openDemocracy: Scandinavian Nazis on the march again

A majority of the demonstrating neo-Nazis in Kristiansand this summer were in fact not Norwegian, but Swedish. They were hard-core members of a violent neo-Nazi outfit which goes under the name of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Den Nordiska Motstandsbevegelsen, DNM). In Sweden, this movement has a particularly strong organization in the largely rural province of Dalarna. [...]

In Sweden and in Finland, members of this movement has been involved in murders of immigrants and anti-racist campaigners, and in murderous arson attacks on asylum reception centers. Key members of this movement are known to have undergone military training with Russian ultra-nationalist forces.  A joint investigation by Filter Media in Norway and Expo in Sweden found that among the Swedish neo-Nazis demonstrators in Kristiansand there were individuals with criminal records relating to violent assaults on police, immigrants and anti-racist activists. [...]

The neo-Nazi march in Kristiansand happened on the watch of a Progress Party Minister of Justice, Per-Willy Amundsen, who in his former days as an MP had a long and sustained record of whipping up popular sentiment against immigrants and Muslims in Norway. Six years ago, Amundsen, then an MP, went on record as approving a fellow party politician who had drawn an analogy between Islam and Nazism.  Amundsen is surrounded by cabinet ministers from his own party some of whom have in the course of the past four years been caught greeting well-known Norwegian right-wing extremists with a friendly ‘good night, and thank you’ on their open Facebook pages, and sharing Facebook posts from a British right-wing extremist organization, Britain First .

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Haaretz: Revealed: Nearly 3,500 Settlement Homes Built on Private Palestinian Land

There are 3,455 residential and public buildings built on private Palestinian lands in the West Bank, according to Civil Administration data. These illegal structures could be legalized under the expropriation law, whose validity is now being determined by the High Court of Justice in response to Palestinian petitions against the law. [...]

The law allows the state to expropriate Palestinian lands on which settlements or outposts were built “in good faith or at the state’s instruction,” and deny its owners the right to use those lands until there is a diplomatic resolution of the status of the territories. The measure provides a mechanism for compensating Palestinians whose lands are seized.

According to the Civil Administration, the 3,455 structures fall into three categories. The first includes 1,285 structures that are clearly private land. These are structures built during the past 20 years on land that was never defined as state land and all have had demolition orders issued against them. The second category comprises 1,048 structures that were built on private land that had earlier been erroneously designated state land. The third category contains 1,122 structures that were built more than 20 years ago, during a period when planning laws were barely enforced in the West Bank.[...]

Of the 1,285 structures built on clearly private land, 543 are built on what the Civil Administration calls “regularized private land,” meaning lands whose owners are known and whose ownership is formally registered. The other homes are built on lands recognized as private after aerial photos proved that these lands had been cultivated over the years, but there is no definitive registry of who was cultivating them. Cultivating land establishes ownership in the West Bank in accordance with the Ottoman-era laws that still prevail there.

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Politico: Viktor Orbán courts voters beyond ‘fortress Hungary’

Hungary’s parliament is selected using a mixed system, whereby some MPs are elected through single-member districts and others through party lists. Citizens in surrounding countries don’t have districts — but they may cast a vote for a party list. [...]

With Romania preparing to celebrate the centenary of its creation in its modern-day form, heightened tensions over minority language and cultural rights are dominating many conversations.

And with Romania’s presidential election and the European Parliament election coming up in 2019 — plus a lack of progress on raising living standards — there are fears that local politicians may resort to nationalist rhetoric as a political tactic. [...]

Fidesz works closely with some local Hungarian groups, and the government in Budapest funds a wide range of projects in the region, from language education and the arts to voter registration drives. Thus far, its efforts have paid off: In Hungary’s 2014 election, over 95 percent of votes cast by non-domestic citizens went to Fidesz. [...]

Each year, Orbán’s most important policy speech takes place not in Hungary, but across the border in Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad in Romanian) where Fidesz has been organizing a summer camp for the past 28 years. And when his party came to power in 2010, one of the first major policy changes Orbán implemented was extending citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in surrounding countries — a policy move that left-wing parties campaigned against during a 2004 referendum.

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The Conversation: Beyond bollards: protecting crowded places means not letting the exceptional become the norm

Terrorists have significantly changed their modus operandi in the new millennium. Until 2001, vehicle-borne devices targeting major financial or political centres used to be the hallmarks of international urban terrorism. These have more recently been superseded by person-borne devices – especially suicide attacks – and subsequently Fedayeen-style mass shootings, targeting of crowds with fast-moving vehicles, as well as low-tech, difficult-to-defend knife attacks. [...]

Many have advocated the use of crime-prevention ideas for dealing with the terrorist threat. These manipulate the built environment to reduce the attractiveness and physical access to target places while increasing the likelihood of being caught. In essence this means the mass use of security bollards and high-visibility policing.

While this might reassure many citizens, the emphasis on structures and deterrence models has limited use. Terrorists seeking martyrdom could simply move to other locations that are not as well defended. [...]

The fourth issue relates to aesthetics. Over recent decades, urban revitalisation has increasingly emphasised inclusivity, liveability and accessibility. These “quality of life” values sit uneasily beside concerns to “design out terrorism” as security becomes part of the design process. [...]

More broadly, counter-terrorism measures deployed in crowded public places must seek to balance security effectiveness with social and political acceptability. We live in dangerous times, but how we react to the risk of terrorism will have impacts on our public realm for many years. In many ways the threat to cities comes as much from our policy responses as the actual act of terrorism. Both have the potential to harm the freedom of movement and expression that define a vibrant city.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Big Is The Bannon Wing Of The Republican Party?

Before we delve into the numbers, let’s first define what we mean by the “Bannon wing.” Generally, we’re talking about a more populist, nationalist and isolationist brand of Republicanism. More specifically, Trump voters who are pro-police, against free trade, against the U.S. playing an active role (militarily and diplomatically) in the international community, strongly against illegal immigration, and in favor of more infrastructure spending. There are obviously other parts of Bannon’s agenda, but these are among the defining features that help separate it from other wings within the Republican Party. [...]

Among Trump voters, approximately 15 percent supported all five positions, including a B or better for their local police. So let’s call this 15 percent the “core Bannon” voter. This isn’t a particularly large group. On its own, for example, it’s not enough to win a Republican primary. But it’s certainly big enough that Trump needs its continued support in order to survive a serious primary challenge in 2020 (if one arises). Remember Trump won only 45 percent of the national primary vote in 2016. To put this 15 percent in some additional perspective, the percentage of Hillary Clinton voters who were Hispanic in the general election, an important part of her coalition, was about 12 percent. [...]

About 50 percent of all Trump voters fall into Group No. 1 — they want the U.S. to be less active on the world stage. The pull of this group shouldn’t be too surprising given that even Clinton was forced to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Trump made a point during the primary campaign of (falsely) claiming that he always opposed the Iraq War.

Group No. 2, nationalist Bannon-ites, make up about 45 percent of Trump voters, people who want to identify and deport all immigrants in the country illegally and give their local police a grade of above average or better. Trump’s appeal clearly went beyond voters with hardline positions on policing and immigration — issues that represented the starkest contrast with Clinton. But cultural conservatives are a substantial portion of Trump’s coalition.

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The Atlantic: How to Repurpose a Bad Statue

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, so did many of its statues, often in giddy, nighttime topplings—most notably, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the ruthless Soviet secret police. These were often joyous, cathartic events, quick and tangible symbols of the end of a brutal and moribund regime, when everything else was changing far more slowly. In Moscow, the statues were then dragged to a grassy lot next to the brutalist Central House of Artists on an island in the middle of the Moscow River. For years, they lay there on the ground, a kind of graveyard of Lenins and Soviet crests and anonymous workers and peasants shorn of their pedestals. In recent years, the city of Moscow has turned them upright—and into an outdoor sculpture garden where the statues can be seen for the ghosts that they are. (I have walked past the garden many times, but found it hard to take interest in what were essentially tombstones with no graves beneath them: Unlike the long-overdue removal of Confederate statues, the removal of Soviet statues in Russia proved superficial and the celebration premature. The statues were yanked down, but the Soviet state didn’t really go anywhere; even the melody of the national anthem is the same.)

In 1997, Taiwan did a similar thing with the statues of nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Jing-guo. Their likenesses were put into a green park on the bank of a lake, the Cihu Memorial Statues Park. Each statue has a description of where it originally stood. These parks deprive the statues of their context and their power; they may look like a brutal dictator, but here they are just stone.

There’s a reason statues can rouse such angry passions. They are designed to evoke emotion and memory in monumental terms. That’s the whole point. But they are not just symbols of what a society has decided is important. Often, they also serve as embodiments of the state, reminders of its presence even when one of its enforcers can’t be there. A statue can be an inanimate chunk of rock or metal in loco parentis. The Confederate statues, many of which went up well after the Civil War, were reminders of who was in charge, symbols not of an old master, but a new one: Jim Crow. Which is why statues can often become flashpoints of conflict, as they did in Eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan revolution and Russian invasion of 2014. Ukrainians gleefully toppled Lenins all over their country, eager to shed their Soviet, Moscow-dominated past, and to move into the future. At the height of the Arab Spring, protestors in places like Syria defaced and brought down statues to the still-living dictators they couldn’t always topple.

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is Trump Country?

Over the past few decades, the top 10% of income earners in the US have appropriated from the bottom 90% an amount of wealth four times greater than the American government’s debt to foreign countries. The majority of Trump’s supporters are within this top decile. [...]

Exit polls are imperfect. But according to the exit data we have, Trump did poorly among voters making less than $50,000 a year (roughly the poorest half of US society); Clinton won this group by roughly 11%.

Trump’s gains appear to have come mostly from the top half of income earners. In 2008, Obama and McCain each received 49% of the vote from people making more than $50,000. In 2016, Trump bested Clinton by 4% in the $50,000–100,000 income bracket, by 1% in the $100,000–200,000 bracket, by 1% in the $200,000–250,000 bracket, and by 2% among those earning more than $250,000. [...]

In America, the top 10% amounts to around 30 million people. A 2% gain among this politically influential group would be immense, especially in an election where Trump lost the popular vote by three million. [...]

For their part, wealthy Trump supporters appear suspicious of the value system that emerged alongside neoliberalization, favoring instead an intransigent conservatism and a less financialized capitalism. These wealthy Trump supporters, who formed the base of his support, are citizens neither of Paris nor Pittsburgh. They live in counties like Putnam and Suffolk: they’re white Americans upset that other Americans are no longer working for them, Americans whose wealth, status, and power have ostensibly been attacked and eroded over the past few decades. And they want it back — with the help of Donald Trump.

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The New York Review of Books: What Makes a Terrorist?

Instead, it is better to think of radicalization as a phenomenon in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Multiple factors interact in complex ways that cause radicalization to emerge in individual people and groups. As with other complex systems, such as ecosystems, removing one factor does not cause the system to collapse but instead to evolve in ways that may be positive or negative. In the jihadist movement there have been many small tipping points, including the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war of 2011—each of which mobilized a new generation of fighters.

Profiles of jihadists have evolved over the years. Generally, revolutionary movements attract different kinds of recruits at different stages in their development. Many of the founders and leaders of the modern jihadist movement were educated members of the upper-middle or upper classes. Even many early foot soldiers were of above-average socio-economic status. Research on recruits to jihadist groups using data from the 1970s to 2010 found that members of these groups were six times more likely than the general population to have a bachelor’s degree. In the Middle East, engineering schools are often the most competitive programs and only take the best and brightest students; jihadists were seventeen times more likely to have an engineering degree. [...]

But as ISIS’s goals continued to evolve so too did their recruits. Few women from Europe ventured to Syria in the early days of the conflict, but by 2014 one in seven European foreign fighters were women, and by 2016 that number had jumped to one in three. Women didn’t become more vulnerable to radicalization over that period—instead, they were targeted for radicalization. Until 2014, ISIS’s local insurgency demanded mostly young men of fighting capacity and thus had little need for women. In June 2014, ISIS declared its so-called Caliphate and shifted its focus to state-building. In order to legitimize that state, the immigration of women, children, and families was explicitly sought after. Once the women arrived they began recruiting female friends, family members, and strangers over the Internet to pull in more “lionesses,” as they were often called, leading to the jump seen in 2016.

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Vox: California has a climate problem, and its name is cars

The state’s pursuit of advanced energy has also yielded an employment bonanza. For every job in fossil fuels, the state boasts 8.5 jobs in renewable energy. And an innovation bonanza: California leads the 50 states in patents in most areas of clean energy.

Perhaps the most notable success of all is California’s incredible progress in becoming more energy-productive — that is, in squeezing more GDP out of every unit of energy consumed. It has recently become the most energy-productive major economy in the world. [...]

The culprit for the slowing decline is a spike in transportation emissions. There was a dip in transportation emissions starting around 2008, with the recession. And though vehicles have gotten more efficient and more hybrids and EVs are on the road since then, the number of vehicles and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have begun rising again, overwhelming efficiency gains. [...]

The other solution to passenger vehicles is reducing commuting times by solving that housing crisis, and getting people out of their cars by increasing infill and density via building out proper public transportation systems (which themselves will need to be electrified). Unfortunately, cheap gasoline lately has meant a decline in per capita public transportation use in almost every major California city.

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