The Conversation: What happened to German prisoners of war in Britain after Hitler’s defeat (June 8, 2017)

By September 1946, more than a year after the end of World War II, 402,000 German POWs were still being held in camps stretching across Britain. They were set to work on tasks including road repair and brickmaking. POWs swept up the rubbish after VE day celebrations and helped construct Wembley Way for the 1948 Olympics. In March 1947, 170,000 were working in agriculture, helping farmers bring in the harvest.

International law stipulated that POWs should be repatriated after a peace treaty was signed, but with Germany occupied, a peace treaty was a remote possibility. So Britain kept its German POWs – who were proving useful as a labour force – without announcing when they might be sent home. The practical issue of arranging transports hindered plans; at the same time, repatriating ardent Nazis among the POWs was considered imprudent. [...]

Public dissatisfaction was formally expressed in August 1946 when Save Europe Now, a post-war pressure group, sent a petition to then-prime minister, Clement Attlee. Attlee soon announced that 15,000 POWs would be repatriated per month. While this was celebrated, criticism of the slowness of repatriation continued until it was completed in 1948.

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The New York Review of Books: The Suffocation of Democracy

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. [...]

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph. [...]

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

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Vox: The legacy of India’s quest to sterilise millions of men

The mass sterilisation drive of 1976 was one of the most infamous incidents of the 21-month period known as the “Emergency,” which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared the year prior, suspending the Indian constitution. Gandhi justified her decision to dissolve human rights protections by citing internal security disturbances and a need to uplift the underprivileged. She implemented welfare-style programmes, gave land to those without property, and artificially lowered the price of some basic goods to make them more affordable. But these policies, ostensibly meant to help poor people, often included a coercive element. In some parts of the country, poor men and women were offered plots of land in exchange for getting sterilised, or for “motivating” others to do so. [...]

Years before the Emergency, the US government began to put pressure on Indira Gandhi to pursue a more aggressive policy on population control. The Lyndon B Johnson administration was concerned that population growth was a threat to trade and national security, a view that was largely due to a powerful lobbying campaign backed by corporate funders, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shell Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. [...]

Vasectomy was a safer procedure than tubectomy, especially at the time, and it required less recovery time and follow-up. But Indian men were also seen as easier to target and reach than women were. Dudley Kirk, the director of the Population Council’s demographic division, wrote that, “particularly in Asian countries,” men were “the logical channels of information and communication [who] regard themselves as the initiators responsible for family destiny.” Thus, Kirk concluded, “a programme to motivate men would be more successful than efforts to motivate women.” [...]

More than four decades after the Emergency, the shift away from men during the backlash has never rebalanced. Today, conventional wisdom among health workers in India suggests that men simply aren’t interested in family planning. But some experts think the blame doesn’t rest entirely on disinterested men: health care workers, too, generally focus only on women. The Indian government’s 2017 statistics showed significantly more female than male community health care workers in every state and district surveyed, with especially drastic differences in some areas. A recent study suggests that reproductive health care would improve for both men and women if more male workers were employed in community health care.

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PolyMatter: Why China Ended its One-Child Policy

China has huge ambitions for the 21st century. But it’s demographic problems will be a significant challenge on the way there.

The Atlantic: Something Went Wrong in Chicago

The verdict was a rare example of a white police officer being convicted of murder for killing a black person. This outcome might tempt some to say that the system finally worked. But really the opposite is true. The system is designed to exonerate police who abuse their authority, not convict them. The system tried to protect Van Dyke, and it failed.

Despite the fact that the shooting happened in 2014, it did not rocket into national consciousness until 13 months later, when video finally emerged after a prolonged public-records battle. The footage showed Van Dyke firing his weapon into McDonald as he lay motionless on the ground. The system tried to prevent that: Rahm Emanuel, the city’s Democratic mayor and former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, attempted to suppress the video, and was successful in doing so, at least until after his reelection campaign, when a court forced its release. [...]

The evidence against Van Dyke was overwhelming, but that was no reason to assume that he would be convicted. According to the Chicago Tribune, a Chicago police officer hasn’t been convicted of murder in “half a century.” The New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo was never charged in the death of Eric Garner, despite video of him choking Garner to death. The Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann was never charged for killing 12-year-old Tamir Rice, despite the video showing him firing only moments after pulling up to the scene. The Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in the shooting of Philando Castile as he reached for his identification, despite video showing the aftermath of the confrontation. These are all examples of the system working, because this is what the system is actually designed to do: provide impunity to police, no matter what harm the police causes.

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The Atlantic: What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.[...]

Sokal Squared doesn’t just expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck, though. It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals. This tendency becomes most evident in an article that advocates extreme measures to redress the “privilege” of white students. Exhorting college professors to enact forms of “experiential reparations,” the paper suggests telling privileged students to stay silent, or even binding them to the floor in chains.[...]

These attacks are empirically incorrect and intellectually dishonest. There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense. While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race, gender, and identity, they have not penetrated the leading journals of more traditional disciplines. As a number of academics pointed out on Twitter, for example, all of the papers submitted to sociology journals were rejected. For now, it remains unlikely that the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review would have fallen for anything resembling “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” a paper modeled on the infamous book with a similar title. [...]

But if we are to be serious about remedying discrimination, racism, and sexism, we can’t ignore the uncomfortable truth these hoaxers have revealed: Some academic emperors—the ones who supposedly have the most to say about these crucial topics—have no clothes.

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Vox: White evangelicals are the only religious group to support Trump

Trump’s standing among white evangelicals has remained virtually unchanged at 71 percent, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll conducted in late August and early September. [...]

White evangelicals remain the only religious group in America to view Trump favorably according to the poll. While white mainline Protestants — which include historically progressive denominations like Episcopalians and Presbyterians — remain about evenly split over Trump, other religious demographics overwhelmingly say they view his presidency negatively. Fifty-nine percent of Catholics and a full 75 percent of black Protestants view Trump negatively, as do 65 percent of the religiously unaffiliated. [...]

Jones told Vox that religious and ethnic identity have been reliable predictors of political partisanship since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “Since Reagan, the basic religious landscape has been very consistent,” he said. White Christian groups — evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics — have tended to support the Republican candidate, while black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, the religiously unaffiliated, and other ethno-religious groups lean Democratic.

However, Jones says, we’re seeing a shift away from Trump in one religious demographic: white mainline Protestants, among the most centrist voters. Historically progressive, white mainline voters have tended to vote for Republican candidates by a slight majority. Since Trump’s inauguration, however, white mainline Protestant support for Trump has dropped by a full 9 points, to 48 percent.

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Atlantic Council: Back to the Bad Old Days in Kyiv

As horrible as the attack on Gusovsky was, it represents just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning of 2017, more than fifty-five attacks have occurred against anticorruption activists and now reform-minded politicians.

And to make matters worse, not only are the perpetrators rarely caught (they were in Gusovsky's case), but Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko—perhaps giving new meaning to the word chutzpah—actually blamed activists for their suffering, implying that civil society's noisy criticism of Ukraine's corrupt old guard was a major contributing factor to the violence directed against them.[...]

Not everyone sees a direct tie to the elections, however. Some argue that post-Maidan Ukraine's inability to fundamentally reform the police, prosecutors, and judicial system has allowed corrupt local mafia clans which thrived under former President Yanukovych to bounce back and act with impunity. And when it comes to Odesa, reformist MP Mustafa Nayyem even warned that national security concerns are at stake and that the Ukrainian state risks seeing the city slip under the control of Russian-supported local elites around Odesa's notoriously corrupt mayor Gennady Trukhanov.[...]

For starters, the West should use its financial leverage against Kyiv and make clear to Poroshenko and those around him that unless they start solving the assaults against anticorruption activists, the financial spigot will be turned off. 

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