the cabinet last week and then a meeting of the full cabinet on Monday. If the final loose ends can be tied up by Robbins and Weyand on Ireland and the role of the European court of justice (ECJ) in protecting citizens’ rights, May is expected to present Britain’s final offer in person to the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, next Monday. [...]

“The truth is if you want to join, you join on their terms. You can quibble about the details, but the broad lines are decided by the EU and dressed up as a negotiation. Similarly, when you leave the EU, once you declare your red lines, the ECJ and free movement being two important ones, then the range of opportunities for the future relationship are very limited.”

read the article

The Guardian: Pope Francis’s failure to say the word ‘Rohingya’ shows he is no peacemaker

The men who run the Vatican aren’t on the whole risk-takers, which is both why the current pope is a breath of fresh air, and also why he has so many enemies within his own kingdom. But nor are they back-downers: so although the political situation has made the trip more and more dodgy, they ploughed on with it; and the uncomfortable result is that, in the week Oxford announces it is withdrawing the freedom of the city from the Myanmar leader, one of its most prominent alumni, in protest at what is happening to the Rohingya, pictures are beamed around the world of her meeting the pope – and, worse, he has bowed to pressure not to refer to them by name. [...]

The truth is, and this visit has made this abundantly clear, the primary role of the pope is as the leader of the Roman Catholic community. The first people he must protect are his own; which is not unreasonable for any leader. So when his representative in Myanmar, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, warned him that if he used the word “Rohingya” he might compromise the situation of the country’s tiny Catholic minority, Francis felt he had no option but to back down.

The Catholic church has many strengths, including in its humanitarian work – after all, it has representatives across the planet, and for all the bad apples we’ve become increasingly aware of, there are many good men and women working tirelessly to improve the living conditions of people who live in challenged situations. But it has weaknesses too, including the fact that its leader, while he might look like a world peacemaker, must look out first and foremost for his own people. And that, it seems, is what has had to happen here.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: Goodbye and Good Riddance, Robert Mugabe

As a young politician in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mugabe was by no means the most prominent of the black nationalists fighting white colonial rule. Neither was he the most motivated. He was, however, the most eloquent. For a clique of educated black elites, whose political and societal outlook was fashioned in mission schools, Mugabe was the man of choice to convey the message to white rulers — in voice and comportment — that blacks were no longer “uncivilized tribesmen.” They were sophisticated enough to deserve the franchise. [...]

At the time, Mugabe had come back home, presumably for the holidays, from Ghana, where he worked as a teacher, with the intention to go back to West Africa. He may never have wanted to stay in Rhodesia for long. He became the reluctant latecomer who would go on to dominate Zimbabwean politics for almost half a century. [...]

He was a rebel, but one who wanted to replace white rulers with a self-interested political project. When he “talked revolution,” it was out of expediency, to further his goal of securing the presidency for life. When he donned revolutionary garb, it was always fleetingly (in the early 1980s, for picture poses), and with an unseemly addition: a tie that clashed with his safari suit.  [...]

It is easy to point to the social programs during the independence euphoria of the 1980s as an example of Mugabe’s commitment to black people and socialism. But throughout the 1980s, and with “Britain’s willful blindness,” Mugabe sought to build a one-party dictatorship in the mold of the Kims’ North Korea. In fact, he invited North Korean military supervisors to help him create a private army brigade that hounded the opposition and committed one of the worst atrocities against African people in independent Africa. In the end, the Gukurahundi massacres left an estimated twenty thousand civilians, most of them isiNdebele-speaking black men, women, and children, dead in unmarked mass graves.

read the article

CityLab: How Brexit Got Snagged on the Irish Border

When Brexit happens, it will create the U.K.’s first-ever land border with the E.U., on the frontier between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This shouldn’t pose passport problems, because the U.K. and Ireland have a longstanding passport-free Common Travel Area agreement. But because Britain is on course to leave the E.U.’s tariff-free single market, imports and exports must somehow be monitored across this 310-mile-long barrier. Controlling this flow by a so-called “hard” border—that is, one with checkpoints and customs controls—would be quite the job. Looking in one direction alone, Northern Irish exports to the Republic are worth £3.6 billion ($4.8 billion) a year, while there are a total of 275 land crossings between the two parts of the island, more than twice the number there are along the E.U.’s entire eastern frontier. A hard border here could thus be a nightmare for both countries. [...]

If that sounds a little too easy, it’s because it is. With no controls for smaller businesses, the Irish border would become a quasi-legal smuggling paradise for importers wanting to avoid paying duty on their goods. There would be nothing to stop, say, a non-European company flying their goods into Belfast, then using a constellation of smaller companies to get it across the border tariff-free. There’s no way the E.U. could accept this. It could end up being a weird backdoor version of the single market—which Britain says it wants to leave.

And E.U. resistance isn’t the only barrier to this plan becoming a reality. Allowing E.U. importers to get their goods into Britain tax-free over the Irish border would be giving their countries preferential treatment, which would break World Trade Organization rules and expose the U.K. to a tsunami of litigation. [...]

Since the referendum, the U.K. government has already risked jeopardizing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brokered peace in the region by forming an electoral alliance with the hard-line loyalist Democratic Unionist Party. By attaching its electoral future to a sectarian party, the British national government has called into question its ability to maintain the “rigorous impartiality” stipulated by the agreement. If that weren’t bad enough, the U.K. is now hurtling toward re-solidifying the border—and potentially toppling a carefully balanced status quo—while contriving to insist that it’s doing nothing of the sort.  

read the article

Al Jazeera: Scotland still wants independence

These setbacks have occurred after a decade of nearly uninterrupted progress for independence supporters. The SNP first took control of Holyrood, Scotland's devolved national parliament, in 2007. In 2011, it won an overall majority of the parliament's seats. In 2014, it staged (and narrowly failed to win) a landmark vote on the break-up of Britain. So the rapid loss of momentum that has taken place this year has been profoundly disconcerting for a movement that had come to view independence as a cast-iron certainty. [...]

The baseline numbers tell their own story. A poll from September put backing for independence at 46 percent - one point higher than it was at the same stage in 2014. Other surveys suggest it might be slightly lower than that, but few indicate that it has fallen far below the symbolic 40-percent mark. Similarly, the SNP - which is now in its 11th year of office - continues to register double-digit leads over Labour and the Conservatives at both the devolved Scottish and UK parliamentary levels.

Until quite recently, polling of this sort would have been unthinkable for nationalists. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, barely a quarter of the Scottish electorate wanted Scotland to leave the UK. Today, it's cited as evidence that the independence movement has stalled and that the SNP is spiralling into decline.   [...]

Since the 2014 referendum, the case against independence has rested almost exclusively on the claim that Britain insulates Scotland from economic pain. In the absence of English public subsidies, unionists argue, Scotland would be a financial basket case, incapable of covering the basic costs of self-government. Even Jeremy Corbyn - who otherwise vigorously insists that spending cuts are an ideological choice rather than a fiscal necessity - has suggested that independence would mean "turbo-charged austerity" for the Scots. [...]

And the ongoing controversy in Catalonia is more likely to shrink the prospects of Scottish independence than it is to advance them. The constitutional standoff between Barcelona and Madrid may have animated the SNP grassroots, and even prompted the party's instinctively cautious leadership to launch a rare intervention into the affairs of a foreign state. But it also illustrates the pitfalls of declaring independence unilaterally (London will resist giving the green light to another Scottish vote for as long as it can), as well as the EU's intense institutional hostility towards regional and sub-state secessionist movements.

read the article

Quartz: No, Pope Francis wouldn’t say “Rohingya” in Myanmar. Yes, it matters

In address made to Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung Suu Kyi, the country’s diplomatic corps, military officials, and Vatican clergy, the pope offered careful words to argue that religious differences should be a source for unity, not division.

Francis said Myanmar was suffering from civil conflict and hostilities “that have lasted all too long and created deep divisions” and that the Southeast Asian country should respect all religious groups, but never uttered the word “Rohingya.” Tens of thousands of members of the largely Muslim ethnic minority have fled Buddhist-dominated Myanmar for Bangladesh after facing violent retaliation following a militant attack. The exodus has created a humanitarian crisis in both countries. [...]

In Myanmar, using the term implies the speaker sides with the Rohingya and is against the government’s view. Papal advisors had warned him that using the word during his first visit to the country could exacerbate the tense situation and also put the country’s very small Christian population at risk. [...]

It’s not uncommon for the pope to avoid directly criticizing his hosts while making trips abroad. On a recent visit to Egypt, where president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been accused of human-rights abuses and sharply limiting democracy, Francis spoke of peace and unity and only broadly warned of the “demagogic forms of populism.” [...]

Francis is expected to travel to Bangladesh later this week to meet with Rohingya refugees, which raises more questions about how effective his trip can be. Will a private gathering with a small group present the opportunity to voice condemnation of what some are calling mounting evidence of genocide? And, face to face, will the pope be able to address the Rohingya by their name?

read the article

Politico: A Catalan de-escalation plan

“We can’t take definitive steps until we have solid international allies,” said Mas, 61, who was Catalan president from 2010 to 2016 and continued to wield influence as part of an unofficial group of more than a dozen people making the big decisions during the independence process. [...]

In an interview in his office in Barcelona, Mas acknowledged the problems facing the secessionist camp, saying the European Union had positioned itself against Catalan independence “at this stage,” and adding that it was hard to imagine Brussels changing its mind in the short term. [...]

There has been a great deal of soul-searching in the Catalan separatist camp after the events of the past two months, which saw a referendum on secession marred by police violence; businesses moving out of Catalonia; a failed declaration of independence; a swift move by Madrid to take direct control of the rebel region; and a judicial push that could see separatist leaders — including Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium, and others currently in previsionary detention — end up behind bars.

As a result, the two main secessionist parties have slowly started to signal their willingness to move away from further confrontation with Madrid without renouncing independence. As those two goals have thus far proven incompatible, some radical secessionists have interpreted it as giving up on independence altogether.

read the article

Deutsche Welle: Jean-Claude Juncker: Migrants 'need legal ways to come to Europe'

We've told the member states of their responsibility, and we will see what the member states do about it. The member states, in their wisdom, don't always follow the Commission's proposals. In 2001, the Commission proposed a joint system to protect the external borders. The member states rejected it then, only to demand it now. And now we've implemented these joint controls of the external borders. When it comes to resolving the great challenges of our age, we have to leave it to the imagination of those who are governing the member states and nations. And immigration and migration is a great challenge of our age. It's not just about preparing for the future; we should have prepared for the present yesterday.  [...]

The populists themselves are dangerous, but they are far more dangerous when the traditional, classic parties adopt their harmful proposals. If the traditional parties follow the populists, they become populist themselves, which is a phenomenon we are already seeing in some EU countries. No, we should not be afraid of the populists; we should embrace those they are fighting. [...]

Yes, but it's a solidarity that must touch on all areas of international life. Africa must become aware of the fact that it is already, today, a big international player. Europe must not distance itself from Africa's universal ambitions. Africa is not a continent that will become part of our history tomorrow. Africa has always been a part of history. Certain Europeans just didn't see it that way.

read the article or watch the clip

Vox: The terrorist attack against Sufi Muslims in Egypt, explained

“Sufism isn’t a sect, and it’s not even a subgroup within Sunnism,” Shadi Hamid, a Middle East and Islam expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. Sufism is “a spiritual tendency within Islam that prioritizes the inward aspects of religion and one’s personal relationship with God,” Hamid said. “This is why defining who’s a Sufi is hard, since many Sufis wouldn’t self-identify as such.” [...]

ISIS follows a fundamentalist, highly intolerant interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. As Vox’s Jennifer Williams explains, “Wahhabism grew out of the teachings of an 18th-century reformer named Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who argued for ‘purifying’ Islam by getting rid of the ‘innovations’ that had snuck in over the centuries as Islam spread to new lands and mixed with indigenous beliefs and practices.” [...]

Groups like ISIS consider Sufis among those “apostates.” That’s because they think Sufis are polytheists because they venerate mystics and erect shrines to saints. ISIS — and other Wahhabi followers — consider the association of God with others an unpardonable sin. [...]

But ISIS writ large isn’t just going after Sufis in Egypt. It continues to attack Sufis around the world, especially in Pakistan. Most infamously, ISIS bombed a Pakistani mosque in February that killed at least 70 people and injured more than 250. Four months before, ISIS murdered 52 people at a Sufi shrine. And in April 2011, suicide bombers killed 41 Sufis during a three-day festival.

read the article

BBC4 A Point of View: The miserable pantomime of contemporary British vegetarianism

"As the years have passed", writes Will Self, "so gnawing on a bloody piece of cow rump has come to seem, to me, more and more...well, vulgar".  

Via Leviticus and Arcimboldo, he charts his conversion to vegetarianism.  

And he explains why it's not just personal morals that are "propelling me headlong towards the horror of Quorn"!

listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: How Hindu Nationalists Politicized the Taj Mahal

Much of the BJP’s vitriol for the history of Muslim rule is projected onto the Indian Muslims of today, comprising 15 percent of the population. Hindu nationalists often question Muslims’ loyalty and right to their homeland, a view exacerbated by the communal tensions engendered by Partition in 1947. The BJP leadership has been criticized for inciting violence against Muslims with its inflammatory rhetoric, including the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat which killed over 1,000 people (Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time). In 2014, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest perpetually cloaked in his saffron robes and appointed the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, stated at a political rally, “If [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.”

In many ways, Adityanath’s meteoric rise in Indian politics exemplifies both the BJP’s ever-tightening embrace of extreme Hindu-nationalist positions and increasing political power. A controversial figure since his election to parliament in 1998, Adityanath founded the militant Hindu group Hindu Yuva Vahini, which has been accused of inciting communal tensions and is linked to recent attacks on Muslims. He has long been a hardline promoter of Hindutva, stating in 2005, “I will not stop until I turn [Uttar Pradesh] and India into a Hindu rashtra [nation].” He promised to cleanse India of other religions, calling this “the century of Hindutva.” After Adityanath became chief minister, he pushed for a number of policies that aligned with his ideological position, including increasing legal protections of the cow, considered sacred in Hinduism. These measures have been criticized for stoking violence against Muslims suspected of eating beef or of raising cattle for slaughter, in attacks known as “beef lynchings.” [...]

While the BJP government has acknowledged the architectural wonder’s value as a tourist destination, its potential future hangs in the balance, given Hindu nationalism’s growing popularity and political power. Shamsul Islam, a professor at Delhi University has said that the Taj Mahal’s very existence is now in danger. While the specter of Hindu mobs destroying it is an unlikely one, Islam recognized that the Taj Mahal could be permanently damaged through deliberate neglect as air and water pollution take their toll on the ancient structure.

Yet this fear is no mere hyperbole. Hindu nationalists have long targeted Islamic buildings and other historic sites. For example, a survey found that 230 Islamic historic sites were vandalized or destroyed, many reduced to mere rubble, during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, which resulted in communal rioting around the country that led to nearly 2,000 deaths. Hindu nationalists have argued that the mosque, constructed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Babur, was built over a destroyed Hindu temple, a claim contested by scholars, near the site traditionally considered to be Lord Rama’s birthplace. On December 6, 1992, leaders of the BJP, alongside fellow Hindu nationalist groups Vishva Hindu Prashad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, gathered outside the mosque to offer prayers, followed by a mob of their followers breaking through the security barrier and, piece by piece, pounding the ancient structure to the ground with sledgehammers. The site has been a source of controversy in recent years—in 2005, Islamic militants attacked the makeshift Hindu temple that had been built on the mosque's ruins with an explosives-laden jeep.

read the article

Vox: When Trump met Xi: how the president learned to stop worrying and love China

Yet since Trump became president, his view seems to have shifted dramatically. The more he has spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the more pro-China he has sounded. And by the time he visited Beijing for the first time, in November, Trump was projecting stunning optimism about the possibility of closer ties between Beijing and Washington. [...]

How long this Damascene conversion lasts, or whether it produces anything good for America, remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is abundantly clear: A presidential candidate who attacked China in harsher terms than any before him now seems more comfortable with Beijing than any of his predecessors.

When one examines Trump’s musings on international politics for the past 30-odd years, in both his writing and his public appearances, there’s one consistent theme: The world is a zero-sum place. If an agreement or policy benefits another country, it hurts America — and vice versa. [...]

Early in his presidency, it seemed like Trump might turn this rhetoric into policy action. During the transition, he spoke directly with the president of Taiwan — a shot at China that no previous American president had been willing to take. In March, he blasted China on Twitter for failing to stop North Korea’s nuclear development. It seemed like the first meeting between Trump and President Xi, on April 6, would be brutally awkward. [...]

The budding friendship between Trump and Xi appears to have profoundly shifted Trump’s view of US-China relations. Why the two men have gotten along so well isn’t clear; reporters aren’t allowed in their private meetings. But it makes some sense given Trump’s apparent admiration for strongmen across the world, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte (both more thuggishly violent than Xi).

read the article

Wisecrack Edition: The Lion King: Is Simba the VILLAIN?

SciShow Psych: Can Trauma Be Inherited?

Social Europe: Links Between Austerity And Immigration, And The Power Of Information

This is the first link between immigration and austerity I want to draw. The Labour party before 2015 had also decided that attacking austerity was politically impossible: ‘the argument had been lost’. Focus groups told them that people had become convinced that the government should tighten its belt because governments were just like households. The mistake here, as I wrote many times, was to assume attitudes were fixed rather than contextual. I was right: austerity is no longer a vote winner (but to be fair, whether I would have been right in 2014/15 if Labour had taken a clear anti-austerity line we do not know).

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers. [...]

This is particularly true when it is in the interests of the governing political party and its supporters in the press to deflect criticism of austerity by pretending immigration is the real cause of people’s woes. This is the third link between austerity and immigration, and it is one deliberately created and encouraged by right wing political parties. In this way Brexit has its own self-reinforcing dynamic. People vote for it because of immigration, its prospect leads to falling real wages as sterling falls and the economy falters, which adds to bad times and anti-immigrant attitudes.  [...]

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. In this post entitled Is Austerity to blame for Brexit, I show a poll where the biggest reason people give for EU immigration being bad is its impact on the NHS. Getting the true information out there will have a big effect. Just as public attitudes to austerity can change, so can they over immigration, but only if politicians on the left start getting the facts out there.

read the article

Social Europe: Bulgaria’s EU Presidency: Normalizing Nationalism?

However, if the EU’s existential crisis seems over, the bloc has significantly lost cohesion in terms of its values. In a word: nationalists are coming to town. This is markedly evident in one of Europe’s lesser-known powers: Bulgaria, where anti-migrant and pro-Russian nationalists now rule in a coalition government with mainstream conservatives (since May). In the year 2000, other EU countries imposed (temporary) economic sanctions on Austria for daring to have a government including the nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ). [...]

The new Bulgarian government is unlikely to face much trouble from Brussels, because the country’s shift is symptomatic of a wider trend in European politics. In both east and west, traditional liberal-internationalist elites have been increasingly destabilized, notably because of bungled management of the economic and migratory crises. In France, the nationalist Marine Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential elections and in Germany the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany party (AFD) broke into the Bundestag with over 12% of the vote. In Eastern Europe, Brussels has been largely powerless in the face of populist and anti-immigration governments and politicians in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Thus, Bulgaria – though a small country dependent on EU funds – is likely to find many allies who would help them veto any liberal pressure from Brussels.

The EU’s poorest member state has nonetheless enjoyed a substantial economic recovery, with GDP growing over 3% in both of the last two years (3.6% 2015, 3.4% 2016). The migratory crisis, however, has proven beneficial to the nationalists. As the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2017 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) report on Bulgaria notes: “The European refugee crisis of the last several years, of which Bulgaria has experienced a small part, has demonstrated two things. First, xenophobia and xenophobic parties are on the rise. Second, government policies in accommodating and integrating refugees have generally failed, while civic organizations have proven to be very active and, in fact, indispensable to helping address refugees’ basic needs.” [...]

Nor is Bulgaria likely to lead a particularly cohesive bloc as EU Council president. The Eastern European populists may be united in their opposition to migrants, but in other respects their positions vary. Bulgaria and Romania are eager to support the EU so as to not be excluded from new structures, while Poland and Hungary have taken to Brussels-bashing, all the while quietly pocketing EU subsidies. In any case, despite a legal victory at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the Commission has backed down from its scheme for mandatory resettlement of 120,000 refugees across the EU. The biggest bone of contention between Brussels and the Eastern European populists has thus been removed.

read the article

CityLab: Visions of Alt-Berlin in 'The Man in the High Castle'

Speer’s plan—developed in close collaboration with Hitler, who understood the nationalistic power of architecture and urban design—was to transform Berlin: the old city was to be reborn as Welthauptstadt Germania (Germania, World Capital), the seat of the new empire.   [...]

Thus, through this one image—five seconds of film—viewers begin to enter the shadowlands between the world that was and the world that might have been. As your eye moves up from the column to follow the shot, you’re treated—or terrified—with a feast of unbuilt architecture. Using the latest software and rendering techniques to visualize the completion of actual archival plans from the 1930s, the production team has masterfully brought to life a mad planner’s beautiful nightmare: an “Alt-Berlin” that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built. (Dick’s story doesn’t get to Berlin, but he certainly would have enjoyed the mind-bending nature of this work.) [...]

Although never built, Speer’s monster-piece (indeed, some dubbed it the “Monsterbau,” or monster-building) truly puts the “dominate” in “dome”: looking like the U.S. Capitol on Pervitin, it would have been large enough to fit the Papal Basilica of St. Peter inside it. Hitler planned to use the massive hall to gather crowds of up to 180,000 people—what would have been by far the largest interior assembly space in the world; planners fretted that the respiration from so many excited Nazis in a single enclosed space might create its own weather patterns. [...]

Speer even contemplated the destruction of his own beautiful creations 1,000 years in the future, expounding his Ruinenwerttheorie—a “theory of ruin value”—for the architectural monuments he designed, a sort of perverted death-cult in stone, the city as mausoleum.

read the article

Quartz: Russia’s dire economics are forcing smokers to grow their own tobacco

Russians’ real disposable income fell for the fourth month in a row in October—a 1.3% drop compared to the same month last year. In September, real wages were 13% lower than in 2014, before the recession started, according to Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Meanwhile, tax hikes on tobacco have made cigarette prices nearly double since 2013—a challenge to one of Europe’s heaviest-smoking populations. [...]

“Several governors have told me that last year people started planting tobacco in their dachas and gardens,” Sergei Ryabukhin, the head of the Russian Senate’s budget and finance committee said last week (link in Russian). “When you go to a region, you realize with horror that people have turned to growing tobacco or shag. According to official statistics [tobacco production] has fallen 21% and people are smoking less. But in reality it’s not like that.”

Despite the country’s massive drop in cigarette sales (19.6% between 2013 and 2016), Russia was still the world’s third biggest market (pdf, p.2) for tobacco in 2016.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Course

Psychologists long took it for granted that the male and female brains were fundamentally different. But in a landmark 1974 book, Stanford developmental psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed thousands of studies and found the opposite: By and large, there just wasn’t much data to support the conventional wisdom. Yes, men’s brains are bigger, but so are their bodies; aside from size, there’s no solid evidence of physical characteristics in the brain that are demonstrably male or female. A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.” [...]

Yet over the years, research has documented differences in cognitive abilities between men and women, something Maccoby and Jacklin noted in 1974. And spatial skills, says Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, “are the largest cognitive sex difference known.” [...]

Maccoby and Jacklin also found differences in math and verbal abilities. But data has since shown that spatial cognition might explain some of the gender gap psychologists measured in mathematical ability. High scores on mental rotation tests correspond to higher scores on math questions that involve geometry or story problems. And spatial cognition turns out to be a better predictor of success in engineering than SAT or GRE scores, for example. [...]

It’s still unclear whether a predilection to wander may help men develop better spatial cognition skills—or whether better spatial cognition skills make their peregrinations possible. “We don’t know what’s cause, and what’s effect,” Cashdan says. What is clear is that cultural biases have an effect. Consciously or unconsciously, girls are nudged away from activities that would help them develop spatial skills almost as soon as they’re born. As they grow, parents respond to their kids’ interests, quickly compounding what may start out as very slight biases. [...]

Moreover, while comparing the cognitive performances of men and women may produce a measurable difference, the averages don’t tell the whole story. “Many women have significantly stronger spatial ability than many men,” explains George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University, who designed one of the tests commonly used to measure spatial cognition ability. Bodner stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Why Females Decide What’s Beautiful

Today Ryan teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is a senior research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Decades of studying sexual selection have led him to develop a theory called sensory exploitation. “The key idea is simple: Features of the female’s brain that find certain notes of the males’ mating call attractive existed long before those attractive notes evolved,” he writes. A central aspect of his theory is animals harbor hidden sexual preferences that influence the evolution of sexual traits. In “The Mate Selection Trapdoor” in this week’s Nautilus, Ryan spells out the adaptive benefits of hidden preferences.  [...]

The view long has long been that males, in their sexual communication, are saying something important about themselves, and it’s up to the females to figure out what that is, to figure out which males are truly attractive and which are not. I argue the other side of the coin. Females aren’t trying to figure out what males are saying. When they mate with a male, by definition, that male is attractive. So females are the deciders. Over evolutionary time, it seems males are trying out a lot of different courtship traits. A bright orange here, a bright blue there, rub your wings together and make a sound, or jump up and do a dance. They are trying to do these things to tickle females’ preferences. But it’s really the females calling the shots. It’s the female’s brain that sets the bar for what kind of traits are attractive and unattractive. [...]

Well, there are idiosyncrasies, for sure, with females. With bowerbirds, females are attracted by all of the ornaments the male displays around the bower. What scientists have shown is that younger females seem to be more swayed by the decorations of the bower than they are by the males themselves. And older females are more impressed by the display of the male than the decorations of the bower. Scientists have shown, in swordtail fishes, that the preference for the male’s sword seems to change with the age of the female, or the size of the female. [...]

It’s taught me it’s hard to know why women prefer certain traits in males. The brain is our most important sex organ, but it has lots of other things on its mind. So it leads you to wonder how the life experiences of women, with things that have nothing to do with sexual beauty, influence what they find as attractive? This isn’t surprising. I’m an academic, so the kinds of folks that I run into in my job have respect for creativity, intelligence, and being articulate. Things that would make a male attractive in this social scenario probably might not add to a male’s attractiveness in other kinds of scenarios.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Love, Death, and Other Forgotten Traditions

In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they’ll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1 If they’re less lucky, they’ll instead experience the curious phenomenon of abstinence-only education, in which the goal is to avoid transmitting any information at all. In addition to being counterproductive—potentially leading to higher rates of teen pregnancy2 and sexually transmitted illnesses3—this practice is strange. Compare it to the practices of many small-scale societies, where children first learn about sex by observing their parents! [...]

Throughout my years of fieldwork with the Shuar, I’ve witnessed a catalog of behaviors that would shock Western1 parents. I’ve imagined how they would stare in alarm at the sight of children setting fire to fields, walking barefoot past tarantulas, or mowing grass with knives. But as the years have gone on, I’ve found myself less surprised by the culture of the Shuar, and more surprised by our own. Why don’t we allow children access to the world as we know it, a world that involves death and sex and, yes, sometimes even machetes? After all, there’s good reason to think that small-scale societies like the Shuar, though not perfect mirrors into the past, are living in ways that closely resemble the lifestyles of our predecessors. Maybe they’ve held onto something we’ve recently lost. [...]

It wasn’t always like this. Just as breastfeeding was once more prevalent in our culture prior to the 1970s, there was a time when death was welcome in our living rooms. In the Victorian era, the funeral parlor was the parlor of your home; the body of loved ones would often rest on an ice board, and embalming might take place in the kitchen. Friends and families would gather together to have tea, to chat, all the while saying goodbye to the body on display. It’s likely that this practice helped the bereaved deal with the reality of death.11

read the article

Al Jazeera: Is Vladimir Putin tired?

There is suddenly too much entropy in the Russian political universe. At least some people are acting as if there are no adults in the house. Political campaigns seem to start without the Kremlin's blessing, state TV channels contradict each other in their coverage of important stories, and infighting between Kremlin factions gets into the open. A major player in that infighting has been Igor Sechin, the head of the oil giant Rosneft, who helped engineer the arrest of Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, but who is currently ignoring court summons for the same the case. [...]

Of course, the Russian leader is very much still around, his busy schedule reflected in daily news broadcasts on state TV. But as political expert Gleb Pavlovsky writes: the "the president is disappearing". Currently a critic of Putin's political regime, Pavlovsky was one of its chief architects in the 2000s - definitely a man whose opinion matters on such occasions. In the article, he goes on to describe the Russian leader as a "not-so-young gentleman dogged by power fatigue and accumulated weaknesses". [...]

If the Kremlin allows Navalny to register as a candidate, Putin is still very likely to win, but for him, that means stepping into unchartered territory. Will this let a revolutionary genie out of the bottle, as it happened with Mikhail Gorbachev's limited reforms leading to the colossal release of political energy which destroyed the entire communist system? Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the hardline part of the establishment? And is this allegedly tired man up for the challenge of running a real campaign against a real rival? Can he run in an election that does not use the surrogate opposition leaders who helped the Kremlin maintain a semblance of pluralism in the last three elections? [...]

The second season began with the chaotic revolution in Ukraine, which allowed the political leadership, or - as many Russians say - the "collective Putin", to rebrand the regime by embracing irredentist nationalism and aggressive conservatism, a plagiarised version of the Christian fundamentalism of the US Bible Belt. That transformation culminated in the annexation of Crimea, which sent Putin's approval ratings soaring to almost 90 percent.  

read the article

Al Jazeera: Akufo-Addo: Africa's march of democracy hard to reverse

Ghana today - at least on the surface - is enjoying political stability, with a multiethnic population coming together in peaceful democratic elections.

President Nana Akufo-Addo speaks with Al Jazeera's Jane Dutton on why his country is so different from its neighbours in this respect - and what work still remains to be done in Ghana and in the rest of the continent. [...]

President Nana Akufo-Addo speaks with Al Jazeera's Jane Dutton on why his country is so different from its neighbours in this respect - and what work still remains to be done in Ghana and in the rest of the continent. 

read the article and watch the interview

Haaretz: Israel's Shabbat Wars Are a Symptom of a Much Deeper Crisis Among ultra-Orthodox Jews

Behind the scenes, even the most devout ultra-Orthodox politician will admit that in reality, it is impossible to enforce a Shabbat standstill on the economy. After all, Haredim make up only a minority of Israeli society. They also understand that any Haredi attempt to do so would dramatically decrease their power to influence other matters close to their hearts. That’s not news and Health Minister Yaakov Litzman’s announcement on Friday that he would be resigning over weekend work on the railway network is an anomaly.

Crucial infrastructure maintenance has been taking place on Saturdays for decades, without causing tension – as long as the work was going on quietly, far from public view. When the Israel Electric Corporation transported a massive turbine on Highway 2 on Shabbat in 2001, it was a public event that the Haredim could not ignore and the ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism left Ehud Barak’s coalition in protest. But week after week, the low-profile maintenance work on the railway and power lines has on the whole been ignored. [...]

The failure of the rabbis to articulate a clear position on the Shabbat issue is just a symptom of the much deeper malaise. The Haredi community is comprised largely of hundreds of thousands of young men and women, trying to build their new families while being cut off from the opportunities the Israeli economy affords bright and eager people like them. Despite the rabbis’ edicts against using the internet, many of these young Haredim are fully exposed to the world outside and yearn to have some connection with it, especially through their workplaces. Secular Israelis may be angry at Haredi attempts to impose religious strictures on public life, but the real rage is the one that is building up among young Haredim at their leaders, rabbis seventy years older than them, who have no comprehension of the obstacles facing them. 

  read the article

BBC4 Profile: Yevgeny Prigozhin

At the Lord Mayors banquet a couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister Theresa May didn't mince her words when she waded into the alleged Russian interference in western countries accusing them of sowing disinformation she declared "We know what you are doing and you will not succeed."

This week on Profile we look at the man accused of funding the St Petersburg troll factory which has produced so much pro-Russian material online. Yevgeny Prigozhin has moved from jail to restaurateur and close friend of President Putin, but precious little is known about his personal life.

listen to the podcast

Politico: Margrethe Vestager versus the Olympics

The IOC is one of the world’s most venerated brands, and an investigation opened in 2015 by Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, into the Olympic-affiliated International Skating Union (ISU) is set to limit the rights of sporting federations to manage their sports and brands. Vestager is expected to reach a verdict, which could include fines, by the end of this year.

IOC President Thomas Bach was in Brussels this week — becoming the first person in his position to address the EU’s national ministers — and told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast that sports bodies should not be treated like businesses. [...]

Bach said the Olympic movement pumps about a billion euros a year back into grassroots sports — “it’s €3 million per day.” For this reason, he wants EU regulators to look past the multi-billion euro broadcast rights deals the IOC benefits from to see a social movement rather than a business.

EU competition regulators agree that sports have an important social role and say they don’t want to get involved in sporting decisions. But they point out that many sports bodies are also businesses too — so any bans on athletes should be proportionate.

read the article

The RSA: Capitalism Without Capital

For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this is not just a familiar story of the so-called ‘new economy’. The growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the big economic changes of the last decade. The rise of intangible investment is, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue, an underappreciated cause of phenomena that ranges from economic inequality to stagnating productivity. In their latest work, Haskel and Westlake bring together a decade of research on how to measure intangible investment and its impact on national accounts, to show how the distinctive features of an intangible-rich economy make it fundamentally different from one based on tangibles.

BBC4 Beyond Belief: Death Rituals in the Absence of a Body

The rituals of Remembrance Sunday still have power to move us. The thought of the millions who died, many of whom have no known grave; they are victims of war known only to God. For the many families who mourned loved ones killed in the World Wars, the fact that there were no bodies to bury, no tangible evidence of death, made the process of grieving and letting go all the more difficult. But does it pose a problem religiously? Joining Ernie Rea to discuss how we mourn our dead loved ones in the absence of a body are Professor Douglas Davies, Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at the University of Durham; Dr Miri Freud-Kandel, Fellow in Modern Judaism at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and Dr Chetna Kang, who is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Hindu Priest.

listen to the podcast

Political Critique: Refugees in Greece. Traumas of Babel

Over the last decade many social and community centres have been created or expanded in response to Greece’s economic crisis. Today unemployment in the country remains at 25%, rising to over 50% among young people. Meanwhile as a result of austerity measures, pensions have been halved, and salaries in state jobs have been cut by 40%. Then on top of it all there is the infamous refugee crisis. [...]

Babel’s individual approach towards each newcomer creates trust. “This is what they have most lacked”, Janis continues. Nonetheless, he explains, it is difficult to establish this kind of relationship, as many refugees have never experienced psychological and psychiatric assistance before. In Babel, they try to go beyond the idea of refugees as a weak group of endangered people, unable to act and make decisions by themselves. [...]

The situation in Germany is a useful point of contrast. Mental health care through psychotherapy aimed at the control of PTSD (stress, anxiety, depressions and traumas) is an important part of integration activities there. Greece, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of professionals, and for this reason, an increasing number of pilot programmes aim to educate the refugees as equivalent psycho-social consultants who can help other asylum seekers or persons granted asylum though group therapy. “The problem is that most of them live in isolation in camps, out of society, so they hardly ever meet local people,” says Janis. [...]

It might sound surprising but in the experts’ opinion it is single men who are the most endangered group, as organizations and community centres pay the least attention to them. These are considered people who are not affected by such problems, or who can solve them on their own.

read the article

SciShow Psych: Why We're OBSESSED with Pumpkin Spice

Jacobin Magazine: The End of the Old Brigade

For his supporters, Adams is the man who guided Sinn Féin to unprecedented political success; for disillusioned one-time allies, he is a slippery opportunist who abandoned fundamental principles in the name of expediency. His most vociferous critics in the Irish media will be glad to see the back of Adams, but their relief at his departure will be mixed with awareness that he did more than anyone to bring the IRA to a permanent ceasefire. He leaves Sinn Féin at a moment of uncertainty on both sides of the Irish border, with fundamental questions to answer about its political strategy in the years ahead. [...]

After his release in 1976, Adams was ready to challenge the old guard in the republican movement. His faction promised that there would be no more ceasefires without a clear British commitment to leave Ireland for good, earning themselves a reputation as hard-line militarists. The vision of a federal Ireland with an Ulster parliament espoused by Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was dismissed as a sop to unionism. Ó Brádaigh and his allies were ruthlessly marginalized by the younger northern Provos who rallied to Adams. In a dramatic role-reversal which reveals much about Adams’ political journey, Ó Brádaigh would later became one of his leading critics when he led Sinn Féin into the peace process of the 1990s. [...]

In the 1983 Westminster election Sinn Féin won over 40 per cent of the nationalist vote. It was a remarkable success that demonstrated the potential of an electoral strategy to Adams and his comrades in leadership. But it also proved to be the high water mark for the dual strategy of “the Armalite and the ballot box.” As time went on, the contradictions between the IRA’s guerrilla warfare and Sinn Féin’s political growth became ever more apparent. Support for the IRA campaign was confined to a minority of nationalists in republican strongholds like Derry, West Belfast and South Armagh. Beyond those circles, there was a ceiling that Sinn Féin could never break while the war continued. Controversial IRA actions, such as the bomb attack that killed eleven civilians at Enniskillen in 1987, would have a direct impact on Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects. [...]

But this should not really be surprising. For Gerry Adams and the movement he has built, social questions are ultimately a means to an end: useful insofar as they advance the prospects of Irish unification, disposable insofar as they don’t. And under his leadership, Sinn Féin has come closer to its primary objective than ever before. When Adams promised, at this year’s Ard Fheis, that his party would secure a referendum on Irish unity within five years, it wasn’t for show. Amid the fallout from Brexit, with unionism historically weak in the North and the conflict fading from the memory of the southern electorate, a referendum is increasingly plausible. What kind of Ireland it would produce is another story.

read the article

Al Jazeera: The death of the Russian far right

Today, most of the leaders of the ultranationalist groups that used to organise the march are either in jail or in self-imposed exile. Their supporters consider them to be politically persecuted and complain about increasing state repression. [...]

"Controlled nationalism is about using nationalists in some [political] games. In some cases, [the authorities] would support nationalists in order to keep the regime alive, to fight the threat of a colour revolution," says Anton Shekhovstov, visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria. [...]

That same year, the Russian authorities decided to finally do away with the November 7 official holiday celebrating the October Revolution. They moved the allocated day off to November 4 - the day Moscow was liberated from the Poles in 1612, an official holiday in tsarist Russia until 1917. [...]

In August 2011, DPNI was banned by the Russian government (the SS had been banned a year earlier). Nevertheless, the government allowed the Russian march to take place. On November 4, more than 10,000 nationalists, joined by opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny, marched in Lyublino with banners reading "Stop feeding Caucasus". Over the years, the central government has been perceived as being quite generous in its budget allocation to the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus and has been criticised by both nationalists and liberals for it. [...]

The result was a "schism" in the nationalist movement with one camp supporting the annexation of Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the other opposing both and supporting the Ukrainian central government. [...]

Human rights groups have been divided over whether or not to consider the detention and imprisonment of ultranationalists to be political prosecution. Human rights organisation "Memorial" considers that in the case of Belov, there are "signs of political motivation".

read the article

Al Jazeera: The Ratko Mladic disease infecting Europe

This verdict will not change anything in the lives of people in Bosnia, or those living in the diaspora around the world. But at least we can comfort ourselves that some kind of justice does exist in this world and that those who are responsible for such horrific crimes, sooner or later, will end up in prison. [...]

A new Europe was born and people were promised to live in unity and solidarity, under the rule of law, in respect of human and civil rights. However, that Europe was not wise or brave enough to find a way to prevent, or, at least, to stop the killings in its very heart. [...]

Instead, they were trying to find a way to negotiate with murderers, while using gentle terms to describe what was going on in Bosnia, like "ethnic cleansing", "conflict", or "civil war". It took them a long time to even recognise that war crimes were committed. Then, it took them almost four years to act and stop the war, four years that cost us over 100,000 lives and more than 2 million refugees. [...]

If the Karadzic's and Mladic's of the Balkans had been stopped on time, and their ideas proclaimed dangerous, it could have been a clear message to all those who support ultranationalist and fascist ideas. But, everybody forgot the lesson we should have learned in the 1990s in Yugoslavia - that fascism is like a disease; it spreads easily and can infect anyone.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Imagining a post-Merkel Europe

Then there is the added Merkel factor: During Merkel's 12 year-reign, not a single coalition partner has emerged strengthened out of a coalition with the chancellor. So, small wonder that the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the SPD are both traumatised by dramatic electoral defeats following an alliance with Merkel, and are very hesitant to enter another coalition with her. [...]

The bigger danger is that the compromises necessary to form governing coalitions, in a more fragmented party system, will not lead to the necessary reforms that Germany needs to undertake, in the face of the digital transformation of its industrial base, competition from the US and China, as well as the demographic strain on its social systems. [...]

To be sure, Merkel's experience and stature as a crisis manager would be a big loss. During the Ukraine crisis, her political standing and her ability to bridge the divide between anti-Putin and more accommodating forces within the EU were key to managing the situation. This allowed Europe to play a crucial role in the crisis. [...]

The biggest foreign policy mistake a new German government could make would be to close the door on Macron's proposals for reforming the eurozone and the EU. In Germany, the only two parties clearly positioned against Macron's eurozone proposals are the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the FDP.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: Will the Saudis Go to War?

What he and his advisers (read: yes-men and sycophants) will decide is unknown. But three things seem clear. One is that the Saudis give all signs of gearing up for a showdown with their rival across the Persian Gulf. A second is that while the kingdom enjoys certain key advantages, the odds will turn increasingly against them if an actual shooting war erupts. The third is that if MbS loses, the royal family will likely lose too — bigly. Monarchy doesn’t go well with modern warfare, as a slew of royal families beginning with the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans discovered in World War I and after. The issue now is whether the House of Saud will join such half-forgotten dynasties in the great royal graveyard. [...]

The kingdom finds itself surrounded by a ring of fire of its own making. But Saudi Arabia is not only destabilizing others — it’s destabilizing itself. Power in the kingdom essentially rests on a three-way social compact among the House of Saud, the general population, and the Wahhabiyya, which is to say the overgrown religious establishment. The first is allowed an absolute monopoly on political power as long as it shares a portion of its oil wealth with the broad masses in the form of jobs and social benefits. The people, in turn, are allowed to collect such benefits as long as they grovel, keep quiet, and do not disturb the status quo. As for the mullahs, their job is to drum up support for the House of Saud as long as the royal family returns the favor by safeguarding shari‘a at home and promulgating the kingdom’s austere, violent, and women-hating version of Islam abroad. [...]

It also has the advantage of some 120 miles of water lying between it and its enemy, not to mention Kuwait and Iraq. A major air or sea assault across the Persian Gulf appears beyond Iranian capabilities while opening up a land corridor with a couple of sovereign states in the way is presumably a non-starter. So while Iran’s manpower reserves are greater, it has no clear way of delivering them to the battlefield. [...]

As a consequence, the relationship between the people and the state is completely different. Where King Salman and Muhammad are isolated not only from the masses but even from other members of the royal family (with whom they’re effectively at war), Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was re-elected in June with 57 percent of the vote, seven points more than he received four years earlier.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Architect of the Radical Right

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia. [...]

Today we remember ferocious civil-rights struggles waged in Birmingham and Selma. But ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia, where one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., ruled with the authority of an old-style feudal boss. His notorious “machine” kept the state clenched in an iron grip; the oppressions included a poll tax that suppressed black voter turnout so that it was on a par with the Deep South’s (and kept overall turnout under 20 percent). Byrd had allies in the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, and the newspaperman James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, long before his lovable-curmudgeon TV role on the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of 60 Minutes in the 1970s, was a fanatical and ingenious segregationist. [...]

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

read the article

The Atlantic: This Isn't the End of the Merkel Era

The most alarmist of these doubts are overstated, according to Peel, who noted that while Merkel “is clearly wobbled and ... clearly weakened,” it’s still a far cry from her being replaced at the helm of German leadership—in part because she lacks a clear successor within her party, but also because she remains extremely popular among the German population. “She survived as her party’s champion as long as she was a winner,” Peel said, noting that more than half of Germans would prefer for Merkel to remain chancellor. “The moment she looks like no longer being a winner, the rebels will start to mutter. And that’s where you’re getting this muttering coming from, I think. But they’ve got no alternative candidate.”

Merkel’s confidence that she will not resign suggests she knows this. But it could also stem from the fact that she’s weathered crises far worse. “This is definitely a challenge and this has weakened her as a leader, but it’s not as big as the refugee crisis,” Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me in reference to Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees. That move prompted similar predictions of her political demise. “When the refugee crisis was unfolding, there was a legitimate fear … that Merkel was going to fall.” [...]

If Germany were to take the drastic step of holding another round of elections, there’s no indication it would lead to Merkel’s fall. If anything, polls suggest it would result in the same divisions delivered by the first election—an outcome that would force the parties back to coalition talks where they started. Dirsus said this could be avoided if the SPD withdrew their refusal to join the government for another grand coalition—a move the party’s leader Martin Schulz has thus far ruled out. “There is now a lot of pressure on the Social Democrats to at least start coalition talks with Merkel because people are reminding them of their responsibilities to the country,” Dirsus said, adding that: “there is no guarantee that [Schulz] would be the candidate again if there are new elections, so he doesn’t really have an interest in new elections.”

read the article