Jacobin Magazine: After Tragedy and Farce: Martin Schulz

Schulz’s sudden arrival as a major national figure reflects an important change in SPD electoral strategy, as it attempts to replicate the personality-cult politics found in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. Clearly looking for the meme magic they’ve watched galvanize the youth vote abroad, Schulz and company have imported North American campaign strategies in what can only be described as a case of combined and uneven development in the field of communications.

This scheme is made all the more remarkable by the fact that Schulz himself is not particularly remarkable. Unlike the Obamas or Trudeaus he’s trying to imitate, Schulz has neither youth nor charm. His impromptu remarks and impassioned yet vague paeans to social justice often come across as scripted. For the most part, he is a regular Third Way Social Democrat who perfectly illustrates modern German political culture’s “moratorium on charisma.”[...]

In 2003, he came to international attention in an incident that touched the highest levels of European Union politics: Schulz heckled then-Italian president Silvio Berlusconi during a speech in Strasbourg, raising potential conflicts of interest related to the Italian’s vast media empire. Visibly offended, Berlusconi retorted that Schulz would play a good Kapo (a concentration camp guard) in a Holocaust movie. The ensuing spat between the two governments ultimately prompted Berlusconi to personally apologize to then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Although little more than a historical footnote, the incident has come in handy for Schulz a decade later, deployed as evidence of his tough, yet decidedly liberal pro-European stance. [...]

As the SPD shifted to the center, it began to attract a different kind of member. The generation of politicians now running the party are not the local peace activists, union militants, or leftist students that once characterized it, but political opportunists who began their careers precisely when large chunks of the SPD’s left wing were abandoning the party for Die Linke. These new leaders were not trained in Brandt’s SPD or in the social movements but learned politics in student parliaments and party factions. Their strategy amounts to electoral logics and tactical alliances; unfortunately, Schulz shares this orientation.

read the article 

The Atlantic: Trump Isn't the Apotheosis of Conservatism

It’s certainly true that the United States has noteworthy traditions of illiberalism and political violence. The 1920s suffered terrorist violence not only at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but also those of anarchist bombers who maimed and killed hundreds of people from 1919 to 1921. From the Civil War to World War II, American labor relations were more violent than those of most other industrialized countries. Four presidents have been assassinated; four others—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—only narrowly survived or escaped a bullet. Race riots have ripped apart American cities for almost as long as there have been American cities.

Donald Trump’s campaign for president certainly drew much energy from this long tradition of political violence. So too did some of Trump’s opponents: Protests in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s Inauguration Day did damage to property, sent two police officers to hospital, and led to 200 arrests.  Smaller scale versions of this form of violent protest have targeted colleges—notably Berkeley and Middlebury—that have invited speakers whom rioters deemed sympathetic to Trump’s cause. [...]

Through most of the history of ideas, the great champions of equality have been xenophobes—not out of bigotry, but because they believed that only a tightly bonded society could suppress the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Let Jean-Jacques Rousseau speak for a tradition that commenced with the Greeks and continued to the Jacobins and beyond: The best leaders determine “that his people should never be absorbed by other peoples” and therefore “devised for them customs and practices that should could not be blended into those of other nations.” Ideally: “Each fraternal bond … among the individual members of his republic became a further barrier, separating them from their neighbors and keeping them from becoming one with those neighbors,” he wrote in his Considerations on the Government of Poland. As for more cosmopolitan societies, Rousseau had this disdainful comment in The Social Contract: “The people has less affection for the homeland which is like the whole world in its eyes, and for its fellow citizens, most of whom are foreigners to it.”

read the article 

Slate: The Week the World Almost Ended

By the early 1970s, the Soviets had realized that a nuclear war would not be winnable in any meaningful sense. Some American weapons would survive any attack, and even one modern thermonuclear warhead could obliterate Moscow. At the same time, the Soviets saw an advantage, however Pyrrhic, to striking first—the more enemy weapons that one could destroy, the fewer that could be used against them. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate written in 1987 and recently made public for the first time, put it this way: [...]

The KGB tasked an internal think tank with detecting Western preparations for a first strike. The result was a massive spy effort dubbed Operation RYaN—“RYaN” being the Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack.” RYaN tasked some 300 operatives with examining 292 different indicators—everything from the location of nuclear warheads to efforts to move American “founding documents” from display at the National Archives. According to declassified Stasi documents, the resulting data was then fed into a primitive computer system, which attempted to calculate whether the Soviets should go to war to pre-empt a Western first strike. [...]

Instead of trying to reassure the Soviets, the Reagan administration had been using the American military to keep them off balance. U.S. warships had been sneaking close to Soviet shores and then launching aircraft that would head toward Soviet airspace, only turning back at the last minute. The Soviets would be forced to scramble their own jets in response. According to a once-classified Cold War history written by the National Security Agency, “[T]hese actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.” [...]

Air Force personnel worried that all this realism might give the impression that NATO was preparing a real attack. According to Tod Jennings, who, as a staff sergeant, spent Able Archer 83 in a bunker outside Oslo, relaying nuclear orders via teletype, the exercise was realistic enough that he and his fellow airmen began asking, “What if the Soviets actually think we’re going to launch nuclear weapons and we’re disguising it as an exercise? What if they launch against us?”

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: Just the Beginning

President Erdoğan, when faced with the fragmentation of the ruling power bloc — which became evident with the failed July 15th coup attempt organized by the Gülenists, his erstwhile allies — was obligated to form a fresh alliance with various other groups within the state apparatus. The basis of this new alliance was waging war against the Kurds in Turkey and Northern Syria, and especially, preventing the creation of a “Kurdish corridor” in Rojava. Erdoğan’s 180-degree turn on the Kurdish question gave him leverage in building new alliances and strengthening his position within the state, thereby expanding his social base. [...]

Those in government circles are concerned that some constituencies of the AKP and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which acts like a de facto coalition partner to the AKP, may not perform as expected in the referendum. The MHP’s supporters across Central Anatolia, who are known to vacillate between the AKP and the MHP, seem to skew strongly towards a “Yes” vote; however, a large part of its supporters in the Western and Southern coastal regions may opt for the “No” vote. It seems that even the AKP’s aggressive ground incursion in Northern Syria failed to create a drastic change of sentiment in this group. Nor did the government’s attempts to equate “No” voters with terrorists and traitors gain traction. Likewise, in the AKP constituency, there are some anxious pragmatists who may refrain from voting “Yes” even if they don’t vote “No,” who have started to express their opinions more openly. In contrast, the HDP’s massive meetings in celebration of the Nawroz festival have shown that the Kurdish party’s ties with its base remain strong despite claims to the contrary, and that the “No” may poll strongly in the Kurdish provinces. [...]

The various “No” campaigns have already brought about a certain strengthening of the social opposition, which seems to have overcome the passivity and trepidation of the past year. However, we must not forget that this mobilization is still relatively weak considering the challenge ahead, and that it is sometimes fraught with problematic political discourse, bordering on liberalism and even nationalism. Although the “No” campaigns have given the socialist left the chance to return to the streets and to political activity among the masses, the socialist left constitutes only a small fraction of the “No” campaigns. There has been a significant dip in the socialist left’s capacity to intervene in the political arena on a larger scale. As such, the question that remains is how the socialist left will compensate for this weakness after the referendum and once again become a considerable force in the political arena.

read the article 

Haaretz: Forget Iran. Is the Fertility Rate the Real Threat to Israel's Existence?

During its 68 years of existence, Israel has changed from a sparsely populated country to one of the most densely populated in the Western world. That is how Prof. Alon Tal, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s public policy department, opens his latest book, “The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel” (Yale University Press).

Israel’s population density, he writes, is 1,000 percent higher than the OECD average. Conservative forecasts say that Israel will have 23 million inhabitants by 2050. Less conservative forecasts predict 36 million inhabitants by then. And well before then, in 2030, Israel will have doubled the population it has today. [...]

It’s no accident that Tal stresses his Zionism. In the introduction to his book, he cites numerous examples of the denunciations heaped on anyone in Israel who raises the demographic issue. Among other things, he mentions the advice given by one of Israel’s leading demographic experts, geographer Prof. Arnon Soffer, to anyone who wants to deal with this issue: “Be prepared to be condemned simultaneously both as ‘anti-Zionist’ by Israeli right-wingers and ‘fascist’ by left-wingers.” [...]

In his book, Tal writes that “Israel’s population growth is driven more and more by high ultra-Orthodox fertility rates.” Thus, if ultra-Orthodox fertility “doesn’t drop significantly, the social and environmental indicators by which quality of life in Israel is measured will deteriorate. In general, ultra-Orthodox parents have more children than they’re capable of supporting, so they have to rely on subsidies to survive. Given the poverty into which most ultra-Orthodox children are born, they don’t enjoy equal opportunities for a prosperous future.”

read the article

The Daily Beast: Is Holy Wine Going High End?

This coming Easter Sunday, millions of Catholics around the world will celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. But some worshippers celebrating Mass in the San Francisco Bay Area will have a spiritual connection closer to death than others: They will be drinking sacramental wine made from grapes grown in cemeteries.

About 24 churches in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland will use wine for Mass made from grapes grown in three East Bay cemeteries. The altar wine, bottled under the Bishop’s Vineyard label, is the result of an experiment driven by economics and California’s long drought. Instead of planting grass over bare spots in the cemeteries at a cost of $50,000 an acre, the diocese decided instead in 2006 to plant vines—which only cost $17,000 an acre. The grapes from the vineyards turned out to be so good that the diocese converted them to wine. (Profits from the wine business go into a scholarship fund for needy Catholic students.) [...]

Most churches buy wine based on price, not flavor, which makes sense since parishioners only take a sip or two of wine during Mass. Even the largest churches will only use 20 or 30 cases of wine a year. It’s perhaps the main reason why the altar wine business has not felt the pressure to go upscale in recent years.

read the article 

Quartz: Your tea addiction may actually be strengthening your bones

Tea consumption correlates to higher bone mineral density (BMD) in women, and especially premenopausal women, a new report accepted for publication in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition found. (BMD is a measure of calcium and other minerals in bones, and is a common measure of bone health, an indicator of osteoporosis, and a gauge for the risk of a bone fracture.)

The researchers reviewed epidemiological studies from all over the world, finding a correlation between tea consumption and higher BMD in postmenopausal women in Canada and England, as well as women in Taiwan, Iran, Japan, and Australia. The study in England, for example, found that the postmenopausal women consuming tea had approximately 5% higher BMD at all three bone sites measured than those who were not tea drinkers. It also found that there was no difference in BMD rates for those who consumed one to three cups versus four or more cups each day, and that adding milk to the tea did not change the correlation.

Men, however, often did not see the same results. In the Iranian study, which also included men, and a Greek study of older men, tea consumption was not associated with higher BMD.

read the article 

Quartz: A photographer captures the evolution of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh

After the loss of Lahore to the newly-created Pakistan, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, envisioned the new capital of post-Independence Punjab as a city that would mark the beginning of a new era for the country.

“Let this be a new town, symbolic of (the) freedom of India unfettered by the traditions of the past…an expression of the nation’s faith in the future,” he said.

A futuristic city, then, was to be built in Chandigarh, near the foothills of the Himalayas—240km north of New Delhi. The location was chosen for its good water supply, moderate climate, and pleasant views. On Dec. 19, 1950, after the tragic death of the Polish architect initially chosen for the project, the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, signed on to create the city’s masterplan.

read the article and see the photos