For months, the domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol was planned in plain sight on social media. So why weren’t we ready for it? This week, former FBI special agent Michael German explains why the bureau deprioritized the threat posed by white supremacists… and why the Department of Homeland Security says they pose “the most persistent and lethal threat to the homeland.” Then, historian Nell Irvin Painter breaks down how a legacy of racism in the United States brought us to this moment. Can we change our trajectory? She argues that the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020 could bring lasting, positive change to this country.
20 January 2021
WorldAffairs: Strongmen From Mussolini to Trump
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has spent her career documenting the stealth strategies authoritarian leaders use to gain power. In her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she outlines the “strongman playbook” used by authoritarian leaders including Donald Trump. She says that the January 6 insurgency by far-right extremists, meant to facilitate Trump’s self-coup, lays bare how much the 45th president has in common with autocrats like Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin. When President Trump incited his followers to storm the US Capitol, some were shocked, but Ben-Ghiat saw this coming. She joins Ray Suarez on the podcast to talk about last week’s events and warn us of what could come next.
The Guardian: The mystery of the Gatwick drone
The airport had been closed for 33 hours. More than 1,000 flights had been cancelled, and more than 140,000 passengers affected. “It showed the serious risk of drone intrusion, and how quickly that could bring an airport to its knees,” said John Strickland, an aviation consultant. In total, 170 drone sightings were reported, 115 of which were later deemed “credible” by police. But neither Mitchell, nor any of the news crews camped out for two days, had managed to get a photo or video. Neither had any of the thousands of passengers and airport staff on site; no one who reported a sighting had captured an image on their phone. [...]
Military drones such as the Reaper or the Predator are capable of flying hundreds of kilometres and staying in the air for more than 24 hours at a stretch. But most drones do not have anything approaching this capability: they vary in size, but most are, even with their arms extended, no bigger than a laptop. They struggle to fly in wind or rain, and have limited battery life. Top-tier consumer drones can travel for up to five miles, but have a maximum flight time of about 30 minutes. Custom-built drones might manage up to a couple of hours, but not much more: larger batteries add weight, which uses up more battery. “If someone were flying drones for hours, they’d need a carload of batteries,” Ryan told me. [...]
When Hudson first heard about Gatwick, “I thought this was some absolute idiot and I wanted them caught.” But then he realised “the basic facts don’t add up”. Sussex police had mentioned lights in the corroborated sightings. But if someone had planned the attack, to the extent that they had procured scores of batteries and hacked the drone’s in-built geofencing software – which uses GPS to stop drones from flying into restricted zones such as airports or prisons – then why would they leave the lights on? “You’d disable them,” said Hudson. [...]
Hudson looked at publicly available information: photographs taken during the incident, and statements by Sussex police. Since then, he has identified inconsistencies that he believes undermine the claim that there were drones at Gatwick. Soon after we first spoke, Hudson sent me a long email, including a timeline of tweets and photographs posted during the incident, highlighting contradictions. (“Did he send you four A4 pages with closely typed text and diagrams?” another drone-flyer joked. “It’s one of Ian’s pet subjects.”) The photos he included showed military counter-drone systems being set up on 20 December, the second day of the shutdown – and tweets by Sussex police mentioning sightings after this point, right into the early hours of 21 December. This included one cluster by “credible” witnesses – airport staff and police officers.
DW News: The emergence of a third party is among us' - Interview with Lincoln Project Co-Founder Rick Wilson
Joe Biden won the US presidential election with 306 electoral votes. But incumbent President Donald Trump has yet to concede, and the Republican Party seems to be at a crossroads after four years of Trumpism. What direction will the GOP take going forward?The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson offers a very bleak outlook into the GOP's future. He says 'the Republican party has sold out itself to Trump' and what follows Trump will be more dangerous, because it will be more sophisticated.
UnHerd: Poland’s rise to cultural power
Last month, CD Projekt Red released another game, Cyberpunk 2077, to critical and commercial success (if marred, on some consoles, by technical bugs). Even before its release, Poland, surprisingly, was the world’s fourth largest exporter of video games, behind only China, Japan and Hong Kong. [...]
That seems to be changing. Over the past few years, Polish cinema and literature, as well as video games, have earned international acclaim — bringing modern craftsmanship to the nation’s history, and welcoming people to landscapes as brooding and mysterious as Scandinavia’s, cities as beautiful as France’s, and industrial wastelands as poetic as the North of England’s. [...]
None of this has come without controversy. As Polish art has achieved more international recognition, Poles have been divided on the image of their nation that is being portrayed. Take Ida: many conservatives were troubled by the film’s dwelling on the complicity of some Poles in the persecution of the Jews. Activists campaigned for text to be inserted to emphasise that countless others struggled and suffered to protect Jewish people. [...]
One could hardly pass over the political implications of art but one should avoid being incorrect, or condescending, or opportunistic. Filip Mazurek, a Polish critic, has written that “English language reviewers have ignored or even denied” the “metaphysical, quasi-religious” elements of Tokarczuk’s work, choosing to focus on “Tokarczuk as an anti-nationalist.” (Polish critics, Mazurek argues, did the opposite.) Again, this is not a criticism of Tokarczuk, but one can hardly be shocked that conservative Poles have been less than enthused about her international acclaim when it is premised, to a large extent, on her status as a symbol of opposition to their beliefs.
19 January 2021
The Red Line: The Geopolitics of Tajikistan
No country could possibly feel more like "the edge of the known world" than the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A nation where the president has been in power since '92 and has ruled the country with an iron fist, amassing a huge amount of wealth for himself using everything from Aluminum to Heroine; but things are beginning to change and Dushanbe could very soon be answering to new masters. Tajikistan is the latest battleground between Beijing and Moscow, the winner of which is yet to be decided. This weeks panel Peter Leonard (Eurasianet) John Heathershaw (Exeter University) Edward Lemon (Oxus Society) Mathieu Boulegue (Chatham House) Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Or follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus More info at - www.theredlinepodcast.com Support the show at - https://www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Disinformation
Laurie Taylor talks to Annie Kelly, a researcher of the Digital Far Right, about the QAnon conspiracy theory and why it has attracted a striking number of female followers, many of whom are mothers. She argues that their rhetoric and slogans have cleverly smuggled legitimate concerns about the welfare of children into a baseless and dangerous set of entirely false claims about the nature of child trafficking. What role have social media sites dominated by women played in the circulation of QAnon theories and how can they be challenged?
Also, Nina Jankowitz, Global Disinformation Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, examines Russia’s role in the spread of disinformation, not only in the USA but also in Eastern and Central Europe. What lessons can be learned from these experiences? She argues that the best types of disinformation are able to amplify and exploit the already existing divisions in society, including racism and inequality in the US context.
Ministry Of Ideas: Progressive Souls
Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the US for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.
Vox: India's huge farmer protests, explained
In November 2020, thousands of farmers marched from the northern states of India to Delhi to protest farming reforms passed by Prime Minister Modi’s government. Those protests have continued throughout the month of December and show little sign of letting up. The farmers have set up camp in and around the capital city to pressure the government to repeal the laws, but the government won’t budge.
The government says these new laws will modernize farming by liberalizing the industry, but India’s farmers say it will be their downfall. Under these new policies, farmers will have fewer government protections and will likely lose the government-regulated markets and prices they have relied on for decades.
To make matters even more difficult, all this is happening as India’s farmers grapple with a shrinking share of the economy that has contributed to a suicide crisis around the country.
To understand the three farming reforms and why they have driven so many farmers into the streets, as well as the history behind the problems farmers have been facing for decades, watch the video above.
UnHerd: Why architecture is political
Architecture is an inherently political act, which is precisely why it is so contested. It is the grandest and most permanent marker of a civilisation, and the clearest and most dramatic expression of a society’s relationship to power. Consider, on the one hand, Trump’s executive order, one of the last of his administration, mandating neoclassicism as the house architectural style of the US federal government; on the other hand, see the New Statesman’s neurotic fear of classical architecture as a form of fascism wrought in stone. Architecture is not just the expression of our positive political values, but also of the pathologies and debilitating culture wars enfeebling our civilisation. [...]
Yet leading up to the Acropolis, winding its way around the ancient hills of Athens, was an alternative vision of modernity, neglected, under-appreciated but far better suited to our current political moment. In the middle of the 20th century, the Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis was tasked with replacing the ugly asphalt road that led to the Acropolis. Hiring provincial stonemasons, accustomed to working in a vernacular style, and using as his materials marble blocks from 19th century buildings recently levelled to create the concrete cityscape of modern Athens, Pikionis fused his aesthetic interest in Modernist art with his appreciation of the old, the worn and characterful. [...]
Yet Critical Regionalism, as outlined by Frampton, is not a retreat into the vernacular, which he expressly warns against as lazily reactionary, and carrying within it the incipient threat of totalitarianism. Frampton cautions against the “demagogic tendencies of Populism” in architecture, “the simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” Instead, he argues, the task for architects is to achieve a “self-conscious synthesis between universal civilisation and world culture.”
In practice, this means marrying the best of the vernacular tradition — a sensitive appreciation of place, climate and culture, the tactility and warmth of natural materials, a rootedness in the specifics of the local and a suspicion of the bland totalitarianism of modernism — with an awareness that we cannot undo the Modernist moment; we are moderns, and any attempt to undo this basic fact will result only in a feeble and debilitating pastiche. [...]
Critical Regionalism is inherently post-liberal in its vision of the good; it is open to the world, not narrow and exclusive, yet rooted in the specifics of place and culture. Instead of defining itself by what it is not, and locking itself into a futile and mutually destructive cycle of opposition to liberalism, perhaps post-liberalism can be profitably reimagined as a form of political Critical Regionalism: alive and responsive to the values of community, tradition and localism, yet at the same time willing to take what is good from liberalism, what is genuinely superior to what came before it, and to reshape it to its own ends.
CNN: Inside Europe's stunning abandoned churches
Across Europe, hundreds of churches that were once filled with worship and song are now at the mercy of the elements. With religion's role declining sharply around the continent in recent decades, the most promising outcome for many of these centuries-old structures is being reincarnated as residential or commercial properties.
Hoping to capture their faded splendor before it's too late, French photographer Francis Meslet has spent almost a decade documenting abandoned churches, chapels and priories in varying states of disrepair. His stunning images show dilapidated pipe organs, overgrown cloisters, long-empty pews and sunlight pouring into naves strewn with dust and rubble. [...]
Featuring images shot across France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Portugal, his new book, "Abandoned Churches: Unclaimed Places of Worship," offers an eerie tribute to a building type he describes as "very special in the history of architecture and the history of men." Meslet, who once wanted to be architect, has a sharp eye for structural symmetry, with his collection spanning styles from gothic to neoclassical.
UnHerd: What did the Habsburgs do for us?
For Rady the unquestionable key to the dynasty’s might was its mystique. It was imbued with an aura of sacral legitimacy which not only held the loyalty of subjects but imbued the family’s members with a driving sense of vocation: “they conceived of their power as both something they had been predestined for and part of the divine order in which the world was arranged.” The self-concept was manifested through intense Eucharistic and Marian piety — well beyond that of other royal households. [...]
For contemporaries, their own lived experience was different. Presentations of the royal house in popular literature had a sense of “sacred drama” about them. The personal sorrows of Franz Joseph, who lost both wife and son before their time, together with the burdens of ruling “were likened to Christ’s Crown of Thorns, confirming the emperor as not only the ruler of peoples but also their redeemer.”
Ethnic fragmentation was contained because the emperor “became the almost exclusive focus of loyalty and symbol of an idea that transcended nation.” Unlike in today’s culture war and Brexit battles, national-separatist ambitions were more pronounced among the intelligentsia than urban-worker and rural-labourer population bases. [...]
Maybe Franz Joseph was influenced by the late medieval chroniclers who constructed elaborate lineages linking the Habsburgs back to the Kings of the Old Testament and even to Noah. Certainly, the very real affection the Empire’s Jews felt towards him is attested to in surviving silver Torah scroll holders, capped with the Habsburg double-eagle, produced in significant numbers during his reign.
18 January 2021
Byzantium & Friends: The monastic experience, with Alice-Mary Talbot
A conversation with Alice-Mary Talbot (Dumbarton Oaks) on the experience of communal monastic life in Byzantium, ranging from its organization and rules to its religious goals, engagement with society, and differences between monasteries for men and women. It is based on Alice-Mary's recent book Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800-1453 (University of Notre Dame Press 2019), which discusses solitary ascetics too.
The Red Line: Colombia (FARC, Paramilitarios and Cocaine)
Colombia has always been closely associated with the international Cocaine trade, but the situation there is far more complicated with wider ramifications for the entire region. The government of Bogota has been at war with the rebels in a 6-way struggle for almost 60 years, with a peace deal now sitting on the table. Is this deal a workable peace though, or just the start of the next phase? We ask our expert panel. Alison Fedirka (Geopolitical Futures) Ted Piccone (Brookings Institution) Chris Sabatini (Chatham House) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
BBC4 In Our Time: John Wesley and Methodism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Wesley (1703 - 1791) and the movement he was to lead and inspire. As a student, he was mocked for approaching religion too methodically and this jibe gave a name to the movement: Methodism. Wesley took his ideas out across Britain wherever there was an appetite for Christian revival, preaching in the open, especially the new industrial areas. Others spread Methodism too, such as George Whitefield, and the sheer energy of the movement led to splits within it, but it soon became a major force.
WithStephen PlantDean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall at the University of CambridgeEryn WhiteReader in Early Modern History at Aberystwyth UniversityAndWilliam GibsonProfessor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History
Wisecrack: That Time Disney Built a Creepy Government
Disney World is beloved all over the globe for the pure escapism it offers. But the story behind this fantasy world is a lot weirder, and a whole lot less magical than it might seem. We'll explain in this Wisecrack Edition: That Time Disney Built a Creepy Government.
New Statesman: With Germany’s political future in the balance, centrist “Merkel voters” will be crucial
To understand the political dynamics, contemplate the historical choice at the heart of Merkelism. Between 1998 and 2005 a “red-green” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens modernised the recently reunified country: liberalising the old federal republic’s conservative social policies; paving the way for a multi-ethnic conception of German identity; deploying troops into combat abroad for the first time since 1945; prodding industries towards a greener future; and introducing welfare cuts purporting to adapt the economy to globalisation. The fundamental choice made by Merkel’s four governments from 2005 has been to continue the country on that trajectory, rather than to deviate from it.
That explains Merkelism’s strengths: its moderation, the stability of its course and the cautiously progressive measures often purloined from the SPD (modern family policies, the minimum wage) and Green traditions (ending nuclear power, admitting over one million refugees). It also explains Merkelism’s weaknesses: its reactiveness and preference for the more comfortable work of bedding in previous reforms over developing new ones for the future. [...]
Merkel’s gambit will loom over the aftermath too, by shaping the range of possible coalition governments. First, the electoral cost of nabbing red-green “Merkel voters” has been the transfer of some right-wing voters to a party, the AfD, that is too toxic to include in coalition calculations. Second, the socio-economic shifts of the past two decades, expanding the pool of economically centrist but socially liberal voters, have benefited the Greens most of all. Both of these trends give the left, and especially the Greens, more paths to power and make the most likely outcome a mould-breaking CDU/CSU-Green coalition. An apt legacy for Angela Merkel.
CityLab: How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs
In his book, “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001,” Kyle Riismandel, a senior university lecturer in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, argues that suburbanites of this era engaged in “productive victimization,” using their imagined and real fears as a means to hoard power and exert local control. It’s a phenomenon he observed growing up in the suburbs of Wanaque, New Jersey — 30 miles away from New York City, 12 miles away from Newark, “but in many ways a world away” — later, at graduate school in D.C., and now, from his home back in the New Jersey suburb of Montclair.
Over those three decades, cultural and political phenomena served to make suburbanites feel less like they were living in a bucolic paradise, and more like in a land constantly under assault — with threats ranging from toxic waste and cancerous household products; to burglaries and kidnappings; to satanic cults and explicit music. Riismandel traces the reaction to these perceived threats, through the weaponization of the environmental movement as a means to offload hazards to poorer communities, the rise of NIMBYs who feared overdevelopment in their backyards, and the advent of vigilantism as a response to crime and disorder. The book captures what Riismandel identifies as a growing anxiety that undergirded white suburban life. “Things aren’t necessarily happening” to suburbanites of the time, he says, “but there’s always a sense they they will.” [...]
This continued production of threat — even without the materiality or the reality of the threat being so big — is in part because it allows people to do things. It’s facilitated by the broader political culture of the rightward turn of the Reagan era and the New Right, saying, you should be scared; that we need more cops on the street. But also in response, you can exert more control as a homeowner, or as a parent, and you can police streets more effectively, or more privately. You can do all these things that allow you to work with, or even replace, the police or the state. [...]
Part of the privilege of living in the suburbs is controlling local space, not being victimized by an actual crime. That you might be victimized by the threat of crime, and the idea of crime, but that you should be able to live free from that fear. This is why I call it the suburban crisis, because it's really just a crisis of privilege. It is not the “urban crisis,” which is, you know, deeply-rooted and systemic and structural, that we see elucidated by a number of scholars, most famously, Thomas Sugrue’s book. They're quite different. One is one of systemic racism and disinvestment. Another is one of privilege and expectation.
FiveThirtyEight: Why The Suburbs Have Shifted Blue (Dec. 16, 2020)
Suburban and exurban counties turned away from Trump and toward Democrat Joe Biden in states across the country, including in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. In part, this may be because the suburbs are simply far more diverse than they used to be. But suburbs have also become increasingly well-educated — and that may actually better explain why so many suburbs and exurbs are turning blue than just increased diversity on its own.
According to Ashley Jardina, a political science professor at Duke University who studies white identity politics, it’s not that racial diversity isn’t a factor. Among white people, at least, educational attainment is often a proxy for how open they are to growing racial diversity, with more highly educated white people likely to think increased racial diversity is a good thing. “Education is so important because it’s intertwined with racial attitudes among white people,” Jardina said. [...]
What about places that become either more diverse or more educated, but not both? Suburban and exurban counties that grew more diverse but did not become more educated still swung toward Biden in 2020, but by a much smaller margin. It’s especially striking when you compare these places to areas that became much more educated but not more diverse, as those places actually had moved more toward Biden, on average. [...]
So what do these trends mean for Democrats — and Republicans — going forward? Jardina stressed to us that in the short term, demography is not destiny. Democrats might struggle to reproduce Biden’s strong performance in the suburbs, particularly if their Republican opponents don’t rely as heavily on racialized appeals and transparently racist tropes as Trump. “The big question mark for me is what happens in these suburban areas in two years or four years if [Republican candidates] adopt a similar strategy to Trump but with more competence and decorum,” Jardina said. “I’ll put it this way — I don’t think Republicans have lost their opportunity to stay competitive in the suburbs.”
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