Jacobin Magazine: Finland’s Revolution

In a period when socialists elsewhere in imperial Russia were obliged to organize in underground parties and were hunted down by secret police, the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP) operated openly and legally. Like German Social Democracy, the Finns from 1899 onwards built up a massive working-class party and a dense socialist culture with its own assembly halls, working women’s groups, choirs, and sports leagues.

Politically, the Finnish workers’ movement was committed to a parliamentary-oriented strategy of patiently educating and organizing workers. Its politics were initially moderate: talk of revolution was rare and collaboration with liberals was common. [...]

In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, moderate socialist MPs, union leaders, and functionaries now found themselves a minority within the SDP. Seeking to implement the orientation elaborated by German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky, from 1906 onwards most of the party infused legal tactics and a parliamentary focus with a sharp class-struggle politics. “Class hatred is to be welcomed, as it is a virtue,” proclaimed one party publication.

This strategy of revolutionary social democracy — with its militant message and slow-but-steady methods — was spectacularly successful in Finland. By 1907, over one hundred thousand workers had joined the party, making it the largest socialist organization per capita in the world. And in July 1916 Finnish Social Democracy made history by becoming the first socialist party in any country to win a majority in parliament. Due to recent years of tsarist “Russification,” however, most state power in Finland by this time was held by the Russian administration. Only in 1917 did the SDP confront the challenges of holding a parliamentary socialist majority in a capitalist society. [...]

Though the newly established Red Government attempted at first to chart a relatively cautious political course, Finland quickly descended into bloody civil war. The delay in seizing power had cost the Finnish working class dearly since by January most Russian troops had returned home. The bourgeoisie took advantage of the three months after the November strike to build up its troops in Finland and Germany. Ultimately, over twenty-seven thousand Finnish Reds lost their lives in the war. And after the right wing crushed the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic in April 1918, another eighty thousand workers and socialists were thrown into concentration camps.

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: Not Just Nuns

The US-backed regime was at war with a growing leftist insurgency born out of frustrated peaceful movements for democratic reforms and an end to the semi-feudal and oligarchic distribution of wealth and power in the country. In a bid to stave off any revolutionary aspirations sparked by Cuba in 1959 and enflamed by Nicaragua in 1979, the United States pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the bloodthirsty Salvadoran military as its forces massacred entire villages; murdered and disappeared tens of thousands of civilians; and assassinated opposition politicians, labor leaders, priests, and even, as Markey’s book vividly recalls, US-born nuns. [...]

Her first overseas mission was to Nicaragua in 1959, the year that Castro triumphed in Cuba, overthrowing the US-backed Batista dictatorship. Maura’s mission, however, had no such revolutionary ambitions. Quite the opposite: she flew from Miami to Managua with the mother-in-law of Anastasio Somoza, the head of the National Guard and key figure in the despotic ruling dynasty that, as Markey observes, “ran Nicaragua more as a business enterprise than as a nation.” [...]

In 1970, Maura began to work in the slums of Managua. This time, her mission was very different. She and her colleagues shared their neighbors’ poverty and their struggles; she accompanied her community as it became increasingly active in social movements met with escalating state repression and marched beside them in the streets, supporting students occupying the National Cathedral and ministering to hunger strikers demanding the release of political prisoners. Following the devastating 1972 earthquake, she organized CBCs in a refugee camp and supported the community’s campaigns for dignified living conditions. [...]

Nuns in El Salvador were receiving death threats from the US-backed military regime and its associated paramilitary groups. The right-wing extremists that governed the country trumpeted the slogan, Haz patria, mata un cura (“Be a patriot, kill a priest”), and after Romero’s murder, it was clear that no one was safe. In accepting the mission, Maura knew that there was a chance, even a likelihood, that she would meet the same fate as the archbishop. She went anyway.

read the article 

Politico: Iran’s president isn’t a reformer. He’s an enabler

In one of his rallies, Rouhani assailed his conservative rival Ibrahim Raisi by stressing that “the people will say no to those who over the course of 38 years only executed and jailed.” Here Rouhani was obliquely referring to one of the regime’s most contentious acts. In the summer of 1988, the aging founding leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in one last act of vengeance against his secular detractors, ordered the mass execution of political prisoners. The judiciary was to discharge its obligations and established a panel of judges soon knows as the “Death Commission” to carry out the killings. Raisi first came to national attention as member of that commission, which put to death thousands of prisoners in short order. Most of the executed were denied a proper burial and had their bodies dumped in mass and undisclosed graves. In the Islamic Republic’s cruel lexicon, these were called “cemeteries for the dammed.”

This was Raisi’s justice, but the burden was not his alone. The prison genocide was overseen by two officials — the then-president of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the speaker of the parliament, the late Hashemi Rafsanjani. As a member of parliament at that time, Rouhani was well aware of what was taking place in the prisons. He chose silence. For the past three decades, the regime has sought to whitewash its past by making it taboo to publicly discuss this episode. Still, rumors abound, and that demented summer is enshrined in the collective memory. By invoking that episode, Rouhani challenged the core legitimacy of a theocratic state that insists on its religious pedigree and its concern for dispensing justice. Khamenei and the ruling elite who are implicated in that massacre are unlikely to easily forgive their newly reelected president for his opportunism. Not only must Rouhani have been aware of that episode, but his political ally and current minister of justice, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, was one of the more aggressive judges on the Death Commission. [...]

So it would be inaccurate to call Rouhani a reformist. He has always been part of a pragmatic cohort of Iranian leaders attracted to the so-called China model of offering citizens economic rewards in exchange for political passivity. During his campaign, he hinted at better times to come by claiming that he would succeed in lifting all the remaining sanctions on Iran. This is impossible, given Iran’s penchant toward terrorism, its human rights abuses and its imperial ravaging of the Middle East. The fact is that Iran has never been able to emulate China’s economic trajectory. A state drowning in corruption, with a history of mismanagement, Iran has always been plagued by the twin forces of inflation and unemployment. It is hard to see how the regime can meet the basic financial demands of its people as it insists on spending vast sums sustaining the Assad dynasty in Syria and menacing Sunni monarchy.

read the article 

FiveThirtyEight: Will Donald Trump Be Impeached?

This might all seem like a liberal fantasy: No president has ever been booted out of the job, and only Richard Nixon resigned under the pressure of the impeachment process.

But people putting money on the line are taking impeachment seriously. According to the prediction market Betfair, the chance that Trump will fail to serve out his four-year term is about 50 percent (!). There’s even a 20 to 25 percent probability (!!) that Trump doesn’t finish out 2017 in office, these bettors reckon. [...]

To provide evidence against Trump being removed, the data would instead have to contain examples of presidents who could have been removed from office, but weren’t. For instance, it might be relevant that there were never serious efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal. In fact, the Democratic leadership in Congress went somewhat out of their way to avoid actions that could lead to impeachment proceedings against Reagan. Why was that, exactly? One could come up with a variety of plausible theories: that the scandal wasn’t severe enough; that Reagan wasn’t personally involved enough; that Reagan’s popularity insulated him from impeachment; that Reagan enjoyed good relations with Congress at a period of relatively low partisanship, and so forth. [...]

The good news for Trump ends there, however. While the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” might seem hopelessly vague, it has a fair amount of legal history and is generally regarded as referring to political crimes (“crimes against the state”) as opposed to personal affairs. A drunk driving conviction might not qualify as a “high crime,” for instance. But an action that wasn’t illegal per se but reflected an abuse of the president’s office could count as one. That Trump almost certainly did not commit a criminal offense in reportedly disclosing highly classified information to Russia would not necessarily protect him from an impeachment charge on those grounds, for example. [...]

For the time being, this factor contributes only modestly to the likelihood of Trump being removed from office. Trump is unpopular, but his numbers are not unsalvageable (several presidents have come back from similar ratings to win a second term). A further deterioration in his popularity would imply that he is unpopular even in red states, however, and would greatly increase the risk to Trump.

read the article 

Politico: Angela’s campaign secret: Be Merkel

In mid-March, Merkel’s Christian Democrats were in a virtual dead heat with center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with each group garnering just over 30 percent in the polls. As of Sunday, Merkel’s party was 12 percentage points ahead of the SPD at 38 percent in the latest poll by Emnid, a German polling institute.

Her secret? Stay the course. In an era when many politicians are driven by the latest approval ratings, Merkel’s almost stubborn refusal to change direction has set her apart. Though Merkel is known to be a close watcher of polls, she uses them to identify the long-term direction, rather than daily strategies. [...]

With the refugee crisis seemingly under control, in Germany at least, the party that most benefited from it — the far-right Alternative for Germany — has seen its support drop. While the AfD’s troubles have been exacerbated by extremist comments by some of its leaders and party infighting, falling refugee numbers have all but robbed it of its core cause.

read the article 

Vintage Everyday: 30 Amazing Photos of Militia Women during Spanish Civil War in the 1930s

The Spanish Civil War, widely known in Spain simply as The Civil War or The War, took place from 1936 to 1939. The Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaning and relatively urban Second Spanish Republic, in an alliance of convenience with the Anarchists, fought against the Nationalists, a Falangist, Carlist, and largely aristocratic conservative group led by General Francisco Franco.

Although the war is often portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism, some historians consider it more accurately described as a struggle between leftist revolution and rightist counter-revolution. Ultimately, the Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975.

A photo collection shows the strength of Republican militia women during Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.

see the photos 

Atlas Obscura: What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery

One of these people was Paul O’Pecko, the Vice President of Collections and Research at Mystic Seaport. “You know how once somebody mentions something to you, the piece of information seems to jump off the page when you are not even looking?” he asks. This quickly happened with woggins. As soon as Lund’s network was alerted, more mentions from ship’s logs began flooding in. A Sag Harbor vessel sailing in 1806 “kild one woglin at 10 am.” New Bedford sailors from 1838 describe “wogings in vast numbers & noisy with their shril sharp shreaking or howling in the dead hours of the night.” In a 1798 diary entry, Christopher Almy of New Bedford writes of “one sort the whalemen call woggins,” which have stubby wings. When they move over the rocks, he says, they “look like small boys a walking.” [...]

But the mystery was only half solved. Penguins, as we understand them, live in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet sailors in the north were also getting in on the action, reporting that they had “caught 10 wogens” or “saw wargins.” “Whalemen were noticing them before they went far enough south to see true penguins,” says Lund. [...]

Michael Dyer, another librarian from New Bedford, had found another major clue: the notebook of a schoolboy named Abraham Russell, decorated with a careful sketch of a “Sea Waggin found on the banks of Newfound Land.” The drawing looked as though it had been traced from a particular illustration of a great auk found in a popular navigational guide. Further finds reinforced this theory, and finally, the group of detectives nailed it down: A southern woggin is a penguin. A northern woggin was a great auk.

read the article 

CityLab: The 100-Year-Old Penalty for Being Black

It’s 1880. The Civil War ended 15 years ago. Three years ago, federal troops withdrew from the South. Now, children of black and white workers of similar economic standing are able to climb up the economic ladder at the same pace. So by the start of the next decade, the median black worker earns more than around 30 percent of the nation’s labor force.

Of course, that scenario isn’t real. It’s a counterfactual from a new working paper published in the National Bureau for Economic Research, by historian William J. Collins and economist Marianne H. Wanamaker. In reality, black workers reached that 30th percentile milestone a full 100 years later, in 2000.

In the paper, Collins and Wanamaker set out to understand the mechanisms that drive a wedge between the incomes of blacks and whites from one generation to the next. Their big finding is this: Between 1880 and 2010, whites showed much higher rates of upward mobility than blacks—even if their parents started from the same economic position. “There is a specific penalty for black people, which is independent of whatever income their fathers earn,” Wanamaker tells CityLab. “And that has been constant over 100 years.” [....]

According to the researchers, the parents’ education and location mattered, but did not fully explain the divergent mobility of their children. What did have some bearing was the differences in“human capital”—the skills and knowledge that a worker contributes in the labor market. But the source of that disparity leads us back to square one.

read the article 

CityLab: Defining European Identity in a Divided Europe

On May 6th, the European Parliament opened the House of European History in Brussels. This museum will dig into the topic of European identity, a concept that predates the European Union itself. A permanent exhibition—in all 24 of the EU’s official languages—shows the timeline of European history beginning with the 19th century, leading visitors through the events of the 20th century and ending with a search for a better, united Europe after the World Wars. [...]

Research suggests that many EU citizens don’t view their national identity and a bigger European one as being mutually exclusive. Instead, those identities may be mixed together in a way that has been described as the “marble cake model.” According to a study by the political scientists Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, around 40 percent of EU citizens imagine themselves holding an exclusively national identity, while around 50 percent identify as belonging to a certain nation as well as being European. A much smaller group, which Adrian Favell calls Eurostars, identifies as exclusively European. Members of this group “wanted to leave behind their national label as citizens of a certain country and to live freely as individuals in a cosmopolitan world within Europe,” Favell says. [...]

Who’s least likely to embrace the idea of a European identity? Stöckel found it was the citizens who felt least represented by the mainstream political parties in their home countries. “Those who only hold a national identity are those who also trust elites much less. This is where the divide plays a role,” Stöckel says. For these citizens, “Europe is a threat to their national identities, to the sovereignty of their countries,” he explained. That tension plays out, for instance, when voters choose candidates based on their stance on immigration.

read the article