Slate: Mommie Dearest (from 2003)

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism. [...]

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.* Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

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Salon: Dead in the water: Why the TPP and TTIP trade deals probably won’t go anywhere

EU officials were quick to downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S. negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP. [...]

“The fact that TTIP has failed is testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest against it, the three million people who signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped, and the huge coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, progressive politicians and activists who came together to stop it,” writes Kevin Smith of Global Justice Now, an organization that has worked to fight TTIP in the United Kingdom.

While the TPP has become a lightning rod for labor and other progressive organizations in the United States, the TTIP has slipped mostly under the radar stateside. That’s partially because talks over it, which began in 2013, have taken place almost entirely behind closed doors. Among the proposals unearthed are provisions to open European public services to U.S. businesses and to scale back online privacy protections. European groups have also raised the concern that the deal could send jobs from their continent to the United States, where trade unions and labor protections are weaker than in the EU.

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Al Jazeera: Will Israel be put on trial for war crimes?

Under the terms of its founding statute, the ICC could take over jurisdiction of such probes if it is persuaded that Israel is unable or unwilling to conduct credible investigations itself.

So far, only three Israeli soldiers have been indicted on a relatively minor charge - of looting - even though Israel's 51-day offensive, named Protective Edge, in July and August 2014 resulted in some 2,250 Palestinian deaths. The vast majority were civilians, including 551 children. [...]

In response, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon criticised Israel for the "low rate of investigations opened into these serious allegations".

Since Protective Edge, two of Israel's largest human rights groups, B'Tselem and Yesh Din, have refused to cooperate with Israeli investigations in Gaza, accusing the Israeli military of using them to "whitewash" its actions.

In June, the New York-based monitoring group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), added to the pressure on the ICC, calling for it to open a formal investigation into the Gaza offensive.

The credibility of Israel's probes has been further undermined by a report issued last week by two local human rights groups. Adalah and Al Mezan, based in Israel and Gaza, respectively. The report accused Israel of failing to examine properly the evidence they had collected relating to 27 suspected war crimes during the 2014 offensive. Five cases referred to the Israeli attacks on UN schools sheltering civilians.Two years on, the groups noted, Israel had issued no indictments. Investigations, where they occurred, were "clearly flawed". [...]

This is the first time Israel has agreed to cooperate with an international body over allegations that could ultimately lead to war crimes trials. Israel denied entry to UN commissions of inquiry in 2009 and 2014, following major offensives in Gaza.

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The Guardian: Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy

It is correct that in Europe and the United States (at least in the case of Trump) less educated males are the main constituency of what is commonly referred to as populism; it is true that in surveys many voters register their sense that the country as a whole is declining (an assessment that does not necessarily depend on their personal economic situation; it is simply not true that every supporter of what can plausibly be classified as a populist party is an objective “loser in globalisation”). But all this is like saying that we best understand the intellectual content of social democracy if we keep redescribing its voters as workers envious of rich people. The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronising to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents. [...]

When in opposition, populists for sure criticise elites. But there is also always something else they do that is the tell-tale sign of populism: they claim that they, and only they, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing his critics in the country: “We are the people. Who are you?” Of course, he knew that they were Turks, too.

The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. Populists’ political competitors and critics are inevitably condemned as part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say when running for office; once in government, they will not recognise anything such as a legitimate opposition. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people at all: there are American citizens, and then there are what George C Wallace, an arch-populist of the 1960s often viewed as a precursor of Trump, always called “real Americans” (white, God-fearing, hard-working, gun-owning and so on). Thus, populists do not just claim: we are the 99%. According to their own logic, they actually have to say: we are the 100%. [...]

More worryingly still: when populists have sufficiently large majorities in parliament, they try to build regimes that might still look like democracies, but are actually designed to perpetuate the power of the populists (as supposedly the only authentic representatives of the people). To start with, populists colonise or “occupy” the state. Think of Hungary and Poland as recent examples. One of the first changes Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz sought after coming to power in Hungary in 2010 was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable them to place loyalists in what should have been non-partisan bureaucratic positions. Both Fidesz and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland also immediately moved against the independence of courts. Media authorities were captured; the signal went out that journalists should not report in ways that violate the interests of the nation (which were equated with the interests of the governing party). Whoever criticised any of these measures was vilified as doing the bidding of the old elites, or as being outright traitors (Kaczyński spoke of “Poles of the worst sort” who supposedly have “treason in their genes”).

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The Guardian: Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen: one of them will shape Europe’s future

Two very different women hold Europe’s future in their hands – and neither of them is Theresa May. The battle for Europe’s soul is being waged between Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen. This is a clash of personalities and visions: Germany’s chancellor v the leader of France’s Front National, the largest far-right party in Europe. As Britain prepares to leave the EU, the Franco-German dimension of the continent’s destiny has arguably never been so important since the end of the cold war. What is at stake is momentous: whether Europe can survive as a project, and whether fundamental principles such as the rule of law, democracy and tolerance can be salvaged. The battle will play out nationally in 2017, in key elections in France and Germany, but it concerns all Europeans. [...]

These two women have one thing in common and one thing only: the depth of their political conviction. Angela Merkel has been unwavering in her message that welcoming refugees is the right thing to do; Le Pen fumes against “rampant Islamisation” of the continent. Merkel wants to save the European project; Le Pen is fully aligned with forces that want to dismantle it (she recently said on CNN that France had become an EU “province”). Merkel nurtures the transatlantic link; Le Pen admires Putin’s Russia – her party sits at the heart of pro-Kremlin networks in Europe, financial ones among them. Le Pen’s ideology draws from France’s historical far right, the ideas of Charles Maurras and colonial racism; Merkel is the daughter of a Protestant pastor for whom individual freedoms are paramount values. Le Pen has always made much about being divorced and smoking cigarettes (trying to cast herself in the image of a modern woman); Merkel’s personal style is more subdued, which isn’t to say her character is less ironclad.

For decades what drove the European project was the so-called “Franco-German engine”. It is now all but broken – mainly because of France’s economic weaknesses, which have severely unbalanced the relationship. What now drives European politics is a different kind of Franco-German equation, one in which Merkel, often faulted for her eurozone policies, has on several occasions attempted to give France’s socialist government some financial breathing space against Le Pen – including by sparing France the wrath of the EU commission for disrespecting deficit targets.

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