The New York Review of Books: Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered. [...]

These elections, reported the Centre for Media Studies, a non-partisan think tank in New Delhi, had been the most expensive “ever, anywhere.” In an election that was fought between six national parties, and many smaller ones, the BJP’s electoral juggernaut received an estimated 45–55 percent of the estimated 55,000 crore rupees (nearly $8 billion) that was spent on this election. Their main rival, the Indian National Congress (INC), accounted for an estimated 15 percent of the total spent. More than half of Modi’s war chest came from anonymous donors. Who these people are can only be guessed at, but since 2016 the BJP has received almost 93 percent of corporate donations, leaving the remaining 7 percent for the other national and state parties to fight over. [...]

The mainstream media, particularly cable news, amplified the BJP’s message and drowned out the opposition. They editorialized the news, started rumors, and spread lies. Truth was an illusion, and everything was propaganda. The INC’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was denounced as a fool and even a foreigner, while Modi, in a tradition that will ring familiar to people in Russia and China, was glorified as the great leader. [...]

And while Gandhi was the obviously better choice, he wasn’t, necessarily, a convincing one. For years, Gandhi dithered about whether he would join politics, enjoying the unheard of privilege, in India, of deciding if he wanted to apply for a job. When he finally accepted, standing for election in 2004, he positioned himself as a foot soldier. He failed to do anything significant to change the country’s oldest party, his family’s party. The Congress was rotting from the roots upward, its representatives seen as incompetent, corrupt, and out of touch, yet Gandhi appeared to shrug and roll his eyes as though to say, Can you believe these people? He officially took over the party’s leadership in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2019, less than a fortnight before voting was to commence, that he announced the main plank of his manifesto.

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The Atlantic: The Fight Against White Nationalism Is Different

Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes. The extremist protostate that once controlled millions of people is dead. The ideology that inspired ISIS, however, remains alive. U.S.-led efforts known as “countering violent extremism,” mainly aimed at ISIS and al-Qaeda sympathizers online, were of debatable utility. U.S. air strikes took out ISIS propagandists, just as an Obama-administration-authorized drone strike years earlier in Yemen killed one of al-Qaeda’s most effective messengers, the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Yet his videos remained on YouTube until 2017, and the same basic ideas have continued to fuel terrorist attacks throughout America’s two-decade War on Terror. I remember the earnest passion one al-Qaeda member displayed, at his home in southern Turkey, as he played me a speech from someone he reverentially called “The Sheikh.” Osama bin Laden had been dead for almost three years, but the man was sure that if I just heard the logic of his words, it would open my eyes. [...]

Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have. [...]

The El Paso attack shows the ways in which white-nationalist terror has become an international movement—while also remaining a distinctly American one. Just minutes beforehand, a manifesto that authorities believe was authored by the suspected shooter was posted online. The 2,300-word racist and anti-immigrant diatribe expressed the fear that white Americans are being replaced by foreigners. As my colleague Adam Serwer has documented, the idea of white replacement, like the tenets of white nationalism more generally, has American roots. And these ideas are central to white-nationalist extremists in other countries. The manifesto cited inspiration from the March massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a white supremacist shot and killed 51 people after posting his own rambling warnings about white replacement. Many attacks by white supremacists target the groups demonized in this propaganda: the black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; the Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable,” the manifesto read. [...]

At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.)

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Jacobin Magazine: After We Sacked the Ministers

Yet there was also a big difference with the movement of three decades hence: the social forces involved. If by the early 1990s the Communist regime was economically and politically on its knees, practically awaiting the final push that would send it tumbling, the current political establishment is strongly supported by economic magnates who would not wish to see them replaced. In the 2019 movement protesters kept politicians of all sides at bay, blocking their usual attempts to blend with the crowd so as to gain political capital. This was crucial in confronting the prime minister with the creative discontent of the country’s educated youth. [...]

Indeed, it’s no surprise that the judicial system is at the center of the current conflict. The three major political parties, PS (Socialist Party, now in government), PD (Democratic Party), and LSI (Socialist Movement for Integration) have all been involved in major corruption scandals and abuses of power in recent years. These parties do refer to different electorates — PS is rooted in the old Hoxhaist party and its intelligentsia, whereas PD is built on the families persecuted by that regime as well as among the largely poor working class from northern Albania; meanwhile, LSI maintains its electorate primarily through rewarding its activists with public sector jobs. But what unites all three is their common entrenchment in right-wing, pro-privatization policies.

Beyond the theatrics of the mutual allegations these parties exchange, they have together contrived to maintain a dysfunctional judicial system that holds no one accountable for even flagrant wrongdoing. In Albania, the legal process is a mere auction for the highest bidder. The power of money in influencing justice is apparent in the spread of property speculation, as public assets are passed into the hands of private “developers.” The status of properties supposedly protected by the state — such as natural reserves, cultural heritage sites, or public buildings like the National Theatre — is illegally changed in order to allow for the construction of private resorts or urban skyscrapers. Moreover, the ambiguous legal status of property owners since the change of regime — for decades, intentionally left unclear and open to speculation — has allowed the current government to undertake megaprojects, for instance the construction of a ring-road in Tirana which would destroy the homes of dozens of families. [...]

The Albanian president — former LSI leader Ilir Meta — joined this strategy by decreeing a new date for the local elections, October 13. Meta labeled the justice reform an initiative by shadowy forces sponsored by Hungarian-Jewish billionaire George Soros, while comparing his own opposition to the stances adopted by various national heroes. The president’s decree, however, was ignored both by PS and Western functionaries, who have shown unprecedented support for Edi Rama’s government in their pursuit of the rapid implementation of the reform.

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Political Critique: Poland’s Future: A view from the countryside

The principal driver of re-ruralisation is the rediscovery of the countryside as an attractive place to live. According to CBOS survey from 2015, just 18 per cent of Poles want to live in a large city, while 40 per cent think of living in the countryside as their ideal.[2] Contrary to the global trend of urbanisation, Poles started the 21st century by going back to the countryside. Material changes such as the ever-increasing ease of working remotely from home facilitated this shift. It is borne out in the numbers: since 2002 the proportion of urban dwellers has declined, while that of rural residents continues to grow. Currently 40 per cent of Poles live in villages and, if such a trend continues, by 2049 this figure will rise to 45 per cent of a population of 34 million (compared to 38 million today).[...]

The countryside itself is the theatre of a third trend: de-agrarisation. Despite EU money, rural areas are losing their agricultural character. Villages have less and less to do with farming land and are becoming a sort of rusticate Arcadia with peace, quiet, and nature at its core. While farming (at present) is still limited to the countryside, only 10 per cent of Poland’s employment is made up of agriculture – by 2049 this figure may shrink to single digits. At the same time for growing category of people, a small plot of land next to their house is an element of their lifestyle.

Finally the trend of internal migration means that wealthier, more highly educated people are starting to come to live in the countryside, while people with low cultural and economic capital go to the cities. Villages near dynamic cities become bedrooms, while places near attractive tourist destinations are enclaves for people searching for a summer relax or a calm life as middle-class pensioners from the city. Such colonisation results in rising class conflict. Especially if we consider that another growing group in the Polish countryside is that of the ‘NEETs’ (people not in education, employment or training) – people that are inactive in cultural, social and political terms and whose views, research shows, may end up on the extreme margins of the authoritarian political spectrum.[3] [...]

All those changes contribute to the unstable political and class relations that determine the balance of power between urban and rural in Poland. They create the structural context for populist mobilisation against various ‘Others’ (middle-class colonists in the countryside, rural migrants in large cities, economic immigrants and refugees in both environments), fuelling radical right-wing sentiment and activism. The best example in Poland is rising nationalism, which, stoked by anti-immigrant campaigns from the ruling Law and Justice party, heightens the risk of ethnic violence. Its combination of Polish nationalism, religious conservatism, anti-elitism, and attacks on those supposedly seeking to dictate to Poland about values and migrant quotas made Law and Justice the largest party in Parliament after 2015 election and is very likely to help it maintain its dominance in the forthcoming 2019 elections.

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The Atlantic: Trump the Bulldozer

But over the past year and change, there’s been a shift: Trump, having shed himself of the aides most likely to try to divert him or change his mind, has followed through on several of the biggest unfulfilled threats I highlighted back then. The catch is that while Trump is getting his way, many of these policies are not turning out as well as the president hoped—as illustrated by severe market jitters on Monday over the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. [...]

This is the template for what has happened in several of the cases where Trump had appeared to fold but has since followed through. Aides who felt he was acting either against the national interest or against his own interest have been shipped out: Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelly. They’ve been replaced by advisers who either encourage Trump, like Navarro, or are determined to enable rather than encumber him, such as acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the television pundit Larry Kudlow, who succeeded Cohn.

In retrospect, the May 2018 announcement that Trump would withdraw from the nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran looks like a turning point. Trump had lambasted the deal as a candidate, but once entering office, he repeatedly recertified Iranian compliance with the agreement, bowing to the will of his aides. He seemed more ready to fire aides than to keep but overrule them. But starting with his withdrawal from the deal, Trump has begun following his instincts more fully.[...]

Negotiations with North Korea have gotten nowhere after two summits—though to his credit Trump did walk away from the second meeting, in Vietnam, when he felt no progress was being made. And Trump is now pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iran on what appears to be, as with NAFTA and USMCA, just a rewrite of the deal that was previously in place, though whether anything will come of the push is unclear.

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The Conversation: Mass shootings aren’t growing more common – and evidence contradicts common stereotypes about the killers

Long-term studies of youth consistently find that violent games are not a risk factor for youth violence anywhere from one to eight years later. And no less than the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 2011 that scientific studies had failed to link violent games to serious aggression in kids.

A 2017 public policy statement by the American Psychological Association’s media psychology and technology division specifically recommended politicians should stop linking violent games to mass shootings. It’s time to lay this myth to rest. [...]

Most mass homicide perpetrators don’t proclaim any allegiance to a particular ideology at all. [...]

It’s also important to point out that the vast majority of people with mental illness do not commit violent crimes. For instance, in one study, about 15% of people with schizophrenia had committed violent crimes, as compared to 4% of a group of people without schizophrenia. Although this clearly identifies the increase in risk, it also highlights that the majority of people with schizophrenia had not committed violent crimes. It’s important not to stigmatize the mentally ill, which may reduce their incentive to seek treatment. [...]

To be sure, the U.S. has experienced many mass homicides. Even stability might be depressing given that rates of other violent crimes have declined precipitously in the U.S. over the past 25 years. Why mass homicides have stayed stagnant while other homicides have plummeted in frequency is a question worth asking.

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statista: The Hong Kong Protest by the Numbers

On Sunday, violent protest broke out in Hong Kong again, with an estimated 150,000 people hitting the streets of the Chinese special administrative region to voice their opposition to a proposed bill that would make extradiction of individuals from Hong Kong to China possible.

The mass protest have been going on since June and while crowd estimates vary widely, probably reached their peak on July 1. 265,000 people alledegly came out to protest on that day, a number calculated with the help of crown-counting AI.

Hong Kong police has said that they have arrested more than 500 people so far since June and that 1,800 canisters of tear gas, 300 rubber bullets and 170 sponge grenades have been used on the protesters, according to Bloomberg.

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Politico: Pass the Duchy: Luxembourg’s grand plan to legalize cannabis

Luxembourg, however, wants to go further and become the first country in the European Union to make cannabis completely legal. Its health ministry is slated to unveil a proposal to start the legislative process this fall, and the goal is for it to become law within two years. [...]

One of the main advocates is Health Minister Etienne Schneider, who cites health reasons as the most important driver. He said young people are already getting weed on the black market, coming into contact with drug dealers who provide cannabis of unknown quality, and getting access to more potentially dangerous drugs. [...]

A possible playbook for Luxembourg is the U.S. state of Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational cannabis. Legalization advocates say that they chose to frame the issue so that voters view pot the same the way they view alcohol — a substance that is widely available and socially acceptable. [...]

"In Germany, there is a consensus that there is a reason why medical cannabis is allowed and that there are patients who benefit from it," Goetz said. "So there's no reason for prohibiting that. But there is definitely not a consensus yet on legalizing it for recreational use."

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