Jacobin Magazine: Between Capital and Volk

Today, even the Union recognizes Germany as a “country of immigration.” Its right wing has been weakened and outright reactionary positions like an ethnic definition of German identity marginalized. Women are no longer seen as the natural servants of their husbands, and the rights of gays and lesbians to life partnerships and parenthood are legally enshrined. The modernization of the Union’s immigration, gender, and family policies is primarily strategic: particularly since Angela Merkel become party leader in 2000, the party has increasingly sought to attract new voters from the political center, rather than the right.[...]

Generally speaking, a structural crisis can have two possible outcomes: either the ruling classes make adjustments to the prevailing order that allows it to survive, or the political paradigm undergoes a more fundamental shift. Although a paradigm shift in European politics seemed possible for a brief moment (Syriza’s rise in Greece, for example), it soon became clear that a slightly modified version of neoliberalism would prevail. [...]

The AfD now began to target voters among the “losers of globalization.” The party’s initial support had mostly come from professionals, entrepreneurs, and the upper echelons of society. Now, support among the unemployed and underprivileged grew as well, due to the AfD’s successful linking of social inequality to immigration in the public eye. While the similar material interests of refugees and the German poor were downplayed, ethnic and cultural differences were magnified. [...]

The AfD’s single biggest threat is by far internal conflict within its own ranks. Should the party collapse in the near future, it will be for this reason alone. The new right is extremely heterogeneous, and strife can break out at any time. Moderate national conservatives and national neoliberals are deeply concerned about the völkisch wing collaborating with forces of the extra-parliamentary far right. The biggest potential for conflict, however, relates to economic policy, as the party has failed to unite on key issues like free trade. While some members reject the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) categorically, others are willing to support it if certain conditions are met. Concrete policies proposals which serve the interests of Germany’s wealthiest stand alongside rhetorical claims to represent the poor and downtrodden. The völkisch wing’s attempts to introduce welfare policies clash with the party’s capital-friendly program and the strong support it still enjoys among small and medium-size business owners and the petty bourgeoisie. [...]

In this light, it appears that both the established parties and the media have exaggerated the threat posed by the AfD. The breaking of political taboos is a strategic tool that grants it disproportionate media attention. At the same time, government actions often escape scrutiny. After all, it was the Union and the SPD that drastically curtailed German asylum law in the past eighteen months, not the AfD. As a consequence, refugees receive less financial support and social services, asylum applications are rejected without proper investigation, Residenzpflicht (“mandatory residence”) has been reintroduced, severely limiting the free movement of asylum seekers within Germany, and war-torn countries have been declared safe, meaning that refugees are returned to them in increasing numbers. All of these measures reflect and echo the AfD’s demands.

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openDemocracy: Charting Russia’s most dangerous cities for LGBT people

n Russia, the first LGBT pride march was held in 1991 on the square before Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre as part of the Soviet Union’s first LGBT festival. The more modern history of LGBT parades in Russia began in 2006 when LGBT activist Nikolay Alekseyev attempted to officially organise a pride march in Moscow. Years passed, and the city authorities still haven’t found the guts to permit a march for LGBT human rights through the capital’s streets and provide security for its participants. However, other banned marches have been successfully challenged in the European Court for Human Rights and Alekseyev has generated support in other regions of the country. He and his colleagues have applied for permission to hold pride marches in Blagoveshchensk, Cherkessk, Cherepovets, Kazan, and Nizhny Tagil among many other cities across Russia, though they have always been rejected and sued city governments in response. A notable exception came in 2013, when the governor of St Petersburg did not forbid the city’s LGBT pride parade, although it did encounter violently homophobic protesters who tried to obstruct the march.

In fact, these violent far-right groups keep close tabs on LGBT activists in Russia and the events they hold – or try to. While the government fights some homophobic campaigners and inciters of hatred, it supports others. After all, instigating violence against LGBT people is essentially the Russian state’s official policy towards sexuality. For example, the 2013 law banning “propaganda” of “non-traditional sexual orientations” sparked a wave of hatred against LGBT people across the country. As we discovered from court decisions last year, after the “propaganda” bill was signed into law, the number of hate crimes against lesbians and gay men doubled.  [...]

After facts came to light about the systematic torture of gay men at secret detention camps in Chechnya, the republic’s press secretary immediately retorted that “you cannot repress those who are not and cannot be here in the Chechen Republic.” Despite the justified focus on Chechnya, these claims are hardly specific to one culture or region within the Russian Federation – officials in other regions speak in much the same manner. For example, the mayor of Svetogorsk in Leningrad Region declared his city “free from gays.” He subsequently argued that LGBT issues and rights are irrelevant there, neither an LGBT community nor LGBT people exist in the small city. [...]

One of the effects of Russia’s “propaganda” law was not simply the rise in violence against LGBT people. It also led to more frequent ewspaper publications on LGBT topics, hence public discussion on a topic which still remains taboo for many people. This was not entirely what legislators intended. We benefitted from this situation by researching the details and contexts of violence against LGBT in Russia as they were reported in media. The Sexuality Lab studied almost 4,500 media publications about violence against LGBT people in Russia between 2011 and 2016. We categorised all newspaper articles in accordance with the sexuality of the victims reported and the locations of crimes committed. All cities were then classified by population, making it possible for us to calculate an index of safety for every urban settlement.

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Politico: Bosnia’s Serb Republic leader: No breakaway vote next year

Many politicians, diplomats and analysts believe an independence declaration by the Serb Republic would trigger a new conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and more violence elsewhere in the Balkans as other ethnic groups attempt to redraw national borders. International officials have repeatedly warned Serb Republic leaders against secession, making clear it would be regarded as illegal and would not be recognized by Western powers. [...]

Dodik made clear, however, that he was not taking the prospect of secession off the table. “Whether some of the forthcoming years will raise that issue, we’ll see, I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m sure that we are following that path — the path to independence.” [...]

The possibility of the Serb Republic seceding is one of several challenges to stability in the Balkans, along with continued disputes between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority and Serb leaders in Belgrade, disputes over the rights of Albanians in Macedonia, and allegations of Russian attempts to foment trouble in Montenegro. [...]

Surveys suggest that the majority of the entity’s population favors independence, which some see as a precursor to union with Serbia.

Banja Luka already has the feel of the capital city of a small country, with public institutions lining boulevards, monuments to war dead in the parks, and the Serb Republic’s flag — similar in appearance to Serbia’s — widely on display. Bosnian national flags and symbols are far less common.

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FiveThirtyEight: Data On Drug Use Is Disappearing Just When We Need It Most

Most major researchers believe that source, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, vastly understates the increase in heroin use. But many rely on the survey anyway for a simple reason: It’s the best data they have. Several other sources that researchers once relied on are no longer being updated or have become more difficult to access. The lack of data means researchers, policymakers and public health workers are facing the worst U.S. drug epidemic in a generation without essential information about the nature of the problem or its scale. [...]

Among the key questions that researchers are struggling to answer: Is the recent spike in deaths primarily the result of increased heroin use, or is it also due to the increased potency of the drug, perhaps because of the addition of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can kill in small doses? [...]

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which is an annual household survey, is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Through roughly 70,000 interviews, the survey collects information nationwide on the use of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as Americans’ mental health. Experts who study illicit drugs say the survey is an important source for estimating the number of those who use alcohol, tobacco and, increasingly, cannabis (because of the normalization of marijuana use). But many consider it inadequate for calculating the number of users of harder drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, which carry a greater stigma. Moreover, the survey excludes people without a fixed address, meaning people who are homeless or transient — a category that includes many of the heaviest drug users. These factors lead experts to believe the survey significantly underreports the number of users of hard drugs in the U.S. (A spokesman for SAMHSA said the survey doesn’t capture certain populations, including the homeless, and acknowledged that it faces other “limitations inherent in surveys.”) [...]

The lack of reliable national data is hindering efforts to tackle the spread of heroin, experts say. Some big cities such as New York have embarked on their own data-collection efforts, something the many smaller cities and towns ravaged by heroin overdoses likely can’t afford to do. Researchers say they need the federal government to help fund and coordinate efforts to collect data from local coroner’s offices, emergency rooms and crime labs so that local officials know where and how to direct their efforts. And, more broadly, they say they need a wide range of groups — researchers, public health workers, law enforcement officers, as well as federal, state and local governments — to work together to understand the heroin epidemic and to figure out how to stop it.

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FiveThirtyEight: Maybe Trump Didn’t Remake The Political Map

If we look at all the special elections, it’s interesting to note that Democrats this year have been outperforming their 2016 baseline most in the districts where Clinton underperformed Obama and least in the districts where Clinton outperformed Obama. The latter group tends to include more highly educated, suburban areas that traditionally voted Republican. These places may be growing bluer, but perhaps Clinton did as well as could be hoped for by a Democratic candidate for the time being. In the districts where Clinton didn’t do as well as Obama had, it’s possible that traditional Democratic voters who voted for Trump in 2016 may not be voting for Republicans in 2017. [...]

For starters, it suggests that Democrats should not give up on areas where Clinton did significantly worse than Obama did. Democrats gained a seat in a special state legislative election in New York where Clinton underperformed Obama by 9 points compared with the national vote, for example. Many of the areas where Clinton did worse than Obama and where there was a large swing in the 2017 special elections, like South Carolina 5, have a low percentage of college-educated voters. So perhaps Democrats should continue to try to compete in traditionally competitive districts with fewer college-educated voters — voters that have traditionally gone Democratic, but went for Trump. These voters may have cast a ballot for Trump, but they’ll apparently still pull the Democratic lever, at least when Trump isn’t on the ballot. [...]

More broadly, the results of this year’s special elections suggest — as have some commentators — that Democrats would benefit from a broad House playing field in 2018. When the electoral map is in flux, like it is now, what the partisan baseline is for an individual district — how Democratic is it, compared with the nation as a whole? — isn’t going to be entirely clear. And because Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House, they really can’t afford to leave any stone unturned.

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Katoikos: Analogies between the Ayotzinapa disappearances and the Grenfell Tower fire

In September 2014, the Mexican town of Ayotzinapa became world-famous overnight, when a group of 43 poor, radical and indigenous students from the local teaching college went missing after being attacked by police in Iguala, a town also located in the narco-dominated state of Guerrero. Facts about the students’ fate were scarce, but it was soon abundantly clear that the Government’s story that they had been kidnapped by drug gangs didn’t hang together and that ministers and military figures were protecting whoever was responsible. Demonstrations demanding truth and justice swept the country, and the number 43 quickly came to symbolise all that was corrupt about how the country was run. [...]

All were keen to stress the basic factual distinctions between the two situations. One major difference highlighted by Rod, an economist who has lived in Mexico City for over 30 years, is that in the case of Grenfell there has been no fairy story, no apparent cover-up by the authorities. Although it’s certainly the case that the Daily Mail and Express both tried to scapegoat first an Ethiopian immigrant and then EU environmental regulations for the fire, those explanations were not at the heart of the State’s explanation. Rod points out that while Theresa May took some responsibility for the deaths and, after some prevarication, did visit the site, Enrique Peña-Nieto, the current president of Mexico, avoided doing so altogether. [...]

For Pablo, both events were characterised by a lack of official interest in protecting the most vulnerable, and the public outrage in both cases partly resulted from decades of inequality. Lisa echoes this, highlighting the fact that both disasters happened to people who have no power and who routinely suffer discrimination. She draws a further analogy with the 1989 human crush at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, in the wake of which the families of the victims were routinely smeared and depicted in the tabloid press as subhuman, in part on the basis of a police disinformation campaign.

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Haaretz: It's Only About Them: U.S. Jews' Outrage on the Wall, Silence on the Occupation Is Obscene

Six months later, this controversy has escalated, leading those Reform and Conservative leaders to cancel a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in protest of his abandonment of a deal that promised space for egalitarian worship at the Wall.

Commentators have already made compelling points about the absurdity of U.S. Jews’ surprise at the turn of events. Noam Sheizaf pointed out (U.S. Jews can’t expect Israel to be liberal only where they want it to) the community’s prime mistake: to assume that their interests can be separated from Israeli politics "and therefore shielded from the nativist and xenophobic ideological trends" now dominating Israel. Chemi Shalev wrote (Netanyahu to American Jews: Drop Dead) that U.S. Jews "know all too well that Netanyahu is the greatest enemy of their cherished ideals of pluralism and equality and liberal values...[which they betray] when they support a government they would find abhorrent under any other circumstances." [...]

It is obscene that on the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation, as a quarter of a million West Bank Palestinians were denied entry to Jerusalem to pray and to celebrate during Ramadan, and as Palestinians in Gaza observed their fast and celebrations in the dark, with barely enough clean drinking water or electricity to survive, American Jewish leaders are upset that they can't just drop in for a visit and close a backroom deal with the prime minister. [...]

I cannot count the number of times over the years that I have been told by Jewish establishment leaders that if anti-occupation activists would just use more polite tones and tactics we could finally change things. Now those same American Jewish leaders have found out for themselves how far "behaving nicely"’ gets them with Israel’s government. We already knew that only if we disrupt business as usual can we create real, sustained, public pressure to end the crisis of ongoing American Jewish support for the occupation.

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Slate: Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?

I didn’t plan to do anything at the Republican National Convention last summer beyond shooting some photos. I was there as a photojournalist. But just after landing in Cleveland, as I waited in line to get in, a man in full Thomas Jefferson costume approached me and asked: “Are you Muslim?” I told him yes. He told me Islam was evil.

I’m used to this: People openly stared when I photographed the new World Trade Center being built on assignment in Manhattan. But in Cleveland, when I talked to people—really talked to them—I could tell meeting a real Muslim face to face made some kind of impact.

I’ve come to believe that many Americans are motivated by fear. Fear that I’ll force women to cover themselves. Fear that they’ll be subject to Sharia law. Fear that I’d kill if given the chance. So I’m going to confront those fears, one by one. In “Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?,” a new Slate video series, I’m going to travel and meet with anti-Muslim activists, hostile state legislatures, and my own family to find out if there really is anything to fear about American Muslims.

The New York Review of Books: Myth-Maker of the Brothel

Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but “Utamaro” is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints. He made a living providing pictures of the “floating world” of commercial sex, commissioned by publishers who were paid by the brothel owners. [...]

In all three pictures, there is an almost total absence of men. These are women on display for the eyes of men, no doubt, advertisements for the sexual trade that played such an important part in the merchant culture of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki. [...]

The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.

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