Foreign Policy: Truth First, Reconciliation Later

These insights, offered by regular citizens, have been folded into Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), which held its first trial this week. For the next two years (a tenure the government can extend), the 11 commissioners—apolitical individuals, “of high moral character” from diverse backgrounds—will oversee the televised trials and establish an impartial narrative of what happened in the violent shadows of former President Yahya Jammeh’s regime. They’ll also, more tangibly, produce a report with recommendations on what the government should do on reparations, amnesty, and prosecution—including, potentially, the prosecution of Jammeh himself.

Prosecution tends to be the most important objective for victims. The government’s emphasis, meanwhile, is often on reconciliation. And this isn’t the only fault line—there is also the question of defining victimhood. So far, the word has been used liberally, even to describe those who suffered “pecuniary loss” at the hands of the former regime. But in a country whose poverty was deepened by Jammeh’s avarice, who hasn’t suffered financial loss by his hand? There’s also the challenge of what to do about the victims who, prior to their suffering, were themselves perpetrators. [...]

Historically, according to the Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff, commissions such as this strive to lay out two types of truth: factual truth (establishing what happened) and moral truth (establishing why those things happened and who did them). In places like Chile and Argentina, he argues, the commissions laid out the former while falling short on the latter. [...]

Giving reparations to these complex victims has risks: It could foment resentment, and here, where many victims are elites, it could reinforce suspicions that the system panders to the powerful. Still, there’s a fundamental reason why it should be done: Justice should be equitable. There is room to be creative in how it happens—there could be specialized panels, for example, that have the ability to make innovative recommendations, such as rehabilitation as a form of reparation, as Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast writes.

read the article

The Atlantic: Hungary’s Workers Are the Victims of a Policy That Limits Migration

At the same time, though, Hungarian workers have continued to move out of the country in search of higher wages abroad. As many as 600,000 Hungarians—equivalent to around 9 percent of the working-age population—work outside of Hungary, and Orbán’s refusal to countenance immigrants filling the void has only made this shortfall more acute. In December, the government rushed legislation through Parliament to try to address this shortage. The new measures give businesses the right to require employees to work up to 400 hours of overtime a year, nearly twice as much as was previously allowed, and demand only that employers pay for that overtime at some point within three years. Simply put, employers can make their employees work more, and not have to pay them until later. The government maintains that these overtime hours remain voluntary and at the discretion of the employee, but many workers and trade unions argue that they have little choice in the matter.[...]

In recent years, the Hungarian leader has successfully circumscribed the media and single-handedly rewritten the constitution to cement his political control (with more changes promised). His government has also stacked previously independent institutions with loyal allies—another law passed in December allows the justice minister to handpick judges in administrative courts, drastically hindering judicial independence. Orbán’s election victory last year gave him a new mandate and renewed momentum to push his agenda. Opposing political parties were weak and fractured, and any popular protest attempts to challenge him had been sporadic and ineffective. The “slave law” appears to have changed that dynamic, though, highlighting not only Orbán’s intransigence when it comes to allowing in immigrants, but also the few levers available to his government to address the labor shortage.

To some extent, Orbán’s reliance on economic growth to counter his opponents is itself a dangerous strategy. While wages have been slowly increasing, partly thanks to economic growth and partly because of the labor shortage, the average Hungarian still makes only barely half that of the average person in Austria, a country that shares a border with Hungary (and that, a century ago, shared an empire). There are also reports that while Hungary’s overall economic indicators are improving, unemployment figures in particular appear to be buffeted by a state-run public-works program that employs large numbers of people.  [...]

Other countries have turned to immigration to address labor shortages. In fact, Hungary is not alone among Central European countries in facing such a problem. Poland, like Hungary, has vocally opposed the EU’s migrant quotas, for example, yet it has brought in thousands of Ukrainian workers fleeing that country’s conflict. And still, Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, suggested in July that he would consider relaxing the country’s opposition to immigration, telling reporters, “If there is a demand on the labor market which Poles are unable or unwilling to meet, we need to take up the challenge so that we maintain our economic growth.”

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: From Reform to Revolution

Dilemma Before seeking the proto-Nazi Freikorps’ support to crack down on the rising insurrectionary forces in Germany, Ebert reportedly declared “I hate revolution like a mortal sin.” But for Luxemburg reform and revolution had never been opposites: they complemented each other. At the age of twenty-seven, she had established herself as a major figure in the Second International by offering one of the most comprehensive, coherent, and devastating criticisms to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist call to prioritize the method of reform to that of revolution. A close friend and collaborator of Engels, a Marxist of impeccable credentials but also a pioneering advocate of gay rights, Bernstein was also the first to articulate a nonrevolutionary path to socialism in what is widely considered the founding text of modern social democracy: The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899). Bernstein’s position had been explicitly discussed (and rejected) at the Stuttgart Conference of the German Social Democratic Party (1898) and is succinctly captured by his famous statement: “the final goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything.” This, Luxemburg emphasized, was a false dilemma. “Can Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not.” At stake in Bernstein’s dilemma, she argued, was not just a tactical choice, a mere discussion about this or that method of struggle; it was the “very existence of the Social Democratic movement” as a distinctive force in the struggle against capitalism. [...]

Bernstein insisted that dialectics demanded that scientific findings be reconsidered in light of new empirical results. And in the circumstances of the nineteenth century, capitalism had shown a surprising capacity for adaptation. From the perspective of economic theory there were a number of new developments with which Marxists had to reckon: the intensification of foreign trade, the expansion of the banking and financial sector, the development of the credit system, the consolidation of middle classes, the rise of property owners, and the emergence of cartels and trusts. Together, they meant that economic crises would no longer take the inevitably destructive form Marx had anticipated. [...]

Luxemburg’s core insight is that the expansion of capital in noncapitalist areas of the world by way of conquest, trade, violence, and deception provides precisely such outlet. Cheap mass-produced goods that struggle to be sold in the markets of developed capitalist states because of low patterns of consumption become available in other areas of the world. They create investment opportunities that displace traditional ways of organizing economic life and destroy predominantly agricultural forms of production. They also bring in technological innovations and modernizing projects that modify existing relations of authority and reshape forms of class conflict different from the capitalist one.[...]

It is important, however, to understand that Luxemburg did not oppose representation in parliament or the fight for trade union and democratic-type reforms. This is particularly clear if one considers her writings on women’s suffrage, which are also an important antidote to the received wisdom among feminists that, unlike her friend and collaborator Clara Zetkin, Luxemburg was largely uninterested in the question of women’s emancipation. Rather, her point was that both the demand for social rights obtained through parliamentary representation and the demand for women’s emancipation ought to be integrated in a more radical critique of capitalism where the key is access to political power and a radical transformation of both the economic and the political structures of society. Just as there could be no progressive national emancipation within capitalism, there could be no gender and racial emancipation either.

read the article

Pindex: Brexit 2: May & Trump vs Truth, with Stephen Fry

The Guardian: Who's afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Their fear is not irrational. Ocasio-Cortez has been using Twitter masterfully, as a way of directing the national political conversation. The Politico article compares her technique to that of Donald Trump, and this isn’t completely wrong: the president has long used his Twitter account to keep the media talking about whatever he wants them to be talking about. Democrats have long failed to keep pace – they end up reacting to whatever Trump says, rather than setting the agenda themselves. In Ocasio-Cortez we see (at last!) what it might look like for lefties to retake control – to begin talking about what we want to talk about rather than whatever nonsense Trump is spewing this week. [...]

If Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t made the remark, there would be no discussion. But she did, and so now there’s a discussion! Now Nobel prize winners are publicly pointing out that high taxes are good, and moderate Democrats are being pressured to endorse “radical” ideas. As the New York Times reported, she is pushing the Democrats to the left whether they like it or not. She has realized what Republicans have known for a long time: if people are talking about your agenda, even if they’re talking about how bad and silly it is, you are making that agenda more plausible. (It’s often called “shifting the Overton window”.) Yes, the National Review will squeal that X tax hike won’t be enough to pay for Y program. But you have got them on the defensive. [...]

This is concerning, of course. In order to get Democrats in Congress to move left, there have to be primary threats. This, historically, is one way socialists have won victories in the United States: they have forced the major political parties to move leftward in order to neutralize the socialist threat. It’s not surprising that Ocasio-Cortez is being asked not to “undermine” fellow Democrats, but it’s encouraging that so far she seems to be going her own way. Politico says that while she is cordial to her fellow party members, she does not give in: [...]

Conservatives cannot stop talking about Ocasio-Cortez. Sean Hannity literally repeats her agenda on live television and then thinks he’s the one winning! She drives them up the wall, and it’s fantastic. But there’s one person who never mentions her: Donald Trump. Strange, isn’t it? Trump mocks everyone on Twitter. But he has never once sent a tweet about her, even though they both have major presences on the platform. I suspect I know exactly why: he realizes that she’s better at this than him. He may be able to make jokes at the expense of Elizabeth Warren, but Ocasio-Cortez is better at online repartee than almost anyone else. He is wise to keep away from tangling with her. Just recently, when Joe Lieberman made a patronizing comment about Ocasio-Cortez not representing the future of the party, she gave a brief but devastating retort that made him look like an out-of-touch fogey. (I doubt he even understood it.)

read the article

Politico: Poland’s ruling party will exploit Gdańsk murder

The government’s plea is self-serving. While there is no evidence that Law and Justice was in any way involved in the murder of Adamowicz, the murder of one of the party's most vocal critics has created an atmosphere of fear and emergency that it is likely to exploit to accelerate its near-total takeover of independent institutions and do away with what’s left of Poland’s democracy. [...]

Indeed, it is laughably naïve to assume that the purged public prosecution service will conduct a thoroughly honest investigation. Just a few months ago, it leveled absurd criminal tax fraud charges against Adamowicz in a thinly veiled attempt to derail his bid for a sixth term as mayor of Gdańsk, where he was a highly popular — and vocally anti-government — figure. [...]

The somber reality is that two centers of the liberal opposition, independent city mayors and secular civil society, were targeted Sunday. Both Adamowicz and the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity — Poland’s largest annual charity drive organized outside of the Catholic Church — have been subjected to a relentless hate campaign by state-owned media and increasing harassment by Polish authorities. Gdańsk’s city hall was also under near constant monitoring by the government-controlled anti-corruption bureau. [...]

From the Reichstag fire to Turkey’s attempted military coup in 2016, history offers an abundance of cases when a sense of emergency is ruthlessly leveraged by an aspiring authoritarian regime to consolidate power. The mechanism is always the same: fear-induced unity silences the opposition and legitimizes a heavy-handed response by the government.

read the article

Vox: Theresa May lost the Brexit vote because Brexit was a lie

May’s defeat should dispel any illusion that there is a happy ending to the Brexit story. The truth of the matter is that the project that defined May’s premiership — negotiating a Brexit deal acceptable to both the EU and pro-Brexit legislators in her Conservative Party — was structurally impossible. The terms on which Conservative Brexiteers wanted to leave the EU were not acceptable to EU negotiators, and the compromises necessary to bring EU negotiators on board were not acceptable to Conservative Brexiteers. No amount of negotiating could address this dilemma. [...]

That’s obviously not what happened. The Leave campaign won principally by manipulating British xenophobia, but also by making a series of grandiose promises: Britain wouldn’t be hurt economically by quitting the EU’s common market; in fact, it would stand to regain hundreds of millions of dollars a week to spend on its health care system. Britain would have no problem getting out of shared EU regulations; Brexit would “take back control” of the legal system. [...]

The fundamental and insurmountable problem is that Brexit was premised on a fantasy — a painless withdrawal from the European Union — that no prime minister could have delivered. Theresa May is no one’s idea of a great negotiator, but her fundamental project — a negotiated settlement to the Brexit situation — was doomed for structural reasons beyond her control.[...]

Realistically, either no deal or a second referendum is the most likely alternative. Sure, Britain and the EU could agree to postpone the March 29 Brexit deadline, but it’s not clear what future negotiations could accomplish. It’s been two and a half years since the Brexit vote, and no one has come close to figuring out how to resolve the fundamental tension between what British Brexiteers demand and what the EU can live with. Their best attempt just went down in flames.

read the article

Politico: How the Brexit vote was lost

Theresa May's Brexit deal was defeated by 432 votes to 202 — a majority of 230. Scores of her own backbenchers rejected the deal, but she did pick up a handful of opposition votes.

Using POLITICO Pro Intelligence, we've analyzed how the vote was lost.

see the map and the graphs

Reuters: Explainer: Where do the Kurds fit into Syria's war?

The main Syrian Kurdish faction, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), began to establish a foothold in the north early in the war as government forces withdrew to put down the anti-Assad uprising elsewhere. An affiliated militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), secured the region. [...]

SDF influence widened to Manbij and Raqqa as IS was defeated in both. It has also reached deep into Deir al-Zor, where the SDF is still fighting IS. The SDF, which also includes Arab and other groups, says it has more than 70,000 fighters. [...]

The PYD is heavily influenced by the ideas of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 34-year insurgency in Turkey for Kurdish political and cultural rights. Ocalan has been in jail since 1999 in Turkey. He is convicted of treason.[...]

Syria’s Baathist state systematically oppressed the Kurds before the war. Yet the YPG and Damascus have broadly stayed out of each other’s way during the conflict, despite occasional clashes. They also have been seen to cooperate against shared foes, notably in and around Aleppo.  

read the article