Scene On Radio SeeingWhite: White Affirmative Action

When it comes to U.S. government programs and support earmarked for the benefit of particular racial groups, history is clear. 

White folks have received most of the goodies. By John Biewen, with Deena Hayes-Greene of the Racial Equity Institute and recurring series partner Chenjerai Kumanyika.

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The New Yorker: What Went Wrong in Vietnam (February 26, 2018 Issue)

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it. [...]

The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking. [...]

Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood. In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam. It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia. [...]

The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after 1954 were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.

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Jacobin Magazine: Is Corbyn the Future of the Left?

Indeed without the partial Americanization of the British Labour Party’s leadership election Corbyn would never have become leader. Influenced in part by the model of the US primary system, his predecessor, Ed Miliband, had abolished an electoral college in which parliamentarians, union affiliates, and rank-and-file members each had a third of the vote, and replaced it with a system of one vote for each member or supporter. Anyone who paid £3 (later increased to £25) could sign up as a supporter, and well over a hundred thousand did. Paradoxically, this reform was urged by Tony Blair and his supporters. In the wake of an alleged instance of union malpractice in the selection of a candidate in one particular constituency — an infraction for which the union was subsequently cleared — Ed Miliband, whose own leadership was constantly being destabilized by some of Blair’s supporters, felt he had to show he was being tough on the unions. So consumed was Blair with antipathy towards the unions — organizations which for more than a century had regularly underwritten the control of the Labour right — that he promoted a reform that was bound to produce a more radical intraparty electorate by increasing the pool of activist electors and strengthening the influence of their votes.

But it would be a mistake to overstate the similarities between Britain and the United States. In most respects, British party politics remained fundamentally different. The Labour Party is not merely a label (or a brand) which enables supporters to engage in candidate selection, but an ongoing membership organization for which the unions that founded it continue to provide vital ballast. And the parliamentary nature of the political system in which it operates leaves Corbyn in a far stronger position than a defeated candidate in the United States, by giving him a clear, ongoing, constitutionally recognized role as leader of the opposition (the Prime Minister in waiting) at the head of a government in waiting (the Shadow Cabinet). Moreover, at present this influence is further accentuated, both within the Labour Party and in parliament: within the party because Labour’s unexpectedly strong electoral performance in 2017 has stabilized Corbyn’s position among previously hostile MPs; and within parliament because the election has left the governing Conservative Party, even after reaching an agreement with the small Northern Ireland Unionist Party of the late Ian Paisley, with an extremely narrow parliamentary majority. [...]

There are some similarities in all the English-speaking countries. But they are not a function of Trump and Brexit or Sanders and Corbyn. In each case there has been some shift to the left in political demands — with greater emphasis on economic inequality and corporate malfeasance. In Australia, for example, the trade union movement — which there, too, forms the bedrock of the Labor Party — has launched a huge public advertising campaign arguing that “big business has too much power” and that “it’s time to change the rules.” And, in each case, the long-standing electoral parties of government on the Left are either in power or in reach of power and remain the focal point for the electoral efforts of progressives. But in most cases, their leaders do not hail from the dissenting left. [...]

Different electoral systems no doubt play a role. In the English-speaking countries, all except New Zealand use majoritarian systems. In the recent continental European elections, all except France use proportional representation. The simple majority (first past the post) system in Britain certainly weakens the incentive for discontented Blairite MPs to break away and form a separate party. That approach was tried in the 1980s and its failure is widely understood.

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The Atlantic: Spitting in Europe’s Face Won’t Help Italy

PARIS—It’s time to retire the famous line by the Italian writer Ennio Flaiano, that in Italian politics, the situation is “always grave but never serious.” Today, it’s fair to say the situation is both grave and serious. The implosion on Sunday of a populist governing coalition—after Italy’s president vetoed the coalition’s choice of a euroskeptical economist as finance minister—has achieved three results, none of them good for the stability of Italy or Europe. It’s set Italy on the path to new elections. It’s strengthened the hand of the right-wing, anti-immigrant League party. And it’s turned Italy into a de facto referendum on the euro—an unprecedented development in a core member of the European Union and single currency. [...]

It’s the latest example of a short-circuit that was tripped when the European debt crisis began a decade ago: Mattarella’s move may be good for short-term stability in the European Union, but it’s not great for democracy—which in turn emboldens the populists who increasingly see the bloc as anti-democratic. The appointment of Cottarelli is a gift for the League, whose leader, Matteo Salvini, campaigned all along on a platform of liberating Italy from servitude to Brussels and Berlin. Meanwhile, the leader of the Five-Star Movement, Luigi di Maio, who only days ago said it was up to the president to choose ministers, has now set Italian social media on fire with calls for Mattarella’s impeachment because he intervened in selecting ministers, and has also called for mass mobilizations across Italy “to manifest our right to determine our future.” [...]

But in rejecting Savona, Mattarella had good reasons. He said on Sunday that any conversations about Italy’s membership in the euro should be held in public—especially since euro membership wasn’t an issue for debate in the platform agreed on by the Five-Star Movement and the League for the government they put forth last week. The League’s Salvini has flip-flopped in recent years on whether he wants Italy to stay in the euro. In the past, he’s said he wants a referendum on euro membership; during the campaign, he moderated his tone on the euro but raised it on immigration. Meanwhile, Di Maio of the Five-Star Movement kept quiet on the euro during the campaign, but the movement’s founder, Beppe Grillo, said this month that he wanted a “consultative referendum” on the currency. “It might be a good idea to have two euros, for two more homogeneous economical regions. One for northern Europe and one for southern Europe,” he told Newsweek this month.

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Quartz: Israel’s very popular on Chinese social media—thanks to China’s online Islamophobia

Israel ranks as the foreign mission with the most followers on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, with over 1.9 million people subscribed to its page, according to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the activity of 10 foreign embassy accounts over the three months ended in January. The country’s embassy also had the fourth-highest number of likes per post, behind only the embassies for the US, UK, and Japan, countries with far greater cultural exports and economic ties to China, according to the study’s author, Fergus Ryan, an analyst focusing on cyber policy at the Canberra-based think tank. [...]

Another likely boost to the embassy’s popularity—its followers in China see its social media pages as an outlet for sharing Islamophobic comments, that at times become outright hate speech.

During the three-month study, the most-shared post from the Israeli embassy on Weibo was a nine-sentence message announcing Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The second most-liked comment on the post was “Put the boot into the cancer of humanity”—a likely reference to Muslims. [...]

Anti-Islam sentiment has become widespread on the internet in China, which is home to about 23 million Muslims. Reports about violence in the Xinjiang region, home to China’s closely-surveilled Uighur population, often generate attention, while stories about services geared to Muslims—such as halal food deliveries—generate anger over “affirmative discrimination policies” toward Chinese Muslim minorities.

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The New York Review of Books: A Mythic, Cool America

But there’s also a familiarity to the lesser-known works adorning the walls. Not because British audiences have seen them before; they haven’t—nearly half of the eighty-odd paintings, photographs, and prints in this relatively small, three-room show have never previously been exhibited in the UK, and the yawning gap between the John Singer Sargents and the Jackson Pollocks in the Tate’s collections has left us sorely deprived. All the same, we know exactly what we’re looking at: representations of the mythologies of an “America” that has long inhabited the popular global imagination, from the towering structures of the archetypal modern metropolis to the rustic barns, uniform fields of corn, and white picket fences of prairie farmland. [...]

An education in the work produced by the precisionist artists of the 1920s through the 1940s, the “cool” of the exhibition’s title is a reference to both form and content. The images use sharp, well-defined lines and striking applications of pigment (whether as bold blocks of color or in arresting monochrome). They speak to a desire for a sanitized version of reality that tries to master the anxieties and ambivalences associated with modern life, a need more keenly felt in America, a country then synonymous with certain signifiers of modernity—industrial and technological development on an epic new scale in the form of dams, bridges, factories and skyscrapers—to a degree still alien to her European cousins.

Strange then, or perhaps fitting, that human figures are so often absent in these scenes. They present a remarkably consistent vision of a country eerily devoid of its inhabitants: factories, mills, and water plants without workers, apartment blocks without tenants, cityscapes minus the bustling populace, farms without farmers. Endless images of man-made edifices reduced to hollow testaments to human endeavor and hard labor. It’s the realization of the American Dream without the mess and confusion of actual human life.  

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Quartz: Photos: 25,000 Berliners drown out a fascist rally with techno

The AfD rally of around 5,000 marched from the city’s central station to the Brandenburg Gate, but found themselves outnumbered five to one, and their chants of “we are the people” drowned out by the 25,000 counter-protesters and sound systems blasting music. The counter-demonstration was organized by the “Stop the hatred, stop the AfD” alliance, a broad collection of political parties, unions, and civil society organizations. [...]

Around 100 clubs organized the “Bass Away the AFD” demonstration, with DJs playing on trucks and floats on the Spree river. Berlin has long been known for its dance club culture, and the atmosphere was not unlike the famous German love parade techno festival, which originated in the city. But this time the message was serious: The AfD, with its racism and hatred, has no place in Berlin.

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Politico: ‘Heretic’ in the Vatican

Celebrated by progressives around the world for his push to update and liberalize aspects of church doctrine, Francis is facing fierce blowback from traditionalists who take issue with his openness to Muslim migrants, his concern for the environment and his softer tone on divorce, cohabitation and homosexuality. Opposition has become so heated that some advisers are warning him to tread carefully to avoid a “schism” in the church.

Father Thomas Weinandy, a former chief of staff for the U.S. bishops’ committee on doctrine, has accused Francis of causing “theological anarchy.” Another group of bishops has warned Francis risks spreading “a plague of divorce.” Last fall, more than 200 scholars and priests signed a letter accusing Francis of spreading heresy. “This was not something I did lightly,” Father John Rice, a parish priest in Shaftesbury in the U.K. said, claiming the pope’s liberal push has caused “much division and disagreement, and sadness and confusion in the church.” [...]

By rendering doctrine more ambiguous, Francis is effectively undermining the church’s authority and reducing the role of priests to that of companion and advisers to their parishioners — a thorny issue that dates back to the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s, according to one diplomat. “The battle is between [loyalty to retired Pope] Benedict, vestments, liturgy and rules, and Pope Francis, who wants priests to use their own judgment and humanity in their reading of individual situations,” the diplomat said. [...]

Francis is a “master strategist” who achieves his agenda “by stealth and cunning,” according to the diplomatic observer.  He prefers shuffling people around rather than directly confronting or sacking them. But he has on occasion shown that he doesn’t shy away from direct conflict and has successfully faced down challenges to his authority, instigated by Burke, from the Order of Malta. “He doesn’t back down, he is really tough and steely,” the observer said.

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Reuters: How young Bosnian men are learning to separate masculinity from violence

At 15, Dragan Kisin was beating kids up, drinking, and getting in all sorts of trouble. His father had left home to avoid gambling debts, and his mother was in despair. Then Dragan joined the Be a Man club in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Banja Luka. He is now a community leader and non-violence advocate.

A delicate balance of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Bosnia was torn apart as federal Yugoslavia dissolved. Up to 100,000 people were killed in the 1992-1995 war and an estimated 35,000 women were raped.

Recognising that the widespread sexual violence perpetrated in the war had given rise to a culture of violence and bullying among youth, the Be a Man club brings young men and women together to fight stereotypes and become role models for their peers.

Be a Man is part of CARE International’s Young Men Initiative in the Balkans. The programme, aimed at boys between 13 and 19, was set up to promote gender equality and non-violent relationships in a region still struggling with the legacy of war.