Jacobin Magazine: Fascisms Old and New

The new right is nationalist, racist, and xenophobic. In most Western European countries, at least those where the radical right is in power or has grown significantly stronger, it adopts a democratic and republican rhetoric. It has changed its language, its ideology, and its style. [...]

On the one hand, the new far right is no longer fascist; on the other hand, we cannot define it without comparing it with fascism. The new right is a hybrid thing that might return to fascism, or it could turn into a new form of conservative, authoritarian, populist democracy. The concept of post-fascism tries to capture this.[...]

The National Front is no longer a movement of nostalgic harbingers of French Algeria; it now depicts itself as a defender of French national identity threatened by globalization, mass immigration, and Islamic fundamentalism. This neocolonial posture can include republican and “progressive” habits: on the one hand, they wish to preserve the Christian roots of France and Europe against the Islamic “invasion”; on the other, they pretend to defend human rights (sometimes even of women and gays) against Islamic obscurantism. [...]

For instance, the radical form of neoliberalism endorsed by Bolsonaro is unknown in Europe, where post-fascism is fueled by anger and discontent with the neoliberal policies of the EU. From this point of view, it seems to me that a fundamental premise for the rise of post-fascism lies in the lack of a left-wing alternative to neoliberalism. [...]

As many observers pointed out, Trump exhibits typical fascist features: authoritarian and charismatic leadership, hatred of democracy, contempt for law, exhibitions of force, scorn for human rights, open racism, misogyny, homophobia. But there is no fascist movement behind him. He was elected as the candidate of the Republican Party, which is a pillar of the American political establishment. This paradoxical situation cannot become permanent without putting into question the democratic framework of the United States.

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The New York Review of Books: The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of “Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”

Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think, to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a ubiquitous, self-evident assumption. [...]

Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich. [...]

The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism, by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism. The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular, materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war, assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.

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UnHerd: It’s time to tax the super rich

When asked how she intended to fund her Green New Deal, she noted that tax wouldn’t be such a crazy idea; the top marginal tax rate for much of America’s history had been around the 60-70% mark and perhaps the “tippy-top” earners on “$10,000,000 or more” ought to pay that much again. Income inequality in the US now exceeds what it was in the 1920s; only the top 1% have seen any real wage growth in the last 30 years, and it’s among the 0.1% that the increase is most pronounced. If you are in that micro-percentile, you can expect to earn 198 times what someone in the bottom 10% earns.

Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate and Democratic senator from Massachusetts, proposed a wealth tax on “ultra-millionaires” – 2% on accumulated wealth greater than $50,000,000, and 3% on wealth greater than $1,000,000,000. (I find writing out the actual numbers much more expressive than the near-euphemistic “million” and “billion”; more comparable to what each of us see when we check our online bank accounts). [...]

Ever since, the trend has been for top rate of income tax to fall – and for inequality to widen. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she dropped the top rate from 83% to 60%. It fell further to 40% under Labour, went back up to 50% after the crash, before George Osborne cut it back from 50% to 45% (with no concomitant easing of his austerity agenda). Osborne later boasted that the measure had recouped £8 billion – apparently because so many top-earners had decided to keep their money in the country. Closer analysis suggest this was more likely the result of clever accounting on the part of the rich (deferring payment from one year to the next) and the actual effect was minimal.[...]

But it’s also true that setting your tax rate low can be utterly disastrous. The infamous Kansas Experiment saw Republican governor Sam Brownback eliminate state income tax and slash taxes for the highest earners in an attempt to boost investment. It resulted in a complete collapse in state revenues, school closures, prison riots, and subsequent shamefaced capitulation. It turns out that sometimes, asking people for less money means that you receive less money.

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Social Europe: Does the European Union generate external instability?

But creating geopolitical stability internally has not, during the last two decades, been followed by external geopolitical stability along the fringes of the union. Most of the big EU member states (UK, Poland, Italy, Spain) participated, often eagerly, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which led to the deaths of some half a million people, destabilised the middle east even further and produced Islamic State.[...]

The wars along the long arc from Libya to Afghanistan, in which EU powers participated, were the proximate cause of large refugee flows a few years ago, which continue even now. (As I have written elsewhere, the underlying cause of migration is the large gap in incomes between Europe, on the one hand, and Africa and the ‘greater middle east’, on the other, but the sudden outbursts were caused by wars.)[...]

It all means that Europe needs a much better thought-out external policy with respect to its neighbours. There are already some signs that it is moving in that direction but it is doing so too slowly and hesitantly. A multilateral compact with Africa is needed to regulate migration from a continent with the fastest rising population and lowest incomes. Much more European investment—in hard stuff, not conferences—is needed. Rather than complaining about China’s Belt and Road initiative, Europe should imitate it—and, if it desires to counteract Chinese political influence, invest its own money to make more African friends. A similar set of much more proactive policies is required within the framework of the Mediterranean initiative, while military options in the region should be forsworn no less clearly than they are within the union.

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Vox: Trump is expected to call for an end to HIV in the US by 2030. That’s totally realistic.

There are currently more than a million Americans living HIV, and about 40,000 new infections are diagnosed here every year. African-American gay and bisexual men are the group most affected by HIV in the US, and diagnoses in the mid-20s to mid-30s age cohort have been rising in recent years. But Trump’s reported proposal is not at all as far-fetched as it may seem. [...]

For now, the details of the administration’s plans are still scant (both HHS and the White House declined Vox’s request for comment). But we asked five HIV and public health experts to weigh in on what Trump’s plan to end HIV in the US should include if the administration is serious about tackling the ongoing epidemic. Here’s what they told us. Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity. [...]

One of the big challenges in the US right now is that only about half of people living with HIV are virally suppressed [meaning they’re on medication that reduces their risk of spreading HIV to almost zero]. If 90 percent of people were virally suppressed, we’d have a different story. So that’s a key part of this: getting people on treatment and virally suppressed. When people are durably virally suppressed, there’s no risk of transmission to an HIV-negative partner. [...]

But since the 2008 recession, there’s been a devastation of local public health departments. The lack of funding for public health has eroded our safety net and made it impossible to control infectious diseases like HIV and other STDs. Investing in local public health is the best thing we can do control HIV.

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CityLab: Amid Tourists and Gentrification, Barcelona Faces a Crime Wave

That may sound like an extreme reaction, but Barcelona is indeed enduring an alarming spike in crime. Across the city, reported cases of crimes rose by 20.5 percent over 2018, with just over a quarter of the city’s residents becoming victims of a crime over the same period. Zoom in on the figures, however, and one area sails far ahead of the rest—the four tourist-filled neighborhoods that make up Barcelona’s Old City, called Ciutat Vella in Catalan. According to figures from the city, 36.6 percent of Ciutat Vella residents reported being victims of a crime over 2018, with the rate of robbery with violence or intimidation reported in August 2018 in the area having doubled year-on-year.

That figure should rightly sound alarming, but the idea of a Barcelonan crime wave needs to be put in perspective. Spain as a whole still has one of the lowest murder rates in the world—lower than Germany, or its neighbors France and Portugal—and Barcelona’s rates do not necessarily buck this trend. According to the Spanish publication La Vanguardia, by far the largest category of reported crimes in Barcelona’s Old City are thefts without violence, which in August 2017 constituted 74 percent of all recorded offenses; robberies with violence and intimidation constituted 5.7 percent.[...]

Ciutat Vella’s problems could also describe parts of any number of heavily touristed European cities, where similar tensions exist over crime, affluence, and visitor safety. But the situation here is being exacerbated by a uniquely Barcelonan twist. The city’s policing responsibilities are divided between a municipal department and one under the control of the autonomous community of Catalonia, which has lately been vying for independent statehood. The set-up is complex, politically fraught, and not entirely joined-up. Such is the cluster of responsible bodies that a crime committed in Barcelona can, during the process of investigation, end up involving several different police forces. [...]

Some feel the city’s government should also bear some responsibility for the problems. Under the leadership of Mayor Ada Colau (who still has a narrow majority approval rating), the Guardia Urbana have backpedaled a little on their previous function as agents of public order. Colau’s left-leaning political grouping, Barcelona en Comú, evolved in part from an anti-eviction activist network, and as a result may tend to be skeptical about any form of heavy-handed police deployment. Former police assistant director and current Catalan Green Party politician Jaume Bosch, one of the officials responsible for creating the Mossos D’Esquadra’s role in its present form, noted in a magazine interview that City Hall had “a somewhat hippy idea, according to which they understood that everything could be solved with social mechanisms, and that the police were not really their thing.”

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Haaretz: Istanbul's 'Fake Auschwitz': What Happened When a Turkish Movie Gala Recreated a Nazi Death Camp on the Red Carpet

What made this faux-Auschwitz all the more strange, gratuitous and incongruous was that the movie itself is not at all focused on the Holocaust or on death camps, even if it does bring in the tragedy of German children who were victims of the T-4 Nazi euthanasia project. That at least would explain the toys and small shoes piled on top of the red carpet – but not the death camps, to which they were not sent.

Indeed, in an interview that took place following the screening, the producer, Mustafa Uslu, explained that the genocide of the Jews had already been presented on film so many times he decided to focus on a different aspect of the Nazis’ murderous policies. This of course begs the question why he opted for the sensationalized Holocaust setting for his gala, if he originally did not think it was "new" enough ground to be a central part of his film.

The gala evening’s strange WWII recreation was only briefly covered by the giant media outlet Haber Turk, which ran the story under the headline, "The Nazi Concentration Camp Gala." The bare "which-celebrities-were-spotted" report used a normal tone, and didn’t question the visuals or propriety of partying alongside the props of genocide. With most Turkish media outlets subject to government pressures not to stir controversy, it is no wonder that no other major outlet tackled the topic head on. [...]

It’s more likely than not that this incident was triggered by inexplicable ignorance, rather than explicit anti-Semitism. But the support the Jewish community received in protesting the event serves as yet another example where Turkish Jews have enjoyed growing solidarity in response to cases of anti-Semitism on social media and within the public sphere.

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IFLScience: Why Do We Cry?

The final and third type is the most interesting. Emotional (or psychic) tears are triggered by exceptionally strong feelings, both positive (joy and excitement, for example) and negative (sadness, anger, and fear etcetera). Experts aren't exactly sure why humans have evolved to express our emotions via the medium of salty eye water. However, there are a few potential explanations.[...]

Another reason could be that welling up offers some kind of release for physical and emotional pain. All tears constitute some mix of water, salt, oil, and germ-killing enzymes but those that stream down our faces when we're emotional or in pain contain higher levels of various stress hormones and feel-good chemicals, including one called leucine enkephalin, which is an endorphin and natural painkiller. This pleasing combination of oxytocin and endorphins could explain the concept of a "good cry".[...]

However, when we are upset or otherwise emotional, we can produce half a cup (or more) of tears in just minutes. This essentially overloads the system so that instead of draining through the puncta, tears roll down our cheeks. It is also why crying can make our nose run.

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