Foreign Policy: We Are on the Verge of Darkness

The global rise of populists poses a dangerous threat to human rights — which exist to protect people from governments. Yet today, a new generation of populists is reversing that role. Claiming to speak for “the people,” they treat rights as an impediment to their conception of the majority will, a needless obstacle to defending the nation from perceived threats and evils. Instead of accepting that rights protect everyone, they encourage people to adopt the dangerous belief that they will never need their rights against an overreaching government claiming to act in their name. [...]

In this cauldron of discontent, a certain breed of politician is flourishing by portraying rights as protecting only the terrorist suspect or the asylum-seeker at the expense of the safety, economic welfare, and cultural preferences of the presumed majority. They scapegoat refugees, immigrant communities, and minorities. Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and misogyny are on the rise. [...]

We see a similar scapegoating of asylum-seekers, immigrant communities, and Muslims in Europe. Leading the charge have been Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, but there are echoes of these arguments of intolerance in the Brexit campaign, the rhetoric of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and far-right parties from Germany to Greece. Throughout the European continent, officials and politicians hark back to distant, even fanciful, times of perceived national ethnic purity, despite established immigrant communities whose integration as productive members of society is undermined by this hostility.

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Foreign Policy: Barack Obama’s Shaky Legacy on Human Rights

But the truth is, a careful review of Obama’s major human rights decisions shows a mixed record. In fact, he has often treated human rights as a secondary interest — nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority he championed.

His actions on counterterrorism provide a case in point. Obama took office with great promise, announcing on his second day that he would stop CIA torture immediately and close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. By all accounts, the torture did stop. But Obama has steadfastly refused to prosecute those responsible or even to allow the release of much more than the summary of a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report that documented it. As a result, rather than reaffirming the criminality of torture, Obama leaves office sending the lingering message that, should future policymakers resort to it, prosecution is unlikely. Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric about reinstating waterboarding (“or worse”), this is hardly an academic point, even considering the opposition of his nominee for defense secretary. [...]

With respect to surveillance, Obama seems to have continued and expanded programs begun by George W. Bush that lead to massive invasions of privacy. Once Edward Snowden alerted the public to these programs (for which he deserves gratitude, not prosecution), the president did initiate some reforms. He supported legislation to limit the National Security Agency’s ability to collect phone records in bulk under one program and to bring more transparency to the specialized foreign intelligence surveillance court. But most of the mass privacy violations that Snowden disclosed remain unaddressed. Obama maintains that when it comes to non-U.S. citizens abroad, the U.S. government is free to sweep up not only records of their email and telephone communications but also the content of those communications. Needless to say, other intelligence agencies, including those with which the United States cooperates closely, are then implicitly free to do the same to U.S. citizens.

Counterterrorism aside, Obama has taken a few important steps, some of which Trump is now threatening to reverse. Early in his tenure, while he still had some cooperation from Congress, Obama passed health-care reform, going a long way toward upholding the right to the highest attainable standard of health by enhancing Americans’ access to health insurance. He got on board with marriage equality, helping secure the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition of the right to same-sex marriage. He also ended “don’t ask, don’t tell” for gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. military, opening military service to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, including transgender people. His support for LGBT rights also became an increasingly important part of his foreign-policy agenda.

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Places Journal: Hitler at Home

It was in the spring of 1932, in the midst of presidential elections, that the National Socialists discovered the publicity value of Adolf Hitler’s private life. The electoral campaign pitted Hitler, then leader of the second-largest political party in Germany, against Paul von Hindenburg, the elderly incumbent revered by Germans as the war hero of Tannenberg, and the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. On March 13, German voters returned a strong lead of over seven million votes for Hindenburg, throwing the National Socialists, who had expected Hitler to be swept into the presidency, into despair. 1 Hindenburg’s failure to win an absolute majority, however, led to a runoff election the following month, and in the period between the two presidential elections the Nazis seized on a new representational strategy. 2 Although Hitler would lose the next round, the campaign, along with the worsening economic crisis, increased his support among the German people by over two million votes, to a third of the electorate. 3 Having proved its broad appeal, the image of the private Führer would become a staple of National Socialist propaganda until the start of World War II.

The coming out of the Führer’s personal life marked a distinct departure from earlier National Socialist publicity, which had focused on Hitler’s role as agitator of the masses and leader of a militant political movement. In the runoff election, the need to cast a wider net pushed Nazi Party propaganda toward a celebration of their candidate’s personal attributes. Hitler’s youth and dynamism, epitomized by his much-advertised campaign flights across Germany, became a selling point. Against the aura of aristocratic dignity that clung to the remote, eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, the Nazis offered the modernity and glamour of a candidate who took to the skies to meet face-to-face with the German people. More daringly, Nazi publicists brought Hitler’s private life into the limelight to emphasize his moral and human character and thereby win over the bourgeois voters and women who earlier had overwhelmingly supported Hindenburg. [...]

Germans knew that Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite, convicted traitor, and leader of a paramilitary force of violent street brawlers. How, then, did Schirach and Hoffmann manage their remarkable reinvention? In short, with an appeal to values rather than to ideology. Hitler was described as a man of Spartan habits and great self-discipline: “It is hardly known that Hitler is a NON-DRINKER, NON-SMOKER, and VEGETARIAN,” Schirach exclaimed in the foreword. “Without imposing his ways in the slightest on others, including those in his immediate circle, he adheres strictly to his own rules for living.” 8 Schirach reinforced this in his captions. “This is how the ‘fat cat’ lives!,” one declared sarcastically under an image of a tired-looking Hitler at the end of a seemingly modest meal. “Marxist liars,” it continued, “tell workers that Hitler revels in champagne and beautiful women. In reality, Hitler does not drink a drop of alcohol! (Hitler is also a nonsmoker.)”

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The Guardian: How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump

For the past eight years American liberals have gorged themselves on symbolism. A significant section of the population, including those most likely to support Barack Obama, have felt better about their country even as they have fared worse in it. The young, good-looking, intact, scandal-free black family in the White House embodied a hopeful future for America and beyond. Photogenic, with an understated chic, here were people of colour who looked even better in black and white. With personal stories of progress without privilege, they provided Camelot without the castle: evoking a sense of possibility in a period of economic stagnation, social immobility and political uncertainty. [...]

But there is a connection between the “new normal” and the old that must be understood if resistance in the Trump era is going to amount to more than Twitter memes driven by impotent rage and fuelled by flawed nostalgia. This transition is not simply a matter of sequence – one bad president following a good one – but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor. [...]

Some of that relationship is undeniably tied up in who Obama is: a black man, with a lapsed Muslim father from Kenya. That particular constellation of identities was like catnip to an increasingly strident wing of the Republican party in a time of war, migration and racial tumult. Trump did not invent racism. Indeed, race-baiting has been a staple of Republican party strategy for more than 50 years. But as he refused to observe the electoral etiquette of the Nixon strategy (“You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Richard Nixon told his chief-of-staff, HR Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to”), his campaign descended into a litany of brazen racist taunts. [...]

There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.

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Quartz: Welcome to an emerging Asia: India and China stop feigning friendship while Russia plays all sides

China has upped the ante, indicating a willingness to help Pakistan increase the range of its nuclear missiles. China’s official mouthpiece, Global Times, contended in an editorial: “if the Western countries accept India as a nuclear country and are indifferent to the nuclear race between India and Pakistan, China will not stand out and stick rigidly to those nuclear rules as necessary. At this time, Pakistan should have those privileges in nuclear development that India has.” [...]

Faced with an intransigent China, India under the centre-right government led by Narendra Modi is busy reevaluating its China policy. Modi’s initial outreach to China soon after coming to office in May 2014 failed to produce any substantive outcome and he has since decided to take a more hard-nosed approach. New Delhi has strengthened partnerships with like-minded countries, including the United States, Japan, Australia, and Vietnam. India has bolstered its capabilities along the troubled border with China and the Indian military is operationally gearing up for a two-front war. India is also ramping up its nuclear and conventional deterrence against China by testing long-range missiles, raising a mountain strike corps for the border with China, enhancing submarine capabilities, and basing its first squadron of French-made Rafale fighter jets near that border. [...]

This Sino-Indian geopolitical jostling is also being shaped by the broader shift in global and regional strategic equations. Delhi long took Russian support for granted. Yet, much to India’s discomfiture, China has found a new ally in Russia which is keen to side with it, even as a junior partner, to scuttle western interests. Historically sound Indo-Russian ties have become a casualty of this trend and to garner Chinese support for its anti-West posturing, Russia has refrained from supporting Indian positions.

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Politico: Why is Trump picking on Merkel?

And once again, Trump bragged that his campaign pronouncements had prompted NATO to shift its focus to terrorism. The truth is that NATO has been fighting terrorist threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan alongside the U.S. for more than 10 years, as well as providing important training and equipment to armies in the Middle East battling the Islamic State. Trump is impervious to these stubborn facts, and equally unaware of the extent to which bragging by an American president is counterproductive. All of which makes it that much harder to imagine him ever becoming a respected leader of NATO and the West, a role every American president since Harry Truman has proudly played. [...]

None of this history seems to matter to the president-elect. And while Trump always seems to go out of his way to denounce President George W. Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq war, he seems unaware that one of the most painful lessons of that war directly relates to the arrogant treatment of friends and allies. His comments recall the way top Bush officials used to talk about Europeans and the NATO alliance at the height of their hubris back in 2003. That was when Washington chose to ignore NATO’s remarkable act of solidarity after 9/11, declaring the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. as an attack on all NATO allies. It was also a time when officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz preferred to see the U.S. go it alone, lest NATO’s command structure slow things down. Later, of course, NATO troops were desperately sought as reinforcements as the war dragged on and on. [...]

Fourteen years later, a new American president also wants to forgive the Russians. But this time Russia’s crime is far too big to ignore. There is no principle in international relations more important than opposing large nations invading and occupying their smaller neighbors. For whatever reason, Trump doesn’t understand this critical principle, so he continues to whitewash Vladimir Putin’s government, to the astonishment of every one of America’s allies and especially to Chancellor Merkel, who has shown substantial political courage to lead the European sanctions effort despite the outcry from the German business community.

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Motherboard: Hot Red Chili Peppers Are Associated With Living Longer, Study Suggests

f hot peppers make you feel like you’re dying, first drink some milk. Once your mouth cools, you’ll be glad to know hot red peppers might be associated with a longer life.

A study by University of Vermont researchers, which was published in PLoS ONE earlier this month, looked at a large-scale US health survey and compared mortality data and self-reported hot red chili consumption among its subjects—some 16,000 of them, followed for 23 years. Subjects who said they ate hot red chilis regularly happened to die less often from heart disease or stroke than comparable subjects who did not eat hot peppers. [...]

The survey didn’t ask participants which type of chili peppers they ate, and there are five species of peppers, each with hot variants, including cayenne peppers, Tabasco peppers and Japanese peppers. Some websites claim there are nearly 100 types of hot peppers, including the hottest man made varieties that hurt significantly more than pepper spray. The survey question specifically asked about “red hot chili” peppers, so consumption of peppers like jalapeños may not have been factored in by participants, the study authors noted.

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Al Jazeera: Death toll in Yemen conflict passes 10,000

The United Nations' humanitarian aid official in Yemen has said that the civilian death toll in the nearly two-year conflict has reached 10,000, with 40,000 others wounded.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' Jamie McGoldrick said that the figure is based on lists of victims gathered by health facilities and the actual number might be higher.

McGoldrick also said that up to 10 million people need "urgent assistance to protect their safety, dignity and basic rights", according to a separate social media post early on Tuesday. [...]

Under the proposal, Hadi's powers would be dramatically diminished in favour of a new vice president who would oversee the formation of the interim government that will lead a transition to elections.

The envoy has been holding talks in the Gulf region in recent weeks, including in Riyadh, where he met Yemen's central bank governor to ease a cash crisis in rebel-held areas.

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Atlas Obscura: Saint Catherine Russian Orthodox Church

In 2004 the Church of the Great Martyr Saint Catherine became the first Russian Orthodox church built in the holy city since 1054, when the churches split in an event known as “The Great Schism.” The 950 years in between saw less than accommodating stances between the two factions of Christian faith, though things have been warming up for some time now.

In the late 19th century, plans were made to build an Orthodox church in Rome, but was delayed over a century by two world wars and a communist government in Italy. Finally, approval was granted by the city in 2001 to build the church on the grounds of the Russian embassy to the Vatican. The church was given a blessing by Patriarch Alexy II. [...]

The rift between the two faiths is not as great as it used to be. Important representatives of both faiths attended the opening ceremony in 2004 and the consecration in 2009. Catholic Romans attend the liturgies at St. Catherine given in Italian, and though there are only a few hundred of them, the Russian Orthodoxes disperse to the many Catholic churches in Rome in a show of reaching a hand across the aisle.

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