Jacobin Magazine: Monarchists and Automobiles

On September 26, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud issued a decree announcing that the monarchy will, starting next June, begin issuing licenses to women. It’s unclear whether there will be special restrictions on driving privileges, though the decree stipulates that women will be permitted to obtain licenses without getting approval from a male guardian, allaying any concerns that the kingdom’s restrictive “guardianship” laws might undermine the new policy. And a Saudi spokesman made it clear that Saudi women would be able to receive a license at age eighteen, just like Saudi men.

In the wake of the decree, the monarchy announced it would also criminalize sexual harassment within the next sixty days, another important sign of progress. Taken together, these reforms could dramatically improve the work prospects (and, to some extent, autonomy) of Saudi women. It will be considerably easier for middle- and lower-class Saudi women — those who can’t afford chauffeurs — to obtain and hold jobs, and criminalizing sexual harassment (assuming the new law is enforced) should make the workplace less hostile. [...]

The ban on women drivers has long been one of the most visible and easily criticized aspects of the kingdom’s ultra-conservative social policy. And yet for years Riyadh refused to budge on the issue, even when the Taliban’s removal from power in Afghanistan left the kingdom alone in denying women the ability to drive legally. So “why now” is an important question. [...]

The preferred explanation in Saudi media is that the economy demanded it. Low oil prices and the war in Yemen (more on that later) have sent the kingdom’s finances into the red — Riyadh has run up budget deficits totaling over $200 billion since 2014, and is looking at another deficit in excess of $50 billion this year. There’s a reasonable chance that the Saudi economy will contract this year for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. Freeing more women up to obtain jobs and increasing the pool of potential car buyers should provide economic boosts.

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The New York Review of Books: The Chinese World Order

Mann’s prediction turned out to be true. China took advantage of the growing potential of unrestricted global commerce to emerge as the number one trading nation and the second-largest economy in the world. It is the top trading partner of every other country in Asia, not least because of its crucial position assembling parts that have been produced elsewhere in the region. Sixty-four countries have joined China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative, which was announced in 2013 and consists of ports, railways, roads, and airfields linking China to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—a “New Silk Road” that, if it succeeds, will greatly expand China’s economic and diplomatic influence. Twenty-nine heads of state attended Beijing’s OBOR conference in mid-May. [...]

That has not happened. Instead, the state has continued to control the Chinese economy in its effort to expand the market share of Chinese enterprises both in China and abroad. Beijing has carried out industrial espionage to acquire advanced Western technology, forced the transfer of technology from Western to Chinese enterprises through joint ventures and merger agreements, and, for a time (although not now), suppressed the exchange value of its currency in order to stimulate exports. Since 2006, Beijing has used various forms of regulation that are not banned by the WTO to make it difficult for foreign businesses to enter and compete in its domestic market, and to give an advantage to Chinese enterprises—especially in cutting-edge fields like semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and information and communications technology. [...]

President Barack Obama sought to strengthen US alliances in Asia in the hope of keeping China’s rise in check. By contrast, President Trump has questioned the value of alliances with Japan and South Korea, withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and for a time put a hold on American Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea. At the Mar-a-Lago summit in April, Trump embarrassingly acted like Xi Jinping’s pupil on the question of North Korea’s growing nuclear menace, stating, “After listening [to Xi] for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.” He then cast aside his campaign commitments to raise tariffs on China and challenge China on currency manipulation in what turned out to be the vain hope that China would solve the North Korea problem for him. To the contrary, the threat has only grown, with Pyongyang’s successful July 4 test of a long-range missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska. [...]

But in Stuenkel’s view, these efforts are not likely to lead to the creation of a US-style global military empire. It would be difficult for China to defend its far-flung, fragile network of economic interests by chiefly military power. China’s enormous investments in resources and infrastructure abroad can pay off only if peace is maintained across these turbulent regions by political means, including respect for international law. According to Stuenkel, China wants nothing more than to preserve the main elements of the world trading order from which it has benefited so much, while gaining greater influence in the institutions that enforce and develop this order.

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Haaretz: Why Trump Is Blaming 'Evil' for the Las Vegas Shooting

The one word he did not mention is terror. And that’s no great surprise, because unless any evidence surfaces in the hours and days to come that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, had converted to Islam – none has emerged, other than the Islamic State making that claim on its Amaq News website – there’s no reason for Trump to designate it as a terror attack. In Trump’s book, if you commit an act of mass violence and you’re Muslim, you’re automatically a terrorist. In fact, that makes you a purveyor of “radical Islamic terror,” pronounced staccato as a shibboleth that, should you refuse to state it in its entirety, proves you are a radical leftist who supports terrorism. If you commit a mass shooting and you’re white and Christian, you’re simply a man who committed an act of evil.

It might be that you’re mentally ill. But even if evidence of Paddock’s psychological health ultimately points in that direction, it will still smack of double-standards: An American Christian’s act of violence can be blamed on his mental health, but if a Muslim shows signs of mental illness – such as in the case of Omar Mateen in the Orlando shooting last year – that hardly matters alongside the label of “radical Islamic terror.”

The textbook definition of terrorism involves the use of violence especially (but not exclusively) against civilians, especially in pursuit of political aims. This last bit is amorphous. We usually label as terrorism those horrific acts that have some political motive – and whether Paddock had one is yet unknown. That said, there have been many acts of terrorism that were designated as such despite the fact that it would be a stretch to call the perpetrators’ ideology political. When members of Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subways with sarin gas in 1995, killing 12 and injuring 50, it was designated as an act of domestic terrorism despite the fact that the bizarre cult’s hope to bring about an apocalypse could hardly be classified as a political statement.

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The New York Review of Books: The Passport of Whiteness

Angela Merkel deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. She was very brave morally and politically in her position on the Syrian refugees, as were many Greek citizens who defied their own panicked government in order to help desperate families in flight. Jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe are as much aimed against these Arabs as they are against Europeans—secular Arabs, middle-class Arabs, moderate Muslims, people trying to get away from the kind of regimes we would also be trying to escape. The attacks are designed to isolate such people further. [...]

In the aging societies of Western Europe, youth is being wasted. Young men are growing up excluded and policed, because of race, because of the past, because whiteness is the only form of wealth some of the people in these societies have. Meanwhile, young Greek people emigrate to Australia, and Portuguese youth are moving in significant numbers to Angola. But how weird is this: the Pakistani community in Birmingham, England, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, although many Brexit backers were that kind of obnoxious white British anti-immigrant toff or lout. [...]

It has also been true of American life that one of the ways in which despised white immigrants gained acceptance and a share in national identity was by subscribing to the racial order of segregation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put a stop to competition from Chinese laborers for jobs in the West. The Dawes Act of 1887 created Indian reservations and was celebrated by white politicians as an honorable conclusion to the “Indian Problem.” In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation as law in Plessy v. Ferguson. European immigration all but stopped in World War I, and white agents who went South in search of black people to fill places in factories were sometimes met with violence from white landowners. But 500,000 black people rushed northward during the Great War, having escaped “the idiocy of rural life,” as Marx once described it. Segregation existed in the North, enforced by real estate companies that controlled where blacks and whites could live, as Lorraine Hansberry’s family tried to tell us.

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openDemocracy: Are we all Catalans now? Why Scotland is very different

Compare this to the experience of Catalonia. The Spanish Government did all it could to stop people voting. They seized ballot papers, arrested officials, disconnected technology and shut down apps, and when that failed used police brutality and repression - the latter in full display of a shocked world who could not believe what they were seeing in 21st century Western Europe. In one day - October 1st 2017 - the Spanish Government lost any right to the high ground and made the Catalan case for independence even more powerful. [...]

Spain is in a very different place. The idea and ideals of Spain have been dealt a powerful, perhaps even mortal blow. It’s hard to see how the Spanish and Catalan authorities can agree any way forward. The stakes are high – this is a crisis about democracy, self-determination and the right of a people to be only governed by consent. The Catalan authorities will clearly not back down, but what mechanisms for independence can be identified which Spain will respect? How can the Spanish government climb down from using repressive force? And if Spain in the short-term further ratchets up the temperature by suspending the Catalan authorities (via Article 155 of the Spanish constitution) what kind of end game have they in mind? [...]

The Catalan vote and the recent Kurdish referendum throw up the thorny issue of who and what constitute a nation state? The realpolitik answer is that the shape and nature of the world and even the boundaries of most nation states is entirely haphazard and one which in many cases defies logic and any sense of natural justice. Instead, the existence of many nationless peoples, from the Kurds to Palestinians and the case of Tibet, are a product of when and how empires retreated and dissolved, and who emerged at the right time to seize the claim of statehood. The writer Fred Halliday called this ‘post-colonial sequestration’ to explain this state of affairs, by which some nations emerged as empires fell, and others (the Kurds, Palestinians, Tibet) missed the opportunity and then have had to struggle to claim their statehood. [...]

All of this also reflects on the nature of the United Kingdom. The caricatured, reactionary image of the UK is one many of us tell and retell on many occasions. This is a country which has presided over war and military action in every year since 1945, which sponsors privatisation and corporate greed the world over, and has long lineages of racism and xenophobia. But there is also another British story: which includes the defeat of foreign and domestic fascism, and the victories and triumphs of generations of working people and the labour movement which have stood for democracy and human rights and against the powers of privilege and reaction.

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